Ancient Philosophy 36 (2016)

©Mathesis Publications 1

The Soul’s (After-) Life

Rachana Kamtekar

In dialogues from the Gorgias and Phaedo to the Republic and Phaedrus,
Plato’s Socrates describes the experiences of the soul after death. Commentators
have generally treated these accounts of the soul’s afterlife as marking a turn
from the main argumentative thrust of the dialogues, and addressing a non-ratio-
nal person (a person governed by a non-rational soul-part) who is unable to be
persuaded by the philosophical arguments of the dialogue,1 or a non-rational
soul-part,2 and offering this audience consequentialist reasons to be virtuous.3 In
the view of these commentators, the after-life accounts are second-rate accounts
addressed to a second-rate audience.4
I argue that the after-life accounts treat the consequences of virtue and vice in
a way that is philosophically sophisticated and well-suited to inspiring genuine
reflection about one’s moral character. To see this, we will need a distinction
between artificial and natural consequences that is most easily seen in the Repub-
lic. In Republic ii, Adeimantus says that when people praise justice, they praise it
for its consequences, and the consequences they praise it for are really the conse-
1 As a general approach to Plato’s myths, this goes back to al-Farabi; a recent example is May-

hew 2008, 170. Saunders 1991, 201-211 says of the eschatological punishments in the Laws pream-
bles to laws governing homicide, ‘the threats of eschatology are essentially attempts to induce fear…
Plato throws anything and everything at the potential criminal’s head, however crude and primitive,
regardless of inconsistency with his official penology’. I do not mean to rule out the possibility that
inferior readers may respond to the myths with fear; what I am arguing is that the best readers too
have something to learn from the myths.
2 Edelstein 1949 argues that myths are addressed to the appetitive part of the soul. A similar
thought is suggested by the claim in Hackforth 1955, 171 that the myths have ‘the aim…of reinforc-
ing or supplementing philosophical argument by appeal to the imagination’. More recently the same
thought is expressed by Destrée 2012, 111. Halliwell 2007, 471 says the myth of Er ‘invites a trust
that might be as much affective as rational’.
3 Since the 19th century scholars have treated consequentialist reasons for valuing virtue as a

mark of an inferior outlook. Archer-Hind 1883 regarding Phaedo 181-186 calls this outlook ‘utilitar-
ian’, and Irwin 1977, 322n2 suggests that Plato criticizes non-philosophers for valuing virtue for its
consequences rather than for its own sake, and that Plato regards a person’s virtue as less than gen-
uine if that person values virtue for the sake of its consequences (Irwin 1995, 194-195). Downstream
from the devaluation of consequentialist reasons, Thayer 1988, 373-374 distinguishes a popular ‘util-
itarian’ vs. philosophical (i.e., intrinsic) valuation of justice in this myth. I believe that Plato does not
reject consequentialist reasons for valuing virtue per se; what matters is what the consequences are,
e.g., in the Phaedo, whether they are wisdom or pleasant bodily states.
4 It is a merit of Annas 1982 that it holds the myths up to the highest philosophical standards,

and, although it argues that they fail by these standards, opens the door to our treating them philo-
sophically.
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quences of appearing just before other people and the gods (362e-367e). The
bulk of Socrates’ defense of justice thus brackets the consequences of appearing
just, but in Republic x, right before recounting the Myth of Er, Socrates asks per-
mission to restore to justice the benefits that accrue to the just person as a result
of his reputation among gods and humans (612b-614a). I will call these the ‘arti-
ficial consequences’ of justice, distinguishing them from ‘natural consequences’,
which are the effects of a person’s being (apart from her being seen to be) just; an
example of a natural consequence would be a choice expressive of one’s just (or
unjust) character. I will argue that in the afterlife accounts, the punishment of a
disembodied soul, e.g., suffering in Tartarus following a divine judgment, is an
artificial consequence of vice, which, as it turns out, serves a corrective function.
By contrast, a person’s reincarnation is a natural consequence of her vice or
virtue: it is due to her desire or choice, and as such is a manifestation of her char-
acter, viz., of her being (rather than appearing/being seen to be) just or unjust.5
Viewed in terms of this distinction, the afterlife accounts appear in a new light:
rather than aiming to inspire future-directed fear in the reader about what will
happen unless she pursues virtue, the accounts of afterlife punishment assure her
that the gods are on the side of her moral improvement, and the accounts of rein-
carnation hold up a mirror in which she can see her present character clothed in a
body or way of life befitting it.
The article is structured as follows. Section 1, concerned with divine punish-
ment in the afterlife, argues that in the Gorgias, Phaedo, and Republic, divine
punishment is for the sake of correcting souls, which we should expect given
Plato’s views both about the function of just human punishment and about the
goodness of the gods’ agency. Section 2 argues that in the Phaedo, Republic, and
Phaedrus, reincarnation is a phase of a soul’s afterlife separate from its punish-
ment and reward at the hands of the gods, and is due to the soul’s own character,
which expresses itself in its desires for the body, or beliefs about or choice of
what kind of life to live. Section 3 argues that the Timaeus and Laws innovate in
eliminating the disembodied phase of the afterlife and collapsing the distinction
between natural and artificial consequences so that reincarnation becomes a vehi-
cle of divine punishment; while this problematizes the goodness of divine pun-
ishment, the ethical lesson of the reincarnation accounts remains unchanged.
Finally, section 4 argues that according to the reincarnation accounts, the differ-
ences between human beings and other animals are less ethically significant than
the differences between one human being and another.
One preliminary before I turn to my main argument. As so-called ‘myths’,
Plato’s afterlife accounts are often taken to demand a different type of treatment
than do Plato’s so-called ‘arguments’. Fortunately, it is not necessary to enter

