Nature Of The Soul In Plato's Phaedo

There are many arguments put forth in Plato’s Phaedo concerning the nature of the soul and life before and after death. Socrates, in his final holding cell, explains to his friends and colleagues the reasoning behind his calm disposition upon his impending doom. Socrates believes that through practicing philosophy, he has already practiced the act of dying, or being separated from his bodily woes and pleasures. Through his argument from affinity, Socrates believes that not only will his soul not be destroyed upon death, but also that he will also rightly be joined in the company gods. However, Simmias cares to differ with his argument of harmony.
Simmias’ harmony argument likens the soul and the body to the attunement of a lyre and its strings. …show more content…
This directly contradicts one of Socrates earlier wise statements when he was trying to console his colleagues about the fear that there was no truth. He asserted that it would be a grave mistake to assume that one person would be on either extreme of the moral field. Extreme assumptions would cause extreme dissapointments and foster misanthropy in the hearts of mankind. It would in fact be wiser to acknowledge that majority of people fall in the middle. Perhaps then the attunement isn’t tied to moral standing but simply balance within the soul. If that’s the case then it is very possible that every soul can be attuned as Simmias suggests. But Simmias has contradicted his self in his own argument with the assertion that souls can be good or bad and Socrates capitalizes on that.
Socrates also argued that the soul is the master of the body. Within the harmony metaphor, the strings of the lyre control the harmony and if the assumption is that souls do not take direction from the body as does the attunement from the strings, this could obviously serve as an intellectual discrepancy and there are a few points to consider when examining this particular