by Andrew Stark
For Martin Heidegger, only if we maintain a constant awareness of death, of our limited time, will we spring into action and forge a self. It’s not that we should remain continually immersed in death in a subjective sense, aspiring to live in a kind of posthumous tranquility as Holderlin strategists do. It’s that we must remain continually aware that death is present at every moment of life in an objective sense. It can happen at any second. If we truly understand this, then death’s ever-present possibility will goad us into action, spurring us to recognize and seize the authentic possibilities that life affords us before it’s too late.34
But what does Heidegger have to say about that other goad to action, not death but time itself? Why wouldn’t the fact that time presents its possibilities for only a limited moment before yanking them away—that there is always a tide in the affairs of humankind—suffice to get us moving even if we lived on endlessly? And if it would, why would we need death in order to shape our self? Wouldn’t Obama have seized the day in 2008, even if his life span was indefinite?
No, not for Heidegger. The passage of time doesn’t create possibilities for the self. Instead, it’s the self’s possibilities that create the passage of time.
It’s a mistake, Heidegger says, to think that a self’s possibilities and opportunities come hurtling at it from the future, passing by like brass rings to be grabbed in the momentary present before disappearing forever into the past. Time does not serve up and then snatch away the authentic self’s possibilities moment by moment. Instead, the authentic self creates its own possibilities—its own plans and projects—and these in turn beat out their own tempo, their own way of measuring time. Each of a person’s significant possibilities fuses future, present, and past moments into a single unique phase in his life. Each possibility melds that part of the future into which the self projects her plan for realizing it, that part of the past during which she developed that plan, and a present that amalgamates that future and that past. Any given possibility extends as far into the future as we project it and as far back into the past as when we began preparing for it. Such possibilities are our authentic units of time.35
Take this a little further. If possibilities are not momentary events that we must seize or let go of forever, then what are they? They’re like persisting things, Heidegger says: tools and materials always ready to hand, objects that simply abide.36 While events are here and gone, we can pick up and set down tools and materials like mallets and boards for as long as we like.37 Instead of “vanish[ing]” in time, “continually passing and coming along,” the Heidegger scholar Carol J. White writes, “possibilities” for Heidegger are more like “a tree or hammer,” things in “space” that “remain . . . present or can be made present again and . . . again.”38
Think of someone who wants a career in the law. For her, that possibility always exists because no matter how successful or unsuccessful she is at being a lawyer, there is always more she could do to realize it; the possibility persists because it is never fully actualized. Whether she has yet even to pass the bar or, having practiced for twenty years, has yet to argue before the Supreme Court, being a lawyer is still and always an unrealized possibility. “Casting myself as a lawyer,” William Blattner writes in a study of Heidegger, “does not terminate in accomplishment or failure, because it does not terminate. . . . as long as I . . . cast myself as a lawyer, being a lawyer is a possibility that stands before me.”39 Like an object persisting in time, not an event flowing back in time.
You may or may not see life this way. The point is that Heidegger did. In a way he had to, if he was going to view death as the only prod available for us to get out and craft a self. Only death, threatening moment by moment to end all our possibilities, can spur us to seize them. Time’s passage alone won’t do the trick. That’s because, if we are true to ourselves, time will have no power to present and then withdraw possibilities from us moment by moment, as if they were ephemeral events. Our authentic possibilities are prior to time, persisting like objects, available always or for as long as we choose. And so only death can crack the whip.40
But many of us will reject the equation of opportune possibilities with persisting objects, like hammers and shovels. In our experience possibilities continually emerge and then disappear back in time—moment by moment, day by day, month by month. The passage of time would be enough, even without death, to get us moving. Here, Sartre departs from Heidegger: “Human reality,” Sartre says, “would remain finite even if it were immortal.”41 That woman, that man, that time with the children when they were young, that sunset, that writing assignment—they aren’t going to be available to us forever. The novel we are brimming with today might not come out the same way in five years or five hundred.
And to the extent that we so view matters, the existentialist consolation—that without death we would not go out and seize the day, crafting a self—will gain little true psychological purchase with us. For us, the churning passage of time, life itself, provides more than enough impetus to create a self. We don’t owe our very selves to the fact that we die. And we have no reason to be grateful for death on that account.42
*
Is death benign? Maybe even good for us? Certainly nothing to us?
It all depends on how we look at things.
Suppose we view our self’s relationship to time as if it resembled a statue’s relationship to space. Then we needn’t think of ourselves as moving, minute by minute, forward in time from birth toward death. After all, we don’t think of a statue as moving, inch by inch, upward in space from the floor toward the ceiling. Just as no part of a statue—its neck, say, or its ankle—is taller than any other, no part of our self—the 8–9 PM June 18, 2017, part, say, or the 1–2 AM May 2, 1998, part—grows older than any other. If only we came to see things this way, J. David Velleman says, then Epicurus’s first consolation could take full psychological hold. Death would be irrelevant to us for as long as we are here. It would remain completely offstage. After all, never would we feel like we were moving even one iota closer to it.
