Comparing The Phaedo And The Upanishads

Phaedo – the existence and nature of the afterlife and the immortality and reincarnation of the soul

Death is defined as the separation of the body from the soul. In The Phaedo, death has two notions; a common one which is the basic idea that the soul dies, and the physical idea that the soul separates from the body after death. “The soul is most like that which is divine, immortal intelligible, uniform, indissoluble, and ever self-consistent and invariable, whereas body is most like that which human, mortal is, multiform, unintelligible, dissoluble, and never self-consistent.” (Phaedo) According to Socrates, knowledge is not something one came to understand but it was actually imprinted on the soul. Knowledge to Socrates was an unchanging eternal truth, something that could not be acquired through experience and time. Socrates friends believe that after death the soul disperses into the air like a breath. On

Separated by language, history and several hundred miles of the Mediterranean Sea, two of the world's greatest cultures simultaneously matured and advanced in the centuries before the birth of Christianity. In the Aegean north, Hellenic Greeks blossomed around their crown jewel of Athens, while the eastern Holy City of Jerusalem witnessed the continued development of Hebrew tradition. Though they shared adjacent portions of the globe and of chronology, these two civilizations grew up around wholly different ideologies. The monotheistic devotion of Judaism that evolved in the Hebrew lands stood in stark contrast to the Greek worship of polytheistic Olympians, a religion that often tended more towards the rational and philosophic than

The Upanishad scriptures suggest that followers exercise their body and mind. These exercises become more important to Hindu practice as time goes by. Through the teachings of Upanishads there is a spiritual essence called “Brahman”. Brahman is a single world soul that is the base of all physical matter, energy, time and space. Brahman is all things on earth and beyond. It is thought that a person’s inner soul known as the “atman”, is part of Brahman and therefore; a person’s innermost soul is part of the single world soul. The meditation associated with the search for perfect knowledge has evolved into a permanent aspect of Hinduism and is known as “Yoga”. During this period Buddhism and Jainism were created as additional ways of reaching enlightenment while denying key teachings and practices.

Plato was a philosopher who was born in Athens (470-390 BCE), and was also a student of Socrates. He felt that intelligence and one’s perception belonged to completely independent realms or realities. He believed that general concepts of knowledge were predestined, or placed in the soul before birth even occurred in living things. Plato believed that the cosmos was intelligible, and the the universe was mathematically understandable. He believes that mathematical objects could be seen as perfect forms. Forms, a doctoral of Plato, can be understood as an everyday object or idea, which does not, exists in the everyday realm, but merely is existent in the hypothetical realm or reality.

“If the truth of all things always existed in the soul, then the soul is immortal” (The Philosophical Journey 89). This states that since the soul has all knowledge integrated, one recollects this knowledge through situations in an individual’s life and use one’s reasoning. With the dialogues of the Meno and Phaedo, Plato discusses the ideas of recollection and immortality of the soul in general. As well, the Republic, through the three different situations shown, Plato shows the ideas of the forms and what is real and what is not.

Plato's theory of forms, also called his theory of ideas, states that there is another world, separate from the material world that we live in called the "eternal world of forms". This world, to Plato, is more real than the one we live in. His theory is shown in his Allegory of the Cave (from The Republic, Book VII), where the prisoners only live in what they think is a real world, but really it is a shadow of reality. According to Plato, to the prisoners in the allegory and to humanity in the material world "truth would be literally nothing but shadows" and he believes us to be as ignorant as the people in the cave. Plato followed the belief that in order for something to be real it has to be permanent, and as everything in the world we

Read the following in Plato's The Last Days of Socrates: Phaedo Wisdom and the Soul

​This paper will analyze afterlife in Hinduism and in Catholicism. Afterlife will be considered in the Catechism of the Catholic Church 1020-1060 and in Romans 10. Afterlife will also be considered in Bhagavad Gita 2:27, Obayashi page 146 and in Rig Veda 10.14.8. This topic is intriguing because death is a part of life and it is interesting to see the different perspectives of their two religions and of what happens in the afterlife. Besides the perspectives, this topic studies the greatest mystery of life, death which is an uncommon topic since people usually shy away from talking about this because of the emotional implications that it brings to people.

Plato, arguably one of the most famous philosophers in history is known for his dialogues and theory of Forms. The theory of Forms argues that ideas (non-physical forms) are more real than tangible objects or what our senses perceive. According to Plato, there is the visible realm and intelligible realm. Reality could be divided into three different levels; the level of appearances, the real level, and the ideal level which he explains through the analogy of the ‘Divided Line’ in The Republic.

Enkidu’s death is the consequence of insulting the Gods. Socrates would disagree with the belief that death is a punishment from the Gods for several reasons. In the Phaedo, he claims that the true lover of wisdom, that is the philosopher, “must escape from the body and observe matters in themselves with the soul by itself” (Plato 103). So, since death is the separation of the soul from the body, only at death can we gain true wisdom. He says, “Wisdom itself is a kind of cleansing . . . he who arrives [in the underworld] purified and initiated will dwell with the gods” (Plato 106). Evidently, if the soul can only attain wisdom from death and if that wisdom leads to purification, which assures you a place with the gods, then Socrates would disagree with The Epic of Gilgamesh that death is a punishment from the gods. This evidence leads us to a look at the contrasting views of an afterlife. In the Phaedo, Socrates explains how the soul exists in the afterlife through the use of two main theories, the theory of opposites and the theory of recollection. It is important to note that he also draws a connection between the soul and wisdom as a rationalization for his belief in an afterlife, saying, “When the soul investigates by itself it passes into the realm of what is pure, ever existing, immortal and unchanging . . . its experience then is what we call wisdom” (Plato 118). By relating the two he can

“Everything which exist in this world and all things that we see around us are not as they appear to us” this is the core idea behind plato’s theory of forms.From this idea only he moves towards explaining his world of forms or ideas.

In order to see exactly what a form is and how it differs from a

The physical world only has one constant - change. The human senses give an idea of the present reality. However, seeing is not believing. The perception we develop through the senses (seeing, smelling, tasting, touching, and hearing) does not consist of real truth. Real truth is not what is in front of us, but of absolute concepts and unchanging truths. Plato encouraged looking past what is directly visible in order to find truths that exist independent of the physical world. The understanding of the idea of reality through the discussion of the Divided Line and the allegory of the cave directly contributes and proves his theory of Forms and lie at the heart of his philosophy, which I think is convincing because of the extent of his discussions through experimental-based and direct evidence.

Plato contended that all true knowledge is recollection. He stated that we all have innate knowledge that tells us about the things we experience in our world. This knowledge, Plato believed, was gained when the soul resided in the invisible realm, the realm of The Forms and The Good.