In this paper I explore prophecy and death, with direct reference to Plato’s philosophy. To begin with we must first recognise that at the heart of the Platonic dialogues is the question of the good life. Plato’s philosophy is, then, both practical and theoretical. It is a search for the good life; but this search is also indicative of the good life. Plato’s philosophy exhibits itself in practice as well as in its account of the best practice, of what is the truly good life. Plato’s philosophy is a call to self-understanding in the broadest sense possible.
The whole of Plato’s philosophy is presented in the dialogues, which are themselves dialogues on various aspects of the whole. In the Symposium, for instance, Eros, or desire, is the topic for discussion. Knowledge, or episteme, is discussed in the Theatetus, rhetoric in the Georgias, and courage in the Laches. Platonic philosophy encompasses all of the theoretical and practical arts which are concerned with understanding and the good life. As a search for the highest, most comprehensive, or truest understanding, it is an attempt to understand the limits to our understanding of what constitutes a good life. The highest or most comprehensive understanding cannot be presented in any systematic fashion, because such an understanding includes what is the desire and practice of the philosopher. There can be no clear and easy separation between philosophical practice and philosophical theory, in other words.
When I say “understanding”, I am not speaking about understanding in an abstract sense – as epistemology – but what things mean to us, what we understand by things. Plato works from within what we already understand, and does not attempt to outline the possibility of understanding before we come to understand. This is something like Husserl's phenomenology, in that meaning is central to knowledge. However, Plato differs from Husserl in that he maintains the totality of our experience and does not attempt to build the world from our individual conscious awareness. Plato’s philosophical approach is rooted in the everyday. It is about truth in the sense of understanding how the world is as we live out our truth.
So whereas Husserl begins with an understanding of cognition, Plato begins with the truth as it relates to the whole of awareness. Husserl abstracts our conscious awareness from the everyday: for example Husserl says that “Phenomenology proceeds by ‘seeing,’ clarifying, and determining meaning, and by distinguishing meanings. It compares, it distinguishes, it forms connections, it puts into relation, divides into parts, or distinguishes abstract aspects. But all within pure ‘seeing’.” [1] Husserl seeks the meaning of phenomena as they present themselves to consciousness, stripped bare of transcendental assumptions. As Husserl states, this could be anything at all – redness, or number, for example. The essence of these things is how they are given to us. Plato, by contrast, in seeking the totality of the meaning of our awareness, seeks not just the meaning of this thing or that, but the meaning of our lives. Plato begins from within awareness, and investigates our understanding of the world. Husserl seeks to build the world up from what presents itself to us prior to how we understand ourselves. When we give an account of ourselves we necessarily refer to what transcends us, we refer to what is good in itself. These beliefs bind the totality of our experience into a coherent whole.
The whole of our understanding is circumscribed by our understanding of the highest or most comprehensive things. So, when we speak about the whole we are not speaking about everything, but the ground of everything. The highest thing is what gives sense or meaning to everything else - it is the foundation for our lives. We can imagine that those for whom power is the greatest good, for example, things exist under the shadow of conquest and defeat. To attempt to understand our understanding is to search out the nature of the highest things as they appear to us. But to understand our understanding is also to understand ourselves, for in attempting to understand the highest things we must ask what is our relationship to the highest things. We are ourselves a part of the whole. In short: to try to understand our understanding is to pursue an understanding of the highest things and ourselves: it is to understand the highest things through an understanding of ourselves. The vexing question is: “How to understand ourselves and move beyond this understanding?” When I ask myself about how I approach life, about what I understand about my life, then I am also asking myself whether I am in any position to judge my own life: I am, in questioning my life, also questioning whether I am in fact capable of searching out this question. To question myself is, therefore, to search out a higher or more comprehensive perspective. This is where philosophy begins: but it is also where it may end.
