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Chapter 7 Supplement Classical Mortality Arguments |
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This supplement to Chapter 7 presents quotations from
three venerable arguments for complete mortality. These arguments are
found in the works of Plato, Aristotle and al-Farabi.
 In Phaedo
Plato has Simmias put the question to Socrates, whether soul and body might be
likened to harmony and the lyre. Should that analogy hold true, complete
mortality would be the soul's fate:
[M]ight not a person use the same argument about harmony and the lyre — might he not say that harmony is a thing invisible, incorporeal, fair, divine, abiding in the lyre which is harmonized, but that the lyre and the strings are matter and material, composite, earthy, and akin to mortality... For I suspect, Socrates, that the notion of the soul which we are all of us inclined to entertain, would also be yours, and that you too would conceive the body to be strung up, and held together, by the elements of hot and cold, wet and dry, and the like, and that the soul is the harmony or due proportionate admixture of them. And, if this is true, the inference clearly is, that when the strings of the body are unduly loosened or overstrained through disorder or other injury, then the soul, though most divine, like other harmonies of music or of works of art, of course perishes at once....[1] This argument against immortality troubles
Socrates and his friends more than any other. In the end, Socrates rejoins
the argument by appealing to past-life recollection as a demonstration of the
soul's existence prior to the body. He goes on to cite the soul's propensity
for internal conflict as a further counter-example to the harmony metaphor
employed by Simmias.[2]
Aristotle also considered the harmony
metaphor to be insufficient as an explanatory theory of the soul's function.[3] He proposed a more
sophisticated materialistic argument, which had the effect of binding the soul
even more tightly to the living body:
"In the book on the Nicomachean [Ethics] Alfarabi appears to have denied that conjunction with the incorporeal intelligences can take place. He stated that such was also the opinion of Alexander. And [he held] that the end for man should not be regarded as anything other than theoretical perfection...."[7] Herbert Davidson notes that al-Farabi's line
of reasoning may have paralleled Aristotle's own:
...Averroes reports Alfarabi's grounds [for his skeptical conclusion] to have been that "the generated-destructible cannot become eternal." An Aristotelian rule laid down that anything generated must undergo destruction and cannot continue to exist forever, and Alfarabi — as Averroes transmits or reconstructs his reasoning — concluded that inasmuch as the human intellect comes into existence, it inevitably undergoes destruction.[8]
next Chapter 8: Personal Identity |
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Chapter 7 Supplement — Endnotes |
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[7] Herbert A. Davidson,
Alfarabi, Avicenna, and
Averroes, on Intellect (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992) 71-72.
[8] Davidson 72.
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Copyright © 1999
Wayne Stewart
Last update 4/19/11