The Myth of Er

This is a text about the Myth of Er, from Plato’s Republic. It is a book I read without having, at the time, the foundations needed to fully understand it. Even so, reading it became necessary for the stage of life I was going through. Before reading it, I researched the work, I already knew Plato’s biography and my interest in philosophy had been awakened.

What is the Republic? It is one of Plato’s most important and best-known works, probably written in the 4th century BC, around 375 BC. The work is built mainly in the form of dialogues, with Socrates as the central character.

One of the great problems guiding the discussion is an apparently simple yet quite uncomfortable question: is it worth being just? What is justice? Is it better to be just for its own sake, or only for the advantages and rewards it may bring? In other words: is it worth acting rightly when injustice could bring more benefits?

From these questions, Plato develops a long inquiry into justice, education, the organization of the city, the nature of the soul and the way we ought to live.

It is in this context that the Myth of Er appears, closing the work. The myth tells the experience of Er, a man who supposedly died in battle and returned to life to tell what he saw after death. His account deals with the fate of souls, the consequences of their choices and the possibility of choosing a new life.

Being at the end of the Republic, the Myth of Er works as a symbolic conclusion of the work and takes up one of its fundamental questions: what are the consequences of our choices, and what kind of life should we choose? It should not be understood simply as Plato’s “final answer”, but as a narrative that closes and expands the philosophical inquiry developed throughout the dialogue.

Who tells the story? Socrates, who was Plato’s teacher and is the main character in almost all his books. It is through his mouth that the myth is narrated.

The setting

Er is a warrior who dies in battle. His body lies for days on the field without rotting and, when it is about to be cremated, he wakes up and tells everything he saw on the other side.

Basically: the first near-death experience report in the history of philosophy.

What Er describes is the process by which souls return to the sensible world. Translating the technical term: the “sensible world” is simply the world we see, touch, smell, the material world, THE ONE HERE. Plato believed the soul exists before and after the body, and that it goes and comes back. What Er saw was precisely the boarding desk of that return. And there are people working there. The Moirai, three figures from Greek mythology who control each person’s fate, represented as spinners (women who spin, that is, produce thread). The idea is that your life is a thread, and they take care of that thread:

• Clotho: the one who spins, that is, produces the thread of your life.
• Lachesis: the one who measures and distributes, draws lots and organizes destinies.
• Atropos: the one who cuts the thread. She is death. Her name literally means “the inflexible”, the one who does not turn back.

Keep that detail, because it matters: the Moirai are there, fate exists in the story. Plato is not denying fate. He is going to do something smarter than that.

The rules of the game

Now comes the good part. The rebirth of souls follows very specific rules.. and each one carries a message.

1. There is a lottery

When the souls are ready to be reborn, they take part in a lottery. But the lottery does not define the life you will have. It only defines the order in which each soul will choose. It is a queue ticket, not a prize. You do not draw what you will take; you draw when you will get to pick.

2. There is enough life for everyone

And here is the central point of the myth: there are more life options than souls. Chance takes part in the process. The lottery exists and determines the order in which each soul will choose, but the choice of the life each one will lead is, ultimately, its own. And, along with the choice, comes the responsibility for it. That idea hit me in an unexpected way. It was the kind of passage that made me stop reading and stare at the ceiling for a good while.

3. The gods are not to blame

Plato hammers on this with full force. The sentence that appears in the myth is practically a verdict: the blame belongs to the one who chooses, and the divinity is blameless. Nobody shoved anything down anybody’s throat. Each soul chooses its path according to the wisdom it has, or according to the lack of it. In the Greek context, that was quite a provocation. The culture of the time was full of stories in which the gods ruined people’s lives out of whim, jealousy or revenge. Plato is cutting that excuse at the root.

The menu of lives

And what was available to choose from? Everything. Rich lives, poor lives, lives of tyrants, lives of famous people, lives of nobodies, simple lives, even the lives of animals. A full buffet of possible existences. But that is where things get really complicated. Because the life that looks good is not always good. The life of a tyrant shines from afar: power, money, everyone obeying you. Up close, it is a machine for producing injustice and, according to Plato, whoever produces injustice ends up destroying themselves from within. There is a great scene in the myth: a soul throws itself at the life of a tyrant, grabs it with everything it has, and only afterwards realizes what came bundled in the package. Then it leaves lamenting and blaming the gods. But it chose for itself. It just did not look properly. So the real challenge was never choosing the flashiest life. The challenge was having enough self-knowledge to choose a life that led to virtue and not to injustice.

