Dialogue on The Republic, Session 6: The Immortal Soul

What is justice? This is the question that began The Republic, when Socrates and friends set out to find justice in the city in order to locate it in the citizens. In our final session on The Republic, on December 12, 2021, members of the Toronto Philosophy and Calgary Philosophy Meetup groups met to reach some conclusions. How does the soul reconcile its combination of rational limits and unlimited irrationality, to apply reason in the changing state of the present? It seems, to Socrates, that the soul requires harmony so that it is true and just to itself in following the mean that is the path between extremes. If the soul is immortal and incapable of its own destruction, as Socrates states, then does justice originate in the soul before it can be found in the city of mortals? We examined Socrates’ proof of the soul’s immortality, and the soul’s imitation of the eternal forms of being in the present, when the soul itself cannot be imitated and is its own derivative. What is the purpose of the curious myth of Er and its numbers and calculations, with which The Republic ends, and what does it tell us about the construction of the soul? Is time cyclic? Do the rewards for justice and penalties for injustice endure from one life to the next? We may consider these questions when we resume season 2 on January 9 when we will begin reading Plato’s Philebus.