To Know Thyself, look at the tombs.

Our awareness that we shall die is a defining attribute of our human race. And the fear of that death is the crisis upon which we paste our denials in the form of personal masks. The personality escapes the probability of its non-existence. Indeed, the person, as if it were an immortal god, would naturally persevere forever without impedance if only it could.  But the special nature or law of a person or human being is to think, and thinking implies that the person is perishable. Thinking, first of all, is a defensive activity – the Supreme Being has no cause to think, does not have to think to be, while the human being as such exists because it thinks.

The more our subsistence is assured and the more leisure time we have to play with, the less we might be called upon to think, if it were not for the knowledge that, regardless of what we do, we shall die. Hence we are anxious to do more to guarantee our leisure in order to think of something else to forestall fate. In leisure we may temporarily escape from that knowledge into doing for its own sake, more generally into the symbolic activity of thinking – the more abstracted from reality the better. The ideal or virtually perfect realm seems like reality because we wish its perfection. That ideality requires our persistent consciousness for its existence, and we are more than willing to oblige. Indeed, abstract thinking for its own sake is the most wonderful anesthetic of all. The idealist dies the good death, is lost in contemplation, is dead to this world. On the other hand, the drunk drinks himself to death and the glutton eats himself into oblivion – nothing shall suffice to satisfy the consumer, whether it be mother’s milk or her words, for he wants not the things themselves but his salvation from their limitations.

The defensive personality is not only a reaction to the dread of non-existence or the unknown, but it also constitutes fear of the known, self-conscious existence. Human life itself is feared, for life implicates death; hence life itself must be controlled by a lifestyle, to the bitter end that life is often choked to death in the process. Paradoxically, life is feared as much and sometimes even more than death. Death is preferable to ambiguous life, at least to the absolute idealist who cannot tolerate ambiguity; that is, death is preferable to the deferment of the ideal in hypocrisy. Again, we live not to live, but to have our ways, and we may fight to the death to have a lifestyle. No matter how trivial the style might seem in the overall scheme of things, we would have it be the sole scheme for the world, for if only everyone did things our way, willful resistance to that way would be nil.

The conscientious self would renounce its inherent hypocrisy in an ultimate act of self-contempt, perhaps insisting, until death body and mind doth part, that the soul shall survive the body's return to dust. Ideals both abstract and personal have many martyrs. What good no matter how trivial has not some one died for?

Socrates thought all humans will their own good as well as the good of others, for they are social creatures; yet they do evil for want of a good definition of Good. A man would not commit a crime if he knew doing so would be worse than any conceivable pain or death. "It is better to suffer an evil than to do one," is a Greek adage incorporated in the Christian canon. In Socrates’ words, “We start from this rule – it is never right to do any injustice, or to do injustice in return, or, when one is evilly treated, to defend oneself by doing evil in return.” In any case where the difference between good and evil is not known, the question must be asked and the answer performed: What is the good?

It is apparent from the trial and execution of Socrates under the restored democracy that asking embarrassing questions was not appreciated by the received authorities. But for Socrates, a life without inquiry was worse than death. He could not stop asking questions, for that would disobey the calling of his god to embrace philosophy or wisdom-seeking. Parents had forewarned their children about the erstwhile astronomer and skeptical dialectician who sought the absolute truth by opposing one argument to another, only to discover that he was the only man around who knew he was ignorant: "There is a certain Socrates, a highbrow; brainy in skylore, has investigated what is under the earth, makes the weaker argument the stronger." And the children had grown up to sit in judgment of the man who would have corrupted them in their youth. He presented his defense to the charge of atheism in plain speech so that any child might understand it; after all, he was under oath: to count on fine words to persuade his jurors of his innocence would be sacrilegious inasmuch as it would teach them not to believe in gods to obtain justice, but to rely on rhetorical devices instead.

Socrates might have fled Athens and avoided the trial. Yet he stayed, presented his defense, and accepted the death penalty rather than exercise his right to propose a legal alternative to death, such as a small fine, claiming, ironically, that it was his ethical duty to accept and to abide by the legal finding of the state. Rather than pay a fee in lieu of death, he proposed to charge a fee for teaching justice to his prosecutors. Since the so-called democrats had left the gate open for his escape twice, no doubt expecting any reasonable man to flee or to at least propose a slight penalty if convicted, critics have absolved the democrats of premeditated murder in his outstanding case. But to run away would be to offend the laws, to destroy the basis of society and hence hurt everyone concerned. Socrates asked, “Do you think it is possible that a city can exist and not be overturned, where sentence given had no force but is made null by private persons and destroyed?”

Ironically, Socrates taught the majority a lesson by abiding by its false judgment. The right thing to do is to obey the laws made by the majority, but that is not to say the majority is always in the right and should be invariably agreed with. It does not matter what the majority thinks simply because it happens to be the many: it is the expert who must be respected most of all, for to do otherwise would destroy conscience and justice. In other words, respect the opinions of the wise rather than the notions of fools, even when those fools have the power to put you to death, for death is of little consequence when the good is at stake. “The difficult thing is not to escape death… but to escape wickedness.” Furthermore, “You are wrong, my friend, if you think a man with a spark of decency in him ought to calculate life or death; the only thing he ought to consider, if he does anything, is whether he does right or wrong, whether it is what a good man does or a bad man.”

