Life After Death_ A History of the Afterlife in Western Religion - Alan Segal [136]
In the final section of the Apology, Socrates asks what death is. His answer is that it is either annihilation or transmigration. If the former, then it is not to be feared because it will be a dreamless sleep. If the latter, then we shall go on to another life. In this he seems at one with the Epicureans and Stoics, except that he adds reincarnation of Pythagoras and Orpheus to the mix. But implicit in this statement is the realization that life is struggle and difficulty; dreamless sleep is preferable to a life of troubles and pain. If accurate, this can hardly be called a healthy agnosticism; it is in fact an evasion, showing unwillingness to discuss the topic seriously.
Plato’s Socrates goes much further in his affirmation of the transmigration of souls. Both in the Apology and in the Crito, Socrates has deliberately refused several chances to escape (an escape route planned with the tacit approval of his captors) to a disgraced life in exile rather than drink poison hemlock, which is the sentence decreed upon him by the court. By refusing the invitation to save himself, he becomes a kind of philosophical martyr to his own truth. The dialogue, then, is not just a discourse on the issue of the immortality of the soul but a disquisition on martyrdom and justice. Socrates’ behavior demonstrates his confidence in the demonstration. In some ways, Plato has already conceded the battle for the preservation of his body by refusing the ignominious choice of escape and discredit; in the Apology, he argues that one should concentrate all one’s efforts on the improvement of the soul over against the body (Apol. 30a-b). Likewise, in the Laws, Socrates states that the soul is completely superior to the body because the soul is the principle of life while the body merely a resemblance of it. In the Symposium, Diotima gives a clear presentation of the way to achieve postmortem survival. The mortal body seeks the immortal by reproduction or imitation (mimesis), a vain and impossible effort, though a necessary one; but the soul is already immortal (Symp. 207d, 208a-b). To become immortal one only needs realize one’s soul’s divine potential for ascent.
In the Phaedo, Socrates undertakes to demonstrate that the soul is immortal so that his execution is but a momentary inconvenience that will allow him to soon join the company of superior humans and gods. In some ways, he is just trying to prove what many Greeks must have thought was self-evident. The proof is so important to the history of the afterlife in the West that it is worth reviewing in more detail. Socrates begins his conversation with the observation that opposites seem to be related-like the pain of his bonds and the pleasure of their removal. No one can have both at once (60b). (This seemingly casual observation becomes the assumption on which all further arguments are built.) This leads to further musings on the relationship between life and death, and that ordinary persons are afraid of death because they are going from life to an unknown end. Actually, continues Socrates, when viewed properly, a philosopher should not be afraid of death because it is the opportunity to live as a soul without a body:
They are not aware of the way true philosophers are nearly dead, nor of the way they deserve to be, nor of the sort of death they deserve. (64b-c)40
Indeed, a great deal can be learned by thinking about death. Philosophers are encouraged to spend their lives doing it. For Socrates, death itself is the separation of the body from the soul:
Is it anything else than the separation of the soul from the body? Do we believe that death is this, namely, that the body comes to be separated by itself apart from the soul, and the soul comes to be separated by itself apart from the body? Is death anything else than that? (64c)
At the same time, philosophers should, in this life, seek something very similar to death: separation from the bondage of the body and