This is a little summary of my reading of a section of "Phaedo" in The Dialogue of Plato. It was interesting for me to discover Socrates' idea of reincarnation:
In a didactic conversation featured in Phaedo, Socrates dialogues with philosophical enquirers Simmias and Cedes, where he illustrates his anthropological notion of the human person, and his theory of human choice and consequential destiny.
Socrates boldly presents a dualistic notion of the human person as a body-soul composite. Personhood is for him, constituted in the soul – which is the faculty of rationality, permanence and purity. The soul, he asserts, which is invisible, pre-existed in the realm of ‘Absolute reality’ which man is capable of re-attaining.
At birth, the soul is “dragged down” into a corporeal, visible, corrupt body into which the soul is ‘locked’ and polluted by its nature of seduction and lusts; and at which point it forgets its preceding knowledge of the Absolutes.
Life for Socrates is a quest for the person to regain pure knowledge through ‘recollection’ – a process that enables those who seek this knowledge to ‘unshackle’ their soul from the evil nature of the body. The ideal destiny of enjoyment of company with “the gods” is won only by those “true philosophers” who throughout life, and at the point of death, have wilfully rejected all association with the body for pure rational wisdom.
For the rest, they shall reincarnate as beasts: the less wicked; as beasts of kinder temperaments and the worst; as savage beasts.
Reading from:
"Phaedo" in The Dialogues of Plato
(ed. Hare and Russell, London, 1970, nn. 65-85.)
