A few years ago, I had a three-hour conversation with my friend Steve, online, in public, about premature death. Before I had the chance to talk to him again, he died, prematurely. It sounds absurd to say that I felt guilty for feeling sad, but I did: I felt sadder than I had a right to be. I wasn’t his relative or even his colleague; we did not “go way back” via a connection from youth, or even graduate school; we were not part of some tight-knit circle of friends; we did not share much about our personal or emotional lives. The only thing we ever did together was talk philosophy.
I first met Steve at a conference, but most of our subsequent interactions were in coffee shops. He taught up in Evanston, north of Chicago, and I teach down in Hyde Park, on the South Side, so we’d swap papers and then get together at a coffee shop downtown, halfway between us, a few times a year, to discuss. The first time we spent all three hours on my paper. From then on I insisted we start with Steve’s paper, before moving on to mine. I’d give him comments, he’d give me comments. That was it, that was our whole relationship, that’s what I’m referring to when I talk about him as my friend: he was someone I exchanged paper comments with periodically, as academics are inclined to do.
It’s not hard to come up with reasons for me to be sad about Steve’s death. I’m sad to miss out on the philosophy he’d never get to write, and that I’d never get to read, and the conversations I’ll never have with him. I’m sad on behalf of other people too—his wife, his young daughter, his brothers and parents, his close friends, and everyone who lacked the good fortune of meeting him altogether, and who might have, if he’d lived longer. And of course there is reason to be sad for him, sad that he’d miss out on those experiences—of family, of friendship, of philosophizing, of meeting new people. Those are good reasons, but when I consider all of them together, they somehow don’t add up, either in quantity or in quality, to the pain I feel in my heart when I think about Steve’s death.
Unlike me, Steve was not a flashy person. He didn’t dress oddly, he didn’t use rhetorical flourishes, he didn’t call attention to himself or reflexively make himself the center of every conversation. He was soft-spoken, gentle, and—in my experience—always calm. On casual inspection, there was not much that was unusual about him—if you met him, you’d notice he was tall and red-headed. Maybe, if you were especially observant, you’d notice he gave off the air of being content—happy with his lot in life. That’s about it.
But when you started talking to him about philosophy, there was this shock. Imagine you’re sitting at home, bored, looking at the same old living room furniture you’ve stared at a million times before, and there’s a knock at the door. You open it, and everything around you is transformed. As soon as your visitor crosses the threshold, you realize that what had seemed to be a dull living room is actually full of mysterious objects, secret passageways, and works of art hidden in plain view. In a way that’s hard to describe or explain, Steve took your ideas more seriously than you did. You’d toss out a thought, casually—“just a suggestion,” “a point I’m in the habit of making sometimes,” “no big deal,” “it’s probably wrong,” “whatever”—and he would respond as if to say, “No, wait. This could be real. This could actually be something.”
You don’t get much sympathy for complaining about being a “thinker”—it’s a cushy life—but thinking is so floppy, ideas are so vaporous and protean, that it’s easy to get the impression that you are not really doing anything. It’s easy to become exasperated with yourself for turning over the same old stale concepts and pedantic distinctions over and over again. As a thinker, you’re always going around making points—“My point is . . . ,” “All I’m trying to say is . . . ,” “The point of this argument is . . .”—and the points are never pointy enough, they lose their force even before encountering counterarguments. Who cares, really? Are we getting anywhere?
The magic of Steve was that his questions, his observations, his calm cheerful insistence on staying on a topic when you thought you’d exhausted it—the sort of insistence that, from anyone else, would come across as stubborn, but that with him came off as gentle resoluteness—his very presence had the effect of solidifying ideas and giving them substance. He made the nothing and nowhere dreamworld of “the life of the mind” into what felt like a real place you could actually be in. It’s not that you suddenly had all the answers, or any of the answers, really, but with Steve you felt you could find them—he filled you with energy and courage and seriousness, with the spirit of “We are in a place designed to be explored, a place where knowledge is ours for the taking.”
When I think of Steve, I think of that place, and I think about what it was like—should I say “was” or “is”? On the one hand, it wasn’t mine—it was ours, and he’s gone. On the other hand, a whole world can’t just poof out of existence like that, can it? Some things are not the sorts of thing that can disappear: “Sorry, the number four is gone, we don’t have it anymore.” When I think of the place I shared with Steve, I can’t help thinking of it as being there, and as not being there, at the same time. This is what I’m sad about: how a mind—with all the space that only it could create—could be the thing we call “dead.” In fact, the word sad really doesn’t cut it. The thought feels broken, and my heart breaks trying to think it.
I’ve dealt with death before—in fact I’ve dealt with the deaths of people much closer to me, emotionally, than Steve. But the only other time I’ve felt this pain—the pain of the absolute unthinkability of the person’s death—was with someone I also interacted with mostly philosophically. I think that it is because Steve was a philosopher, and because my engagement with him was philosophical, that his death brings me the peculiar pains that it does.
That seems to be the opposite of what Socrates predicted would happen. In the Phaedo, which is the dialogue dramatizing Socrates’ death and the conversations he had right before it, Socrates says that “a man who has truly spent his life in philosophy is probably right to be of good cheer in the face of death.”1 It is in this dialogue that Socrates describes philosophy as a preparation for death, and philosophers as experts in death: “The one aim of those who practice philosophy in the proper manner is to practice for dying and death.”2
Steve was a philosopher, and I am, and that was the reason for and nature of our connection—we knew each other almost exclusively as philosophers. Yet the thing that was supposed to make dealing with death easier has made it harder. Where is the calm and equanimity that Socrates promised me?
The Phaedo shows us how well philosophy prepared Socrates for death; his friend Phaedo, who narrates the story, reports that “in both manner and words he died nobly and without fear.” Does philosophy really have that effect on the rest of us? Eerily enough, I asked Steve this exact question during our last conversation—I asked him whether philosophy prepares you for death. Even more eerily, he never got a chance to answer. A question from the audience interrupted him, I said we would go back to it, and we had time, we went for another hour, but I forgot, and he forgot, and our conversation ended. And then before I could talk to him again, he died. So we never did. What is the answer? Does philosophy prepare you for death?
Suppose you knew you were going to die soon. How would you prepare yourself? I am not asking about how you would make the best use of your remaining time. If you were asked that question, I imagine you’d answer that you want to spend your final days being close to loved ones, or engaging in the activities you most enjoy, or finishing important projects, or eating favorite foods, or visiting favorite places. But it’s not clear that those same activities would serve as an answer to the question about preparation. There’s a difference between finding the best way to spend the remaining hours before a portentous event—such as a final exam, a wedding, an interview, one’s own death—and preparing for that event. I’m not asking how you would pass your final hours. I’m asking, how you would prepare?
