Death and Immortality – Page 10 – Maverick Philosopher

A Reason to Take Care of Oneself

It may be that moral and intellectual progress is possible only here. After death it may be too late, either because one no longer exists, or because one continues to exist but in a state that does not permit further progress.

It is foolish to think that believers in post-mortem survival could have no reason to value their physical health and seek longevity. Even a Platonist who believes that he is his soul and not a composite of soul and body has reason to prolong the discipline of the Cave. For it may be that the best progress or the only progress is possible only in the midst of its speluncar chiaroscuro.

Philosophia longa, vita brevis. It is precisely because philosophy is long that one ought to extend one's earthly tenure for as long as one can make progress intellectually and morally. And this, whether or not one has the hope that Vita mutatur non tollitur.

On Taking Pleasure at the Death of an Enemy

Schadenfreude at the death of an enemy presupposes that being dead is an evil state of affairs. The decedent, however, might express, if he could, Schadenfreude of his own: "I have been released from all evils while you remain trapped."

Is being dead an evil? See article below.

Sudduth on Survival

Jime Sayaka interviews philosopher of religion Michael Sudduth on the topic of postmortem survival. (HT: Dave Lull) Excerpt:

My central thesis is that traditional empirical arguments for survival based on the data of psychical research—what I call classical empirical arguments—do not succeed in showing that personal survival is more probable than not, much less that it is highly probable, especially where the survival hypothesis is treated as a scientific or quasi-scientific hypothesis. So my objection is first and foremost a criticism of what I take to be unjustified claims regarding the posterior probability of the hypothesis of personal survival, that is, it’s net plausibility given the relevant empirical data and standard background knowledge. Consequently, the classical arguments, at least as traditionally formulated, do not provide a sufficiently robust epistemic justification for belief in personal survival. That’s my thesis.

Our friend Sudduth a couple of years ago made the journey to the East (to allude to a Hermann Hesse title). Thus he states elsewhere in the interview, "I am a Vedantin philosopher, so I certainly accept the idea of survival, at least broadly understood as the postmortem persistence of consciousness." I would have appreciated some clarification and elaboration on this point. I would guess that Michael now no longer believes in the survival of an individuated, personal consciousness, but believes instead in the survival of a pre-personal or impersonal consciousness common to all of us. But I am only guessing. I am aware, though, that one can be a Vedantin without being an Advaitin.

A. J. Ayer’s Near-Death Experience

Here. (Via Reppert. Merry Christmas, Vic)

Cat Blogging Friday: Jack and Tyke and “This Strange Scandalous Death”

Jack Kerouac was a cat man and a mama's boy.

The following from Chapter 11 of Big Sur, emphasis added. After three weeks alone in Big Sur in Lawrence Ferlinghetti's Bixby canyon cabin, Kerouac, freaked out by the solitude and his metaphysical and religious brooding amidst the starkness of nature, hitch hikes for the last time in his life north on Highway 1 toward Monterey and San Francisco where he receives another 'sign':

The next sign is in Frisco itself where after a night of perfect sleep in an old skid row hotel room I go to see Monsanto [Ferlinghetti] at his City Lights bookstore and he's smiling and glad to see me, says "We were coming out to see you next weekend you should have waited, " but there's something else in his expression — When we're alone he says "Your mother wrote and said your cat is dead. "

Ordinarily the death of a cat means little to most men, a lot to fewer men, but to me, and that cat, it was exactly and no lie and sincerely like the death of my little brother — I loved Tyke with all my heart, he was my baby who as a kitten just slept in the palm of my hand with his little head hanging down, or just purring, for hours, just as long as I held him that way, walking or sitting — He was like a floppy fur wrap around my wrist, I just twist him around my wrist or drape him and he just purred and purred and even when he got big I still held him that way, I could even hold this big cat in both hands with my arms outstretched right over my head and he'd just purr, he had complete confidence in me — And when I'd left New York to come to my retreat in the woods I'd carefully kissed him and instructed him to wait for me, 'Attends pour mue kitigingoo" — But my mother said in the letter he had died the NIGHT AFTER I LEFT! — But maybe you'll understand me by seeing for yourself by reading the letter:

