That to Philosophise is to Learn to Die

Cicero says that to philosophise is nothing else but to prepare for death. This is because study and contemplation do, in some measure, withdraw our souls from us, and employ them separately from the body — which is a kind of apprenticeship and resemblance to death. Or perhaps it is for another reason: all the wisdom and reasoning in the world must ultimately come to this one point — to teach us not to be afraid of dying. Either our reason mocks us, or it ought to have no other aim than to make us content with what cannot be avoided.

If we have not yet learned how to live, how is it that we know how to die? And yet we have more practice at dying than we think. Every night of dreamless sleep is a small rehearsal; every hour of unconsciousness or illness; every moment when we were not aware of ourselves. We have been absent before and returned. Death is only an absence from which there is no return, but the absence itself should not be strange to us.

“Let us learn to stand firm, and to fight death; and to begin to deprive death of the greatest advantage it has over us, let us deprive it entirely of the power to frighten us. Let us frequent it, be used to it; let us have nothing so often in our thoughts as death.”

The philosophers who recommend this exercise do not mean, I think, that we should spend our lives in gloom, tormented by the prospect of the end. They mean the opposite. The man who has thought clearly about death and accepted it — not resigned himself grudgingly, but genuinely come to terms with the fact of it — is the man most free to live. He is not spending half his life in flight from the end of it.

The peasant and the philosopher both die. But the peasant, who has never thought about it, arrives at the threshold without preparation and is terrified. The philosopher, if philosophy has done its work, arrives as at a place he has visited many times in imagination — not without gravity, but without the desperate, futile resistance of one who has refused until the last possible moment to acknowledge where life was always tending.