The Idea of Immortality of The Soul in Plato's Meno and Phaedo

In Plato's Meno and Phaedo, Socrates argues for the immortality of the soul. His goal is to prove that the soul is eternal, meaning that one's soul exists before they are physically alive and continues to exist after they die. His motivation for this argument is to prove Cebes wrong because Cebes is concerned that when a person dies their soul dies along with the physical body.

There are two parts and fourteen steps of the argument that Socrates addresses. Firstly, he states that everything comes to be from its opposite, if it has an opposite. For example, things that are large only come to be large from being small at one point. This implies that there are two directions of coming to be, such as growing and shrinking. Another example of a state coming to be from its opposite is sleeping and being awake. For one to be awake, they must have been not awake (asleep) at one point, and therefore they undergo the process of waking. In order for his argument to come full circle, it has to be understood that being alive and being dead are opposites of each other. According to the first steps, coming to be alive is from death and coming to be dead occurs from first being alive. This process too goes in both directions: being born and dying. It can be obviously proven that Socrates is a living thing at the time he is posing this argument. This would assure that his soul must have pre-existed in Hades because the state of being alive comes from the state of being dead. States of coming to be can be thought of as a range or spectrum, with one state on one end and its opposite on the other.

Part two of the argument discusses death more in-depth and concludes the argument. Socrates notes that the process of dying is distinctive and cannot be mistaken. If the two processes of being dead and alive were not balanced, or recognized as opposites, then nature would be 'handicapped.' This means that everything would be in the dead condition because there would be no opposite, life, to balance it out. Since the condition of being dead is a state of being, it has to have a process of coming to be in both directions, just like the conditions explained in part one. If people come to be dead from once being alive, there is no reason that people do not become alive from once being dead. This implies that souls must reside somewhere, and that place is Hades. By observation, it is known that the process of coming to be continues eternally, as birth and death take place constantly, every single day. Since the soul resides in Hades, people return to life from here, after previously being dead. So, instead of dying completely, Socrates' soul will travel to Hades and exist there until it possibly comes to be in a living body again someday, typically after nine years. Every process of coming to be continues eternally, including the transition of death to life and life back to death. In conclusion, Socrates' soul is proven to be immortal from the given premises.