"Sunday 20 July 1960, Dear Son, I'm afraid you wont like my letter because I only have sad news for you right now. I really dont know how to tell you this but Brace up Honey. I'm going through hell myself. Little Tyke is gone. Saturday all day he was fine and seemed to pick up strength, but late at night I was watching TV a late movie. Just about 1: 30 A. M. when he started belching and throwing up. I went to him and tried to fix him up but to no availe. He was shivering like he was cold so I rapped him up in a Blanket then he started to throw up all over me. And that was the last of him. Needless to say how I feel and what I went through. I stayed up till "day Break" and did all I could to revive him but it was useless. I realized at 4 A. M. he was gone so at six I wrapped him up good in a clean blanket — and at 7 A. M. went out to dig his grave. I never did anything in my whole life so heart breaking as to bury my beloved little Tyke who was as human as you and I. I buried him under the Honeysuckle vines, the corner, of the fence. I just cant sleep or eat. I keep looking and hoping to see him come through the cellar door calling Ma Wow. I'm just plain sick and the weirdest thing happened when I buried Tyke, all the black Birds I fed all Winter seemed to have known what was going on. Honest Son this is no lies. There was lots and lots of em flying over my head and chirping, and settling on the fence, for a whole hour after Tyke was laid to rest — that's something I'll never forget — I wish I had a camera at the time but God and Me knows it and saw it. Now Honey I know this is going to hurt you but I had to tell you somehow… I'm so sick not physically but heart sick… I just cant believe or realize that my Beautiful little Tyke is no more — and that I wont be seeing him come through his little "Shanty" or Walking through the green grass
… PS. I've got to dismantle Tyke's shanty, I just cant go out there and see it empty — as is. Well Honey, write soon again and be kind to yourself. Pray the real "God" — Your old Mom XXXXXX."

So when Monsanto told me the news and I was sitting there smiling with happiness the way all people feel when they come out of a long solitude either in the woods or in a hospital bed, bang, my heart sank, it sank in fact with the same strange idiotic helplessness as when I took the unfortunate deep breath on the seashore — All the premonitions tying in together.

Monsanto sees that I'm terribly sad, he sees my little smile (the smile that came over me in Monterey just so glad to be back in the world after the solitudes and I'd walked around the streets just bemusedly Mona Lisa'ing at the sight of everything) — He sees now how that smile has slowly melted away into a mawk of chagrin — Of course he cant know since I didn't tell him and hardly wanta tell it now, that my relationship with my cat and the other previous cats has always been a little dotty: some kind of psychological identification of the cats with my dead brother Gerard who'd taught me to love cats when I was 3 and 4 and we used to lie on the floor on our bellies and watch them lap up milk — The death of "little brother" Tyke indeed — Monsanto seeing me so downcast says "Maybe you oughta go back to the cabin for a few more weeks — or are you just gonna get drunk again" — "I'm gonna get drunk yes"

[. . .]

It was the most happy three weeks of my life [the three weeks at Ferlinghetti's cabin in Bixby canyon] dammit and now this has to happen, poor little Tyke — You should have seen him a big beautiful yellow Persian the kind they call calico" — "Well you still have my dog Homer, and how was Alf out there? " — "Alf the Sacred Burro, he ha, he stands in groves of trees in the afternoon suddenly you see him it's almost scarey, but I fed him apples and shredded wheat and everything" (and animals are so sad and patient I thought as I remembered Tyke's eyes and Alf's eyes, ah death, and to think this strange scandalous death comes also to human beings, yea to Smiler [Ferlinghetti] even, poor Smiler, and poor Homer his dog, and all of us) — I'm also depressed because I know how horrible my mother now feels all alone without her little chum in the house back there three thousand miles (and indeed by Jesus it turns out later some silly beatniks trying to see me broke the windowpane in the front door trying to get in and scared her so much she barricaded the door with furniture all the rest of that summer).

