The Thinker 117
painful and it might result in their having to reorder their lives. It is
more con ve nient to kill the person who is asking them the noisome
questions.
To philosophize, it has often been said, is to learn how to die, and
in his encounter with death Socrates is entirely admirable— for he
is richly consistent with the central premise of his thought. All
through his life as a thinker, Socrates has prefaced his annoying
inquiries with a simple disclaimer: I do not know the answers to the
major questions about life, but it appears that you yourself do. Tell
me what you think. What is a good life? What is a bad one? What
makes an existence worth sustaining?
Faced with death, Socrates shows what makes him diff erent from
other men— and also suggests that his professions of ignorance were
something more than a game. Most men, he says, presume to know
something about death: they know that it is bad. Death almost always
involves suff ering, and of course it is horrible to have to leave the
earth. But from this view Socrates dissents. He does not really know
what death is or what the afterlife entails— though he is willing to
guess in a more or less playful way. (Maybe death is an eternal sleep;
maybe death takes you to a world where you meet the good and great
who have lived before you.) What he does know about death is that,
really, he knows nothing at about it. Death might be a very bad thing,
but it might be quite a pleasant matter. No one really knows. No one
knows but all have their ideas. Socrates does not know, and that is all
there is to it. He will keep open to death—he will sustain his igno-
rance about the matter despite the temptations that arise. He will die,
in other words, as he has lived: not claiming to k now what in truth he
does not know. Socrates’ mode of ignorance sustains him serenely
and potently at the threshold of death. The so- called knowledge of
his contemporaries would probably not serve them half so well.
Socrates’ death dramatizes the most daunting of all the thinker’s
challenges. He is forced to contend with poverty, loneliness, and the