Death and the paradox

xxiii.

We have looked at the problems posed by the current views on death, and at the background provided by past approaches to the question. We are now going to consider the practical aspects of the question. When, where and what is the best death, and what is the nature of the choice (if any) that we have on the subject, and to what conclusions do these questions lead?

xxiv.

Once I have established that dying of old age is not necessarily the preferable or natural possibility, all alternatives left to consider amount to suicide (since death by accident cannot be chosen). So the question becomes (and it's a serious question): is it best to let oneself die of natural causes, or to choose one's death by means of a calculated suicide? And if so, when should we kill ourselves? We must of course consider that, framed in this way, death by natural causes is itself a choice - it's just that you don't choose WHEN you're dying. And so everything points to this as the most synthetic form of the question: when is the best time to terminate your life (if any)? We shall return to this later.

xxv.

The nature of the choice is not homogeneous for all of us, of course. It depends heavily on what kind of future we have, and what situation we're in when we reach an elder age. If certain conditions apply, the choice of death does not pose itself. If I have a family, for instance, all considerations of suicide must be dropped. The responsibilities towards my wife and children (even if the latter are economically independent, there's affective and emotive responsibilities) are enough to forbid me from choosing death.

xxvi.

If I do not have a family, or do no longer have one, or have lost all connections with the members of my family, then the dilemma of natural death versus suicide has the grounds to be posed, and it is only under this implicit condition that we shall now explore its possibilities.


xxvii.

Let's go back to the question in the final form it revealed itself: when is the right moment to die (and is there one)? It is widely agreed that youth is the best part of life, so for all the emo kids who protest otherwise, definitely not then. As a rule, as long as you have full possession of your physical and mental faculties, there is no reason for you to consider death. It is also common sense that aging is not a pleasure, and that the longer you age, the more difficult it becomes. So if there has to be self-termination, it would have to be only after the body has reached a point of irreparable deterioration. If you contract a disease as lacerating and degrading as alzheimer's, for instance, it makes sense to end it before it gets to the stage that you've forgotten how to eat, even if you have a family.

xxviii.

Still, it's not that you should live or die because youth is pleasant and old age is painful. It's that when you're young, you haven't had the time to fulfill (or even choose) a 'purpose', and therefore to kill yourself then is to negate the value of life itself (you are essentially saying, it is better never to have been born than to live at all). I don't really agree with that statement and that's not the question I'm posing. I'm saying this: assuming that life is worth living, what is the right way to end it? All other questions would be thoughts on life, not thoughts on death, so they're not the subject of these meditations. Therefore if one should terminate life by one's own hand at all, it would have to be in old age, not so much to spare oneself the pains, but because I'm assuming that then you've had the time to do whatever it is that you've invested your life into doing. If you reach the age of eighty and you still have dreams you want to fulfill, the problem of killing yourself is again not to be posed.

xxix.

First scenario. I am seventy, and I seem to be pretty much as lucid now as I've been most of my life. My body isn't deteriorating too badly: I can still go out for a walk by myself, I can take care of things, and I'm not tormented with too much pain. Conclusion: no need to consider ending life. Even if you already feel accomplished, you haven't really lost anything you had when you were young (other than the possibility of playing rugby with your mates), so there's no more reason to kill yourself now than there was then.

xxx.

Second scenario. I am sixty, and I can feel that my mind is beginning to slip away. I forget things, I can no longer reason clearly, I often fail to make sense with my friends in conversations, and I am no longer good at the mathematics/economics/journalism that I've spent my life doing. I've suffered from a disease of the bones or the heart or the nervous system a few years ago, and now I've got killer back pains every night when I go to sleep, or it looks like I'll need a wheelchair five years from now, or I'm wetting my bed, or several of these put together, and I'll need a nurse to take care of me. Conclusion: the conventional objections to suicide do no longer hold.

xxxi.

Kant went down that road. Here's Scruton's account of his final days. It makes for a rending read:

Kant gave his last official lecture in 1796. By that time his faculties had begun to decline and a sombre melancholy had replaced his former gaiety. Fichte describes him as seeming to lecture in his sleep, waking with a start to his half-forgotten subject matter. Soon he lost his clarity of mind, his ability to recognise old friends, even his ability to complete simple sentences. He faded into insensibility, and passed from his blameless life on 12 February 1804, unaccompanied by his former intellectual powers.