You might think this question makes no sense, because there is no such thing as being prepared or unprepared for death; you might think the only question is how to pass the time until it comes. I think that is wrong, and so does Tolstoy, who makes the experience of being unprepared for death the subject of his novella The Death of Ivan Ilyich. The story concerns the final months of the life of a bourgeois Russian official. Ivan Ilyich was a paragon of familial, career, and social success—his home is a party hub for aristocrats—until he started experiencing a pain in his side. The pain gets worse, and eventually it becomes clear that Ivan is dying. Everyone around Ivan—his wife, his friends, even his doctors—pretends that he is not dying, that he will get better soon. They repeatedly insist that he is turning a corner. He finds himself miserably isolated in his knowledge of what his happening:
In the recent loneliness in which he found himself, lying with his face to the back of the sofa, loneliness in the midst of a crowded city and his numerous acquaintances and family—loneliness that could not be more absolute anywhere, either at the bottom of the sea or underneath the earth.3
Ivan’s solitude comes from the fact that he alone is confronting his death, while everyone else around him is studiously avoiding it. Ivan himself does make efforts to avoid this confrontation, but when he attempts to resume his former habits and practices, he finds they have been hollowed out:
He tried to return to his previous ways of thought, which had concealed the thought of death from him. But—strangely—everything which previously had concealed and covered up and obliterated the awareness of death now could no longer produce this result. . . . He would say to himself, “I’ll take up some work, that’s what I live by.” And he went to court. . . . But suddenly in the middle of it the pain in his side . . . began its own gnawing work. Ivan Ilyich listened and tried not to think about it, but it kept on. It came and stood right in front of him and looked at him, and he became petrified; the fire in his eyes died down, and he again began to ask himself, “Is it alone the truth?” . . . He would return home with the depressing awareness that his work as a judge couldn’t hide from him as it used to what he wanted it to hide; that with his work as a judge he couldn’t be rid of It. And what was worst of all was that It was distracting him not to make him do anything but only for him to look at It, right in the eye, look at it and without doing anything endure inexpressible sufferings.4
Illness gives Ivan a distance from his life-projects that allows him to wonder, for the first time, whether he ever had any reason to pursue them. What were once untimely questions—Should I be married to this person? socialize with these people? pursue these career goals?—have become open to the suspension of judgment. And Ivan finds no way of defending his old, reflexive answers:
It occurred to him that the notion that had previously seemed to him a complete impossibility—that he had not lived his life as he should have done—could be the truth. It occurred to him that his barely noticeable attempts at struggling against what was considered good by those in high positions above him, those barely noticeable attempts which he had immediately rejected, could be genuine, and everything else wrong. His work and the structure of his life and his family and his social and professional interests—all that could be wrong. He tried to defend all that to himself. And suddenly he felt the fragility of what he was defending. And there was nothing to defend.5
Ivan finds, upon examination, that his answers to questions about how to live had been dictated by the savage commands of his kinship group—he did what it took to fit in among the people that surrounded him.
“But if this is so,” he said to himself, “and I am leaving life with the realization that I have lost everything I was given and that it’s impossible to put right, then what?” He lay on his back and started to go over his whole life afresh. When in the morning he saw the manservant, then his wife, then his daughter, then the doctor—every one of their movements, every one of their words confirmed for him the terrible truth that had been disclosed to him in the night. He saw in them himself, everything by which he had lived, and saw clearly that all this was wrong, all this was a terrible, huge fraud concealing both life and death. This realization increased, increased his physical sufferings tenfold. He groaned and tossed about and pulled at the clothes on him. He felt suffocated and crushed. And he hated them for that.6
And yet, having dismissed his life as a lie, he nonetheless goes on to cling, in the face of death, to a “declaration that his life had been good. This justification of his life caught on something and stopped him from going forward, and that distressed him most of all.”7 This problem, the problem of justifying his life, is the Tolstoy problem.
Ivan’s predicament is that death both necessitates a justification for his life and also drives him to abandon the only justification he knows. But the other significant aspect of Ivan’s predicament is that he is alone. Everyone around him is consumed by the need to evade death, the only way they know how—by immersing themselves in those same, conventional pursuits, and by pretending that Ivan is not dying. Tolstoy makes repeated reference to this “lie” and how it isolates Ivan: “this lie around and within him poisoned most of all the last days of Ivan Ilyich’s life.” Consider his final interaction with his wife:
“You feel better, don’t you?”
Without looking at her he said, “Yes.”
Her clothes, her body, the expression of her face, the sound of her voice—everything said to him one thing: “Wrong. Everything by which you have lived and are living is a lie, a fraud, concealing life and death from you.”
He hates her for forcing him to lie to her, so much that he can no longer tolerate her presence:
His expression when he said “yes” was terrible. Having said that yes, he looked her straight in the eye and with unusual strength for his weakness turned himself facedown and cried: “Go away, go away, leave me!”8
Ivan experiences his wife as taunting him: waving before him and then immediately withdrawing the possibility of comfort and human connection.
The life of Ivan Ilyich turned out to be no preparation for the death of Ivan Ilyich; his life was such that he became unhinged by the prospect of death. Ivan’s crisis resembles Tolstoy’s own, as described in Confession, written many years earlier, and it also resembles the one experienced by Pierre in War and Peace:
Whatever he started thinking about, he came back to the same questions, which he could not resolve and could not stop asking himself. It was as if the main screw in his head, which held his whole life together, had become stripped. The screw would not go in, would not come out, but turned in the same groove without catching hold, and it was impossible to stop turning it.9
The questions Pierre asks himself are the same familiar set, and instead of making progress on them, Pierre, like Ivan and Tolstoy, runs headlong into the fact of death:
“What is bad? What is good? What should one love, what hate? Why live, and what am I? What is life, what is death? What power rules over everything?” he asked himself. And there was no answer to any of these questions except one, which was not logical and was not at all an answer to these questions. This answer was: “You will die—and everything will end. You will die and learn everything or stop asking.” But to die was also frightening. . . . And he again put pressure on the stripped screw, and the screw kept turning in one and the same place.10
We find the same scene yet again in Anna Karenina, where the character Levin recapitulates the experiences of Tolstoy in Confession:
“Without knowing what I am and why I’m here, it is impossible for me to live. And I cannot know that, therefore I cannot live,” Levin would say to himself . . .
Levin was several times so close to suicide that he hid a rope lest he hang himself with it, and was afraid to go about with a rifle lest he shoot himself.11
These various descriptions of confrontations with the prospect of death share a desperate, sinking sense that most of the practices on which we rest the meaning of our lives collapse at the slightest intellectual provocation; and that, once life’s justification has been undermined in this way, no amount of thinking can restore it. All of these descriptions are also characterized by loneliness and isolation: in Confession, Tolstoy presents himself as posing questions primarily to himself; the same is true of Ivan and Pierre and Levin.
