THE CONCEPT OF MAN IN GREEK THOUGHT
- Individuality and Destiny
- Prescott Johnson
Presented at Roberts Wesleyan College, May, 1963
* * * *
INTRODUCTION
The previous discussion of the Greek concept of man was devoted to showing how man expresses his nature in his cultural creations, art and society. It was further pointed out that in a very real sense man transcends his creative enterprises. In those circumstances of societal decay, he is free to resist and overcome the determining conditions of that society and develop his essential humanity. He is able in turn to reconstitute society with his creative insight and energy. Man is the creative source and ground of culture, yet able to determine both his personal and social experience precisely because he is a substantive individual possessing his being in freedom. Thus in this lecture, “Individuality and Destiny,” I wish to consider man as a substantive individual whose free acts of self-creation secure for him a significant destiny.
- Religious Backgrounds
The philosophical theories, in Greek though, concerning the nature and destiny of man have their roots in Greek religion. In this regard, there are two basic ideas which constitute structuring principles for both Greek religion and Greek philosophy. They are the concepts of Moira (μo_ρα and Dike (δίκη).
Moira means a part, portion, or division, as in a part opposed to the whole. It also means the part or portion which falls to one, one’s portion in life. Thus it signifies one’s destiny and fate. In fine, Moira has the twofold meaning of portion and destiny.
In the fifteenth Iliad, Homer describes the religious reference of Moira. One day Zeus awakens and finds the Trojans hard pressed in battle by the Greeks, who are assisted by Poseidon. Zeus instructs Iris to order Poseidon to withdraw from battle and got to Olympus or to the sea (his proper sphere). Poseidon is angry and protests:
“Alack, strong though he be, these words are past all bearing. Will he constrain me by violence against my will, though I am his equal in rank? For we are three brothers, born of Cronos and Rhea, Zeus and I and Hades, the lord of the dead. And in three lots are all things divided, and each took his appointed domain.[1] When we cast the lots, to me fell the hoary sea, that I should dwell therein forever; and Hades drew the misty darkness, and Zeus the broad heaven among the bright air and the clouds: The earth and high Olympus are yet common to all. Therefore never will I walk after the will of Zeus; no, masterful though he be, let him stay in his own third part (_κηλoς . . . μεvέτω τριτάτ_ _v_ μoιρ_).”[2]
The idea which Homer presents is that the gods have their own proper domains of the world. Its several parts have been apportioned to them. It is the destiny, or fate, of the gods to respect that apportionment and to live and act in their own spheres. The gods have their own Moira, their own domain and destiny. Further, Homer makes it clear that the gods do not constitute or determine their own Moria. Rather, they are subject to a Moira which rules them. Moira is an objective order to which they are under subjection. And it is thus even more the case that men are ruled by the objective order of Moira; they, too, are subject to a lot and destiny in life which is apportioned to them.
Viewed philosophically and scientifically, Moira is a spatial concept. It also connotes the static. It thus signifies a static space, or sphere, which is divided into many parts with fixed boundaries and limits.
In its conceptual import, Moira became a determining principle of Greek philosophical and scientific thought. The development of early Greek science from its Milesian beginnings reveals the progressive influence of Moira as a regulative principle of thought. In what is almost the only single surviving fragment of his writing, Anaximander says:
Things perish into those things out of which they have their birth, according to that which is ordained; for they give reparation to one another and pay the penalty of their injustice according to the disposition of time.[3]
The “Indefinite,” the “Limitless thing,” is eternal, “incorruptible and undying” reality. From it come the four primitive the four primitive elements, earth, air, water, and fire. They occupy their own appropriate regions; thus they are ruled by Moira. The individual “things” of the world are derived from the fusion of the primitive elements. This fusion involves an appropriation of some elements by another element, a transgression of the boundaries of the elements set by Moira. The plundering of one element by another to make individual things is injustice, unrighteousness. The penalty which the individual thing must pay is death and dissolution.