Kant died at the age of eighty. Suppose that he'd died at the age of seventy. Would he or anyone else have lost very much? And if so, then what, exactly?


xxxii.

A common way to dismiss this would be to say, "These reflections only indicate a fear of aging." Yes, in part they do, but this misses the point. The conventional social response, the 'obvious' voice, is precisely the one which says - all of this is only considered by people who are afraid of becoming old. Even if there is some truth in it (and there is, of course), you must stop to consider that the statement is reversible. A Viking would say that we're only considering the alternative because we're afraid of death. Everyone would like to choose the path of courage, if that's a possibility, but once you strip away the clichés, the question remains of what is really courage, here. This is not a rhetorical question. Is it to shun the cold of solitude and pain, and by the bold decision to find death before both strength and mind are lost? Or is it to endure with patience the conclusive ride, and pay the debt of nature while enjoying the final skies? The whole point of these reflections is that the dilemma cannot be taken for granted. Yes, our society today says the second option is the right one. But others before it said different things. We cannot determine the answer simply by looking at what all the other people do (or are doing).

xxxiii.

So if one is done with his/her 'purpose' or interest by the elder age, and if s/he also doesn't have a family, what then? Is the dilemma of suicide then opened? Alas, no. Regrettably, this is where things get more rather than less complicated, and where the whole edifice of suicide is mined in its foundations, and it goes to show what we were saying from the outset: that a 'philosophy of death' is untenable from its inception.

xxxiv.

Planning your death involves a series of round-about psychological fuck-ups. For instance, it makes sense to plan on spending the last few years in hedonistic debauchery, throwing to the winds any money you don't intend to leave to charity. But as we mentioned, the hedonistic perspective doesn't work, even in such micro-versions. The moment you abandon yourself to pleasure with the justification that your imminent mortality allows it, the justification itself spoils the fun: you can't have fun without thinking that you're going to die. And then there's no fun. The agency contaminates the performance.


xxxv.

Another example. It would make sense for a writer or poet to produce his/her final works when s/he knows s/he's going to die: the knowledge of death would inspire very acute meditations on the subject (and from a cynical point of view, it would sell if s/he killed him/herself right after). We've seen it in everyone from Seneca to Sylvia Plath. So I could say, 'geez, I'll reach the age of 55, then write my last collection on the subject of death, then kill myself.' But the moment you start writing it, the act itself fucks you up: you become aware that you then become compelled to kill yourself to 'respect' the statement you're making, otherwise you're a charlatan. And this deterministic pressure is bound to have such horribly burdensome effects as to make the years under them not worth living, which defeats the point you were killing yourself for in the first place. The fact that you are, in a way, binding yourself, leads you to struggle against those binds, in the same process by which you originally struggled against the 'binding' of a death you did not like. It may even dissuade you from actually killing yourself - which makes the writing a waste of time, because if you hadn't planned on killing yourself, you wouldn't have written that which deterred you from killing yourself anyway!

xxxvi.

And so we come back to the original paradox: that you can't speak or think of death because any philosophy of death is a philosophy of life. It only holds, and it MUST be held, until you reach the point of executing it in practice. You can't plan the actions of your end, because if you end, there are no actions, and therefore whatever you're planning is not the end.

xxxvii.

It's impossible to have a philosophy on death, but it's also impossible NOT to have one, simply because we cannot make our choices in life unless we are thinking of how we want it to end. To be alive necessarily implies to think of death (even if you say, 'I do not think of death,' you are already thinking of death), but in order to truly think of death, you would have to be dead. This is the inescapable paradox on which all thoughts of death must depend. The ethics of suicide are valid and sustainable, at least as much as those behind natural death, but the fact of death itself makes these ethics performative rather than descriptive - they are something that we *do,* not something that is right or wrong. (And I suspect all ethical systems may be like that, in truth). The irony is that society spends so much of its energy into condemning suicide, which is something that we can't implement anyway. At least not until we have no choice. And then it isn't really suicide, or at least, it doesn't have the same ethical weight.

xxxix.

I expect several other of the philosophies and systems that we use to bear us forward, those which speak not just of death but of the meaning of life, are based on equally intangible foundations - paradoxes which cannot be sustained, yet simultaneously cannot be demolished. It is incredible how effectively they hold us together.

xxxx.

For the rest, nothing has changed. For the rest, you are immortal for as long as you're alive.

xxxxi.

...the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.

Death and what comes after (historically)

xviii.

