Immortality in ancient philosophy

• By
• Brennan, Tad
DOI
10.4324/9780415249126-A133-1
Published
2002
Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy

Article Summary
In Greco-Roman philosophy immortality is discussed in two contexts: as an uncontroversial
attribute of the gods and as a highly controversial attribute of human souls. Subdividing
this latter topic, one may discern a more metaphysical question about whether every
human soul as such is immortal in virtue of its nature or essence, and a more ethical topic
about whether certain souls may enjoy a greater degree or share of immortality through
adopting a certain mode of life. (This sub-topic is joined to the first main topic, to the extent
that the virtuous agent’s approximation to immortality is part of their imitation of god
or homoiōsis theōi).
Several Presocratic philosophers held that human souls are immortal, but it is Plato who
first offers extensive arguments for this claim, as well as extensive reflections on the ethical
import of personal immortality. Aristotle’s psychology leaves little room for the soul’s
immortality, and it remains controversial whether he wished to leave any whatsoever.
Discussions of immortality and its ethical consequences are similarly downplayed in
surviving Stoic sources. The Epicureans gleefully argued the contrary view that a virtuous
outlook depends on our conviction that we are irredeemably mortal. Only with the
resurgence of Platonism in the Common Era does the soul’s immortality become once again
a commonplace among philosophers. The connection between this and the Christian belief
in resurrection is complicated. It is presumably due to the ascendancy of this double legacy
that current popular usage counts it as nearly tautological that souls are immortal, but
acknowledges a real question of whether human beings have souls, where ancient usage
accepted as a near tautology that all living beings have souls, but admitted wide dispute
over whether souls are immortal or not.
1. Before Plato
In early Greek literary sources, from Homer’s time forward, immortality is an
unchallenged feature of divinity, and ‘the immortals’ is a common expression for the
gods (see Homer). Human beings are just as routinely called ‘mortals’, but the question
of the soul’s mortality is not as clearly settled. Human beings enjoy – or suffer from –
some form of personal survival after death in Homer; their souls descend to Hades
where they remain recognizable as the individuals they were in life, though diminished
in their powers. But Homer famously says of the fallen warriors that ‘they themselves’
remained lying on the field, while their souls fled to Hades (Iliad I.4); the later
philosophical assumption that the soul is the real self is not clearly made.
The rise of more systematic theories of the afterlife is shrouded in the obscurity known
as Orphism (Bremmer 2002). Though confident assertion is impossible, it seems that at
the beginning of the sixth century BC a religious movement developed in Greece,
perhaps with some inspiration from Eastern sources, that claimed that human souls are
immortal, and that after death we are judged by the gods for our actions on earth. These
doctrines were attributed to the mythical singer Orpheus, and no historical author can
be identified. The influence of Orphic doctrine may be measured, for instance, by the
references to its pernicious popularity in Plato, Republic II (364e).
Pythagoras seems to have grown out of this milieu, though the details of his doctrines
are nearly as obscure (see Pythagoras §2; Pythagoreanism §3). A contemporary spoof of
his views by Xenophanes (§1) guarantees that he believed in transmigration
(Greek metempsychōsis); the story tells of a human soul reincarnated in a dog. More
importantly, Pythagoreans such as Philolaus certainly advocated the claim that the soul
is superior to the body and that life in the body is a sort of imprisonment, or burial alive,
for the soul. Socrates is represented as treating such theories with the utmost
seriousness in Plato’s Gorgias (493) and the Phaedo (61).
Empedocles also preached metempsychōsis under the influence of Pythagoras; he
himself had been a fish, a young girl, a bird and a shrub (fr. 117). Life on earth is a
punishment for some previous sin (fr. 115; perhaps the sin of sacrificing animals, which
themselves house souls previously human), but a blameless life can promote the soul to
the status of a god (fr. 146) (see Empedocles §7).
Alcmaeon (§1), another Pythagorean, claimed that the soul is immortal and that it
resembles the immortal gods (e.g. the sun and moon) in its unceasing motion (fr. A12).
A generous eye may here discern something like an argument for the soul’s immortality;
more guardedly one may say that the references to the soul’s resemblances and motion
contain the raw material of later arguments.
Xenophanes deserves further mention for having noticed that a strict adherence to the
doctrine of divine immortality requires the revision of some elements of popular
theology. To a cult that ritualized the death and resurrection of a god he said: ‘if you
think he’s a god, you shouldn’t mourn him; if you think he died, you shouldn’t worship
him’ (fr. A13). In opposition to theogonies and genealogical accounts of the gods’ births,
he said ‘it is equally impious to say that a god came to be as to say that one died’, on the
grounds that this too implies the god’s non-existence at some time (fr. A12).
