To Philosophise is to Learn How to Live

To philosophise, Michel de Montaigne famously said, is to learn to die. This is a thought that can be traced back through Cicero to Plato’s dialogues. So in the Phaedo we see Socrates arguing (not very plausibly, incidentally) that death should not be considered a bad thing because it is either a kind of sleep, or else it is a relocation to another world where you can get to hang out and chat with Orpheus, Hesiod, Homer and the gang.

From the very beginning, in other words, Western philosophy has seen death both as a philosophical problem (how do we think about death?), and as a philosophical opportunity (how, either through thinking in the right way about death, or through dying in the right way, might we be elevated to a higher philosophical position?).

But recently I’ve been thinking about the weirdness of the idea that the philosopher is somebody who is particularly good at dying. This is, it increasingly seems to me, a rather strange job-description. And the more I have thought about this, particularly in the light of Chinese philosophy, the more there has seemed to me to be something seriously out-of-kilter here.

In the classic Western philosophical picture that emerges from Socrates to Montaigne and beyond, death is taken as the background against which life unfolds (“our little life is rounded with a sleep”). Thus, if we are really concerned with thinking hard about life (which, we are to presume, is to some extent what philosophy is about), then we have to first think very hard about this background. So, for thinkers from Plato to Heidegger, knowledge of life proceeds from knowledge of death (or, as Heidegger might say, it proceeds from one’s “comportment towards death”). Death is the main issue; and it is only in facing up to this main issue that we really face up to the secondary issue of life. One implication of this kind of thinking is that death can easily take on a greater weight or reality than life — and life can be diminished, made illusory or insignificant. This is something that also happens in Buddhism. Wherever it appears, I’m increasingly sceptical of it.

Turning to Chinese traditions of thought (at least, to non-Buddhist traditions from China), things often look rather different. Here’s Confucius, for example.

季路問事鬼神。子曰：「未能事人，焉能事鬼？」敢問死。曰：「未知生，焉知死？」

Ji Lu asked about serving spirits of the dead and gods. The master said, “You are still not capable of serving human beings, how could you serve spirits?” [Then Ji Lu said] “But dare I ask about death?” Confucius said, “You do not yet know life. How could you know death?”

In Chinese thought, life is the main issue. And if death is a concern for us, its mattering can only be seen against the background of life itself. This is perhaps why, in Edmund Ryden’s translation of the excellent “Key Concepts of Chinese Philosophy” (中國古典哲學概念範疇要論) by Zhang Dainian (張岱年), the character for life, sheng 生, is listed, but not the character for death, si 死.

In the various traditions of Chinese thought, life and death are rarely posed as grand metaphysical problems. Instead, the processes of generation (which is another meaning of sheng 生, the character representing a sprouting plant) and of dying are both seen as a part of the endless transformation of the ten thousand things. To the extent that they are opposed forces, living or generation and dying or dissolution are equally aspects of life itself. And if they exist in opposition, it is an opposition that is fundamentally complementary rather than antagonistic. In the section called ‘Knowledge Wandering in the North’ (Zhi bei you 知北遊), found in the outer chapters of the Zhuangzi, this mutual entanglement of life and death is put like this:

生也死之徒，死也生之始，孰知其紀！人之生，氣之聚也，聚則為生，散則為死。

Life is that which follows death; death is that which begins with life. Who knows how they are interwoven? Human life is the accumulation of vitality: it is accumulated and thus there is generation, it is scattered and thus there is death.

In this picture, death is not a thing. It is not some terrible metaphysical event that we have to face up to if we are to get to grips with life at all. And certainly, it is not something that, if we are to be good philosophers or good sages, we have to learn how to do. Nobody needs to learn how to die. One of the few good things about dying is that it takes no special skill. So to philosophise, or to study the way of the sages, is not to learn how to die. Instead, it is to learn how to deal with a life in which there is endless generation and dissolution, in which there is the perpetual accumulation and dispersal of vitality, in which the ten thousand things (and ourselves, as things amongst things) transform themselves again and again. To philosophise is to learn how to live.

Here it seems fitting to end with a lovely quote from early Qing dynasty philosopher Wang Fuzhi (王夫之), taken from Zhang’s book. The quote comes from Wang’s Outer Commentary on the Book of Changes (周易外傳). It could be read, as Zhang points out, as a riposte to the Buddhist advocates of the unreality of life. It is also perfectly possible to read it as a riposte to Platonists and all others who claim that life is somehow insubstantial. It reads like this:

夫可依者有也，至常者生也。皆无妄而不可謂之妄也… 夫然其常而可依者皆其生而有；其生而有者，非妄而必真。

That which can be depended upon is existence; that which is most constant is life. These things are without unreality, and one cannot call them unreal… And so the things that are constant and can be relied upon, these things are life and existence. Life and existence — these are not unreal, and are necessarily true.