We could say, as does modern philosophy, that our most comprehensive understanding is only ever an understanding of the merely human. This is akin to saying that we make the highest things as a result of the human practice of understanding. Philosophy is practice and nothing more. It is to do, but not to seek; or if it is to seek it is to seek for nothing. From this perspective – the perspective of science – our understanding of what it is to be excellent becomes fantasy. All valuations of excellence are merely human or relative evaluations. Science dissolves everyday human existence, and in so doing dissolves the entrance to philosophy. (And it also ultimately dissolves its own foundation – the postmodern position that science is just another form of poetry is the extension of the scientific perspective: science becomes just another fantasy of our human understanding). If our understanding of excellence is merely fantasy, then it cannot serve as the arbiter of different ways of life. If we understand excellence to be nothing, then we are saying that understanding is nothing for us, that understanding cannot be at all related to living well.
If we do not wish to dissolve our own existence, if we start from the assumption that our life cannot be denied without denying the whole of existence, then we must give credence to the quality of our lives. To question our understanding is to attempt to understand what is most excellent. Philosophy cannot begin from nothing, it cannot arise solely in theory, it must begin from our desire for excellence, and it is this desire which saves understanding from disappearing into nothingness. The philosophical way of life is illuminated by the love of wisdom. However, the philosopher – as one who desires to understand – is excellent only if the whole of understanding is excellent, if the most comprehensive understanding is excellent. The philosopher may not be excellent despite his or her desire to understand excellence. Who is to make this judgment, and how? The excellence of philosophy – and the philosopher – can only be sought through philosophy. Philosophy is radically self-reflective. This also makes it appear circular, and only with its practice can we know whether it is a mere spinning of the wheels, or a movement which overcomes limited or deficient perspectives.
If this way of life were not also partly reflected in other ways of life, then we could only say that alternative ways of life reflect their own internal understandings, and that the philosophical way of life is merely one among many. The philosophical way of life cannot be a completely different understanding, it must be a better understanding. Of fundamental importance is the intimate relationship between understanding and living. Where this relationship is not acknowledged then philosophy cannot arise. In the Philebus, for example, we are presented with a young pleasure seeker who by his very understanding of life, is unwilling to engage in conversation with Socrates. Philebus believes that pleasure, and only pleasure, defines the best way to live. To even engage with Socrates in a philosophical inquiry is, as Philebus recognises, tantamount to denying his own position. Philosophy is redundant if life is pleasure and nothing more.
When we look at the ancient sophists and rhetoricians, we find at least the reflection of philosophy. They must acknowledge some relationship between understanding and living. The sophists, for example, say that one can live in any fashion at all, because truth is radically relative. One is absolutely free, in other words. The rhetoricians make a political play of the relationship between understanding and living, and teach the art which allows one to convince others that one’s way of life is based on the best understanding.
Once we make the claim that our way of life is better than another then we are exposing ourselves to inquiry. In recognising that our way of life is better than others we are moving beyond the internal experience of this way of life, and saying that this experience may also count as the measure of other ways of life. When I say that the life of pleasure is better than the life of contemplation, for example, I am putting forward pleasure as the measure of all ways of life. But this is also to say that it is not just one way of life which is superior, but that any way of life which enhances pleasure is the superior way of life. As soon as I say that pleasure is the measure of all ways of life, I am equating pleasure with what is most excellent; I am saying that excellence is pleasure. When we defend our way of life we are, despite the reticence of people like Philebus, defending a certain understanding.
Only the unreflective life could lie outside of the boundaries circumscribed by philosophy. Plato makes it clear that this type of life is suitable only for shell-fish and gods. Humans are by nature reflective, whereas shell-fish and gods are not. It may not be wrong to characterise the life of the shell-fish as the constant passing of unrecognisable pleasures. This is also to caricature the life of humans wholly determined by pleasure – Philebus, for example, cannot afford to recognise himself (at least not in conversation with others), lest he give in to philosophy.
But what of the unreflective life under the wisdom of the gods? If we discount revelation – which, we could say, opens the space for interpretation, and so reflection – then the unreflective life according to divine wisdom is exhibited through tradition. The gods are inaccessible because history separates humanity from the divine. One cannot understand the divine, one can only be instructed by what always shows itself to be the authority on the divine. And the authority on the divine is the tradition, or the way that things have always been done. The divine things are the most ancient things, and respect for the divine is also respect for what is older. Instruction by elders, who were themselves instructed by elders, defines this way of life.
