Why do we suffer, and to what end?

Crito

“Besides, Socrates, I do not think that what you are doing is just, to give up your life when you can save it, and to hasten your fate as your enemies would hasten it, and indeed have hastened it in their wish to destroy you” –Crito

Crito’s plea to Socrates is the epitome of the questions that surround suffering in death:  how could we possibly distinguish between what kind of suffering is permissible and whom the suffering is bestowed upon?  Crito suggests that Socrates’ allowing himself to die is wholly unjust because of the joy and the pain that he would bestow upon others by not escaping:  the joy that his enemies would feel at Socrates’ bending to their will; and the pain that his loved ones would feel at his death.  So why have death at all, if it only brings pleasure to your enemies and sorrow to your loved ones?  Better yet, why do we suffer at all? 

In the Crito, Socrates distinguishes between physical and spiritual suffering and uses physical suffering as a metaphor for spiritual suffering.  On some levels, there’s the recognition of our physical limits and the suffering that comes with nearing the ends of those physical limits—such as through process of aging.  When commenting on his serenity toward his own death sentence, Socrates tells Crito that “it would not be fitting at my age to resent the fact that I must die now.”  We know from the apology that not only is Socrates content with the idea that he is old, but he is also accepting of his fate because he knows that it is a result of his pursuit of the good life—a pursuit that he believes will bring him favor in the underworld.  Thus, Socrates believes that his physical body was well-spent.   

What do we take away from this?  Simply that things run their course:  Socrates was old, and confident that he had lived well.  When Crito begs Socrates to extend his life to the maximum by escaping, Socrates sees two problems with doing so:  the means and the ends.  The means of extending his life (escaping) require wrongdoing, and that is injurious to the soul.  The ends—living longer—require Socrates to live with a quickly decaying body. 

Socrates beckons Crito to remember that “the most important thing is not life, but the good life…and that the good life, the beautiful life, and the just life are the same.”  In the process of escaping in order to extend his own life, Socrates believes he would injure his family and friends by making them targets of the government of Athens, he would injure the city of Athens by forsaking its laws, and he would injure his own soul by straying from the good.  Socrates’ contentment in doing what is good gives him peace about the prospect of death because when he arrives to Hades, he will have all his good acts as defense before the gods. 

So here is what this means to me:  the point is not that suffering is imposed on us, but rather that we choose to act rightly even in the face of suffering.  The ultimate rewards of the good life, according to Socrates, are the blessings that will come in the afterlife or the ease that one feels with oneself before settling into a permanent dreamless sleep.  Socrates finishes by telling Crito:  “Let it be…and let us act in this way, since this is the way the god is leading us.”

Death is inevitable, so is the suffering that comes along with it.  But we fight to stave off death so much.  With the advent of medical developments, it becomes difficult to determine how one might modernize the pursuit of the good life appropriately.  For example, in cases like Terri Schiavo where one is in a persistent vegetative state—we know that there is a decreased quality of life.  When Socrates refers to “a body that is corrupted and in bad condition” and deems it not worth living with, it’s likely that Mrs. Schiavo’s body would have fit this bill by Socrates and Crito’s standards.  But Mrs. Schiavo’s case ignited the discussion of euthanasia for a reason—people aren’t comfortable with drawing the line between how much suffering is too much suffering and whether or not we have the right to determine the answer to that question.  Discussions of euthanasia are especially muddled since we have to take in account the spiritual suffering of those performing euthanasia and the physical suffering of euthanasia candidates.  

How are we supposed to determine the right actions for borderline cases when the line between dying and death is so fine that it’s scarcely visible?  When do we have a duty to save others or a duty to just “let it be”?  And how do we live with those decisions? 

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Fear of Death in the Apology

Plato’s Apology  is a telling Socrates’ speech in his own defense to the jury of Athens for the crimes of denying the gods and corrupting the youth.  The charges against Socrates are obviously trumped up, but they stick because Socrates has managed to publically embarrass a number of important figures.  After levying his proof to show his innocence of the charges, Socrates stipulates that what the court is really asking him to do is to cease being a philosopher.  Socrates then questions what that would mean and finds that the value of his occupation as a philosopher outweighs the danger of death.  Rather, a man should merely strive to be good.  For Socrates, to be good means that he must obey the order of the Gods, and the Gods ordered him to be a philosopher.  To do anything otherwise (even in the face of death) would be to suggest that one knows better than the gods.

“To fear death, gentlemen, is no other than to think oneself wise when one is not, to think one knows what one does not know.  No one knows whether death may not be the greatest of all blessings for a man, yet men fear it as if they knew that it is the greatest of evils.  And surely it is the most blameworthy ignorance to believe that one knows what one does not know…If I were to claim that I am wiser than anyone in anything, it would be in this, that, as I have no adequate knowledge of things in the underworld, so I do not think I have.”

Socrates discusses the most pervasive human fear:  the fear of the unknown.  In this case, people (other than Socrates) fear death because the afterlife is something that is completely unknown.  The bigger fear that Socrates identifies is that people are afraid to admit that they don’t know what the afterlife is.  Through these two combined fears, the jury assumes that death is the greatest of all fears—because it’s the thing that no one knows anything about and no one wants to admit that they don’t know anything about death. 

Death is just as taboo in today’s Westernized society, if not more, than it was in ancient Greece.  In a British article on the grieving process of an intellectually disabled young woman, the social workers noted that the biggest obstacle to helping the young woman grieve over the loss of her mother was her caregivers’ unwillingness to discuss death.  I’m inclined to believe that the unwillingness to discuss death wasn’t strictly due to the limits of the young woman’s comprehension.  The fact is that people are unwilling to discuss death, and perhaps that’s because of the fear of the unknown that Socrates points out.  How do people deal with the unknown?  Well, it seems that a popular response is to deny that anything is unknown.  Denial is hardly an attractive option, but Socrates says that even if one does not wish to discuss death, one should be far more concerned with the quality of their lives—well, the quality of one’s soul, to be more precise.  Paying attention to the development and quality of one’s soul requires a great deal of evaluation, and the evaluations of one’s own soul are within reach whereas the evaluation of the afterlife is not. 

Perhaps this is the real reason people are afraid of death—we are afraid to evaluate the quality of our own souls, because of the conclusions we might reach.  For one thing, if we were to assume that death is 1.  “A change and relocating of the soul from here to another place,” it is terrifying to imagine that a whole eternity could be based upon the actions of one lifetime.  As a result, it’s easier to subvert the issue by trying to deny that there is some sort of judgment after death that would determine the quality of the place the soul ended up in.  If we were to go with Socrates’ other suggestion, “the dead are nothing and have no perception of anything”, then death would resemble 2.  “A dreamless sleep” and would therefore be a “great advantage.”  The point being:  people have no rational reason to be afraid of death —unless what they are really afraid of is that death means our souls go somewhere else, and we are not all that confident in the quality of our souls. 

Even more terrifying is the idea that no one else can answer the question of what the quality of our own soul might be.  We have to operate on the basis of self-evaluation—and we hardly trust ourselves!  That’s why we’re afraid of death, in the first place:  we don’t trust the goodness of our own souls.  Socrates is certain that philosophy is an excellent mode of perfecting the soul, which is why in the Crito he says that philosophy is preparation for a good death.  Socrates concludes his speech to the jury with a farewell: 

“I go to die, you go to live.  Which of us goes to the better lot is known to no one, except the god.” 

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