Confronting Death
Ying Wang • Colorado College
And then a gloomy rhyming word, like – ‘Death’.
It rang hollow, ghostly, subdued, to me.
– Goethe, ‘Faust’
My understanding of life and death was radically changed this past summer. All of a sudden, my mom forgot basic arithmetic and the meaning of words. After I found that she could not answer any simple questions, I immediately burst into tears. In the hospital, the doctor pointed at some tiny, tiny dark points on an X-ray film of my mom’s skull and told me that my mom had had a stroke caused by these little blocks in her cerebral artery. But I was unable to make any sense of these blocks. They were nothing more than little heaps of fat sitting inside my mom’s brain, but they were able to make my mom terrifyingly different from the smart, lovely woman I have known for twenty years. Their power horrified me. They made me consider how fragile our brains and selves are—or even if there are “selves” at all given that some tiny blocks could so easily destroy them.
Modern neuroscience has significantly challenged our understanding of the “self” because substantial studies of human brains find nothing representing it. Therefore, the notion of a coherent self seems more like a romantic matter rather than a scientific fact. Neuroscience has thus offered new grounds for bundle theory, a long-lasting ontology theory developed by David Hume in the eighteenth-century and later adapted by Derek Parfit to explain personal identity. In Parfit’s interpretation of bundle theory, no coherent self exists and humans are nothing more than bundles of past experiences and memories unified by causal relation.
Nonetheless, if we take the bundle theorists seriously, the question of why death is so scary becomes confusing. Indeed, if life is no more than a series of different events and mental states, then a person only exists at this very moment. There is no real continuous existence based on a unity of consciousness, and thus death is merely an event in the far future that is wholly independent from this very moment. However, for many of us death is so frightening that believing in bundle theory would not seem to help at all. There must be some deep repugnance for death that made me cry when I learned that my mom had a stroke. My problem now becomes, how could I, a mere bundle of my past experiences, be scared by death?
For bundle theorists, this question would seem so naïve that they would confidently assert that my feelings are only illusions. After all, if there is no persistent self, the future death has nothing to do with the present. However, in this paper, I will justify the fear of death and argue that we should be afraid of it even in the context of bundle theory. I will begin with a concept I call the “Naturality of Fearing Death”, which offers an explanation of why human beings inevitably possess attitudes and emotions toward death and why these emotions often take the form of fear (although there could be many other forms as well). “Fear,” in this context, indicates a strong wish to avoid an event, usually accompanied by anxiety about the uncertainty inherent to the event. I will then analyze and respond to the bundle theorists’ “living in the moment” objection to the fear of death. After that, based on the work of Haslanger and Kierkegaard, I will give normative reasons why a moderate fear of death is in fact beneficial in practice. I hope to show why there is nothing wrong with fearing death and how we can, in fact, use our fear to work for social justice.
The Naturality of Fearing Death:
First of all, I argue that it is natural and inevitable for human beings to produce emotions and attitudes regarding death, although these feelings may not necessarily appear as fear. Although we may be unaware of the presence of death most of the time, it perpetually influences our lives. For example, death plays an essential role in the formation of basic social norms. We typically go to school at the most vigorous age when death is furthest away so that we have a long time to apply our knowledge. Similarly, the general notion of retirement allows the elderly to enjoy the last period of their lives in leisure. Of course, there are many other reasons for these norms, but a thought experiment helps to indicate that human life is deeply intertwined with death. Imagine an immortal race such as Tolkien’s Elves–they have no need to rush in life, to get their education done by a certain age, or to work as hard as possible in their middle age to save money, and so they lead calm and elegant lives. By contrast, we mortals live lives that necessarily terminate, and our awareness of the termination leads us to utilize precious time by making life plans. If, suddenly, biologists eliminate death or significantly extend lifespan, our plans would go through massive changes as well. Thus, consciously or not, death is looming whenever we are making and carrying out life plans (which is to say, regularly and often).