5 This distinction follows Irwin 1977, 185; however, Irwin might reject the idea that the choice
of a reincarnation is a natural consequence on the grounds that the relationship between character and
choices is closer than that. But the Myth of Er is part of an account of the ‘wages’ (μισθούς) of jus-
tice (612b8) and injustice, and the choice of lives (I will argue) is a consequence of one’s character.
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into the fray on the ‘myth vs. argument’ distinction here,6 for Plato himself
guides readers as to how to approach accounts the content of which exceeds what
is established by dialectic (of which myths are one example). The Republic offers
an example of this in its treatment of stories about the gods, which, if they are to
be permitted in the ideal city, must fall within the boundaries of the patterns
(τύπους…ἐν οἷς δεῖ μυθολογεῖν, 379a2) established by dialectic, according to
which, since god is good, a god can be the cause only of good things, and cannot
change (378e-383c). Stories about gods will include content not given by dialec-
tic, but this content should not conflict with the truths established by dialectic.
So, for example, the dialectically-established conclusion that a god cannot be the
cause of bad things predicts the Myth of Er’s claim that god is not responsible
(θεὸς ἀναίτιος, 617e5) for our choices—presumably since our choices might be
bad.7
The suggestion that the after-life accounts consist of speculation constrained
by the dialogue’s dialectical arguments is confirmed by Socrates’ comments
about their status. For example, in the Phaedo, Socrates says that while he does
not insist that things are as he has said, we should risk the belief that something
like what he has said is true about the soul and its dwelling places (114d). In the
Gorgias, Socrates says that his account of the soul’s judgment in the reign of
Cronos and in the reign of Zeus is not to be dismissed as a μῦθος for it is a λόγος
that he is telling as true (523a, cf. 527c); what he believes as true and counts as
reasonable is that the soul is separated from the body at death and is marked by
its injustices, for which it is punished (524a); while his audience may scorn this
as myth, the only account that ever remains in place is (as he has argued through-
out the dialogue) that it is worse to do than to suffer wrong, and having done
wrong, worse to remain unpunished than be punished (527a).8
This suggests that as we examine Plato’s accounts of the soul’s afterlife, it will
be useful to be looking to identify the dialectically-derived claims to which they
must conform. In section 1, I argue that Plato’s accounts of divine punishment
conform to his arguments about the purpose of just punishment and the goodness
of the agency of the gods.

6 However, I have discussed the relationship between myth and argument at greater length in

Kamtekar 2006. Morgan 2000 says the ‘genetic’ myth—‘creat[es] an image of philosophical truth’
(161)—but this is not necessary, she says, for educational ‘rhetorical’ myths, which may be false as
long as they express acceptable ethics (162-163), or philosophical myths, which are set in and
affected by a dialectical context and help turn people towards a life of philosophy (164). The general
account of myth as speculation constrained by dialectical argument holds for myths with all the func-
tions Morgan identifies.
7 Thanks to Tad Brennan for suggesting this example.
8 This does not mean the myths only repeat the arguments. An excellent example of how the
myth expands on the content of the arguments is to be found in Edmonds 2012, which argues that
Plato uses the myth of the afterlife to clarify the way in which the ἔλεγχος functions as corrective
punishment: there is the phase of diagnosis of error in the interlocutor’s beliefs, akin to the phase of
divine judgment, followed by the pain of exposure, akin to whatever afterlife punishment consists in,
and in both cases, some are cured but others not (as Callicles is not cured by the ἔλεγχος).
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1. Divine Punishment
Since the closing myth of the Gorgias (523a-526d) describes an afterlife judg-
ment and punishment without any mention of reincarnation,9 beginning with this
account helps us focus on the particular concerns of divine judgment and punish-
ment and, as I argue further down the road, helps us to see that divine punishment
and reincarnation are separate phases of the afterlife with distinct functions.
To introduce the account, Socrates sets out the basic problem of rendering a
just judgment: on the one hand, the soul of the judged, which has in it the effects
of an agent’s actions and pursuits (524d-25a), is concealed by the body, by
worldly possessions, and by friends; on the other hand, the eyes of the judge can
see only these. A genuinely just judgment (δικαιοτάτη, 524a), of what is rather
than what seems (526e-27b), is of naked soul by naked soul. Naked judgment is
Zeus’s solution to a previously bad arrangement, when divine judgment too was
conducted on souls while they were still embodied, the result of which was that
people who were not worthy of these treatments (ἀνάξιοι, 523c1) were punished
in Tartarus or rewarded in the Isles of the Blessed. Zeus set up divine judgment
so that souls would be judged when dead, stripped bare of the trappings of bodily
beauty, power, and wealth that conceal them while they live, and their judges
would examine them only with their own souls, rather than with their eyes or
ears. Thus under the new regime, Zeus’s sons—Minos, Rhadamanthus, and Aea-
cus—judge disembodied souls (523e-524a). They see in these naked souls what
belongs to the soul’s nature and what has happened to it on account of the per-
son’s pursuit of each matter (524d)—not only what actions the soul is responsi-
ble for, but what effect those actions had on its character.
The goal of divine punishment is to make the soul—ideally the soul of the
wrongdoer, but failing that the soul of onlookers—better. Thus the gods send
curable wrongdoers’ souls to Tartarus (the prison of justice and repayment, τὸ
τῆς τίσεώς τε καὶ δίκης δεσμωτήριον, 523b3), for one who is correctly pun-
ished (ὀρθῶς τιμωρουμένῳ) is improved (βελτίονι γίγνεσθαι καὶ ὀνίνασθαι).
Incurable wrongdoers are punished too, but for the sake of the improvement of
others (525a-b). The rationale for divine punishment of curables echoes that for
just human punishment: earlier, Socrates argued with Polus that if a wrongdoer is
punished justly, he is benefited, i.e., his soul is improved by being rid of corrup-
tion and injustice (476e-477b). Now of course Socrates need not hold that divine
punishment and just human punishment have the same goal; he could for exam-
ple, maintain that while it is not the place of human beings to reward or punish on
the basis of desert, it is the place of the gods. Nevertheless, in fact the Gorgias
gives just human punishment and divine punishment the same goal, viz., soul-
correction. If punishment has this goal, the judgment by Minos, Rhadamanthus,
and Aeacus cannot be final, in the sense of determining the soul’s future forever
9 Dodds 1959, 381 says that reincarnation is implied by the claim that punishment of the incur-
able benefits others who view it. But if the curable souls can become better as a result of being pun-
ished in the afterlife, why should they not also become better as a result of watching the punishment
of others?
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after.10 Disembodied souls continue to have a life, in which they can become bet-
ter or more just (or not).
Although the Phaedo, Republic, and Phaedrus depart from the Gorgias by
introducing reincarnation into the life of the soul, they treat reincarnation as a
distinct phase of the afterlife from the reward or punishment phase, and follow
the Gorgias for the latter. Let us start with a preliminary demarcation of the pun-
ishment-or-reward phase from the reincarnation phase (the case for which will
not be complete until section 2). In the Republic, the souls are judged upon death,
and the unjust are sent below the earth to suffer while the just are sent up to the
heavens to enjoy beautiful sights, each for a thousand years, during which they
receive a ten-fold repayment for their deeds while embodied. It is only after this
that they return to the place where they will choose their next life; Socrates
clearly marks the end of the punishment phase: ‘Indeed, then, such are the penal-
ties and punishments (δίκας τε καὶ τιμωρίας) and again the rewards that are
counterparts to these’ (616a8-b1). In the Phaedrus, souls first fall into bodies as a
result of their failure to see forms; each of these fallen souls is judged at death
and punished or rewarded until a thousand years are over, following which it
chooses and lives its next life. Embodied life is followed by judgment and pun-
ishment or reward, which is followed by the choice of a new life, a cycle that
repeats ten times over ten thousand years (three thousand for a soul that chooses
a philosophical life three times in a row, after which it can return to its home
among the Forms, 248a-249b). In the Phaedo, after being judged, ordinary souls
are sent to Acheron or Tartarus to become purified (καθαιρόμενοι) by paying
penalties (διδόντες δίκας, 113d7-8); virtuous souls are sent to the true surface
of the earth; and those who have purified themselves by philosophy are sent to a
place even more beautiful than this where they get to live without a body in the
time to come (113d-114c, cf. 108c).11 The reincarnation of the first two groups
into different animals (80d-82c) that live in the misty hollows of our world
(109a-e), however, is due to their desires for the body (see section 2).
Having established the separateness of the punishment or reward phase of the
afterlife in the Phaedo, Republic and Phaedrus, let us see whether it serves the
goal of improving the soul as in the Gorgias. There is a straightforward argument
that the Republic follows the same course as the Gorgias. According to the
Republic, a god, being good, can be the cause only of good things (378e-381c);
10 So we should refuse the supposition of commentators that Socrates is describing a last judg-

