A SURPRISE IN THE REPUBLIC

In the tenth book of Plato's Republic (608d2–5), Socrates asks Glaucon an unexpected question: “Haven't you realized that our soul is immortal and never destroyed?” Glaucon, caught unawares, responds rather incredulously: “No, by god, I certainly have not. Yet you find yourself able to assert this?” Although Socrates is confident that he is indeed able to affirm the soul's immortality, Glaucon is reflexively surprised and suspicious.

Glaucon's surprise is understandable on several distinct levels. In addition to the general incredulity Socrates' contention might awaken in a normal Greek of his place and time, his question in Republic 10 also occasions two more local forms of surprise. First, by the time Socrates puts his question to Glaucon, we have moved through the great bulk of the Republic, a work whose central concern is the care and custody of the soul, finding it to contain only the briefest hints that its author supposes the soul to be immortal (Rep. 496c3–e2, 498d25; cf. 330d1–331a6). Second, and more pointedly, we have to the contrary been given some reason for doubting that the soul could possibly be immortal; and presumably this is at least part of the reason Glaucon wonders aloud how Socrates feels justified in regarding himself as in a position to assert its immortality so baldly.