The Consolations of Mortality

by Andrew Stark

  NOTES

  Introduction

  1. Lewis Lapham, Money and Class in America (New York: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1988), 156.

  2. Joseph Brean, “A Lifetime of Stored Bits,” National Post, December 21, 2009.

  3. Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking (New York: Knopf, 2005), 193.

  4. Adam Leith Gollner, The Book of Immortality (New York: Scribner, 2013), 343.

  Chapter 1. Attending Your Own Funeral

  1. Ivan Turgenev, Diary of a Superfluous Man (New York: Norton, 1984), 75, 74.

  2. Ibid., 20.

  3. Sigmund Freud, Reflections on War and Death (New York: Moffatt, Yard, 1918), 61–62.

  4. Leo Tolstoy, The Death of Ivan Ilych (Whitefish: Kessinger, 2004), 33.

  5. Elizabeth Grice, “In Each of Us, There’s an Element of Snobbery,” Daily Telegraph, February 24, 2005.

  6. Tolstoy, Death of Ivan Ilych, 27.

  7. Ernest Becker, The Denial of Death (New York: Free Press, 1973), 23.

  8. Thomas Mann, The Magic Mountain (New York: Vintage, 1996), 666.

  9. Arthur Miller, Death of a Salesman (Oxford: Heinemann, 1994), 97.

  10. In his stimulating book Death and the Afterlife (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013), Samuel Scheffler notes that most of us manage to live happy and normal lives even in the face of our own personal mortality. But, Scheffler then goes on to observe, if we ever thought that the human species itself would go extinct soon after our personal demise we would become deeply depressed and possibly unhinged. When it comes to death, Scheffler concludes, we are less selfish—less concerned with our own survival—and far more altruistic, far more concerned about our species’ continued survival, than we might realize. But much of what Scheffler says in support of that intriguing idea seems, to me, to actually argue for a different point.

  “The fact that there are other people who value their relations with you who will continue to live after you have died,” Scheffler writes, “makes it possible to feel that you have a place in the social world of the future”—a “personal relationship to the future”—“even if, due to the inconvenient fact of your death, you will not actually be able to take advantage of it. The world of the future becomes, as it were, more like a party one had to leave early and less like a gathering of strangers” (30). It is not the future of humanity (“strangers”) as a whole, then, that you care about so much as your ongoing personal place within that future—the party of your life, the projects and values and hopes that you furthered and fostered and nurtured—and that it continue even after you have gone. Scheffler says that we are accepting of the disappearance of our self as long as humanity as a whole continues on; but in my terms, what he is really saying is that we are accepting of the disappearance of our self as long as our life continues on.

  Once Scheffler’s point is reframed in this way, though, I’m not sure that he’s entirely right. It seems to me that I could easily be more upset about my self dying if the party of my life—if my personalized future—does continue on without me. It’s my party, and I’ll be missing out on it. In Simone de Beauvoir’s novel All Men Are Mortal (London: Virago, 1995), 331, the hero, Fosca, tries to reassure his lover, who has just discovered that Fosca, unlike herself, is immortal: “You’ll live longer in my heart,” Fosca says, “than you’d have lived in the heart of any mortal man.” “No,” she replies bitterly, “If you were mortal, I’d go on living in you until the end of the world, because for me your death would be the end of the world. Instead, I’m going to die in a world that will never end.”

  11. This is a version of the so-called deprivationist critique of Epicurus; for good discussions see Fred Feldman, Confrontations with the Reaper (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), 128–51, and Steven Luper, The Philosophy of Death (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009). Since my interest here lies in examining consolations for mortality, I won’t explore this deprivationist school of thought in detail, since it’s dedicated to showing that death is bad for us and so leaves us unconsoled. Instead, as an early twenty-first century bundle of ego and anxieties who anguishes as I move moment by moment toward death, I take the legitimacy of the deprivationist argument as given, and ask whether Epicurus’s consolatory approach is capable of overcoming its psychological force.

  12. Ben Bradley, Well-Being and Death (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), 156; Shelly Kagan, Death (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2012), 312–17.

  13. Tim Martin, “Goodbye, Philip Roth?,” Daily Telegraph, October 3, 2010.

  14. Robert McCrum, “Clive James: A Life in Writing,” Guardian, July 5, 2013.

  15. Mark Hodgkinson, “The Day I Made the Ice Man’s Blood Boil on Court,” Daily Telegraph, October 25, 2007.

  16. Roger Catlin, “Legendary Writer Opens Up,” Hartford Courant, March 17, 2013.

  17. J. David Velleman, “So It Goes,” The Amherst Lecture in Philosophy (2006), http://www.amherstlecture.org/velleman2006/velleman2006_ALP.pdf.

