Socrates believed that the body is the appearance in life, the soul is the essence, and death frees the soul from the shackles and desires of the body, and gets the last freedom, symbolizing his healing from the disease of the body, so he asked one of his friends to sacrifice a chicken to Asclepius, the god of medicine, for him after his death, because the ancient Greeks had a tradition, when a person was healed from a long-term illness, he had to sacrifice a chicken to the god of medicine, Socrates believed that when the soul and the body lived together in the world, they were in a state of illness, And death brings the healing of the soul.
Socrates believed that he had been guided by a divine voice all his life, and when he wanted to do something he should not do, he would say "no" to him, and when he was sentenced to death by Athens, he decided to obey the law and accept death, and when he made this decision, the voice did not come out to stop him, so Socrates was convinced that his choice was right. Russell believed that Socrates' actions were as much a sign of mental illness as Joan of Arc (1412 1431, a Catholic saint and French national hero) who was inspired by God's voice. Socrates claimed to be a big gadfly sent to Athens by God in order to stimulate the slow and stupid cow of Athens to move forward quickly, but in fact he himself was not a cow chased by the gadfly of death, and he spent his whole life thinking about philosophy and death.
There is no doubt that Socrates' calmness in the face of death is admired by the world and has become an unavoidable public case in the history of philosophy, but all this in Kierkegaard's view, Socrates is still only in the stage of ethical life, Kierkegaard believes that Socrates is living for others, and all his actions try to conform to the requirements of social ethics and moral laws, and the reason why he went to death is to set a moral model for everyone, and he chooses death as a rational choice in the face of the uncertainty of death. Kierkegaard believes that there is also a sensual life and a religious life corresponding to this kind of ethical life, and the sensual life is also called the aesthetic life, this kind of people live only for themselves, they are drawn by their own desires and cannot control themselves, and everything is aimed at satisfying their own desires. Religious life, on the other hand, is faced with an either/or uncertainty choice, and does not hesitate to jump into the equation and make a reckless choice for the sake of what he thinks he can live and die for, just as Abraham sacrificed his only son Isaac to God.
Socrates argues that the soul is immortal, he pulls philosophy back from heaven to earth, marking the first peak of human reason, but the moment he drinks poison hemlock, it is really an irrational act, because he is not without a choice, since he thinks that only God knows whether it is better to live or die, there is a great uncertainty about how to choose, even if the soul does not disappear with the destruction of the body, but it is not certain that the soul after death will necessarily become better, Reason must be inclined not to take risks for this uncertainty, just as those believers who believe in the existence of heaven will never commit suicide, but Socrates did not show the slightest hesitation when he drank the poisoned wine, at this time he went from extreme rationality to extreme irrationality, and in the pursuit of rationality all his life was finally irrationalized, just like a climber who has been working hard all his life suddenly jumped into the abyss, which is full of paradoxes in itself, and his death has become the most fascinating typical public case for posterity.
The immortality of the soul is the premise of Plato's philosophy, and if someone can prove that the soul does not exist or that the soul will disappear with the death of the body, his ideas of the world of ideas, recollections, creationism, and the ideal state will encounter insurmountable contradictions, and his huge philosophical edifice will collapse. Sure enough, in the Roman period, Lucretius (c. 99 BC - c. 55 BC) was another representative of atomism after Democritus and Epicurus. Lucretius opposed Plato's philosophy, believing that Plato's doctrine would be unsustainable as long as the proposition of the immortality of the soul was falsified, so he listed 27 methods of proving the death of the soul in one fell swoop in his book "Treatise on the Nature of Things", and asserted that "even if the soul still feels after leaving the body, it still has nothing to do with us." "Six of the 27 proofs are representative:
1.The soul and body are born, grow up, and age together, and will also dissolve with the dissolution of the body.
2.The soul and the body can only live because of their common union, so it cannot exist without a body.
3.An immortal soul must have its own senses, but the five senses cannot exist apart from the body.
4.If the soul is eternal, one should remember the past life.
