philosophers, artists, saints

      More profoundly feeling people have at all times felt sympathy for the animals because they suffer from life and yet do not possess the power to turn the thorn of suffering against itself and to under­stand their existence metaphysically; one is, indeed, profoundly indignant at the sight of senseless suffering. That is why there has arisen in more than one part of the earth the supposition that the bodies of animals contain the guilt-laden souls of men, so that this suffering which at first sight arouses indignation on account of its senselessness acquires meaning and significance as punishment and atonement before the seat of eternal justice. And it is, truly, a harsh punishment thus to live as an animal, beset by hunger and desire yet incapable of any kind of reflection on the nature of this life; and no harder fate can be thought of than that of the beast of prey pursued through the wilderness by the most gnawing torment, rarely satisfied and even then in such a way that satisfaction is purchased only with the pain of lascerating combat with other animals or through inor­dinate greed and nauseating satiety. To hang on to life madly and blindly, with no higher aim than to hang on to it; not to know that or why one is being so heavily punished but, with the stupidity of a fear­ful desire, to thirst after precisely this punishment as though after happiness – that is what it means to be an animal; and if all nature presses towards man, it thereby intimates that man is necessary for the redemption of nature from the curse of the life of the animal, and that in him existence at last holds up before itself a mirror in which life appears no longer senseless but in its metaphysical significance. Yet let us reflect: where does the animal cease, where does man begin? – man, who is nature's sole concern! As long as anyone desires life as he desires happiness he has not yet raised his eyes above the horizon of the animal, for he only desires more con­sciously what the animal seeks through blind impulse. But that is what we all do for the greater part of our lives: usually we fail to emerge out of animality, we ourselves are the animals whose suffering seems to be senseless.

      But there are moments when we realize this : then the clouds are rent asunder, and we see that, in common with all nature, we are pressing towards man as towards something that stands high above us. In this sudden illumination we gaze around us and behind us with a shudder: we behold the more subtle beasts of prey and there we are in the midst of them. The tremendous coming and going of men on the great wilderness of the earth, their founding of cities and states, their wars, their restless assembling and scattering again, their confused mingling, mutual imitation, mutual outwitting and downtreading, their wailing in distress, their howls of joy in victory – all this is a con­tinuation of animality: as though man was to be deliberately retro­gressed and defrauded of his metaphysical disposition, indeed as though nature, after having desired and worked at man for so long, now drew back from him in fear and preferred to return to the unconsciousness of instinct. Nature needs knowledge and it is terrified of the knowledge it has need of; and so the flame flickers restlessly back and forth as though afraid of itself and seizes upon a thousand things before it seizes upon that on account of which nature needs knowledge at all. In individual moments we all know how the most elaborate arrangements of our life are made only so as to flee from the tasks we actually ought to be performing, how we would like to hide our head somewhere as though our hundred­ eyed conscience could not find us out there, how we hasten to give our heart to the state, to money-making, to sociability or science merely so as no longer to possess it ourselves, how we labour at our daily work more ardently and thoughtlessly than is necessary to sus­tain our life because to us it is even more necessary not to have leisure to stop and think. Haste is universal because everyone is in flight from himself; universal too is the shy concealment of this haste because everyone wants to seem content and would like to deceive more sharp-eyed observers as to the wretchedness he feels; and also universal is the need for new tinkling word-bells to hang upon life and so bestow upon it an air of noisy festivity. Everyone is familiar with the strange condition in which unpleasant memories suddenly assert themselves and we then make great efforts, through vehement noise and gestures, to banish them from our minds: but the noise and gestures which are going on everywhere reveal that we are all in such a condition all the time, that we live in fear of memory and of turning inward. But what is it that assails us so frequently, what is the gnat that will not let us sleep? There are spirits all around us, every moment of our life wants to say something to us, but we refuse to listen to these spirit-voices. We are afraid that when we are alone and quiet something will be whispered into our ear, and so we hate quietness and deafen ourselves with sociability.
       Now and again, as already said, we realize all this, and are amazed at all this vertiginous fear and haste and at the whole dreamlike con­dition in which we live, which seems to have a horror of awakening and dreams the more vividly and restlessly the closer it is to this awakening. But we feel at the same time that we are too weak to endure those moments of profoundest contemplation for very long and that we are not the mankind towards which all nature presses for its redemption: it is already much that we should raise our head above the water at all, even if only a little, and observe what stream it is in which we are so deeply immersed. And even this momentary emerging and awakening is not achieved through our own power, we have to be lifted up – and who are they who lift us? 

