Philosophy as Practice for Dying

"Well then, to you, my judges, I want now to give my account of why it seems to me natural that a man who has truly spent his life in philosophy should be confident when he is about to die, 64a and hopeful that he will win the greatest goods there once his life is over. How this can be so, Simmias and Cebes, I will try to explain.

"Those who happen to take up philosophy in the right way are, it seems, practising nothing else, though others do not notice it, but dying and being dead. If this is true, it would surely be strange to be eager for nothing but this all one's life, and then to be troubled when the very thing arrives that one has long been eager for and practising."

Simmias laughed and said: "By Zeus, Socrates, 64b you have made me laugh, though I was hardly in a laughing mood just now. I think most people, if they heard that, would think it very well said of philosophers — and our people at home¹ would heartily agree — that philosophers really are half dead, and that they themselves are well aware that philosophers deserve to be."

"And they would be speaking the truth, Simmias, except for their claim to be aware of it. For they are not aware in what sense true philosophers are half dead, or in what sense they deserve death, or what kind of death.

64c "Let us talk among ourselves," he said, "and say goodbye to them. Do we believe that death is something?"

"Certainly," Simmias answered.

"Is it anything other than the separation of the soul from the body? And is being dead this: that the body has come to be apart, separated from the soul, by itself, and that the soul is apart, separated from the body, by itself? Can death be anything other than this?"

"No, it is just this," he said.

"Then consider, my good friend, whether you agree with me in what follows, 64d for from this I think we shall understand better the things we are examining. Does it seem to you to befit a philosopher to be keen on the so-called pleasures of, for instance, food and drink?"

"Not in the least, Socrates," said Simmias.

"And the pleasures of sex?"

"Not at all."

"And what about the other ways of caring for the body? Do you think such a man values them? Fine clothes and shoes and the other adornments of the body — do you think he values them or despises them, 64e except so far as there is every necessity to have them?"

"I think the true philosopher despises them," he said.

"Then do you think," he said, "that in general such a man's concern is not with the body, but that, as far as he can, he keeps apart from it and turns towards the soul?"

"I do."

"Is it clear, then, first of all, that in such matters the 65a philosopher, more than other men, frees the soul as far as possible from its partnership with the body?"

"It appears so."

"And most people think, Simmias, that a man who finds no pleasure in such things and takes no part in them does not deserve to live, and that one who cares nothing for the pleasures that come through the body is close to being dead."

"What you say is quite true."

"Now what about the acquisition of wisdom itself? Is the body a hindrance or not, if one takes it along 65b as a partner in the search? I mean something like this: do sight and hearing give men any truth, or is it as the poets are always telling us, that we neither hear nor see anything accurately? And yet, if these of the bodily senses are neither accurate nor clear, the others will hardly be so, for they are all inferior to these. Or don't you think so?"

"Certainly I do," he said.

"When, then," said he, "does the soul grasp the truth? For whenever it tries to examine anything along with the body, it is plainly deceived by it."

65c "That is true."

"Is it not, then, in reasoning, if anywhere, that something of reality becomes clear to it?"

"Yes."

"And it reasons best, surely, when none of these things troubles it — neither hearing nor sight, nor pain nor any pleasure — but when it comes to be as far as possible alone by itself, bidding the body goodbye, and, having as little partnership and contact with it as it can, reaches out for reality."

"That is so."

"And is it not here too that the soul of the philosopher most 65d despises the body and flees from it, and seeks to be alone by itself?"

"It appears so."

1. Simmias means the Thebans, whose fondness for the pleasures of the table was proverbial. ↩