The only life completely unexposed to philosophy but making claims to wisdom would seem to be the life which judges excellence according to tradition. This way of life is defended by Aristophanes in his comic play The Clouds.
In The Clouds we first come to know Socrates as a natural philosopher who engages in bizarre natural science experiments within his “thinkery”. A student explains that Socrates was wondering how many of its own feet a flea could jump, and to solve the puzzle Socrates dipped two of the flea’s feet in wax, so that he could step-out the distance in wax flea-feet slippers. Another puzzle solved by Socrates concerned the question of whether a gnat hums through its mouth or backside. When we read this section of The Clouds we can’t help but get the impression that Socrates is unconcerned with the common or everyday; he cannot even see the comedy of his own actions. But as we will encounter throughout the rest of the play, unable to see what is comic, he is also unable to distinguish between the important and the trivial.
When Strepsiades, a local peasant, decides to enroll his son in the “thinkery” - to help him overcome his debtors - we are introduced to another aspect of Socrates’ philosophical practice - sophistry. To educate Strepsiades’ son, Pheidippides, Socrates brings onto the stage “Just Speech” and “Unjust Speech”. These “speeches” debate the merits of traditional morals. “Just Speech” stands for respect for tradition, respect for what is older, because the ancients were wise. “Unjust Speech” argues that if we judge the behaviour of the gods by the traditional understanding of justice then we must judge them to be unjust: Zeus is definitely not an exemplar of morality. He argues that because the gods are by the traditional account the standard by which we judge what is just and unjust, then justice does not really exist. But it is this immoderate account, the shameful uncovering of the gods that “Just Speech” takes issue. Irreverence is the ground of what is base and ignoble in the city, and the attitude of the “Unjust Speech” reflects the lack of respect for everything that is traditional, and hence worthy.
This lack of respect for the traditional order of things is the cause of Pheidippides beating his father, later on in the play. And the comic climax arises with Socrates running from the “thinkery”, pursued by Strepsiades: Socrates is justly punished for shaming the gods.
Of course, Aristophanes cannot defend the traditional life according to the precepts of tradition – tradition is silent according to its own understanding. And neither can he risk taking on philosophy on its own turf: Aristophanes would then merely be transforming tradition into philosophy! No, Aristophanes shows that philosophy leads to a laughable, and ultimately dangerous, way of life. The traditional way of life, although unable to comment upon itself, at least maintains peace within the city: philosophy is dangerous, tradition is safe. Philosophy is revolutionary from the perspective of politics, in other words. But of course, once the cracks in tradition start to appear, then tradition is in no position to heal itself. Tradition collapses as tradition when it must look for some sort of foundation. If one is not to return to the past via some sort of romantic yearning for a lost confidence, then one is necessarily confronted with the question of “what to be”? Practical wisdom is called for. And if practical wisdom is to remain within the boundaries of the tradition then it must exhibit itself as prophecy. Prophecy is practical wisdom under the guidance of the traditional gods; it is to bring understanding from the domain of the past, to the present. Prophecy breaks with tradition, while maintaining the original seat of understanding. Although it is not for prophecy to understand the gods themselves, prophecy is an understanding of what is understood by the gods. When the prophet claims to have grasped what is understood by the gods, then he is also claiming a special relationship with the gods. He is claiming to have grasped the gods better than others; he is closer to the gods than anyone else. In grasping what is understood by the gods, the prophet is stepping into the territory of philosophy in a way that tradition can not. The prophet claims to be wise because he communes with the divine. But this very claim is open to interpretation because it is sanctified not by what is older, but by what is present. Whereas the tradition doesn’t interpret – elders and religious experts instruct and admonish, they do not seek to understand – the prophet exposes the gods themselves to interpretation: the prophet speaks without the support of history. Prophecy, if it is absolutely true, must be ahistorical.
One may argue that the philosophical and religious-prophetic perspectives are incommensurable, but this is not so. Both aim at communion with the divine, and each would hold that an account of the truth concerning the divine is not harmful to its cause; indeed, it is central to philosophy, and at least possible for religious prophecy.
