Ensouled Means Self-Moved
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Socrates — πᾶν γὰρ σῶμα ᾧ μὲν ἔξωθεν τὸ κινεῖσθαι ἄψυχον, ᾧ δὲ ἔνδοθεν αὐτῷ ἐξ αὑτοῦ ἔμψυχον, ὡς ταύτης οὔσης φύσεως ψυχῆς·
Socrates completes the proof of the soul's immortality and draws out its meaning in a definition. The mark that divides the living from the dead is where motion comes from. Any body that moves only because something outside pushes it — a stone, a corpse — is apsychon, soulless. A body that moves from within, out of its own self, is empsychon, ensouled, alive. Self-motion just is what soul is; there is no other nature it could have. And because the soul is the self-mover, it can never have been set going by anything else and can never stop — it is the ungenerated, undying source of all the motion there is. The reasonable, unmoved friend the first speech prized now looks strange indeed: on this account, to be unmoved is to be, precisely, soulless.
Having proved the self-mover immortal, Socrates draws out the definition of soul itself. Any body moved only from outside is soulless, dead matter; a body that moves from within, out of itself, is ensouled — alive. Self-motion is the very nature of soul, and this is what makes the soul deathless.
This is the metaphysical keystone the whole palinode is built on, and it turns the first speech inside out at the deepest possible level. Soul, Socrates argues, is by definition the self-moving — to auto heauto kinoun, the thing that moves itself. Everything else in the universe is moved from outside, in an endless chain of pushes; only soul is the source, the one thing that begins motion rather than passing it on. That is why it is immortal: what starts all motion cannot itself have been started, or be stopped without the whole moving world grinding to a halt. Now set this beside where the palinode is going. The first two speeches told the boy to prefer the still, self-possessed, unmoved man and to fear the one 'moved' by love. But Plato has just proved that being moved-from-within is not a defect to be avoided; it is the very signature of being a living soul at all. The soul genuinely stirred by love is not malfunctioning — it is doing, at the highest pitch, the one thing that makes it soul. And this deathless self-mover is precisely what the great myth is about to describe taking wing: the soul as charioteer and horses, moving of itself, rising or falling by the direction of its own motion. Immortality, self-motion, and love are being fused into a single claim — that the soul is a moving thing whose motion, rightly aimed, carries it home to the divine.
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