by Andrew Stark
17. Jasper Rees, “We Are a Modest Country Singer,” Independent, November 24, 1995.
18. Gail Shister, “No ‘Dancing’ for the Credibility-Conscious Norville,” Philadelphia Inquirer, October 11, 2006.
19. Val Hennessy, “Victims of the Fame Virus,” Daily Mail, November 15, 2002.
20. R. Todd, “The Real McCoy,” Sunday News, November 10, 1996.
21. Dan Shaughnessy, “Wading Through the Boggs,” Boston Globe, April 9, 1989.
22. Jim Shelley, “Catch a Falling Star,” Guardian, June 8, 1996.
23. Sulak Sivarksa, Seeds of Peace (Berkeley: Parallax, 1992), 62–72.
24. Jack L. Rubins, “Narcissism and the Narcissistic Personality,” American Journal of Psychoanalysis 43 (1983): 3.
25. For businesspeople, bankruptcy is also a means of expunging losses from the ledger. It enables those with more losses than winnings to wipe the scoreboard clean every so often and—so it’s said—begin the game anew at the starting line. In similar fashion, many deem the institution of retirement to have furnished the wealth-accumulation game with a recognizable “finish line,” as an AFL-CIO pamphlet once described it, so that you can choose to quit the game while you’re ahead. The bottom line: just as you can begin the game anew through bankruptcy, such that your past losses no longer count, you can end it with retirement, such that any future drawdowns don’t count.
But the bankrupt does not in fact begin the game anew. After all, none of his competitors in life go back to their beginnings when the bankrupt does. Instead it’s more apt to say that bankruptcy merely furnishes a pit stop during which the bankrupt retools himself while others keep on going. Nor does retirement provide a reliable end to the game of wealth accumulation, since so many expire before they reach that finish line. The availability of pit stops for renewal and the possibility of dying before the race is over are characteristic of only one particular game, namely car racing. Perhaps that’s why, emulating as it does the chase for wealth, it has become such an emblematic American sport.
26. Thomas Bonk, “It Was Tiger’s Year After All,” Los Angeles Times, December 9, 2003.
27. Derek Parfit, Reasons and Persons (Oxford: Clarendon, 1984), 200, 267.
28. I am focusing on mental continuity and leaving aside the question of whether instead physical continuity (specifically of the brain) counts as a criterion for the self’s survival, since physical continuity doesn’t figure into the Buddhist consolation.
29. Parfit, Reasons and Persons, 280.
30. Ibid., 199.
31. See, e.g., Sydney Shoemaker, “Personhood and Consciousness,” in Consciousness and the Self: New Essays, ed. JeeLoo Liu and John Perry (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 204.
32. Parfit pairs another case, “Operation,” with “Teletransportation”: You know that you will soon undergo a painful operation. But before that happens all of your memories, beliefs, plans, thoughts, feelings, attachments, aspirations, and desires will be wiped out and replaced with new ones. Should you dread the operation? If so, why? After all, won’t it happen to an entirely different person?
One way of looking at Operation is that it, too, illustrates the profound difference between a future-looking and a past-looking perspective. Ahead of me in Operation lies the complete extinguishment of all my memories, plans, attachments, and so forth—and their replacement with an entirely different set. Even so, I myself would still conclude that it’s “me” who would undergo the operation, and so will dread it. That’s because when I look ahead, what matters to my sense of survival is not whether my memories, thoughts, plans, commitments, and perceptions will continue to display certain kinds of relationships and similarities, but simply whether my bare subject will continue moving forward in time, which it does in the Operation case. For me, looking forward, the person undergoing the operation will still be me. Of course, once my memories, thoughts, plans, commitments, attachments, and beliefs are emptied out and replaced with new ones, that new person, looking backward, would not think he is me. He himself would not think that I have survived because, in looking backward, he conceives not a continuing bare self but a series of memories, plans, attachments, and so forth. And when he consults them, he will find that none of them refer to or have anything to do with mine.
