Instead, he turned the tables, addressing his judges in a manner that makes
the reader understand precisely why the town council wanted this man dead.
Then he took his poison, like a man.
Socrates rejected expediency, and the necessity for manipulation that
accompanied it. He chose instead, under the direst of conditions, to maintain
his pursuit of the meaningful and the true. Twenty-five hundred years later,
we remember his decision and take comfort from it. What can we learn from
this? If you cease to utter falsehoods and live according to the dictates of
your conscience, you can maintain your nobility, even when facing the
ultimate threat; if you abide, truthfully and courageously, by the highest of
ideals, you will be provided with more security and strength than will be
offered by any short-sighted concentration on your own safety; if you live
properly, fully, you can discover meaning so profound that it protects you
even from the fear of death.
Could all that possibly be true?
Death, Toil and Evil
The tragedy of self-conscious Being produces suffering, inevitable suffering.
That suffering in turn motivates the desire for selfish, immediate gratification
—for expediency. But sacrifice—and work—serves far more effectively than
short-term impulsive pleasure at keeping suffering at bay. However, tragedy
itself (conceived of as the arbitrary harshness of society and nature, set
against the vulnerability of the individual) is not the only—and perhaps not
even the primary—source of suffering. There is also the problem of evil to
consider. The world is set hard against us, of a certainty, but man’s
inhumanity to man is something even worse. Thus, the problem of sacrifice is
compounded in its complexity: it is not only privation and mortal limitation
that must be addressed by work—by the willingness to offer, and to give up.
It is the problem of evil as well.
Consider, once again, the story of Adam and Eve. Life becomes very hard
for their children (that’s us) after the fall and awakening of our archetypal
parents. First is the terrible fate awaiting us in the post-Paradisal world—in
the world of history. Not the least of this is what Goethe called “our creative,
endless toil.”^131 Humans work, as we have seen. We work because we have
awakened to the truth of our own vulnerability, our subjugation to disease