Lester Moen and Socrates and Nietzsche (I got lost in the middle someplace)

          I was quite moved when I read the Socrates’ dialogue with Crito.  I wondered after I read it if my father had ever read The Republic.  His formal education ended in the third grade when his father died, but he read voraciously all of his life.  The reason I thought that he might have is that Socrates’ interaction with Crito was so much like my father’s with me.  When I was in elementary school I used to think I knew a lot about politics and I enjoyed discussing my ideas with him.  He always listened respectfully.  He never disagreed with me, but he always had another question to ask that made me realize that my glib answers were somewhat faulty.
           As I read the dialogue I also heard echoes of the discussion I had with my father at his deathbed. His enemy was not evil men but the evil of cancer Several times throughout the dialogue Plato asks for Crito’s help:  “This is what I want to consider with your help, Crito.”  We know, however, that he had already made up his mind about what he should do.  He simply wanted to help Cirto understand that his decision was the right one.
          The doctor had told my father that with aggressive treatment he could probably hold the tumor at bay and extend his life for six months, a year – perhaps two.  Without treatment he would be dead within 10 days.  My father asked me, “What do you think I should do, Cora Lee?”  I told him that he should take the treatments and hope for the two years.
          He said, “If I die today, I die knowing that I’ve had a good life, 81 years is an accomplishment. I’ve had a wonderful wife, a loving family, and many, many great friends.  Should I trade a good and peaceful death now for what?  Maybe six months.  Maybe two years, and all that time sick, your mother having to clean up after me?  Do you remember how pitiful Joe was those last years?  Life has been good to me.  I have no reason to fear death.”
        He had made up his mind years ago that he would not suffer the indecency of extensive medical treatment, that he would die at home in his chair.  Imminent death did not shake his resolve. He died peacefully in his sleep eight days later.  At his funeral my brother said, “He taught us how to live, and now he taught us how to die.”
          My father was not a perfect man, but he was an honorable man.  One of the difficulties of arriving at a point where we understand one another is that for the most part we start out discussing those issues about which we disagree.  Perhaps if we establish some points about which we all agree we could more easily work our way through the sludge of misunderstanding.

            There are those who would say like Dylan Thomas, “Rage, rage against the dying of the light!” but can we agree that in every culture from the dawn of man we have all been wanting pretty much the same thing, to live a good and honorable life in such a way that the idea of death has lost its sting?  Nietzsche says that “the challenge is to make of (our lives) a work of art.”  The next question is, how is that done?  What gets in the way of our living a life with gusto. Although Nietzsche openly denigrates reason, morality and virtue, there is something in him that recognizes their importance.  He says that “Confusing consequence with cause is the ruination of reason.”  If reason can be ruined, doesn’t that imply that it is a good?  In explaining the way in which we confuse consequences with causes he says vice and extravagance to not destroy a people.  If a people are destroyed they will degenerate into vice and extravagance (26).   Doesn’t the existence of vice imply an existence of virtue?

Often our disagreements are simply a matter of semantics.  Nietzsche condemns the church for fighting “against the intelligent on the side of the ‘poor in spirit,’ assuming that the “poor in spirit” are stupid. The poor in spirit are not overly proud. Blessed are the poor in spirit simply means that those who are not blinded by excessive pride are blessed.  Often we fail to listen because we think we know the answer.    Many very intelligent people don’t make it in the world of work because they think they know it all and they’re difficult to work with.   Hubris is still the undoing of many a great man.

We all want our lives to be a work of art.  We just have different ways of getting there.  In our attempt to live the “good life” we often stumble, and sometimes it’s difficult to get up again.  We get so oppressed by the weight of our mistakes that we grovel in the mud.  Man has always searched for something that will liberate him, help him walk tall again.  Sometimes he sacrificed the lamb; sometimes he threw the virgin into the fire.  For Christians, the symbol of Christ on the cross is the symbol of that liberation; a symbol that means that what is past is past and enables them to