Body and Soul in Ancient Philosophy

Three kinds of Platonic immortality 159
immortality. Indeed, Diotima makes it clear that some self-prolongations
are “more immortal” than others (209c7). At the biological
level, for example, you are reliant on the expectation of your descendants
in every generation making their own bid for immortality by reproducing,
just as you did. Similarly, at the higher levels, the virtuous character
that you instilled in those you influenced will not necessarily pass
to later generations, and the legal system you created may eventually be
superseded. Immortality by proxy is, it seems, condemned to being always
provisional and subject to renewal. Even if you were to achieve it
– that is, even if your procreation were to continue for ever – your immortality
would have to be classed as a contingent rather than a necessary
attribute: it would be true at best that your extended self never dies,
but not that it is incapable of dying.
Describing immortality by proxy in the Symposium, Diotima remarks:
“… mortal nature seeks, so far as it is able to do so, to exist forever
and be immortal. The only way in which it is able to do so is by
giving birth …” (207d1–3; cf. 208b2 – 4). This can easily give the impression
that Diotima is not committed to the immortality of the soul,
on the grounds that if she were she could not also endorse the view that
immortality by proxy is the only immortality available to us. To see what
is wrong with that inference, 17 we can compare the Timaeus’ account of
immortality by self-definition. For there we are told something very
similar regarding those who achieve this particular kind of immortality,
namely that “so far as it is possible for human nature to share in immortality,
they in no way fall short of this” (90c2–4). Yet Timaeus has already
made it explicit that, with or without intellectual advancement,
the rational soul is literally immune to dying (43d6 –7), which one
would have thought to be a far more complete way of sharing in immortality.
Hence when Diotima places limits on what is possible for
“mortal nature”, and when Timaeus similarly restricts what is possible
for “human nature”, we must take them to be speaking, not of what
is possible for a soul, but of what is possible for the soul-body composites
that we human beings are. It is as humans that we can be everlasting
only in so far as our progeny, biological or otherwise, will continue to
fly the flag for us in the human world, or (on the Timaeus alternative)
17 Cf. Hackforth 1950. I have been guilty of making such an inference myself in
Sedley 1999, 310 n. 2. For a judicious overview of the issue, see Sheffield 2006,
esp. 147 – 148. My point about the parallel usage at Ti. 90c2 – 4 has a partial antecedent
in Luce 1952, 140.