How does socrates conceive of death

Phaedo related how Socrates met with a few of his friends when the appointed day came for him to drink the deadly hemlock. His wife, the long-suffering Xanthippe, had to be sent away because for some reason she found it upsetting that her husband had to die. Socrates, on the other hand, was in a cracking good mood, because he insisted that for a true philosopher the day of death was a good one, that because he had lived his life in a good way, he had no fear of death.

Socrates insisted that for a moral person, death was a good thing and should be welcomed. Suicide was wrong, he added, because men and women are the property of the immortal gods, and as such should not be harmed intentionally because this was an attack on the property of others. But when death did come, it was no bad thing. Socrates replied that it was because of the immortality of the soul that death was no evil.

The purpose of philosophy was to free the soul by guiding it to the eternal truths, and so when death came, it was a liberation. The body, he asserted, was a messy pit of passions and rude cravings. The soul, rather than the flesh alone, was capable of seeing truth, and therefore death was the moment when the soul would be set free to find true virtue and happiness.

This sharp distinction between body and soul would have a deep influence on the writers of the New Testament and on the early Christian church fathers. What if it just died with the flesh? How does one know that the soul really exists at all? Socrates replied to these questions, offering his friends four arguments that, to his mind at least, assured him of immortality in the realm of pure spirit and forms.

First of all, he argued, the soul must be immortal because life always comes from the dead as we see in nature. In the decaying of organic matter, new life in the fields always emerges.

As nature always seems to generate new life out of decay, so too the soul must emerge alive when the crumbling flesh perishes. Further proof of this, he insisted, was the principle of recollection, in which men seemed to remember concepts they had not known before. Socrates, with Simmias agreeing, asserts that there exist such things as justice itself, goodness itself, beauty itself, and so on. These things cannot be detected by the senses, but only through the efforts of the unaided intellect.

Any inquiry into justice, goodness, or whatever else will only be productive if we have a clear idea of what these things are in and of themselves. Our quest for the truth will be much aided by death if at that point our soul is completely separated from the contamination of the body. Throughout their lives, philosophers, in their search for truth, have attained a state as close to death as possible, trying to distance the soul as much as they can from the needs of the body.

Therefore, death should only be seen as a help to philosophers, giving them even greater separation between soul and body. Socrates also points out that only a philosopher who does not fear death can truly be said to possess courage and self-control.

If everyone but philosophers fear death, the only reason a "brave" non-philosopher would face death would be through a fear of something worse than death. Similarly, a non-philosopher practicing self-control would only be doing so in order to indulge a greater pleasure that follows from the act of self-control. These people would be exchanging pleasures for pleasures, pains for pains, fears for fears. The philosopher exchanges all these things for wisdom, the only thing of true value.

This pursuit of wisdom will cleanse the philosopher of all the impurities of bodily life and its passions, preparing him for an exalted afterlife among the gods. In this one section of text we are introduced to a number of ideas that have served as the foundation for much philosophical thinking and debate for the past years. The main goal of this paper is to provide an account of why he is committed to asceticism. The ultimate problem with this change of values and of thoughts is that it undermines our virtue and happiness section 3.

A precise account of this allows us to explain why bodily pleasures and desires lead to our unhappiness and, indeed, our reincarnation, whereas their avoidance allows us to be wise, happy, and escape the cycle of reincarnation. Socrates distinguishes between pleasures of learning and those of the body and says that the philosopher leaves the pleasures of the body alone d—e.

Our first step is to see the insidious effects of bodily desires on our beliefs and actions. The body bewitches the soul with its desires and pleasures; this bewitching goes along with and perhaps is the cause of the soul loving and serving the body.

In these passages, Socrates makes clear that pleasure, in bewitching us, changes our beliefs without good reason. Philosophy allows the lover of learning [13] to see something. Why would these desires make the soul an accomplice in its own imprisonment? Such desires lead one to want to stay in the prison of the body because they lead one to see the body as something good.

The soul does not view bodily desires as foreign to it or not properly its own; instead, it takes these desires as its very own, becoming bewitched by them. Our first reason, then, genuinely to avoid bodily pleasures and desires, not simply to evaluate them as worthless, is that when we have such desires they subvert our soul, changing our values so that we perpetuate our imprisonment.

If we only evaluated pleasures and desires as worthless, without trying to avoid or resist them, our values would end up changing so that we would start evaluating them as worthwhile. Our next step is to consider how bodily pleasures and desires change our beliefs and our values.

After the prison passage, Socrates explains that philosophy tries to persuade the soul to release itself from the body by showing it that this is the only route to truth 83a—b.

It is perhaps surprising to learn that this is, in fact, the greatest and most extreme of all evils. The passage also mentions a second, related, problem that arises from pleasures and pains. Woolf says that this passage only makes claims about intense pleasures and pains, leaving us free to have other such pleasures and pains.

