Plato Phaedo Death & Aristotle Categories Contrast Forms

In a homily one of my parochial priests' paraphrased Socrates stating, “The unreflective life is not without living” (Gonzalez). He added to that, “Living with awareness and becoming aware of what God is doing while living within our life is the key” (Gonzalez). In Plato’s Republic regarding Phaedo, Socrates contemplates his death and the life he lived. However, even though his theory of forms is quite reflective of that of a sort of reincarnation and pre-existent life after and before death or immortality of the soul, his argument is imperfect, cyclical, and seemingly not sound. Looking at Socrates’ logic and buying the actual thought of a pre-existent fantasia-like life that is now existent on earth is completely unbelievable to my rational mind. Socrates’ forms were even indefensible within itself by his Socratic ignorance. He most likely had this concept of trying to make sense of the world around him in an idealistic and contemplative sense because he was about to die and what would happen to his soul. The forms were trying to explain the intangible and unrealistic views about the soul and other subjects. Aristotle disagreed with Plato over the theory of the forms in Categories and challenges the forms while epistemology showing that reality is based on the things of this world actually existing based on substance. In a comparison of Plato's fundamental forms of reality is not what we can touch, see, or feel but only is just ideas, Aristotle’s Categories argues for the substance of reality and his analysis of language is fundamentally a statement about the ontology of theory of being and reality of what is real through substance.

To Socrates, the forms are unchangeable and eternal, such as the soul. As a philosopher, he contemplates death and the soul being separated from it. He questions:

…[death] is nothing but the separation of the soul from the body? And that being dead is this: the body’s having come to be apart, separated from the soul, alone by itself, and the soul’s being apart, alone by itself, separated from the body? Death can’t be anything else but that, can it? (70. 64c)

Simmias disagrees as he knows in his rationale that “It’s just that” as he says (70. 64c). Socrates then goes on to compare his cross-examination of philosophical telosto the pleasures of food, drink, and sex, and Simmias again disagrees (71. 64d). To Simmias, these pleasures aredisdainfulin the eyes of philosophy. So, then, Socrates continued the argument for the immortality of the soul continues. He posits that knowledge is attainable by the dead as the soul is imparted from it and gains wisdom by ridding it from its company and that its pursuit and attainment is what they should live by so that they should remain pure from the body “until God himself shall release us” (72. 66db-67b). Here we see his forms argument in the idea of death being eternal trying to grasp the idealism of the soul apart from death and the body, though not too sound as a valid initial argument.

To take a step backward about Plato’s forms, Socrates idealism is played out further when discussing wisdom, and other such virtues by reason of death. He says that men who are philosophers should not fear death but welcome what they had longed for by death's release and an attainment for wisdom through it to rid themselves of this world (73. 67e-68a). Such wisdom is like the other virtues and examples of forms such as "temperance, justice, and bravery may, in fact, be a kind of purification of all such things, and wisdom itself a kind of purifying rite" (73. 69b-69c). Cebes has to point Socrates to the other direction noting the death of the body and the soul where:

…men fear that when it’s been separated from the body, it may no longer exist anywhere, but that on the very day a man dies, it may be destroyed and perish, as soon as it’s separated from the body…one needs no little reassuring and convincing, that when the man has died, his soul exists, and that it possesses some power and wisdom. (74. 70a-b)

Therefore Plato’s Socratic polemic is that wisdom as a form comes through the death of the body to the soul and that such forms exist without being sensible and immortally. Socrates argues that “all things would ultimately have the same form: the same fate would overtake them, and they would cease from coming to be” reciprocally (75. 72b) in a cyclical argument. This is not so to Cebes, myself, or Aristotle.

