Is there, in fact, such a process as 'coming to be alive'? In one sense there clearly is. Things come to be alive when they come into being at birth or conception. But from a thing's coming to be alive in this sense, the proper inference is not that it was previously dead, but that it did not exist previously at all. The sense of 'come to be alive' required for the argument is not that in which a living thing comes into being, but that in which a soul 'becomes incarnate' in a living body. Yet it cannot do this unless it already exists before birth or conception. And whether it does so or not is just what is at issue. See on 70c4-8 (p. 105).
71b6—d4. The examples of complementary processes have a Heracleitean ring about them. Cf., e.g., DK 22 B 88, 126. That 'there are' such processes as cooling and heating is true enough. It does not follow, of course, that they continually recur in each individual thing subject to them. What has cooled down may never warm up again.
The parallel between dying and going to sleep owes its appeal, in part, to a superficial resemblance between sleep and death. Sleep, however, is a temporary state, whereas the permanence of death could not be denied without begging the question. There is, moreover, a basic difficulty in the analogy between waking up and coming to life again. Someone who wakes up exists before waking, whereas someone who comes to life, in the sense of being born or conceived, has not previously existed. A thing cannot be said to 'come to life again' in the sense required by the argument, unless the persistence of an independent subject, 'the soul', is already assumed. Yet this is just what has to be proved. See on 70c4—8 and previous note.
Note also that 'coming to life again' implies a previous life, whereas 'waking up' does not imply a previous waking state. The argument exploits a purely formal resemblance between the two Greek verbs. The prefix common to both of them has a quite different function in either case, shown in the words italicized. See T. M. Robinson, Dialogue 1969,124-5.
What is meant by 'even if in some cases we don't use the names' (71b7—8)? Is it, as most editors assume, that not all processes have names, as do those just mentioned? Or is it that not everything that is in fact a 'process of coming-to-be' would normally be so called? On the first interpretation, the point will be that the available terminology for processes is defective; on the second, that the ordinary use of 'coming-to-be' is unduly narrow. For the relation between names and realities see on 107cl—d2.
71d5—e3. The noun 'death' is ambiguous in Greek as in English. It may refer either to (1) the process of dying, or (2) the event terminating that process, or (3) the state succeeding that event. The verb translated 'be dead' at 71c5 and 71d6 is ambiguous between (2) and (3)—see 64a6 and note 4. Here, however, (3) is clearly the sense required, both for noun and verb. For the opposite of 'death' in senses (1) and (2) would not be 'life' but 'birth' or 'conception'.
'That which is living' and 'that which is dead' have been used at 71dlO—13 for the definite article and neuter singular participle. Note that when Socrates shifts to plural participles at 71dl4—15, he uses both masculine and neuter forms, and thus distinguishes between 'living people' and 'living things'. The masculine form is used by itself at 70c9, 70d3-4, 72al, 72a4-5 and 72d9, and the neuter by itself at 71dl0—13, 72c7-d2 and 77c9. The argument was extended to non-human beings at 70d7—9. It is nowhere suggested, however, that human and non-human beings are animated only by the souls of their own respective kinds. On the contrary, see 81e—82b.
71e4—72al0. The word here translated 'obvious' (e5) may mean either 'observable' or 'certain'. Thus the meaning may be either that people can be observed to die, or that it is certain that they die. The process of 'coming to life again' is, as Socrates seems to recognize, neither observable nor certain. It is not, of course, made any more believable by the fact that dying is both observable and certain. There is, moreover, a peculiar difficulty in understanding what 'coming to life again' means. Socrates is thinking, evidently, not of 'resurrection' or 'rising from the dead', in which bodily identity is maintained, but rather of 'reincarnation', in which the soul is conceived as entering a fresh body. Yet the whole idea of the soul's 'entering' a body is perplexing. For it seems to require that the body be thought of as already existing, prior to incarnation, just as a gaol exists prior to a man's imprisonment in it. Yet there is, of course, no separate body existing before conception in the way that a corpse exists after death. The genesis of a living thing cannot, therefore, consist in the animation of an already existing, but previously inanimate, body. Nor is it easy to suppose that the soul, if it is a 'life-principle', enters the body at any point after conception has occurred. For it is natural to associate the start of life with conception itself.
72all—d5. The logical role of this passage is not very clear. It is sometimes treated as merely ancillary to the main argument. Note, however, that it is introduced to justify 'admissions' made earlier (72all—12). These have rested partly upon the postulate that there is such a thing as coming to life again (see on 71al2—b5). Socrates has so far gained assent to this postulate by simply rejecting the possibility of nature's being 'lame' as an obviously unpalatable alternative (71e9). As if the point were not yet firmly established, he has said (71el4—72a2) that if there is such a thing as coming to life again, it will consist in a process of coming-to-be from dead to living people. The present passage may be meant, therefore, to secure the postulate: a process of coming to life again must be assumed, to prevent everything from ending up dead. Taken in this way, the passage supplies a fundamental principle for the whole argument.
But several uncertainties remain.
At 72b5 the translation 'they would cease from coming to be' differs from Hackforth's 'the coming into being of things would be at an end', and from Bluck's 'everything ... would cease from being born'. The supposed consequences of a linear universe may be not merely that things would cease from 'being born' or 'coming into being', but that they would cease from 'coming to be anything', i.e. from acquiring any new character at all. For they would remain permanently frozen in one of a pair of opposite states.
The idea that in a linear universe all things would end up having 'the same form' (72b4) is illustrated with the examples of all things being asleep, and Anaxagoras' 'all things together' (72b7—c5). It is not clear, however, whether these suppositions are meant merely to lead up to the crucial case of life and death (72c5—d3), or whether they are thought of as absurd in themselves. Is it being suggested that a perpetually dormant universe is inconceivable? If it is, Socrates does not say why he finds it so.
The argument at 72dl—3 is too cryptic to be reconstructed with confidence. The translation 'if the living things came to be from the other things' follows Burnet's text. But what are 'the other things'? They cannot be 'the dead' (Bluck: 'the other world'). For the hypothesis that living things come from them seems to be counterfactual, whereas Socrates holds that living things actually do come from the dead. Burnet takes 'the other things' to mean 'things other than the dead', and Hackforth (62, n.5) emends the text to obtain this sense. Alternatively, the hypothesis may be that living things come from 'things other than the living', i.e. from non-living sources. In that case, if living things were to die, without subsequently being reborn (cf.72c7—8), then when the 'other', non-living sources were exhausted, all possible sources would be used up. Everything would then be 'spent in being dead' (72d3). Note, however, that if 'the other things' are conceived as 'sources', from which new living things are generated, there has been a shift from the sense in which opposite things were originally said to 'come to be' from each other. See on 70c4-8 (p. 104).