ment, and along with the supposition, their complaint that Socrates’ account of the afterlife contains
elements inconsistent with this supposition. See, e.g., Mackenzie 1981, 230: ‘Reform is a means to
virtue and happiness but this [eschatological] punishment is the end of a process.’ Similarly, Saun-
ders 1991, 53 thinks that an end to afterlife punishment can only be justified by the introduction of
reincarnation. Rowe 2012, 193: ‘the myth itself fails…to work even in its own terms: for…the sup-
posed deterrent effect of the punishment of “incurables” will actually have no subjects to work on’.
But it is perfectly reasonable to suppose that seeing the punishment of incurables deters curable souls
in Tartarus from committing injustice in the afterlife.
11 Sedley 1990 argues that the Phaedo’s cosmos is ‘psychocentric’, with souls being sent to var-
ious places for their purification.
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this fact imposes a constraint on what may be said about the gods, and in particu-
lar, if it is said that anyone suffers at the hands of a god, it must said that they are
benefited by their punishment (ὠνίναντο κολαζόμενοι), and it may not be said
that they are wretched who pay the penalty (ἄθλιοι…οἱ δίκην διδόντες)
(380b2).12 (Of course, there is the possibility of some local evil serving a greater
good, but as we will see, making a god responsible for even the local evil is
something Plato avoids.)
One benefit of post-mortem punishment is that it seems to make a soul that has
suffered it cautious in its choices. According to the Myth of Er, the souls that
have suffered a just punishment and paid the penalty in the afterlife (δίκην
δεδωκέναι, ἔκτεισμα…ἐκτίνοιεν, Republic 615a-b) choose their next life far
more carefully than those who have ‘come down from heaven’, because of all
they have suffered themselves and seen others suffer (619d).
How does suffering and witnessing the suffering of other souls make a soul
more cautious? Is it because we do not want to undergo again the suffering we
have just endured and so choose with a view to avoiding it? Unfortunately,
Plato’s discussions of human punishment offer little guidance here, for they do
not explain how just punishment (often described in terms of suffering pain and
deprivation) is supposed to reform the soul. Commentators speculate: Perhaps
pain replaces former associations between injustice and pleasure with associa-
tions between injustice and pain?13 Or perhaps suffering disciplines the appetites,
whose unruliness is responsible for the wrongdoing in the first place, and thereby
introduces self-control into the soul?14
Although the discussions of divine punishment are no more forthcoming with
a general account of how punishment improves the soul, they offer some unique
insights into the educational power and limits of punishment. First, in the
Phaedo, the very vicious are thrown into Tartarus, the curable having a chance
once a year to emerge from Tartarus when, if they are able to persuade their vic-
tims, their sufferings (κακά) come to an end (114b). Presumably the victim has
this role because he is likely to be in a privileged position to know when the
wrongdoer recognizes the badness of his crime—the badness the victim has suf-

12 Thanks to an anonymous reader for Ancient Philosophy for suggesting I quote this passage.
13 This is the proposal of Brickhouse and Smith 2010, but the problem is that it reinforces a false
belief in the goodness of pleasure and the badness of pain (without qualification). Corporal punish-
ment, if it is to improve, should lead us into the condition of the noble person of Republic iv who is
not angry at his appetitive suffering when he is being punished justly. So it would seem it has to be
accompanied by some sort of reflection on the badness of one’s wrongdoing. The ‘medical’ model of
punishment for the Timaeus and Laws of Saunders 1991 is an analogue: pain disrupts the soul’s habit-
ual movements. But as Stalley 1996 has pointed out, the Laws uses fines rather than corporal punish-
ment for free citizens. Stalley’s own account (369-370) is that punishment accompanied by the
direction of thought makes the wrongdoer’s spirited part angry with his appetites.
14 See Sedley 2009, 61-64. This requires attributing to Socrates in the Gorgias a Republic-style

psychology, but perhaps Socrates’ talk of the persuadable part of the soul, in which the appetites
reside, which in fools is undisciplined (493a-b), is sufficient justification for this.
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fered—which would seem to be a precondition for further improvement. 15 One