The story goes that we originally believed in heaven and hell, but since we evolved away from superstition and towards scientific enlightenment, we developed this view that there's nothing after life. Actually, the belief that there's nothing after life is far, far more ancient than the belief in heaven and hell. Homer held to this view, painting the afterlife as no more than a shade of what passed before it, and so did the Old Testament of the Bible. Pindar's Elysian fields and Plato's reincarnation theories came much later, as did Christ and his vague mentions of 'a reward in heaven.' Usually, societies need to become quite complex before they conceptualise a genuine system of reward and punishment to follow death. Homer doesn't send Achilles to any heaven, but Virgil, in the more intertextual Roman society, gives an accurate description of what the Roman paradise is like. The author of Beowulf, writing in the dark ages, makes no compromises about its hero surviving, but Dante, at the shores of the Late Middle Ages (about six-hundred years later), produced the most sophisticated portrayal of the afterlife you can imagine. As for the Bible, there's no mention of heaven and hell in the Old Testament, and even the canonical gospels aren't exactly precise on the subject. The Gehenna is meant to be 'hell,' but the literal meaning of the term is a valley outside Jerusalem, disreputed for being a site for apostates (there's one liberal translation if I've ever seen one!). Heaven and hell, for all of their eternal duration, are really rather young.

xix.

Anyway, the most interesting and incisive text on death by the ancients came a thousand years before either Homer or the Bible. The epic of Gilgamesh tells the following story, more or less: Enkidu, the best friend of Gilgamesh, dies. Gilgamesh, baffled at this final reality, goes on a quest to figure out how to become immortal and avoid the same thing happening to him. He finds and conquers a flower of immortality, but this is stolen from him (by a snake) while he sleeps, and he is left to weep over his loss. He comes back to his village to live the rest of his life, and there he sculpts the story of his journeys. His act of inscription is crucial to his tale, to the point that it's foregrounded as early as in the first tablet, as the epitome of his presentation as a character: "He carved on a stone stela all of his toils, / and built the wall of Uruk-Haven, / the wall of the sacred Eanna Temple, the holy sanctuary."



xx.

This is the point, and Gilgamesh goes to show just how ancient it is. The fatality of termination leads us to want to 'build' something with our lives - this is how we respond to death. And this is what leads us to the old idea that life must have a meaning - that is to say, essentially, *something which can be translated into an inscription,* and therefore written down. Though that still doesn't save Gilgamesh, or ourselves, from the inevitability of death.

xxi.

What is the 'meaning' that, once invested on life, redeems it from death? Right. Like I'm going to get into that one.

xxii.

Anyway, what the specific 'meaning of life' is, is not really that important. It always has the same function of transcending the temporal limitations of our beings. Also, I don't want to discuss it now because it's a topic which deserves its own series of meditations. It really can't be reduced simply to 'a construct used to respond to death,' even theoretically. The representation which we refer to by the expression 'meaning of life' is far more complex than that, planting its roots directly in our sense of identity, in our philosophical quest for purpose, in the values of our society (and the tension between determinism and autonomy), and in the nature of our personal spiritual journey. I think it's necessarily plural, in the sense that there isn't a *single* meaning of life to be sought, but it flourishes into different shapes and forms according to the contingencies and individuals (though there's always a collective drive, theistic but also cultural, to reduce this polyfunctional quest to a single Word). Precisely on account of its multifarious quality, it transcends the teleology of this discussion, which shall therefore now return to its single topic. That is to say, death.

Still a few more things to say. Part IV is upcoming.

Death and responding

xi.

I mentioned there's no natural way of dying. The thing is that, while our methods for relating to other people or making love or cultivating a family have several features which are inbuilt, there's nothing inbuilt on how to die. Nature kills animals off by violence, but that simply means that the animal couldn't choose his mode of death. We're 'programmed' to be happy or unhappy when certain things happen, but death is simply not in the programs, not in the scripts, not in the blueprints. We simply have no referent to determine what's the best way to die. That's why the Viking option and the modern option can be weighed against each other, but it's impossible to evaluate them other than by experience. And since no-one comes back from the experience of dying, we've got no report to go by. In the end, both these philosophies of dying prove, once again, to be no more than philosophies of living.

xii.

