On Wed, Dec 9, 2009 at 09:06:01
David asked this question:
Panic in the middle of sleeping. I freak out because I know that I could die in my sleep and I would have never known that there was such as thing as existence. The scariest part, the most frightening, the worst thing in the world, is that one day, maybe not in my sleep, it will happen.
I wonder about the last image of earth. I'm not religious, so I don't believe that I am going anywhere after death. I always find corners and odd places that people don't visit and think, What if this place was the last thing that I saw? What if the last thing that I witness during my short lifetime is a KFC bowl? What if I die at the DMV?
It doesn't matter really. There hasn't been proof positive of an afterlife, so realistically none of this matters. And you if believe that your memory continues through family and lineage, I'm sorry to bum you out but at some point existence/ space as we know it will fold in on itself taking everything with it. For some damned reason I always think about Bob Dylan when I think of everything disappearing. I think about how touching his lyrics are and in the end, it will be as if his voice, and those words never existed.
I try to force myself to not think about the end of existence, but it is creeping. Life is short. Life is so god damned short.
My girlfriend of many years has said that I am morbid. She can see my face change, and its usually during moments of happiness that I understand the cruelty of the gift of consciousness. It is other people's lives that depress me even more than my own. To look upon a face of a someone you love and know that they are destined for the graveyard is an adult harsh realization.
I wish that we were all going to another place afterwards. I wish that we could all share a drink when we get there, but there is no escaping it.
David's articulate question has prompted me to think again about my views on the fear of death (see my 1993 paper Is it Rational to Fear Death?). I said then:
Whether logical thinking is capable of altering one's attitude to death is a test — perhaps the ultimate test — of the practical relevance of philosophy.
But is that all the philosopher is called upon to do: think logically about the topic in question? I'm recalling Lou Salomé's remark about Nietzsche, the first modern psychologist: 'The will of the times transformed the exactitude of logic into a psychology with its own exactitude' (quoted in Matthew Del Nevo 'Lou Salome and Nietzsche' Philosophy Pathways Issue 148).
Salome, who went on to inspire Freud at the very beginning of his explorations in psychoanalysis, is talking about something that Nietzsche achieved, in his writing, which we recognize today as bearing the hallmark of the psychodynamic method; the relentless and exact exploration of human motivation and feelings, our acknowledged and unacknowledged sense of who and what we are.
I'm not qualified to do that. Actually, I don't want to know too much about what goes on 'down there', not out of fear but rather the sneaking suspicion that, like so much else in the wide world of knowledge, once you see the facts for what they are, all you can say (in the words of the Lieber and Stoller song) is, 'Is that all there is?'
Is that all there is — to my subconscious? I'd rather not know. (Or, if you insist, tell me later.)
Freud had much to say about the fear of death (read Freud's later writings, or, possibly better, Norman O. Brown's blockbuster Life Against Death: The Psychoanalytic Meaning of History 1959). Enough to convince me (if I hadn't already been convinced) not to take the 'fear of death' at face value.
From a logical perspective, death isn't like the things we fear, such as necrotizing fasciitis or funnelweb spiders. We fear these things, in part, because they are deadly. Death isn't 'deadly'. Death is death. But that's just a tautology. It says nothing. Epicurus has the perfect retort to someone who fears the approach of death: 'Where I am death is not; where death is, I am not.' Death isn't like a funnelweb spider; it doesn't 'sting'.
But I suspect David knows, or half-knows this. What keeps him awake at night is not so much the fearful thought that 'death may happen', as the realization of human finitude: the eternal nothingness that exists beyond my life, beyond human history, beyond the history of the universe.
There are various logical responses to this, some of which I explored in my paper:
You wouldn't want to live forever. Bernard Williams in his article, 'Reflections on the Makropoulos Case' (Problems of the Self 1973) offers a brilliant exposition of the main theme of Carel Capek's play (also known as The Makropoulos Affair), depicting the unbearable tedium of immortality. The 1992 film comedy Death Becomes Her (Meryl Streep, Bruce Willis, Goldie Hawn) mercilessly pulls apart our naive and sentimental views about 'living forever' (although in this case, with bodies that can be worn and damaged, the result is more like a living death).
Suppose you die, and then in David's words, you 'go for a drink afterwards'. After the drink, then what? More life, then another drink (or two)? Wouldn't you run out of things to do? Repeated ad infinitum, wouldn't every conceivable human activity eventually become a total bore?
There's a kind of cheating answer to this: as life goes on, imagine that your memories fade further into the distance and eventually disappear. By the time you come round to learning how to water ski for the 88th time, you have forgotten the 87 times you learned to water ski in the past.
The problem with this is that there are some memories we just want to lose. To let go of these is to lose a part of you. It's a kind of death, only a death encroaching from behind, a death that perpetually stalks you as you live. But, at least, there would never come a point where you had to face death. Is that enough? I'm not sure it is.
The very fact that you have lived is an eternal fact. We can say the same of the universe itself: the fact that the universe has existed, is an eternal fact. (This idea is explored eloquently in Richard Schain's article, 'The Pointillist Canvas of Eternity' Philosophy Pathways Issue 79). In a similar vein, Wittgenstein remarks in the Tractatus, 'If we take eternity to mean not infinite temporal duration but timelessness, then eternal life belongs to those who live in the present' (6.4311). Nietzsche's doctrine of the 'eternal recurrence' (beautifully expounded at the end of the 2001 film K-Pax, by Kevin Spacey as the alien visitor K-Pax) offers a materialistic reading of the same metaphysical theme: you will live the same finite life over and over, and all your joys and sorrows, your triumphs as well as your disastrous mistakes, will be repeated ad infinitum.
But I suspect that David will not find these metaphysical or quasi-metaphysical thoughts reassuring. I don't.
Even less reassuring is my contribution to the debate:
My subjective world, as a reality constituted by its own appearance, only appears to continue; and that appearance itself is something which neither 'continues' nor 'fails to continue', for in itself it is nothing. My subjective world can never die, can never cease to continue, for with every new moment it is as if it had never existed, and will continue no longer than that very moment.
(Naive Metaphysics: a theory of subjective and objective worlds p.120).
As I remark, in Glass House Philosopher Notebook 2, Page 72, Marcus Aurelius in his Meditations expresses the same thought but more concretely:
Even if you're going to live three thousand more years, or ten times that, remember: you cannot lose another life than the one you're living now, or live another one more than the one you're losing. The longest amounts to the same as the shortest. The present is the same for everyone; its loss is the same for everyone; and it should be clear that a brief instant is all that is lost. For you can't lose either the past or the future; how could you lose what you don't have?
(Marcus Aurelius Meditations Gregory Hays tr. London: Phoenix 2004)
Problem is, this only works (if at all, a big 'if') on the assumption that your worry is simply about losing your life. Aurelius' remark has no effect on the problem of human finitude as such, or indeed the finitude of the universe.
That just about exhausts the logical responses. It was the death of my mother in 1991 that first prompted me to explore the question of the fear of death. That was the first time I really became aware that I was going to die, that death wasn't just some abstract concept. My father died in 1998. My wife died earlier this year, in March. With June's death I feel in a strange way that I have been finally set free.
I suspect that the real answer to David's question, if there is one, must come from psychology. The fearful idea that eventually we will lose not only our own selves but the universe and all values that have ever existed is an abstract representation of the infant's fear of loss — the infant in all of us. That's why some find religion so comforting. For those, like David, like myself, who must live without the consolations of religion there is no simple remedy. But sometimes the passage of time itself supplies the cure.
