DEATH IS AN ADVISOR

Abstract

Living under Western cultural influence generally circumscribes our attitudes and actions according to the profiles of the past. Thus, the influences received from philosophy (to name one example) regarding the enigma of Death, under a line of contrast between two conceptions: that of Socrates, on the one hand, and that of Plato, on the other (notwithstanding the coherence between the Master and the Student, perhaps never equaled in the course of history), we see that the former asks multiple questions: What is death? "I don't know, and I don't care; what matters is life." For Socrates, the soul on Earth matters, but there is no belief in the immortality of the Soul. His position is one of autarchy (live well, die well), whereas for Plato, Soul and Body are separate; the soul is spirit and the body is matter, the soul is immortal; Plato thinks about the afterlife, more than about being here (which Socrates does not).