A Different Version of Immortality in Plato’s Symposium
Subject Areas : Geneology of philosophical schools and Ideas
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Keywords: Immortality soul remembrance and memory forms virtue Plato ,
Abstract :
A well-established and common view in Plato’s philosophy is that the immortality of the soul after death is a persistent and fixed type of immortality. The human soul, or at least an important part of it, which is the same intellect, is a substance of a different type and from a different world, which remains alive after death. However, Plato’s Symposium portrays a perspective of immortality that, through creating a phenomenological image of the soul and attributing the tendency for immortality to Eros, considers the soul to be vulnerable to change. Hence, he maintains that the immortality of the soul is different from the common sense interpretation of this concept. The present paper argues that, in order to understand and interpret Plato’s intended meaning of immortality in Symposium, it is necessary to pay careful attention to some of his remarks in this regard, as well as to his discussions of birth and education, and remembrance and reminiscence. In this way, one could infer a dynamic and creative model of immortality which neither necessitates the after-death subsistence of the identical soul, which enjoys the passive and stagnant introversion of the Ideas, nor presupposes the existence of a soul of another type. The present paper, while referring to and describing Plato’s four-fold model of immortality, explains their important, similar, and, in some cases, different characteristics. It also demonstrates that this immortality is in permanent unity with the creation of certain words regarding true virtue or its images and life in the memory of future generations and indirectly affects the world affairs.
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