Paste your essay in here…Plato views the soul as an immortal entity, equating it with knowledge, especially that of the Forms. A person’s soul remains in existence for as long as people remember him or her. Death is an illusion to Plato, as argued in the Phaedo. In this account of Socrates’ death, the belief in the separation of the soul and body is exemplified—especially by Socrates’ indifference about his death. To Plato, facing death means having lived a just life, given that the morally and just should have no reason to brood about what happens after death. As Socrates tells Cebes in the Phaedo, “I’ll find excellent masters in the gods… That’s why I don’t grieve as much as I might, and I have good hope that something awaits the dead—something as was said long ago, far better for good men than for bad” (Phaedo, 63c). Socrates’ utter disinterest in bodily desires allows for an easy separation of his soul and body after death. Within the Phaedo alone, Plato presents several arguments for the immortality of the soul. The Argument from Opposites states that everything comes to be from its opposite, essentially saying that life is a cycle of transformation. The Theory of Recollection shows that the soul exists before birth, since all learning is recollection and we are reminded of one thing by seeing another. However, this argument does not prove if the soul exists after death, which is what leads people like Simmias and Cebes to remain unconvinced about the soul’s existence after death. Regardless, when they think about the fact that the soul must be reborn after dying, Simmias and Cebes agree that the soul indeed exists after death. The Argument from Affinity associates the soul with qualities of the divine, immortal, and invisible, and the body with the tangible, mortal, and invisible. So, when the soul relies on the body to get information, it only touches upon the mutable,the physical, thus becoming disoriented. The soul must obtain its own knowledge in order to gain wisdom.
The Theory of Recollection supports Plato’s claim that the soul has no beginning, and that it was always there, preexisting us. The soul is the seeing of knowledge—not only seeing the thing, but the quality of the thing, which is the Theory of Forms. The Forms are non-material things, like beauty and justice, that represent a higher form of reality than the physical world we live in. Knowledge of the Forms, to Plato, was the highest form of knowledge. The Form of Beauty is exemplified in the Symposium, in Diotima’s account of the “Ladder of Love”—the transformation of love from a state of mere physicality to a more soulful and reflective state. First, a young boy should admire beautiful bodies, one specifically, and “bring it forth beautiful words and ideas” (Symposium, 210b-210d). Secondly, he must recognize similarities in all bodies and view their beauty equally. Next, he must recognize spiritual beauty so that he can admire the soul instead of the physical body. This will help him love beauty in a broad sense, and to expand his definition of beauty. These steps mark the journey from admiration of materialistic beauty to admiration of the soul’s beauty and wisdom.
In addition to the soul being knowledge, the soul is also a tripartite entity. It consists of logos (reason), emotions and passion, and fulfillment of desires. When these three things are in harmony, Plato thought, it allows for a just society. The soul encompasses living a just life, and also has to do with politics. In “The Allegory of the Cave”, it is evident that the soul is affected by the type of society it lives in. The soul is not free until all are. The cave represents both collective ignorance and incarceration. Also it is a transition from darkness to light, perhaps representing what is to be gained by having knowledge of the Forms. In relation to the tripartite soul, the “Myth of the Charioteer” suggests that the soul is in dynamic movement. It is constantly being moved and steered—the noble steed being reason and the unruly steed being bodily desires.
Unlike Plato, Aristotle saw the body and soul as directly proportional and inseparable. Given that the soul cannot exist without the body, and vice versa, the soul plays a role in the function of the body. Aristotle says, “The soul must be a substance as the form of a natural body potential with life, and [such] substance is an actuality. So the soul is the actuality of such a body” (412a20-21). The actuality is the movement from the potential to the actual. Since everything is matter that takes a certain form, actuality is the development from potential to actual. The soul is not merely one of the body’s moving parts, instead it contributes to the entire function of the body. The soul is the body’s potential fully developed. A human’s soul is his form and the matter is his body. Aristotle believed it would be illogical to question whether the soul and body are one. “One should not inquire whether the soul and body are one or not, just as one should not ask whether the wax and its shape or, in general, the matter of each thing and that of which it is the matter are one or not…” (412b6-9). Aristotle states that there are two actualities, the soul being the first. The soul is the capacity that allows the body to do certain things. However, if the soul acts apart from the body, then that certain part may be separate, raising the argument of the mind being separate from the body.
This idea of the cohesion of the body and soul is put into a more modern perspective in Walt Whitman’s 1855 poem “I Sing The Body Electric”. Here, Whitman describes the physicality of the body. He writes, “I believe the likes of you are to stand or fall with the likes of the soul, (and that they are the soul)” (9.4-5). He argues that the body and soul both do an equal part, and both he and Aristotle believe there is no discrepancy between the two. Whitman and Aristotle’s view on the soul challenges monotheistic religion’s ideas of the soul living on. The Judeo-Christian-Islamic tradition views the soul as a holding place for both good and bad deeds. Therefore, the soul must live on after our death, in order for humans to be placed in either Heaven or Hell based on their moral standings. Aristotle does not allow for the immortality of the soul, given that the soul and body are one, and with the death of the body comes that of the soul as well.