The rule of Moira culminates in the atomic theory of Leucippus and Democritus. According to that theory, the world is composed of empty space and atoms. The atoms are material particles which exist in and more through empty space according to mechanical necessity. As is any corporate body, man is a composite of material particles. For Democritus, the soul is a mere collection of atoms. Thus Aristotle comments:
Democritus affirms the soul to be a sort of fire or heat. For the “shapes” or atoms are infinite, and those which are spherical he declares to be fire and soul: They may be compared with the so-called motes in the air, which are seen in sunbeams passing through windows. The aggregate of such seeds (πάvσπερμια, panspermia), he tells us, forms the constituent elements of the whole of nature (and herein he agrees with Leukippus), while those of them which are spherical form the soul, because such figures most easily find their way through everything, and, being themselves in motion, set other things in motion.[4]
The two functions of the soul, life and knowledge, are explained along mechanical lines. The motion of the soul-atoms is not an inherent principle of spontaneous activity, but is due, like that of other atoms, to mechanical shock and collision. At death the atoms are dispersed; there can be no question of immortality. Knowledge is but a process in which a group of bodily atoms perceives other groups colliding with them, or with filmy wraiths (δείκελα, ε_δωμα; deikela, eidola), thrown off by them. The effect of the argument is to expurgate out of existence whatever is mysterious and unintelligible in the ideas of “soul” and of “life.”
This view of the world and of man‑-his nature and destiny‑-which the scientific tradition in Greek thought developed, is precisely a scientific reading of the mythical idea of Moira. Reality is conceived of in terms of the spatial and static. Empty space is a static sphere in which material atoms are assigned their places, or portions, and their motions according to the rule, or destiny, of mechanical necessity. In the place of the play of the gods on Olympus three is now the dance of atoms in space.
The second major explanatory principle employed in Greek thought is the notion of Dike (Δίκη). Dike means custom, usage, manner; then order, law, right. It therefore means righteousness. In distinction to Moira, Dike is a temporal concept; it connotes time and number (the measurement of time).
In Hesoid, Dike is the Hora, the season who brings wealth. Her sisters are Eunomia (Law-abidingness), and Eirene (Peace), who was represented in art, carrying the infant (Ploutos) in her arms. Her mother is Themai.[5] Wealth must not be seized; it is much better and more abiding when it is given of god, and comes in its duly appointed season (κατ_ καιρόv) in the circle of the year.[6]
Thus the ordered path of the seasons, the appointed path of “seasonable works” (_ρια _ργα), the wheel of time, is also the wheel of right (Dike). This is expressed by Sophocles, when he says:
Time, in the length of his unnumbered years, gives birth to all things out of the darkness, and, when they have come into the light hides them again.[7]
The order of time as the just rule of the periodicities of things is at the heart of the Greek mystery religions. The Eleusinian Mysteries call to mind the story of Demeter, goddess of the crops, and her daughter Persephone. Persephone was carried off by Hades, god of the underworld, to be his bride. While Demeter wandered over the whole earth in search of her, all vegetation died, winter descended upon the land, and man was about to die of starvation. Then the gods decreed that Persephone should spend half the year beneath the earth with Hades and half in the world above with her mother. Each autumn she descends into Hades, leaving death and desolation behind her; each spring she rises, bringing greenery and warmth and life. The initiates to the Eleusinian cult celebrated the “mysteries” by reenacting the descent into Hades and the resurrection of Persephone, participating in the cycle of death and life and, finally, of the promise of a happy immortality, far away in the islands of the blest. The Orphic Mysteries, too, depict the cyclic order of time. They recall the myth of the god Dionysus. He was first begotten by Zeus from a divine mother, Persephone, subsequently slain in the form of a wild bull by the evil Titans and devoured by them. Zeus saved his heart, ate it, and begot him a second time from a human mother and made him Lord of the world. Then Zeus slew the Titans and made man from their ashes. Hence man is a dual creature, a mixture of the evil substance of the Titans and of the divine substance of the god they had devoured. His soul is a fragment of Dionysus, his body a heritage from the Titans. Salvation consists in freeing the divine soul from the bondage of the body. This requires a long series of reincarnations, at the end of which the purified soul is freed from the wheel of birth and rebirth and reunited with its divine source. This purification is accomplished by joining the Orphic cult, assisting at its mysteries and following its rule of life. The mysteries probably centered about a dramatic representation of the death of their god and his restoration to life. Great importance was attached to the “omophagia” or partaking of the flesh and blood of the sacred bull.
