The Soul According to Plato, Aristotle, and Augustine

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The Soul According to Plato, Aristotle, and Augustine

The soul can be defined as a perennial enigma that one may never understand. But many people rose to the challenge of effectively explaining just what the soul is about, along with outlining its desires. Three of these people are Plato, Aristotle, and Augustine. Even though all three had distinctive views, the similarities between their views are strikingly vivid. The soul indeed is an enigma to mankind and the only rational explanation of its being is yet to come and may never arrive.

Plato believes the soul is an immortal separate entity that is entrapped in the body until one dies. The soul is what possess knowledge and remembers what was known from previous lifetimes. He illustrates this with the story of Socrates and the slave boy. With this, he showed that while the slave boy was an unschooled individual, he was still able to solve the problem of doubling a square. Plato attributes this accomplishment to the soul as remembering a previous encounter with an eternal knowledge.

To Plato, the soul is a self mover that is not restricted to mortality. He also states that without the soul, the body would not be able to move; the soul is the provider of energy for movement in the body. Since the soul is a self mover, it is inherently a source of energy and life that depends on nothing else to exist; therefore, the soul is immortal.

Plato also believes that the soul is entrapped inside the body and for those who seek

wisdom; they need to separate their soul from their body because wisdom is of another world that only the soul may behold. But as afore mentioned, the body without a soul is dead; by default the only way to have true wisdom is analogous in preparation for death.

The nature of the soul is presented to us in an illustration of a story of a charioteer who has two horses to control: one is white and is good and noble, the other is black and frequently goes of course while it succumbs to temptations. This is how Plato describes the soul in three parts: the charioteer represents reason (which guides), the good white horse represents spirit (which animates and drives on towards glory), and the untamed black horse correlates with desire (which motivates). These three are also in competition with each other; however, for happiness to be obtained, a soul needs all three of these compon...

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...wever, the only aspect I agree with is the structure of the soul. I adamantly disagree that the soul had past lives and is just merely remembering things in this current lifetime. I recognize that the body does need a source to move it and that source must be energy. If the soul is immortal and energy, (by the laws of thermodynamics) cannot be destroyed, perhaps energy and soul are synonymous and there is no such thing as soul, but mere energy in our bodies. I also don’t believe that what a plant has, whatever it is, can be defined as a soul as Aristotle claims. In whomever or whatever a soul dwells, that entity must be aware of its existence, and I don’t think plants know it’s alive. I also agree with Augustine that the soul genuinely desires happiness and that happiness is only the truth. A soul wouldn’t desire that which is false, if happiness is a natural good thing as Plato holds, then of course the soul desires that which is good. And since that which is good is true, I must agree that our soul desires that true thing-or being.

Works Cited

Melchert, Norman. The Great Conversation: A Historical Introduction to Philosophy. 4th ed. Toronto: McGraw Hill Companies, 2002.

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