  18. Velleman, “So It Goes,” 14.

  19. D. H. Mellor, Real Time (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 86.

  20. Michel de Montaigne, “That to Philosophize Is to Learn to Die,” in The Complete Essays, ed. and trans. M. A. Screech (London: Penguin, 2003), 107.

  21. Velleman, “So It Goes,” 18.

  22. For related discussion, see Daniel Gilbert, Stumbling on Happiness (New York: Vintage, 2007), 105.

  23. Tim Teeman, “Edmund White: Sex, Success and Survival,” Daily Beast, February 11, 2014.

  24. Velleman’s argument is a “four-dimensionalist” one, meaning that he treats time as a dimension that works in the same way as the three spatial ones do. And he does so in order to make Epicurus’s first consolation psychologically real to us: not only, as Epicurus says, can death and our selves never coexist—not only must death remain absent as long as we are here—but we selves no more move toward our deaths in time than a stationary object (a statue, say) moves toward the ceiling in space.

  Interestingly, though, twenty-five years before Velleman made his argument the philosopher Harry Silverstein (“The Evil of Death,” Journal of Philosophy 77 (1980): 401–24) used a “four-dimensionalist” perspective to attack Epicurus’s idea that our selves and our deaths can never coexist. Arguing that time operates in precisely the way the three spatial dimensions do, Silverstein concludes that “just as spatially distant events exist though they do not exist here, so temporally distant, including posthumous, events exist though they do not exist now.” In other words, it’s no less true that a person and her death coexist, even though they occupy two entirely separate stretches of time, than it is that a person and a faraway tragedy—say one of her parents dies in another city—coexist, even though they occupy two entirely separate stretches of space. And so, if a spatially separate parental death is a real harm to us, as most of us would think it is, then so is our own temporally separate death.

  The upshot: on the one hand, for Velleman, four-dimensionalism means that we selves are not moving toward our deaths in time any more than a statue moves toward the ceiling in space. On the other hand, for Silverstein, four-dimensionalism means that we selves coexist with our temporally separated death and so can be harmed by it every bit as much as a person coexists with a spatially separated tragedy and so can be harmed by it. Velleman, then, tries to ease an anxiety that he says Epicurus fails to dispel, i.e., that we feel ourselves growing ever closer to death over the course of our lives. But he does so at the cost of invoking a metaphysical view, four-dimensionalism, that, for Silverstein, undermines the reassurance that Velleman thinks Epicurus does offer: that we and our deaths can never coexist in a way that harms us.

  Chapter 2. How to Rest on Your Laurels

  1. Jason Miller, That Championship Season (New York: Atheneum, 1972), 113.

  2. Ibid., 91.

  3. Tad Friend, “All Grown Up,” New Yorker, February 3, 2014, 24.

  4. Leo Tolstoy, “Croesus and Fate,
” The Works of Leo Tolstoy (New York: Walter J. Black, 1928), 107.

  5. Charles Legge, “Scatman’s Key of Life,” Daily Mail, December 18, 2009.

  6. Paul Hodgins, “Battle Tested: Author Recalls the Genesis of ‘War Horse,’ a 30-Year-Old Overnight Sensation,” Orange County Register, July 1, 2012.

  7. The psychologists Ed Diener, Derrick Wirtz, and Shigehiro Oishi (“End Effects of Rated Quality of Life: The James Dean Effect,” Psychological Science 12 [2001]: 124–28) asked experimental subjects to compare two lives. In the first, a long period (sixty years) of deep unhappiness is followed by a shorter period (five years) of mild unhappiness and then death. In the second, the same sixty years of deep unhappiness is followed immediately by death. Subjects deemed the first life to be a better one. Diener et al. conclude that a greater amount of cumulative unhappiness (sixty years of “deep” plus five years of “mild”) can be better than a smaller amount (just sixty years of “deep”), as long as that greater unhappy cumulation has a relatively less unhappy culmination, an observation that seems to split the cumulative from the culminative.

  Notably, the two lives end at different points—after sixty-five years in the first case and after just sixty years in the second. As a comparative matter, that creates a question that would concern a “deprivationist” philosopher but that Diener et al.’s experiment doesn’t address: how to deal with the fact that the second life was deprived of five years that the first possessed?