might draw a parallel here with the roles of elenchus and inquiry: the interlocutor
has first to recognize his mistake before he is motivated to improve by seeking
the truth.16 (Further, the victim is likely to set and stick to a sufficiently high
standard for determining whether the wrongdoer has learned his lesson, rather
than being moved by pity.17)
Second, consideration of reward suggests a limit on what may be learned by
the imposition of artificial consequences on an agent. In Phaedo 114c, Republic
615a, and Phaedrus 247a-b and 248a-b the extremely virtuous enjoy a disembod-
ied life in which they can contemplate the incomparable beauty of the Forms and
acquire wisdom. However, as we just saw, Er says that most of those who choose
their next life carelessly have come down from heaven, where they were sent as a
reward (Republic 619c-d). We may distinguish between correction, the removal
of false beliefs or bad desires (which punishment may be able to effect), and edu-
cation proper, into truths about the way things are (which it cannot). And a dis-
tinction between what happens to the soul and what it chooses to do can explain
how it is that those who come down from heaven still choose badly: the reward
of spending time in the Isles of the Blessed, granted to souls who are capable of
appreciating and benefiting from the truths about the greatest realities is an
opportunity, but it is up to the soul whether it appreciates and benefits from this
opportunity, and uses it to guide its future choices, for understanding requires the
soul’s own activity (cf. 518c-519a). In the Phaedrus, this is represented by the
fact that the disembodied soul in the heavens that has the opportunity to see the
Forms still needs to ascend to them and for this needs to (and may fail to) keep its
bad horse in line (247a-b, 248a-b). These considerations suggest that divine pun-
ishment and reward aim at improving souls, even though they cannot by them-
selves make souls good.
Yet two major studies of Plato on punishment, Mackenzie 1981 and Saunders
1991, conclude that punishment in Plato’s eschatology is retributive (even
though human institutions of punishment would be similarly limited in the moral
reform they could effect). Among the reasons Mackenzie 1981 229-232 (cf.
226n2 and 227) gives for claiming that the eschatology is retributivist are that
afterlife punishments are assigned for and in proportion to past crimes, rather
than being focused on their effectiveness in curing wrongdoers for the future;
15 So I think the inference (made, e.g., by Mackenzie 1981, 227-228 and Saunders 1991, 199)
that here Plato recognizes that punishment should provide a victim satisfaction, is too hasty.
16 Saunders 1991, 197 speaks of the ‘paradox’ of being helped by a painful experience, ‘for to be

helped is not normally a painful experience’. But being refuted is painful.

17 But it is also possible that Plato thinks victim forgiveness is a condition of the restoration of a

normal relationship. In the Laws, a similar human institution—forgiveness by the victim’s family
after a year—may be thought to aim at the restoration of normal social relationships. Here, the unin-
tentional homicide is exiled for a year (although he has not acted unjustly, and so does not need cor-
rection), for the sake of the victim (the dead person, and in an extended sense, the family), in line with
the Laws’ separate consideration of the treatment required for the improvement of the wrongdoer and
the compensation required for the victim (865e-866a).
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that the emphasis in the afterlife accounts falls on the wrongdoer’s personal
responsibility for his actions rather than the ignorance that led him to do them;
that afterlife punishment for bad done is coordinated with afterlife reward for
good done, and is final. Saunders 1991, 197-201 finds that while the accounts of
afterlife punishment retain the language of ‘cure’, there is no evidence that the
pain suffered has any ‘influence on character and convictions’; further, if the
afterlife suffering did reform souls, it ‘ought to dispense with the further punish-
ment of an undesirable reincarnation’.
Saunders makes explicit what I think many readers wrongly assume, which is
that reincarnation is a further punishment following punishment in Tartarus. But
if I am right that the reincarnation that follows punishment in Tartarus is not pun-
ishment by the gods but a natural consequence expressing the soul’s character (as
I shall argue in section 2), then the ‘twice punished’ reason for supposing divine
punishment to be retributive evaporates. Mackenzie’s main reason—the propor-
tionality of punishments to deeds, rather than to their effectiveness in correc-
tion—may be countered by three considerations: first (as we have just seen),
there is an annual review of punishment in the Phaedo (114b); second (as I have
argued), punishment can effect only limited, albeit crucial, moral reform; and
third, the proportionality of the punishment—e.g., suffering the crime committed
ten times over—is better suited to bringing about a change of disposition than to
retribution; for retribution, it would seem, an eye for an eye should suffice.
Mackenzie 1981, 229 also finds that Plato uses ‘the familiar vocabulary of
desert’ for divine punishment.18 In the final myth of the Phaedo, Socrates says
that it is a fitting fate (προσήκουσα μοῖρα) for the incurables to be thrown into
Tartarus forever, that the honor (τίμη) for good deeds is determined according to
worth (κατὰ τὴν ἀξίαν, 113e), that the wicked soul is ‘led by necessity to its
proper dwelling place’ (πρέπουσαν οἴκησιν), and that each soul ‘dwells in a
place suited to it’ (τόπον προσήκοντα, 108c). But while saying that X ‘fits’ or
‘is fitting for’ (προσήκει, πρέπει) Y can imply that Y deserves X, it can also
indicate that X would be precisely the thing for Y, for other reasons than desert—
18 Allen 2000 surveys the language used to describe punishment in Classical Athens:
Δίκην διδόναι or δίκην λαμβάνειν conceive of punishment as an exchange of jus-
tice between punisher and punished; here, the wrongdoer is the active subject of pun-
ishment rather than its passive object (as in the English ‘pay the penalty’).
Τιμωρία conceives of punishment as a process that reassesses honor and status; it
gives satisfaction to the one who inflicts it (out of anger at a wrongdoing); it may serve
the goal of taking justice (τίσις) from the wrongdoer or of teaching the wrongdoer his
place in the social order.
Ζημία and κολάζειν focus on punishment’s effects on the object of punishment.
Allen points out that Plato uses the word κολάζειν more than any other, thereby focusing attention
on punishment’s effects on the wrongdoer to the exclusion of its role in the relationship between pun-
isher and punished, or in the reassessment of status of wrongdoer and victim (68-72). Κολάζειν is
almost better translated ‘discipline’ because it can be used in contexts when that is all that is being
done; indeed, Aristotle contrasts κόλασις as being for the sake of the person punished, with τιμωρία,
for the sake of the punisher (Rhetoric 1369b12-15), and (Allen’s observation), Aristotle’s student
Theophrastus speaks of κολάζειν a plant that will not grow straight.
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to make Y better, or to enable Y to do what it is Y’s nature to do. In the Gorgias,

for example, what makes particular sufferings imposed on souls by the gods fit-
ting for them seems to be that they are just the sufferings needed to make the
souls mend their ways.

