Body and Soul in Ancient Philosophy

Three kinds of Platonic immortality 157
By contrast the upward transition from mortal to immortal, such as
Tithonus had made, was a regular element of the mythological tradition,
and we should expect this religious tenet to find some counterpart in
Platonic theory. But where?
When we look in Plato for his equivalent of mythical apotheosis, we
cannot straightforwardly locate it in conferred immortality, because the
living things granted this in the Timaeus did not pass into it from a prior
state of mortality; they have had it for as long as they have existed.
Moreover, in Republic 10 Plato makes Socrates, after denying that
anything immortal could perish, explicitly add the inference that nothing
could become immortal either: “For if there were any addition to
the number of immortal things, you know that it would come to be
from what is mortal, and in the end everything would be immortal”
(R. 10, 611a6 – 8). This curious argument is in a way the mirror
image of one in the Phaedo (72a11 –d5), according to which the transition
from living to dead must be reciprocated by a transition from dead
to living, or else in the end everything would be dead. Neither argument
suggests that the unwelcome result would, were it possible, already
have come about by now, as they perhaps would have done had they
been working from the assumption that the world has existed from infinite
time past. 16 Rather, it is indicated that the unacceptable outcome
– everything immortal, or everything dead – would lie in the future.
The conviction that things could not end up that way therefore relies
on an assumption much like that underlying the Timaeus, if read literally,
that the world as we know it has at some time in the past been intelligently
planned and created so as to continue for ever into the future.
According to this argument from Republic 10, at least, no mortal
being could be elevated to either essential or conferred immortality.
Yet the human aspiration to become immortal, represented by the familiar
myths of apotheosis, is one that Plato fully acknowledges and approves.
His way of incorporating it into his philosophy is, it seems, to
allow for a third kind of immortality, one that stops short of increasing
the number of immortal beings in the world. Unlike essential and conferred
immortality, this third kind has to be hard won by each individual,
thus reflecting the religious idea of apotheosis as a reward for highachieving
mortals. I shall call it ‘earned’ immortality.
16 I say this with some caution, because a not dissimilar argument occurs at
Phdr. 245d7 –e2, in a context where it is implicit that the world has always existed.