Socrates himself
Ellis 1
Dennis Ellis
Professor Veroli
Philosophy 101
24 February 2015
Plato’s Theory of Recollection and the Immortality of the Soul.
“What happens to our soul after we die?” “Is there an afterlife?” “Do our souls even exist?” These questions, and many like them, have been pondered over and theorized by philosophers for millennia. Plato, one of the world’s greatest and most renowned philosophers, created numerous theories to answer these questions. Two of his most famous theories are his Theory of Opposites and his Theory of Recollection. Each of these have many separate aspects that thoroughly answer these questions, however a problem arises when one looks at both theories side by side. Plato uses the Theory of Opposites in his proving of the Theory of Recollection, however there are numerous flaws in the both theories, which subsequently brings into question the stability of his argument on the immortality of the soul.
The Theory of Recollection states that all knowledge and experiences one knows, experiences, and has known and will experience were all inborn in the soul at the time of birth. Socrates gives an excellent example of this in page 568 of Great Dialogues of Plato. He says “ Here is an example: Knowledge of a man and knowledge of a lyre are different… well, you know about lovers, that when they see a lyre or a dress or anything else which their lover uses, this is what happens to them: they know the lyre, and they conceive in the mind the figure of the boy whose lyre it is… seeing one thing, from sight of this you think of another thing whether like or unlike, it is necessary that that was recollection.”(Phaedo, 72E-74A). Even if two objects are completely different from each other, the ability to draw a correlation between the two stems from the pre-existing knowledge that each and every one of us are born with.
Plato’s Theory of Opposites is first introduced in Phaedo, which accounts for the conversations leading up to Socrates’ death, as well as his actual death by the consumption of Hemlock. In addition to Socrates, two others are present for the duration of these conversations – Greek philosophers Simmias and Cebes. The Theory of Opposites states that, in order for something to exist, its opposite must also exist. On page 564 of Great Dialogues of Plato, Socrates says “…everything comes into being like that, always opposite from opposite and from nowhere else; whenever there happens to be a pair of opposites, such as beautiful and ugly, just and unjust, and thousands of others like these. So let us enquire that whether everything that has an opposite must come from its opposite and from nowhere else. For example, when anything becomes bigger, it must, I suppose, become bigger from being smaller before… and if it becomes smaller, it was bigger before and became smaller after that?)”(Phaedo, 70B-71D). Plato argues that this theory is also applicable to the question of the immortal soul. In order for us to currently be alive, we must have been dead at some point, because since death is the opposite of life, life therefore comes from death. Consequently, if we were dead at some point, we must have been alive at some point before, and this cycle continues.
Even in modern times, the Theory of Recollection has come up from time to time in certain scientific studies, however most of these studies are rife with sources of error. One of the primary studies that I have learned about was not even related to the Theory of Recollection, however I feel that pieces of evidence that can be interpreted as supporting the Theory of Recollection can be extracted from this study. However, these pieces of evidence are questionable at best, and can be attributed to a plethora of other factors. During the course of a psychology course I took, I remember the professor telling us of a man that performed a (highly unethical) language experiment on newborn children. The man took a group of newborn children and sent them to be raised with a mute family during their infantile and adolescent years. Since this time period in a child’s life is when their language skills are developed, he wanted to see how not hearing any language at all would affect their language development, and if they would develop any at all. It is reported that, after many years of being exposed to no significant formative language, the now adolescent children appeared to have developed their own language, one which nobody else other than themselves and their fellow study subjects could understand.
If this experiment had been performed when Plato was alive, he would have been ecstatic to be able to use this to aid him in proving the Theory of Recollection. He would have most likely argued that, since they were exposed to no language during their formative years, one can thus extrapolate that their learning of the language came from within. He could also have argued that, regardless of if they made their own language or spoke fluent English, their knowledge of how to string a bunch of sounds together and make them have some sort of significance was pre-existing before they were even born. However, anyone with even the slightest bit of skeptical intuition would not find it that difficult to identify many sources of experiment. The largest error also provides a practical and logical account for the creation of their language. Even though the leader claimed to have ensured they were not exposed to any sort of language, this would prove to be all but impossible over the prolonged time period that the experiment was run. Additionally, even if they were never taught a specific language, they still would have been exposed to words in literature, and they would have been able to assign their own ambiguous sounds to the characters they saw on the pages before them.
One of the issues with the theory of opposites is that it is only applicable in certain circumstances. Take, for example, what Plato writes about the theory of recollection on page 564 “If you wish to understand things more clearly, think of all animals and vegetables and, in a word, everything that has birth, let us see if everything comes into being like that, always opposite from opposite and from nowhere else”(Phaedo, 70B-71D). If one believes that animals have souls, then some sense can be made of this statement, however one part in particular stands out as completely nonsensical — his mention of vegetables. Not even Socrates himself argues that vegetables have souls. The application of the theory of opposites in regard to the immortality of the soul to vegetables is absurd. When Plato speaks of birth, he is referencing what he would consider the imbuing of a body with an ethereal soul. Vegetables are not born, therefore there cannot be the opposite of a vegetable. If someone were to say that they were able to show you what the opposite of an eggplant is, you would be liable to run in the opposite direction as you would think they had lost their mind.
Even though Plato attempts to use these two theories to prove the immortality of the soul, there are still many questions regarding this that are left unanswered. He is able to expertly fence the questions posed by Simmias and Cebes in his jail cell, and they are pleased with his answers. While Plato and many philosophers have spent their entire lives theorizing about the existence of an immortal soul and striving to answer the question about what happens when we die, (much to the chagrin of Plato’s Theory of Recollection) there is no way of knowing whether their arguments are true are not.