Similarly, our attitude to life includes our attitude toward death. This complementary relationship between life and death becomes most apparent when death becomes an urgent possibility rather than a far-away event. When busying myself with everyday life, I seldom bring the concept of death to my mind. Time appears to be an inexhaustible resource to me, and I do not actively keep in mind that the amount of time I could spend with my family was limited. However, after my mother’s stroke, it comes to me now and then that an end of our relationship is hiding behind our everyday interactions. Realization of the inevitability of such an end has instilled in me new thoughts whenever I am with my mother: to argue less with her, to understand her better, and to cherish the moments I could spend with her.
To summarize, the reason for our fear of death is not that death itself is scary a priori. The word ‘fear’ could be replaced by hatred, relief, and many other feelings. The key reason why these feelings are natural is that in the throes of existence death matters. Death presents itself in our lives consistently and influences our life choices heavily. Hence, human beings cannot avoid thinking--consciously or unconsciously--about death. Even those who display defiant rage or admirable courage in the face of death are showing their feelings about it. I call this deduction the Naturality of Fearing Death.
While the Naturality of Fearing Death does not distinguish fear (in the specific sense of being afraid) from other feelings such as hatred and relief, in practice fear is certainly the most common one. Look at people’s faces outside of Intensive Care Units to see this fact. Instead of just being a feeling or instinctual response, being afraid of death can have a complex set of causes. For instance, Nichols et al. have summarized six common reasons behind people’s fear of death, including: “loss of self-fulfillment, loss of social identity, consequences to family and friends, transcendental consequences, self-annihilation, and punishment in the hereafter” (Nichols et al. 323). There are also culturally dependent factors that lead a person to fear death. For instance, in Chinese culture, many people are afraid of dying alone, which explains why, in Chinese tradition, the more children one has, the better. These all are practical but legitimate reasons for fearing death.
Against the Fear of Death:
Over the history of philosophical debates over death, a strong objection to fearing death has been that, given that we have no control over the future, it is pointless to worry about it. Therefore, although the fear of death comes naturally, we should train ourselves to get rid of this fear. Among the figures who support this idea, I want to discuss two representative arguments given by ancient Greek philosopher Epicurus and bundle theorist Galen Strawson.
Writing in the third and fourth centuries B.C., Epicurus develops an early form of Hedonism simply known as Epicureanism. He believes that most profound good comes from happiness, and good can not exist independently of happiness. Also an atomic materialist, Epicurus thinks that after one’s death the soul disperses along with the atoms in the body, and so there is no continuation of life after death. Based on this understanding of death, he centers his philosophy of death on the notion of ‘prudence.’ He claims that because when death comes we are not aware of our feelings at all, the fear of future death only makes the present painful. Therefore, he advises people to break free from fearing death so that they could live a most prudent and pleasant life (Epicurus 50-53). From this standpoint, being afraid of death is not only futile since no feelings or emotions will be present at the moment of death, but also imprudent, as it distresses us in the present when we are still alive.
Strawson agrees with Epicurus that we should live in the moment, but he goes a step further arguing we can only live in the moment. He claims that because we humans are not entities with control over our futures, the loss of the future (i.e., death) cannot harm us. However, Strawson does admit that he himself fears death. He does not take our lack of ownership of the future to mean that the fear of death is invalid. Here, I agree with Strawson because he points out that we do not need to own something in order to fear it. Strawson has also taken a step further to explain why he is afraid of death even though he has no control of it. He interpretes death as a feeling of “not being there”(Strawson 97). He uses a metaphor to describe the concept of death: an empty house with a window and without anyone in the house looking out from the window. Everything outside of the window keeps its own pace, but in the house he is not there anymore. It is this feeling of absence that worries and scares him. Even though Strawson offers a beautiful reason for his fear, it is left unexplained why he chooses to keep this fear in his heart. If he has no control over something that is independent of this very moment, why accept this fear? In other words, why would someone care for death, if it is, as bundle theorists argue, an event in the future that only is only loosely related with the present via casualty? But the Naturality of Fearing Death argument can help justify his feelings. Rather than a remote event in the future, death is a subjective fact in the present moment. Death manifests itself in Strawson’s life as an emotion evoked by the fact that after death he could not observe the world again, an emotion which Strawson identifies as fear.
