Dying At The Right Time
Morgan Rempel wonders whether there is a good time to die.
Regardless of how all of this did in fact unfold all those years ago, as well as the extent to which we still discuss and debate it today, one thing seems unequivocal: that Socrates and Plato died, and that each of us, here and now, one by one, will die too.
I merely suggest that using the tools of philosophy there does not appear to be a way to establish whether any of our deaths are reflective of “a good time to die”. Let alone establishing whether any of our particular demises reflects either a “good death” or a “bad death”. We may as well conclude as Malcolm Forbes did that “he who dies with the most toys wins.” A truly capitalist death.
Instead, for any number of “serious philosophers”, it’s back up into the clouds:
So, which frame of mind here reflects the optimal or the only truly rational assessment of Socrates’s choice? Is Socrates’s choice another rendition of Christ dying for us on the cross? A moral death that offers us “life lessons” in regard to the relationship between a citizen and “the state”?
And, again, the part where God fits into all of thus? Did Socrates have an “immortal soul” that would continue on into the “next life”? Clearly, to the extent that he believed this to be the case, was or was not his death in fact a ticket to immortality and salvation on the other side? Did not “the state” facilitate this?
Still, as with us today, there is that ubiquitous gap between what they believed about any of this and what they could demonstrate was in fact true objectively for all of us.
Here, philosophically, some things never seem to change.