Know how to live or know how to die? Ulysses, Socrates and the Samurai
If death is what opposes life, it is also true that only what lives dies. So that, far from being its opposite, death is rather what the life process ends in and definitively accomplishes. “Set of functions that resist death”, to use the words of doctor Bichat, life is the essence of the living. Nothing is more natural, necessary and ordinary than dying. However, death scandalizes and constitutes an event that never leaves men indifferent. It terrifies some who see nothing in it, but it torments those who disbelieve and dream of an endless life just as much. “Extraordinary order”, said the philosopher Vladimir Jankélévitch, death is, therefore, a scandalous necessity.
It is therefore hardly surprising that it was the focal point of all morals, ancient or modern, sometimes to be sublimated sometimes to be denied, often to be coaxed and even sometimes braved. To live well and to live wisely would thus be to live in a thoughtful relation to death so that knowing how to live would perhaps be nothing other than knowing how to die. To convince ourselves of this, we will first propose here to return to the sources of Western thought, that is to say in Greece, but secondly to operate a decentering and to question the representation of death in a theory ( and an asceticism) little known to Westerners, that of Budô, in other words, the feudal tradition which saw the birth, in Japan, of the order of Samurai warriors.
Braving and accepting death: Achilles and Ulysses
Homeric myths show that men, even before the birth of philosophy, were already preoccupied with questions that modernity would consecrate as existential. Conscious of the inevitability of death, of the precariousness of the order of human affairs, they imagined, through the figure of the hero, a form of excellence, of virtuosity, and at the same time a kind of life, a true askésis, capable of saving them from the despair in which the consciousness of their own finitude had first plunged them. So the hero’s vocation is also to express the dream that everyone carries within himself and inseparably to remind us of the order of our mortal condition.
Not afraid of dying, distinguished by his bravery, the hero pushes to the limit the courage and generosity that characterize him, agreeing to sacrifice himself when necessary. Thus Achilles, knowing that if he kills Hector, he too will lose his life, accepts it and, by exposing his life without reservation, accedes to heroism which presents itself as the acceptance of a death which is not necessarily desired. Because if the hero is constantly threatened, if he puts himself in danger, he is afraid of dying. Heroism, therefore, does not lie in the recklessness of one who does not fear for his life but rather in the ability to overcome this fear nobly. In this, it presents itself as an asceticism, as a transformation of oneself, a perfection which is practiced in the experience of danger and threatening death. It should be noted in this connection that the episode during which Ulysses, in song XI of the Odyssey, proves capable of going down into Hades and back up is not without interest. Because by going down where the dead stay and returning, Ulysses manifests the extraordinary ability to rub shoulders with death and so to speak of escaping from it, as if the hero’s strength were that of frequenting, of experiencing the everyone dreams of being able to escape. The hero’s character here perfectly reflects the nature of human life. Like all living things, man is mortal. But unlike other animals, he knows it. Aware of his finitude, fearful of dying, how can we be surprised that man has developed the representation of an ideal of courage and bravery in the face of death?
Socratic life: a practice of death?
This relationship, so singular to death, finds an intriguing echo in the figure of Socrates or, more precisely, in the portrait painted by Plato in his dialogues. It is in the Phaedo, in fact, that the one who will be condemned to death by the Athenian judges explains that, having trained all his life to die, there is no reason to fear death. Indeed, the exercise of philosophy, as it is conceived, according to Plato, by Socrates, consists, as everyone knows, in saying things as they are, therefore in producing true knowledge. Now, is knowing anything other than producing exact definitions of what we aim to know? And what does producing the definition of justice or even courage? Again, it is no secret that the method of general definitions, both implemented and advocated by Socrates, is nothing other than the method which consists, for example, in gathering the multiplicity of things that we say beautiful under the unity of the essence of beauty. Now, what are the essences if not intellectual beings, which Plato designates by the Greek term of ousia when he wants to highlight the participation (météxis) of beautiful things in the essence of beauty, but which he designates by the term idéa when it rather wants to highlight the transcendence of essences in relation to sentient beings?