Over and over again, Tolstoy tells the same story of being unprepared for the confrontation with death. Whether this confrontation occurs at the end of one’s life, as it does for Ivan, or in middle age, as it does for Tolstoy, or in one’s twenties or thirties, as it does for Pierre and Levin, the effect is the same. The prospect of death represents the stopping of the clock that has been ticking the background of everything we do, counting off each fifteen-minute period. All of a sudden, untimely questions can no longer hide in the background; all of a sudden, we are called upon to answer them—but we cannot. We cannot justify our lives, and the attempt to do so will only convince us that life is meaningless. Tolstoy tells this story with courageous honesty. But it is not the only story there is.
If the Death of Ivan Ilyich describes what it’s like to be unprepared for death, the Phaedo shows us what it’s like to be prepared. Socrates passes his final hours inquiring into the immortality of the soul. This activity is of a piece with how Socrates has lived his life—he died as he lived, philosophizing—and, at the same time, fitting or suited to the circumstances he is in, namely, to someone who faces impending death. His usual modes of living neither collapse nor have to be suspended in the face of death.
Recall how intractable Ivan finds the problems posed by death: “It was distracting him not to make him do anything but only for him to look at It, right in the eye, look at it and without doing anything endure inexpressible sufferings.”12 Ivan is torn between staring death in the face and suffering, alone, inexpressibly, on the one hand, and looking away from death, alongside his family and friends, on the other. Socrates, by contrast, looks death straight in the eye, and has a conversation with his friends about it.
The Phaedo is a rigorous philosophical dialogue, presenting a series of increasingly complex arguments for the immortality of the soul, as well as objections to those arguments, one of which requires an extended foray into the general theory of causation. It is also unmistakably a death scene: Plato describes how Socrates’ closest friends gather mournfully around him in his jail cell to keep him company during his final hours, how he drinks the hemlock, how they watch its numbing effects work their way up from his feet, to his legs, to his belly, knowing that “when the cold reached his heart, he would be gone.”13 And then it does, and he is.
If the Gorgias showed us that philosophy can be political and the Symposium and Phaedrus showed us that it could be erotic, the Phaedo shows us that philosophy can be funereal. It is worth stressing how remarkable it is that philosophical conversation is capable of matching the solemnity of death. Ordinary conversations—describing the enjoyment of a movie or a meal, grumbling discontentedly about one’s boss, planning for an upcoming vacation—seem unfitting or inappropriate in the face of death. Death trivializes those pursuits and concerns, just as death trivialized Ivan’s whole life. That is why we have developed certain religious or quasi-religious (“spiritual”) formulae that we use at funerals and memorial services—a special kind of speech designed to erect a wall between life and death. But that kind of speech is specialized to a funereal context, whereas philosophy is not. Philosophy is a way of living one’s life, and it is also a way of dying.
It is possible to die without experiencing the kind of terror that Ivan feels, just as it is possible to coast through life without confronting the Tolstoy problem. The condition that many of us are in on our deathbeds—in severe pain, or drugged, or otherwise cognitively impaired—makes it unlikely that dying will be the time we confront death. But the question raised by Tolstoy is this: Is such a confrontation ever anything but a disaster? Tolstoy shows us many characters, at many stages of life, including himself, recoiling from failed attempts to face their deaths with eyes wide open. Is such a thing even possible?
The answer Plato offers in the Phaedo is yes. He shows us Socrates choosing, at a specific moment during his final hours of life, to confront death. The event takes place at around the midpoint of the dialogue, after Socrates has given three arguments for the immortality of the soul. There is a murmur of unrest among his friends. It turns out that two of the people who have been listening quietly to Socrates’ arguments—Simmias and Cebes—have formulated objections to them. They are troubled by the force of these objections, which seem to show that Socrates is wrong to believe that his soul will survive his death, but hesitate to raise them: now does not seem like the right moment to call into question Socrates’ basis for facing his death with equanimity.
Socrates encourages them to present their objections. He insists that his proximity to death makes him even more eager to hear their counterarguments; he compares himself to swans who, though they sing beautifully all the time, sing even more beautifully in the face of death. Socrates wants to face up to the prospect of his own death. Simmias and Cebes, taking Socrates at his word, each offer a persuasive counterargument to the claim that the soul survives the destruction of the body. The narrator of the dialogue, Phaedo, reports that the effect of these arguments was to induce despair in the assembled group:
When we heard what they said we were all depressed, as we told each other afterwards. We had been quite convinced by the previous argument, and they seemed to confuse us again, and to drive us to doubt not only what had already been said but also what was going to be said, lest we be worthless as critics or the subject itself admitted of no certainty.14
But the one person who did not despair was Socrates. Phaedo expresses wonder at:
the pleasant, kind, and admiring way he received the young men’s argument, and how sharply he was aware of the effect the discussion had on us, and then how well he healed our distress and, as it were, recalled us from our flight and defeat and turned us around to join him in the examination of their argument.15
How could someone who is clinging to the immortality of his soul in the face of his imminent death receive counterarguments in a “pleasant, kind, and admiring way”? That is the question that Plato wants us to be asking ourselves. The answer is clearly not “Because Socrates knew he had a decisive reply in his back pocket.” After Socrates gives his reply, Simmias still confesses to “private misgivings about what we have said” and Socrates concedes that this worry is well placed: “You are not only right to say this, Simmias, but our first hypotheses require clearer examination, even though we find them convincing.” Socrates can pursue the argument no further, as it is time for him to die, but suggests that Simmias do so, in the future: “If you analyze them adequately you will, I think follow the argument as far as a person can, and if the conclusion is clear, you will look no further.”16 Socrates responds in a “pleasant, kind, and admiring way” to the challenges levelled against the answers on which he bases his life, not because he knows these challenges are wrong, but because he thinks they might be right.
Socrates explains why he reacts as he does: “We should not become misologues [i.e., haters of reason], as people become misanthropes. There is no greater evil one can suffer than to hate reasonable discourse.”17 He warns that just as the experience of being let down by other people, especially our closest friends, can lead us to lose faith in humanity, so too the experience of being let down by arguments leads people to lose faith in argumentation.