(A subsidiary use of ‘immortal’ applies it to non-personal objects or stuffs, e.g. the
primal apeiron of Anaximander (§2) or the elements of Empedocles (see Empedocles
§3); here the word may be a merely ornamental variant for ‘imperishable’ or may
alternatively credit its subject with at least some divine properties.)
2. Plato
Plato may be said to have begun from a stock of doctrines on immortality that was
largely prepared for him by Socrates’ interest in Pythagorean views of the soul, on one
hand and Xenophanean rationalizing of theology on the other. In his earliest depictions
of Socrates, Plato makes him espouse an unwavering belief in the existence and
immortality of at least some gods and a commitment to the soul’s immortality that is
more circumspect and critical but no less profound (Socrates’ apparent agnosticism
about the soul’s fate after death in Apology 40c may reflect that dialogue’s emphasis on
the avoidance of unjustified claims to knowledge). The idea that the soul is the true
locus of personhood, that its welfare is vastly more important than the body’s welfare,
that at least some part of it survives death, is judged for its actions and may be
reincarnated, that the post-mortem fate of the soul provides reasons to embrace a life of
earthly virtue – for all of these Socratic commitments there is Presocratic precedent.
These core commitments are also maintained throughout the Platonic corpus, long after
the composition of the Apology and Crito. The use of afterlife judgement as a further
incentive to virtue, along with the theory of psychic immortality it entails, may be found
in the Gorgias, Meno, Phaedo, Phaedrus, Republic, Theaetetus and Laws. (The Republic’s
vindication of the just life in no way depends on eternal rewards, but after that
vindication is complete, book X mentions them as an additional consideration.)
What Plato added to these views was not so much new content as a new ambition: to
prove the soul’s immortality. The majority of the dialogues attributed to his middle period
– especially the Phaedo, Phaedrus and Republic – include explicit attempts at such
proofs. The Phaedo is devoted to this task almost single-mindedly and is structured as a
series of such proofs. Most critics individuate them as follows.
Opposites Argument 70a–72e. Whatever has an opposite comes to be from its opposite;
the cold from the warm, the weaker from the stronger, the sleeping from the waking.
Between every pair of opposites there must always be two processes of transformation,
e.g. cooling down and warming up, falling asleep and waking up. Living and dead are
evidently opposites, and one of the processes between them, namely dying, is evident
to us. We may infer that there is a second process by which living things and stuff come
from dead things or stuff. This conclusion is taken (by a palpable equivocation on ‘the
dead’) to mean that ‘the souls of the dead must be somewhere whence they can come
back again’. An appendix argues that if the process from life to death were not matched
by a process from death to life, then the original stock of living things would have been
exhausted in the infinite past.
Recollection Argument 73a–77e. Our ability to give the right answers in abstract
discussions shows that we possess a kind of knowledge (of the Forms, as it happens)
that we must have acquired before birth. It follows that ‘our souls existed apart from the
body before they took on human form’. That they continue to exist after we die is said to
follow by combining this proof with the Opposites Argument outlined above. (On this
and the related argument of Plato’s Meno 81 ff. see Innateness in ancient philosophy.)
Resemblance Argument 78b–84b Forms and particulars differ systematically: Forms are
invisible, unchanging, uniform and eternal, where particulars are visible, changeable,
composite and perishable. The human soul is invisible too, and it investigates Forms
without the aid of bodily senses. By ruling a particular body it resembles the divine
which rules and leads. Thus the soul is ‘most like the divine, deathless, intelligible,
uniform, and indissoluble’. Its uniformity and partlessness exempt it from the
decomposition that destroys compounded bodies; for all these reasons we may
conclude that it is immortal. (Significantly, it is never claimed that the soul actually is a
Form, and the theory of soul-construction in the Timaeus 35 explicitly makes souls a
third class of entities distinct from Forms and bodies.)
These three arguments are met by two fascinating and devastating objections from
Socrates’ interlocutors, Simmias and Kebes. It is in response to these objections that
Socrates propounds his final proof, which is discussed elsewhere (see Plato §13).
The Phaedrus (245) argues for the soul’s immortality from its essence as a self-mover;
what acts as an ultimate source of motion for other things cannot have any beginning,
or any end. Republic X (609–10) adds the argument that each thing can be destroyed
only by its own proper evils – as iron by rust, wood by rot or fire and so on – and if the
agents that make it worse do not destroy it, nothing else will. But what makes the soul
worse is vice, and this has no tendency to destroy the soul. Thus nothing can destroy
the soul, and it is imperishable.
Republic X (611) also argues that the soul’s immortality precludes its having parts (the
Resemblance Argument of the Phaedo had already emphasized the soul’s uniformity
and simplicity). Socrates claims that the complex psychology elaborated in the bulk of
the Republic applies to the soul only as it is ‘maimed by its association with the body’; in
itself, and when not incarnate, the soul is partless. Immortality is also attributed only to
the partless, purely rational soul in the Timaeus (69), where the lower parts are called
‘mortal’. On the evidence of these three dialogues, then, it seems that immortality is a
property only of our rational souls. But the myth in the Phaedrus (247–257) and
the Republic’s Myth of Er tend to suggest that immortal souls still possess irrational
parts even when divorced from bodies. This ambivalence over the simplicity or
complexity of the discarnate soul became a point of controversy among later Platonists.