In Plato’s Euthyphro, Socrates discusses the question of “what is holy” with Euthyphro the prophet. Socrates searches out the limits of Euthyphro’s understanding, and in so doing exposes the inadequacy of the tradition as a basis for philosophical wisdom.
The Euthyphro
Moving through questions such as: “is the holy what the gods love, or is what the gods love holy?” Socrates exposes Euthyphro’s understanding as hopelessly bound by the conventional understanding of the divine. This would not be so hopeless if Euthyphro didn’t attempt to commune with the gods directly. Euthyphro transcends the traditional relationship to the gods without transcending the traditional understanding of the gods.
Euthyphro offers initially the response that what is dear to the gods is holy and what is not, is unholy. This is easily picked apart by Socrates: the gods may very well disagree about what is dear to them. Zeus could agree that such and such is holy, whereas Cronos may not. Who is right, we cannot tell, unless we ourselves know something of the truth.
With this rebuttal we get some idea of where Socrates is coming from. We, as humans, also disagree about what is dear to us. To imagine that we have direct and certain knowledge about what is holy and unholy is to transcend our humanness. This is akin to removing ourselves from history, to become timeless. Euthyphro believes that he has such timeless knowledge. He is repeatedly driven to perplexity by Socrates. However, because he does not recognise that the gods of the city are historical or conventional, Euthyphro cannot recognise his own limits. Socrates’ arguments remind us of the “Unjust Speech” of The Clouds. But whereas “Unjust Speech’s” opponent, “Just Speech” does not present the nobility of tradition, which only arises in practice, the nobility or ignobility of Euthyphro’s position is exhibited in his speech. Prophecy collapses the distinction between humanity and the divine, and so Euthyphro must face the arguments of the “Unjust Speech” square on. He cannot retreat into the tradition, into the safety of practice informed by tradition, without losing his claim to prophecy.
When Euthyphro says that the holy is what all the gods love, Socrates shows that Euthyphro would have to understand more than a god to understand what is loved by the gods. He does this with some playful displays of logic. First he makes a distinction between the holy as a thing which is loved by the gods because it is holy, and the holy as thing which is holy because it is loved by the gods. With this separation he goes on to argue that if we take one definition of the holy we exclude the other: if the holy is shown to be what the gods love because it is holy, then it cannot also be holy because the gods love it. This would mean that the gods love what is holy, but what they love is not holy. By making these strange distinctions between the holy itself, and the love of the gods, Socrates is exposing Euthyphro’s own misunderstanding. The irony is that Euthyphro’s definition that the “holy itself” is what all the gods love may very well be true, but that the truth concerning the “holy itself” precludes us from grasping its nature entirely. Euthyphro maintains throughout the dialogue that he in fact knows what the holy is, that he can know what the gods love. Absurdities arise for him because either: (1) he can love as a god, and so not know what he is loving - the gods do not reflect upon their own love - or if they do it is circular - like Aristotle’s thought thinking itself, or (2) he can know what it is that the god’s love, and in so doing he is saying that it is not only the love of the gods which defines what is holy, but that the holy is in fact holy despite the gods. By claiming to know what the holy is, Euthyphro claims to know what even the gods could not. Euthyphro’s understanding of the highest things is confused or lacking in some way.
If we reflect on the relationship between the “holy itself” and the love of the gods, as professed by Euthyphro, we come to see that there can be no separation. The holy defines the whole world of the gods, as it were. The gods are the most divine things, and so they cannot look beyond themselves to decide what they should or should not love. The gods love simply, and this love is necessarily holy. To separate the “holy itself” and the love of the gods is, therefore, to question that the gods are the highest or most divine things in the cosmos - it is to make the gods subordinate to something else of which we have an inkling. In saying that we understand the “holy itself” we are stating that we understand more than the gods, because we can see past their understanding to the ground of their understanding. If we implicitly know what is the “holy itself”, through revelation, then we ourselves are no different to gods. Once we become gods, the divine is reduced to the human. And in misunderstanding ourselves we are also reduced.
