Socrates

Ultimately, Socrates wanted his students to understand the life, meaning, and feelings of a true philosopher. By being in good cheer just hours before his death, he was not only argued that death was good, but he also showed it. By explaining to his students that the body is merely a prison for the soul, and that one's senses are no more than illusions to reality, Socrates argument that a philosopher is only truly alive when dead and in actuality dead while alive became the truth to those around him and also to future philosophers.

Socrates slowly eased into the discussion of death by simply suggesting that death is nothing more than the separation of the soul from the body. As their investigation of death continued, Socrates used repetition of his idea's to explain a philosophers good cheer before death. Socrates first asked, "Do you not think, he said, that in general such a man's concern is not with the body but that, as far as he can, he turns away from the body towards the soul,"(Plato, 101). After his student's agreed, Socrates questioned their understanding by asking, "Ð'...the philosopher more than other men frees the soul from the association with the body as much as possible," (101). These questions created the base of Socrates argument by explaining how the body only confines and punishes the soul.

Continuing his argument, Socrates moved deeper into the subject of the body and soul by explaining how the body only pollutes the soul with useless knowledge. More specifically, Socrates tangents off onto the idea that one's bodily senses clutter the soul. Socrates point is well proven when he asked Simmias if he had ever seen the beautiful or good with his eyes, or if he had ever grasped the beautiful and good with any of his bodily senses. Socrates toped it off by telling Simmias, "Ð'...because the body confuses the soul and does not allow it to acquire truth and wisdom whenever it is associated with it. Will not that man reach realityÐ'...," (102). By asking this, Socrates is saying that only with death will one truly reach reality, or in other words, know and experience what true beauty, good, and even evil is. Finding the truth and reality is a passion of every philosopher, therefore; every philosopher is truly alive upon death, and until they die their soul is simply dead inside their bodies.

Not only did Socrates describe the body