Friedrich Nietzsche, Schopenhauer as Educator §5

Heel of a shoe.

"How well-made that is! What a skillful workman! What a brave soldier!" That is where our inclinations come from, and our choice of careers. "What a lot that man drinks! How little that man drinks!" That is what makes people temperate or drunkards, soldiers, cowards, etc.

Pascal, Pensées 117 (1987: 38)

money is the most reliable thing in the world

One day, with the first sunshine and the floods of early spring, the father, taking his son with him, set out in a little cart, drawn by a chestnut piebald nag, of the kind known among horse-dealers as "magpies"; it was driven by a little hunchback, the progenitor of the only serf family owned by Chichikov's father, who performed almost all the duties in the house. They drove with the "magpie" for over a day and a half. They spent a night on the road, crossed a river, had their meals of cold pie and roast mutton, and reached the town only on the morning of the third day. The streets of the town dazzled the boy with their unexpected splendour, making him gape for several minutes. Then the "magpie" plunged with the cart into a big hole at the entrance of a narrow lane running downhill and thick with mud; it took the "magpie" a long time to get out of it; after struggling with all her might to wade through the mud, urged on by the hunchback and by the master himself, she finally succeeded in dragging them out into a little yard standing on the slope of the hill. Two flowering apple-trees grew in front of the little old house, covered with shingle and with one narrow opaque window, and there was a small garden at the back. Here lived a relative of theirs, a wizened old woman who still went to market every morning, drying her stockings on the samovar afterwards. She patted the boy on the cheek and admired his plumpness. There he was to stay and go every day to the town school.
  After spending a night there, his father set off home again next morning. No tears were shed by his father at parting. He was given fifty copecks in copper coins for pocket money and to buy sweets and, was was far more important, this wise admonition: "Mind, Pavlusha, do your lessons. Don't play the fool and get into mischief. Above all, do your best to please your teachers and superiors. If you please your chief, you will be all right and you will get ahead of everyone, even if you turn out to be a bad scholar, and even if God has given you no talent. Do not make friends with your classmates. They will teach you no good. But if you do make friends with them, play with those who are better off and might be useful to you. Don't entertain or treat anyone, but behave in such a way that you may be treated by others and, above all, take care and save your pennies: money is the most reliable thing in the world. A classmate or friend may cheat you and be the first to leave you in the lurch when you're in trouble, but money will never let you down whatever trouble you may be in. With money in your pocket you can do anything and money will see you through everything." Having delivered himself of these precepts, the father parted from his son and dragged himself off home again on his "magpie" and from that day his son never set eyes on him again, but his words and precepts sank deeply into his mind.

Gogol, Dead Souls (1961: 235-236)