We necessarily distinguish ourselves from the gods when we search out a definition for what is holy. The gods do not search. And if we maintain, like Euthyphro, that we do know exactly what the holy is, then we cannot but appear absurd. To believe that we know the gods fully, would seem to mean that we know ourselves only partially. We become blind to the source of our vision, and are reduced to our understanding of the divine; an understanding which renders the gods as caricatures of ourselves. Only by acknowledging that we do not have divine knowledge can we overcome this absurdity. But what do we not know? What is divine and what is not, and how do we know that we do not know it? We must know something of the nature of the divine and of ourselves to know that we cannot take the perspective of the gods, without so reducing our own understanding. Philosophy must be a prophecy of some sort; not a prophecy bound to history, like Euthyphro’s, but a prophecy which seeks to understand what is our understanding of the divine. This search must take us to the limits of our understanding, which is also to say that it takes us to the limits of life, to the edge of temporal existence. In seeking out these limits, we are wrestling with the meaning of death. When we ask of the meaning of death we are approaching death philosophically. We are not just observing death, but trying to understand what life is.
In the Phaedo, Plato explores the foundation to the philosophical way of life. Plato presents the roots of philosophy itself, and in this sense the Phaedo moves us to question what is the understanding of those who seek the truth in giving an account of themselves and the world. With this question we ourselves are moving towards a theoretical appropriation of the truth of philosophy which, Plato will show, can only be fully realised in death – with the complete union of ourselves and the eternal beings – and so truth can only be fully appreciated from within our own lives. The divine is realised in the way that we live our lives.
Socrates says that the true philosopher is one who practices dying. If philosophy is the practice of dying then understanding death will be somehow related to our search for it. Philosophy is the search for death, and in searching for death we die - we become something other than what we were. Implicit in the idea of searching is truth. We seek so as to find the truth. This is so, even if our seeking ends in the realisation that there is nothing to be sought (as with Nietzsche - who equates freedom or death with nothingness or chaos).
Socrates gains assent from the others that death is nothing more than the separation of the soul from the body. The rest of the dialogue is concerned with this separation, and questions are posed about the existence of the soul in relation to the body: whether the soul is merely an epiphenomenon of the body, and whether an inquiry into death is a reflection on eternity or non-existence.
By introducing death as the separation of the soul from the body, Socrates separates existence into two realms. In the death-realm our soul is unmixed and pure, and in our earthbound existence, our soul is mixed with the body. Life, as soul, comes from the death-realm, but our lives are defined by a mixture of soul and body. This is to make a distinction between life as not the body (which is, by itself, non-living), and life as not death (this living existence). The distinction between these two ways of looking at life arises with death. Death stands between this existence and another. But to be dead, may also mean to exist beyond this separation. Death can be referred to in both these ways – as the annihilation of one existence, and as another existence altogether. Upon death, from within this existence, the body shows itself to be non-living. Only if death is another existence can we speak about the soul existing before and after this existence, however. On death, the separation of the soul and the body, or the presence of the body as non-living – as dead, invites us to wonder about the existence of the soul. It invites us to wonder about life and death itself.
When Socrates asks of his companions what does life become, or what follows life, he introduces the question with the example of sleeping and waking. Sleeping comes from waking, and vice versa. Socrates is asking about the relationship between the different existences. His companions agree that life comes from death and that death follows life. Our existence as it is now, as a mixture of soul and body, is not eternal, but arises out of another existence and becomes that other existence when we die. To ask about this existence will be to ask about the nature of death. We are asking about our soul as it exists in separation from the body. We are searching out the nature of our soul, in other words.
Throughout the dialogue Plato will play on the common understanding of death as non-existence. Death as commonly understood means the annihilation or end of a living thing. This is the perspective of death from observation. When we look at living and dying as we would at someone sleeping and waking, we see only existence and non-existence. Socrates is living one moment and the next he is dead. He is here one moment and the next he is gone. Death, as the annihilation of existence, can only be known as non-existence. How then do we go about searching out non-existence? How could the philosopher practise death? How can we understand that which presents itself as non-existence?
