How Does Socrates View The Fear Of Death

Socrates’s view of the fear of death is in line with many key points in his philosophy that being what does one truly know about a topic. Socrates does not know what happens after death admitting this to the jurymen that vote for him it could be like a dreamless sleep, never aware only silent, or it could be the touted afterlife that many have spoken about. He just doesn’t know what awaits him only that he has ideas and both or neither could turn out to be true. This concept is key to his view of the fear of death as everyone is aware of death but no one actually knows what it is. It’s that idea of not knowing what it truly is that makes Socrates believe the fear of death is irrational. It makes no sense to him to be afraid of something that
Death is a natural process that everything that is alive goes through and is destined to happen to the living from the moment of birth. That alone is reason enough not to fear it but to fear it because you have made it into this horrible process that is somehow bad for you is irrational. There is only one fact of death that holds true and that is that death is not life. So how is it possible to understand a subject that you are not experiencing or have ever experienced. A person does not experience death until the time for them to die has come, the act of describing it or understanding it before then is the creation of a false conclusion based on no evidence or knowledge. It is a conclusion reached by a leap in logic that by not understanding it that somehow makes it bad, which doesn’t follow because not understanding means a person cannot properly make a decision on it for a lack of knowledge. This means that a person judgement must wait until they do understand it to make a
The results of death could be a blessing but death insofar as it being a blessing is disagreeable as it is the only absolute end people know. He opposed the idea that an end to his public practice of philosophy was worth his life meaning he rather die than have that ability taken away from him. It was just as integral to him as his life because it was how he lived his life that by not doing so would be the same as not living. Life is just as integral to most so an end to that can never be seen as a good thing. The argument of what if someone who is in such constant pain that death would be a blessing is valid but I would argue that the person has already reached their end it just so happens that the process of death has yet to catch up resulting in such agonizing suffering. This is not to say that death should be feared only that because of what it entails and what we do not know cannot be considered a