When Cebes asks how so, Socrates responds that, in fact, each pleasure and pain nails and pins the soul to the body, making it bodily. Each one goes along with thinking that something is true. He also does not say that this belief is forced, leaving open the possibility that we can sometimes resist thinking that something is true. Every bodily pleasure and pain is to be avoided; every one nails us to the body; every one is associated with thinking that these things are to some degree true. The intense ones are, indeed, our greatest evils.

We do not need to settle, for our purposes, whether we should think of the body as literally having beliefs and literally enjoying things. The important question for us is how the beliefs caused in us by pleasure and pain change our way of life.

It must be, that part of what we are brought to believe, is that the cake is genuinely good or worth enjoying. That is why believing the same things as the body goes along with enjoying the same things as it: you acquire beliefs about what to pursue.

Socrates seems to be operating with the idea, typically thought of as Socratic, that if you believe that something is good, then you will desire it. We can avoid this result, though, if we do our best to avoid having these experiences in the first place. Given the way that pleasures and pains get us to believe falsehoods and change our values, we can see why we would simply avoid the activities that bring pleasure and pain.

Shortly after the previous passage, Socrates is clear the philosopher avoids pleasure and pain because he [19] realizes that to do otherwise would be counterproductive:.

Note that Socrates does not suggest that the philosopher might choose to have pleasures and pains but to evaluate them as worthless, nor does he suggest that the philosopher might choose to have them, understanding that he will have to fight against them.

Socrates does not suggest these options because of what he said in the previous passage which comes shortly before this one : experiencing these will change our thoughts and values. He would not hope for philosophy to free him while allowing himself to experience pleasure and pain, because this would be to unravel the work already done. We should avoid the activities that bring about pleasures and pains to the extent possible, but when we do not succeed, we can try actively to resist them.

Instead, there is an active struggle between soul and body repeatedly described in the Phaedo , in which each is vying to rule the other. Nature commands that the soul be master and the body slave 79e—80a , but typically it is the body that rules 66c—d.

Philosophers actively resist. The body uses pleasures and desires to rule the soul, but the wise person fights against them. We should avoid pleasures, pains, and bodily desires not because we are completely powerless if we experience them, but because they push us away from the truth and change our values unless we work to resist them.

We should seek a rest and devote our energies to the truth. The soul, especially the wise soul, rules. He explicitly says that it does so not by surrendering to bodily affections, but rather by opposing them, for example by pulling against drinking and eating when there is thirst and hunger 94b.

Clearly, it is not enough for the soul simply to use reason to determine what is best, evaluating as worthless affections that are worthless. It must actively oppose bodily affections, treating them as one might an insubordinate soldier or servant.

We can see why Socrates thinks we should avoid having these bodily affections in the first place, so one does not have to fight against them. Socrates is advocating a radical view, a strong form of asceticism. But he has good reasons for thinking it is necessary, given how he thinks bodily pleasures and desires affect us. Let us turn to how these problems caused by pleasure and pain are related to the other problems caused by the body.

But, Woolf says, Socrates does not think that we should literally avoid using our senses; rather, he is telling us to downgrade the value of our senses. The problem with this argument is that Socrates does not treat pleasures in a parallel fashion to perception. When discussing these bodily affections, he does not limit his restrictions to some specific activity like investigation.

Socrates thinks we can use the senses without thinking that what they deliver is true. We must actively avoid them in all circumstances because they change what we think is true, our way of life, and what we enjoy.

So far, in this paper I have focused on passages that come after his affinity argument 78b—80e. But the problems caused by the body are introduced much earlier, in what is known as his defense speech 63b—69e.

The problems are 1 that the body can make us not succeed in grasping the truth and 2 it can make us not even try to grasp the truth, because we value and desire something else. Both pleasure and the senses can be involved in 1 , but the senses are not involved in 2.

There are three ways that the body can 1 make us not succeed in grasping the truth. Both pleasures and the senses can 1a distract the soul so it does not reason well 65c.

There is also a specific problem with grasping the truth that is only caused by the senses. A person can try to inquire using the senses, whereas one cannot try to inquire using pleasure or pain. And Socrates is quite clear that 1b inquiry through the senses is deceptive e.

Thus, Socrates thinks it is particularly important not to use the senses when inquiring. Just as the senses cause a specific problem with grasping the truth, so also pleasures and pains cause a distinct problem for grasping the truth. As we saw in the passage about the most intense pleasures and pains 83b4—e1 , Socrates thinks that 1c whether or not we are inquiring or reasoning, pleasures and pains make us think that things are true that are not true.

We have seen that after the affinity argument Socrates argues for 2 , i. Socrates also highlights this earlier in the dialogue, in his defense speech. For example, he says that the body fills us up with lusts, desires, fears, fantasies, [26] and much nonsense, which lead us to go to war, leaving us with no time for philosophy 66c—d.

Thus, throughout the dialogue Socrates treats the senses and bodily desires as presenting overlapping but distinct problems. While the senses are sometimes distracting, Socrates never suggests that we must always avoid using the senses; in fact, he explicitly says philosophy permits their use to the extent necessary 83a. It is because their souls are pure that they can grasp things that are pure 67b , namely, the forms.

