[Author’s Name]
[Institution’s Name]
Essay on Death of the Soul
The opening scene presents a conversation between Echecrates and Phaedo, in which Phaedo relates the story of Socrates' death day. Following this initial conversation, Phaedo's narration brings us into Socrates' cell. The question of the meaning that death holds for the philosopher becomes explicit. Socrates abruptly offers the startling advice that the one who engages worthily in philosophy ought to be willing to die, although it is prohibited that the philosopher takes his own life. This strange advice elicits from two young men in attendance, Cebes and Simmias, the demand that Socrates defend his willingness to die in terms of both the prudence and the justice of this disposition.
Socrates rests the most prominent and paradoxical claim of his ensuing defense that the philosopher prepares for and welcomes rather than fears death on the character of the philosopher's goal, pure wisdom. The object of such wisdom is eternal, unchanging, and thus incorporeal. It follows that we can only communicate with such wisdom when we are likewise incorporeal. Socrates' definition of death points to the locus of the necessary link between humanity and pure wisdom: death, we are told, is nothing but the separation of body from incorporeal soul. Therefore, in pursuit of the goal of pure wisdom, the philosopher scorns his embodied existence and yearns for death.
In order to show the desirability of the next world, however, Socrates must portray the character of this world in all its defectiveness. Accordingly, running alongside his otherworldly presentation is a characterization of the philosopher's earthly existence. This dual presentation gains in importance when we recognize that Socrates' defense of his willingness to die, his evocation of the rewards awaiting the philosopher in the next world, is explicitly mythic; at the conclusion of his defense, the crucial question of whether the soul does in fact endure after death remains entirely unresolved................
