By |

Given the Choice, Who Would You Be in Your Next Life?

The Last Judgement, by Michelangelo.
The responsibility lies with the chooser; God is not responsible. — Republic X

By Dr Neel Burton — Psychiatrist, philosopher, and wine writer; Fellow of Green Templeton College, University of Oxford; author of over twenty books.

Plato concludes The Republic with the myth of Er, a timeless story of death, judgment, reincarnation, and the soul’s freedom to choose its destiny. This fresh retelling and interpretation explores why it remains one of the greatest philosophical myths ever told.

The Myth of Er has had an enduring influence on the Western imagination, shaping, among other things, our inherited ideas of heaven, hell, and moral destiny. Although Plato presents the story as told by Socrates at the end of The Republic, it draws on older Greek and Near Eastern traditions of judgment after death, cosmic order, and the journey of the soul.

The Myth of Er

Er, a soldier from Pamphylia, was slain in battle. Twelve days later, as his body lay on the funeral pyre, he returned to life and told those around him what he had seen in the interval between death and rebirth.

During those twelve days, his soul had journeyed to a strange meadow marked by four openings: two leading upward into the heavens, and two descending into the earth below.

Judges sat in this meadow and assigned souls according to their conduct in life. The just were directed to the right and upward, ascending through one of the openings into the heavens; the unjust were directed to the left and downward, descending into the earth.

At the same time, other souls were returning. Bright, cheerful souls descended from above, having completed a thousand-year reward in the heavens. They spoke joyfully of what they had experienced. By contrast, other souls rose up from below, exhausted and in pain, describing a thousand-year punishment in the depths of the earth.

When Er approached the judges, he was told that he was not to be judged. Instead, he was to observe and later report what he had seen to humanity.

After seven days in the meadow, the souls set out on a further journey of five days, eventually arriving at the Spindle of Necessity.

This was a vast column of light, brighter than anything they had ever seen, extending through the cosmos and holding together the movements of the sun, moon, planets, and stars. The structure of the heavens rotated like a spindle, with concentric circles turning within one another.

At its centre stood Necessity, or Ananke, attended by her three daughters, the Fates. In each of the celestial circles sat a Siren, each producing a single note, so that together they formed a cosmic harmony.

When all the souls had gathered, a prophet announced:

“Hear the word of Lachesis, daughter of Necessity. Mortal souls, you are entering a new cycle of life and death. Your destiny will not be assigned to you, but chosen by you. The one who draws the first lot shall choose first; and the life chosen shall become his fate.”

The souls then came forward in order and selected their next lives from a vast assortment of human and animal forms.

The first to choose, having seen neither reward nor punishment in a way that had truly reshaped him, hastily selected the life of a tyrant. Only later did he discover that this life entailed horrors he had failed to foresee, including the destruction of his own family. His earlier virtue had been habitual rather than reflective; he had never truly understood what made a life good.

By contrast, many of those returning from punishment in the underworld, having suffered greatly, now chose more moderate and balanced lives. But their choices were often driven by fear and aversion rather than understanding.

Last of all came Odysseus, the man of many ways. Having experienced the extremes of fortune and glory, he searched for a long time before finding the life of an ordinary private man, overlooked by everyone else. Delighted with his discovery, he remarked that he would have made the same choice even if he had been first to choose.

Once all souls had chosen, they travelled to the plain of Forgetfulness. There they encamped by the River Lethe. Each soul was required to drink from the river, and in doing so forgot everything it had previously known. Some, still unsteady from desire or confusion, drank more than they needed.

In the night, as they slept, the souls rose upward like stars and were reborn into their chosen lives. At that moment, Er awoke to find himself once again on his funeral pyre.

Interpretation of the Myth

At the beginning of The Republic, Plato’s brother Glaucon challenges Socrates with a stark claim: most people are not just; they merely behave justly when it is advantageous to do so. If they could act unjustly without consequence, they would.

In response, Socrates constructs an elaborate account of justice—not as social convention or reputation, but as something belonging to the inner structure of the soul. Just as health is not merely the appearance of the body but its proper functioning, justice is the harmonious ordering of the self. An unjust soul, however successful it may appear externally, is internally disordered.

The myth of Er comes at the end of this argument, and one of its purposes is to show that justice does, in the end, prevail. Although the just may suffer and the unjust prosper in this life, each soul ultimately receives its due. In this sense, the myth answers Glaucon’s challenge: justice is not merely socially convenient, but intrinsically valuable, because it orders the soul. The myth suggests that such a soul is ultimately rewarded.

But the myth does something more than reassure us that justice is eventually rewarded and injustice punished. It explores something more unsettling: how easily souls can misjudge what is good for them, even after they have seen the consequences of their choices.

The problem Plato is concerned with is not only moral weakness, but moral blindness. Even a thousand years in heaven or hell does not guarantee wisdom. Some souls, having endured punishment, choose more carefully; others, despite every opportunity to learn, repeat their mistakes. Experience alone is not enough. Suffering may teach caution, but only philosophy teaches understanding.

Within this framework, justice is not simply about behaving correctly, but about forming a soul capable of recognising what is truly good. Without such understanding, even freedom of choice can become dangerous. The tyrant’s error lies not merely in his lust for power, but in his ignorance about the kind of life he is selecting. His failure is epistemic before it is moral.