Socrates thinks that the mistake is similar in the case of people and arguments. If you find everyone around you to be evil and untrustworthy, you should conclude that the problem might be you—you are trying “to have human relations without any skill in human affairs.” Likewise, though misologues “believe themselves to have become very wise and that they alone have understood that there is no soundness or reliability in any object or in any argument” and think that “all that exists simply fluctuates up and down,” the fluctuation in question is really happening in their own soul:
It would be pitiable, Phaedo, he said, when there is a true and reliable argument and one that can be understood, if a man who has dealt with such arguments as appear at one time true, at another time untrue, should not blame himself or his own lack of skill but, because of his distress, in the end gladly shift the blame away from himself to the arguments, and spend the rest of his life hating and reviling reasonable discussion and so be deprived of truth and knowledge of reality.18
When Pierre concludes “there was no answer to any of these questions,” Socrates would say he is mistaking a fact about himself for a fact about the world:
We should not allow into our minds the conviction that argumentation has nothing sound about it; much rather we should believe that it is we who are not yet sound and that we must take courage and be eager to attain soundness, you and the others for the sake of your whole life still to come, and I for the sake of death itself.19
Socrates goes further than encouraging them to pursue the inquiry. He warns them of his own bias. He admits that the proximity of death will incline him to be too ready to believe in the immortality of the soul, and thus that they need to guard against what he is saying:
If you will take my advice, you will give but little thought to Socrates but much more to the truth. If you think that what I say is true, agree with me; if not, oppose it with every argument and take care that in my eagerness I do not deceive myself and you and, like a bee, leave my sting in you when I go.20
Socrates sees that he is defending an answer to an untimely question, and he invites his friends to refute him. The link Socrates draws between misology and misanthropy is as telling as the claims he makes about each considered on its own. Recall how their existential crises lead Pierre, Ivan, and Tolstoy to withdraw into themselves. If Socrates is right, and the kind of thinking they are trying to do is essentially social, then misology and misanthropy amount to the same thing. Love of argument requires that you love other people—and, because refutation is the highest favor you can do another person, the converse is also true.
This is the climactic moment of the dialogue: Socrates shows great love for his friends when he instructs them to “give but little thought to Socrates but much more to the truth,” and great courage in being willing to subject to refutation the claim on which his ability to confront death rests, “for the sake of death itself.”
Tolstoy accurately perceives that many ways of spending your life cannot stand up to death, collapsing in the face of it; philosophy, Socrates demonstrates, is an exception. Philosophy did not consign Socrates to loneliness and alienation in the face of death, nor did the prospect of death undermine his own answer to Socratic questions—even though it invited objections to those answers. Philosophy lives up to the challenge of death. You can be philosophizing—socially, philanthropically, happily—and be facing up to death, at the same time. I experienced this myself.
After Steve died, there was a memorial service at the chapel of the university where he taught. Three people close to him made beautiful speeches about him, a priest read a poem, there was music. It was a moving ceremony, but not an unusual one. It was what happened before the ceremony that was unusual. One of Steve’s colleagues had organized a philosophical conference on Steve’s unfinished work, and the conference took place over the two days before the ceremony. About thirty philosophers flew in from around the world to sit around a table and discuss Steve’s unpublished papers one by one.
I arrived at the conference on the verge of tears, and as soon as I saw a friend I collapsed into his arms, sobbing. As the first session convened, I said to myself, this is going to be impossible. I’m not going to be able to do philosophy; I’m going to cry every time I open my mouth. Looking around the room, I could see that others were in the same condition. But an amazing thing happened to us: After a few initial tears, we all threw ourselves into philosophy mode. My first comment was a question—there were a few sentences in the paper for that session that I felt were important, but didn’t understand. I read them out loud and asked for help. My friend—the one who I had been sobbing with just a few minutes earlier—came to my aid. Calmly, patiently, he explained Steve’s argument—and the flaw he saw in it. Together, the group summarized the main points of Steve’s papers, we explained them to one another, we raised objections to his claims, we thought about responses on his behalf, or about ways of pressing our objections further—to make them more devastating. We considered how to tie the papers together, and to our own work; we joked over his funny choices for examples. We argued with one another, and with Steve. We remarked, more than once, how much Steve’s personality came through in his written words, how much we felt we were talking to him.
The conference didn’t feel tragic; it felt happy. And it was interesting. There were things we wanted to know, we were trying to find them out, and inquiring into them was somehow befitting; it suited the context of death. Philosophy—the fact that we were philosophers, and that Steve was one too—made it possible to be mourning our friend, and to be happily inquiring, at the same time. And when I think about how cooperative, and spirited, and well-prepared, and engaged everyone was in the discussion, and compare it to other conferences I’ve attended, I think I can say something stronger: the fact that we were dealing with our friend’s death made us philosophize better, like the swans who sing more beautifully when faced with death.
But if philosophers are so good at dealing with death, why am I so sad about Steve? It might be noble if I were sad on his behalf, or on behalf of his family, but the truth is that I am selfishly sad: I miss him. Even now, as I write these words, I feel sad about Steve being dead—sad and not cheerful, not inquisitive, not energized, not philosophical. Why? I think the answer is simply that I’m often thinking about his death when I’m alone. Confronting the death of a dear friend requires all of my philosophical powers, and I don’t have all of those powers sitting in a room, by myself. Sitting by myself, what I am doing is not so much thinking as remembering. I am remembering the conference, and the joy and attentiveness of those conversations. I am remembering the Phaedo, and my many classroom discussions of it—it is probably the text I have taught most often during my fifteen years as a professor at the University of Chicago. Most of all I am remembering Steve, and what it was like when I had him to share my ignorance and my struggle.
We are unable to think about the most important things on our own, and we habitually shield ourselves from this terrifying fact. All of us, even professional philosophers, walk around with a conceit of knowledge separating us from other people. Our feeling of basic mental competence—of having the answers on which the living of our lives depends—keeps us from connecting with others in the ways that benefit us most. Ignorance of ignorance leads us to think that we are to figure these important questions out for ourselves. Ignorance of ignorance prevents us from thinking alongside another person about what neither of us knows. Ignorance of ignorance is the barrier between us. Socrates dismantled that barrier. Steve did the same.
Recalling my conversations with Steve forces me to confront the gulf between what my mind can do on its own, and what it is capable of when paired with a kindred spirit. I know what I don’t have, what I’m not doing—and that’s what hurts. To be a philosopher is to feel, with special acuteness, one’s need for others—especially those others who also feel the same need, with the same acuteness. You can see what an immense task lies before you, how easily you might be prevented from achieving it, and how precious are those who are willing to help.
Does that mean that philosophy makes you less afraid of death—or more? The answer to that question begins with corpses.
Where is Steve now? Does he still exist? What happens to your soul after you die?
Many readers of this book will immediately offer the following answer: Steve is nowhere, he does not exist; when you die, your soul, if any such thing can be said to exist, is annihilated. Some readers may, based on tenets of their faith, think that the opposite answer is obvious. Very few people, if asked these questions, will even pause before they respond, or think that the answers are anything but straightforwardly obvious. Both those who think that it is easy to say that Steve exists, and those who claim that it is easy to say that he does not, resemble one of Socrates’ interlocutors: Meno. Recall that after Socrates asks him what virtue is, Meno is unable to stop repeating how easy that question is to answer: “It is not hard to tell you, Socrates . . . it is easy to say . . . it is not difficult to describe . . . one is not at a loss to say what virtue is.”21 Meno’s facility for saying what virtue is turned out to be superficial; he was readily brought to contradict himself. The same is true with our facility for determining the fate of the soul.
