Socrates On Philosophy and Death
November 16, 2016 at 1:07 am
(This post was last modified: November 16, 2016 at 1:17 am by Mudhammam.)
What is philosophy? Despite an overuse of the term, or its unfairly maligned reputation as an armchair pastime that, if its true value hasn’t been outlived, then it has at least been greatly exaggerated, “philosophy” has remained integral to the collective thought process of Western civilization for over 2,600 years. Whatever ideals or concepts with which one associates “philosophy,” the idea most commonly invoked seems to be one of the following: A philosophy is a way of viewing the world, perhaps something that develops as an individual acquires knowledge about their surroundings, or certain principles by which to organize their thoughts and actions. Secondly, philosophy is an art of ratiocination, the application of reason to a calm reflection of one’s experiences. In the ancient world, philosophy was typically divided into three specific areas of study: Natural science, logic or dialectic, and ethics. Moreover, the concept of philosophy was not merely an intellectual exercise performed by educated academics, a point of view from which one calibrated their standards of evaluation, or a sense of purpose, but a commitment to principles by which one was to be guided each day. “The one aim of those who practice philosophy in the proper manner,” Socrates famously declares near the outset of Plato’s masterful dialogue, “On the Soul”, or more properly, Phaedo, “is to practice for dying and death.” What does Socrates mean that to practice philosophy “is to practice for dying and death”? The aim of this discussion is to briefly examine three possible meanings of Socrates’ profound statement and their relevance to one’s understanding of philosophy today.
These I take to be as follows:
1) The suggestion of an ethical perspective that naturally proceeds from his understanding of the relationship between mind and body, and which proved especially influential upon Platonism, Stoicism, Cynicism, and Christianity.
2) The many possible epistemological or metaphysical implications of certain mind-body distinctions, chiefly: The felt necessity to abstract one’s self from the world in attempting to understand reality from an unbiased or objective perspective; the self-annihilation oftentimes entailed in philosophical frameworks that are strictly materialistic and/or mechanistic; the result of meditative or mystical experience in which multiple practitioners have described losing all sense of a “center” or “core identity,” acquiring a non-dual awareness of mind and body.
3) A reflection upon the impending, nay, imminent demise of ourselves and all around us, and more importantly, the ways by which one is able to cope with existential hopelessness or doubts about the soul’s survival.
The first and most natural reading of Socrates is to take his words at face value in the context of the dialogue, wherein Plato’s teacher, but moments away from the end, argues for the doctrine of the soul’s transmigration; death is but a separation of body and soul, of which the former is a sort of prison of the intellect; the soul, through the exercise of the mind or the intellect, must seek to cleanse itself of all such mortal, or transient, bonds. How does the soul, or more properly the intellect, accomplish this purification process? Through philosophic reflection and a shunning of brute sensations, or as Socrates goes on to say in the Phaedo, in a section that has been called “the Magna Carta of Western mysticism”: “For to investigate something through the body is to do it through the senses,” i.e. the cave life in Plato’s famous illustration, where
Secondly, to “practice dying” is to eliminate the self conceptually in theory and/or in practice. As one attempts to form a coherent picture of the world, an understanding of reality that is in some sense true independently of the self -- as a subject who is continually making observations and measuring judgments against an ideal of objectivity -- one must take on what Thomas Nagel called “the view from nowhere.” Then there is the conclusion that a materialistic or purely mechanistic view would seem, inevitably, to reach: there is no simple unit or substance such as the “soul” or “self” as it has been traditionally conceived. It disappears into the machinery of the brain, a sophisticated complex that either produces the meta-sensation of an intellectually extricable, single, continuous, self-identity with memories and expectations (subtly placed in the background of all impressions/perceptions, combining certain ideas of relation together, distinguishing these from others, and so forth) -- or the computations are themselves indistinguishable from Descartes’ cogito, at least in all but the obvious contrasts that separate first and third-person descriptions. In the same vein, there have been countless mystics, from a diversity of religious or philosophical points of view, who have similarly described a feeling of losing the “I” that naturally seems to lie behind the eyes; much more than metaphysical speculation, it is actually possible to annihilate the experience of the objective-subjective dichotomy -- the “I” -- that otherwise feels most natural to our sense of individuality.
Thirdly, and finally, “to practice for dying and death” is to prepare one’s self, psychologically, for the possibility that the end of our life “in some remote corner of the universe,” as Nietzsche put it, and similarly the end to which all tends, amounts to an utter dissolution of form; sensation, including personal identity, are reduced to a permanent nothingness; that objective point in space-time in which the following is true: All of those whom we have loved, including ourselves, have perished, forever ceasing to exist. The two guarantees that we receive at birth are that we must die, and that the longer one lives, the more one must learn to suffer. To practice philosophy is to prepare one’s self for death, to face it head-on as an intellectual problem, to realize as Socrates did that either the gods will reward our goodwill, or there will be nothing subsequent to the final act; as Epicurus taught his disciples, the subsequent nothing can be nothing to worry about. This equalization of practicing philosophy and preparing for death also brings to mind the great consolation letters, such as those Cicero received addressing his grief over the death of his daughter or that beautiful correspondence between Plutarch and his wife that the former wrote following the death of their infant child. Of course, it would be remiss of me not to mention that great work of Boethius, The Consolation of Philosophy, written as the poor saint languished in prison, awaiting his execution. Cicero once wrote that philosophy is “the culture of the mind” and “the medicine of the soul,” but he also said that “the whole life of a philosopher” is something more. It is that, which, in my opinion, ultimately defines what it means to “practice philosophy.” And what is that?
It is “a meditation on death.”