we intend

... the capacity to impose functions on natural phenomena [is] remarkable, but equally remarkable is the fact that functions may be imposed quite unconsciously, and the functions once imposed are often—so to speak—invisble. So, for example, money may simply have evolved without anyone ever thinking, "We are now imposing a new function to these objects"; and once money has evolved, people may use money to buy and sell without thinking about the logical structure of imposed function. However, for all cases of agentive function, someone must be capable of understanding what the thing is for, or the function could never be assigned. At least some of the participants in the system of exchange must understand, consciously or unconsciously, that money is to buy things with, screwdrivers are for driving screws, and so forth. If we assign a function that is totally apart from human intentions, it would have to fall in the category of nonagentive functions. Thus suppose someone says that the intended agentive function of money is to serve as a medium of exchange and a store of value, but money also serves the hidden, secret, unintended function of maintaining the system of power relationships in society. The first claim is about the intentionality of agentive function. The second claim is about nonagentive function. To see this, simply ask yourself what facts in the world would make each claim true. The first claim is made true by the intentionality with which agents use objects as money. They use it for the purpose of buying, selling, and storing value. The second claim, like the claim that the heart functions to pump blood, would be true if and only if there is a set of unintended causal relations and these serve some teleology, even if it is not a teleology shared by the speaker.

... What is the relation between singular and collective intentionality, between, for example, the facts described by "I intend" and "We intend"? Most efforts I have seen to answer this question try to reduce "We intentionality" to "I intentionality" plus something else, usually mutual beliefs. The idea is that I intend to do it in the belief that you also intend to do it; and you intend to do it in the belief that you also intend to do it; and you intend to do it in the belief that I also intend to do it. And each believes that the other has these beliefs, and has these beliefs about these beliefs . . . etc., in a potentially infinite hierarchy of beliefs. "I believe that you believe that I believe that you believe that I believe. . . .," and so on. In my view all these efforts to reduce collective intentionality to individual intentionality fail. Collective intentionality is a biologically primitive phenomenon that cannot be reduced to or eliminated in favor of something else. Every attempt at reducing "We intentionality" to "I intentionality" that I have seen is subject to counterexamples.
  There is a deep reason why collective intentionality cannot be reduced to individual intentionality. The problem with believing that you believe that I believe, etc., and you believing that I believe that you believe, etc., is that it does not add up to a sense of collectivity. No set of "I Consciousnesses," even supplemented with beliefs, adds up to a "We Consciousness." The crucial element in collective intentionality is a sense of doing (wanting, believing, etc.) something together, and the individual intentionality that each person has is derived from the collective intentionality that they share. Thus, to go back to the earlier example of the football game, I do indeed have a singular intention to block the defensive end, but I have that intention only as part of our collective intention to execute a pass play.
  We can see these differences quite starkly if we contrast the case where there is genuine cooperative behavior with the case where, so to speak, by accident two people happen to find that their behavior is synchronized. There is a big difference between two violinists playing in an orchestra, on the one hand, and on the other hand, discovering, while I am practicing my part, that someone in the next room is practicing her part, and thus discovering that, by chance, we are playing the same piece in a synchronized fashion.
  Why are so many philosophers convinced that collective intentionality must be reducible to individual intentionality? Why are they unwilling to recognize collective intentionality as a primitive phenomenon? I believe the reason is that they accept an argument that looks appealing but is fallacious. The argument is that because all intentionality exists in the heads of individual human beings, the form of that intentionality can make reference only to the individuals in whose heads it exists. So it has seemed that anybody who recognizes collective intentionality as a primitive form of mental life must be committed to the idea that there exists some Hegelian world spirit, a collective consciousness, or something equally implausible. The requirements of methodological individualism seem to force us to reduce collective intentionality to individual intentionality. It has seemed, in short, that we have to choose between reductionism, on the one hand, or a super mind floating over the individual minds, on the other. I want to claim, on the contrary, that the argument contains a fallacy and that the dilemma is a false one. It is indeed the case that all my mental life is inside my brain, and all your mental life is inside your brain, and so on for everybody else. But it does not follow from that that all my mental life must be expressed in the form of a singular noun phrase referring to me. The form that my collective intentionality can take is simply "we intend," "we are doing so-and-so," and the like. In such cases, I intend only as part of our intending. The intentionality that exists in each individual has the form "we intend."