The mythical idea of Dike, the just order of time and its periodicity, became next an organizing principle of philosophic and scientific thought, and as such gave rise to the mystical tradition in Greek speculation. Heraclitus affirmed the principle, when he revolted against the rationalizing science that had been developed under the rule of Moira. Time, not space, is the key to Heraclitus. Under the concept of Moira, the elements which constitute the world had their rigidly defined spatial provinces, so that the mutual invasion of one another’s spheres was an act of unjust aggression. Heraclitus, on the contrary, insists that they form a permeable cycle of transformations, which, so far from being rigidly distinct, are perpetually passing one into another. “Fire lives the death of air, and air lives the death of fire; water lives the death of earth, earth that of water.”[8] As this fragment shows, the movement of change is the movement of life. Live is not stationary; there is no such thing as the fixed and changeless immortality which Olympian theology ascribed to the gods. Life and death, Dionysus and Hades, are the same.[9] Whereas Milesian science had interpreted the becoming of the elements as a mere process of mechanical separation, Heraclitus will have it that all becoming is the becoming of life; and, as in the wheel of reincarnation, every birth is, also and equally, a death. “Mortals are immortals, and immortals are mortals, the one living the other’s death, and dying the other’s life.”[10] Fire is “ever-living” (άείζωov); and it lives by death and rebirth into all other forms. Thus “it is wisdom to confess that all things are one;”[11] “all things come out of one, and one out of all things.”[12] Heraclitus believes that the one can pass out of itself into the manifold, and yet retain its oneness. The continuity of life is not broken by death, but rather renewed. This temporal order of the world, whose life is a permeable cycle of transformations, is, further, the principle of justice. Under the rule of Moira, justice is a barrier, a keeping of bounds. But for Heraclitus justice, or Dike, is fundamental and is precisely the living power which own no barriers between elemental regions, but passes, on its ordered course, through every phase and form.
The principle of Dike and the mystical thought it sustains found expression in the teaching of Pythagoras. By his time Olympian elements had reshaped Dionysiac religion in the Orphic revival. What had formerly been a religion of earth and of the life and death of its vegetation in the circling seasons, became a religion of the heavenly bodies, and especially of the sun. The sun also moves through the circle of the year, waxing in summer and waning in winter; but it comes to be conceived as an immutable and deathless god. The Olympian notion of immortality (athanasia), as a life that negates change and death, intrudes itself. The soul also became Olympian. It is now an indestructible individual. In its pure state it consists of fire, like the divine stars from which it falls. In its impure state, throughout the period of reincarnation, it is infected with the basic elements, and weighed down by the gross admixture with the flesh. Two contradictory notions of the nature and destiny of the soul are contained in Orphic religion. One is Dionysiac: there is but one life which dies and is reborn in every shape of existence. The other is Ouranian: there are many indestructible individual souls, whose destinies are the upward flight to a mansion in the stars. Finally, Orphism inspired a cosmic dualism, a counterpart of the dualism in the nature of the soul. The two principles of Light and Darkness, Good and Evil, are fundamentally contrasted.
