For Simmias the soul is a kind of harmony, meaning that it vanishes and dies with the body. He makes the correlation because “a harmony is something invisible, without body, beautiful and divine in the attuned lyre [like the soul], whereas the lyre itself and its string are physical bodily, composite, earthy, and akin to what is mortal [like the body]” (124). In consequence, by following the analogy, the soul dies because when an instrument is broken or destroyed, the harmony supposedly is as well. He is thus claiming that the body determines the soul’s state and recognizes that it is not immortal. You can make the claim that he is a naturalist.
What is the soul for Cebes?
For Simmias, the soul is something that precedes the body but is mortal nonetheless. He is against Simmias in believing that the soul is stronger and more long-lasting than the body. Socrates summarizes his point succinctly: “Cebes, I thought, agrees with me that the soul lasts much longer than the body, but that no one knows whether the soul often wears out many bodies and then, on leaving its last body, is now itself destroyed” (129).
Is the soul corporeal? If yes, in what sense?
For Simmias the soul is corporeal. This is so because it is not beyond the natural realm; it dies the moment the body does and appears the moment it does as well. If Simmias’ ideas were modernized, he would probably sound a lot like the empirical scientists/philosophers that claim everything in the universe is made up of atoms and the like (e.g. Daniel Dennett, Francis Crick). While Simmias may ascribe qualities to the soul unseen in corporeal things, he is still undeniably subjecting it to whatever happens to the body—thus making the soul part of it.
For Cebes the soul is not corporeal in the extreme sense held by Simmias. However, the possibility of a soul’s death makes it corporeal in some sense. By allowing such a possibility, he robs the soul of its divinity and makes for a very bizarre concept.
What is the relationship between soul and body?
The answer to this question is remarkably simple with regards to the views of Simmias and Cebes. If the soul is a kind of harmony for Simmias, then he must believe the body generates the soul. For Cebes, on the other hand, the soul generates the body since it precedes it. In fact, Cebes answers this question directly: “[A] weaver had woven and worn out many such cloaks. He perished after many of them but before the last…The image illustrates, I think, the relationship of the soul to the body.”
Work Cited:
Plato. Five Dialogues: Euthyphro, Apology, Crito, Meno, Phaedo (Second Edition). Trans. G.M.A. Grube.