It is in fact not obvious to anyone what happens to a person after they die, and if some people claim that it is, their actions belie those statements: those who insist that something called “science” definitively forecloses the possibility of life after death act continue to act as though the souls of their loved ones are still around, those who piously avow a belief in the immortality of the soul mourn their dead loved ones as though their souls have been annihilated, and neither group treats corpses in a manner consistent with their professed account of death. When it comes to the question of what happens to the soul after death, we waver. The name for wavering in this arena of life is superstition. What characterizes the philosophical approach to death, above all, is the principled rejection of superstition.
Those who vehemently deny the immortality of the soul—call them materialists—waver by continuing to care about fulfilling the dead person’s wishes, by thinking it is important to remember them and memorialize them, by describing themselves as still loving them, and by treating invocations of their name as carrying weight: “If X were here, he would be ashamed of you!”
In defense of these practices, materialists might claim that what they care about is not the person themselves, but their “legacy” or “memory” or “spirit.” People invoke these terms in order to avoid a troubling admission of concern for someone who does not exist, who is not there, who is nothing. But if you see the dead person’s legacy or spirit as enough of a thing that it makes sense for you to direct love and concern at it, if you think that in honoring their “memory” you are honoring not some part of yourself, but a being distinct from yourself, then you are wavering from materialism. You evidently think that even when the body is gone, something of a person remains, disembodied.
Materialists ought to be more puzzled than they are by their inclination to comply with the dead person’s wishes, requests and intentions. If we are close to one another, and I tell you I wish for X, and later on I tell you I’ve changed my mind, and no longer wish for X, you wouldn’t persist in trying to fulfill that wish. If I stop wishing for something, you stop having reason to fulfill my wishes. But if you are a materialist, you ought to think that dying is a pretty decisive way to stop wishing for something: someone who does not exist can’t do anything, including wish. So it is puzzling for materialists to act as though someone’s failure to exist were compatible with their continuing to engage in the practice of wishing.
If materialists waver, so do believers. People whose religions commit them to the existence of the afterlife feel the terror of death just as anyone else does, nor are they spared the wrenching pain of loss. They do not respond to their loved one’s death as though the loved one has moved to a place where they can’t contact them for a while but expect to later rejoin them. They might say that is how they see the situation, but their profound sorrow and their mourning practices point in a different direction. Nor does their religion expect consistency of them: if a devout Catholic approaches her priest in the throes of grief over the death of a loved one, their religion enjoins the priest to offer her comfort and support, rather than to censure her as an evident nonbeliever. Religious people, like nonreligious people, put up with superstitious wavering. Socrates does not.
When Crito asks Socrates, “How shall we bury you?” and Socrates replies, laughing, “In any way you like, if you can catch me and I do not escape you.” Socrates laments the fact that
I do not convince Crito that I am this Socrates talking to you here and ordering all I say, but he thinks that I am the thing which he will soon be looking at as a corpse, and so he asks how he shall bury me.
Socrates insists that Crito “should not say at the funeral that he is laying out, or carrying out, or burying Socrates.” One might have thought that this linguistic point—do we call Socrates’ corpse “Socrates”?—doesn’t matter so much. But Socrates insists that it does, and explains this point to Crito directly:
For know you well, my dear Crito, that to express oneself badly is not only faulty as far as the language goes, but does some harm to the soul. You must be of good cheer, and say you are burying my body, and bury it in any way you like and think most customary.22
The norm in our world, as in Socrates’, is to treat corpses with extravagant fanfare. The second half of the Iliad is organized around the fate of corpses—first Patroklus’, then Hector’s—and militaries today continue to repatriate corpses, even at great danger and expense. The opening of Karl Ove Knausgaard’s series My Struggle is an extended meditation on the efforts we make to dispose of corpses quickly and discreetly.
Knausgaard imagines some scenes of death: An old man dies during a movie. A teacher gets a heart attack on the playground of the school. A homeless person freezes to death. A small girl is run over by a bus. A young man gets drunk, falls into a lake, and drowns. Knausgaard comments, with reference to their corpses, “There is no need for any rush, they cannot die a second time.”23 He wonders, “Why all this haste to remove them from the public eye?”24
If one asks which theory of the soul’s fate after death answers Knausgaard’s question, the answer is, neither. Our scrupulous care for corpses makes sense neither on the assumption that the soul survives death, nor on the assumption that it is annihilated by death. If the soul survives death, then it does so by being separated from the body. It would follow that from the moment of death onward, it does not undergo what the corpse undergoes, and what happens to the corpse does not matter to the person. If the soul is annihilated by death, it likewise no longer inhabits the body, and the person is now nonexistent. Whether the soul is mortal or immortal, death separates it from the body, which entails that from death onward the soul’s fate is decoupled from the body’s. In either scenario, it is silly for Crito to do what Socrates anticipates he is going to do “when he sees my body being burned or buried, [to] be angry on my behalf, as if I were suffering terribly.”25
Socrates summarizes what he knows about life after death when he says, “Either the dead are nothing and have no perception of anything, or it is, as we are told, a change and a relocating for the soul from here to another place.”26 This is what people living in his time knew—that one of those two things is true—and people today are in that position, too. We know that we will die, and we know that after we die, we will either be annihilated or continue to exist in some form. Whatever we might profess, we do not actually know which of those two things will happen. The state of the art has not advanced much in 2,500 years. Most people have beliefs about the question, and are prepared to assert those beliefs with passionate certainty, but they also are inclined, like Crito, to waver substantially from those beliefs.
It is precisely this wavering that Socrates will not tolerate. He is not going to insist that his friends agree with him about the question he is inquiring into—Is the soul immortal, or is it destroyed at death?—but he puts his foot down when it comes to the existence of death. Death is real, corpses really are not ensouled, and Socrates will not put up with any superstitious nonsense to the contrary. Socrates cannot say for certain whether his soul will be eliminated or continue to exist after he dies, but he feels extremely confident that exactly one of those possibilities will occur. He is not going to allow his friends to suggest that his dead body will be haunted by his disembodied soul, because that is a way of trying to assert two incompatible possibilities at the same time. Why is Socrates so intolerant of superstition? Because wavering between two incompatible results gets in the way of the attempt to inquire as to which of those results is actually true.
We are accustomed to looking at death through a panicked haze, so terrified of it that we will not even really accept that it takes place. From that vantage point, we can only feel the fear of death; we cannot understand why we are fearful. Once we die, our bodies will be nothing more than things. To understand the import of this event, you first have to believe that it will take place. Looking at death carefully, and accurately—as neither the religiously minded nor the scientifically minded are inclined to do—does not dispel one’s own fear of death. But it does clarify the situation: we will discover there are two ways to fear death.