2. The Natural Consequence Interpretation of Reincarnation

By contrast with punishment, reincarnation in Plato assigns bodies to souls
that express, because they are suited to, the moral character of these souls.19 The
agent of such assignments is the soul’s own desires, beliefs, or choice of a type of
life. 20 As with divine punishment, things are clearest if we begin with a
paradigm, which for reincarnation is the Republic’s myth of Er.
The last third of Er’s account of the afterlife, after the description of the judg-
ment and subsequent punishment or reward of souls (614b-616a), and the orbits
of the heavenly bodies around the spindle of necessity (616b-617d), explains
how souls come to be in bodies by their own choice (αἵρεσις). Er’s account pre-
serves god’s blamelessness for bad outcomes (which some reincarnations are) by
assigning responsibility to the chooser (αἰτία ἑλομένου, 617e4). And as
remarked earlier, this is predicted by the Republic’s position that god is good and
the cause of good things only (379b-380c).
Socrates interrupts his narration of Er’s account to make clear its message:
because we choose our own next incarnations, the most important thing of all is
to learn how to make the best choice, and that requires caring only about justice
and injustice, respectively the greatest good and greatest evil, and learning about
other things—wealth, beauty, public office, high birth—how they, in combina-
tion with one another and with a given state of soul, contribute to a life of justice
or injustice (618c-619b).21 Socrates’ commentary on the meaning of the myth of
Er emphasizes the significance for all time, including the present, of our choices.
In Republic iv he adds to the intuitive idea that our actions flow from our charac-
ters the non-obvious claim that we acquire just or unjust characters by perform-
ing just or unjust actions (442e-443a, 444c-d); here in Republic x he invokes the
bi-directional relationship between action and character to show how different
characters choose the life in which they find themselves, with their circumstantial
19 Plato attributes the idea of reincarnation as punishment to the followers of Orpheus without
endorsing it. At Cratylus 400c, Socrates suggests that the name σῶμα for the body is due to the
Orphics, who believe that the soul is imprisoned in the body until it has paid the penalty for its
wrongs. Σῶμα, he says, derives from σώζεται (‘preserves’) because the soul is preserved or guarded
by the body until it has served its sentence.
20 Morgan 2012, 325 agrees: ‘In all these scenarios we see a concern to make bodily nature

express the character of the soul.’

21 Socrates says that the arrangement (τάξις) of the soul is not included in the model of the life
(βιός) to be chosen, for the choosing alters that arrangement (618b); this seems to an afterlife applica-
tion of the book 4 principle that actions shape character (444c-d). But there are at least two ways this
might work out: because it is choice rather than bodily action that shapes character or because what is
chosen includes actions that will, when performed, shape character (e.g., the eating of one’s children,
chosen by the formerly habitually virtuous person [619b-c]).
10

opportunities for justice or injustice, for the sake of justice or for the sake of
something else.22
Er’s narrative shows by example how, in the absence of a focus on justice and
injustice, our reincarnation choices may be shaped by what appears significant to
us from our very partial perspectives (620a-b): Orpheus chooses the life of a
swan because, having died at women’s hands, he does not wish to be born to a
woman; Ajax chooses to be a lion because, remembering that Achilles’ armor
went to Odysseus instead of to him, he wishes to avoid human life; Agamemnon,
who also hates human beings, chooses to be an eagle.23 These souls make poor
choices because their perspective is so narrow: they think the best life is simply
one that avoids the particular evils they previously endured—they are like the
people Aristotle mentions who identify happiness with health when they are sick,
with wealth when they are poor, and with knowledge when conscious of their
ignorance (EN i 4.1095a22-26).
We can discern this same pattern in the Phaedo, where Socrates describes the
reincarnations of people of various moral characters: the glutton is reborn in the
body of a donkey; the violently vicious, in the body of a wolf; those who prac-
ticed popular and social virtue, in the bodies of bees or other social animals (81c-
82c). Here, what drives reincarnation seems to be the soul’s desire for a life of a
certain sort. Socrates prefaces the particular reincarnation trajectories ending in
the bodies of wolves, donkeys, and bees by saying that their desire for the body
(τῇ…τοῦ σωματοειδοῦς ἐπιθυμίᾳ) imprisons the souls in a body with a charac-
ter such as they have practiced in their previous life (81d-e).24 Bodily desires and
pleasures seem to have this effect by deceiving the soul about what is real (81b);
one possible consequence for souls that think that only the body is real is that
they become ghosts, haunting graves and monuments because they fear the
unseen and Hades (81c, 108b). In any case, the crucial point is that their reincar-
nation is the result of their own desires (82e).25
Whereas the Phaedo emphasizes the soul’s desires (which may have their
effect via an effect on its beliefs about what is real), and the Republic the soul’s
choice, the Phaedrus emphasizes the soul’s cognitive state (cf. Rohde 1966, ii
479-480 n20), its loss of contact with the truth, to account for its first incarnation:
souls that do not gain an adequate vision of the Forms in their circuit of the heav-
22 A number of recent commentators have noted that the afterlife choice of lives mirrors ordinary

choices: Thayer 1988; Halliwell 2007; Ferrari 2009; Destrée 2012, 121.
23 On the other side, a swan and other musical animals choose (αἵρεσιν, 620a8) human lives.

Tad Brennan (personal communication) suggests that the only examples of metempsychotic promo-
tion from non-human to human here are of ‘musical’ animals because of music’s affinity with ratio-
nality. A more basic point is that these animals’ choosing seems to require that they have, at least
when disembodied, regained some of the intellectual capacities lost or stopped up during their non-
human embodiment.
24 Or, possibly, their bodily desire; Plato’s only other use of σωματοειδοῦς, at 81c, can also be

read either way.

It is a merit of the natural consequence interpretation of reincarnation that we do not have to
25

ask whether being reborn as a bee is a reward or a punishment.

