Philosophy: Mind, Soul, Consciousness, Body - Part 6

Let's come back to the topic of the Soul

Plato sees the soul as something existing detached from the body. For him, the soul belongs to the ideal pure world to which ultimately our mind belongs, because through it we can recognize the ideal world. But because the soul incarnates (actually has to incarnate) in a body over and over again having to live again and again in the real (i.e., second-class) world, she becomes contaminated and defiled; but she is immortal; she is indestructible. Her true home is the ideal and perfect world, the world of BEING and perfection to which she returns time and again; but the real world, which is the world of temporality and the world of BECOMING destroys that perfection.

In his work Phaidon (also Phaedo) Plato presents his ideas of the soul (Phaidon is one of Plato's works written in dialogue form, in which he describes, among others, the last meeting of Socrates with his friends).

Actually, in this work he describes the last hours of his teacher and mentor Socrates, who had been sentenced to death by the hemlock although, to my knowledge, it must be assumed that this is not a factual report, but a fiction (it's true that Socrates died by the hemlock, but whether his last few hours really ran as Plato describes it, may be doubted). Socrates, who is credited with the famous saying, "I know that I know nothing," is expected  to explain to those present why he considers the soul to be immortal.

Plato has Socrates explain that at the moment of our death, the soul is going to separate from the body, which means a separation of reality from illusion (which is this real world). It is a separation from the illusion conveyed by our sensory perceptions. Death, so Plato has Socrates teach, brings us home to the world of flawless souls and takes us away from the world of illusions. One of those present, the Pythagorean Cebes, does not believe in the immortality of the soul. Plato has Socrates encourages him to consider whether the souls of the dead would exist in the other world (Plato probably means the ideal world), and Cebes replies that if so, they could certainly return to our world and reincarnate. However, he, Cebes, does not believe in that other world. When a soul leaves the dying body, Cebes says, it behaves like the smoke of a dying fire; she dissolves into nothing.

However, Plato has Socrates argue that the soul has substance, even if it is not material, and substance cannot just disappear; all kinds of substance are indestructible, though they may very well change their properties. The properties of a substance, according to Socrates, oscillate between two extremes or between two poles, and as an example he mentions the two extremes of sleeping and being awake.
The sleeping person awakens and the person having been awake up to now falls asleep. Thus both have changed their state from one extreme to the other. The sleeper has become the person being awake, and the person having been awake until now has become the sleeper.
Waking arises from sleeping and sleeping arises from being awake.

According to Socrates, life and death are quite similar: life arises from death and death arises from life. The law of opposites governs the world. And like the substances, such a pair of opposites can never disappear. Figuratively speaking, the pendulum can swing back and forth between the two extremes, i.e., between the two poles (cf. Yin-Yang), but nothing – and least of all the soul – can really pass away.

The ancient Greeks had thus anticipated the matter-energy conservation theorem of physics: the totality of all matter and energy in the universe is constant. Although different forms of energy can be transformed into each other and, in particular, according to Einstein's formula E = mc^2 energy can be transformed into matter and matter into energy the total amount of matter and energy does never change.

By the way, Socrates' saying, “I know that I know nothing” is actually an adulterated rendition of a quotation from Plato's work "Apología Sōkrátous". Correctly translated, the saying should read, "I know that I do not know". It is intended to encourage people to question what they think they know.

To be continued.