Ladies … and … gentlemen … get ready to … rummmmmmble. In this corner, weighing in at [fill in your weight here], the challenger, a personal favorite who’s won a few and lost a few but who never says die. Give a sympathetic welcome to [fill in your name here]. And in this corner, weighing in at “heavy dude,” the reigning champion, a veteran vanquisher who’s never been defeated. Give a reluctant but inevitable welcome to El Muerto—death.
A mayfly lives a single day, a human being about thirty thousand, in a universe that’s been going about its heedless business for more than five trillion days and counting. On a cosmic scale, both the fly and I live but an instant, and while one of us doesn’t care, the other one devours multivitamins and scrubs his hands every ten minutes.
Socrates declares, in Plato’s Phaedo, that true philosophers make dying their profession, and indeed Socrates died a philosophical death. From Socrates’s perspective, death was either a restful nonexistence or a migration to another realm, such as Hades, where one could meet up with old friends. Contemporary philosopher Simon Critchley agrees that the task of philosophy is to prepare us for death, to cultivate an attitude with which to face and face down the terror of annihilation, but without offering the promise of an afterlife. Critchley’s enjoyable Book of Dead Philosophers examines the deaths of almost two hundred philosophers to see if they had the courage of their convictions. Judge for yourself.
Heraclitus suffocated in cow dung.
Plato allegedly died of a lice infestation.
Zeno of Elea died heroically by biting a tyrant’s ear until he was stabbed to death.
Lucretius is alleged to have killed himself after being driven mad by taking a love potion.
Hypatia was killed by a mob of angry Christians, and her skin was peeled off with oyster shells.
Sir Francis Bacon died after stuffing a chicken with snow in the streets of London to assess the effects of refrigeration.
Descartes apparently died of pneumonia as a consequence of giving early-morning tutorials in the Stockholm winter to the cross-dressing Queen Christina of Sweden.
Hume died peacefully in his bed after snubbing the inquiries of Boswell as to the atheist’s attitude towards death.
Kant’s last word was “Sufficit”(it is enough).
Hegel died in a cholera epidemic and his last words were, “Only one man ever understood me, and he didn’t understand me” (presumably he was referring to himself).
Jeremy Bentham had himself stuffed and sits on public view within a glass box at University College London (in order to maximize the utility of his person).
Nietzsche made a long, soft-brained, and dribbling descent into oblivion after kissing a horse in Turin.
Wittgenstein died the day after his birthday, for which his friend Mrs. Bevan had given him a blanket and wished him “Many happy returns.” Wittgenstein replied, “There will be no returns.”
Sartre said, “Death? I don’t think about it. It has no place in my life.” Fifty thousand people attended his funeral.[i]
Philosopher Susanne Langer tells us, “With the rise and gradual conception of the ‘self’ as the source of personal autonomy comes, of course, the knowledge of its limit—the ultimate prospect of death. The effect of this intellectual advance is momentous. Each person’s deepest emotional concern henceforth shifts to his own life.”[ii] In other words, corporeal angst is a natural downside of self-awareness.
As self coalesced over the course of human evolution, consuming more and more of our attention, we’ve come to experience death as a tragedy. Fear of dying shadows our lives and grief attends the death of loved ones. Natural selection couldn’t care less, because if anxieties goad us to more vigilantly safeguard ourselves and our kin, so much the better for our genes (even more so if, to allay our unease, we lose ourselves in sex).
Every individual must confront annihilation. Philosopher George Santayana argues that the need for meaning compels us to believe that life, despite its transience and less-than-upbeat ending, is worth living. But many of us, faced with mortality and prospective meaninglessness, opt for one of humankind’s proven workarounds: a) deny the finality of death, b) disindividuate by linking our identity to a cultural entity that will outlive us, c) discount the future and live in the present, or d) drink like a fish.
From the standpoint of self, death is the elephant in the room. Yet here’s what will remain of each of us a hundred years from now: a dash, one or two inches long, between the date of birth and date of death on a tombstone.[iii] To self it’s a depressing thought, but it’s also a ticket to freedom, because as science and philosophy attest, and as odd as it sounds, individuality is not personal. It’s an “everyone’s got one” quirk of the universal process, an odd pirouette in life’s molecular dance, and evidence suggests it would be to our immediate benefit, as well as the benefit of others and the planet, to get over ourselves.
We can shed self gradually, on our own terms, or wait for El Muerto to rudely strip it from us. Philosophy and science agree that if you want a philosophical death, now is the time to get philosophical.
According to Richard Feynman you only live one life you make all your mistakes and learn what not to do and that’s the end of you. Mark Twain was unafraid of death because he’d been dead for billions of years before he was born and it had rarely inconvenienced him. Katherine Hepburn felt that death would be a great relief—no more interviews—but it was Woody Allen who best expressed what most people feel: “I don’t want to achieve immortality through my work I want to achieve immortality through not dying. I don’t want to live on in the hearts of my countrymen I want to live on in my apartment.”
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[i] Critchley, Simon (2009-02-06). The Book of Dead Philosophers (Vintage) . Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.
[ii] Humphrey, Nicholas (2011-01-31). Soul Dust: The Magic of Consciousness (Kindle Locations 2227-2234). Princeton University Press. Kindle Edition.
[iii] Tolle, Eckhart (2009-03-25). Stillness Speaks (Kindle Locations 217-219). New World Library. Kindle Edition. .
