What are you afraid of? Spiders, public speaking, the dentist, calculus? What about death. How you feel about death has probably been shaped by your beliefs about whether or not there’s an afterlife and if there is, what it's like.
The ancient Egyptians believed that at death, your heart would be weighed against a feather to determine if it was fit to enter the underworld. A heart heavy with misdeeds would be fed to a demon.
Christians may envision St. peter waiting at the pearly gates to welcome you into heaven, unless your name doesn't make his list. Imagine not only being turned away from the coolest club in town, but banished to the eternal torments of hell.
As we learned in our discussions about the philosophy of religion, when the stakes are eternal, it's only reasonable to get a little nervous about what's basically the ultimate final exam, but if it makes you feel any better, many philosophers have believed and still believe the death is nothing to fear.
In 399 BCE, Socrates was sentenced to death for, among other things, refusing to acknowledge the official deities of Athens, radicalizing youth, and generally honking off the people in charge. But even when he faced his own imminent death, he remained calm and unafraid. He was a philosopher after all, and fear was no match for his ability to argue.
Socrates didn't think we could know if there's an afterlife or not, but he thought there were really only two possibilities, and as far as he was concerned, neither of them was anything to be afraid of. Here is his argument:
Either death is a dreamless sleep, or death is a passage to another life. Dreamless sleeps are nice, not scary. Socrates said he could use the rest, and a passage to another life sounds good, too, because he'll get to hang out with cool people from the past who’ve already died, therefore, either way, death is nothing to fear.
Socrates idea of the afterlife was Hades, which he seems to have pictured as being a lot like Athens, except that no one had any physical bodies, only disembodied minds, and frankly, he thought that sounded awesome, because bodies can be a real pain. They just need to be fed and required rest, just so much upkeep. So, in the afterlife, Socrates imagined he'd get to have endless philosophical conversations, and continue learning new things, with the greatest thinkers of the past. And they wouldn't have to take a break to eat or sleep or pee!
Now Socrates recognized that, although his favorite activity, philosophizing, didn't require a body, some things do, and if all of your favorite pastimes are physical, you might find the afterlife disappointing. That's why Socrates recommended spending your life looking after your mind, cultivating that part of you that you’ll get to keep forever if there's an afterlife. If you do that, when the time comes for you to die, you’ll actually see death as a benefit, because you won't be troubled by bodily things, while your mind will be in top form.
for:阅读练习生
乙亥年七月初七
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