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.”
0 comments:
Post a Comment