Plato’s other Picture of Immortality in Symposium

The established view about Plato’s take on the immortality of the soul regards it as the indestructibility of a substance, at least the rational part of it, nous, akin to the Forms or Ideas and therefore something to remain as unchangeable and essentially the same in the flux of the sensible world, flying to the super-sensible realm of the Forms to persist there forever. In the Symposium, however, Plato seems to contradict this characterization by presenting a Humean picture of the mortal soul and attributing the desire for immortality to eros. Here, the immortality of our mortal and changeable souls is at best possible only through the dynamic process of birth, generating and nurturing different kinds of offspring, including at the top producing discourses about true virtues instead of images of virtue, which provides the lovers with immortality by creating remembrances or memorials that will outlive them. In this article, I will explain this concept of immortality by describing the common and most important features of four models of immortality and its connections with remembrance and mediate/indirect effect on the world.