I'm being honest. As a Muslim I really, really, really struggle with the idea of an eternal hell, as sometimes I feel like I'm only doing stuff just to avoid hell rather than out of genuine love for God. I'm willing of course to accept punishment in the afterlife but sometimes I hope it's more like Plato's description in the myth of er.

@Iwpoe,
What do you mean by eternal suffering in one form or another?

@iwpoe
Really? Didn't Plato in his myth of Er say punishment was to benefit the wicked, and that only some people(murderers, tyrants, which I'm happy about) would get eternal punishment? What about the poor person say who never had the chance(I'm not trying to be emotional just curious that's all)? and isn't this view more like Cicero's description in the Dream of Scipio for the Epicureans, but even then they still had a chance to ascend higher?(Not trying to be emotional, just curious)

AKG wrote:

@iwpoe
Really? Didn't Plato in his myth of Er say punishment was to benefit the wicked, and that only some people(murderers, tyrants, which I'm happy about) would get eternal punishment? What about the poor person say who never had the chance(I'm not trying to be emotional just curious that's all)? and isn't this view more like Cicero's description in the Dream of Scipio for the Epicureans, but even then they still had a chance to ascend higher?(Not trying to be emotional, just curious)

You know I've never been seriously asked about the view. Few scholars of Plato take his views of the afterlife particularly seriously (or take them as mythical or allegorical in the most extreme sense). I can sketch an outline of the view and its implications loosely as I've come to understand it over the years, and then later (I'm supposed to, eventually do a long blog series closely reading Plato and the Platonists) the serious scholarly work of trying to unpack the Platonic concept can be done in earnest.

If you want any contemporary thinker as a jumping off point into the Platonic view of the afterlife, Nietzsche is actually a good candidate. His concept of eternal recurrence is simply a rehashing of one not too uncommon Greco-Roman view of the afterlife. The upshot isn't the same since you generally get either, if you have an ethico-mythical Nietzsche, a view of cyclical perpetuity wherein you're supposed to take some thought-experiment inspired stance on your life or, if you have a metaphysical-dionysiac Nietzsche, some view where the creative man has the only life worth living because he both actually moves the cycle of his own and other's own recurrence and stands out in it as a singular moment worthy of existence (or something like that- it's a bizarre view). But the leading picture of a world that comes back in a cycle over and over in some sense is perfectly good.

But in the Platonic rout the view goes something like this:

1. Change is ultimately only a kind of illusion/appearance (in the sense that the ultimate nature of all things is in some sense unchanging- English introduces all sorts of misleading epistemological connotations here, so it's better to think of 'illusion' in the sense of 'elusive' or 'befuddling'. The point being that if you look at things simply on the surface you can easily get confused and think they are at one time X the next time Y and for all you know could become Z.)
2. The world is ultimately ordered, so there is a kind of imperative in all moving things to return to what they are or more accurately things are becoming just what they are perpetually in the fullness of time or perhaps sub specie aeternitatis (there is a lot of ambiguity with respect to time in Greek thought, so I'm trying to leave that open. I think the cleanest example of a fully developed vision of this in the world is Ptolemaic astronomy, which is fully Platonic in the sense that it models the motions in the heavens upon their perpetually actualizing the same circular cycles despite apparent chaos, i.e. if you looked only casually, you might think that the stars were just doing anything, but if you pay more and more attention you come to gradually realize their everlasting geometrically articulable order.)
3. Human suffering is on all levels caused by relative disorder in the body, the city, the soul, or etc.
4. The primary cause of disorder in the soul is ignorance (though there is also emphasis on the training of habits and some sense in the tradition that some people are simply lost their whole lives irredeemably. It's not clear to me whether this should be considered a practical or a fundamental difficulty. I think you can make a strong argument that the cultivation of good habits is either the result of loosing ignorance or itself a form of curing ignorance, but the issue of poor birth is less clear to me. Aristotle, for instance, thinks that women and natural slaves are both possible and in some sense cut off from ultimately being ordered by their birth. I can think of one possible resolution, but it's not clear. I would need a detailed reading of the late Platonists to see how the issue gets sorted out.).
5. Ignorance is curable and curing ignorance is a fundamental tendency in all men, even though few will reach very high in that practice.
6. Curing ignorance particularly about the soul and its proper relation to the World is the means by which the soul comes (back?) to its proper order.
8. Philosophy at it's heart is the project of doing so.
9. Disorder in the soul is related to other kinds of disorder but is of premier ethical importance because...
10. The soul is immortal.
11. This immortality seems to include the possibility of return to bodily existence and of becoming mislead due to ignorance so...
12. Philosophy is the ultimate preparation for death.
13. Proper preparation for death entails better outcomes in the afterlife. The Sage/Philosopher's soul finds himself at the highest level of the Kosmos as befitting the likeness of his soul to the highest things.
14. But bad preparation for death inclines a man to live again as a man or even worse as different kinds of animals or even plants.
15. I call this eternal suffering because worldly existence as we have it just is a kind of suffering and those moments resembling respite from suffering are simply those moments which most approximate the soul to ultimate order thus...
16. The soul that never inclines upwards is damned in the sense that he returns to life and its disorder over and over, and lest you get too deluded into thinking that, by, say, spending your life on opium you're pretty happy, you shall die and be utterly lost and return as some sort of plant or something blown about almost entirely by external forces for some untold number of generations, etc.

