From the Beginning to Plato

PLATO: AESTHETICS AND PSYCHOLOGY 413
16 Although the Phaedo does include talk of the desires etc. ‘of the body’, it is
unlikely that we should take this at face value. Without soul to bring life to it, the
body is merely inert matter, and unable either to do or to feel anything.
17 The issue arises specifically in relation to the third argument for immortality, the
so-called ‘affinity’ argument: see Rowe [12.18] and [12.2], 189.
18 In so far as that content would be memorable, in a Platonic world, it would be true;
but in that case it would not distinguish any one excellent soul from another.
19 The chief difference will be that in the one case the soul can evidently lose its
irrationality altogether, while in the other it must permanently retain it— if
irrationality is part of its essence. Yet a soul which is both out of a body and has
been trained to separate itself from ‘bodily influences’ might perhaps be said to
have irrational elements only potentially, and then only if it is bound to be
reincarnated. It might be partly this that Plato has in mind when in the Timaeus he
calls the two lower parts ‘mortal’ (69e).
20 Republic 498d suggests that arguments heard in a previous life might affect a soul
in a subsequent one; and evidently, if what was a human soul passes into the body
of a donkey, that must have something to do with what that soul had become in its
previous occupation of a body (i.e. donkey-like). But neither that soul nor any other
will have any evidence to connect it with the earlier human person; it cannot even
be inferred that Ned (the donkey) was previously Fred (a man), since donkeys’
souls may presumably also have previously animated donkeys.
21 Elsewhere (Phaedrus 249b–c) it looks as if Plato may envisage a partial
recollection of the Forms, which explains the formation of concepts presupposed
by the ordinary, everyday use of language; but in the Phaedo what is being talked
of is an experience which is evidently restricted to philosophers.
22 Phaedrus 246dff. According to the Meno (86a), the soul is perpetually in a state of
having learned the knowledge in question, which seems to imply that there never was
a point at which we actually acquired it.
23 In the Meno, the theory of recollection is introduced to resolve the general question
about how one can look for something one doesn’t know, or recognize it when one
has found it. It is evidently the vividness of the experience in question, together
with the way that what we remember allows things to make sense, which is
supposed to rule out the possibility of false memory.
24 This expression should not be pressed too hard. The Forms, which are the objects
of knowledge for the soul, are apparently ‘outside’ time and space altogether;
divine souls (gods), on the other hand, appear to be part of the natural universe
(except in the case of the creator god of the Timaeus—but whether we are supposed
to believe literally in his existence is unclear), which is where all discarnate souls
also seem to be located; on death souls simply move to some less well-known, but
nevertheless physical, location.
25 An underlying assumption of the Timaeus is that if the world is as good as it can be,
it cannot be any other way than it is, and will include all possible types of
creatures.
26 From this perspective, the description of these two parts as ‘mortal’ (see n. 19)
looks natural enough, in so far as their presence is a consequence of the soul’s
function in relation to the body, and the compound of soul and body is itself
mortal. They would be actually mortal if a soul finally and permanently escaped the
bodily condition.