/lit/ - Literature

>>14021015
Go to daily Mass. It will heal your soul. Give it a month. You will feel a difference, I guarantee it. Much shorter, no music. Just sit somewhere you don't have to interact with people -- on Sundays also, if you can manage. That sucks about the awful music.

Don't kill yourself.

Get a copy of Sr. Faustina, Divine Mercy in My Soul. Give it a try.

Rollan

Every single thread on the first two pages is blogposting "lifestyle" shit from phoneposting faggot zoomers, so here's a thread about an actual book, just in case there's another person on /lit/ who is here to talk about them.

I was reading the Phaedo and following Plato's argument for the immortality of the soul, which seems to rely on these premises:
- Absolute ideas underlying particular things exist (granting him this), not just particulars.
- Any given particular thing is a sort of confluence of its underlying ideas, and exists by "participating" in them.
- The absolute idea underlying the class of particular thing, "living being," is life - or soul, whose ideal nature is life.
- Just as the underlying essence "evenness" doesn't pass away when a particular set of even-numbered things is disaggregated, and just as the underlying essence "greatness" doesn't pass away when something great is destroyed, the underlying essence "soul" does not pass away when the particular thing it animates is destroyed.

Therefore, the soul is immortal. An additional premise Plato gives in support of this is that, if we accept the lyre/harmony analogy for body/soul (or body/life), we have to accept a complete determination of the harmony by the lyre, that is, of the soul by the body - on the lyre analogy, the soul would be a totally passive byproduct or "ghostly image" emitted by the body, but would not act upon the body. So, if we don't want to give up our conviction that the soul does act upon the body (for instance in restraining "lower" impulses, but also in the conventional sense of governing it, i.e., free will), then we can't accept the lyre analogy. Plato doesn't prove the last bit, he just assumes (and his interlocutor agrees) that we don't regard the soul as a total epiphenomenon.

Am I wrong in this interpretation? If not, is this argument the first explicit appearance of the problem of universals specifically re: the human soul? Because how does Plato's argument preserve the INDIVIDUAL soul, then? It says that "soul" is the animating idea of the living person, just like how threeness is the animating idea underlying "particular tripartite-things." But threeness is anonymous, it underlies many things indifferently. How is the soul any different, going by this argument alone? Plato may have proved that "soul" or "lifeforce" survives death, but how has he proved that individuality does? Is this the first appearance of the Islamic & medieval Christian problem of whether it's the concept "humanness," or INDIVIDUAL souls, which is the essence of human beings?