he asleep and awake analogy. One would have to agree that a person could be only one or the other. If you are not sleeping, then you are awake and if you are not awake then you have to be asleep. This example further proves that you can only be one of something or the other, its opposite, but you must be one of them. Sleep can not come from thin air, and neither can being awake. A person must physically be one before that person can become the other. Then Socrates ventures to say that if you are not alive then you are dead. This idea works because to prove the theory of immortality because according to the previous two statements, life must come from it’s opposite, which is death. So therefore there must be a form of being dead, which we are to assume is the freed soul. This appears to be a valid proof until one of Socrates’ friends, Cebes, brings up a counter point. He said that there is a process of becoming hot or cold and there is a process of going to sleep and waking up. Then Cebes states, that there is no process to dying or becoming alive. There is no point in between, where a person has a partial soul, either on its way in or on its way out. At this points Socrates abandons this theory and brings out his second point.Socrates’ second attempt to prove the immortality of the soul is based on the simple and composite theory. This proof relies on the assumption that everyone believes that a human is made of a soul and a body. This proof separates all things into to categories, the simple and the composite. Those that belong to the simple category have no parts, are indestructible, and are invisible. The composite category is composed of things that have parts, are visible, and are destructible. Socrates says that when a person dies, he separates into a body and into a soul. What once was a composite are not a simple, the soul, and a composite, the body. He then argues that because the soul is a si...
