In Plato's Meno and Phaedo, Socrates defends the immortality of the soul. His goal is to prove that the soul is eternal, meaning that a person's soul exists before they are physically alive and continues to exist after they die. His motivation for this argument is to prove Cebes wrong, because Cebes fears that when a person dies, their soul dies along with their physical body. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on “Why Violent Video Games Should Not Be Banned”? Get the original essay The argument addressed by Socrates has two parts and fourteen steps. First, he asserts that everything arises from its opposite, if it has an opposite. For example, things that are big only become big because they are small at a given moment. This implies that there are two directions of becoming, such as growth and shrinkage. Another example of a state arising from its opposite is sleep and wakefulness. For a person to be awake, they must not be awake (asleep) at any given time, and therefore they are undergoing the process of awakening. For his argument to come full circle, one must understand that being alive and being dead are opposites of each other. According to the first stages, becoming alive comes from death and becoming dead comes from first being alive. This process also goes both ways: being born and dying. It can obviously be proven that Socrates is a living being at the time he makes this argument. This would ensure that his soul must have pre-existed in Hades because the state of life comes from the state of death. Becoming states can be thought of as a range or spectrum, with one state at one end and its opposite at the other. The second part of the argument discusses death in more depth and concludes the argument. Socrates notes that the process of death is distinctive and cannot be confused. If the two processes of being dead and alive were not balanced or recognized as opposites, then nature would be “handicapped.” This means that everything would be in a state of death because there would be no opposite, life, to balance it. Since the condition of being dead is a state of being, it must follow a two-way process of arising, just like the conditions explained in part one. If people die after being alive, there is no reason why people shouldn't become alive again after being dead. This implies that souls must reside somewhere, and that place is Hades. Through observation, we know that the process of becoming continues eternally, since birth and death take place constantly, every day. Since the soul resides in Hades, people come back to life after being dead. So instead of dying completely, Socrates' soul will travel to Hades and exist there until it one day becomes a living body again, usually after nine years. Every process of becoming continues eternally, including the transition from death to life and from life to death. In conclusion, it is proven that Socrates' soul is immortal based on the given premises..