Life and Death

Plato's treatment of death begins from the proposition that philosophy is, in its essence, a preparation for dying. In the Phaedo, Socrates, awaiting execution, argues that the body is a source of confusion, appetite, and distraction, and that so long as the soul is joined to it, genuine knowledge of the Forms remains obscured. Death, which separates the soul from the body, is therefore the condition toward which the philosopher has been striving throughout his life. The relation of this teaching to the questions treated in the chapter on SOUL is direct.

Several arguments for the immortality of the soul are developed in the dialogue. The argument from opposites holds that life comes from death and death from life, as waking comes from sleeping. The argument from recollection maintains that the soul must have existed before birth, since learning is the recovery of knowledge already possessed. The argument from affinity contends that the soul resembles the invisible and unchanging Forms rather than the visible and corruptible body. And the final argument holds that the soul, which brings life to the body, cannot itself admit death, just as fire cannot admit cold.

The dramatic setting of the Phaedo gives these arguments a force beyond their logical character. Socrates does not merely argue for the immortality of the soul; his composure before death is itself a demonstration that the philosopher's commitments lie beyond the body's fate. The bearing of this on the questions treated in the chapter on IMMORTALITY is evident.

Plato thus establishes the terms within which the subsequent discussion of life and death proceeds. To reject his position, as Lucretius and Descartes do in different ways, still requires answering the questions he raises: what is the soul, what is its relation to the body, and what becomes of that relation when the body perishes.

Aristotle approaches the question of life as a biological inquiry rather than a metaphysical one. Where Plato treated the soul as a substance imprisoned in the body and longing for release, Aristotle holds that soul and body are not two separate things but two aspects of one reality: the soul is the form of a natural body that has life potentially. A living body without a soul is conceivable only in the way that an unshaped lump of bronze is an axe; the form is what makes it what it is. The relation of this doctrine to the questions treated in the chapter on SOUL is direct.

Life, on this account, admits of a precise definition. "What has soul in it differs from what has not, in that the former displays life." The minimum conditions of life are self-nutrition and growth. Plants live because they nourish themselves and reproduce. Animals add sensation and locomotion. Humans add rational thought. Each level of soul contains the powers of the levels below it, so that human life presupposes animal life, and animal life presupposes vegetative life. This hierarchical ordering of living things bears on the questions treated in the chapter on ANIMAL.

Death, for Aristotle, is the corruption of the composite of form and matter. When the body can no longer sustain the activities of life, the soul ceases to be actual in that body. Whether any part of the soul survives this corruption is a question that Aristotle leaves ambiguous; his brief remark that the active intellect is "separable and impassible and unmixed" has been the subject of much controversy among his interpreters, as discussed in the chapter on IMMORTALITY.

Aristotle's biological definition of life becomes the framework within which most subsequent discussion proceeds. Aquinas adopts and extends it; Descartes challenges it by proposing a mechanical account of vital functions. The question of whether the rational soul survives the death of the body remains one of the central points of disagreement in the tradition.

Lucretius, following Epicurean physics, argues that the soul is a material thing, composed of especially fine and smooth atoms distributed throughout the body. It gives the body its warmth, sensation, and vitality, but it is not immortal. When the body dies, the atoms that compose the soul scatter into the surrounding air. There is no underworld, no afterlife, no divine judgment. Death is simply the cessation of sensation. The bearing of this doctrine on the questions treated in the chapter on IMMORTALITY is direct.

From this physical account Lucretius draws his ethical conclusion. "Death is nothing to us, and concerns us not a jot, since the nature of the mind is proved to be mortal." Where we are, death is not; where death is, we are not. To fear death is therefore irrational, since the state of being dead involves no deprivation for the person who has ceased to exist. It is, Lucretius argues, no different from the infinite time before we were born, and no one grieves over that absence.

The therapeutic purpose of this argument is explicit. Lucretius holds that fear of death, fostered by the terrors of religious teaching about the afterlife, is the root of most human misery. It enslaves men to superstition and prevents them from enjoying the life they have. Philosophy, by revealing the true nature of things, frees the mind from this bondage. The relation of this argument to the questions treated in the chapter on RELIGION is evident.

Lucretius establishes the materialist position in the discussion of life and death. His argument that death is mere dissolution is taken up by Montaigne, contested by Augustine and Aquinas on theological grounds, and given a new psychological dimension by Freud, who locates in the tendency toward dissolution a drive as fundamental as the drive toward life.