The Phaedo is, like many Platonic dialogues, a conversation within a conversation. It begins when a man who was not present at the death of Socrates accosts Phaedo, who was, and asks to hear every detail of what happened. Plato thus makes it clear that after Socrates’ death, his friends told and retold the story of their final conversation with Socrates. I have had a similar experience: since my final conversation with Steve was online, and recorded, I have been able to watch it many times. As I mentioned, the conversation was about premature death. We started with a paradox I’d found in a blog earlier that day, to the effect that all death is premature death.27 If you consult actuarial tables you will see that someone who dies at eighty could have, given that he reached that age, expected a few more years of life. The same is true at age ninety, or ninety-five; even when you turn one hundred nineteen, which is as high as the actuarial tables go, you can expect six more months. No matter when you die, someone who arrived at that age could reasonably have expected to live longer, because that’s what happens to most people who arrive at that age.
Steve’s solution to the paradox as stated was that we should fix expectations at birth, on the basis of the natural lifespan dictated by our biology. We can then say that dying at forty is premature, whereas dying at ninety is not. But Steve and I came to conclude that there was indeed a sense in which all death is indeed premature, though it doesn’t have much to do with actuarial tables or biology. To see why, we have to consider the drive by which any conscious mind—whether it be ten, forty, or ninety years old—reaches forward and illuminates not only the present moment but also some stretch of the upcoming time.
Suppose that the oldest person who has ever lived is alive right now. They’d have no basis for expecting that “most people who arrive at my age live a bit longer,” and yet they still wouldn’t be expecting to die at every moment. Living, at any age, involves projecting yourself into the future. When we go through a day, making decisions, planning, organizing our agency, we stretch ourselves forward in time. Indeed, this kind of stretching is required even for the mental activities of planning, deliberating, and considering, all of which take time. And so it is natural that one fears the scenario in which this expectation is not met, in which one is cut off from the future one is counting on. In this sense, all death is premature death, whereas in the biological sense, only some death is.
When I first watched the video of my conversation with Steve, I was overwhelmed by sadness, and struck by the many strangely portentous moments in the conversation. Over time, however, I came to approach the video differently: to study it. On the second or third viewing, I started to become dissatisfied with Steve’s analysis. Steve’s death strikes me as premature not only because, at thirty-eight, he hadn’t lived out his biologically mandated lifespan, but—somehow—because he was a philosopher. But why would the fact that he was a philosopher make his death seem especially premature? I watched again, hunting for an answer to that question. Sometime around the fifth or sixth viewing, I realized that there is a distinction that lurks in the background of our conversation the whole time. We keep alluding to it, skirting around it, brushing up against it, but never explicitly bring it up. It is a distinction between two different ways of projecting oneself forward in time, and thus two different forms that the danger of interruption can take. I realized there isn’t a single fear of death, but two versions of that fear.*
The first version is a manifestation of the bodily command. Our bodies savagely command us to protect them, to keep living at all costs. They tell us that being deprived of more life is, per se, an evil, and they do this by filling us with blind, unthinking terror in the face of death. Epicureanism, the philosophical school focused on taming the bodily command, is especially attuned to this bit of savagery; it is, therefore, unsurprising that the two best known arguments against the fear of death—or rather, to anticipate the distinction I am about to make, against this version of the fear of death—have come from Epicureans.
Epicurus argues that death cannot be a misfortune, since there is no one around to suffer it:
So death, the most frightening of bad things, is nothing to us; since when we exist, death is not yet present, and when death is present, then we do not exist. Therefore, it is relevant neither to the living nor to the dead, since it does not affect the former, and the latter do not exist.28
The poet Philip Larkin, who sings out his own fear of death in the poem “Aubade,” rejects this argument:
specious stuff that says No rational being
Can fear a thing it will not feel, not seeing
That this is what we fear—no sight, no sound,
No touch or taste or smell, nothing to think with,
Nothing to love or link with,
The anaesthetic from which none come round.29
The Epicurean says that the absence of the subject of experience is the reason why we shouldn’t be afraid of death. According to Larkin, this is silly, because the disappearance of the subject of experience is precisely what we fear in the first place.
Another famous Epicurean argument, presented by the Roman poet and philosopher Lucretius (99–55 BCE), tells us that rationality requires symmetrical treatment of past and future: if the question is whether it is a bad thing not to exist for some stretch of time, then we should answer this question in the same way with reference to the time before we were born, and the time after we die. We shouldn’t be any more bothered by postmortem nonexistence than we are by prenatal nonexistence.30
The philosopher Thomas Nagel replies to Lucretius’ argument, offering the following justification of our asymmetrical response: someone born earlier than Steve would have to be a different person from him—formed from a different sperm and egg, and perhaps even to different parents. By contrast, it is easy to imagine that Steve could, in principle, have lived longer than he did. A person can lament missing out on the time after she died without thinking that she missed out on any time before she was born. The forward-looking fear of death is justified, according to Nagel, because “a man’s existence defines for him an essentially open-ended possible future, containing the usual mixture of goods and evils that he has found so tolerable in the past.”31
I don’t want, here, to try to adjudicate these disagreements—between Epicurus and Larkin, between Lucretius and Nagel. Instead, I want to point out an assumption they all share, one that is expressed well in the quote from Nagel, just above: the fear of death is the fear of being deprived of the “usual” sorts of goods with which life has already familiarized you. Larkin agrees, when he bemoans the loss of tasting and smelling and loving and linking. He already knows what those activities are like, and he wants to keep doing them. This is how the fear of death appears when it is the product of the bodily command: a demand for continuity, for more of the same.
The popular acronym FOMO can be used to refer to the fact that the bodily command instills in us a “fear of missing out” on the future instantiations of the goods we have experienced in the past. Larkin and Nagel disagree with Epicureans about whether FOMO is a good reason to fear death—Larkin and Nagel think it is—but all parties agree that if there is a reason for fearing death, it is FOMO. It is a basic principle of Epicureanism that, whatever the fear of death is, it isn’t a fear of missing out on something new: Epicureans equate the good with pleasure and insist that there are no new pleasures in store for us.32 What the future has to offer you are the same goods you have already been experiencing over the course of your life. Larkin and Nagel do not call this assumption into question, but if one does, one arrives at a distinct reason to fear death.
When we speak of “the end of life,” that phrase can refer to the time when life comes to a stop, but it can also refer to the fact that life sets us a completable task. In this second meaning, “end” is synonymous with “goal” or “target.” It is possible to fear that these two senses of “end” will not come together for us, and life will stop before it’s finished. I will call this second version of the fear of death FONA, because it is a “fear of never arriving.” Whereas FOMO is exclusively a fear of being deprived of future goods, FONA is a fear of being deprived of both present and future goods: if I will never arrive at the goal of the activity I am currently engaged in, then I might as well not have done any of it. There is no reason to take the means to an end you will never arrive at: FONA is the fear that you are striving in vain.
Notice that the two Epicurean arguments do not address FONA at all. Even if I won’t be around to experience my failure to arrive at my goal, I can lament the fact that this future, unexperienced failure renders my current actions pointless. And, to address the Lucretian argument, striving for a goal is essentially asymmetrical: failure to arrive at your destination is only a failure after you’ve gotten started.
