Death Is the Muse of Philosophy

The Quote

"Death is the true inspiring genius, or the muse of philosophy, wherefore Socrates has defined the latter as preparation for death. Indeed without death men would scarcely philosophise."

— Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation, Vol. II, Chapter XLI (Haldane and Kemp translation)

Original language: German

Historical Context

Arthur Schopenhauer published The World as Will and Representation in 1818, at the age of thirty, and spent the rest of his life defending and amplifying it. His central thesis is that the world has two sides: as representation, it is the world of appearance ordered by space, time, and causality; as will, it is the thing in itself — a blind, ceaseless striving that manifests itself in every natural force, every desire, every life. The individual, on this account, is a particular expression of the will, and the will is the only thing that does not die with the body.

The supplementary chapters of the second edition (1844) apply this metaphysics to the deepest questions, and none more directly than the chapter on death. Schopenhauer opens it with the sentence quoted here: death is the muse of philosophy. The remark is both a tribute to the ancient tradition — Socrates, reported by Cicero, called philosophy a preparation for death — and a statement of Schopenhauer's own conviction that the awareness of mortality is the ground of all serious reflection.

Meaning

The sentence has two parts. First, the diagnosis: philosophy is born of death. Human beings are the only animals who know that they will die, and this knowledge is the engine of the questions that philosophy asks — What am I? What is real? What survives? "Without death men would scarcely philosophise": if life were infinite, the questions would lose their urgency, and the mind would have no reason to look beyond the immediate. It is the certainty of the end that forces us to ask about the beginning and the middle — about what a life is for.

Second, the reference to Socrates: philosophy as "preparation for death" (melete thanatou). Schopenhauer takes the ancient maxim seriously and gives it his own metaphysical content. To philosophize, for him, is to come to understand what in us does not die — the will — and to loosen the identification with the individual self that will cease. The person who has understood the metaphysics of the will is no longer afraid of death in the way of the unreflective, because they have seen that what they really are does not come to be and does not pass away.

Interpretation

Schopenhauer's chapter is one of the most sustained philosophical treatments of death in the modern tradition, and it is the direct ancestor of much that followed. His claim that death is the muse of philosophy anticipates the existentialists' insistence that mortality is the condition of meaning — though Schopenhauer gives the claim a very different foundation. Where Heidegger would locate authenticity in the individual's owning of their own death, Schopenhauer dissolves the individual into the will: the deepest truth about us is not the individual self but the striving that is common to all life, and death is the return of the individual phenomenon into the universal will.

The famous conclusion of the chapter follows from this. Schopenhauer argues that the intellect — tied to the brain — is destroyed with the body, but the will is not: "man, in the depths of his self-consciousness, feels himself to be eternal and indestructible." The individual fears death because it identifies entirely with its own fleeting form; but the will itself, the thing in itself, is indestructible — it goes on, manifesting in new forms, because it was never a particular thing to begin with. Schopenhauer's consolation is metaphysical rather than personal: the "I" that dies is not the deepest truth of who we are.

The Fear of Death

Schopenhauer is unusual among the philosophers of death in taking the fear of death with complete seriousness. He does not pretend it is easy to overcome; he calls it the root of all philosophical reflection precisely because it is so powerful. His response to the fear is not the Epicurean argument that death is nothing to us — he thinks that argument misunderstands the depths of the will — but the metaphysical education of the will: the gradual recognition that the individual self is a surface, and that the will beneath it cannot be destroyed. The person who has understood this, he believes, can approach death with a composure that argument alone could never produce.

The Legacy of the Muse

Whatever one makes of Schopenhauer's metaphysics, his opening claim has proved remarkably durable: the awareness of death is the wellspring of philosophy. The claim is confirmed by the history of the subject — from Socrates's preparation for death, through the Stoic meditation on mortality, to the modern philosophy of death — and by the psychology of death anxiety, which finds the fear of death beneath much of human culture. Schopenhauer's sentence remains the most elegant statement of the idea that without death, human beings would scarcely think at all.

Related Learning

• Read the Schopenhauer thinker page for the life and system of the philosopher of the will.
• See Mortality wisdom for the practice of receiving finitude as the source of meaning.
• Explore the philosophy of death for the wider tradition of reflection on mortality.

Sources

1. Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Idea, Vol. III, Chapter XLI, trans. R.B. Haldane and J. Kemp (Project Gutenberg). https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/40868
2. "Arthur Schopenhauer." Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/schopenhauer/
3. "Death." Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/death/