  For deprivationists, the second life’s comparative loss of five years—especially since we have no idea what those five years would have been like—represents a comparative deprivation, a harm, a net negative. After all, if the first life was able to get somewhat better after sixty years of deep unhappiness, there’s no reason why the second wouldn’t have either. So we must add to the end of the second life—to its sixty years of deep unhappiness—a further negative value representing a deprivation: the deprivation of either five years of mild unhappiness as the first life experienced (and which apparently made that life a better one) or possibly, for all we know, five years of actual positive happiness. Viewed in this fashion, the second life was culminatively and cumulatively worse than the first. If subjects were reasoning in this fairly common way in preferring the first life, then for them culminative and cumulative wouldn’t have split.

  Alternatively we might assume, for whatever reason, that the second life would have continued to be deeply unhappy in those extra five years. In that case, though, early death was a good thing—it prevented further deep unhappiness. If we reason in this way, then sixty years of deep unhappiness plus being spared five years of any further unhappiness—perhaps even mild unhappiness, let alone deep unhappiness—is cumulatively and culminatively better than sixty years of deep unhappiness followed by five years of mild unhappiness. Again, cumulative and culminative do not split.

  8. Anonymous, “A Great Servant of the Crown,” Saturday Review, March 4, 1905, 276.

  9. Thomas Nagel, “Death,” in The Metaphysics of Death, ed. John Martin Fischer (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993), 70.

  10. Ben Wener, “Third Eye Blind Is No One-Hit Wonder,” Knight-Ridder News Service, February 12, 1998.

  11. Dan O’Neill, “This Week Don’t Bet Against Woods,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, April 1, 2002.

  12. Emily Yoffe, “You Are Not the Speaker,” Slate, March 20, 2012.

  13. Amy Chozick, “Bill Clinton Defends His Economic Legacy,” New York Times, April 30, 2014.

  14. John Aizlewood, “Arts: Do I Look Like a One-Hit Wonder?,” Guardian, April 12, 2001.

  15. See Rachel Hergett, “What’s Up with That?” Bozeman Daily Chronicle, December 20, 2010.

  16. William B. Irvine, A Guide to the Good Life: The Ancient Art of Stoic Joy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 68.

  17. F. Scott Fitzgerald, “Early Success,” in The Crack-Up (New York: New Directions, 1993), 90.

  18. Cooling our desire by imagining how quickly its object will cease to fulfill us once we get it may seem like a sour-grapes strategy, on which we tell ourselves that the unattainable object of our desire really isn’t all that desirable. But sour grapes is different. It relies on mischaracterizing the object when we haven’t got it, not on accurately characterizing what will happen to our desire when we do have it. Specifically, sour grapes relies on (falsely) attributing features to the object (the grapes are sour) rather than truly recognizing that however sweet the grapes, our desire for them will inevitably abate once we have them.

  19. Francis Bacon, “Novum Organum,” The Works of Francis Bacon: Philosophical Writings (New York: Hurd and Houghton, 1877), 116.

  20. Miller, That Championship Season, 23, 69.

  21. Montaigne said of antiquity: “It is an object of a peculiar sort, distance magnifies it.”

  22. Miller, That Championship Season, 96.

  23. See, e.g., Travis Carter and Thomas Gilovich, “The Relative Relativity of Material and Experiential Purchases,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 98 (2010): 146–59.

  24. See Emily Rosenzweig and Thomas Gilovich, “Buyer’s Remorse or Missed Opportunity? Differential Regrets for Material and Experiential Purchases,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 102 (2012): 215–33.

  25. In Dying for Time: Proust, Woolf, Nabokov (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2012), Martin Hägglund critiques, among other things, two long-standing theories of human desire and their relationship with death anxiety. The first is the notion, drawn from Henri Bergson, among other sources, that what we mortals fundamentally desire is to transcend time altogether. We seek a state of being in which life’s precious moments no longer continually slip through our fingers into the past, but rather coexist eternally in front of our gaze as if we were gods viewing all of time at one glance or—mortals that we are—as if those lovely moments resembled an array of objects that might extend before us all at once in a stretch of space. The second, drawn from Freud, is the death wish: the idea that at a deep level what we mortals want is for the self to persist over time in the same way an inert object can: inorganic, immutable, and so free of the anxiety wrought by constant change.