 11

ens (due to the bad horse’s dragging down the whole chariot) have their wings
damaged, and end up depending on ‘what they think is nourishment—their own
opinions’ (248b). They are then reborn, first as human beings in various profes-
sions, and then, after judgment and punishment for their justice or injustice in
that life, as other animals, depending on their choice (αἵρεσιν, 249b1). Escape
from reincarnation requires philosophy. Once again, there is a clear path from the
soul’s opinions to its reincarnation through its choice of a body.
To the Phaedo, Republic, and Phaedrus moral-psychological claim that what
assigns bodies to souls are the soul’s desire, opinion, or choice, the Timaeus adds
a scientific specification of the ‘fit’ between souls and bodies by showing how
certain types of bodies are well-designed for certain kinds of psychic life. While
human reincarnations are determined by whether our thoughts in the previous life
were rational or appetitive (90a-b), so that, for example, a cowardly man is
reborn in a woman’s body (90e) and a glutton in a four-legged animal’s, the
lesser gods design bodies and mortal souls that are as good and fine as possible
for the kind of life to be lived in each case. For example, since rational move-
ments are circular, in order to enable human beings to reason, the gods put the
rational part of the soul in round heads; they put these heads atop bodies that can
move effectively on the earth (44d-45b); they design eyes to be receptive to the
fiery light of the rationally-moving heavenly bodies, for observing this move-
ment enables contemplation of the rationality of the cosmos, which makes the
soul itself rational (45b-47c). Because human emotions and appetites interfere
with rational activity, stopping the circle of knowledge and distorting the circle
of opinion with rectilinear sensation (43b-44a), the gods locate these in the chest
and abdomen, far from the rational soul, thereby allowing the rational soul to rea-
son in peace (69c-e).
The natural consequence interpretation of reincarnation escapes criticisms of
Plato’s accounts of the afterlife on other interpretations. Annas 1982, 126 faults
the Phaedo and Republic accounts for failing to integrate the idea that when we
die our souls undergo punishment in Tartarus or reward in the Isles of the
Blessed with the idea that reincarnation is the vehicle of our soul’s punishment or
reward.26 In particular, Annas complains that reincarnation undermines both the
future-regarding consequentialist reasons to be virtuous the myth is meant to pro-
vide (on the grounds that the absence of continuity of consciousness between
lives undermines first-personal concern for the well-being of one’s future
embodiments),27 and the past-regarding sense of personal responsibility for one’s
character and actions (on the grounds that these are in large part determined by
26 Although he does not criticize Plato for it, Sedley 2007, 94 assumes that reincarnation in the

Phaedo serves the purposes of purification and punishment as do experiences in Tartarus.

27‘Why should I be deterred from injustice by the thought that my soul will be reincarnated in a
wolf? If I were to be aware of being a wolf, and regret having brought this about…then it would be a
disincentive; but nothing in the Phaedo suggests that there is continuity of consciousness between
reincarnations’ (Annas, 1982, 129). Ron Polansky has pointed out to me that since the soul after death
is supposed to possess power and intelligence (Phaedo 70b), Plato may think there is continuity of
consciousness across the soul’s disembodied periods in between incarnations.
12

previous lives one cannot remember).28

However, on the natural consequence interpretation, reincarnation is not a
vehicle of punishment or reward for our souls; far from failing to integrate after-
life punishment and reward with reincarnation, Plato carefully assigns them com-
plementary roles: benevolent gods punish the souls of wrongdoers to give them a
chance to improve while disembodied, after which those souls themselves choose
their next embodiments, a choice that reflects how much or how little they did in
fact improve. Considering the reincarnations I might choose for my future lives is
presently motivating for me, despite my having forgotten my past life and despite
my knowledge that in its next life my soul will not remember this one, but not by
making me think, ‘if that is what wickedness leads to “in the end”, then it is
surely to be avoided’.29 Rather, instead of appealing to some amoral concern I
have for my future self, thinking about the reincarnations I might choose gives
me a perspective on what kind of thing my soul is now becoming. What life
would I choose? What sort of body would my desires belong in? The answer tells
me something about my current state of soul. If I see myself reborn in the body of
a wolf, that suggests that my soul is already that of a wolf; this realization has the
potential to make me choose, right now, not continue to live with a wolfish soul.
In one respect this series of thoughts resembles Socrates’ thought-experiment in
Philebus 20e-21c to show that pleasure is not the good for a human being: I may
be a hedonist who avowedly values only bodily pleasure, but imagining a life of
pleasure and only pleasure, such as that of a (‘happy’) clam, gives me a new per-
spective on my avowed values. It is likely that I do not want to live the life of a
clam, and yet, by avowing only the value of pleasure, I am now living as if I were
one, as if I cannot appreciate the values of reason.

28 ‘[T]o the extent that my present life is the product of past lives and their afterlife requitals, it

becomes hard for me to think seriously that I should be rewarded or punished… A conviction that the
responsibility for my character and actions…can be traced in large part to previous lives which I do
not remember is bound to undercut the feeling that I am responsible for what I have done… And
together with this, of course, the sense that punishment for what I do and am is fair is bound to wither
too’ (Annas, 1982, 132). So too Halliwell 2007, 464: ‘within the myth prenatal choices are them-
selves formed partly on the basis of previous existences, so that, on this scenario, the individual may
be paying the price (or reaping the rewards) of the life of someone else’. Inwood 2009, 38ff. exam-
ines this suggested injustice of reincarnation by considering five types of justice—reparation, equal-
ization, desert, departures from equality that are justified by choice, and lottery—and argues that
reincarnation in the Republic is consistent with none of them.
29 Annas 1982, 129 is right that the myths do not envision continuity of consciousness across
lives (and the myth of Er explicitly rules it out); however, this need not undermine future concern if
other factors than continuity of consciousness can justify future concern. Williams 1973 argues for
the bodily criterion of personal identity on the grounds that I have concern for what happens to my
successor in the future who has had so many false beliefs and memories implanted in her that she
takes herself to have been someone else, and Strohminger and Nichols 2014 suggest that intuitions
about personal identity track continuity in moral character rather than continuity in consciousness, at
least for third-person judgments.
 13