Marcus Aurelius approaches the question of death not as a theoretical philosopher but as a Roman emperor writing in the midst of plague and war. His position is neither Plato's confident hope of immortality nor the materialist consolation of Lucretius, but something that may be called Stoic acceptance: the recognition that death is part of the natural order, and that to resent it is to quarrel with nature itself.

The recurring theme of the Meditations is impermanence. Alexander the Great and his mule-driver were brought to the same condition by death. The whole of Roman glory is a procession of men moving toward the same dissolution. The purpose of this meditation is not despair but perspective. If everything passes, then the present moment is all one possesses, and the only question of importance is whether one uses it virtuously. The bearing of this conception on the questions treated in the chapter on VIRTUE AND VICE is evident.

On the question of what death itself is, Marcus holds his judgment in suspension. Perhaps the soul survives and rejoins the universal reason; perhaps it disperses into atoms. In either case, the wise man should not fear it. "Wait for death with a cheerful mind, as being nothing else than a dissolution of the elements of which every living being is compounded." If the elements came together by nature, their separation is equally natural, and "nothing that is according to nature can be evil." This agnosticism about the soul's fate after death distinguishes Marcus from both Plato and Lucretius, each of whom claims to know the answer.

Marcus Aurelius transmits to later centuries a way of confronting death that requires neither metaphysical certainty nor philosophical therapy, but moral discipline and acceptance of the natural order. Montaigne takes up this Stoic composure and translates it into the idiom of Renaissance self-examination.

Augustine's treatment of death is governed by the doctrine of original sin, as discussed more fully in the chapter on SIN. Death, on his view, is not natural to man but a punishment. God created Adam with the possibility of immortality, but the Fall brought death into the human condition. "By the sin of the first man, death passed upon all men." The body's mortality is therefore not a neutral biological fact, as Aristotle maintained, nor a harmless dissolution, as Lucretius argued, but the consequence of a spiritual catastrophe.

This theological understanding gives death a moral weight that it does not possess in pagan philosophy. Augustine distinguishes two deaths: the death of the body, in which the soul departs, and the second death, which is the eternal separation of the soul from God. The first is universal and inevitable in the fallen condition. The second is the fate of the damned. Between the two stands the hope of resurrection: God, who permitted death as the consequence of sin, also promises the restoration of the body at the end of time. The questions this raises are treated more fully in the chapter on IMMORTALITY.

In the Confessions, Augustine treats the experience of death in more personal terms. The death of his friend in Book IV and the death of his mother Monica in Book IX are occasions not for philosophical argument but for grief, prayer, and the recognition that human attachment cannot survive without the anchor of something eternal. The philosopher's composure before death, cultivated by Plato and the Stoics, appears to Augustine as a form of spiritual insufficiency, a failure to love deeply enough to mourn.

Augustine's account of death as the consequence of sin and the occasion of hope in resurrection becomes the framework for the medieval Christian understanding. Aquinas takes up and systematizes this teaching; the broader question of whether death is a natural event or a theological problem remains a point of division between the Christian and the naturalistic traditions.

Aquinas inherits two traditions that stand in tension with each other. From Aristotle he receives the doctrine that the soul is the form of the body, inseparable from it in the way that shape is inseparable from wax. From Augustine and the Christian faith he receives the doctrine that the soul survives bodily death and awaits the resurrection. The question of how both can be maintained is central to his treatment, and bears on the problems discussed in the chapters on SOUL and IMMORTALITY.

His resolution turns on a careful distinction. The human soul, unlike the souls of plants and animals, performs an operation, intellectual understanding, that does not employ a bodily organ. Because it has an operation independent of the body, it can subsist independently of the body. It is a form, as Aristotle held, but a subsistent form, capable of existing on its own after the composite of soul and body is dissolved by death. This is not, however, the natural condition of the soul; the soul separated from the body is, in an important sense, incomplete. Its natural state is union with matter. The resurrection of the body is therefore not merely a miraculous reversal of death but the restoration of the soul to its proper condition.

On the nature of life itself, Aquinas follows Aristotle closely. Life is self-movement; the living thing moves itself, while the non-living is moved only by external causes. The vegetative powers of nutrition and growth represent the minimum of life. But Aquinas adds that God, as pure act, is supremely alive, and that all created life participates in and depends upon the divine life. The questions this raises about the divine nature are treated in the chapter on GOD.

