Living on in one's works
On the axis: Death · what outlasts us
Failing a survival of the soul, to live on in what we leave behind, children, a work, a trace in memory: a real victory over death, or a consolation that no longer concerns us once we are gone?
Justification
The does not posit survival, it argues for it, through four linked proofs: the generation of opposites, which presupposes knowledge prior to birth, the soul's affinity with the simple and indestructible intelligible, and finally the essence argument, the soul that carries life within it being unable to admit its contrary. The reasoning rests on the of soul and body: what is simple does not decompose, hence does not perish. Death then ceases to be annihilation and becomes the soul's passage toward the intelligible, and philosophy itself, as detachment from the body, is its anticipated rehearsal.
Those who practise philosophy in the right way are in training for dying.Phaedo, 67e
Phaedo, 64a, 102a-107b · Republic, X, 614a-621d (myth of Er)
Anchors: Plato (Diotima) · Unamuno · Arendt