To be pure is to not have foreign or inappropriate things mixed in to you. When bodily desires come into the soul, they make it impure. The soul must not let them in if it is to acquire wisdom. In the next section we will gain a more precise understanding of purification; but already we can see that it involves not allowing bodily desires into the soul.

The primary means seem to be pleasure and pain. Socrates presents a vicious circle between pleasure and desire. We become body-lovers, the sort of people who might describe themselves as temperate, but in fact only delay some pleasures because they desire greater ones 68e—69a. The philosopher, by contrast, is not eager for the pleasures of food, drink or sex 64d and hence avoids these pleasures and thereby avoids strengthening the desire for them.

It is worth stepping back to consider the broader picture that Socrates presents in the Phaedo , in which intense pleasures and pains force us to believe things that are not true and in which all bodily pleasures, pains, and desires have a deep and insidious effect on our thoughts and values unless we actively avoid and resist them.

Socrates thinks you should evaluate these bodily affections as bad, but doing so is not sufficient; you need to abstain and purify as best you can so that you can philosophize as best you can.

As mentioned at the beginning of this section, Socrates has no qualms with the pleasures of learning e , as one would expect, since he thinks there is genuine value in learning. I take it that most people both now and in fourth century Athens would not agree with Socrates that there is nothing intrinsically good about bodily pleasures.

We will see why Socrates thinks this in the next section. But suppose, for a moment, that he is right about this. Then it is plausible to think that we should actively avoid bodily pleasures and desires on the grounds that we cannot experience bodily pleasures, pains, and desires without having them affect our values and actions.

The standard concern with this Stoic view is that it is counterintuitive. One reason it seems counterintuitive is that the happy life seems to involve pleasure or at least the absence of prolonged pain.

Socrates provides a different sort of concern with the Stoic position: when we have intense pleasures or pains they force us to believe false things and change our values, which makes wisdom impossible and, in fact, not even desired.

This disagreement about whether we can be happy on the rack ultimately rests on Socrates denying a fairly common idea among ancient, modern, and contemporary ethicists.

The idea is that the world simply provides us with, at most, something like a pro-attitude, an unendorsed appearance, or an impression of an action as worth doing, which we are free to affirm or deny or some other similar action. But this is not the picture in the Phaedo. We do not distinguish between two aspects of desiring, the impression and the acceptance.

Philosophy can see the cunning of the prison and use this knowledge to help us avoid forming bodily desires and resist the desires that we have already formed. But even when we do not associate ourselves with a bodily desire, it is still a desire that we have and having such a desire is precisely to be compelled toward its end.

We should avoid being in such a state to whatever extent we can. I have argued that Socrates is speaking literally when he says that we should avoid bodily pleasures and desires. He thinks that having bodily pleasures and desires leads us away from the truth and changes our values. But what, exactly, is wrong with this change to our values and why, exactly, should we pursue truth? An answer to these questions is needed to understand fully his asceticism.

Throughout the Phaedo Socrates consistently identifies us with our souls most memorably at c when he says that Crito can bury him any way he wants as long as he can catch him. Our soul has proper activities and a proper condition. Thought and inquiry are proper activities of the soul; if inquiry is successful, it leads to the proper condition, wisdom.

The soul itself according to itself grasps the truth by thinking about the forms. When the soul grasps the truth and so has wisdom, it is happy. As we will see, philosophers desire to be dead because they desire to have their souls in this condition. Thus, the main problem with pleasure and pains diverting us from the truth is not that this is harmful to achieving some further end, but rather that it directly undermines our proper condition and thereby our happiness.

The soul itself might desire sex, but it does so not in accordance with its being a soul, in other words, not in accordance with itself. When the soul has such desires, it is not itself according to itself 81b—c, discussed below. At this point, everyone seems to have a reason to seek dying and being dead, since only those who seek it have genuine virtue. To my knowledge, no other scholar has laid this out.

Can death be anything other than that? Being dead requires more than death does. As we will see, viewing them as distinct also helps us understand why philosophers view it as an accomplishment to be dead.

Moreover, if Socrates thought these were the same thing, it is unclear why he would provide these two definitions in a row, using clearly different formulations. Instead, my suggestion is that Socrates carefully gives distinct formulations, which he later relies on, but he realizes that Simmias may not have immediately grasped these nuanced differences, so he only asks Simmias about the simpler definition, that of death.

Socrates says that being connected to the body makes it impossible for the soul to acquire truth and wisdom 66c—e. Then he says, in the passage below, that pure knowledge can only be acquired when the soul is itself according to itself. Given that in order to have genuine knowledge the soul must be both separate and itself according to itself, Socrates argues that the only way for the philosopher to have what he desires is for him to be dead:.

The time, so it seems, when we will have that which we desire and whose lovers we claim to be, namely wisdom, will be when we are dead, as the argument indicates, and not while we are alive. For if it is impossible to have pure knowledge of anything when we are in the company of the body, then one of two things: either knowledge cannot be acquired anywhere, or it can be acquired when we are dead.