Pythagoreanism is an attempt to intellectualize the nature of Orphism. In its intellectual doctrines, it fuses the elements of Dionysus and Orpheus. From Dionysus comes the unity of all life in the cycle of death and rebirth. The concept of the “Primal One” which flows out in the manifold world is the statement of Dionysiac unity. To Orpheus is due the shift of focus from earth to heaven; the substitution for the vivid emotional experience of the renewal of life in nature, of the worship of a distant and passionless perfection in the region of light, from which the soul, now immortal, is fallen into a body of this death, and which it aspires to regain by the moral observances of asceticism. The Orphic had retained the emotional experiences of reunion and the ritual had induced it, and, in particular, the passionate spectacle (theoria) of the suffering god. Pythagoras gave a new meaning to theoria; he reinterpreted it as the passionless contemplation of a rational unchanging truth, and converted the way of life into a “pursuit of wisdom” (philosophia). The way of life is still also a way of death; but now it means death of the emotions and the lusts of this vile body, and release of the intellect to soar into the untroubled empyrean of theory. This is now the only avenue by which the soul can “follow God (_πεσθαι Θε_), who has ascended beyond the stars. The dualism in the Primal One between the limit and the Unlimited, the Light and the Dark, the Good and the Evil, and the dualism in the soul are thus expressed in Orphism intellectualized. But, though it moves further from Dionysus towards Apollo, Pythagoreanism remains Dionysiac at the root, and keeps something alive of the faith first delivered to the saints of mysticism.
- Plato’s View of Man
Both the Olympian and the Dionysiac elements, the one ruled by Moira and the other by Dike, are found in Plato’s concept of human nature and destiny.
The influence of Dike, with its insistence upon time and the transformation of things into their opposites, is clearly suggested with respect to Plato’s analysis of bodily life. Plato adopts Heraclitus’ theory that natural processes constitute a dynamic order of qualitative opposites. Individual things are generated from their opposites and, in turn, generate their opposites. Thus Plato remarks in the Phaedo:
“Let us consider the question whether it is inevitable that everything which has an opposite be generated from its opposite and from it only. Then,” said he, “We have this fact sufficiently established, that all things are generated this way, opposites from opposites.”[13]
Both bodily life and bodily death are natural processes. They too, then, are generated from their opposites. This means that bodily life, the life we have as individuals, must, and does, terminate in death as its qualitative opposite. Dike, which order all things in their permeable cycle of transformations, decrees that life must give way to death.
In the Phaedo, Socrates and his friends are discussing that most profound question of the meaning of man’s life and death. It is Socrates’ last day on earth; the sunset of that day is the sunset of his life. Having learned from Heraclitus that life is but the gateway to death, he nevertheless dares to affirm:
“. . . but I have great hopes that there is something in store for the dead, and, as has been said of old, something better for the good than for the wicked. . . . I wish now to explain to you, my judges, the reason why I think a man who has really spent his life in philosophy [φιλoςoφί_; the love of wisdom] is naturally of good courage when he is to die, and has strong hopes that when he is dead he will attain the greatest blessings in that other land.”[14]
If, now, there is a life which is to survive transformation into death as its opposite, that life must be a reality which is exempt from the world of qualitative opposites, which constitutes the world of becoming. This reality Plato calls “soul.” In this manner, then, we are brought to the basic question of the nature of the soul, or of man in his most fundamental being.
Plato makes it very clear that there must be something in our experience that warrants the belief in the soul as a power and reality which is exempt from the flux of nature so as to survive the death of the body. The great Phaedrus myth is addressed to this particular matter.
“We will liken the soul,” Plato says, “to the composite nature of a pair of winged horses and a charioteer.”[15] The wings, which are attached to the horses and possibly to the charioteer himself, raise the chariot to the supercelestial regions where the divine spectacle becomes visible to the charioteer. The two steeds are able to pull the chariot around and around on a level, but cannot raise it. One steed is “noble and of noble breed,”[16] and is able to pull the chariot ahead in the race to a distant goal. The other horse is “quite the opposite in breed and character,”[17] constantly getting out of control, taking the bit into its own teeth to follow his own interest, oblivious to the race as well as to the upper regions.
