Page 11 - GALIET PLATO´S PHAEDO: Reason and Idea Plato IV

not the ruled, to the divine and not the mortal.14 From these premises, he concludes that the soul is uniform, always same as itself, divine, deathless, intelligible whereas the body is “the human, mortal, multiform, unintelligible, soluble and never consistently the same.”15 Platonism tends to conceive of the soul by analogy to the Idea and vice-versa.
As a result, the philosopher and, generally, anyone, must aspire, then, to liberate his soul from the prison of the body. This can be the most joyful moment in life, Socrates posits, and it is what makes possible that life and philosophy be a meditation about death. That is, philosophy is to be practiced in order to prepare one for death, which is the separation of soul from the body.16 However, to Socrates death must not be voluntary because a human being does not possess his own life; it is a gift of the gods that only they can take away.
Of primary importance is the fact that Plato’s ideas can be demonstrated by reason. These famed four arguments are deemed rational, though one can grasp in them or their foundations certain intuitions that are not properly rational.17 The first argument (70c- 72e) is the one of opposites. It consists in affirming that all things
14 Plato. Phaedo. 79e
15 Plato. Phaedo. 80b
16 Plato. Phaedo. 64b-65b
17 The intuition, for example, that the soul resists the body and that the body does not follow the soul. Also, there are some divergent mytho-magic elements such as orphic and Pythagorean ideas of metepsimchosis or transmigration of souls.
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