Firstly, we must understand that our temporal existence is defined by life and death as commonly understood: the coming into existence and the moving into non-existence. To understand temporal existence is to stand outside of it. When we reflect on what comes to be and what passes away, we are positioning ourselves outside of this movement. When we reflect on death from this position it presents itself as non-existence. If we look within our own lives, however, if we search out the edges of our own existence, then we can understand death through a search for the eternal, the lifeless and deathless realm, which is the “other” existence of our temporality. Given that our temporal existence is the totality of our experience, to search out eternity through our soul is to search out what is the limit of this totality. If this limit is merely another reflection of temporal existence, then we are limited to an understanding of life only. Only with a connection between the soul and eternity can we say that death is not non-existence, and that philosophy is a striving for truth rather than nothing.
Within the dialogue we are presented with a number of arguments which connect the soul to eternity. The recollection argument, for example, shows that for us to understand anything at all then we must have been born with a certain predisposition to make sense of things. We can, for instance, recognise things which are similar and things which are different. This is something we couldn’t have possibly learnt, because it is the basis for all learning. These recollected understandings are something like Kant’s transcendental categories in that without such knowledge we could not understand anything at all. However, Kant’s transcendental categories serve to make eternity inaccessible, for the only eternal things of which we can understand are the very things which make temporal existence possible - i.e., space and time. Plato would agree with Kant, up to a point, for he would, I think, say that we could not have a stable vision of the eternal things, but he would broaden our understanding of understanding and say that the eternal things provide the foundation for our understanding. This is obviously a different understanding of understanding to Kant. Kant wonders what is necessary for the world to appear to us as it does - as the movement of things through space and time. Plato wonders what is necessary for us to understand anything at all. Before we ask about the appearance of things we must first ask about how we could even understand one appearance as appearing different to another. Plato is situated to a much greater extent within the everyday world than is Kant. We can get a sense of this by looking about ourselves, and wondering about how we understand things as they are; say, the difference between the door and the table. If we wonder about how the table could appear to us, and not just sink back into a homogenous background, then we are making a distinction between the world as it appears and the world as it is. We are saying that the world as it is, is the world without us, where all things look like everything else. Plato keeps within the world as it presents itself to us; Kant steps outside of this world, sees that it would be an undifferentiated mess, and thereby tells us why we couldn’t know anything about things as they really are.
It is for this reason that in the Phaedo, Socrates says that we must search for eternity using images, much the same way as we can look at the sun in a reflection on water. If we try and look at eternity directly then our soul is blinded. We must maintain the distinctions which are presented to us so as we can understand more fully what is our own understanding of the world. This is to remain within the world as it presents itself to us, and so instead of dissolving our understanding, we seek to deepen it. Socrates gives the example of trying to understand what is the cause of beauty. He says that if someone answers bright colours or shape or something like that, then they have completely missed the mark. They have moved beyond the beautiful in their definition of it. When we try and understand what is beautiful what we are doing is approaching the world differently. We are gaining a deeper appreciation of what is beautiful. We gain this appreciation by moving upwards through an ever deepening understanding of what beauty is. We move upwards through the destruction of images in other words. But this movement also shows our separation from the beautiful itself. As we move closer to an understanding of beauty, we also become aware of our separation from beauty itself. We move closer and further away: we could think of this as the boundaries which establish the breadth of our understanding. In this same way we can search out our soul and eternity.
Following this reasoning, Socrates states that life itself can never admit death (death as understood as annihilation), without it becoming something other than what it is. Life itself is eternal, in other words. Life itself is deathless. In searching out death we cannot completely overcome our own existence. However, philosophy would be impossible if life itself was the only ground to our existence.
Life itself belongs to the class of the unlimited. In the Philebus, Socrates explains the unlimited as that which always seeks to enlarge itself, without ever knowing that it is enlarging. Blind desire would be unlimited, for example. To limit desire we also need to add that which is lifeless: the Ideas. A true account of ourselves would need to encompass, then, an understanding of what is eternally stable. In giving a completely true account of ourselves, we would need to be unchanging, we would be dead, in other words. To move towards a true account of ourselves while we are living, however, would require that we at least recognise the difference between good and bad aspects of ourselves. We would need to be able to understand this recognition as true, and not just some fancy that we ourselves have made up.