Plato employs this imagery to remind us that there are qualitatively distinct phases of experience of which we are aware. There is in us an aspiration (_ρως) which raises us to the level of peace and harmony where the broad structure of reality becomes discernable to reason (vo_ς). This rational nature which aspires to and apprehends being is called τ_ λoγιστικόv. The aspiring nature of reason is represented by the wings and the cognitive nature of reason is represented by the skilful charioteer. There is also an irrational nature in us, represented by the two steeds. One part is inclined toward reason, the spirited element which causes us to pursue and struggle for goals. This is called θύμας, spirit, or will. The other part is disinclined toward reason, blind and sensuous desire. This is called έπιθυμία, appetite. These distinct aspects and activities which constitute the dimensions and directions of experience indicate, not only that the soul is composite, but that the various elements within the soul are distinct and must not be identified or confused with each other.
The power and activity in the soul which loves and knows truth and being, the reason, is the highest element in man. It is his essential nature. Plato calls it “a divine quality, a thing that never loses its potency.”[18] It is that aspiring insight which, as we saw earlier, manifests itself in the creation of art and society along rational lines. Now, when Plato expresses the hope that he will survive the experience of death, that the soul is immortal, he has in mind this, the rational power and activity of the soul. The affirmation of this hope, however, leads to the question as to the nature and function of the rational soul, such that its immortality is credible.
Now, philosophical or scientific naturalism dies hard. In the Phaedo, Plato has to contend with the view that the soul is a natural phenomenon which, like all other things in nature, is destined to perish. The soul, or individual life, is conditioned by the living body with its various urges and tendencies. Wherever we find human life, such a body is obviously present. The suggestion presents itself, therefore, that the soul, or life, is dependent upon the body. Simmias, who is one of the disputants in the argument of the Phaedo, argues that the soul is a harmony of the motions of the body. “The soul,” he says, ” is a mixture and a harmony of these same elements, when they are well and properly mixed.”[19] This theory is known as “epiphenomenalism.” The soul is a certain pattern or harmony of natural motion. Thus the soul and life are this “attunement” of non-living things. With the disruption and cessation of this “attunement” of material elements in bodily death, the soul itself perishes.
Among Plato’s replies to Simmias and the doctrine of epiphenomenalism, is the one which refers to the phenomena of human substantiality. We regard the living individual as an independent being or substance, having certain properties, like virtue, tall, etc. We attach substantive proper names and pronouns to such independent, living beings, recognizing that they are in some sense responsible agents, acting of themselves. We could not modify these modes of speech, which permeate all language, without losing our ability to speak intelligibly of ourselves and other men. But, as Plato points out, epiphenomenalism, which makes the non-living body not only the condition but the cause of life, involves precisely such a total break with these basic phenomena. If the living man is the harmony of a non-living body, merely a complex set of attributes or the harmony of something else which really dominates him, we should never be able to say truly that this is unqualifiedly a man, but only that this is a man more or less, or that this is a man to a certain degree. The whole would be a body rather than a man; so we should have to say that it was a man only to a certain degree, as various qualities, like virtue and tall, which do not dominate the whole structure, are always present only in a qualified manner, to a certain degree. Needless to say, this is not the case. When we see a man, we recognize the general form or pattern of humanity as dominating his whole being. Hence we say in unqualified terms this is a man, not this is a man to a certain degree. Since we cannot say this on an epiphenomenalist view of life and soul but must express absurdities which cannot agree with the phenomenon of human substantiality, we must regard this view to be untenable.[20]
The second disputant in the discussion of the Phaedo is Cebes. He is no epiphenomenalist. Instead, he holds that the soul or principle of life is independent of the body. He is willing to admit that it may dominate the body. But he adduces phenomena, such as physical concussions, which seem to indicate that the body also influences the soul. It may very well be, then, he says, that the body will finally wear down and exhaust the soul, so that it will in the end cease to exist. Thus Cebes proposes a “dualistic” theory of mind and body, an interactionism, which is as inimical to the immortality of the soul as is epiphenomenalism.[21]
Put in modern terms, Cebes’ objection to the immortality of the soul rests upon the postulate of a mechanical interpretation of nature. The objection is guided by what are today called the laws of the Conservation and Degradation of Energy. While observing a real distinction of mind and body, Cebes contends that in every act of intercourse with the body the mind parts with energy which it cannot recover. Thus its progress to destruction starts with its very first entrance into contact with a body, and consequently it is only a matter of time until it will cease to exist.