That's basically the view. Again, that's a sketch. We'd have to sit down, read Plato, read Aristotle, read some of the intermediary tradition, then read Plotinus and Proclus to see how to best justify and correct that sketch, but that's more or less how it looks.

Christianity differs most significantly in that it is not ignorance but some kind of fundamental disorder or depravity that needs intervening divine correction and in that there is, apparently, not a perpetual cycle of living in which one might accomplish this task (though, as some are wont to point out, the dead in hell might be able to manage with much more difficulty some kind of salvation, and I shan't say outright that this is impossible of God's grace, though I am not sure it can be understood with reason).

Edit: I forogt to address your examples because I was focused on that sketch, lol.

The man who is punished is benifitted because he forced to understand that his actions are disordered. The justificaiton of that claim is the whole project of the Republic, but if you dwell on my 3 - 9 and reflect on the myth of the cave the outline becomes clearer. Why do they go back into the cave? Because people need to be dragged out and made to see the truth more clearly to most become what they are. This has to be ultimately an individual achievment, but it can be aided by external correction (punishment in the immediate case, but education in the case of the non-basely wicked). Philosophy is, after all, a kind of group project.

I say that people are eternally suffering in the sense that it's quite possible that the cycle of their reincarnation is indefinatly long and may never lead them any higher. That could presumably be forever. An optimistic Platonist could say that there is an inherant tendency in the soul such that all souls attain the highest levels in the fullness of time, but it's not clear to me.

The average poor person is suffering from bad birth, though this is at least partially (presumably) due to the failures of his own soul in a prior life. Practically speaking, he might most likely be able to hope for a kind of everyday virtue and thus ascend in his next life to something more closely approximating true virtue, etc.

I am less certain about Cicero. I don't often take the Latins seriously on anything they say.

Last edited by iwpoe (7/12/2016 10:57 pm)

AKG wrote:

I have a question. If the cycle is indefinite for some what would happen to a soul say when the universe ends?

Well, one possibility is that the Universe is without beginning or ending. Aristotle seems to think this. I'm not sure how that question gets worked out in the subsequent tradition since the cosmogony of the Neo-Platonists is taken even less seriously than their views on the afterlife. My guess is that they probably think the whole order of things is in some sense eternal.

The immortality of the soul, however entails that there can be no final ending to the World. Forms can't be destroyed nor can the One or the Haenads, etc. Whether there can be a final ending to this particular natural arrangement, that won't be a state of nothingness. The ignorant and disordered soul would presumably ignorant and disordered with respect to whatever non/post-terrestrial activity there is left to it, which would also be a kind of suffering.

AKG wrote:

(You have blog? I'd be interested to see what it like).

I'll let you know.

AKG wrote:

How come you don't take the Latins seriously?

Because they are βάρβαροι, and all the serious contributions to philosophy until Augustine and Boethius are written in Greek. Even Emperor Aurelius, for what he's worth philosophically, had the sense to write in Greek.