Anyway, if the Socratic method of general definitions prefigures what Plato called, the doctrine of essences, it is important to understand that if knowledge is, precisely, to access essences, the method of dialectic will constitute an intellectual exercise operated by the intellect (noûs) aiming at the apprehension of purely intelligible beings (the noèta). By which we see that the philosophical exercise, which is that very of the seizure of the essences, consists in turning away from the sensitive world, to detach itself from it, to rise to the intelligible world. This exercise, which can very well be considered as an asceticism since by turning towards the intelligible, one vivifies the intellect in oneself, is indeed the one by the operation of which one detaches oneself intellectually, psychically, from the bodily reality.
How then to be surprised that Socrates, after having drunk the hemlock and answering Simmias who asked him how he managed to seem, at the time of his imminent death, so calm, emphasized that he had nothing to fear of death? Indeed, practicing philosophy being striving to know, and knowing is knowing the essences, then philosophizing is nothing other than practicing the exercise which consists, in trying intellectually to access the essences, to detach oneself from sensible or material reality. Now, what is death if not the separation of body and soul? By which one sees without difficulty in what the practice of philosophy can be envisaged as an activity which consists, in the sense that we have explained, of dying while alive.
Note further, as Dodds did in The Greeks and the irrational, and Henri Joly in The Platonic Reversal, that the Socratic faculty of dying by the body to “be born in thought” is most often expressed by attitudes of shamanic type, based on the mastery of gymnastic-sophistic techniques of which Plato gives an example at the beginning of the Banquet (175a-b) where we find Socrates, in the hall, motionless and concentrated in his thoughts. This strange faculty of making oneself insensitive to the sensitive thanks to psychosomatic techniques would once again make it possible to conceive of philosophical life as a “mélétè thanathou”, a “practice of death”. There is, therefore, an affinity between the hero and the philosopher, or at least Ulysses and Socrates, who therefore presents himself as a demythified expression of the Homeric hero.
Is it not eloquent, therefore, that death is at the heart of the asceticism of one who is said to be the “patron of philosophy”? And how can we fail to see that wisdom is already defined here in relation to the horizon of death? If philosophy is wisdom and if wisdom is etiquette, then knowing how to live would ultimately be nothing but knowing how to die.
The Samurai way is death!
If living wisely is not only accepting death but embracing it as Socrates embodying wisdom as “méléthè thanatou”, this idea of the “sophia” that the Greeks bequeathed to us no doubt finds an authentic analogy in the Far East, especially in Zen and the Budô tradition.
The samurai is the name given to the Japanese warrior, more traditionally called bushi. One can locate the beginning of the formation of the order of the warriors at the beginning of the eleventh century, the first shogunate (government dominated by the warriors) having been constituted, as for him, in 1192. “Does not gain after having struck but strikes after winning!”. This currency dear to Bushi reflects at least two things. First, the importance given to the psychic dimension of combat and the influence that the spirit can exert on the body that envelops it. Second, the incessant technical development that such an ideal requires. To win and survive, you have to believe in it and to reach this level of self-confidence, you have to work tirelessly. However, it remains to be clarified what constitutes the fundamental motive for the invincibility of the Samurai.
Shusaku Shiba, great swordmaster of the nineteenth century, relates in Hitoyo hidden (The teaching in a night of a secret of the art of saber), the following Zen tale:
A young monk who went to town to deliver a missive to his addressee had to cross a bridge on which stood a Samurai who, to prove his strength, had decided to duel the first hundred men who would appear on the bridge. He had already killed ninety-nine, our young monk was next. The Samurai provoking him, he begged him to let him pass, as his missive was urgent, promising to return then to fight. The Bushi agreed and the little monk, who had never touched a sword in his life, before returning to the bridge, went to find his master to tell him of his despair. He replied: “Indeed, die because there is no chance of victory for you. So you no longer have to fear death. I’m going to teach you the best way to die. You will brandish your saber above your head with your eyes closed and you will wait. When you feel a cold on the top of your head, it will be death. Only then will you bring your arms down. ” The young monk saluted his master and returned to the bridge where the Samurai awaited him. The fight began. The little monk did what his master had taught him, which greatly surprised the Bushi because this attitude reflected no fear. The young monk, motionless, holding his saber in both hands above his head, concentrated on the top of his skull. The warrior said to himself that if his opponent had returned to the bridge, it was probably because he was not an amateur. He became afraid: “I must have a very great warrior in front of me”, he said to himself. “Only saber masters take an attack position from the start of a fight. And in addition, he closes his eyes!”. While the monk, concentrated on the top of his head, had forgotten the Samurai, the latter, convinced that at the slightest movement from him, he would be cut in half, dared not make the slightest gesture. He ends up abandoning the fight by saying “you are a high-level henchman”, which means, as Kenji Tokitsu suggests in the book cited in note 3, “I cannot defeat you without risking my life”.