Conceiving the Afterlife: Life 2.0 or Beatific Vision?

As
far as I can tell, the popular Islamic conception of the afterlife is
unbelievably crass, a form of what might be called 'spiritual materialism.' Muslims
get to do there, in a quasi-physical hinterworld, what they are forbidden to do
here, for example, disport with virgins, in quantity and at length. And
presumably they are not wrapped up, head-to-foot, like the nuns of the 1950s.
You can play the satyr with their nubility for all eternity without ever being
sated. But first you have to pilot some jumbo jets into some skyscrapers for the
greater glory of Allah the Merciful.

That the afterlife is a garden of sensuous
delights, a world of goodies with none of the bad stuff endemic to our sublunary
sphere, strikes me as a puerile conception. It is a conception entertained not only
by Muslims but also by
many Christians. And even if many do not think of it in crassly hedonistic
terms, they think of it as a prolongation of the petty concerns of this life.
They think of it, in other words, as Life 2.0, an improved version of life here below. This, however, is not what it is on a sophisticated
conception:

. . .
the eternal life promised by Christianity is a new life into which the Christian is reborn by a
direct contact between his own personality and the divine Spirit,
not a prolongation of the 'natural' life, with all its
interests, into an indefinitely extended future. There must always be
something 'unworldly' in the Christian's hopes for his destiny
after death, as there must be something unworldly in his present
attitude to the life that now is. (A. E. Taylor, The Christian
Hope for Immortality, Macmillan 1947, p. 64, emphasis in
original)

A. E. Taylor is no longer much read, but he is 'old school' in the depth of his erudition, unike most contemporary academics, and is thus well-worth reading. In the passage quoted he makes a penetrating observation: the true Christian is not only unworldly in this world, but also unworldly in his expectations of the next. This by contrast with one who is worldly in this world and desires his worldliness prolonged into the next.

The epitaph
on Frank Sinatra's tombstone reads, "The best is yet to come." That may well be,
but it won't be booze and broads, glitz and glamour, and the satisfaction of
worldly ambitions that were frustrated this side of the grave. So the believer
must sincerely ask himself: would I really want eternal life?

At
funerals one sometimes hears pious claptrap about the dearly departed going off to be with
the Lord. In many cases,
this provokes a smile. Why should one who has spent his whole life on the make
be eager to meet his Maker? Why the sudden interest in the Lord when, in the
bloom of life, one gave him no thought? If you have loved the things of this
world as if they were ultimate realities, then perhaps you ought to hope that
death is annihilation. Do you really desire direct contact with the divine Spirit?

In any case, it is the puerile conception
with which some mortalists and atheists want to saddle sophisticated theists. (A
mortalist is not the same as an atheist, but most of the one are the other.)
But is there a non-puerile, a sophisticated conception of the afterlife that a
thinking man could embrace? The whole trick, of course, is to work out a
conception that is sophisticated but not unto utter vacuity. This is a hard task, and I
am not quite up to it. But it is worth a try.

Our opponents want to saddle us with
puerile conceptions: things on the order of irate lunar unicorns, celestial teapots, flying spaghetti monsters, God as cosmic
candy man, and so on; but when we protest that that is not what we believe in,
then they accuse us of believing in something vacuous. They would saddle us with
a dilemma: you either embrace some unbelievable because crassly materialistic
conception of God and the afterlife or you embrace nothing at all. I explore
this at length in Dennett on the Deformation of the God
Concept.

Self-professed mortalist and former Jesuit
Peter Heinegg writes, "It was and is impossible to conceive of an afterlife
except as an improved version of this life (harps, houris, etc.), which doesn't
get one very far." (Mortalism, Prometheus 2003, p. 11) Granted, the
harps-and-houris conception is a nonstarter. But is it really impossible to
conceive, at least schematically, of an afterlife except as an improved version of this life?