Aristotle presents three different forms of the soul: the nutritive or vegetative, the sentient, and the rational. The nutritive soul’s functions are nutrition and reproduction, and when this soul is possessed by plants, they grow, decay and experience nutrition, but do not have experience motion and sensation in the way that humans do. Then there is the sentient or sensitive soul, which enables animals to feel the “power of sensation”. This quality distinguishes animals from plants. In the presence of sensation, pleasure and pain also have to be felt, thus allowing for the existence of desire (413b23-25). This sense is the work of physical organs, the work of the body. Finally, there is the rational soul, in charge of intellect and reason, helping its possessors make logical choices. The rational soul is one’s conscious and intellectual capacity, existing specifically in humans. Human beings, the highest form of life, are in possession of all three types of souls, whereas plants possess only one. Plants, non-sentient living things, have the lowest form of the soul, the nutritive, whereas humans have the highest, the rational. These types of souls all align with Aristotle’s belief in potential. The nutritive soul allows living things to change, grow, and decay, while the rational allows for intellectual growth.
In Friedrich Nietzsche’s "'Guilt,' 'Bad Conscience,' and the like", the second essay in Genealogy of Morals, the soul is likened to humans returning to their animal instincts. Society is something that represses our animal instincts, forcing us to internalize them. He examines promises, memory, and forgetfulness, and their relation to society, eventually saying that these all have to do with free will. To keep a promise requires a good memory and also an assurance that the promise will be kept, which requires a certain predictability. There is a certain calculability and predictability in a society of people living under a shared set of beliefs or laws, which makes it easier to make assumptions about the future, and therefore, promise. He then says the ultimate result of this process is the “sovereign individual,” who is liberated from social mores and has his own free will. Society and customs are merely a means to one becoming their own individual. Nietzsche says:
This emancipated individual, with the actual right to make promises, this master of a free will, this sovereign man… and of how this mastery over himself also necessarily gives him mastery over circumstances, over nature, and over all more short-willed and unreliable creatures? … The “free” man… also possesses his measure of value: looking out upon others from himself, he honors or he despises.
This quotation argues that free will, and the ability to pass judgment, are what comprise one’s conscience. Studying genealogy, according to Nietzsche, helps us understand the good and bad, the origin of morality. He talks about the “bad conscience”, claiming that punishment is a result of forgetting our promises. Memory plays an integral role in promises, and punishment guarantees that we will not forget the promise again. Nietzsche also claims that suffering has come to have negative connotations, but in older times it used to invoke images of joy and celebration. To look down upon suffering, he says, is to reject our instincts. “Today, when suffering is always brought forward as the principal argument against existence, as the worst question mark, one does well to recall the ages in which the opposite opinion prevailed because men… saw in it an enchantment of the first order, a genuine seduction to life”.
Given that Nietzsche did not view punishment as the origin of guilt or bad conscience, he hypothesized that the rejection of our animal instincts was the cause. Though we are fundamentally animals, humans’ transition into modern society has caused them to forget their animal instincts and rely on the conscience instead. We turned our instincts, such as hunting and destruction, inward within ourselves, which is how the bad conscience came to be. This internalization of the instincts and the looking inward, a Freudian concept, evolves into what Nietzsche calls the “soul”. He claimed that our inner lives expanded and became more complex, as our outward ones became more diluted. This, to Nietzsche, is the soul.
While these three philosophers express very different views on the soul, there is indeed some overlap. Aristotle sees the soul as neither a body nor a corporeal entity. In this way, his argument is similar to that of the Phaedo where the soul is seen as different from the body, and something that exists within us from the very beginning. To Plato, the soul was the seeing of knowledge, seeing the quality of something beyond physicality, which was known as the Forms. Plato saw the soul as immortal separate from the body, the soul being a result of bodily desires and physicality being eliminated. In contrast, Aristotle saw the soul and the body as directly proportional, needing one another. Aristotle and Plato reject bodily desires, whereas Nietzsche believes they are natural. To Aristotle, the soul is something that needs to be nourished, and the nutritive soul is one that can experience growth and decay, different from Plato’s idea of the immortality of the soul. Plato’s ideas suggest that to be a just and moral person, only the soul has to function and connect with the Forms. Aristotle differs in that he sees the body and soul as dependent on one another, so to be just, both have to function at their best.
Though Aristotle and Nietzsche’s views of animal instincts differ greatly, they share the belief that humans have a certain complexity that differs them from other animals. Aristotle claimed humans indeed have animal instincts, but what separates them from animals is the ability to reason. Nietzsche argued that humans have inherent animal instincts, which are not overtly expressed because of society’s repression. Nietzsche sees animal instincts as a top priority, and views their repression as the cause of a bad conscience. Aristotle believed the ascent beyond our animal instincts is how we fully realize our soul. Despite the differences in opinion, Nietzsche and Aristotle share the belief that a sense of free will distinguishes humans from other creatures. Also, like Plato, Nietzsche believes that humans are shaped by the society they are in. The soul and the conscience relates to society as a whole, and the soul is, in a sense, an emancipation, similar to the transition from darkness to light in Plato’s “Allegory of the Cave”.