One of the questions I ask my Intro to Philosophy students is this: If you felt called to do something but knew it would cost you your life, would you not do it and live? Or would you do it and die?

The question is prompted by Socrates and Martin Luther King, Jr. Would you continue on in obedience (they felt) to God or would you hightail it outta there?

In our discussion of Socrates’ position on death it became clear to me that I usually think of death as pertaining to some physical end. Or I should say that the notion of death is conceptualized as something completely physical. There’s the soul, sure. But whatever happens on that side of the equation has nothing to do with death.

Now I’m not so sure. Maybe death or maybe what it means to die is also wrapped up in what it means for us to live.

It was Socrates’ inability or unwillingness to live without being free to think, free to question others and himself that led him to think that kind of unexamined life (Apology 38a) just isn’t worth a hill of beans. It isn’t worth living. Aristotle would agree, I believe, and would go so far as to say that it isn’t even a human life if you’re not thinking and reasoning. This doesn’t mean that thinking here is limited to philosophical thinking, at least on Aristotle’s view. But there seems little doubt that Socrates does mean a deep, reflective activity. A life without examining oneself isn’t much of a life.

Although we briefly discussed the issues of postmortem harm, the really interesting thing was this topsy-turvy feeling I had about what is a “death” and what does it really mean to “live”. Perhaps there still is a connection between how many tubes one wants poking out of one in order to call that situation “a life”. Are you really living anymore under certain medical interventions? Is being on a respirator “living”?

The flip side, though, is coming to a point where none of the physical stuff even comes close to “defining” what death is or what dying is. And that’s the surprising part. Dying, it seems, has everything to do with how one lives. What constitutes death has everything to do with what a person considers  “living”. And if that’s the case, then what we should be “worrying about” is “living” not “dying, death, and immortality”.

When we get to DZ Phillips, I think he’ll have something to say about this and help me out. From what I gather, his view about immortality is intimately connected to the nature of the life the person lived. How we conceive of a person in his “immortal” state is completely connected to the life that person led here in the nittygritty world.