We can find FONA expressed in poetry, for instance in the Keats sonnet that begins:
When I have fears that I may cease to be
Before my pen has gleaned my teeming brain,
Before high-pilèd books, in charactery,
Hold like rich garners the full ripened grain33
Only immortality would satisfy Larkin’s insatiable desire for more and more of the same, whereas Keats could, in principle, be satisfied by living long enough to glean all the unripe ideas teeming in his brain, ripen them to the full, and enclose them in a sufficiently high pile of books. Keats had a task he wanted to get done, and he (rightly) feared that he would not live long enough to complete it. The difference between how Keats and Larkin approach death might, in part, be due to age: “Aubade” was one of Larkin’s last poems, he finished it at the age of fifty-five, eight years before his death, whereas Keats’ sonnet was written when he was twenty-two, three years before his death at the age of twenty-five. It stands to reason that a young man’s fear of death will be more likely to take the form of FONA, an old man’s, FOMO. When we see it as especially tragic that a young person’s life was cut short, we are thinking in terms of FONA; when we see any death, no matter how old, as sad, we are more likely to be thinking in terms of FOMO. The right way to think about the premature death paradox with which Steve and I wrangled is that in one way (FOMO) all death is premature, and in another way (FONA) some deaths are more premature than others.
Though Socrates comes across as brave and stoical in the Phaedo, Plato shares one striking detail that reveals a chink in the Socratic armor. In the opening moments of the conversation, before the philosophical inquiry begins, the reader learns that while in prison, Socrates started writing poetry. Socrates explains that for a very long time he had had versions of a dream in which he receives instruction to “practice and cultivate the arts.”34 Before his trial, his long-standing interpretation of that dream had held that it was encouraging him onward in the pursuit of philosophy, but during the days spent waiting to die he began to second-guess himself. Maybe the dream had meant, all along, that he should write poetry? So he started setting the stories of Aesop to verse, composing poems for the first time in his life.
Socrates relates these facts breezily, without much fanfare, and his friends don’t pursue the topic. Commentators are likewise inclined to pass over these brief remarks so as to focus on the meat of the dialogue—the significance of death and the immortality of the soul—but it’s worth pausing for a moment to appreciate how strange this is. Socrates, who famously refused to write his own ideas down, who eloquently declared himself to be against writing, started doing just that?35 Socrates, who often inveighs against the poets as dangerously ignorant (of their ignorance) of their own subject matter, became a poet? In the final days of his life, Socrates entertained some sort of doubt as to whether philosophy was his true calling? Apparently.
In the ensuing conversation with his friends, and in the earlier jail cell conversation reported in the Crito, Socrates betrays no such doubts about his life’s purpose. But the reader might reflect that it is not so surprising to learn that there were moments when he was sitting alone in his cell, waiting to die, when he was less than fully sure of himself, moments when he did not feel full of eagerness and courage, moments when he may even had something like the experience that Ivan had when he “started to go over his whole life afresh” and felt terrified by his inability to justify himself.36
It appears that the philosopher is not immune to the fear of death. But the question is: Which version of that fear does he feel? Just before Socrates drinks the hemlock, Crito points out that he could extract a few more minutes of life:
But Socrates, said Crito, I think the sun still shines upon the hills and has not yet set. I know that others drink the poison quite a long time after they have received the order, eating and drinking quite a bit, and some of them enjoy intimacy with their loved ones. Do not hurry; there is still some time.37
Socrates firmly refuses:
It is natural, Crito, for them to do so, said Socrates, for they think they derive some benefit from doing this, but it is not fitting for me. I do not expect any benefit from drinking the poison a little later, except to become ridiculous in my own eyes for clinging to life, and be sparing of it when there is none left. So do as I ask and do not refuse me.38
Socrates thinks that it might be understandable for others to cling to life, always wanting a bit more of it, but this sort of attitude would be unfitting for him as a philosopher. In the opening of the dialogue, Socrates’ wife is present with him in the jail cell, and when she sees his friends she remarks, “Socrates, this is the last time your friends will talk to you and you to them.” At this, Socrates sends her home. He does not want his friends, or himself, filled with sadness at the prospect of the future conversations they are missing out on. After he drinks the hemlock, and his friends break down in tears, he chides them along the same lines: “It is mainly for this reason that I sent the women away, to avoid such unseemliness . . . so keep quiet and control yourselves.” Socrates will not tolerate displays of FOMO. Why? I suggest: Socrates sets FOMO aside to focus on FONA, which looms so large for a philosopher that confronting it calls for all his energy and attention.
Consider what happens when Crito asks after Socrates’ last wishes:
What are your instructions to me and the others about your children or anything else? What can we do that would please you most?39
Socrates tells Crito that he has only one instruction for him, which is to “live following the tracks, as it were, of what we have said now.” As mentioned above, Socrates admitted to Simmias that “our first hypotheses require clearer examination, even though we find them convincing. And if you analyze them adequately, you will, I think, follow the argument as far as a person can.” Socrates wants his friends to continue his inquiries—and he expects them to. In the Apology, after the jury has voted to put him to death, Socrates prophesies that many would spring up, in his place, to refute the Athenian people.40 Socrates sees that he is going to die without completing his life’s task. How can he avoid being paralyzed by the terror and pain of that thought? The answer is: hope. He hopes that he himself will continue philosophizing in the afterlife, that his friends will continue in his footsteps in their own lives, and, generally, that philosophy will go on.
Epicureans wanted to dispel FOMO because the disquiet of worrying about what you might miss out on in the future prevents you from enjoying those very same goods, now. The fear of death is an irritant in the tranquil calm that is Epicurean happiness. Socratics want to dispel FONA for a very different reason: because it can sap your motivation, dampen your energy, and prevent you from throwing yourself into whichever task you fear may be interrupted by death. Epicurean arguments against the fear of death are designed to keep you stably ensconced in the present; Socratic arguments against the fear of death are designed to move you forward.
Socrates is always exhorting people to move forward. For example, he says in the Meno: “We will be better men, braver and less idle, if we believe that one must search for the things one does not know, rather than if we believe that it is not possible to find out what we do not know and that we must not look for it.”41 Socrates’ response to the depression induced by Simmias and Cebes’ objections is very similar. When the assembled company starts to doubt whether arguing is really getting them anywhere, and they begin to suspect that “the subject itself admitted of no certainty,” Socrates hears the voice of FONA whispering in the background. He chides them to be brave and energetic: “We must take courage and be eager to attain soundness, you and the others for the sake of your whole life still to come, and I for the sake of death itself.” Socrates may see FOMO as beneath him, but FONA is a real threat. It must have been FONA that afflicted him in those lonely hours in his jail cell when he wondered whether it had been a mistake to devote his life to philosophy.
