Body and Soul in Ancient Philosophy

160
David Sedley
only in so far as something everlasting in us comes to stand at the core of
our incarnate being. This does not in any way deny that the immortal
component in us can and will, in its own right, proceed to future existences
in and outside other bodies. Immortality by procreation is therefore
not a theory which in Plato’s thought competed with, let alone eventually
gave way to, that of the soul’s immortality. 18 This is confirmed by its
reappearance in his last work, the Laws (4, 721b6-c8), where it is invoked
as the basis both of personal self-immortalization and of the eternity
of the human race, despite the fact that the thesis of the soul’s immortality
remains intact there too (10, 967d4 – 7).
That brings us back, finally, to the question whether a transition between
kinds of immortality is possible. At the end of Diotima’s speech
we are left with a puzzle. In a celebrated climax, she speaks of one who
has progressed beyond intellectual procreation, peaking in a kind of direct
communion with the Beautiful itself. Such a person must
give birth, not to images of virtue, since what he has made contact with is
no image, but to truths, since it is the truth with which he is in contact.
And when he has given birth to true virtue, and nurtured it, it belongs
to him to become loved by the gods (heovik^r), and to him it belongs, if
to any human being, to become immortal. (212a3 –7)
How does this supreme achiever come to be immortal? Can it really be
just another case of immortality by vicarious prolongation through one’s
progeny, allegedly the only immortality available to mortal nature? That
kind of immortality is available to any animal that breeds. Undoubtedly
the creation of real and enduring intellectual brainchildren is a higher
kind of immortalization than mere biological proliferation, and Diotima
might mean that, to that extent, the truest intellectual legacies constitute
the truest kind of immortality. But her wording cannot be said to encourage
this reading. The culminating creative act to which she refers,
that of bringing “true virtue” to birth, seems to refer purely to the initiate’s
own attainment of virtue, thanks to the full moral understanding
that communion with the Forms alone can bestow, without any reference
to a posthumous legacy. 19 And correspondingly, when she adds
18 Such an interpretation is not endangered by the fact that at Smp. 207e1 – 208a7
not only bodily but even psychic continuity is made episodic, since this is still
explicitly the continuity of the human being (note the masculines at 207d5-e1, e4)
in respect of his/her mental states, and not that of the soul itself.
19 See the powerful arguments of Sheffield 2006, 146 –151, also O’Brien 1984,
esp. 198.