And yes, I'm aware of Freud's death drive, but I don't think this solves our problem at all. In theory it means that death is 'in our script.' But for one thing, the drive expresses itself as a desire to return to the womb, which is not at all the same thing as dying in the real world (meaning that whatever event we can encounter which makes us die, will never correspond to our internal 'script'). And for another, the problem remains that building a life-philosophy on the basis of such a script doesn't necessarily make the quality of said life better. If it were as easy as that, the Vikings would never have gone against their self-preservation instincts to develop their doctrines. Or the Samurais. Or the Spartans. Or the Mongols. Or the buccanneers. Or the Crusaders. Or...



xiii.

The problem is that even though it's impossible to have a view on death, it's also impossible NOT to have a view on death. The fact of our mortality is so immense and inescapable that we simply cannot choose not to respond to it. The way that we construct our response to death is often the compass by which we orient ourselves in life. This is true regardless of whether you think there's nothing after these years of breath, or whether you think we all go to some magical cloudy place where everybody is 'maximally' happy forever.

xiv.

And so I must fall into a moral dilemma regarding death even as I'm aware that such a dilemma is inherently flawed in its terms. Once you assume that dying when you're old isn't necessarily the best way to go, what position must you take? What is left for you to take? We shall come back to this question in considerable death. Whoops. In considerable depth.

xv.

"Everybody dies of old age unless forced otherwise. Therefore, dying of age is the best way to die." That's a stupid syllogism. Dying of old age is just another case of being forced to die.



xvi.

"The only logical response to death is hedonism. Since we're all going to die and nothing is going to be left or matter after that, I should just concentrate on eating and fucking as much as I can, while I still have the possibility." This too is MASSIVELY STUPID. Augmenting the pleasure doesn't resolve the problem that pleasure passes. From an economical point of view the above statement is correct, but the questions of the human spirit cannot be reduced to 'an economical point of view.' We don't reason (about death, and in general) so grossly.

xvii.

More to the point, constructing a philosophy based on maximising pleasure on account of death is self-defeating. It fosters a hunger which cannot be sated, and so cannot lead to happiness or peace, which in turn corrodes the pleasure. Yeah, it's important to have a life-philosophy which allows for rather than represses pleasure, but I think it's clear that we should not confuse that with one which priorities only pleasure at the expense of all the rest. So let's drop hedonism here. As a response to death, it is delusional.

To be continued soon(ish) in Part III!!

Thoughts About Death

i.

Here's a quote by author Sam Harris, taken from this article:

A world in which global health is maximized would be an objective reality, quite distinct from a world in which we all die early and in agony.

Harris is discussing ethics, and he's trying to use an extreme-case scenario to drive us to a moral conclusion - that a world where we live longer is better than one where we die early and in agony. I don't think this is nearly as obvious as Harris would like to think. I'm not even sure it's true at all.

ii.

The 'obvious' argument is a tenet of a number of philosophers. Here's Thomas Nagel defending it, cited from that same article:

For example, a world in which everyone was maximally miserable would be worse than a world in which everyone was happy, and it would be wrong to try to move us toward the first world and away from the second. This is not true by definition, but it is obvious, just as it is obvious that elephants are larger than mice. If someone denied the truth of either of those propositions, we would have no reason to take him seriously...

I guess there's no reason to take me seriously, but I find this daft. Or at the very least, a case of false rhetoric. So much maturity and illumination is attained through sacrifice and pain, that imagining a 'happy' human being as a human being with no misery is a meaningless exercise. When you imagine 'maximal' misery, you stretch the concept of misery to such a point that it is no longer in touch with its original meaning (if any at all). Besides, it's equally vacuous to postulate a world where everyone is 'maximally miserable' when joy and misery are relative to other people - if everyone is maximally miserable, it's tantamount to saying that everyone is maximally happy. Formulating hypotheses which are not just unattainable but even inconceivable is not useful to clarify a discourse - and so much philosophy is based on precisely such hypothetical 'examples,' which take given real-world conditions and project them to extremes so as to test their 'universality,' that I usually lose interest quickly.

But then, much common sense is based on the same things. And one example of an 'obvious' truth is the claim that it's better to die old than young, in peace rather than in pain.

iii.

In the natural world, death in the animal kingdom is almost always violent. You could say that we are designed to end abruptly, rather than pine away and decay. As most everything else we do, our ways of dying are a violation of the natural order.


iv.