John Searle, The Construction of Social Reality (1995: 21-26)

unmingled with any sadness

It is quite commonplace for moralists to warn people against supposing that sensual pleasure, fame, and money are genuine or unequivocal goods. It is worth looking in some detail, however, at the particular critique of these attractions that Spinoza offers. Of sensual pleasure he says this: "By sensual pleasure the mind is enthralled to the extent of quiescence, as if the supreme good were actually attained, so that it is quite incapable of thinking of any other object; when such pleasure has been gratified it is followed by extreme melancholy, whereby the mind, though not enthralled, is disturbed and dulled." Spinoza is clearly not talking about the sort of pleasure one gets from a brisk walk in the country. That is not the sort of activity which enthralls us to the point of quiescence or whose appeal drives out all the thoughts of other things. Nor is it common, or even understandable, that an activity of that sort should be followed by melancholy, much less by "extreme melancholy." A bit further on Spinoza asserts that sensual pleasure is followed not merely by melancholy but by repentance. This only confirms the strong impression that, whether or not he is clear about this himself, Spinoza is describing sexual pleasure, which he evidently finds extremely enticing but which he also finds to be mixed characteristically with unpleasant experiences of depression and guilt.
  Spinoza's initial point about money and fame is a somewhat different one. It is that there is no limit to how much of those things people who care about them desire; indeed, the more people have of them the more they tend to want. The pursuit of sensual pleasure is limited by our susceptibility to fatigue or to the exhaustion of our capacity for engaging in, or for enjoying, whatever activity is in question. But no limitation of this kind is inherent in the pursuit of money or the pursuit of fame, which are by nature endless and uncompleteable and which will continue as long as they are not limited by something outside themselves—some goal which defines how much money or how much fame is enough. Spinoza finds that these goods cannot of themselves bring satisfaction, because there is no particular amount of them which is inherently satisfying. Moreover, pursuing either of them is inevitably competitive and leads inescapably to undesirable experiences, such as those of envy, hatred, fear, and disappointment. People who are committed to the pursuit of conventional goods, Spinoza warns, expose themselves to extremes of contradictory emotion. They swing from intense pleasure to feelings of melancholy and guilt; and their satisfactions are often mixed with frustration when they discover that attaining what they desire serves only to arouse a further desire for more than they already have.
  As Spinoza elaborates these points, the quality and tone of his account undergo a conspicuous change. The conventional goods, he says, are not only unreliable and unsatisfying. They are actually evil and extremely dangerous to us; and anyone who devotes himself to them is "in a state of great peril." As he goes on, Spinoza seems to be more and more carried away. The peril to which he refers turns out to be not just a danger of moral corruption of of misery or of some sort of deterioration of the soul. He insists that it is literally a peril of death. And then it becomes not only a peril but even a certainty of death! Conventional goods often cause the deaths of those who possess them, Spinoza declares, and they always cause the deaths of those who are possessed by them. The context makes it unmistakably clear, by the way, that these references to death are not metaphorical. Spinoza's statements really are just as wild as they seem.
  Spinoza never completed the Treatise on the Improvement of the Understanding. He clearly had some notion of completing it, however, since he made a number of notes in the margin of his manuscript concerning changes to be made in a subsequent version which he never actually wrote. One of those notes occurs at the point where he makes the remarkable—indeed, incredible—claim that giving in to or allowing oneself to be possessed by desires for sensual pleasure, money, or fame brings certain death. His note to himself reads: "These considerations should be set forth more precisely." Indeed! Evidently he became aware of the exaggeration into which he had permitted himself to be swept, caught himself up short in his marginal admonition to himself, and intended one day to give a more measured and less fantasy-ridden account of his subject.
