The Meaning of Death
In the Phaedo, the Socratic way of life is portrayed under the test of the prospect of immediate death. Such a prospect is the ultimate test for any way of life. A philosophy of life that forgets that life ends will break down here and not only leave its adherent with nothing, but leave him with the realization that he is left with nothing. Even when the question of piety, for instance, is of immediate concern to oneself, it is possible to ignore it, and, through lack of philosophical resources, not even to realize that it is of concern. But if you have the good fortune to live long enough, then it will not be so easy in like manner to ignore the question of the meaning of one’s own death. The substance or hollowness of a way of life will begin to show itself here if nowhere else.
The guiding principle of Socratic philosophy is “Know thyself.” When waiting for the hemlock, the upshot of that principle seems to be: “Know that you are mortal.” But still the command needs interpretation. Clearly, knowing that you are mortal means, among other things, knowing that you are going to die. But even this proposition remains unclear until it becomes clear what death is. Thus, Socrates addresses the question of the nature of death and puts all the arguments he can find to the test.
Socrates lived his life in the pursuit of wisdom. His implicit guiding question at every turn was: “What is the nature of this situation in which I now find myself? What does it ask of me? What am I called upon to recall that I may recognize this situation for what it is and so choose and act from the best knowledge available to me?” In short, he lived his life undertaking the task of anamnesis at every turn, attempting to perceive the essential forms of every situation, from the particular situation, for example, of having to defend himself in court to the most general situation of being a human being living on the face of the earth. If he was successful, then he never forgot that the life he aspired to comprehend has a natural end. (Forgetting mortality, the understanding of everything else is deeply skewed out of proportion to the scale of human life.) In the Phaedo, what has always been implicit acknowledgment of personal mortality comes to explicit recognition as Socrates tests the arguments relevant to the question, “What is death?”
As reported in the Apology, Socrates once said that he does not know what death is, and that as far as he knows it may be the greatest blessing. He said this to indicate why it would not be reasonable for him to renounce his way of life under the threat of death. But in the Phaedo, he is seriously engaged in the question of what death is, as if he expected to find out. Why doesn’t he just say to his friends, “Well, guys, I don’t know what death is, so I think I’ll just wait and see. Maybe I’ll find out and maybe I won’t.” He doesn’t say this because he knows that, as in all other situations in life, without preparation of the soul, nothing will be seen; experience comes to the prepared mind. In accord with his guiding principle, then, Socrates must test all the ideas about death available to him, just as he tested ideas about virtue and piety, so that he comes as close as possible to recognizing his death for what it is, just as he came as close as he could to seeing piety and virtue for what they are, but without the arrogance of a final, dogmatic opinion. On the Socratic view, this is the only path of wisdom open to a human being.
A Problem of Interpretation
There appears to be a conflict between one clear implication of the Socratic imperative to self-knowledge on the one hand, and the arguments of the Phaedo on the immortality of the soul, on the other. The most important element of self-knowledge is the practical knowledge that one is not a god, existing eternally in an essentially unchanging realm, but a mortal, living within the limitations of time and historical circumstance. This knowledge requires an incorporation into one’s self-conception of the recognition that all of one’s thoughts, plans, and ambitions are within the setting of a finite life and are properly scaled to its dimensions. The fact of one’s inevitable death is not, on the view suggested by the imperative, a calamity that is somehow accidental though inevitable. Rather, it signals an essential aspect of one’s human being. If such knowledge is acknowledged in practice and not just in theory, then one’s self-regard and, by extension, all of one’s knowledge is profoundly tempered; with anamnesis of mortality, you are rendered more reasonable and open to humane experience.
On the other hand, the arguments of the Phaedo seem clearly to be in favor of immortality of the soul, or seem at least to be searching for such a conclusion. But any such conclusion runs, apparently, counter to the significance of the Socratic imperative sketched above.
Let me suggest one approach to this problem. The conflict would be resolved if we add the following line of thought to what has already been observed about Socratic philosophy:
There is nothing about human life that cannot be questioned and examined. But real questioning implies alternative answers and alternative lives. We can form the idea of immortality by deriving it from a questioning of the proposition that each of us will die. Since it is part of the examined life to let nothing that we assume about ourselves remain untested, unexamined, unquestioned, let us bring ourselves into self-knowledge as far as our abilities allow by questioning too this proposition of mortality.
Thus, we must ask: what does the question of mortality mean? What sense do the alternative answers make? Like the final episode in a drama, what happens here makes all the difference for the meaning of what happens before. Some of us assume that we are the sort of beings for which death is a final extinction. Others assume that we are the sort of beings that live forever. But what do these assumptions mean in real terms? We can’t allow them to remain purely speculative and impractical. We need to know how we are to live differently if one answer rather than another is true.
Since we recognize death at least in a limited way, we can inquire about it, bring it under examination and make its questioning part of our life. The question, “What is death?” is one of the most important and one of the most difficult; without illumination here, we remain in large a mystery to ourselves and the meaning of our lives remains a question mark.
One implication of this line of thought is that an abandonment of the possibility of immortality signifies an abandonment of much of what we would become. It is part of our nature to strive for, hope for, aim for, more than what is merely human; a striving for self-overcoming is part of our destiny. Thus, it is never given to us to know in any explicit, thematic way, what the limitations of human nature are, as if we were to find borders across which we could not step.
A potentially tragic vision of human nature is implied in this “resolution,” for it implies that on the one hand our aspirations may always be over-reaching our humanity, so we may be ever bound for brutal disappointment. Yet we need our highest aspirations for a full realization of our potential and self-knowledge. Abandonment of those aspirations implies a lapse into the cynical relativism or stifling dogmatism that human beings naturally find oppressive and disheartening.