A new aspect of divine immortality is introduced in the discussion of eternity in
the Timaeus (37e). Time itself is created along with the visible cosmos, so all of the
entities that cooperated in its creation – including the Creator – must somehow be
outside time altogether. This god’s immortality is not merely a matter of its having a life
like our own, extended ad infinitum; for the Creator there is no ‘was’ or ‘will be’, a
doctrine that later influenced Augustine’s account of atemporal divinity (see Augustine
§8). In contrast, the immortality of souls in general (and thus of the lower, created gods)
no longer follows from their intrinsic nature; since they came to be and are of a
composite nature, they are intrinsically liable to decomposition and destruction. Their
immortality is extrinsically guaranteed by the Creator’s continued concurrence, and their
eternity, like that of the cosmos itself, is one-sided, towards the future only, a feature
that provoked protests from Aristotle (On the Heavens I 12).
3. Aristotle
Aristotle did not take up the Platonic project of proving the soul’s immortality or of
providing eternal rewards for virtuous conduct. Indeed, by defining the soul as the ‘first
actuality of an organic living body’ (On the Soul II 1), he seems to have precluded the
possibility that any soul can survive the dissolution of the body whose actuality it is. Two
lines of thought complicate this story and seem to make room for some immortal
element in the soul. The first is the caveat, stated twice (On the Soul I 1, II 1), that the
continued existence of any part of the soul in separation from the body is impossible,
unless there is some activity of the soul that is not a complex activity of the soul and
body: thinking is explicitly offered as a possible example of this, in contrast to such
activities as feeling fear or anger, which clearly involve psycho-physical cooperation.
The second and related complication is that in his analysis of intellect and intellectual
thought (On the SoulIII 4–5), Aristotle refers to a mind that is ‘immortal and eternal’ and
is somehow involved in human thought. If we connect these two strands together, we
may conclude that we have found something like the rational part of an individual
human being’s soul and that we are being assured of its immortality. However, another
line of interpretation will make this immortal and eternal mind (what later tradition calls
the ‘active intellect’) a force external to the individual, whether a divinity that may be
personal in its own right or a reservoir of impersonal thinking power. On views of this
sort, what Aristotle is offering us falls far short of anything that might be considered
personal survival (see Aristotle §§16, 19).
Nor does Aristotle make use of the arguments we found in Plato that a certain form of
life is to be preferred because of its consequences in the hereafter. It is true that he
argues for the superiority of the life of philosophical contemplation on the grounds that
the philosopher will most resemble the gods, be dearest to them and be most likely to
earn their favour (Nicomachean Ethics X 8). But these benefits belong to this life, not the
next. So too when his advocacy of contemplation culminates in the call to ‘be immortal,
to the extent possible’ by employing our reason, the divine element in us (Nicomachean
Ethics X 7). There is nothing about the afterlife in this appeal, only a striking shift of
meaning. Immortality has here come unmoored from survival after death or eternal
existence and now simply denotes a kind of activity that a participant may share in for
finite, even fleeting, periods of time.
On the other hand, Aristotle’s commitment to the literal immortality of the gods is
unequivocal (see Aristotle §16). The heavens and earth are eternal in past and future,
and the eternal movements of the heavens are the result of the eternal activity of gods
who keep them in motion (Physics VIII 6; Metaphysics XII 7–8; On the Heavens I 3)
4. After Aristotle
Stoic theology bears some resemblance to the two-tiered henotheistic system of
Plato’s Timaeus, in that only one god, Zeus, enjoys literal immortality, while the rest of
the pantheon are created at the start of one cosmic cycle and subsumed into Zeus at its
conflagration (Seneca, Letters 9.16) (see Stoicism §5). We hear very little about the fate
of human souls after death (not that their corporeal nature provides any conceptual bar
to immortality, since even Zeus is corporeal). One source claims that they outlive the
dissolution of the body and that perfectly virtuous souls last until the next conflagration,
while those of the vicious last shorter periods (Eusebius Preparation of the Gospel
15.20.6) – thus the perfectly virtuous enjoy as much immortality as the gods do, apart
from Zeus. No surviving Stoic source offers post-mortem rewards as an incentive for
virtuous behaviour; so far as we can tell, the reasons to be virtuous all had to do with its
production of happiness in this life.
