When it comes to being human, Socrates and Machiavelli have two completely opposite opinions. In Plato's Meno, he believes that being human is something you are born into through the work of the goddess Persephone: you are retrained into a new life based on the previous one and everything you know has been learned in your life passed. He therefore strongly disagrees with the idea that man is like a machine. Unlike Socrates, in Machiavelli's The Prince there is a deep division among humans: there are the eaters and the eaten and you have the choice of who you want to be. In other words, Socrates believes that you are who you are because you were born into it, while Machiavelli believes that you have a choice in who you want to be in life. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on “Why Violent Video Games Should Not Be Banned”? Get the original essayIn Machiavelli's The Prince and Plato's Meno, discussions of what it means to be human have very different content. Plato vividly describes his view of what it means to be human through a story of Persephone. It claims that you are born into a recycled life and that guides you into present life. Machiavelli, on the other hand, believes that there are choices in your life and that they are not simple like Plato's definition. Both philosophers offer examples to make sense of their own definition, and in context it makes sense; However, neither philosopher can answer the question completely, as they both have valid arguments in the examples they claim. Plato believes in the cycle of life, stating that "the soul is immortal and has been born many times and has seen everything here and there." in the house of Hades there is nothing that he has not learned” (Meno, 17). In this way, Plato demonstrates the essence of his argument about what it means to be human. It describes that there is a soul and that it is the soul that assimilates everything that is learned. Plato's idea of ​​soul in this quote illustrates that nothing is learned, but remembered. This is because the soul has already experienced and learned things in past forms, and in this life the person must remember all these things. Socrates then moves the discussion towards a concept of destiny. It reestablishes that all things were learned in past life forms and that remembrance takes place in the present life. Destiny intrudes into the conversation when he states that being human in this current life was not a choice. He believes that you must relearn from your past life experiences in order to use the predetermined life you are currently living. This refutes Meno's definition that humans are mechanical in nature. This would perhaps be more convincing to Machiavelli who found some of these models to be true. Machiavelli best describes two views of human nature when he clarifies two ways of obtaining a principality. He discovers that a prince can gain his dominion either through lineage or by obtaining it in some way. He then adds that in the case of the latter, the notions of “eater” and “ate” are present. In other words, the eater represents the prince wanting to control power over others and the eaten represents all of the subjects. This does not mean, however, that those being eaten desire to be commanded or oppressed, simply that they will inevitably experience this treatment in the wild. This is what we find when Machiavelli describes that “the people neither desire to be commanded nor oppressed by the great, but greatly desire to command and oppress the people” (Machiavelli 38). He.