Suppose, with That Championship Season’s Coach, that we view the moments of our life—and especially our moments of triumph—as trophies and jewels, objects that persist with us in time, as real now as on the day they happened. We could then wrap our life up early and relax, without feeling that our best days were slipping ever further back into the past, turning us into has-beens. And in that way Epicurus’s second consolation could take full psychological hold. Once death comes, not only would we no longer be here to be harmed by it; our life would no longer be here either, having long since been happily completed.
Suppose, with Derek Parfit, that we view our self’s relationship to time as if it resembled a chain’s relationship to space. Suppose we saw that there’s nothing more to our selves than a series of connected links, each one containing whatever thoughts, sensations, feelings, and perceptions occupied our mind at successive moments in our life. Once we see that there’s nothing more to us than that chain—no deep further self to whom the chain belongs—then, the Buddhist consolation says, we will understand that there’s nothing that death brings to an end. After all, each link in our chain can continue on in all those who shared the same memories, passions, experiences, and beliefs.
Suppose, with Heidegger, that we view the moments of our life—and especially its moments of opportunity—as hammers and shovels, available to be picked up and set down as we liked. Suppose we treated our authentic possibilities as if they were objects, persisting and lingering in time along with us instead of slipping remorselessly through our fingers into the past if we don’t grab them. Then only the prospect of our ultimate death would be able to incite us to get moving and craft our self. And so we should be thankful that we die. Otherwise we would never feel any urgency about making something, a self, out of our existence. If we came to see things this way, then the existentialist consolation would stand a good chance of taking hold.
But any
consolations that rely on equating our selves to statues or chains, or the moments of our lives to trophies or tools, ultimately won’t grab us. They implausibly deny our reality, the reality that cries out for consolation: we are selves who move inexorably through time, second by second, toward our deaths while the moments of our lives flow incessantly through our fingers, second by second, back into the past. Statues and chains, trophies and tools: all are lifeless. Striking how, to console us about death, the various strands of the “death is benign” school all have to offer views of our selves, and the moments of our lives, that lend themselves to analogies with inanimate objects.
We shall have to search elsewhere for consolation. Perhaps if we look at matters in the right way, we will see that we can gain everything we covet in an immortal life from within the confines of our current mortal one. I turn to the various forms of this consolatory idea in the book’s next part.
PART 2
Mortality Intimates Immortality
five
RETIRING YOUR JERSEY
Reggie Lewis was a local hero, a star guard for the Boston Celtics during the early nineties. When Lewis died suddenly of a heart attack in July 1993, the stricken Celtics retired his jersey, meaning that no Celtic ever again would wear Lewis’s number 35. The team took this step, they explained, as “a memorial to him.”1 The Brooklyn Nets used similar language in announcing the retirement of Jason Kidd’s number 5 in 2013: the gesture, Nets owner Mikhail Prokhorov said, was meant to “commemorate” Kidd’s career.2 And when the Los Angeles Kings retired Wayne Gretzky’s 99 in 2002—every other NHL team also retired the number—Gretzky, wiping away a tear, declared that “to be remembered as an LA King is something special.”3
But the idea of retiring a jersey as a “memorial” to an athlete, or as a way of “remembering” him, seems odd. How can the disappearance of the number worn by a star player memorialize him, bring him to mind, make us recall him? It’s true that an athlete’s retired jersey might then be hoisted to the rafters of his home arena, or exhibited in a hallway. But as a visual display, that too seems more like a withdrawal from view—placing the jersey out of the way—than a claim for attention. In any event, the commemorative gesture is almost always described as retiring the jersey, not hoisting it to the rafters. The Major League–wide retirement of Jackie Robinson’s number 42 in 2012 was called a “commemoration,” and there are no rafters in open-air baseball parks.4
Strange. If a team really wants to memorialize a star performer, then shouldn’t all its players’ jerseys henceforth be emblazoned with his number, along with each player’s own? In fact this too has been tried. In 1974, every Philadelphia Flyer wore a number 4 “memorial patch” to commemorate the career of Barry Ashbee, cut short by an injury. Gretzky himself, when he started out, wanted to wear number 9 as a memorial tribute to his idol, hockey legend Gordie Howe.5 And even as it retired Jackie Robinson’s number, the evidently self-divided Major League Baseball organization also created a “Jackie Robinson Day” on which every player wears Robinson’s 42.6
But how can these two contrary practices, number-retiring and number-emblazoning, both be appropriate forms of commemoration? If the one is apt, then how can the other be? Keeping a great one’s number in view seems like a natural way of making sure an athlete gets remembered. But withdrawing his number from view? It’s certainly understandable as a kind of honor. But not as a memorial. And yet that’s the language being used.
