In Plato's Meno and Phaedo, Socrates supports the immortality of the soul. His goal is to demonstrate that the soul is eternal, meaning that one's soul exists before they are physically alive and continues to exist after death. 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. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an original essay There are two parts and fourteen steps to the argument Socrates addresses. First of all, he states that everything arises from its opposite, if it has an opposite. For example, big things only become big from small at a certain point. This implies that there are two directions of becoming, such as growth and contraction. Another example of a state arising from its opposite is sleep and being awake. For one to be awake, he must have been unawake (asleep) at some point, and thus undergoes the process of waking. For his argument to come full circle, it must be understood that being alive and being dead are opposites of each other. According to the first steps, becoming alive comes from death and becoming dead comes from first being alive. This process also goes in both directions: birth and death. Socrates can obviously be shown to be a living being when he makes this argument. This would ensure that his soul must have pre-existed in Hades because the state of being alive derives from the state of being dead. States in flux can be thought of as a range or spectrum, with one state on one end and its opposite on the other. The second part of the topic discusses death in more depth and concludes the topic. Socrates notes that the process of death is distinctive and cannot be confused. If the two processes of being alive and dead were not balanced, or recognized as opposites, then nature would be “handicapped”. This means that everything would be in a dead condition because there would be no opposite, life, to balance it. Since the condition of being dead is a state of being, it must have a process to become reality in both directions, just like the conditions explained in the first part. If people die because they were alive once, there is no reason why they shouldn't become alive because they died once. This implies that souls must reside somewhere, and that place is Hades. From observation, we know that the process of becoming continues eternally, as birth and death occur constantly, every single day. Since the soul resides in Hades, people return to life from here, after having previously been dead. So, instead of dying completely, Socrates' soul will travel to Hades and exist there until one day it returns to a living body, typically after nine years. Every process of becoming continues eternally, including the transition from death to life and from life back to death. In conclusion, from the given premises it is demonstrated that Socrates' soul is immortal.