The Epicureans talked a great deal about the soul’s fate after death and made it central
to their ethical teachings; but in contrast to Platonic promises of immortal rewards, they
fervently promised mortality. What blights our earthly life, they insisted, is not death, but
the fear of death, and the fear of death may be fully dispelled by understanding how
fully we die. Death brings the physical dissolution of the atomic complex that is our soul,
and with it the complete cessation of any subject that could experience pleasure or pain,
the only things that are good or bad. Thus no Tartaran torments can be felt and none
are to be feared; a series of arguments proves that death can have no sting
(see Epicureanism §13). ‘The correct understanding that death is nothing to us makes
our mortality enjoyable, not by adding infinite time, but by taking away the yearning for
immortality’ (Epicurus Letter to Menoeceus 124).
But immortality and imperishability are essential attributes of the gods, according to
Epicurus (the other essential attribute is happiness or blessedness). The nature of the
Epicurean gods’ existence, and thus of their immortality, has always been a matter of
controversy, but both were fervently asserted (see Epicureanism §9). Our happiness can
be seen as an approximation of divine bliss: the Epicurean adept ‘will live as a god
among human beings; for there is no resemblance to a mortal animal when a human
being lives surrounded by immortal goods’ (Letter to Menoeceus 135). This rhetorical
flourish underplays one point of resemblance: the human being will die. Here as with
Aristotle the language of ‘immortality’ is being applied metaphorically to a distinctly
temporary activity (here the enjoyment of pleasures, rather than contemplation).
After the Hellenistic period, philosophy once again fell under the sway of Plato and
Aristotle, and old issues were revived. Alexander of Aphrodisias (§2) advocated a
reading of Aristotle’s psychology according to which no part or aspect of the individual
human soul is immortal; this view later formed part of the Averroism (§2) that jolted
medieval Christianity.
Platonists tried to reconcile the various strands of Plato’s views on the parts of the soul
and their immortality (see Platonism, Early and Middle §5). The tendency of Platonism
from Plotinus onwards is to endorse the disembodied existence of souls with such
vehemence as to make it seem that it is our current corporeal state whose reality needs
proving, rather than the soul’s immortality. Our true selves are identified with a level of
reality that is not only immortal but outside time altogether (see Plotinus §6). In Laws X
(904) Plato defended divine providence by giving souls responsibility for the kind of life
they lead at their next embodiment. This project of theodicy via reincarnation is
embraced by later Platonists and results in one of the more chilling passages of
heartless piety in antiquity, when the fourth-century Platonist Sallustius argues that
birth-defects in ostensibly innocent newborns are merely evidence of their souls’
wickedness in a previous life (Sallustius On the Gods and the Cosmos 20.2).
References and further reading
• Aristotle (c. mid 4th century) The Complete Works of Aristotle, ed. J. Barnes, Princeton,
NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984, 2 vols.
(The standard English translation; contains all the works of Aristotle referred to in this
entry.)
• Bostock, D. (1986) Plato’s Phaedo, Oxford: Clarendon Press.
(Helpful though highly unsympathetic discussion of Plato’s most sustained discussion of
immortality.)
• Bremmer, J. (2002) The Rise and Fall of the Afterlife, London: Routledge.
(An up-to-date survey of what is known of Orphism and the origins of the early Greek
doctrine of immortality.)
• Brentano, F. (1992) ‘Nous Poiētikos: Survey of Earlier Interpretations’, in M.C.
Nussbaum and A.O. Rorty (eds), Essays on Aristotle’s De Anima, Oxford: Oxford University
Press.
(‘Nous Poiētikos’ = active intellect. A useful introduction to the controversies
engendered by Aristotle’s fleeting references to psychic immortality.)
• Burkert, W. (1972) Lore and Science in Ancient Pythagoreanism, trans. E.L. Minar, Jr,
Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
(The standard work on early Pythagoreanism.)
• Diels, H. and Kranz, W. (1951) Die Fragmente der Vorsokratiker (Fragments of the
Presocratics), Berlin: Weidmann, 6th edn.
(Citations indicated by ‘fr.’(fragment) and a number. The standard collection of the
ancient sources, both fragments and testimonia, the latter designated by ‘A’; Greek texts
with translations into German.)
• Plato (390s–347) Plato: Complete Works, ed. J.M. Cooper, Indianapolis, IN: Hackett.,
1997.
(The most complete one-volume edition; contains all the dialogues of Plato referred to in
this entry.)
• Sallustius (c. 362) On the Gods and the Cosmos, trans. G. Murray, in Five Stages of Greek
Religion, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1951.
(A manual of Neoplatonist religion.)
• Sedley, D. (1999) ‘The Ideal of Godlikeness’, in G. Fine (ed.), Plato 2 – Ethics, Politics,
Religion, and the Soul, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 309–328.
(On the pervasive ancient theme of becoming like god.)
• Warren, J. (2000) ‘Epicurean Immortality’, Oxford Studies in Ancient PhilosophyXVIII:
231–262.
(Good recent survey of views.)