From the Beginning to Plato

398 FROM THE BEGINNING TO PLATO
It seems obvious enough that the tripartite model of the soul will work better
in this context, as it will in the previous one: if the soul which survives death retains
its emotions and its irrational desires, it will have a considerably greater chance
of standing in for the original person. In fact, this will turn out to be the case
even in the Phaedo for all except the purified, philosophical soul. Whatever we
suppose to be the non-mythical equivalent of the fates of non-philosophical souls
which Socrates describes (living on the shores of lake Acheron, or being swept
along in the appalling rivers of the underworld), there will be little point in
punishing them unless they are recognizably the same souls, dominated by
irrational impulses, which motivated the unsatisfactory behaviour for which they
have been condemned; and indeed the Phaedo openly acknowledges the point,
describing the unpurified soul as ‘interspersed with what belongs to the category
of the body’, however it may be that something incorporeal can be ‘interspersed’
with anything (81c). To this extent the two models for understanding the soul,
unitary and tripartite, will be practically indistinguishable. 19 But on either
account virtually all individuality must be lost as soon as a soul enters another
body. There will certainly be no memory of any previous bodily existence, and
so even if it is the same soul-stuff that animates the new body, it might as well be
a new soul; no one will recognize Socrates in his new existence, and he (if it is a
he) will not even recognize himself. 20
What he will have a memory of is of the Platonic Forms, though his memory
will remain latent from birth unless and until he is able to ‘recollect’ it. 21 This is
the Platonic doctrine of anamnēsis, which is brought in as the basis of the second
argument for immortality in the Phaedo, and which claims that ‘learning’ in the
important cases is really a matter of rediscovering knowledge of things we knew
before we were born. We are nowhere told, except in a mythical context, 22
exactly when and how we came to know the Forms; we have simply had
acquaintance with them in the past, and this is sufficient to guarantee our access,
given the right conditions, to a collection of objects which are not themselves
objects of direct experience in our bodily lives. 23 Once again, we are brought
back to the essential unworldiness of the soul in Plato’s thinking. His is an
extreme form of dualism: the soul is not just a separate entity from the body, but
one that, despite its function as originator of movement and change, seems to
belong—by its essential nature—outside the body, and outside the world 24 in
which that movement and change occur (though it still remains an open question
whether any non-divine soul can remain permanently in a discarnate state). Only
in the Phaedo is dualism allowed to be challenged, when one of Socrates’
interlocutors brings forward the view that ‘soul’ is merely a kind of
epiphenomenon of the mixture of physical constituents in a body (the ‘harmony’
theory of soul). But Socrates gives this rival account short shrift, dismissing it by
means of arguments which with a little reformulation it might easily evade. Plato
had evidently not seen the true strength of the competition to his own view.