When Socrates says that philosophers are experts in death and dying, when he speaks of acting “for the sake of death itself,” when he confesses that he is “in danger at this moment of not having a philosophical attitude about” the immortality of the soul, Socrates is thinking primarily of FONA. The poet’s FONA may be extinguished by producing a sufficiently high pile of books; the philosopher’s won’t be. The philosopher faces FONA in its most acute form, because she takes on a task whose shape is not dictated in advance by the temporal confines of a human life: “it does not matter to such people whether they talk for a day or a year, if only they may hit upon that which is.”42
Those are the lines from the Theaetetus that I quoted when introducing the phrase “untimely questions” in part one. In that passage, Socrates sketches a prototype of the ideal philosopher, and contrasts it with someone who “is always in a hurry when he is talking; he has to speak with one eye on the clock.”43 Interlocutors such as Euthyphro and Protagoras routinely break off their conversation with Socrates by telling him that it is time for them to go: they are getting through life fifteen minutes at a time, which is to say, they “speak with one eye on the clock.” Projects that take longer than fifteen minutes—be it months, or years—also keep you on the clock, both because they typically dictate what you need to do for a given fifteen-minute period, and because they stand in the shadow of the big clock of life. Even a project that requires you to dedicate your whole lifetime to it is different from one that requires you to take your eye off the clock altogether. Whereas we usually ask ourselves what we can get done in the next fifteen minutes, or the next few years, or perhaps our whole lives, when we step into the role of the philosopher, we must disregard all such clocks. For that is the only way to ask questions such as, “Is the soul immortal?” (or “What is thinking?” or “How can love be both rational and attached?” or “When and where do we practice equality?”).
How do you take on, in a life, a project that is too big for a life? What if, like Socrates, you have less than an hour left to live, and you’ve just been confronted with some objections that call for much more than an hour’s worth of philosophizing? How do you avoid giving up?
One tempting move is to claim that the journey is the destination, because the joys of philosophical inquisitiveness are their own reward. If this were true, philosophical FONA would become FOMO—a fear of missing out on more of the same. But it simply isn’t true. Philosophy is an end-directed activity; it aims at knowledge. What motivates the person who engages in it is the desire for that knowledge. Socrates does not spend his final hours taking a last draft of his “usual pleasures” of philosophical conversation. He spends them looking for answers. There is somewhere the philosopher is going, which makes it reasonable for her to fear the prospect of never arriving there. Granted, Socrates thinks limited progress is both possible and valuable—an answer can become partially tied down, even if not yet completely tied down—but one makes limited progress only by aiming for completion. In order to philosophize, Socrates must vanquish the voice of FONA, which tells him, “You will never achieve knowledge about the soul’s immortality.” How does he do it? For one, practice: he has spent his whole life approaching people such as Protagoras and Euthyphro and bravely diving into some huge question he knows they will all too soon walk away from. Socrates has become an expert at taking his eye off the clock. For another, he has help.
If I am right that even Socrates was subject to moments of wavering when he was alone in his cell, then we can explain his harshness toward his friends’ wavering by way of the central claim of this book: in the presence of others, something becomes possible that isn’t possible when you are alone. Socrates sees the duty of a friend to be the source of precisely the sort of assistance we can’t give ourselves: to challenge your claims, hold you to your agreements, and persist in the inquiry. They remind you that the only alternative to inquiry—the way we live when we’re not living inquisitively—is pretending that you already have the knowledge that you are seeking. However frightening and dispiriting inquiry may be, it is better than the alternative. Your friends are there to help you stop pretending.
Many people assume that the real you are the tears you shed when you are alone, not the brave face you put on in public. Larkin cynically dismisses the idea of being brave in the face of death: “Courage is no good: It means not scaring others.”44 He assumes that the brave face must represent a nod to social convention, which is to say, the savage command of kinship. Socrates does not agree, because he thinks there is something different that we can do with other people, besides negotiate the bonds of kinship: we can inquire with them. Socrates denies that his true self is the person he is when no one is looking, believing that he is his truest self when he’s arguing with his friends. Socrates’ foray into poetry teaches us that what fortifies him in the face of death is not his unshakable belief in the immortality of the soul—a belief presumably present to him in his private moments as well, and indeed one would have felt all the more secure when it was not exposed to challenges and doubts—but rather his argumentative, inquisitive practice of philosophy in relation to that belief. What helped Socrates face death was not his belief that the soul was immortal, but his inquiry into whether it was.
Tolstoy and his characters encounter the Socratic truth that the unexamined life is not worth living, but without the Socratic tools that would help them see how the examined life is possible. Recall Tolstoy, in Confession: “But as soon as I tackled them and tried to find the answers, I at once became certain first that these were not childish and stupid questions but the most important and profound questions in life, and second that I could not, just could not answer them, however much I thought about it.”45 By his own account Tolstoy lives much of the first part of his life fifteen minutes at a time, until, sometime around midlife, he looks up from the clock and finds himself faced with a set of untimely questions—only to be immediately engulfed by waves of FONA. He is so paralyzed by the terrified certainty that he will never arrive at real answers to these questions that he cannot get himself to inquire at all. This is the Tolstoy problem: there is a thought you are avoiding your whole life, namely, the thought that your life may be unjustified, and when you confront it, your life unravels.
The mythology of death often involves a confrontation with a divine figure who demands that you explain yourself. He stands between you and a gate that you can only pass through if you succeed in justifying your life. Socrates himself tells some version of this myth multiple times, at the end of the Gorgias, the Phaedo, and the Republic, while at the same time conceding that it is only a myth: “No sensible man would insist that these things are as I have described them.”46 Socrates clearly thinks that the myth of being judged at the end of one’s life contains an insight. What is it? I propose that this myth tells us what the problem of death represents for us: it is our way of thinking about the time when there is nothing left that stands between you and untimely questions, when they can be delayed no longer. Preparation for death is preparation for that time, and to do philosophy is to see that time as right now.
Socrates found that you can confront untimely questions without being overwhelmed by FONA, so long as you do so together with others. If you are a philosopher, you routinely ask questions that are too big for you to answer, in conversations that you know will be cut off before reaching their endpoint, and then they are cut off, and you don’t arrive at the endpoint, and you wake up the next day and do it all over again. This is what Socrates means by saying that the philosopher is an expert in death and dying, that he has been preparing all his life for death.
The final words of the Phaedo praise Socrates as “a man who, we would say, was of all those we have known the best, and also the wisest and the most upright.”47 Socrates’ friends were awed and inspired by his courage, but they may not have taken sufficient account of the role they played in making it possible.
“In what way is the study of philosophy training for death?” I asked this question at the one hour forty-minute mark of my final conversation with Steve, and he never had the chance to give voice to his answer. But I think he did show me his answer. In our final conversation, as in so many of the others, Steve and I were preparing ourselves, and one another, for death.