Apparently Socrates had overcome the fear of death, not knowing precisely what death is, if anything at all. “No one knows whether death is really the greatest blessing a man can have, but they fear it as the greatest curse.” In any case, “It is impossible that any of us conceives it aright who thinks it is an evil thing to die.”  In no case had anyone died, and then rendered an honestly conscious account of the unconscious state.

When "the unknown" or nothing specific is feared, the term 'anxiety' is usually employed today instead of 'fear', for ‘fear’ is usually applied to a certain object; but we choose to employ fear here as the general term for the specific fate everyone would rather avoid. Now the fear of the unknown, or the fear of Nothing, is similar to the fear of the Supreme Being or Unknown God who presumably inspires or breaths life into everyone, figuratively speaking, and then knocks them down like cardboard cutouts and puts them to death. Hence the god of death, who presumably presides over the Better Place preached by funereal preachers, holds sway over life as well. The factual remains of death are obvious to the survivors left behind to observe the corpse; only non-existence of the self is unimaginable to them, hence they imagine it has flown elsewhere for the time being. What then is the self, if it is unknown when standing alone?

“Know Thyself”, read the inscription on the temple of the gods. Can the knowledge of thyself be had in the knowing of the ‘self’ as if it were an object capable of limitation by objective definition, just as other objects are presumably defined hence conceived, or is knowing thyself rather the knowledge of the limitations of the knower who conceives those objective definitions? The limitations of the limiting power of conception or the intellectual force that makes things known, that is to say the ultimate inadequacy of all definitions, duly defines ignorance or unknowing. And the limit of the limitations to limiting are likewise unknown, hence we forever strive to know more than we do. Then knowledge is ever insufficient or inappropriate, for no object can be known or appropriated as it really is, as the thing-in-itself, for the power of the subject or knower is forever inadequate to the task. Furthermore, since the exercise of the power of conception depends on social mentality, there is good cause to doubt that the knower exists or stands apart as an individual except in the extent of its ignorance of the truth and nothing but the truth.

However that might be, Socrates took the Delphic injunction, Know Thyself, to heart. For the Greeks of his day, to know thy self meant to know one’s own limits. For Socrates, to know thyself one must first of consider the ultimate limit to life on this heavenly body named Earth; to wit, death. Yet death cannot be personally experienced while alive; one can only speculate. Wherefore Socrates tells us that philosophy is a preparation for death.  We might prefer to say that philosophy ponders on the meanings of death. Philosophers have posited that there is no such particular thing as a self or soul or definite quiddity of a human being. The “I”, as it were, perishes with the person, and is nothing but a fabrication or social fiction; useful perhaps, but only slightly more than nothing. But let us leave the soul for Platonic contemplation.

Justice is doing the right thing that each might have his deserts, and Socrates preferred death to injustice, as if death were nothing by comparison. Civilized men, who are well disposed to kill each other en masse for the sake of justice, have had ample resort to the justificatory notion that the holy state lead by god almighty is always in the right; on the other hand, the anarchist for whom the state is an encroachment on holiness wants liberty or death, and is willing to kill for it. We believe Socrates was a soldier first of all, and we must not imagine he was a pacifist who preached “Thou shall not kill” under any circumstance. His absolute obedience to the state even when wronged suggests to some modern conservatives that Socrates preferred the peace of slavery or safety in numbers over the peace of the freedom that requires each of us to resist injustice at the risk of losing our lives, hoping that fanatics will fear failure, lest injustice prevail over a cowardly and dumb herd unworthy of the noble name Man. Yet his critical resistance to dogmatic ignorance, passive as it was in the final analysis, speaks otherwise. In any event, the definition of the term “harm” in “Do no harm” is left up to us.

It seems that even the philosopher must fight for the right, for the good of society, whatever that might be, or at least advise others to do so. In any case, we are fools to believe that death is a great evil if not the greatest evil of all, and that therefore we are justified in stooping to every indignity to survive. A militant may claim that a life not worth killing for is not worth living, while a pacifist might say that a life one must kill for is not worth living; in either case, death is not the prime consideration. Death is a state or quality of things and not something in itself. Even if death were a thing, it would seem that a philosopher cannot be certain what it is in itself when he is alive, nor shall he know anything about it when he is dead – hence an Epicurean will enjoy himself in moderation so as to prolong his pleasure, leaving the gods to do their own thing at some undisclosed cranny of the universe. Socrates is nowhere in particular at present. He lives on, so to speak, in our perusal of his corpus – Comte would say he is part of that Great Being on whose shoulders we stand. We may hope to hear further from him, but for now we reflect on his remains.

”And now it is time to go, I to die, and you to live, but which of us goes to a better thing is unknown to all but God.”