Death and Philosophy (Malpas and Solomon)
OVERVIEW
“Death and Philosophy” is a collection of the various philosophical attitudes toward death, from the ancient Greek philosophers to modern day thinkers. It was edited by Jeff Malpas and Robert C. Solomon, both philosophy professors, but it’s a collection of essays from many thinkers. “Death and Philosophy” got me thinking (like Stephen Jenkinson’s “Die Wise”) about the stories we tell ourselves about death, and how these stories matter. Which stories help us alleviate anxiety? Live more fully? Be better citizens? I think this book presents us with a buffet of options. What is missing here, and Solomon calls for more attention to this in the field of philosophy, is the social dimension of death, and how our fear of death extends into that dimension as a social animal. That aside, there’s not much left wanting.
Here are some of the stories we could (and do) tell ourselves about death:
Death is an aesthetic
In western European and North American culture, we fasten to the middle chapter of our life stories, the part of the plot where we are aesthetically valuable… firm bodies, unblemished skin, youthful, vital, beautiful. We rage against the denouement of our story entirely. We see closure as constriction. But a culmination and closing are the aesthetic requirements of a well-shaped story. The human story is not meant to be a work of art – timeless and static. The human story is meant to be a handcrafted thing: lovingly used up, beautiful in its patina, lucky to be touched by antiquity. Death is the end of the story. It’s the border that frames the book, but it also frames the narrative. Death is the ending that allows us to apprehend each moment, each lived experience, in connection to the whole. How we frame things has always been how we assign value. The context is the thing. Viewed this way, death is an aesthetic framing, a value-giving border that imbues our lives with meaning.
Death is evil
Death is the basic ill of existence, a useless and evil thing. Death is, and should always be seen as, an unwelcome guest. Death is an insult. Not only is it pointless to try and accept one’s mortality (to flatter death), it’s abhorrent. To acknowledge death as something positive, to consider it fitting for people to die, is tantamount to declaring that murder is permissible. Death cannot and must not be meaningful. That’s not to say we should strive for immortality –it’s not that we’ll ever reach a place where death is overcome, only that death should be held in utter contempt by the living.
Proponents: Elias Canetti
Death is nothing
Death is not a catastrophe and those who think it is (e.g., Tolstoy, Becker, Camus, Sartre) are overstating the case. Only experiences can be good or bad, and so the cessation of experience (death) can neither be good nor bad for us. Death is neutral, and we should attend to its prospect with total indifference. There will be no you to suffer the misfortune of death. When you are here, death is not, and when death is here, you are not. You will never meet death because to be dead is not to be at all. Death does not need to be a fearful thing, and to spend your days worrying about death is to misunderstand that death is a state you will never experience.
Proponents: Epicurus, Lucretius
Death is harmony
Everything is impermanent and change is inevitable. In fact, looking around, one sees that ceaseless change is the only constant. Where there are beginnings there are endings, which become beginnings again. The sunbeam becomes the plant, becomes the rabbit, becomes the fox, becomes the apple tree, becomes the human, becomes the soil. Life and death are not adversaries, they are interdependent partners. To speak of life and death as if one is natural and one unnatural is to lament that life should be the permanent thing (the only permanent thing in the universe, it would seem), and what about permanence is natural? Death is not perverse nor problematic; death does not subvert life, it complements it. Death is the life-giving thing, and life is the death-giving thing. To wish it was different is to be fundamentally detached from the nature of things; it is to be wholly undiscerning.
Proponents: classical Chinese philosophy
Death is a companion
Death is not an event that takes place in the future, it’s an ever-present possibility. Not something we wait for, but something already here with us in every moment. Death is not a stranger… death is a travelling companion. And in embracing death as an ever-present possibility, we are liberated. Liberated from superficiality and self-deception, awake to the transition from existing to living. Our lives are momentary – a chain of births and deaths, each moment arising and perishing. By embracing death not as a future event, but as an ever-present shadow, we can wake up to the radical momentariness of our lives. We can be reborn in each moment – free of grasping and clinging, full of gratitude and joy. To live in denial of death is to live in a state of unknowing. We should instead befriend death, inviting him to master our hearts.
Proponents: Montaigne, Nietzsche, Nishitani
Death is a fetish
On one end of the spectrum are those who live their lives in denial of death, but on the other there are those who make too much of death. Death should not be the focal point of our lives. The fact is that we will die, but that is just one fact among many (taxes being the other). Living in the shadow of death every waking moment is not the only alternative to death denial. Death fetishism is a rebellious opposition to denying death. It places death as the ultimate experience and devotes excessive attention to it – it makes death the meaning of life. Death fetishism is then the denial of life, which is much more egregious than the denial of death. One should neither deny nor exalt death, but rather should treat it as one does other facts of life. Death is neither a prominent theme nor a total absence in the stories of our lives, it can simply be – one fact of life among many.
Death is denied
Death is an irredeemable badness. Anyone who argues that death is nothing, or is natural, is a sleight of hand artist deceiving themselves. Natural selection has cursed us with a cruel awareness of our finitude. Our deaths are tragedies. Luckily, we have also evolved tools to placate the discomfort of mortality salience. Nature has bestowed on us the ability to self-soothe – our short attention spans and tendency toward distraction come instantly to mind. Instead of being anxious about death, we could be tranquil(ized) – a kind of existential opiating where we keep it far from mind. We can feign ignorance and allow ourselves to be “cajoled, cosseted, and mesmerized” by the trivialities of life to keep death awareness at bay. We can busy and bury ourselves in our day-to-day lives. We could hide oblivion with our own obliviousness. This may not be seen by everyone as a rational approach, but it is an understandable one. We have evolved to experience mortal terror but also to manage it – and there’s nothing impractical about continuing to do so in this way.
Proponents: No one notable (but probably billions in practice)
WHAT NOW? (actions for mortal atheists)
Choose your story
Like in Stephen Jenkinson’s “Die Wise,” one of the actions we need to take is to decide what role death is going to play in our lives – what the story of death will be for us. For Jenkinson the story of death is about it being normal, natural, right, and just, but you can see from the above that there are many alternatives on offer. Adding to the variety are the ways in which we may decide which story fits best. Is it the story that makes us happiest, or most virtuous, comforted, philanthropic, village-minded? Is it a story about us as individuals or as social creatures? Is it a story about us as global citizens, or maybe it extends beyond us as a species to our place in the ecosystem, or even the universe? Is there value in us sharing the same story, or will every story be unique? Should we prioritize stories that invoke a certain feeling, or invoke a certain behaviour? And who gets to decide?
IN SUM:
Is this book entirely secular? No. (Chapters 6 and 8 are the worst offenders)
If you had to describe the book in one sentence? A course titled “Philosophy of Death: 101 Ways To Contemplate Your Mortality.”
Who should read this book? Anyone (like me) who is excited by a book with both “death” and “philosophy” in its title.