Plato’s reply to this very devastating form of naturalism starts from his observation that this particular problem raises the still more fundamental one concerning the whole nature of coming into being and passing away.[22] He argues to the effect that any natural change requires certain necessary conditions without which the change cannot occur. The growth of a plant out of the soil requires a material environment: soil, atmosphere, light. Socrates’ sitting on the couch requires the articulation of his bones, his muscles, and his joints. But to make the material conditions of an event in nature the real cause of the event is unwarranted. It involves an inversion of condition and cause, makes the condition of an event the cause of the event. The plant cannot grow without soil, atmosphere, and light, which are capable of supporting plant life. But the plant is the cause of the growth. Socrates cannot sit on the couch without bones, muscles, and joints. But his moral intention is the cause of his refusal to escape from jail. Socrates insists that, in viewing nature, “That without which the cause cannot be a cause,” the material condition, is not to be confused with “the real cause.”[23] In the case of the soul, we may thus come to see that life is not the condition for the living body, but that the living body is the condition for that of which life itself is the true cause. Thus the soul, or the principle of life, rather than being determined by matter, or the living body, itself determines the matter and is, accordingly, not subject to the dissipation and destruction by the material conditions of bodily life. This is, indeed, the conclusion to which Socrates proceeds in his refutation of both epiphenomenalism and interactionism.
For Plato, the true and sustaining causes of things are what he called “Ideas.” Beautiful things, he says, are not beautiful because of themselves, but because of beauty, with which they have some sort of communion or in which they somehow participate.[24] There are many Ideas, as beauty, justice, holiness, etc. Each Idea, though connected with others, is distinct from them and changeless. It has no opposition in itself and does not take its origin from any other Idea.[25] At this point in Plato, the principle of Moira enters into his philosophy. The Ideas have a purity and constancy of character, an integrity which is not encroached upon. Concrete things which are somehow acted on by the Ideas, or participate in them, are also capable of not participating in them. One such opposite thing emerges out of another opposite thing, out of participation into non-participation, out of non-participation into participation.[26] The picture may lose or regain its derived beauty, the state may lose or regain its derived justice. This flux in which things emerge from and issue in their opposites represents the rule of Dike in Plato’s theory of becoming.
Now, when a picture loses its beauty, or a state loses its justice, what happens is that the material conditions take things into their own hands so as to free themselves from the influence of the Idea which is its higher cause. This dominance of material conditions over the true cause, which happens in the destruction of what we call an ordinary thing, is due to the fact that the ultimate cause of the thing’s inherent pattern does not lie within itself. The picture does make the picture beautiful; the state does not make itself just. Each of these things is brought into being and sustained by something outside of itself. Thus when its sustaining cause ceases to operate, it is reduced to the opposite state of its condition and is, as we say, destroyed.
Is this true of individual life? It is conditioned, as we have seen, by the living body with its various urges and tendencies. But it is not caused by the living body which conditions it. Rather, it is caused by a certain sort of motion which “governs” the elements of the body, “opposing” them and “mastering” them.[27] The soul, or life, Plato says, is a self-originating motion: “self-motion is the essence and the very idea of the soul.”[28] This vital motion has many forms, all of which may be comprehended under the term “aspiration.” The term “life” has become so far inverted as to mean the external dependent processes which condition this self-originating motion, rather than the thing itself. It is true that aspiration always moves the living body. But the body does not determine the aspiration; it is rather the aspiration which determines the body. Thus it is aspiration which rules the body and constitutes the form of life itself. In fine, life consists of the motions of a living body, conditioned by the body, and caused by human aspiration.