Suppose that a bunch of young adolescents
were to claim that it is impossible to conceive of adulthood except as an
improved version of adolescence. These boys and girls imagine adulthood to be
adolescence but with the negative removed: no pimples, no powerlessness, no
pestering parents, no pecuniary problems, no paucity of facial hair or mammary
deficiency, etc. They simply cannot conceive of anything beyond the
adolescent level. If you were to try to convince them that their horizon is
limited and that there is more to life than adolescent concerns you would not
get through to them. For what they need is not words and arguments; they need
to grow up. The notion of growing up, though it entails persisting in time, is
distinct from it: it involves the further notion of maturation. They need to
shed false beliefs and values and acquire true ones.

In this life, we
adults are like adolescents: confused, unsure of what we really want, easily led
astray. We have put away many childish things only to lust after adult things,
for example, so-called 'adult
entertainment.' We don't read comic books, we
ready trashy novels. We don't watch cartoons, we watch The Sopranos
and Sex in the City. We are obviously in a bad state. In religious
terms, our condition is 'fallen.' We are not the way we ought to be, and we
know it. It is also clear that we lack the ability to help ourselves. We can
make minor improvements here and there, but our basic fallen condition cannot
be ameliorated by human effort whether individual or collective. These, I
claim, are just facts. If you won't admit them, then I suggest you lack moral
discernment. (I am not however claiming that eternal life is a fact: it is a
matter of belief that goes beyond what we can claim to know. It is not
rationally provable, but I think it can be shown to be rationally
acceptable.)

Contrary to what Heinegg says is impossible, I am able,
employing analogies such as the foregoing, to conceive of a radical change that
transforms us from the wretched beings that we presently are into beings who
are genuinely and wholly good. (I concede, though, that conceivability is no
sure guide to real possibility; but the issue at the moment is conceivability.)
What is difficult and perhaps impossible is to conceive the details of how
exactly this might come about. As I said, it can't be achieved by our own
effort alone. It requires a divine initiative and our cooperation with
it.

It won't occur in this life: I must pass beyond the portal of death,
and I must somehow retain my personal identity through the passage. Much will
have to be sloughed off, perhaps most of what I now consider integral to my
selfhood. As noted, the transition is a transformation and purification, not a
mere prolongation. Will anything be left after this sloughing off? I suggest
that unless one is a materialist, one has reason to hope that the core of the
self survives.

And this brings us back to what Schopenhauer called the
'world-knot,' the mind-body problem. If materialism could be demonstrated, then
the foregoing speculations would be mere fancies. But materialism, though it
can be assumed, cannot be demonstrated: it faces insuperable difficulties. The
existence of these difficulties makes it reasonable to entertain the hope of
eternal life.

But if the afterlife is not Life 2.0 and is something like the visio beata of Thomas Aquinas, wouldn't it be boring 'as hell'? Well, it might well be hell for something who was looking forward to black-eyed virgins and a carnal paradise. But suppose you are beyond the puerility of that view. You want not sex but love, not power but knowledge, not fame but community, not excitement but peace and beatitude. You want, finally, to be happy.

Would the happy vision be boring? Well, when you were in love, was it boring? When your love was requited, was it boring? Was it not bliss? Imagine that bliss ramped up to the maximum and made endless. We tire of the finite, but the divine life is infinite. Why then should participation in it be boring? Or consider the self-sufficient bliss tasted from time to time here below by those of us capable of what Aristotle calls the bios theoretikos. Were you bored in those moments? Quite the opposite. You were consumed with delight, happy and self-sufficient in the moment. Now imagine an endless process of intellectual discovery and contemplation.