These I take to be as follows:
1) The suggestion of an ethical perspective that naturally proceeds from his understanding of the relationship between mind and body, and which proved especially influential upon Platonism, Stoicism, Cynicism, and Christianity.
2) The many possible epistemological or metaphysical implications of certain mind-body distinctions, chiefly: The felt necessity to abstract one’s self from the world in attempting to understand reality from an unbiased or objective perspective; the self-annihilation oftentimes entailed in philosophical frameworks that are strictly materialistic and/or mechanistic; the result of meditative or mystical experience in which multiple practitioners have described losing all sense of a “center” or “core identity,” acquiring a non-dual awareness of mind and body.
3) A reflection upon the impending, nay, imminent demise of ourselves and all around us, and more importantly, the ways by which one is able to cope with existential hopelessness or doubts about the soul’s survival.
The first and most natural reading of Socrates is to take his words at face value in the context of the dialogue, wherein Plato’s teacher, but moments away from the end, argues for the doctrine of the soul’s transmigration; death is but a separation of body and soul, of which the former is a sort of prison of the intellect; the soul, through the exercise of the mind or the intellect, must seek to cleanse itself of all such mortal, or transient, bonds. How does the soul, or more properly the intellect, accomplish this purification process? Through philosophic reflection and a shunning of brute sensations, or as Socrates goes on to say in the Phaedo, in a section that has been called “the Magna Carta of Western mysticism”: “For to investigate something through the body is to do it through the senses,” i.e. the cave life in Plato’s famous illustration, where
Quote:“it is dragged by the body to the things that are never the same, and soul itself strays and is confused and dizzy, as if it were drunk... But when the soul investigates by itself it passes into the realm of what is pure, ever existing, immortal and unchanging, and being akin to this, it always stays with it whenever it is by itself and can do so; it ceases to stray and remains in the same state as it is in touch with things of the same kind, and its experience then is what is called wisdom?”“Altogether well said and very true,” his interlocutor, Cebes, replies. Therefore, according to a straightforward interpretation of the dialogue, to live by philosophy correctly is to keep the mind unpolluted in its apprehension of unchanging truths; it was thought that this was best achieved by neglecting the “passions,” or concerns of the body that extend beyond mere necessity. The schools of the Cynics and Stoics also seem to have followed this reasoning, and it is summed up well by the Christian author of Colossians:
Quote:“Set your affection on things above, not on things on the earth… Mortify therefore your members which are upon the earth; fornication, uncleanness, inordinate affection, evil concupiscence, and covetousness, which is idolatry… But now ye also put off all these; anger, wrath, malice, blasphemy, filthy communication out of your mouth.”To disregard the passions in favor of reason, then, allows to one draw closer both to the True and to the Good, which many philosophers since Plato have described as “convertible terms,” or “transcendental properties of being” (being, true, good, one, etc., can be interchangeably predicated upon the other, and seem to transcend basic categorical distinctions that one makes when conceptualizing the world). Hence, the first interpretation of Socrates extends to ethical practice as well as the exercise of philosophy in general, which brings us more precisely to the next possible meaning.
Secondly, to “practice dying” is to eliminate the self conceptually in theory and/or in practice. As one attempts to form a coherent picture of the world, an understanding of reality that is in some sense true independently of the self -- as a subject who is continually making observations and measuring judgments against an ideal of objectivity -- one must take on what Thomas Nagel called “the view from nowhere.” Then there is the conclusion that a materialistic or purely mechanistic view would seem, inevitably, to reach: there is no simple unit or substance such as the “soul” or “self” as it has been traditionally conceived. It disappears into the machinery of the brain, a sophisticated complex that either produces the meta-sensation of an intellectually extricable, single, continuous, self-identity with memories and expectations (subtly placed in the background of all impressions/perceptions, combining certain ideas of relation together, distinguishing these from others, and so forth) -- or the computations are themselves indistinguishable from Descartes’ cogito, at least in all but the obvious contrasts that separate first and third-person descriptions. In the same vein, there have been countless mystics, from a diversity of religious or philosophical points of view, who have similarly described a feeling of losing the “I” that naturally seems to lie behind the eyes; much more than metaphysical speculation, it is actually possible to annihilate the experience of the objective-subjective dichotomy -- the “I” -- that otherwise feels most natural to our sense of individuality.
Thirdly, and finally, “to practice for dying and death” is to prepare one’s self, psychologically, for the possibility that the end of our life “in some remote corner of the universe,” as Nietzsche put it, and similarly the end to which all tends, amounts to an utter dissolution of form; sensation, including personal identity, are reduced to a permanent nothingness; that objective point in space-time in which the following is true: All of those whom we have loved, including ourselves, have perished, forever ceasing to exist. The two guarantees that we receive at birth are that we must die, and that the longer one lives, the more one must learn to suffer. To practice philosophy is to prepare one’s self for death, to face it head-on as an intellectual problem, to realize as Socrates did that either the gods will reward our goodwill, or there will be nothing subsequent to the final act; as Epicurus taught his disciples, the subsequent nothing can be nothing to worry about. This equalization of practicing philosophy and preparing for death also brings to mind the great consolation letters, such as those Cicero received addressing his grief over the death of his daughter or that beautiful correspondence between Plutarch and his wife that the former wrote following the death of their infant child. Of course, it would be remiss of me not to mention that great work of Boethius, The Consolation of Philosophy, written as the poor saint languished in prison, awaiting his execution. Cicero once wrote that philosophy is “the culture of the mind” and “the medicine of the soul,” but he also said that “the whole life of a philosopher” is something more. It is that, which, in my opinion, ultimately defines what it means to “practice philosophy.” And what is that?
It is “a meditation on death.”
He who loves God cannot endeavour that God should love him in return - Baruch Spinoza
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