  ... In discussing desires for money and fame, Spinoza attributes much of the unsatisfactory quality of these objects as ends in themselves to the fact that they are necessarily scarce. Since there cannot be enough of them to satisfy all possible desires, the satisfaction of one person's desires diminishes the chances of satisfaction for others. Those who desire money or fame are therefore inevitably in competition with others who are also ambitious to acquire them. It is the inevitability of competition which leads Spinoza to regard the value of attaining these goods as inextricably compromised by the evils of hatred, envy, fear of loss, and other disturbances of the mind.
  ... What is the cure for all this? How are we to avoid these disturbances of the mind, which obstruct and interrupt the sustained serenity and joy which Spinoza seeks? The secret, he declares, is to care deeply only for what is eternal and infinite—in other words, for what is neither transitory or scarce. The enjoyment of something of that kind will be, he assures us, unmingled with any sadness; no contrary pain will be inherent in the pleasure it brings. Now, it is pretty clear that being eternal and infinite is not really enough. After all, the number six is eternal; and even if we add all the other positive integers, so that we get an object that is not only eternal but infinite as well, this hardly solves the problem of how to achieve perfect happiness.
  Of course Spinoza has something more particular in mind, which comes out when he begins to describe the ideal condition of human life. Here is the paragraph in which his central claim emerges:
All things which come to pass, come to pass according to the eternal order and fixed laws of Nature. However, human weakness cannot attain to this order in its own thought, but meanwhile man conceives a human character much more stable than his own, and sees that there is no reason why he should not himself acquire such a character ... What that character is we shall show in due time, namely that it is the knowledge of the union existing between the mind and the whole of nature.
  It is clear enough what eternal and infinite object it is that Spinoza identifies in this passage as capable of playing a fundamental role in the achievement of human happiness. It is "the eternal order and fixed laws of Nature." But the observation Spinoza makes next is sometimes misunderstood. After referring to the eternal order and fixed laws of Nature, he observes that we are too weak to attain this order in our own thoughts. Now this has been construed by some readers as a lament over our inability to arrive at a totally comprehensive knowledge of Nature ... we are simply not intelligent enough to grasp the eternal order in all its details.
  Spinoza himself makes it rather clear, however, that his attention is not focused primarily on our intellectual limitations. After alluding to human weakness and to the incapacity it entails, he declares that "man conceives a human character much more stable than his own," and that this conception of a more stable character provides the ideal goal toward which human endeavor must strive. The ideal is not formulated in terms of intelligence or of knowledge or of understanding, but as a matter of stability. In other words, what we conceive as the ideal character for ourselves is not one distinguished primarily by greater knowledge than we possess, but one which emulates the characteristics which Spinoza has just been ascribing to Nature—namely, order and fixity or, to use the his word, stability. Our aim is to be rid of the disturbances which unbalance our condition, interrupt the evenness of our thoughts and feelings, and make us suffer passively the effects upon us of forces with which we do not identify and which we experience as alien to ourselves.
  How does Spinoza imagine this stability can be achieved? There, of course, is where knowledge comes in. We achieve stability by understanding "the union existing between the mind and the whole of nature"—that is, by recognizing ourselves as products of forces which are generated systematically and in a lawful manner according to the fixed nature of the world, and by understanding that what goes on within us is by no means random or unintelligible but that it is (like everything else that happens) a necessary consequence of the fundamental substance and structure of the universe. The more we come to see the events of our own lives—and especially the events of our minds—as manifestations of an eternal and fixed order of natural law and natural necessity, the more intelligible they become to us and the less we are beset by emotions which breach and undermine the order of our nature and the stability of our existence. This reduces our sense that the power of the universe is alien to us and that we are merely passive with respect to it.

