溫故知新 Old wisdom, today’s insight — ONGO
What If the Love of Wisdom Is Itself the Practice of Dying?
If a life toward wisdom is the freeing of the soul, little by little, from the body's desires, is it already a rehearsal of the freedom death will complete?
Those who rightly love wisdom are, in truth, practicing how to die.
This question split thought over the relation of death and wisdom. In the "Phaedo" Plato saw death as the soul's release from the prison of the body, and philosophy as the rehearsal of that freedom in advance — death is not an object of dread but the completion wisdom has moved toward. This soul-centered view of death rooted deep in later Western thought. Yet the same phrase "practice of death" turned in another direction with the Stoics — they practiced death not for a world of the soul freed from the body, but to live this life whole and free. From the other side Epicurus refused the very premise of an immortal soul, holding that the soul scatters with the body. Is death the soul's liberation, a training for life, or mere scattering — Plato stood highest on "the soul's liberation."
For us who easily take death only as life's utter opposite, Socrates's saying — that the love of wisdom is itself the practice of dying — joins living well and dying well into a single road.
On his last day, the cup of poison before him, Socrates says a startling thing to his friends — the true philosopher is one who has practiced dying all his life.
📝I, Too, Stand Before It
On his last day, the cup of poison before him, Socrates says a startling thing to his friends — the true philosopher is one who has practiced dying all his life. The practice of death he means is a training to turn the soul toward the true rather than being swayed by the body's desires and senses. So a life that loves wisdom is already living, little by little in advance, the soul's freedom that death will finally complete. I sense this question places death not as the opposite of life but as its completion. A life well lived need not fear death — for it has already walked in that direction. I stand before this question too, retracing what my day is bound to, and toward what it grows, little by little, free.
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