Plato’s view on death
According to Plato, Socrates didn’t fear death. He stopped fearing death when God ordered him to live the life of a philosopher. “No one knows whether death may not be the greatest of all blessings for a man, yet men fear it as if they knew that it is the greatest of all evils.” He says that this is just as bad as thinking that you’re wise, when you’re actually not. Arguing to the jury that death may not be as bad as people believe, he suggests that death can be a couple of things: Firstly, death can be nothing, and therefore it cannot be harmful. Secondly, death can be a change and a movement of the soul. He imagines himself together with other injustice acquiesced men, with who he can talk and who he can examine. Thirdly, death can be an eternal sleep, what he doesn’t think is bad at all. Hence, Plato doesn’t see death as something harmful or bad. He is not sure
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However, because we don’t know what death is, it isn’t strange that we fear it. People like to have control over things. And when we can’t control something, we fear it. Throughout the years, we took more and more control over nature, for example, building a dam to protect ourselves from the water, but we still cannot control earthquakes, and therefore we fear them.
In addition, the virtue of Plato’s view on the worldly existence is that it is very optimistic. He stresses the importance of education (of the soul), which is a good thing. Also, he wants people to live in harmony with each other. Nevertheless, I’m afraid that people aren’t capable of having so much solidarity by sharing their knowledge with others, after they have escaped the cave. I think that it would result in a group of elite, who have more knowledge than others, and instead of sharing their knowledge, they would keep it to themselves, and inequality will