Now, to separate the soul from the body, is to learn to die, and nothing else whatever. Wherefore take my advice, and let us meditate on this, and separate ourselves as far as possible from the body, that is to say, let us accustom ourselves to die.
This will be enjoying a life like that of heaven even while we remain on earth, and when we are carried there and released from these bonds, our souls will make their progress with more rapidity; for the spirit which has always been fettered by the bonds of the body, even when it is disengaged, advances more slowly, just as those do who have worn actual fetters for many years. But when we have arrived at this emancipation from the bonds of the body, then indeed we shall begin to live, for this present life is really death, which I could say a good deal in lamentation for if I chose.
A. You have lamented it sufficiently in your book on Consolation, and when I read that, there is nothing which I desire more than to leave these things; but that desire is increased a great deal by what I have just heard.
M. The time will come, and that soon, and with equal certainty, whether you hang back or press forward; for time flies. But death is so far from being an evil, as it lately appeared to you, that I am inclined to suspect, not that there is no other thing which is an evil to man, but rather that there is nothing else which is a real good to him; if, at least, it is true that we become thereby either Gods ourselves, or companions of the Gods.
However, this is not of so much consequence, as there are some of us here who will not allow this. But I will not leave off discussing this point until I have convinced you that death can, upon no consideration whatever, be an evil.
A. How can it, after what I now know?
M. Do you ask how it can? There are crowds of arguers who contradict this, and those not only Epicureans, whom I regard very little, but, somehow or other, almost every man of letters; and, above all, my favorite Dicaearchus is very strenuous in opposing the immortality of the soul: for he has written three books, which are entitled Lesbiacs, because the discourse was held at Mitylene, in which he seeks to prove that souls are mortal.
The Stoics, on the other hand, allow us as long a time for enjoyment as the life of a raven; they allow the soul to exist a great while, but are against its eternity.
—from Cicero, Tusculan Disputations 1.31
On first reading Plato’s Phaedo, I was fascinated by the relationship between the question of the soul’s immortality and the problem of knowledge, and I will still connect those two topics in my own thinking to this day. If I wish to know what will become of my soul, I must determine what constitutes the essence of that soul, and if my human identity is defined by the power of reason, then I am left asking myself whether consciousness is as corruptible as the flesh.
At the same time, I was initially taken aback by the dialogue’s opening claim that philosophy is a preparation for death. Having grown so accustomed to the assumption that we should cling dearly to life at all costs, the idea that dying could be a sort of release from the hardships of this world, and that the philosopher was always in training for such a moment, was asking me to consider my existence in a completely new way.
Cicero shows his love of Plato in this chapter, and I can hardly deny the profound appeal of thinking that the purpose of this life also requires the very transcendence of this life. When I seek to find my own inner peace, and withdraw into my own thoughts, am I not, in a sense, leaving the rest of the world behind me? The soul then considers itself without the limitations of the body, and rests in a freedom from the burden of mundane circumstances.
If thought is at its most serene when removed from the distractions of what we call the daily grind, might I not say that meditation is something that approaches a state much like dying? And if I can already accustom myself to a rigor of rising above the bonds of this earth, will I not then possess a greater capacity to welcome the joys of a future state?
I am fascinated by the possibility that, as in so many other aspects of my experience, I may have my terms reversed. Perhaps what I call life is really death, and what I call death is really life? This has certainly proven to be true when I have previously drawn hasty conclusions about the nature of riches and poverty, blessings and curses, or happiness and misery.
I must be careful, however, not to let myself slip into extremes, and when it comes to the Phaedo, I am prone to both a morbid disgust with my present situation and a feeble escape into dualism; the fact that I tend to melancholy and romanticism doesn’t help in the matter. I do myself no favors by feeling sorry for myself, or partitioning off the parts of the world that I find distasteful, so I must tread carefully whenever I engage with Plato.
I do know Cicero is not reading him in this way, so I will encourage myself to be inspired by his brand of enthusiasm. There is no harm in trusting that things are made to get better.
Yet I continue to be impressed by the “big tent” attitude taken by Cicero, where his hope for the soul’s immortality is still tempered by a healthy skepticism, and his claim that death need never be perceived as an evil can apply equally to both those who expect to live forever and those who see the grave as an end.
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