For all of that, though, there is a kind of memorialization going on with jersey-retiring. But to see this, we must first consider another contemporary memory-related practice. It’s the advent of so-called life-logs.7
Microsoft engineer Gordon Bell is the pioneer here. Bell’s battery of cameras, recording devices, and computers is designed to capture real-time video, audio, and textual representations of everything he sees, hears, reads, thinks, does, and even dreams, 24/7, with the idea that it will all then be digitally preserved forever. With life-logs, a person’s complete temporal biography, the entire contents of his memory—and more, since he will inevitably forget much of what he sees and does—gets permanently converted “into a spatial dimension”: into digital storage space, cloud cyberspace.8 “I can off-load my memory,” Bell says, and thus gain “a kind of immortality.” After all, as Bell puts it, “I am data.”9
With my death, or so I would have thought, will come the complete obliteration of my memories. My demise, as J. M. Coetzee’s character Elizabeth Costello says of hers, will bring the “collapse” of “my whole structure of knowledge”: in particular my knowledge of the past, all those recollections that live in my mind alone, including the exquisitely unique combination of emotion and sensation that I associate with events that others may recall as well, but only through their own unique lenses and filters.10 It’s almost too much to bear—“surely it won’t all die when I do”11—or even to state explicitly. “She will not be forgotten as long as I live,” E. M. Forster wrote of the warm memories he held tight of his mother, instead of acknowledging what he actually feared: she will be forgotten as soon as I die.12 But now, as Bell says, life-logs promise immortality at least to that part of our self that consists of our memories, even if it cannot promise immortality to our entire self. “My memories,” Proust says, “did not easily resign themselves to the idea of ceasing to be, and desired for me neither extinction nor an eternity in which they would have no part.”13
Or put it another way: what Bell proposes with his digitized life-log is a kind of faux immortality, not the real version in which we actually live forever. In its way, it’s a natural extension of Epicurus’s first consolation—that as long as the self is present, death cannot be. As long as our memories are preserved, then to the very considerable degree that we are our memories, we haven’t died completely. “Memory is identity,” Julian Barnes says, “I have believed this since—since I can remember. You are what you have done; what you have done is in your memory; what you remember defines who you are.”14
Certainly, the tenor of Bell’s remarks, in fact of his entire endeavor, resonates with a kind of death denial, although it’s a turbocharged version. Bell not only emphasizes that our future projects can continue on after we have departed, as Ivan Ilych’s did. He promises that all our past memories can live on too. As one digital memoirist puts it, “I feel I have left something which will still be there for others to see long after I’m gone.”15
But it’s one thing to create a digitized running record of your memory. It’s quite another to ensure that others, going forward into the limitless future, will actually look at it. If all that your memories are doing is lying as bits and bytes inside the “spatial dimension” of an online archive, inert and unviewed for eternity, is there any sense in which they would continue to live?
In Coetzee’s Elizabeth Costello the title character, an author, ruminates on a similar question concerning her literary legacy. On the one hand, she well knows that “it is only a matter of time before [her] books . . . will cease to be read and eventually cease to be remembered.”16 Yet on the other hand, even though the day will come when nobody ever again will absorb her prose, Elizabeth still takes comfort in knowing that her novels will continue to exist. They’ll remain accessible in libraries or at least online. Perhaps, even ages and ages hence, a lone copy will still inhabit somebody’s dusty bookshelf: “a home where it could snooze, if fate so decreed . . . and no one would come poking with a stick to see if it was still alive.”17 But can Bell’s digitized memories claim immortality if nobody ever pokes them with a stick? Wouldn’t they then be well and truly dead? Or would they just be snoozing?
Let’s try a different analogy. Compare a person’s digitized memories, lying unread in cyberspace, not to unread books but to unconscious memories. As long as they are unconscious, my memories comprise a set of unaccessed images or thoughts recorded in a substrate of neurons within my brain. Call the images and thoughts the “higher level” of my memories. And call the
neural substrate the “lower level.” When an unconscious memory becomes conscious—when it crosses my mind—it changes in neither respect. Conscious or unconscious, a memory remains composed of higher-level thoughts and images recorded in a lower-level neural substrate.18 And so no justification exists for saying that my memories are any more dead when unconscious than when conscious. By bringing an unconscious memory into consciousness, it makes more sense to say that I have taken something from the dark and brought it into the light than it does to say that I have converted something dead into something living.19 It’s a process of transfer, not transformation. Unconscious memories, even permanently unconscious memories, are no less alive than conscious ones. So will my unread memories, as long as they continued to exist on the planet in digitized form, really be any less immortal than they would if someone actually accessed them now and then?
But what if my unread memories, archived in cyberspace, are less like unconscious memories than like unread books? When I take a book off the shelf and read it, I haven’t simply removed something from the dark and brought it into the light. Here, it does seem more apt to say that I have converted something dead into something living. While it lies on the shelf, the book comprises a series of higher-level words and sentences recorded on a lower-level substrate of paper and ink. When I pick the book up and read it, those higher-level words and sentences become images and thoughts dancing in my mind. And the book’s lower-level substrate of inert paper and ink becomes a substrate of electric neural circuits sparking in my brain. There is a real transformation here. What was on the shelf has germinated into something new in the mind, at both the higher and the lower levels. In that way, it does make sense to say that the reader is giving life to what would otherwise have been a dead, inert text.