Epicurus makes two other important observations relevant to the fear of death. First, he claims that to lead a prudent life we need “sober reasoning searching out the grounds of every choice and avoidance” (Epicurus 52). Such reasoning cannot be done without considering the future. Second, his philosophy is completely normative; that is, it gives guidance on how to live while avoiding what the nature of life and death is. Because death is a significant—perhaps the most significant—part of the future, it follows from Epicurus’s first observation combined with the Naturality of Fearing Death that the Epicurean philosophy of life should necessarily involve a consideration of death. Therefore, in a normative sense, what we think about future death may inform how we act now. For example, if a person is worried about dying alone, she might prudently decide to get married and have children now. Again, this emotion toward death could legitimately manifest as fear.
How Ought We Understand Death?:
The normative significance of death is further important because it directs us to important ontological questions, such as what the word ‘death’ really means, which meanings of ‘death’ we are referring to when we think about and react to death respectively, and what are the functions of those meanings. We notice that, even though we can define death in an impersonal or objective way (with science or religion), we cannot avoid feeling and responding to the subjective presence of death in our life. When death really comes to one’s face, someone who has read a lot about death might not be able to find reassurance in literary advice. This gap between objective theory and subjective practice can shake the credibility of objective guidance as to how to react to the notion of death. To elucidate this gap and discuss what to do about it, I want to introduce Haslanger’s analyses of meaning, including her differentiation between manifest and operative concepts and her normative approach toward this distinction.
Haslanger claims that there are two layers of concepts behind any word: the manifest one and the operative one. She characterizes the former as “the more explicit, public, and ‘intuitive’ one,” whereas the latter is “the more implicit, hidden, and yet practiced one” (Haslanger 14). This theory seems to hold true in the case of the word death. While I will not try to articulate what these concepts of the word ‘death’ are, I reference Haslanger’s theory to point out that what we think death is and what we actually feel about it could be quite different. For example, Nichols et al. have carried out a quantitative experiment which explicitly reveals such differences. They invited Tibetan Buddhists and Tibetan scholars to complete a questionnaire about the fear of death, the former based on how they actually feel about death and the latter on how Tibetan Buddhists ought to feel. Surprisingly, it turned out that Tibetan Buddhists reported fearing death much more than they were assumed to be according to the canonical Buddhist texts. To explain what leads to the gap, the researchers put forward ‘the traditional Buddhist distinction between innate self-grasping and philosophical self-grasping’ (Nichols et al. 330). One may arrive at a deeper philosophical understanding of death through practicing philosophical and religious reflection, but such reflection cannot immunize one from interpreting life events as they appear in one’s innate self-grasping. In this innate self-grasping, the subjective impression that death makes could not be remodelled through reflection. It is clear that this Buddhist distinction fits well into Haslanger’s manifest/operative framework of concepts.
Given the extant differences between concepts, Haslanger concludes that both of them are inadequate and discusses a third possibility: to consider the meaning of concepts on the normative level. She advises us to think about how we should define words so that the definition benefits us in practice. Applying her suggestion in the context of thinking about death, we should weigh the practical pros and cons of different definitions of death. Although Epicurus’ normative reason for not fearing death is sensible, I claim there are more important reasons why we should care about death and fear it.
The first reason is developed by Kierkegaard, who argues that death is our teacher, and fearing death lets us understand the scarcity of time. He writes, ‘who has not heard how one day, sometimes one hour, gained infinite worth because death made time dear, but with the thought of death the earnest person is able to create a scarcity… and the merchant profits by using time’ (Kierkegaard 84). Kierkegaard puts forward the notion of “earnestness” toward death, according to which he urges us to contemplate death carefully and frequently so that we can pursue the right goals at present. The fear of death could guide our current life in a way that highlights what really matters right now. Thinking of death earnestly pushes one to ask oneself such questions as, “Is there someone you want to thank before your death? Do you want to say sorry to someone if this is the last chance that you could do so? What do you want to accomplish before your death?”
