Fear of death

Death is scary—that’s pretty much universal.  There’s all sorts of reasons for being afraid of death e.g. fear of infiniteness, finiteness, meaninglessness, nothingness, the unknown, or of the cessation of being.  Yet Socrates evidently marches toward his death without complaint, without fear, and doesn’t postpone his death for even a second despite his having multiple opportunities to do so.  

A Socrates-like acceptance of death is unusual in Western society.  Granted, there are those who are accepting of the finitude of their bodies and feel content at the approach of death.  But death arrives in all sorts of circumstances:  sometimes it’s expected as in the case of those with terminal diseases or the elderly; sometimes it’s not expected like with fatal shootings or a fatal heart attack in an otherwise healthy person; sometimes there’s suffering such as with terminal patients, and other times it’s quick and (so we are told) painless like with lethal injections or fatal accidents.  If there’s anything that human beings have in common with each other (besides our humanness), it’s that we were all born at some point and we are all going to die at another point.  

To reiterate—death is scary.  For most of us.  If we’re not scared of death now, it’s likely we were at some point in our lives.  

So what was Socrates’ secret to approaching death fearlessly and even joyously?

Three beliefs:  1) the soul is immortal; 2) his practice of philosophy has suitably purified his soul so that the afterlife will be a good afterlife; 3) if he is wrong and there is no afterlife, then he has still led an incredible life. 

If we look at that again, we’ll notice that Socrates explains how he is comfortable with his own death.  There’s no discussion of the devastating process of dying and how that affects personhood no discussion of the loss of loved ones.  There’s no discussion of the process of grieving or how to do it.  Instead, Socrates tells us that “any man that you see resenting death was not a lover of wisdom but a lover of the body, and also a lover of wealth or honors, either or both” (68b).  Later, Socrates rebukes others for grieving over his impending death and sends away the women for crying over him.  

What do we do with the complexities surrounding death?  How do we grieve properly?  Death is just as much a part of life as living is and yet society seems entirely inept at dealing with it.  Socrates is aware of the relationship between living and dying, so consider this post as a teaser for the multiple issues that arise in Phaedo. 

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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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