What I am suggesting is that an afterlife worth wanting would be one, not of personal prolongation, but one of personal transformation and purification along lines barely conceivable to us here below. God is just barely conceivable to us, and the same goes for our own souls. So we ought to expect that the afterlife will be the same. If we descry it at all from our present perspective, it is "through a glass darkly."

Three Possible Death-Bed Thoughts

I'm glad I lived, but I'm glad it's over. "I hope never to return." (Frida Kahlo) Once is enough.
I wish I'd never been born. Once is too much.

This is the wisdom, if wisdom it is, of Silenus, reported by Sophocles (Oedipus at Colonus, ll. 1244 ff.) and quoted by Nietzsche in The Birth of Tragedy, section 3:

There is an ancient story that King Midas hunted in the forest a long time for the wise Silenus, the companion of Dionysus, without capturing him. When Silenus at last fell into his hands, the king asked what was the best and most desirable of all things for man. Fixed and immovable, the demigod said not a word, till at last, urged by the king, he gave a shrill laugh and broke out into these words: "O wretched ephemeral race, children of chance and misery, why do you compel me to tell you what it would be most expedient for you not to hear? What is best of all is utterly beyond your reach: not to be born, not to be, to be nothing. But the second best for you is — to die soon."

I love this life and wish it didn't have to end. Once is not enough.

My view is the first. Suppose a representative of Governance appears to you at life's end. He says he has the power to grant you another go-round on the wheel of becoming: if you accept his offer you will repeat your life with every detail the same. Every detail! Including the detail of accepting the offer of Noch Einmal! (Think about what that entails.) I would say, "Hell no!," not again, not even once let alone endlessly. Up or out! Either up to a better state, or annihilation.

This life is preliminary and probationary; surely no end in itself. And if not preliminary and probationary, then meaningless. In this life were are in statu viae.

Saturday Night at the Oldies: Beethoven, Billy Bob, and Peggy Lee

The Man Who Wasn't There is one of my favorite movies, and the best of Ludwig van Beethoven is as good as classical music gets. So enjoy the First Movement of the Moonlight Sonata to the masterful cinematography of the Coen Brothers.

Here is the final scene of the movie. Ed Crane's last words:

I don't know where I'm being taken. I don't know what I'll find beyond the earth and sky. But I am not afraid to go. Maybe the things I don't understand will be clearer there, like when a fog blows away. Maybe Doris will be there. And maybe there I can tell her all those things they don't have words for here.

That is the way I see death, as an adventure into a dimension in which we might come to understand what we cannot understand here, a movement from night and fog into the clear light of day. It is a strange idea, I admit, the idea that only by dying can one come into possession of essential knowledge. But no more strange than the idea that death leaves the apparent absurdity of our existence unredeemed, a sentiment expressed in Peggy Lee's 1969 Is That All There Is?

Perhaps no other popular song achieves the depth of this Leiber and Stoller composition inspired by the 1896 story Disillusionment (Enttäuschung) by Thomas Mann.

The Dignity of the King

Wherein resides the dignity of the king? At every time in every possible game, the king is on the board. He cannot be captured: he never leaves the board while the game is on. He alone is 'necessary,' all other pieces are 'contingent.'

But at game's end, he too goes into the box with the lowliest of the pawns, as if to demonstrate that the high and mighty in life are equalized in death.

Hitchens on Conversion

Christopher Hitchens, Mortality, Twelve, 2012, p. 91:

If I convert it's because it's better that a believer dies than that an atheist does.

Witty unto the end. But in the end, what does wit get you? One last vain flash of brilliance and then extinction — or judgment.

Six Types of Death Fear

1. There is the fear of nonbeing, of annihilation. The best expression of this fear that I am aware of is contained in Philip Larkin's great poem "Aubade" which I reproduce and comment upon in Philip Larkin on Death. Susan Sontag is another who was gripped by a terrible fear of annihilation.

There is the fear of becoming nothing, but there is also, by my count, five types of fear predicated on not becoming nothing.

