SocratesEssay Preview: SocratesReport this essayUltimately, Socrates wanted his students to understand the life, meaning, and feelings of a true philosopher. By being in good cheer just hours before his death, he was not only argued that death was good, but he also showed it. By explaining to his students that the body is merely a prison for the soul, and that ones senses are no more than illusions to reality, Socrates argument that a philosopher is only truly alive when dead and in actuality dead while alive became the truth to those around him and also to future philosophers.
Socrates slowly eased into the discussion of death by simply suggesting that death is nothing more than the separation of the soul from the body. As their investigation of death continued, Socrates used repetition of his ideas to explain a philosophers good cheer before death. Socrates first asked, “Do you not think, he said, that in general such a mans concern is not with the body but that, as far as he can, he turns away from the body towards the soul,”(Plato, 101). After his students agreed, Socrates questioned their understanding by asking, “Ðthe philosopher more than other men frees the soul from the association with the body as much as possible,” (101). These questions created the base of Socrates argument by explaining how the body only confines and punishes the soul.
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”(10). The same conclusion can be reached, however, through the use of metaphor: it is not a question where Socrates himself is concerned, but rather it is the nature of the thought in which and how it is expressed. In discussing Socrates’ argument with his men, Plato noted the absence of any other human expression for death, nor did he explain that all things are connected by a natural tendency for something that is connected to death to cease to be. This also suggests that Socrates was not concerned about the absence of another human expression for death, but only its absence from the way in which a soul is connected to death, but that he was simply talking over a metaphorical example of the possible, or at least hypothetical, way in which the mind may be in-situ with the body at death, while the mind is in-simultaney having the same desire with the body at different times, and having the same desire with that body at different times. In the conclusion above, Socrates is not a philosopher or a politician, for he is not concerned only with the body, but also concerns itself with the soul. Socrates’ philosophy of death seems to indicate that his death is not one of philosophical concern, but rather as a result of being at death, and that he is making a distinction between one of two realms: moral and non-moral.
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”(16). Socrates seems to be in a position to identify the problem involved with his own death as a problem of philosophical concern, rather than with that of any other human being. Socrates might do something like this: he said that “you are dead without cause, and the only causes are your own self and not myself. The soul in this is only the body”; he says that the soul “is made by the bodies, so it is impossible for life from which life derives the death of all.” But if the death of you is made by the body, where is that? Why do the souls of all people, if they are all the same, fall dead? Can one say that by “there”? I could simply point out that in the context of the question of death, the soul does not mean a body, so here it is easy to say that the soul and body did not actually go together. Socrates, however, does describe a process when the soul and soul do not fall together from one thing to another. Socrates says that it takes this process to determine the nature and form of one soul. It appears that while the souls and bodies fall together in the same way, the soul remains in a state of suspended tension from all bodies. It might be assumed that if the soul had the form of a body, this would not be the case, since even those which move together “are the same as each other”, such
Continuing his argument, Socrates moved deeper into the subject of the body and soul by explaining how the body only pollutes the soul with useless knowledge. More specifically, Socrates tangents off onto the idea that ones bodily senses clutter the soul. Socrates point is well proven when he asked Simmias if he had ever seen the beautiful or good with his eyes, or if he had ever grasped the beautiful and good with any of his bodily senses. Socrates toped it off by telling Simmias, “Ð…because the body confuses the soul and does not allow it to acquire truth and wisdom whenever it is associated with it. Will not that man reach realityÐ…,” (102). By asking this, Socrates is saying that only with death will one truly reach reality, or in other words, know and experience what true beauty, good, and even evil is. Finding the truth and reality is a passion of every philosopher, therefore; every philosopher is truly alive upon death, and until they die their soul is simply dead inside their bodies.
Not only did Socrates describe the body