Yet reward and punishment alone are not enough. The deeper concern of the myth is the formation of character. We do not choose wisely merely because we have suffered, nor because we have prospered, but because we have learnt to distinguish appearance from reality and the merely desirable from the truly good.

Odysseus, at the end of the myth, provides the final illustration. Having experienced the extremes of human life, he passes over lives of power and renown to choose that of an ordinary private man. It is one of the most quietly profound moments in Greek literature. The greatest of heroes no longer seeks greatness, but peace. His choice suggests that wisdom lies not in acquiring more, but in learning what is enough.

In the end, the myth of Er is less a literal description of the afterlife than a meditation on justice, character, and choice. Plato affirms that justice is ultimately rewarded, but he also insists that reward alone is not enough. A good life depends not merely on receiving one’s due, but on acquiring the wisdom to recognise what is truly worth choosing.

Continue Exploring

If this essay spoke to you, you might look into The Meaning of Myth and The Gang of Three: Socrates, Plato, Aristotle.

You may also enjoy

Explore all Plato Essays

Explore all Mythology essays

Explore all Indian Philosophy essays

Explore all Success & Failure essay

By |

George Eleftheriades and Michael Selvanayagam, researchers at the University of Toronto, have designed and tested a new approach to invisibility cloaking. Their method involves surrounding an object with miniature antennae emitting an electromagnetic field that cancels out waves reflecting back from the cloaked object. Although their tests showed the cloaking system to work with radio waves, they see no reason why, as the necessary antenna technology matures, it could not also work with light waves.

All this opens the way for a Harry Potter-style invisibility cloak that is thin, scalable, and adaptable to different types of objects. Some of the uses being touted for this quasi magical cloak include hiding military vehicles and conducting surveillance operations. But what if the cloak falls, as it surely will, into the wrong hands? Have the scientists really thought through the consequences? The infamous banker Bob Diamond spoke of ethics as ‘what you do when nobody’s looking’. If bankers, politicians, and even churchmen can no longer be trusted to do the right thing, then who can? But beyond this, the cloak of invisibility raises important questions about human nature: do intelligent people do the right thing because it is the right thing or because they fear being caught, judged, and punished? More fundamentally, is man innately good, under the direction of his conscience and sense of guilt, or is his restraint rather the product of fear and coercion instilled by a Hobbesian social contract that serves to keep him in check?

In Greek mythology, the Cap of Invisibility or Helm of Darkness is a helmet or cap variously worn by Athena, Hermes, and Perseus to make themselves invisible to gods, heroes, monsters, and men. In Book II of the Republic, Plato discusses the Ring of Gyges, which, according to legend, makes its bearer invisible. The ring was once given to the shepherd Gyges who used it to seduce the Queen of King Candaules and thereby usurp the throne of Lydia. In the Republic, the character of Socrates asserts that justice is the excellence of the soul without which a man cannot live well and be happy, and, therefore, that justice is inherently desirable. However, Glaucon doubts whether to be just is always better than to be unjust. All goods, he says, can be divided into one of three classes: harmless pleasures that are desirable in themselves; goods such as gymnastics, the care of the sick, or the various ways of making money that are desirable for what they bring; and goods such as knowledge, sight, or health that are desirable both in themselves and for what they bring. To which of these three classes does justice belong?

Socrates replies that justice belongs to the third class, but Glaucon points out that most people would disagree and place it firmly in the second class. Indeed, most people think that to do injustice is good, but that to suffer injustice is evil; as the evil outweighs the good, they agree among themselves not to do injustice. If a just man got hold of the Ring of Gyges, he would most certainly behave unjustly, proving that he is just only because he is weak and fears retribution, and not because justice is desirable in itself. The truly just man who cares only for justice and not for the appearance of justice will be thought unjust and suffer every kind of evil until the day he finally understands that he should not be, but only seem, just. In contrast, the unjust man who is resourceful enough to seem just will be thought just and always get the better of everyone and everything. Adeimantus adds that when people praise justice, they praise it for what it brings rather than for itself. Realizing this, the superior man devotes himself not to justice itself but only to its appearance.

Adeimantus claims that he does not truly believe his argument, but is nonetheless pressing it to provoke Socrates into taking its other side and demonstrating that justice is desirable in and of itself. As part of his lengthy reply, Socrates famously conjures up an idealized Republic to help him define justice (or, as he puts it, “locate justice within the State”). After having defined justice in the state and justice in the individual, Socrates asserts that the just man orders his inner life in such a way as to be his own master and his own law. The soul of such a man can be said to be healthy, for justice and injustice are to the soul as health and disease are to the body: virtue is the health and the beauty of the soul, vice its disease and debility. If justice is the health of the soul, and if health is desirable in and for itself, then, by analogy, justice too is desirable in and for itself.

This is as far as Plato gets in the Republic. Notice that his conclusion that justice is intrinsically desirable does not in itself answer the original question, which was whether an intelligent person would still behave justly if he no longer feared being caught and punished. From Plato’s other writings, the answer is surely yes, even if Plato defines ‘intelligent’ in such a way that only he and some of his friends at the Academy actually meet the criteria. These select men are, of course, the famous philosopher-kings.