Aquinas's account holds together Aristotelian biology, the doctrine of the soul's immortality, and the Christian teaching of bodily resurrection within a single metaphysics of form and act. Descartes proposes an entirely different account of the relation between mind and body, one that dissolves the Aristotelian framework on which Aquinas's synthesis depends.

Montaigne takes his title from Cicero, who took it from Plato: to philosophize is to learn to die. His treatment of the theme, however, is more personal and less systematic than anything in the ancient tradition. He writes as a man who has witnessed the deaths of friends, who has suffered a near-fatal riding accident, and who feels the approach of his own death in the gradual decline of his body.

In his early essay on the subject, Montaigne recommends the Stoic and Epicurean strategy of constant meditation on death. "Let us learn to stand firm and to fight death. Let us deprive death of its strangeness. Let us frequent it, let us get used to it." By thinking about death continually, one robs it of its power to surprise and terrify. This is classical therapy, drawn from Lucretius and Seneca, and it bears on the questions treated in the chapter on EMOTION.

In his later essays, however, Montaigne quietly revises this position. In "Of Experience," written near the end of his life, he suggests that philosophical preparation for death is largely unnecessary. Nature herself provides what is needed. His own brush with death taught him that the passage is gentler than the imagination supposes; consciousness dims before pain becomes unbearable. The peasant who dies without having read a page of Seneca dies as well as the philosopher. Death, on this later view, requires no special preparation beyond the ordinary business of living well. The question of how far philosophy can assist in confronting death, and how far nature renders such assistance superfluous, is one that Montaigne leaves in suspension rather than resolving.

Montaigne's movement from philosophical mastery of death toward a simpler trust in nature opens a question that neither the ancients nor the scholastics had explored in quite these terms. The tension between the mind's attempt to prepare for death and the body's own resources for meeting it is taken up, in a different register, by Freud.

Shakespeare's treatments of life and death are distributed across the tragedies and the late romances, but they return with particular concentration to one question: whether a life that has become intolerable may be laid down, and whether what awaits on the other side of the act is relief or is a further torment. Hamlet's soliloquy in the third act of the play puts the question in the form by which it has been known to every reader since. To be, or not to be, is there asked as a matter of whether a man shall endure the outrages to which living exposes him or take up arms against his own life and, by opposing, end them. The argument the prince holds with himself is not finally decided, and what checks him at the end is neither an appeal to duty nor to fear of damnation, but the thought that dreams may come to the sleep of death and that no traveller has returned to say what they are.

The same question is present in the other plays, though in different colors. Macbeth, who has taken many other lives, reflects at the end of his own that life is a tale told by an idiot, signifying nothing, and the speech is not contradicted by the play in which it stands. Lear, bending over the body of Cordelia, asks why a dog, a horse, a rat have life while she has none. Prospero, at the close of The Tempest, assimilates the insubstantial pageant of the players to the substance of our own lives, from which we take our rest in what he calls a sleep. Each of these is a different moment in the treatment of the same theme, and what unifies them is the refusal to allow life or death to be treated as unqualified goods or unqualified evils, or as the simple objects of a consistent desire.

The questions raised belong partly to the treatment of Immortality, where the prospect of what lies on the other side of death is discussed at length, and partly to that of Sin, where the specific question of self-destruction and the Christian prohibition against it is considered. The general question of whether death is an evil to the one who dies, which Lucretius and the Epicureans had treated on their own grounds, is reopened in Shakespeare without being resolved.

The philosophical treatments after Shakespeare keep referring to the scenes he made of these questions, even when they do not mention him by name. Pascal, writing of the misery of man without God, will use a vocabulary that cannot easily be separated from the Shakespearean picture of a being aware of his mortality. Descartes, meditating on what may be the case if the life of dreaming is continuous with the life of waking, is on terrain that The Tempest had already made familiar. The line of thought that ends in the nineteenth-century treatments of suicide, of despair, and of the limits of what reason may say about death begins in the plays of Shakespeare at least as much as in the treatises of the philosophers.

Descartes departs from the Aristotelian account of life in a fundamental way. Where Aristotle and Aquinas held the soul to be the principle of all vital functions, from nutrition to thought, Descartes restricts the soul to thinking alone. The body, including all its vital operations (heartbeat, digestion, respiration, growth), is a machine. It operates according to the same mechanical laws that govern clocks and hydraulic automata. No soul is needed to explain why the heart beats or the blood circulates; these follow from the body's physical structure, just as the motions of a clock follow from the arrangement of its gears. The bearing of this on the questions treated in the chapter on MECHANICS is direct.

