All Soul Is Immortal
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ψυχὴ πᾶσα ἀθάνατος· τὸ γὰρ ἀεικίνητον ἀθάνατον
The proof turns on one distinction. Everything that moves was set going by something else — except the soul, which moves itself. What has no outside source of motion has no beginning, and what has no beginning cannot be brought to an end. So the soul, Plato argues, never dies.
Socrates has declared that mania is a divine gift. Now he must prove it — by proving the soul is immortal. His proof is unexpected: motion itself is the key. Whatever is always moving cannot die. And the soul moves itself.
The word carrying all this is <em>psychē</em>, and it has come a long way. In Homer the psychē is the faint breath that leaves a dying man and drifts to the underworld, barely a self at all. Plato takes that thin ghost and makes it the deathless source of all motion in the cosmos — the argument he presses again in the <em>Phaedo</em>. Much of what Europe would later mean by "soul" begins in this reversal.
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