Aristotle, in his study of courage in the Nichomachean Ethics, holds that death is the ultimate measure of that virtue: “With what sort of terrible things, then, is the courageous man concerned? Surely, with the greatest; for no one is more likely than he to stand his ground against what is dreadful. Now death is the most terrible of all things” (1115a24-26). Courage is properly directed to the preservation and flourishing of life, and yet even the most heroic of lives, those we rightly celebrate in song and story, come to an end. Just as death is the greatest challenge for courage, so it is for human life as a whole. Precisely because death is the limit and ever-impending end of human life, meditation on this “most terrible of all things” can serve as a profound discipline, transforming life through an interior liberation.
While courage enables one to face and overcome obstacles to the flourishing of life, that life is nonetheless finite. Humans have grappled with this finitude from the beginning of recorded history. For Homer, mortality is the chief characteristic that distinguishes humans from the gods, and cognizance of death pervades the consciousness of his human characters. Mortality exposes humans to genuine risk and summons them to courage, even to the point of self-sacrifice. Mortality imposes a scarcity of time and opportunities. Humans must make choices during the course of their finite lives, and those choices have real gravity, bearing with them the possibility of nobility. Each human has a particular moira, or share of life, which unfolds until reaching its boundary in death. In this sense, death encompasses human life, establishing its ultimate horizon. From birth onward, life is like a country, broad and capacious, whose borders are defined by death.
The power of death is not merely objective and external. Death is not simply a biological event that happens to plants and animals, or to strangers and acquaintances, or even to friends and family. It is an event that I will inevitably experience, bringing my own life to its conclusion. The confrontation with death must likewise be in the first person; only then can it transform one’s consciousness, eliciting an experience of freedom. Accepting death forthrightly frees one from an internal condition of servitude to perceived threats that would otherwise bind.
As long as life endures, one is in the existential condition of the journey, on the way toward future states. These states are not random: life is directed toward various fulfillments, biological, psychological, and social. Death is the end of this journey, at least in the sense of cessation, if not also culmination. The undoubtable delimitation of the journey gives it the structure of a narrative, with a beginning, middle, and end. Narratives, however, are embedded one within another. Even as one’s own narrative ends, the larger narratives into which it has been interwoven, those of children and community, stretch out beyond one’s life into the future. The story ends but the mythos continues.
Death structures life in a way that reaches ironically both forward and backward beyond the bounds of one’s own life, eliciting a corresponding psychological and spiritual focus. Devotion of one’s effort to children and family is perhaps the most immediate example of this focus. The honoring of the dead, especially of one’s family, is another. Customs such as burying the dead in the earth with symbolic markings create bonds with one’s community stretching backward in time. Cultures with the most vibrant sense of such bonds often cultivate them with songs and rituals that honor the dead. The extension of focus beyond one’s own life is not limited to one’s family; it flows naturally into engagement with the larger institutions of the community. By participating in the building and maintenance of those institutions, one’s life is integrated into the narrative of civilization.
Of course, this positive response is not simply inevitable. Death can be and often is rejected at a spiritual level. Fundamentally, the rejection of death is rejection of one’s finitude as a subject. The healthy desire to preserve one’s life can become a desire for one’s subjectivity to extend in time without limit. The center of this desire is the self as locus of experience, to which one can have an addictive attachment. This psychological condition tends to induce a kind of presentism, cutting one off from both the past and one’s genuine future. One’s ancestors, almost all of whom are dead, seem to recede into an ever-greater distance. When looking to the future, one feels bitterness rather than joy in seeing that it is not oneself, but one’s children, if one has any, who will go on. When death is viewed as the permanent annihilation of one’s personal utility, it cannot help but be anathema from a utilitarian perspective, which posits utility as the sole source of value.
One’s orientation to death is not simply a matter of in-born temperament. The positive orientation to death can be cultivated through askēsis, or exercises by which one undergoes spiritual change. Askēsis includes deliberate crafts such as meditation, self-examination, and other disciplines by which one takes intentional care for one’s life. These practices can work on the psyche in ways that modify one’s moral and intellectual intuitions. Of all the practices of askēsis, one of the most powerful is philosophy in the form in which it was conceived by Socrates and pursued in the schools descended from him. For Socrates, especially as he appears in the Phaedo, a chief purpose of philosophy is to learn how to die. “The one aim of those who practice philosophy in the proper manner it to practice for death and dying” (64a). This “practice for death” is not a special part of philosophy but a central dimension of what the Platonic tradition takes to be the heart of philosophy, the journey of the psyche to observation or contemplation (theoria) of what is most real.
Theoria had a specific religious connotation in ancient Greece relating to the practice of pilgrimage. A pilgrimage was a devotional journey to attend a religious festival at a sanctuary, often distant from one’s city. At the culmination of the festival the image of the god, normally hidden, would be put on display (theas) for the contemplation or observation (theoria) of the pilgrims. Aristotle, in the Protrepticus, explicitly connects the religious sense of theoria with its newer philosophic sense: “For just as we travel abroad to Olympia for the sake of the display (theas) itself, even if there is going to be nothing more to get from it—for the observing (theoria) itself is superior to much money—and as we observe the Dionysia not in order to acquire anything from the actors—indeed we pay—… so too the observation (theoria) of the universe should be honored above everything that is thought to be useful.”
In Plato’s Republic, this “pilgrimage” to theoria is articulated through the allegory of the sun (507b-509c), the divided line (509d-511e), and the allegory of the cave (514a-520a). In each case, the psyche ascends from appearances to contemplate ever greater unity, and in doing so receives integration and order. Through such contemplation, philosophy accustoms the psyche to “gather itself and collect itself out of every part of the body and dwell by itself both now and in the future, freed, as it were, from the bonds of the body” (Phaedo 67d). The journey to theoria detaches one from appearances of lesser reality and transforms one in accordance with a vision of the ordered universe (kosmos) as a whole. The ordered whole seen in theoria is greater than one’s physical life, and death can be seen as a free return of oneself to that whole.
By directing theoria to a meditation on death itself, the psyche gains courage in the face of it. “As true philosophers are always studying death, to them, of all men, death is the least terrible” (67e). The meditation on death, in which one squarely confronts death and accepts it, is an essential form of care for one’s psyche (107d), correlative to knowledge of the self. However, the meditation on death is not chiefly intellectual. On the contrary, death is an aporia to the intellect, perhaps the greatest. Meditation on death transforms the psyche by decentering the self, but only through a will shaped by love and cultivated through practice. It is notable that this askēsis does not depend on beliefs about an afterlife. Plato offers no argument or logos concerning what comes after death in the dialogues. Rather, he refers to such only in the form of mythos, even if he treats the latter with respect.
The askēsis of philosophy, including the meditation on death, does not aim at a Stoic freedom from passion. On the contrary, it involves an eros for truth that Socrates compares to the truest worship of Dionysus, attained only by those who participate most fully in his mysteries: “As those concerned with the mysteries say, there are indeed many who carry the thyrsus, but the Bacchants are few. These latter are, in my opinion, no other than those who have practiced philosophy in the right way. I have in my life left nothing undone in order to be counted among these as far as possible, as I have been eager to be in every way” (69d). The philosopher, in this conception, is a votary who can undertake the pilgrimage to theoria only by way of an eros for a beauty (Symposium 204-211) that encompasses and transcends his own death. For one transformed by such an askēsis, life can be concluded by offering oneself up in an act of love. The goal of meditation on death is thus not mere acceptance of finitude, but the culmination of desire: not to grey out, but to flame out, reaching to the heights of love for beauty and the good even as one gazes upon the most terrible of all things.