What does this tale teach us? First, that if the Bushi has “thrown in the towel”, it is because, as a high-level warrior, he has guessed the state of mind of his opponent, that is to say, his determination to dying, an obstacle which he could not overcome at his level. Second, that if the little monk survived, it was because he had agreed to die and that, during the fight, he was already living his death. Force to live, faculty to detach oneself from life and therefore from oneself, acceptance of death, thus define wisdom, that is to say, an art of living.
So it is not surprising that the Samurai ethics, as explained by the Japanese writer Yukio Mishima, constitutes an authentic philosophy of death and defines, in fact, a kind of life in which to live well is basically only knowing how to die, as evidenced by the Hagakuré. This work, which contains the teachings of the Samurai who became a priest Jocho Yamamoto, gathered and put in order by his disciple Tsuramoto Tashiro. In the book I, we can read: “I discovered that the way of the Samurai is death. If you have to choose between death and life, choose death without hesitation”.Later, in Book III, Yamamoto adds: “We must start each day with a meditation gathered in which we will represent our last hour and the various possible ways of dying”.
At the same time (around 1700), one will also find in the Budo Sho Shin Shu (Fundamental thought of the way of the warrior) by Daïdoji Yuzan, a work whose influenced greatly Japan until the end of the World War II, the following exhortation: “The thought of death is the first thing that the bushi must have in mind, day and night, from the feast of January 1 until December 31”. Samurai ethics, founding the invincibility of the warrior, advocates the integration of the concept of death, so that “among the Bushis, the time of death, as Kenji Tokitsu aptly emphasizes, “is ahead of itself”. Because he lives the time of his death before “really” dying, the warrior in combat, detached from his life, having accepted to die, makes himself invincible by this determination itself. So his strength is eminently psychic, not that he can dispense with intense physical training, but because the acceptance of death can only be explained by the exercise of the will to renounce life. It is, therefore, detachment, as we have already indicated, detachment from oneself, which constitutes the exercise and the object of the wisdom of the Samurai.
Unlike Achilles and Ulysses, the Samurai, therefore, has the ability to overcome the fear of death to which the majority of men succumb. He is distinguished from ordinary people by his iron will, forged in the mental effort to live detached from life. We find this state of mind of the Samurai, during the Second World War, among the suicide bombers who aroused so much disbelief in Western societies who believed they could only recognize a confession of fanatic nationalism. However, these Kamikazes are indeed the contemporary expression, here dramatic, of this culture of Japanese warriors. Fighters who set off to attack American buildings in “bombers” with insufficient fuel to ensure their return, these men who sacrificed their lives could only do so because they had accepted their death. In this, they were considered to be quite exceptional, as evidenced by their name. The word “Kamikaze” literally means the wind (Kaze) of the gods (kami). So these fighters, like the Homeric heroes, would draw their strength from the gods and have something divine that would give them this heroic power. Having oriented their whole life towards death, striving most intensely not to desire anything else, repressing their thirst for life, they worked, as samurai ethics recommends, to mentally remove the interval from time that separated them from their death.
It is, therefore, possible, at the end of this text, to emphasize that, beyond the singular case of the Kamikaze, the two attitudes of the hero and the Samurai are defined as two asceticism taking death as its object, centered around the idea according to which knowing how to live and knowing how to die merge to constitute wisdom, an exceptional virtue, entirely absorbed in detachment, self-forgetfulness that constitutes the very exercise of the will, renouncing to life. If we are to take note of the specificity of Socratic asceticism, we can, therefore, add to the above that it is, in fact, not at all fortuitous that death is at the heart of the concerns of the pioneers of the philosophy. Because it is precisely both the point of truth and the point of the blindness of human life. Will Pascal basically say something else in his Theory of Entertainment and his painting of the misfortune of the human condition? And how, moreover, be surprised if the man is the living who thinks about life?
