Death Unto Life
Death Unto Life Is the mind capable of producing a pure thought? I think not. We live in a world influenced by power, prejudice, and greed among other things. It is a world where people inheritably accept the values and morals of their society. As a product of our environment we cannot help to be overcome by the fears, wants, and desires that flow through our world so readily. It is these very things which make us incapable of pure thought. Our thoughts are and always will remain impure as long as our body produces these opinions; the very poison that contaminates our thoughts.In Phaedo, a fictionalized account of Socratese, Plato speaks of the separation of the soul and body. He speaks of pure knowledge and reasoning without the use of the senses, a facet we find so necessary in almost any earthly task."Then he will do this most perfectly who approaches the object with thought alone, without associating any sight with his thought, or dragging in any sense perception with his reasoning, but who, using pure thought alone, tries to track down each reality pure and by itself, freeing himself as far as possible from eyes and ears, and in a word, from the whole body, because the bod
The soul, once separated from the body, is immaculate. y confuses the soul when it is associated with it. It can see vaguely through the barred windows but the bars are forever there, obstructing the truth. The body believes it knows what the essence of a beautiful painting is because it holds the properties of possibly other paintings or objects it was once told were beautiful. "The soul reasons best when none of the senses trouble it, neither hearing nor sight not pain nor pleasure, but when it is most by itself, taking leave of the body and as far as possible having no contact or association with it in it's search for reality" (Phaedo, 65b). The body is impure because it has been corrupted by reality. It is a theory that is open to interpretation and possibly each individual has their own conception of what it is to acquire absolute knowledge. What our body perceives and what our soul perceives are two separate entities. It causes us to have an opaq!ue view of the world, everything slightly duller because our thought can never be truly pure. We cannot fully comprehend what it is to be beautiful because our body poisons our thought. It will not be hindered or biased by wants, desires, or fears. It is a wisdom that can only be experienced when the soul is separate from the body, after death or perhaps before life. But rather the acquisition of knowledge will be in it's most pure state, unimpeded by our body, "because as long as we have a body and our soul is fused with such an evil we shall never adequately attain what we desire, which we affirm to be the truth" (Phaedo, 66b). It is the Forms in their purest states.
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Unto Life,
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Acceptance Essays