Socrates’ misperception of equal forms spell out his irregular view of an argument for imperfection and also recollection. As Cebes and Socrates debate the equalof a log to a log or a stone to a stone, Socrates asks, "But now, did the equals themselves ever seem to you unequal, or equality inequality? (76-77. 74a-c)” Obviously not to Cebes clear rationale. Socrates recycling thesis is that these forms can remember or recollect them, as from birth, but they are in fact different. The prior acquaintance of me filming myself at a coffee shop singing an original tune is not like the actual representation of me being there to the live audience nor the experience I had or their point of view. It is but a mirror image. It is also imperfect, I may sound louder or quieter or sicker than I actually am to the general audience than how I edited down my footage or I may be in a different format visually on screen than what I normally am in real life. Of course, I might be recognizable, but others could also cover me or sound just like me if they were to know my tune’s actual music on “the lyre”.

Note the cyclical, imperfect, and Socratic ignoranceargument or recycling theory of recollection once again. Plato says of Socrates, “living people are born from the dead, and the souls of the dead exist" (75. 72e). This reminds me of my discussions with Mormon acquaintances on being a "spirit-child" before coming to earth to live out my purpose for God's meaning. Where does this make sense at all in any of Plato's former texts? If the forms prior to birth, even our souls, and bodies, existed then yes, we would recognize them in this life, however, that déjà vu like moments seem too much of a movie like "The Matrix Trilogy" by which is all fantasy, and as I began the argument against Plato, unrealistic.

The metaphysics of The Categoriesare more realistic in Aristotle's theory of predication where language derives and defines the existence of substance rather than unknowable forms. For example, Aristotle says, "To give a rough idea, examples of substance are a man, horse; of quantity: four-foot, five foot; of qualification: white, grammatical: of a relative: double, half, larger; of where: in the Lyceum" (206. 4.25b). Of primary substances, he relates to them "as subjects or in them as subjects" (207. 5b35). For in them, such as color or individual body "if the primary substances did not exist it would be impossible for any of the other things to exist" (207. 2b5). Therefore, primary subjects to Aristotle have a metaphysical reality of persistence through change predicated on the name of their subject and definition as such. They are compounds of form and matter. Secondary substances are as adjectives to the subjects, or qualifications. Aristotle states:

…that a secondary substance likewise signifies a certain qualification-for the subject is not, as the primary substance is, one, but man and animal are said of many things. However, it does not signify simply a certain qualification, as white does. White signifies nothing but a qualification, whereas the species and the genus mark off the qualification of substance-they signify substance of a certain qualification. (208. 3b15-22a)

Aristotle’s rational explanation of the definitive substances explains away that which is grounded in reality and not idealism as Plato sees things.

Now the fact that a subject in a sentence of something is a substance that has an undertone of change is the predicate of which Aristotle differs in Plato’s immortality of the soul argument failure. In The Categories, Aristotle says, “For example, an individual man-one and the same-becomes pale at one time and dark at another, and hot and cold, and bad and good” (208. 4b17-20). Henceforth, the theory of substance has the persistence to change and move on, whereas, in Phaedo, Plato’s forms are unchangeable.

One could go on more if we were to compare more of Aristotle’s metaphysics in Physics to Phaedo about how the forms differ from the language of reality. Plato is grounded in pointing upward while Aristotle is grounded in pointing to what is. The genius of Categories is that it takes the definitions of such words and gives them substance to their meaning, instead of supernaturally causing confusion as Plato says of Socrates’ in Phaedo. Albeit, both have good points, where they differ is that the statements Aristotle poses are generally discussed as substantially superior to Socrates' interpretation to Socrates' understanding of an afterlife as they more logically lays out that which exists as opposed to that which is only contemplative near Socrates' deathbed. Aristotle had more of a sense of the actuality of things whereas Plato personified them in the invisible, yet for Aristotle, something did not come out of nothing. All in all, though I myself do believe the soul is eternal, I do not agree in which the way Plato describes its philosophy of theology Christologically.

Works Cited

Gonzalez, Felipe, Rev. 1st Sunday of Lent Homily. February 18, 2018.

Pojman, P. Louis and Vaughn, Lewis. Classics of Philosphy. Third Edition. Oxford. New York. 2011. Print.