Harry Frankfurt, Necessity, Volition, and Love (1999:48-52)

such keen pleasure

They had reached the gap between the two clumps of red-hot pokers, and there was the Lighthouse again, but she would not let herself look at it. Had she known that he was looking at her, she thought, she would not have let herself sit there, thinking. She disliked anything that reminded her that she had been sitting thinking. So she looked over her shoulder, at the town. The lights were rippling and running as if they were drops of silver water held firm in a wind. And all the poverty, all the suffering had turned to that, Mrs Ramsay thought. The lights of the town and of the harbour and of the boats seemed like a phantom net floating there to mark something which had sunk. Well, if he could not share her thoughts, Mr Ramsay said to himself, he would be off, then, on his own. He wanted to go on thinking, telling himself the story of how Hume was stuck in a bog; he wanted to laugh. But first it was nonsense to be anxious about Andrew. When he was Andrew's age he used to walk about the country all day long, with nothing but a biscuit in his pocket and nobody bothered about him, or thought that he had fallen over a cliff. He said aloud he thought he would be off for a day's walk if the weather held. He had had enough of Bankes and of Carmichael. He would like a little solitude. Yes, she said. It annoyed him that she did not protest. She knew that he would never do it. He was too old now to walk all day long with a biscuit in his pocket. She worried about the boys, but not about him. Years ago, before he had married, he thought, looking across the bay, as they stood between the clumps of red-hot pokers, he had walked all day. He had made a meal off bread and cheese in a public house. He had worked ten hours at a stretch; an old woman just popped her head in now and again and saw to the fire. That was the country he liked best, over there; those sandhills dwindling away into darkness. One could walk all day without meeting a soul. There was not a house scarcely, not a village for miles on end. One could worry things out alone. There were little sandy beaches where no one had been since the beginning of time. The seals sat up and looked at you. It sometimes seemed to him that in a little house out there, alone—he broke off, sighing. He had no right. The father of eight children—he reminded himself. And he would have been a beast and a cur to wish a single thing altered. Andrew would be a better man than he had been. Prue would be a beauty, her mother said. They would stem the flood a bit. That was a good bit of work on the whole—his eight children. They showed he did not damn the poor little universe entirely, for on an evening like this, he thought, looking at the land dwindling away, the little island seemed pathetically small, half swallowed up in the sea.
  'Poor little place,' he murmured with a sigh.
  She heard him. He said the most melancholy things, but she noticed that directly he had said them he always seemed more cheerful than usual. All this phrase-making was a game, she thought, for if she had said half what he said, she would have blown her brains out by now.
  It annoyed her, this phrase-making, and she said to him, in a matter-of-fact way, that it was a perfectly lovely evening. And what was he groaning about, she asked, half laughing, half complaining, for she guessed what he was thinking—he would have written better books if he had not married.
  He was not complaining, he said. She knew that he did not complain. She knew that he had nothing whatever to complain of. And he seized her hand and raised it to his lips and kissed it with an intensity that brought the tears to her eyes, and quickly he dropped it.
  They turned away from the view and began to walk up the path where the silver-green spear-like plants grew, arm in arm. His arm was almost like a young man's arm, Mrs Ramsay thought, thin and hard, and she thought with delight how strong he still was, though he was over sixty, and how untamed and optimistic, and how strange it was that being convinced, as he was, of all sorts of horrors, seemed not to depress him, but to cheer him. Was it not odd, she reflected? Indeed he seemed to her sometimes made differently from other people, born blind, deaf, and dumb, to the ordinary things, but to the extraordinary things, with an eye like an eagle's. His understanding often astonished her. But did he notice the flowers? No. Did he notice the view? No. Did he even notice his own daughter's beauty, or whether there was pudding on his plate or roast beef? He would sit at table with them like a person in a dream. And his habit of talking aloud, or saying poetry aloud, was growing on him, she was afraid for sometimes it was awkward—

Best and brightest, come away!