The problem is that in sanctifying our vision, in entering into philosophy, it would seem that we are moving towards non-existence: we are giving up the safety of our present understanding. The Phaedo invites us to overcome this fear by entering into the philosophical conversation initiated by Socrates. The fear of philosophy is the same fear as the fear of dying, and the only way to overcome such fear is to enter headlong into the search for death. But we cannot ever complete our search without also dying: the Phaedo ends with Socrates’ death. However, after Socrates’ death, his speech still remains - to be interpreted or appropriated by others.
The drama of the dialogue mirrors what is the philosophical search for death: Phaedo recounts to another person the story of Socrates prophesising about death; this is after Socrates has died, and after he has practised a life of philosophy. Phaedo is, in other words, recounting the philosophical meaning of death (Socrates’ speech), as presented by death (Socrates). Phaedo is a prophet in the sense that he brings the dead back to life. Death is resurrected as speech about philosophical prophecy. We cannot know death itself – that would be like speaking about Socrates as non-existent – but we can speak about death and eternity. This speech is speech about the foundations of philosophy, the foundations of the most comprehensive understanding. And such a speech is prophetic. But it is not direct communion with eternity – as Euthyphro imagines his speech is – rather it is communion through philosophy, which maintains the distinctions between life (temporality) and death (eternity). Prophecy is descriptive, just as Phaedo describes to his companion Socrates’ last conversation, and also as Socrates will describe to his companions the myth of the afterlife. But true prophecy can only be reached by way of philosophy. We can only understand death searching our own lives, and this understanding will invoke the endless cycle of prophecy and reflection.
We cannot fully understand death, but we can get an inkling of eternity because we ourselves can understand, when we reflect on our own knowledge, that it is not a sufficiently eternal description of eternity. But just as we try and understand what the dead Socrates has to say, so death presents itself to us as something that we can understand. Death is not completely dissociated from this existence, but is always the reflection of the foundation to our understanding. The foundation to our understanding is the recognition of what we do not know. What we do not know is not non-existence. In understanding the separation between our understanding and the foundation of our understanding we move towards eternity, and in so doing we understand ourselves more fully. Recognising the foundation of our understanding will always be a prophecy – it is akin to communing with eternity. To fully recognise what we do not know – to give an account of eternity – is to prophesise and hence appropriate eternity, thus making it temporal.
Why isn’t this movement simply circular, how do we know that we are moving towards truth and not some illusion? We return once again to the question of death: is it non-existence? This question cannot be settled in theory, death will always appear as non-existence from observation. Only with the practice of philosophy can our understanding of death be sanctified. Practice, or living one’s life fully aware, saves philosophy from non-existence. Reflecting on this awareness is to abstract from life, to observe life, and so to reinvoke non-existence. A prophetic vision of the foundation of this understanding gives a more comprehensive understanding of eternity: and so the cycle continues. As a vision of the foundation of our most comprehensive understanding, prophecy sanctifies philosophy by bringing to life what appears to be non-existent. This is mirrored in the Phaedo, where Phaedo the narrator speaks about the dead Socrates – he prophesies, in other words – and saves him and philosophy from non-existence.
We can understand why Aristophanes was wary of the philosophers and the prophets – tradition is much more secure, whether it is better is a question which it cannot answer. This blindness of tradition is presented by Plato in the Euthyphro. The prophet who communes directly with what he thinks is eternal misunderstands himself. This misunderstanding can only be rectified with a reflection on death, which is also a reflection on the foundations of philosophy. However, the foundations of philosophy – true prophecy – can only be reached by the practise of philosophy, and to practice philosophy is to search for wisdom through an examination of our own lives. Even if our existence deepens along with our understanding still we wonder whether this is enough to save philosophy from comedy or tragedy.
[1] Husserl, E. (1973) The Idea of Phenomenology (Trans. W.P. Alston & G. Nakhnikian), Martinus Nijhoff, The Hague: p. 46.
