orrying about the matters that concern us in our earthly lives only distracts the pursuit of happiness and wisdom that Plato saw as the purpose of life. He took this further when he went on to describe the relationship between the body and the soul. In Christian philosophy the body is the corporeal perfection that houses an equally perfect (though intangible) soul. Both are human; both are perfect; both come from a divine God. To Plato however the body was scorned as a crude vessel for a form of a person. It had some benefits that cannot be ignored, the possibilities for family, wealth and earthly happiness, but these paled in comparison to the world of the forms. Plato conceded to say that although there is no inherit evil in these pleasures, they should only be indulged minimally as the truer gift in life is to seek the form inside us. Plato’s belief was that we are all representations of the pure form of ourselves that existed in the life before, and as soon as we are born we start to corrupt (in modern thinking, the development of “filters”), mutating the ideals and spiritual luggage we carried inside us in our transition from the life before. . This is how isolated peoples on earth form similar ideas about justice, and what it means to treat people well. It is the body that causes this mutation of ideas. One of the core principles as to why the body is not to be taken as the be all and end all of existence unfortunately relies on now archaic Grecian scientific knowledge. One of the Greeks crowning achievements was the concept of “indivisibles”, or atoms, as we know them today. The idea of things that are elementary to material existence being imperishable, due to their very nature, was eagerly adopted by Plato. He argued that the body, being made up of many smaller units, would soon disassemble. This gives material life the temporary and unimportant spin the Plato had searched to explain properly. This...
