A valued correspondent offers,
I'm 70 years old, but I feel like I'm just getting started. Maybe that's a common experience.
I follow not far behind, and I can relate to the sentiment. I am just getting started as I near the end of the trail. The clock is running and I feel like a chess player in time trouble. I am working on a book that I hope will sum it all up for me and bring my life to a rounded completion. Will I have time before the flag falls?
Death is the muse of philosophy and one of her great themes. Now death is Janus-faced. One of her faces is that of the Grim Reaper, the other that of the Benign Releaser.
How bad can death be if it releases us from this obviously unsatisfactory and bewildering predicament? Only the spiritually insensate could be blind to the horror of this life, a horror mitigated but not outweighed by the beauty in the world and goodness in some people.
You live in a charnel house that is on fire and you pronounce it a wonderful abode? How could escape from it not be good? On the other side of the question, that persons cease to exist utterly seems to be a very great evil, something intolerable barely conceivable. To appreciate this one must not think abstractly and objectively -- one dies, all men are mortal -- but concretely and subjectively: I will die. You, dear heart, will die.
When we think concretely and personally about death, our own death, and the deaths of those we love, we find ourselves agreeing with Arthur Schopenhauer: "The heart rebels against this, and feels that it cannot be true." ("The Vanity of Existence" in The Will to Live, ed. R. Taylor, p. 229) Let us assume that you love and cherish your wife. Your loving her has conferred upon her uniqueness, at least relative to you. (Josiah Royce) Now imagine her lovable and loving unique personality blotted out of existence forever. Or consider your own case. You have devoted a lifetime to becoming who you are. You have worked steadily at the task of self-individuation. Only to become nothing? Could things be arranged so badly for us? But then the whole thing would be a bad joke.
Is death evil or not? No one knows. That we remain in the dark on a question so close to the heart and mind is yet another reason why our condition is a predicament. Should we therefore conclude that the good of escaping it outweighs the bad of personal cessation? No one knows.
The Epicurean reasoning strikes many as sophistical. And maybe it is, though it is not obvious that it is. "When I am, death is not; when death is; I am not."
Dying is the end of trail, the last step on the via dolorosa. It is indisputably evil, the only good thing about it being that it will force jokers finally to become serious. Will you be cracking jokes as you gasp for breath and feel yourself helplessly sliding into the abyss? Death, however, is not the last step; it is beyond the trail and its trials and beyond dying, a transcendent 'state' shrouded in mystery, or maybe not even a state: just mystery.
Companion post: On the 'Inconceivability' of Death
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