2. There is the fear of surviving one's bodily death as a ghost, unable to cut earthly attachments and enter nonbeing and oblivion. This fear is expressed in the third stanza of D. H. Lawrence's poem "All Souls' Day" which I give together with the fourth and fifth (The Oxford Book of Death, ed. D. J. Enright, Oxford UP, 1987, pp. 48-49).

They linger in the shadow of the earth.
The earth's long conical shadow is full of souls
that cannot find the way across the sea of change.

Be kind, Oh be kind to your dead
and give them a little encouragement
and help them to build their little ship of death.

For the soul has a long, long journey after death
to the sweet home of pure oblivion.
Each needs a little ship, a little ship
and the proper store of meal for the longest journey.

3. There is the fear of post-mortem horrors. For this the Epicurean cure was concocted. In a sentence: When death is, I am not; when I am, death is not. Here too the fear is not of extinction, but of surviving.

4. There is the fear of the unknown. This is not a fear with a definite object, but an indefinite fear of one-knows-not-what.

5. There is the fear of the Lord and his judgment. Timor domini initium sapientiae. "The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom." (Proverbs 9:10, Psalms 111:10) A certain fear is ingredient in religious faith. Ludwig Wittgenstein was one who believed and feared that he would be judged by God. He took the notion of the Last Judgment with the utmost seriousness as both Paul Engelmann and Norman Malcolm relate in their respective memoirs. In 1951, near the end of his life, Wittgenstein wrote,

God may say to me: I am judging you out of your own mouth. Your own actions have
made you shudder with disgust when you have seen other people do them." (Culture and Value, p. 87)

Wittgenstein had trouble with the notion of God as cosmic cause, but had a lively sense of God as final Judge and source of an absolute moral demand.

6. Fear of one's own judgment or the judgment of posterity.

Dallas Willard (1935-2013)

I met Dallas Willard only once, at an A. P. A. meeting in San Francisco in the early '90s. I had sent him a paper on Husserl and Heidegger and we had plans to get together over dinner to discuss it. Unfortunately, the plans fell through when a son of Willard showed up. But we did speak briefly and I still recall his kindness and his words, "I'll help you any way I can." In the few minutes I was with him I became aware of his depth and his goodness.

My only serious engagement with Professor Willard's work was via a long and intricate paper I published in Philosophia Christi, "The Moreland-Willard-Lotze Thesis on Being," vol. 6, no. 1 (2004), pp. 27-58.

A search of this site turns up only one post on Willard, Knowledge Without Belief: a Dallas Willard-Josef Pieper Connection.

We have it on good authority that death is the muse of philosophy. The muse reminds us that our time is short and to be well used. I expect Willard would approve of the following lines from St Augustine's Confessions, Book VI, Chapter 11, Ryan trans.:

Let us put away these vain and empty concerns. Let us turn ourselves only to a search for truth. Life is hard, and death is uncertain. It may carry us away suddenly. In what state shall we leave this world? Where must we learn what we have neglected here? Or rather, must we not endure punishment for our negligence? What if death itself should cut off and put an end to all care, along with sensation itself? This too must be investigated.

Up or Out!

Academic tenure is sometimes described as 'up or out.' You either gain
tenure, within a limited probationary period, or you must leave. I
tend to think of life like that: either up or out, either promotion to a Higher Life or
annihilation. I wouldn't want an indefinitely prolonged stay in this
vale of probation.

In plain English: I wouldn't want to live forever
in this world. Thus for metaphysical reasons alone I have no interest
in cryogenic or cryonic life extension. Up or out!
It would be interesting to delve into some of the issues surrounding
cryonics and the transhumanist fantasies that subserve this hare-brained scheme. The possibilities of fraud and foul play seem endless. Some controversies reported here. But for now I will merely note that Alcor is located in
Scottsdale, Arizona. The infernal Valle del Sol would not be my first
choice for such an operation. One hopes that they have good backup in
case of a power outage.