3. Punishment by reincarnation in the Timaeus and Laws?

The Timaeus and Laws do not seem to preserve the segregation I have argued
for between the improving afterlife punishment for which the gods are responsi-
ble, on the one hand, and reincarnation for which each soul is responsible, on the
other. These dialogues seem to dispense with the disembodied reward-or-punish-
ment phase of the afterlife and to make reincarnation the vehicle of punishment.
And if we ask the question, ‘who is responsible for a particular reincarnation, the
gods or the soul?’ the answer seems to be: ‘both’.
So, on the one hand, prior to souls’ first assignment, each to its own star, the
Demiurge of the Timaeus tells the souls that they will be responsible for their
(mortal) embodiments (42b-c); for example, the soul that cannot cease from bad-
ness will be reborn as a wild animal on account of its extreme likeness (κατὰ τὴν
ὁμοιότητα) to such a nature (42c). Animals other than human males are the
products of the degeneracy of those first put into mortal human bodies by the
lesser gods: when these men fail to bring their thought-distorting passions (43d-
e) under control, they are reborn as women; if they have too visual an approach to
astronomy they are reborn as birds; if they are too attracted to bodily pleasures
they are born with more and more legs pulling them down towards the earth. The
degree of elongation of an animal’s head indicates how distorted are its circles of
thought, and its orientation towards and distance from the center of the earth indi-
cates its absorption in bodily desires; the stupidest animals of all are reborn as
fish (91d-92b). On the other hand, Timaeus says that the gods who made the
water-dwelling animals deemed them unworthy of breathing pure air, on the
grounds that their souls were impure because of a wrong (ὑπὸ πλημμελείας, lit-
erally, a false note); these souls have obtained the furthest dwellings as their lot
(εἰληχότων), as a penalty (δίκην, 92b-c). Calling the acquisition of water as a
dwelling and a water-breathing body a ‘penalty’ suggests, at least, that reincarna-
tion as a fish is an artificial consequence, in part due to the agency of the gods.
That both soul and god are responsible for reincarnations and that reincarna-
tions are an artificial as well as natural consequence is even clearer in Laws x,
when the Athenian argues that god designed the world so as to assure its virtue as
a whole (903b) and the victory of virtue over vice (904b), but that he accom-
plishes this easily because so much of the work is done by souls.30 All god has to
do is to design the world so that whenever souls come to be of a certain character,
they must take a certain place and reside in certain locations (904b-c), but that
such characters come to be is due to the soul’s own wishes (904c). Yet it is god
that assesses the penalty (δίκη, 904e4, 905a1, 3) and transfers the souls that are
becoming better to a better place and the ones becoming worse to a worse place
(903d). The Athenian concludes: you can try to hide, but you will pay recom-
pense (τείσεις…προσήκουσαν τιμωρίαν, 905a).
In these discussions, the fact that Timaeus and the Athenian call reincarnation
30 Stalley 1983, 177 suggests that this punishment is for the wicked to live among souls like

themselves, which he says has the advantages of heaven and hell without the difficulties. Stalley is
more circumspect about reincarnation in the Laws than I see reason to be.
14

a ‘penalty’ leads us to expect, especially given Plato’s previous accounts of after-

life punishment, that reincarnation will be morally improving. So for example, if
embodiment as a fish is a penalty, it should improve the soul that lives in a fish’s
body. This is what Sedley 2007, 124-126, cf. 94-95 argues. According to Sedley,
not only does the perfection of the world require the presence of fish and other
inferior beings, because a perfect world contains all the kinds of living things
(41b-c), but in addition, the Demiurge puts these inferior beings to good use by
making embodiment serve the moral improvement of souls. This makes the
world (already complete with all kinds of living things) even more perfect.
In section 2 I argued that the aspect of reincarnations for which the gods are
responsible is bodies, which are engineered for the types of lives souls are to
live—bodies for crawling, or swimming, or flying—but that each soul is respon-
sible for acquiring that type of life to live. To save the view that the gods are
responsible for only good things, we might say these bodies are instrumentally or
conditionally good insofar as they enable the end of living a certain type of life;
on the other hand, that end is not itself particularly good—except insofar as the
perfection of the cosmos requires the presence in it of all kinds of living things
(Timaeus 39e-40a). On Sedley’s account, living as a certain type of animal is also
good insofar as it serves the moral improvement of the soul embodied as that ani-
mal. But to see how animal bodies serve the end of the soul’s moral improvement
we need to extrapolate from the case of the human body, which does facilitate
psychic activities that improve us: we stand erect, with our heads atop our bodies,
and with eyes in our heads that can observe the rational revolutions of the heav-
enly bodies; these make it possible for us to become rational ourselves. Animal
bodies with heads pointed earthwards cannot have this effect, but is there some
morally improving effect they can have?
One thought about how it might be good for a soul to be born into the body of
a fish is that people who pursue bodily pleasures do not realize how tedious is a
life spent only on the satisfaction of bodily desires, and living a fish-life will
show them this.31 But would it be while a fish that the soul learns this lesson?
That would require that the fish be able to reflect on its own qualities (a capacity
Timaeus explicitly denies plants and perhaps implicitly denies the appetitive part
of the soul [77b-c]). Timaeus does not allow for any time comparable to the dis-
embodied post-judgment sojourn of previous dialogues, when a soul might
remember its previous life and reflect on the character it acquired during this
life.32 But by the next incarnation, the previous life has been forgotten. Further, if
living a life devoted to bodily pleasures is sufficient to show that it is tedious,
why do not human beings who live such lives discover this?33 Perhaps it is
because human beings enjoy experiences due to the low-level rational capaci-
31 Thanks to Hendrik Lorenz for this suggestion.
32 Saunders 1991 205 crisply describes the change the Laws’ account of the afterlife makes from
the earlier accounts as eliminating (disembodied) post-mortem punishment or collapsing reincarna-
tion into post-mortem punishment.
33 Thanks to Ursula Coope for this question.
 15

ties—of memory, anticipation, the ability to judge that their life is good—whose
contribution they do not acknowledge or value. Still, if the fish is deprived of
even these capacities, it seems not to have any chance of moral improvement.
Alternatively, one might think that the soul sent into the fish body is too far gone
for reflection; what it needs are rather some motions that will restore a prelimi-
nary order to it (swimming in circles? slowed-down rectilinear motions, corre-
sponding to water-dulled perceptions and desires?).34 Perhaps this problem is
like the problem of saying how someone’s character is improved by suffering
pain (section 1), but at least in that case the capacities required for learning are
not blocked by the punishment. And while Timaeus might have said that animal
bodies are designed to make the souls that inhabit them suffer (as the God of
Genesis ordains for the snake) and thereby to improve, he does not.
Another alternative is that reincarnation into an inferior life form is not a cor-
rective kind of punishment, but retribution, with retribution itself being part of
the goodness of the cosmos.35 But this does not seem consistent with the Athe-
nian’s outlook on punishment. For in the general preamble to the lawcode, the
Athenian argues against calling what is a natural consequence of injustice—end-
ing up with an unjust character—a ‘penalty’ (δίκη), on the grounds that the just
and a penalty (τὸ δίκαιον καὶ ἡ δίκη) are something fine, whereas the acquisi-
tion of an unjust character leaves the one who suffers it uncured. Better to call the
acquisition of an unjust character mere retribution (τιμωρία, 728a-c).36 The
Athenian is agreeing that the worst consequence of unjust actions is the acquisi-
tion of an unjust character, but criticizing the expression of this truth in terms
such as ‘vice is its own punishment’ (τὴν…λεγομένην δίκην τῆς κακουργίας
τὴν μεγίστην). Unless Plato is being careless with the terminology he himself
has introduced (which seems to be new in the Laws, for earlier, he treats punish-
ment by any name—δίκη, τίσις, τιμωρία—to be aimed at improving the soul of
the wrongdoer), he must think that divine punishment does somehow produce
some good.37
34 Ron Polansky has suggested that being in the body of a non-human animal may keep the soul