I believe there is a more important moral consideration why we should fear death, but this time not only the death of ourselves but also of other individuals. In a society where we are overwhelmingly connected to each other, it is all too easy for us to hear others’ sufferings without feeling any of them. Our failure to share others’ emotions isolates us from each other, as Neil Gaiman depicts in his American Gods:
We draw our lines around these moments of pain (of others), and remain upon our islands, and they cannot hurt us. They are covered with a smooth, safe, nacreous layer to let them slip, pearl-like, from our souls without real pain. (Gaiman 986)
This phenomenon is undoubtedly problematic because it is sympathy and empathy that drive people to understand others’ condition and choose to help them. However, feeling and expressing emotions toward others’ potential death is perhaps an effective way to penetrate the “nacreous layer.” By training ourselves to share others’ fear of death, we become more sensitive and sympathetic toward others’ feelings and hence value their lives.
Finally, feelings about death besides fear could also illuminate and even orient our lives. Hermann Hesse vividly describes in Steppenwolf how someone—whom Hesse calls “the suicide”—gains power to control one’s life through his aspiration to death. Such power comes from his freedom of terminating life and erasing all of his wrongdoings and pain: “He gained strength through familiarity with the thought that the emergency exit stood always open, and became curious, too, to taste his suffering to the dregs. If it went too badly with him he could feel, sometimes with a grim malicious pleasure: “I am curious to see all the same just how much a man can endure. If the limit of what is bearable is reached, I have only to open the door to escape” (Hesse 27). The Steppenwolf does not live to remedy his wrongdoings or to get rid of pain. On the contrary, his view of life makes it a gamble in which his goal is to see how much pain he could possibly bear. When the amount of pain goes beyond his limit, he has the option to turn around and quit the game through choosing death willingly. Therefore, his power to escape through the emergency exit anytime liberates his present behavior.
Conclusion:
To fear death is not only natural and sensible but also prudent and even normative. After all, in a universe where entities as tiny as atoms fuse and split and those as gigantic as planets solidify and explode, it would be a wonder if we, evanescent human beings, could ignore our own end. In every moment of living, we are simultaneously witnessing and confronting death because living itself implies death. Any thoughts about living properly–which we consistently produce–are also thoughts about how to die properly. We treat life with emotions, and hence face death with perhaps even stronger emotions. She loves her happy life, and so she hates the ruthless death; he loathes his miserable existence, and so he welcomes the consoling death. Our emotions toward death co-exist with death itself, and if we do not feel anything about death, it is only because we do not yet know there is death. My own feeling toward death is fear. That fear is not irrational; rather, it has an orienting power and sheds light on this very moment.
Bibliography:
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von. Faust. Translated by A. S. Kline, 2003.
Hesse, Hermann. Steppenwolf. Translated by Basil Creighton. Picador, 2002.
Gaiman, Neil. American Gods. Dark Horse Books, 2018.
Strawson, Galen. ‘I Have No Future.’ The Subject of Experience. Oxford University Press, 2019.
Epicurus. ‘Letter to Menoeceus.’ in The Philosophy of Death Reader. Edited by Markar Melkonian. Bloomsbury, 2019.
Haslanger, Sally. “What Are We Talking About? The Semantics and Politics of Social Kinds.” Hypatia, vol. 20, no. 4, 2005.
Nichols, Shaun, et al.. “Death and the Self.” Cognitive Science, vol. 42, 2018, pp. 314-332.
Kierkegaard, Søren. “At a Graveside.” Three Discourses on Imagined Occasions. Edited and Translated by Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong. Princeton University Press, 2009.