Related (and rather more substantive) post: Will Science Put Religion out of Business? A Preliminary Tilt at Transhumanism

Roberto Rosselini’s Socrates

It was my good fortune to happen across Rosselini's Socrates the night before last, Good Friday night, on Turner Classic Movies. From 1971, in Italian with English subtitles. I tuned in about 15 minutes late, but it riveted my attention until the end. It is full of excellent, accurate dialog based on the texts of Plato that record Socrates' last sayings and doings. I was easily able to recognize material from the Platonic dialogues Euthyphro, Apology, Crito, and the immortal Phaedo. The dialog moves fast, especially in Italian, and near the end it was difficult to read the fast moving subtitles through eyes filled with tears.

One ought to meditate on the fact that the two greatest teachers of the West, and two great teachers of humanity, Socrates and Jesus, were unjustly executed by the State. This is something contemporary liberals, uncritical in their belief in the benevolence of government, ought especially to consider.

My eyes glued to the TV, I was struck by how Socratic my own attitude toward life and death is. Death is not to be feared, but is to be prepared for and embraced as a portal to knowledge. It is the ultimate adventure for the truth seeker. It is not unreasonable to suppose that it is such a portal even though we cannot know it to be so in this life. There is no dogmatism in the Socratic wisdom: its incarnation does not claim to know here what can only be known, if it will be known, there. He is an inquirer, not an ideologue defending an institutional status quo. The point of the arguments recorded in the Phaedo, and partially rehearsed in the movie, is to persuade sincere truth seekers of the reasonableness of the philosopher's faith, not to prove what cannot be proven, and especially not to benighted worldlings who care little about truth, smug worldlings whose hearts and minds have been suborned by their love of power and money and the pleasures of the flesh.

His friends want the seventy-year-old philosopher to escape and have made preparations. But what could be the point of prolonging one's bodily life after one has done one's best and one's duty in a world of shadows and ignorance that can offer us really nothing in the end but more of the same? This vale of soul-making is for making souls: it cannot possibly be our permanent home. (Hence the moral absurdity of transhumanism which is absurd technologically as well.) Once the soul has exhausted the possibilties of life behind the veil of ignorance and has reached the end of the via dolorosa through this vale of tears then it is time to move on, to nothingness or to something better.

Or perchance to something worse? Here is where the care of the soul here and now comes in. Since the soul may live on, one must care for it: one must live justly and strive for the good. One must seek the knowledge of true being while there is still time lest death catch us unworthy, or worthy only of annihilation or worse.

Socrates' life was his best argument: he taught from his Existenz. He taught best while the hemlock was being poured and his back was to the wall. His dialectic was rooted in his life. His dialectic was not cleverness for the classroom but wisdom for the death chamber.

Whether his life speaks to you or not depends on the kind of person you are, in keeping with Fichte's famous remark to the effect that the philosophy one chooses depends on the sort of person one is.

Does it matter whether Socrates existed and did the things attributed to him in the Platonic writings? I don't see that it does. What alone matters is whether a person here and now can watch a movie like Rossellini's and be moved by it sufficiently to change his own life. What matters is the Idea and the Ideal.

What matters is whether one can appropriate the Socratic message for oneself as Johann Gottlieb Fichte did in this very Socratic passage from The Vocation of Man (LLA, 150):

Should I be visited by corporeal suffering, pain, or disease, I cannot avoid feeling them, for they are accidents of my nature ; and as long as I remain here below, I am a part of Nature. But they shall not grieve me. They can only touch the nature with which, in a wonderful manner, I am united, not my self, the being exalted above all Nature. The sure end of all pain, and of all sensibility to pain, is death; and of all things which the mere natural man is wont to regard as evils, this is to me the least. I shall not die to myself, but only to others ; to those who remain behind, from whose fellowship I am torn: for myself the hour of Death is the hour of Birth to a new, more excellent life.