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Socrates Argument Of The Movement Of Life And Death

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In Plato’s The Phaedo, Plato recounts Socrates’ last days. Socrates’ road to death leads him into an exchange of ideas about the concept of an afterlife. Socrates develops several arguments regarding the immortality of the soul. This was to prove that death is not the dying of body and soul jointly, but when the body dies the soul still exists. The weakest argument Socrates presents is The Argument of the Movement of Life and Death (70b-72a), which the soul is fixed and external. It is difficult to completely say that Socrates’ arguments are ludicrous because his introduction with basic comparative opposites is coherent, but then comes the gray scale of right and wrong. I agree that there is a theoretical soul, but disagree that there …show more content…

The Argument of the Movement of Life and Death stems from the notion that opposites come from their opposites (71a). One example is “it must have been greater and then have become smaller” (71a). This example can be represented with a piggy bank. If you never started with a small amount of coins, then you cannot have a lot of coins because there would be no start amount to compare it to. According to Socrates, this is “a process of generation from each to the other” (71b) since you can gain more coins by adding more to the piggy bank and you can end up with less coins when you retrieve the coins from the piggy bank. This leads to Socrates’ main question: “Do you not say that living is the opposite of being dead?” (71d). Death and life are opposites: a person cannot be dead if they were never alive and a person cannot be alive if he/she is immortal. This is all coherent up until this part. Even though Socrates does state that opposites are involved with processes (71b) and is understandable, his next proposal does not, despite abiding from all his previous questions and statements. Socrates declares that since life and death are opposites (true) and they are involved in a process or circle of life (true), then “souls of the dead exist somewhere, whence they come back to life” (72a). I agree that death and life are opposites and the circle of

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