5.If the soul enters the body from the outside, it cannot have such a close connection with the body.
6.The idea of having a dead body and an immortal soul is absurd in itself.
It is not difficult to see that Lucretius's proof method has a lot of far-fetched points, full of arbitrary color, but I don't think it is clumsy than Plato's proof method of the immortality of the soul, if you only look at the proof method itself, it seems that it is difficult to determine who is right and who is wrong, and it is impossible to determine who is more correct, it seems to make sense, the problem is **? It was not until Kant in the 18th century that this problem was solved.
Kant divided the world into two realms: the phenomenal world and the object itself, human reason can only know the phenomenal world but cannot know the object itself, the objects touched by people's senses belong to the phenomenal world, but the cause behind the phenomenal world of the object itself belongs to the unknowable transcendent world, in which the concepts of soul, universe, God and so on all belong to the category of the object itself, and any knowledge about these concepts is unreliable. If reason tries to form knowledge about them, it will inevitably fall into the dichotomy (two contradictory theories of the same object can be held up separately). For example, Lucretius once put forward a famous thought experiment about the infinite universe, known as Lucretius's spear, he proposed that if the universe is finite, what happens if you go to the end of the universe and throw a spear with all your might? He thinks there are only two things that can happen, bounce back or keep flying. Either way, it means that there is something beyond the edge of the universe. There is something blocking the bounce back, and there is more room to continue flying. Thus, Lucretius asserted that the universe must be infinite. On the surface, Lucretius's thought experiment seems to be unassailable, but in fact it is completely unreliable, and the premise of the experiment is problematic in the first place, because there may be no end to the universe at all, and it is entirely possible that the universe has no end just as the earth has no edge. Second, people cannot understand the space-time of the universe in terms of the concept of space-time in terms of people or on earth, and that will only lead to wrong conclusions. In fact, the concept of the universe itself belongs to the unknowable self-body, and the universe as a whole is incomprehensible to man.
Although there is no right or wrong between the two opposing views of Plato and Lucretius, the reality is that for 2,000 years Plato's philosophy has far more fans than fans of the philosophy of Democritus, Epicurus, and Lucretius, and its influence is even more incomparable. It can be seen from this that the criteria for people to agree with a certain philosophical idea are not as people think, follow the rational and logical method, people will not be able to be respected because your point of view is more reasonable, or more able to stand the test of practice, but more depends on whether your point of view is in line with people's certain wishes, this desire comes from people's subconscious appeals, that is to say, people's emotions rather than facts are the key to determining which point of view can be more acceptable. To determine whether a person's thoughts are more acceptable and disseminated by people, its emotional value is more important than factual judgments, that is to say, value judgments in philosophical propositions are more important than factual judgments, of course, this effect is hidden, people do not feel its existence, people have always felt that they are pursuing truth and will not be affected by emotions, which is why Western philosophy for two thousand years has been making footnotes to Plato's philosophy.
Plato said that "philosophy is the exercise of death", warning people to practice the liberation of the soul from the "captivity" of the physical "prison", to overcome the barriers of the physical senses and to completely free themselves from the shackles of will and desire, and finally to enter the world of the gods of ideas, as the English scholar Ae.Taylor pointed out in his "Life and Writings of Plato": "Plato gives us the hope of immortality, not the certainty of immortality", in the final analysis, Plato has to practice death and believe in the idea of eternity, which just proves that he came to such a conclusion because he was afraid of death, rather than judging things as they are, in the final analysis, it was death anxiety that made him a great philosopher, for this reason, the following paragraph is used as the end of this section, "Death is an event that man cannot avoid." Throughout the ages, many philosophers have indeed regarded this event as the only event that mattered, and the question of death took center stage in their thinking, and in the eyes of some, if it could not help him to reconcile with the terrible and inevitable death, he could at least help him to understand it. As a result, they often reflect on the issue of death. [The Philosophy of Survival] by Philip Lawton, by Marie-Louise Bishop, translated by Hu Jianhua et al., p303
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