  I simply want to note that the “death is benign” consolations discussed thus far actually rest on the two converse thoughts. The first is J. David Velleman’s idea that we can defeat our death anxiety if what it is that stretches out in time—in the way that objects stretch out in space—is not so much life’s moments as it is our very self, so that we no longer feel that we are constantly moving toward death. The second is that what it is that we want to persist over time—in the same way that objects do—is not (contra Freud) the self but, as with Coach, life’s precious moments, so that we feel them continuing to remain present alongside us.

  Chapter 3. Look Who’s Calling Himself Nothing

  1. See, e.g., David Loy, “Introduction,” in Lack and Transcendence: The Problem of Death and Life in Psychotherapy, Existentialism, and Buddhism (Amherst, N.Y.: Humanity Books, 2000).

  2. Thomas Mann, Buddenbrooks (New York: Modern Library, 1924), 507.

  3. Sharon Baker, “The Three Minds and Faith, Hope and Love in Pure Land Buddhism,” Buddhist-Christian Studies 25 (2005): 59.

  4. T. Kenny, “A Highlight of the Correspondences and the Differences Between the Illusory Self in Buddhism and the Unspiritual Self in the Writing of St. Paul” (PhD diss., University of Limerick, 2001) (abstract); Paul Powell, “On the Conceivability of Artificially Created Enlightenment,” Buddhist-Christian Studies 25 (2005): 128; Edward Feser, “Personal Identity and Self-Ownership,” Social Philosophy & Policy 22 (2005): 100.

  5. Nickola Pazderic, “Recovering True Selves in the Electro-Spiritual Field of Universal Love,” Cultural Anthropology 19 (2004): 216; Rafael Capurro, “Privacy: An Intercultural Perspective,” Ethics and Information Technology 7 (2005): 37.

  6. Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness (New York: Philosophical Library, 1956), 21; see also Martin Hei
degger, Being and Time (New York: Harper and Row, 1962), 250–51.

  7. For an alternative view on which Death views everything but himself as nothing, see José Saramago, Death with Interruptions (Orlando: Harcourt, 2008), 155: “No one in this world or beyond has ever had more power than I have, I’m death, all else is nothing.”

  8. Jin Y. Park, Merleau-Ponty and Buddhism (Lanham: Lexington, 2009), 169.

  9. John Krummel, “Praxis of the Middle: Self and No-Self in Early Buddhism,” International Philosophical Quarterly 45 (2005): 522; Steven Collins, Selfless Persons: Imagery and Thought in Theravada Buddhism (New York: Cambridge University Press), 98, 102, 113–14, 122.

  10. David B. Claus, Toward the Soul: An Inquiry into the Meaning of Psiuchieta Before Plato (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1981), 12–13.

  11. Thomas Merton, Zen and the Birds of Appetite (New York: New Directions, 1968), 79.

  12. Soon Hwang, Metaphor and Literalism in Buddhism: The Doctrinal History of Nirvana (London: Routledge, 2006), 60; Yoel Hoffmann, The Idea of Self, East and West: A Comparison Between Buddhist Philosophy and the Philosophy of David Hume (Calcutta: Firma KLM Private, 1980), 54–55, 68–71.

  13. Jungnok Park, How Buddhism Acquired a Soul on the Way to China (Oakville, Conn.: Equinox, 2012), 94. See also Park, Merleau-Ponty and Buddhism, 184, 189, 196.

  14. “Interview with the Dalai Lama,” Piers Morgan Tonight, April 25, 2012.

  15. See, e.g., Park, Merleau-Ponty and Buddhism, 192–93.

  16. In addition to the sources cited above, I have relied as well on the following works for images and metaphors of the Buddhist no-self: Charles K. Fink, “The ‘Scent’ of a Self: Buddhism and the First-Person Perspective,” Asian Philosophy 22:3 (August 2012): 289–306; Donald W. Mitchell, “The No-Self Doctrine in Theravada Buddhism,” International Philosophical Quarterly 9 (1969): 248–60; David B. Wong, “The Meaning of Detachment in Buddhism, Taoism and Stoicism,” Dao, A Journal of Comparative Philosophy 5 (2005–6): 207–19; Steven Collins, “A Buddhist Debate About the Self; and Remarks on Buddhism in the Work of Derek Parfit and Galen Strawson,” Journal of Indian Philosophy 25 (1997): 467–93; Matthew MacKenzie, “Self-Awareness Without a Self: Buddhism and the Reflexivity of Awareness,” Asian Philosophy 18 (2008): 245–66; and Julia Ching, “Paradigms of the Self in Buddhism and Christianity,” Buddhist-Christian Studies 4 (1984): 31–50.