PETER AYOLOV

## **From Sōma Sēma to the Panopticon: The Soul, the Author and Twenty-Five Centuries of Symbolic Power** ### **Introduction: The Long Escape from Plato's Prison** The history of Western civilisation can be read as the history of one invisible invention: the creation of symbolic prisons. Long before walls, watchtowers, surveillance cameras and artificial intelligence, philosophy itself built the first prison—not around the body but inside it. This prison had no stones, no chains and no iron bars. It was constructed from language, concepts and metaphors. It was called the soul. The decisive turning point occurred in the sixth century BC when Orphic and Pythagorean thinkers overturned the older Homeric understanding of human existence. The famous formula *Sōma Sēma*—the body is a tomb or prison—transformed the body from the centre of human identity into a temporary container occupied by a superior, invisible entity. Plato elevated this religious metaphor into one of the fou...

How Plato's Body-Prison Shaped Twenty-Five Centuries of Western Thought? “But let there be no misunderstanding: it is not that a real man, the object of knowledge, philosophical reflection or technological intervention, has been substituted for the soul, the illusion of theologians. The man described for us, whom we are invited to free, is already in himself the effect of a subjection more profound than himself. A 'soul' inhabits him and brings him to existence, which is itself a factor in the mastery that power exercises over the body. The soul is the effect and instrument of a political anatomy; the soul is the prison of the body.” ― Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison ## Abstract This article argues that one of the central tasks of contemporary philosophy is to reverse one of the most influential conceptual shifts in Western intellectual history: the Platonic and Orphic-Pythagorean elevation of the soul over the body. Beginning with the f...