Death and Philosophy

  Philosophy - life! - only gets interesting when death gets real. It is our mortality that makes the question of meaning so inescapable. Socrates in the Phaedo said that philosophy is preparation to die, that philosophy was already a kind of dying to the world. I think Socrates was able to face death because he had made, through his philosophy, the grief of his friends unintelligible. He had made himself into a kind of android, an artificial intelligence. Not in general but in that scene, which is one of the few that I suffer to read. (Plato made him into that. I suspect that character was more Plato in a certain mood than Socrates.)

   To take to sting of death you must make life on this earth meaningless, or terrible, a disease.  Or you must make death unreal: for example, what is really alive in a spirit, which leaves the body, which is not you or your life, when the body ceases to be. But you body is of the earth, and that is just another way of demeaning earthly life.

  To say yes to this world is to let the sting of death cause you fear and grief. Life affirmed is at best bittersweet.