Quickly on those two terms, because they are the heart of the text:

• Virtue, for Plato, is not being “nice” or following rules of moral etiquette. It is the soul working well, in order, with reason in charge, like a tuned instrument.
• Injustice is the opposite: the soul in disarray, ungoverned, with the impulses in command. For Plato, this is a kind of disease of the soul. And that is why being unjust is bad for you, even if nobody finds out and even if you profit from it.

And there is a cruel detail: character

Character, one’s way of being, the moral structure of a person, is very hard to change after the choice is made. In other words: you do not only choose the circumstances of your life. You also choose, bundled and built in, the kind of person you will be within it. It all comes in the same package. That is why the myth insists so much that the most important skill in the world is being able to foresee the good and the evil a life can bring. Knowing how to look at an option and see not the shine on the surface, but what it will do to you on the inside, in the long run. Without that, you are betting in the dark with your own destiny.

And why don’t we remember any of this?

Good question, and the myth answers it. Before reincarnating, the souls cross an arid plain and drink the water of the River of Forgetfulness (in Greek, Lethe, a word that literally means “forgetting”). One sip and done: everything is erased. That is why nobody arrives here remembering their own choice. We are born without the manual, without the receipt, without the memory of having signed at the bottom. Which is a bit mean, I admit. But it is also exactly what makes life a real life, and not the execution of a script you have already read before.

What Plato really meant by all this

1. It is a frontal attack on fatalism

Fatalism is the belief that everything is already written and nothing you do matters, “if it is meant to be, it will be”. Its cousin, determinism, is the idea that everything you do was already caused by things outside your control: genetics, upbringing, society, chance. Notice what Plato does: he does not deny that fate exists. The Moirai are there, weaving. The lottery exists. Chance exists and really interferes. He could simply have said “fate does not exist”, but he did not. What he does is more sophisticated: he shows that, even within fate, freedom remains. You do not choose your position in the queue. You choose what you do with it. And since there is always a good option left on the table, the excuse “I had no alternative” simply does not hold.

That is the central thesis: the human being is free and, being free, is responsible for the path they walk.

2. It is a message about whose fault it is

The entire structure of the myth serves to close the emergency exits we use to escape responsibility.

Blame the gods?? Denied.. the divinity is innocent. Blame the lottery?? Denied.. there was good life left over. Blame the lack of options?? Denied.. the menu was huge. Blame whoever chose before you?? Denied.. ask Odysseus.

What is left?? You =)))))

3. The “choice” did not happen in an afterlife, it is happening now

This is the most important point, and it is where the myth stops being a story about reincarnation and becomes a story about today. Remember that character comes built into the choice and is almost impossible to change afterwards? Remember that the soul that grabbed the tyrant’s life did so on impulse, without examining? Well: that is an image of what we do all the time.

With every decision, what to study, who to hang out with, what to accept, what to let slide, what kind of person to allow yourself to be in an argument, you are back in that field, choosing a life package without properly seeing what comes inside. And, just as in the myth, after a while it becomes very hard to undo. The River of Forgetfulness is the perfect image of this: we forget that we are choosing. We act on autopilot, blame the circumstances, and only notice the package when it is already too late.

4. That is why philosophy matters.. and that is the real conclusion of the book

Here everything fits together. If the only thing separating a good choice from a disastrous one is the ability to examine the options before grabbing the first one that shines, then the most valuable skill there is consists in learning to examine. That is what Plato calls philosophy. Not memorizing Greek names: it is the training of looking at things calmly and seeing what they really are, not what they appear to be. It is exactly what Odysseus did while everyone else was trampling each other.

And so the Republic closes the circle. The initial question was “is it worth being just?”. The myth’s answer is: it is, because justice is not a rule imposed from outside that gets in your way, it is what keeps your soul in order, and a soul in order is the only thing capable of choosing well. Being unjust does not give you an advantage; it leaves you blind at the moment when seeing matters most.

“Keep thy heart with all diligence; for out of it are the issues of life.” — Proverbs 4:23