piously in hopes of obtaining a clean soul for it’s journey to the underworld. Plato explains, “If it is pure when it leaves the body and drags nothing bodily with it, as it had no willing association with the body in life, but avoided it and gathered itself together by itself and always practised this, which is no other than practising philosophy in the right way, training to die easily” (Plato 119). He continues by saying, “A soul in this state makes its way to the invisible, which is like itself, the divine and immortal and wise, and arriving there it can be happy, having rid itself of confusion, ignorance, fear…” (Plato 120).As we can clearly see, both Plato and Descartes teach that the human being can exist separately from the body and that knowledge is merely a form of recollection or a gift from a Supreme Being. I tend to lean more towards believing in Plato’s argument. Although I strongly disagree with knowledge is recollection because I am paying twenty thousand dollars to “learn” right now I do agree that the soul lives on after the body dies and eventually reincarnates into a new body after experiencing the after-world. Death is a given in today’s society but I do not feel that our lives need to be spent preparing for it because God gives us the ability to do many more constructive, useful things rather than prepare for our death. In ending, Plato and Descartes teach us numerous ideas of the true nature of the human being. Some similarities exist as well as some differences, but I believe in the end, the true nature of the human being is left up to the ideas of every individual person. ...