Aspiration is but one aspect of the soul. It is the _ρως which causes us to seek fulfillment, corresponding to the wings in the Phaedrus myth. But aspiration, which dominates the living body, must in its turn be dominated by a still higher principle. Aspiration must be governed by apprehension, the charioteer in the myth. The apprehension of true being, then, governs the aspiration which brings life to the body, and is therefore ultimately causative of individual human life.
Now, aspiration of the living individual is not determined by and apprehension external to it. The aspiration of the soul is determined by an apprehension wholly intrinsic to it and realized by itself alone, the apprehension of the pure Idea. These Ideas, as beauty, justice, and finally the Good, are not determined by anything beyond them. The are accessible to individual insight. Precisely this insight into beauty and justice, into the Good in its various aspects, is responsible for man’s rational creation of culture, which we discussed yesterday. These Ideas are themselves the ultimate determining causes. They are also changeless and incorruptible. When the individual person unites with them through rational aspiration and apprehension, he becomes free and changeless.
For Plato, man’s essential nature is life, or soul, consisting in aspiration and apprehension. He therefore has a destiny even here and now. As he apprehends the Ideas and allows himself to be ruled and directed by them, he becomes self-determining and free; as he unites with them through aspiration and apprehension, to that extent he becomes immortal. This destiny is granted man because his individual life, while associated with bodily conditions, is free from the determination of those conditions. Now, does not this fact that individual life, or soul, cannot be identified with the body, the material condition, assure man a further destiny, namely, the survival of his life beyond the death of the body?
To this final question concerning man’s nature and destiny, Plato gives an affirmative response of reasoned hope. Individual life is a three-fold hierarchy: first, a living body able to be controlled by aspiration; second, this governing aspiration, entering into the body bearing life or reason with it; third, the ultimate cause, insight itself, which guides the governing aspiration. While aspiration bears life and introduces it to the body, aspiration is not itself life. The life of this life-bearing aspiration is precisely the deathless structure of reason. In the present, all three factors are necessary to constitute a living, self-moving being. While essentially aspiration and apprehension, or reason, life as a whole cannot be lived without the body. But may not life grow into such a perfect union with its changeless source as to outgrow the need for its bodily condition? Precisely this, we have seen, is Plato’s reasoned hope.
Plato expresses the thesis that reason is itself the life which constitutes and pervades the soul by showing, in the Phaedo, that the Idea of life, or aliveness, is the essential, constitutive quality of the soul. The soul is caused by its sustaining Idea, or Form, the Form of life. Each concrete thing in the world, as we have seen, is caused by its sustaining Idea. According to Plato, an Idea is an identity which cannot be combined with its opposed Idea. And he also holds that when a concrete individual thing is essentially constituted and qualified by an Idea, that thing cannot then admit an Idea which is opposed to its sustaining Idea. Opposed Ideas cannot be combined in things. When an individual thing is exposed to an Idea which is opposed to its inherent Idea, or Form, that thing must either be annihilated or it must withdraw. In the case of something like snow, which has the Idea of cold, when it takes on the Idea of heat, it is annihilated and becomes something different, namely, water. The essential Idea, or Form, of the soul is life. It cannot take on its opposed Idea, or Form, of death. When confronted with death, the soul must either be annihilated or it must withdraw. Since, however, the soul is the very principle of life, the simple and divine being of self-moving, deathless reason, or pure act, it is further incapable of taking on the Form, or attribute, of destructibility. Thus it cannot undergo annihilation. Accordingly, when the soul is faced with death, it must retreat; it thus lives beyond death, beyond the gates of night and day, in the land of the immortals.[29] Moira has triumphed over Dike. For under Moira the soul possesses herself inviolate, her boundaries resistant to the encroachments of death and destruction, forever secure in that Olympian home which is her rightful destiny.
[1]τριχθ_ δ_ πάvτα δέδασται, __κασται δ_ _μμoρε τιμ_ς.
[4]Aristotle, De An. a ii. 403b 31.