What would the soul be without the body? Socrates has us imagine the sea god Glaucus who, though a god, has been buffetted about by the waves and incrusted with mollusks, seaweed, and the like so that he appears more like a “wild beast” than a divine being. The soul’s true nature, he suggests, is just as difficult to perceive, wrapped up as it is in the body. But if it were free of the body, what would be left? Socrates hints that it might be a single part – the rational part, presumably – which, through love of wisdom ( philosophia), would live in contemplation of the forms (of “what is divine and immortal and what always exists”).
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