Plato on the Soul

Linked from Essay I, Section 13: "The subject (or, to use a more popular expression, the soul) has perhaps been believed in hitherto more firmly that anything else on earth because it makes possible to the majority of mortals, the weak and oppressed of every kind, the sublime self-deception that interprets weakness as freedom, and their being thus-and-thus as a merit."

But I think that if the soul is polluted and impure when it leaves the body…, bewitched by physical desires and pleasures to the point at which nothing seems to exist for it but the physical….these are not the souls of good but of inferior men…."

From Plato, Phaedo, 81b p. 32

No one may join the company of the gods who has not practised philosophy and is not completely pure when he departs from life, no one but the lover of learning….those who practise philosophy in the right way keep away from all bodily passions, master them and do not surrender themselves to them…."

Plato, Phaedo, 82b p. 33

Reader's Questions

• Would it be reasonable to think of Plato (or Socrates) as a prototypical ascetic priest?
• Do Plato and Nietzsche mean the same thing when they refer to "soul" in these contexts?

RETURN TO ESSAY ONE