Breakfast with Socrates by Robert Rowland Smith

Start with waking up: What does it really mean to be awake? How do we know we're not still dreaming? Descartes argues that if you're able to doubt whether you're awake, you are at least thinking, and so you probably exist - no small achievement for first thing in the morning. From waking up in the morning through traveling to work, shopping, eating, going to a party, falling asleep, and dreaming, Smith connects our most mundane habits to the wider world of ideas. Former Oxford Philosophy Fellow Robert Rowland Smith whisks you through an ordinary day with history's most extraordinary thinkers, explaining what they might have to say about your routine. Nevertheless, the forgetting of death is precisely that which allows life to go on, to fulfil itself.Have breakfast with Socrates, go to work with Nietzsche, head to the gym with Foucault, then have sex with Ovid (or Simone de Beauvoir).

Should we therefore just forget about it? Pascal thought this was an equally obtuse approach to knowing one will die. But spending one's life preparing for its end might strike some as disproportionate. According to Montaigne, it's philosophy that can help, because philosophy teaches us how to die. The question then - and this is the 'existentialist' question par excellence - is how to live in the knowledge of our mortality. If we weren't going to die we couldn't live, which means that - strange as it may sound - death operates as a generator of life. In a paradoxical sense, then, it's death that gives us life. Besides, as Heidegger also stressed, death can happen at any time, so to think of it as a distant end is to mistake an essential imminence that can be activated at random.īut just as death is the counterpart of life, so life is the counterpart of death. So let's not think of death as a destination at the end of life, but rather reconceive it as the very condition under which life is lived. We can only 'be' to the extent that our being inclines towards death. We can live in the moment for all of our lives only to discover that one such moment will be our very last.ĭeath is not only inevitable, like a destination that we will all one day arrive at, but, as Heidegger argued, already within us. Because living in the now keeps our attention trained on the present, we don't look forward towards the end, and so can come to believe that the end doesn't exist. It suggests that there are ways that we, us mortal human beings, might be able to cheat death: cheat it by living in the now.

The phrase 'the immortal now' contains a tantalising promise.

Breakfast with Socrates by Robert Rowland Smith