How To Be An Agnostic

Following Socrates

work comes to an end: the person you have become then will
be the person you are in eternity. What someone felt about
their death revealed much about their attitude to life and how
far they had advanced on the way of life of the philosopher.
In Plato’s dialogue the Gorgias, Socrates tells a myth about the
last judgement that captures the right attitude someone should
have to their death. (Similar stories end the Phaedo and the
Republic too, suggesting the importance of this exercise.) It used
to be the case in primordial times, the myth goes, that people
were judged before they died, by still living judges. Depending
on how they had lived their lives they would either go to the
Isles of the Blessed or to the prison of Tartarus. However, some
cases were being decided badly, an issue that was brought to
Zeus’ attention by Pluto. Zeus, in his wisdom, noticed that
the judges were being misled by the way people dressed for
their judgement – donning their fi nery in order to look fi ne
in soul too. So, Zeus decreed, people would no longer be told
when they are to die and they would be judged on that fi nal
day naked. With that change, the Great King before the throne
of judgement would be judged in the same way as the most
humble serf: according to the beauty and perfection, or the
distortion and ugliness, of his soul. Socrates tells Callicles, his
main interlocutor in the Gorgias, that he passionately believes
this myth and has taken it to heart:

I think about how I’ll reveal to the judge a soul that’s as

healthy as it can be. So I disregard the things held in honour

by the majority of people, and by practising truth I really try,

to the best of my ability, to be and to live as a very good

man, and when I die, to die like that.

He calls Callicles to this way of life, because he regards it as
worth more than any other. ‘Maybe you think this account is
told as an old wives’ tale, and you feel contempt for it,’ he asks.
But the spiritual truth is a good one nonetheless. Philosophical
success in life is not about having the right arguments, seeming