I don't know of any major culture which does not celebrate, with variations in colour, death on the battlefield. In most cases, it's even thought of as the best or the only way to die. The Vikings came to the point of vilifying death by natural causes. They told the story that if you didn't die in battle, then eventually an old lady would come in your tent at night and strangle you (this was meant to be the most abhorrent mode of death - unmanly, unnatural and unholy). I mention this only to say that dying 'of natural causes' (which, as we have seen, is not natural) has only recently become established in the popular imagination as the normal way of dying. The Vikings would have been revolted at Harris' *obvious* best-case-scenario for the death of men. And they're hardly alone. How many of our civilisations produced heroes who died young? Start from Achilles and count the bodies.

v.

Though I'm trying to keep a discussion of gender at the margins of these meditations, the parallel comes to my mind of the young lady in love who dies - another particularly popular trope. I wonder if it relates to Achilles somehow. Manon Lescaut, Madame Bovary, Anna Karenina, Lucinde, Nana, all the endless young ladies of Opera, all the femme fatales in Hollywood. There's just no end to them. This time the correlation is between love and dying young, rather than violence and dying young. Two forms of passion, I guess.



vi.

The problem with living longer lives is that the (perceived/expected) duration of your life determines the way you behave with it. That's why the equation longer life = better life is simply not tenable, even if we're talking about one same person. Knowing that you're bound to die at a comparatively young age may foster life-styles and philosophies which are less materialistic and more concentrated on enjoying the present moment. And you can eat, drink, smoke, play, fuck as much as you like, if that's your fancy. Our current culture encourages an attitude to death which is projective, and this of course has its downsides. Think about all the books you've read not for the pleasure of reading, but to build up your culture. Ours is the first civilisation which had to draw the distinction between pleasure-reading and, well, every other type of reading. Originally the two things were the same. Think about all the hours you've spent packed into a gym. Modern cultures are kind of religious even when they're at their most secular, in that they promise happiness as a postponed state, and they see the present as the labour-camp. (Ironically, they have reached this conclusion by negating the existence of an afterlife).

vii.

A few things I should clarify. Firstly, I'm not saying that the modern stance is 'bad' and that that of the Vikings is the better one. It's not like I'm bemoaning those dear old times when people died by the sword all the time. I'm not committing to either of the two teleologies, in fact. I only refuse to take either of them for granted. The thing about both of these philosophical paradigms is that it's impossible to determine which one makes us happier from our position. And this is because there is no 'natural' way of dying, but more on this later.

viii.

Secondly, I'm not commending violence, even indirectly, much less war. I have no interest in violence (at least not in the terms of this particular discussion).


ix.

The problem is that it's impossible to have a 'view' on death. You cannot 'speak' of death. You cannot have a philosophy to deal with it. Consider the cliché of stating that one is not afraid of death. It's a rhetorical turn of phrase utilised, amusingly, by both Christians and atheists, though they invoke opposite motivations (theists claim to have no fear because they know there's salvation after death, atheists say that their lack of faith in such a metaphysical immortality points precisely to their lack of fear of death). But it fails the test of experience - there's no reason to imagine that people staking such a claim would be any less terrified than anybody else if you pointed a loaded gun to their face (would you?). You cannot have a philosophy of death because it would always, necessarily, be a philosophy of life.

x.

The only discussions of death which can be taken seriously must come from people who have risked their lives. If you defeated cancer, been involved in a military fire-fight or survived an airplane crash, *then* you can say something meaningful about it (assuming you're not mentally incapacitated by trauma).

To be continued in Part II tomorrow!

Death of the Rant Machine

I promised I'd update at least one more time, and here I am. I find myself in the port of Amsterdam at the moment, on a ship which has just arrived here from Copenhagen. We do not have many breaks but there is time enough for a quick note before dinner.

My good readers, my beloved friends, I do no longer have the time to keep and update a blog. I do not even have enough to expose myself to the popular culture which frequently becomes the topic of my writings. I have little free time, and that which I have, I spend it all in my cabin, reading the books that I have taken with me, or going to see me girlfriend in her own cabin (yeah, I'm in a relationship with one of the waitresses on board, a Brazilian who is a true girl of iron).

So this leaves little time for the Rant Machine. To all those who are reading me and have read me, thank you for your time and attention. It was nice to have a blog and it has been useful and gratifying in more ways than one, so I'm sorry that I cannot keep it up.

I belong to the sea now. Until next time we meet on dry land, and until an improbable (who knows) resurrection of the Rant Machine, farewell, and stand me now and ever in good stead.

Yours,
John Silver, a.k.a. Andrea Tallarita.