from committing crimes so bad only a human being could commit them. But since injustice resides
not in the commission of crimes but in the motivation to commit them, it would have to be insofar as
being in such a body inhibits the formation of certain desires, beliefs, and intentions that the soul can
improve as a result of a non-human embodiment.
35 Mayhew 2008, 179: ‘This relocation of souls to the places they deserve to be is what it is for

virtue to be victorious in the universe; this is what the good of the whole universe consists in.’
36 Mackenzie 1981, 196n57 suggests that the reason not to call it a δίκη is that a δίκη requires

the intervention of an external judicial agency, but this, while true, does not explain the contrast with
τιμωρία, which also requires the intervention of an external judicial agency—on Mackenzie’s own
account, according to which τιμωρία refers to an actual penal action, viz (n62). I agree with Saunders
1991, 207 that the contrast is between punishment as something fine (δίκη), which involves curing
the wrongdoer, and the suffering that is a consequence of wrongdoing (τιμωρία), which does not
cure. However, I do not agree with Saunders’ placement of divine punishment in the second category,
for that would mean that punishment by the gods is not something fine, that the gods are the cause of
something bad, and that the Athenian is wrong, by his own lights, to call divine punishment a δίκη.
37 The δίκη τιμωρός of 872e, cf. 870d-e, which requires a kin-killer to suffer the same crimes as
16

Perhaps, then, the good served by reincarnation is as deterrence: in the Gor-

gias and Phaedo, the punishment of incurables was justified by its good effects
on other, curable, souls who are its witnesses; perhaps punishment-by-reincarna-
tion-as-non-human-animals is justified because it offers human souls the oppor-
tunity to reflect on their own characters.38 As we saw in section 2, however, one
would not need to believe in reincarnation-as-punishment, or even in reincarna-
tion at all, in order to derive this benefit from reflecting on non-human animals.
One would only need to think about how one’s own character and choices map
onto the different types of lives in the world.

4. Conclusion: Humans and Animals Within and Without

I have argued that reincarnation is a mechanism for making periodic readjust-
ments in the fit between souls and bodies to account for souls’ character and
intellectual condition—although once the gods are involved in bringing about
this fit, it becomes necessary that the fit serve some good, but hard to see how
that good is the improvement of the soul unless the body is human.
Many readers of the Timaeus have seen in its account of the generation of ani-
mals from degenerate human souls the idea that human beings are at the apex of a
hierarchy. This ranking of humans and animals seems consistent with the images
of the soul Plato uses in the Republic, which describes the human soul as contain-
ing within it a human being, a lion, and a many-headed beast, with our prospect
for happiness lying in the human being’s control over the animals (588b-589b),
and the Phaedrus, which describes the soul as a chariot in which reason is the
charioteer, and the spirited and appetitive parts are a good and bad horse, respec-
tively, with the charioteer properly determining the direction of the chariot
(246a-256e). Yet the idea that the human soul’s reincarnation into non-human
animals depends on our character and intellectual qualities, and the idea that the
shapes and orientations of animal heads (how round and how elongated; orien-
tated earthwards?) are an indication of those animals’ departure from rational
thought, undermines the absolute difference between humans and other animals
that might be suggested by the claim that human beings alone are rational, other
animals non-rational.39
Further, the superiority of the human being is a superiority of a type of life,
one that affords its possessor opportunities for intellectual activity; an individual
human who fails to take up those opportunities fails to achieve the superiority of
he committed, may be thought of as ‘teaching a lesson’. The Athenian sees it as operating in reincar-
nation when the matricide is reborn as a woman.
38 If non-human animals in the Timaeus play the role of incurables in the earlier accounts, this

may explain why Plato neglects to say how a soul in the body of non-human animal could be reborn
as a higher life-form.
39 Sorabji 1993 shows how, in ancient texts, the denial of reason to non-human animals requires

the enrichment of their perceptual and other non-rational capacities to account for their behavior.
Osborne 2007, 43-62 examines ancient reincarnation accounts to argue that claims about the continu-
ities between the capacities of humans and other animals do not drive, but are driven by, our value
judgments.
 17

which she is capable.

Near the beginning of his search for the definition of political expertise in
Plato’s Statesman, the young Socrates jumps from the claim that political exper-
tise is the collective (rather than individual) rearing of herd-animals, to the claim
that it is the collective rearing of human beings rather than other animals. The
Visitor objects that the Younger Socrates is hewing off one small part and leav-
ing behind many large ones, without a reference to real classes. It is rather like
dividing the human race into Greeks and barbarians (i.e., non-Greeks), he says,
as if not speaking Greek is a characteristic on the basis of which to define a kind
of person (261d ff.). The Visitor adds that another intelligent (φρόνιμος) animal,
such as the crane seems to be, might also similarly give itself airs and oppose the
crane to all other animals. Readers of Plato who take the point of the passage to
be methodological are right, but our examination of reincarnation shows that the
Younger Socrates’ mistake is also one of substance. It is not that it is mistaken to
classify animals as sea, land, and air animals, land animals as quadrupeds,
bipeds, etc.; however, the true hierarchy is moral and intellectual, and by the time
we are adults, our bodies may belie our souls. This means that the moral and
intellectual difference between a gluttonous human being and a cow may be less
significant than the moral and intellectual difference between that gluttonous
human being and a philosopher.40
Department of Philosophy
University of Arizona
Tucson AZ 85721

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