Second Letter to the Free People of the World, 4.

4. Socratic Death:

Socrates was in pursuit of two things at once. First: Autonomy of the individual against the society (the right to live as an individual). Second: Thinking freely and questioning everything. Socrates did not falter for a moment to put his personal life in danger and invite death in order to show the significance and superiority of individual thought over the group, the society and the government. He proved himself before the city as an individual, by welcoming death. By his death Socrates became the symbol of an individual who existed and lived for himself and independent of the city. But one must not forget that his death was a defeat for the city-state, because it revealed a fundamental deficiency ie. the weakness to recognize the freedom and the autonomous existence of the individual, it revealed that the city-state could not accept the individual's freedom and his autonomous existence.
Tokvil correctly notices: "Our fathers did not know the word "self-belief" that we have devised for ourselves, since in their days no person could have been found who didn't belong to some group, or who was able to consider himself absolutely alone." In the pre-modern times, the idea of an individual, an individual free in his choices and alone in his privacy, was unknown. The birth of a subject who was the master of himself, who was defined by the commitments brought about by his choices, is symptomatic of the fact that he no longer understood himself primarily as a part of an organic whole. A person dissolved in a community cannot make use of the creative and critical facilities of his mind and thought. This is not possible unless the person can see himself as separate from the group and the community.

Foucault quotes Baudler as saying that modern man is an individual who creates himself as a work of art. The autonomous individual is a dissident, he "differs" from others, he is a maverick. Not only does he create the style of his own living, but he chooses the fashion of his death by himself as well. Isn't death also the creation of a work of art? Particularly in a system where individualism and freedom of thought are not recognized.

Difference is the necessary condition of man's growth and flourishing. It bestows upon each member of the human race, man and woman alike, the choices that give value and meaning to his or her autonomy. Individual autonomy can only be realized in a "multi-cultural" society, a society where the presence of different cultures makes meaningful choices possible. It has to be accepted that autonomous individuals are capable of choosing between several teachings and life patterns. According to Ulrich Beck, the German sociologist, individualization in modernity means that people have to create their own life story in the absence of certainties and fixed obligating traditional norms, and by the emergence of new ways of living that are constantly under change and evolution.

Socratic death is a style of living, a style of living that men of wisdom have not ceased to praise throughout the history. The choice of death, if one is forced to deny one's individuality, and is deprived of the opportunity to think freely, talk freely and live freely, is a choice, against which reason has no objection left to present. Unconditional freedom or indefinite hunger strike is based upon such theoretical background.

Part 1 >> Part 2 >> Part 3 >> Part 5 >> Part 6