Body and Soul in Ancient Philosophy

158
David Sedley
Earned immortality itself comes in two forms. The first, which is
highlighted at the end of the Timaeus (90b1 – c6), lies in human self-definition.
Each of us has two mortal soul parts – appetite and spirit – plus
one, the intellect, which is immortal. When you choose what sort of life
to lead, you are deciding whether it will be your drive for bodily indulgence,
your competitive drive, or your intellectual drive that becomes
the real you. If you make the best decision and unify your self with
your intellect, you are making yourself identical with that in you
which is immortal. The number of immortal beings in the world is
not increased, and yet you have become one of them.
There seems no obvious reason why this particular kind of immortalization
should not be reversible. After identifying yourself with your
intellect, you might in principle be so corrupted as to sever the link and
revert to identifying yourself with one of your lower drives. If this were
deemed somehow impossible, that could be for psychological reasons
alone, and not because the nature of the immortality at issue did not
allow it.
The other way in which we can earn immortality is by perpetuating
ourselves in our progeny, biological or intellectual. This powerful idea
of immortality by proxy is presented by the priestess Diotima, as quoted
by Socrates in the Symposium (206c1 – 209e4). At the lowest level, all animals
satisfy their desire for immortality by reproducing their kind.
Human beings can immortalize themselves in more elevated ways
too, by living on, for example, in the wisdom they have taught to others,
in their literary creations, or in the law codes they have drawn up
for their cities.
If not immortality strictly speaking, this is a mortal being’s best approximation
to it. The limited success of the attempt lies partly in the
fact that it is not in any narrow sense you that will endure into the indefinite
future, just a proxy self consisting in your descendants or creations.
Diotima puts a positive spin on what may seem a disappointingly
weak conception of personal endurance by emphasizing that even the
continuous selves we pride ourselves on being during our incarnate
life are in reality no more than sequences of overlapping episodes
(207d4 –208b2), making our posthumous survival through our progeny
less different than we might initially have thought it to be. But she does
not seek to disguise the fact that vicarious self-perpetuation comes a
poor second to personal immortality.
No doubt, also, the limited success of your bid for immortality may
depend on the fact that even your proxy self has only a tenuous hold on