poor Miss Giddings, when he shouted that at her, almost jumped out of her skin. But then, Mrs Ramsay, though instantly taking his side against all the silly Giddingses in the world, then, she thought, intimating by a little pressure on his arm that he walked uphill too fast for her, and she must stop for a moment to see whether those were fresh mole-hills on the bank, then, she thought, stooping, down to look, a great mind like his must be different in every way from ours. All the great men she had ever known, she thought, deciding that a rabbit must have got in, were like that, and it was good for young men (though the atmosphere of lecture-rooms was stuffy and depressing to her beyond endurance almost) simply to hear him, simply to look at him. But without shooting rabbits, how was one to keep them down? she wondered. It might be a rabbit; it might be a mole. Some creature anyhow was ruining her Evening Primroses. And looking up, she saw above the thin trees the first pulse of the full-throbbing star, and wanted to make her husband look at it; for the sight gave her such keen pleasure. But she stopped herself. He never looked at things. If he did, all he would say would be, Poor little world, with one of his sighs.
  At that moment, he said, "Very fine," to please her, and pretended to admire the flowers. But she knew quite well that he did not admire them, or even realize that they were there. It was only to please her ...

Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse (1973: 79-83)

his hour was in sight

A secret hoard of indifference—like a thick cake a fond old nurse might have slipped into his first school outfit—came to his aid and helped to reconcile him to sacrifice; since at the best he was too ill for aught but that arduous game. As he said to himself, there was really nothing he had wanted very much to do, so that he had at least not renounced the field of valour. At present, however, the fragrance of forbidden fruit seemed occasionally to float past him and remind him that the finest of pleasures is the rush of action. Living as he now lived was like reading a good book in a poor translation—a meagre entertainment for a young man who felt that he might have been an excellent linguist. He had good winters and poor winters, and while the former lasted he was sometimes the sport of a vision of virtual recovery. But this vision was dispelled some three years before the occurrence of the incidents with which this history opens: he had on that occasion remained later than usual in England and had been overtaken by bad weather before reaching Algiers. He arrived more dead than alive and lay there for several weeks between life and death. His convalescence was a miracle, but the first use he made of it was to assure himself that such miracles happened but once. He said to himself that his hour was in sight and that it behoved him to keep his eyes upon it, yet that it was also open to him to spend the interval as agreeably as might be consistent with such a preoccupation. With the prospect of losing them the simple use of his faculties became an exquisite pleasure; it seemed to him the joys of contemplation had never been sounded. He was far from the time when he had found it hard that he should be obliged to give up the idea of distinguishing himself; an idea none the less importunate for being vague and none the less delightful for having had to struggle in the same breast with bursts of inspiring self-criticism. His friends at present judged him more cheerful, and attributed it to a theory, over which they shook their heads knowingly, that he would recover his health. His serenity was but the array of wild flowers niched in his ruin.

Henry James, The Portrait of a Lady (1976: 40-41)

you can live and die at peace

True, we men are assailed by grief in our lives, and we lament. But in the end lamentation must cease, giving way to peace and acceptance of our lot. Socrates sets the great example: where consuming sorrow seems in place, there springs the great, loving peace which opens the soul. Death has lost its meaning. It is not veiled over, but the authentic life is not a life toward death; it is a life toward the good.
 While Socrates, in his last moments, already seems far away from life, still, he is lovingly aware of every little human reality, such as the jailer's kind attentiveness. He has a thought for the proprieties: "Perhaps it will be well to bathe before drinking the poison, and so spare the women the trouble of washing my body."
 All pathos vanishes amid jests and such attention to practical matters. These betoken peace of mind. Democritus, who remained more on the surface of things, believed that to achieve peace of mind it sufficed to live with moderation and stick to the tasks that are within your capacities. He did not know the inner upheavals which once illuminated gave Socrates a deeper, wiser peace of mind. What made Socrates free was that in nonknowledge he had certainty of the goal toward which he had undertaken the venture of his whole life and now his death.
 The Phaedo, along with the Apology and the Crito, is among the few irreplaceable documents of mankind...
 The apparently cool equanimity of this attitude is, however, deceptive. Actually, we cannot read these dialogues without becoming engulfed by deep emotion which affects also our thinking. Here we find an imperative without fanaticism, the highest aspiration without ethical dogma. Keep yourself open for the one absolute. Until you achieve it, do not throw yourself away, for in it you can live and die at peace.

Karl Jaspers, Socrates, Buddha, Confucius, Jesus (1962: 15)