This account has a significant consequence for the understanding of death. If the body is a machine, then the difference between a living body and a dead one is not the presence or absence of a soul but the difference between a working mechanism and a broken one. "Death never comes through the absence of the soul," Descartes writes, "but only because some one of the principal parts of the body has decayed." The soul departs because the body can no longer function; the body does not cease to function because the soul has departed.

Animals, lacking rational souls, are on this account pure automata. Their apparent suffering, their apparent purposes, are nothing but the mechanical operations of matter in complex arrangement. This is the first fully mechanistic theory of life in the Western tradition, and it draws a sharp line between man and all other living things, as discussed in the chapter on ANIMAL. Only man, possessing a rational soul entirely distinct from the body, is more than a machine.

Descartes's mechanical conception of life becomes influential in the development of modern physiology and medicine. Later writers, from William James to Freud, argue that consciousness and the body cannot be so sharply separated as the Cartesian account requires, though none returns entirely to the Aristotelian position that Descartes displaced.

William James approaches the question of life and death from the side of psychology and evolutionary biology. He accepts the post-Darwinian view that life exists on a continuum, that the difference between the simplest organism and the most complex is one of degree rather than kind. But he does not accept the conclusion that the mechanists draw from this continuity. The evolutionary account, in his view, does not show that consciousness is an illusion or an epiphenomenon; it shows that mentality in some form accompanies life at every level. The bearing of this position on the questions treated in the chapter on EVOLUTION is evident.

James rejects both the Cartesian view that mind is a separate substance and the materialist view that mind is nothing but the behavior of matter. Consciousness, he holds, is real, causally efficacious, and intimately bound up with the living organism. It is the "stream of thought" that flows through the life of every sentient being, selecting, emphasizing, and organizing experience according to the creature's interests. Life and consciousness are not identical, but they are, in practice, inseparable. The questions this raises about the nature of MIND are treated in the chapter on that idea.

On the question of whether consciousness survives bodily death, James maintains an empirical openness. The question, as he frames it, is whether the brain produces consciousness in the way that a generator produces electricity, or transmits it in the way that a prism transmits light. If the latter, then the destruction of the brain need not entail the destruction of consciousness. James leaves the question unresolved, holding that "the whole drift of my education goes to persuade me that the world of our present consciousness is only one out of many worlds of consciousness that exist."

James's insistence that consciousness is a real feature of the living world, not reducible to mechanism, reopens questions that the Cartesian and materialist traditions had attempted to settle. The more radical claim, that the mind's relation to life and death is not merely uncertain but internally conflicted, is developed by Freud.

Freud introduces into the discussion of life and death a hypothesis that departs from the assumptions of the entire preceding tradition: that the drive toward death is not external to the living organism but internal to it. In Beyond the Pleasure Principle, he proposes that alongside Eros, the life drive which binds organisms into ever larger unities, there operates a death drive which seeks to dissolve those unities and return the organism to the inorganic state from which it arose. "The aim of all life is death."

The argument is speculative but has its origin in clinical observation. Freud observed that his patients compulsively repeated traumatic experiences, even when doing so brought no pleasure. The pleasure principle could not account for this repetition compulsion. Something deeper appeared to be at work: a tendency to restore an earlier state of things. Since the inorganic preceded the organic, the deepest tendency of every organism, on this view, is to return to the inanimate condition from which it arose.

This position reverses the assumptions of previous writers on life and death. Plato, Aristotle, and Aquinas all treated life as inherently oriented toward preservation and flourishing. Even Lucretius, who denied the afterlife, conceived of death as coming to the organism from without, not from within. Freud locates the impulse toward death at the heart of the living organism itself. Civilization, he argues, is the product of the tension between Eros, which builds, and the death drive, which destroys; and neither can be eliminated without abolishing human life altogether. The bearing of this analysis on the questions treated in the chapter on DESIRE is considerable.

Whether Freud's theory of the death drive is properly scientific or speculative remains a contested question. But the idea that life and death are not simply opposites but are intertwined within the organism itself has influenced subsequent discussion of human nature and bears on the problems treated in the chapters on DESIRE and EMOTION.