Descriptive Philosophy (Essay Sample)

Differences between the Soul and the Body According To Socrates
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Socrates is among the most influential philosophers that history has ever known. Other scholars, who existed, also advanced their thoughts as Socrates did, but Socrates is of no parallel measure to other later philosophers who develop their philosophical views on the same lane as Socrates. Socrates conceived the idea of the mind being dissimilar from the body. According to Socrates, the mind/soul outlive’s the body. There are arguments Socrates raises to support his contention of the body being distinctive from the body. Aquinas and Aristotle tried to distinguish the body and soul, but their arguments are a bit blurred to see the difference but a co-existence of the body and mind. Socrates does clearly distinguish the body and the mind in his arguments. In this paper the writer will elaborate on the arguments advanced by Socrates in support of the assertion, ‘the body is distinct from the soul/mind.’ (Tredennick, 2005).
Socrates advanced the concept of the soul giving life to the body; this idea became fundamental in many philosophical views in ancient Greece and Western philosophy (Tredennick, 2005). Socrates held in the eternity of the soul whereas the body is worldly. The difference of the body from the soul drives the point of; if the soul is immortal then the body is doomed to death. Socrates offers four arguments in support of his assertion of the immortality of the soul as put forth in Phaedo by Plato. The advanced arguments as advanced by Tredennick (2005) are the cyclical argument, the theory of recollection, the affinity argument and the argument from the form of life.
In the cyclical argument, Socrates advances an argument that; the living comes from the dead. Socrates says that, "if it was true that the living come from the dead, and then the soul must exist in the other world, for if not, how could they have been given birth to again." In explaining how the soul survives the body, Socrates uses examples of relationships. Examples used by Socrates are in the relationship of hot-cold and sleep-awake. Socrates advances his argument for the immortality of the soul by stating that, things that have opposites come to be from their opposites. West (2008) illustrates how Socrates gets Cebes to conclude that the dead are generated from the living through death, and the livings are generated from the death through birth.
Additional proof of the immortality of the mind is the theory of recollection. Socrates put forth an argument for the possibility of drawing information out of a person who seems not to have any knowledge of a subject prior to being interrogated about it. Socrates concludes that this person must have gained that experience in a previous life and is now recalling it (West, 2008). The answers by such person who is interrogated in the story of Socrates must have been got in a previous life lived by the soul of the individual.
Socrates puts forward The Affinity argument in support of his argument of the mind being eternal. Socrates demonstrates that the mind bears a resemblance to the imperceptible and celestial though the body take after that which is observable and corporeal. From the foregoing argument there comes a conclusion of, while the body may be seen to exist after death in the form of a corpse since the body is mortal and the soul divine, the soul will outlast the body (Tredennick, 2005). Those minds that are not upright to live in the underworld are confined in another body since they can’t live in perpetuity as those of men who learnt to differentiate the soul and the body. In the affinity argument, Socrates concludes that the soul of a virtuous man is immortal where the course of passing into the underworld is determined, by the way, a man subsisted his/her being.
A conclusion on the immortality of the soul by Socrates is reached in Phaedo where Socrates gives an analogy in support of his conclusion. The argument from the form of life separates the soul from life through equating a soul to the utter beauty that Socrates puts as, "anything beautiful than utter beauty is beautiful only insofar as it partakes of absolute beauty." (West, 2008). Complete beauty is a form as the mind is a form and forms under no circumstances convert to their contraries. Socrates backs up his conclusion by asking, " will not the number three endure annihilation or anything sooner than be converted into an even number while remaining three?" (Tredennick, 2005).
Other distinctions of the body from the soul stem out of the four arguments outlined in advancing Socrates’s argument on the immortality of the soul. Socrates says that the body is of the imperfect, practical sphere whereas the mind is of the perfect real world. All that is seen surrounding us is the sensible world that is just a misapprehension. The real world cannot be perceived by the eyes but is where the Form (the soul) exists (Tredennick, 2005). Socrates contends that the world the body lives in cannot be real since it keeps changing always. Socrates advances the distinction of inhabitance of the body and soul as the sensible and real world respectively.
The body does not grasp reality as the mind does. Socrates explains this concept by attr...