33. In physical terms, I am agnostic as to how this continuity of self on into the future is accomplished. If someone told me that computer nano-chips would one day begin gradually replacing my brain cells cyborg-style, I would still think of my self as surviving as long as I felt there was no temporal gap in this process. See, e.g., David Chalmers, “Uploading: A Philosophical Analysis,” in Intelligence Unbound: The Future of Uploaded and Machine Minds, ed. Russell Blackford and Damien Broderick (Malden: Wiley, 2014), ch. 6.
Chapter 4. Bucket Lists
1. Paul Tillich, The Shaking of the Foundations (Eugene: Wipf and Stock, 2011), 169.
2. Heidegger, Being and Time (New York: Harper and Row, 1962), 401.
3. Ibid., 257–59.
4. Søren Kierkegaard, “At a Graveside,” in Three Discourses on Imagined Occasions (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), 81.
5. Julian Barnes, Nothing to Be Frightened Of (New York: Knopf, 2008), 109.
6. See, e.g., Maureen Dowd, “Is Barry Whiffing?” New York Times, April 29, 2014.
7. William Ian Miller, Losing It: In Which an Aging Professor Laments His Shrinking Brain (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2011), 209–10.
8. Heidegger, Being and Time, 234–37.
9. Liza Field, “Nature Displays Value of Death,” Roanoke Times and World News, October 19, 2006.
10. See Muriel Spark, Memento mori (London: Virago, 2010), 193, on “that sense of calm and freedom that is supposed to accompany old age.”
11. Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spake Zarathustra, trans. Thomas Common (Ware: Wordsworth, 1997), 68.
12. Sigmund Freud, Reflections on War and Death (New York: Moffatt, Yard, 1918), 43–44.
13. Viktor Mayer-Schönberger, Delete: The Virtue of Forgetting in the Digital Age (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009), 166.
14. We might think that the opposite is occasionally true. I might say, for example, that I’m sure interest rates will rise though I don’t know exactly when. But even here I am actually more certain about that future event’s “when” than its “will.” What I am saying is that although I don’t know the exact date, I think interest rates will rise sometime in the near term. Meanwhile, given the possibility of everything from oil shocks to war I actually have no idea whether they in fact will. By contrast, mass death or extinction due to natural events resembles individual death—we know that some disasters (earthquakes, meteor collisions with the planet) are certain to happen, but are far less certain as to when.
15. See also Heidegger, Being and Time, 288; Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness (New York: Philosophical Library, 1956), 536.
16. Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 538.
17. Logan Hill, “Dern Has a Story for You,” New York Times, November 7, 2013.
18. Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 536.
19. David Dalton, Piece of My Heart (New York: Da Capo, 2009), 19.
20. Ibid., 191.
21. Ibid., 57.
22. Ibid., 184.
23. Jerry Hopkins, The Lizard King: The Essential Jim Morrison (London: Plexus, 2009), 235.
24. Ibid., 241–42.
25. Christopher Bowen, “Love and Defection,” Scotsman, November 21, 1998.
26. Rick Kogan, “He Led Styx to the Top, but Now Singer Has to Sail Away on His Own,” Knight Ridder Tribune News Service, December 18, 2002.
27. Frank R. Pieper, “First and Last Kiss Has No Fire,” News Gazette, October 2, 2000.
28. A. O. Scott, “Hizzoner on Screen: Regrets? That’s Not His Style,” New York Times, February 1, 2013.
29. “Far too many live, and far too long hang they on their branches. Would that a storm came and shook all this rottennes
s and worm-eatenness from the tree!” See Nietzsche, Thus Spake Zarathustra, 69.
30. Diane Ackerman, A Natural History of the Senses (New York: Vintage, 1991), 132.
31. Peter Simons, “Events,” in The Oxford Handbook of Metaphysics, ed. Michael J. Loux and Dean W. Zimmerman (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 370, 372.
32. Some philosophers value death because, they fear, in its absence the human virtue of courage would wither if not disappear. After all, the idea of sacrificing one’s life for the sake of something one cares about even more deeply—one’s country, one’s ideals—is central to our sense of human grandeur and glory. But this idea runs into a paradox. For it necessarily assumes that we humans are capable of valuing many things more highly than life itself. And so whatever loss death inflicts, there remain other things whose loss would, depending on the circumstances, require even greater courage to sustain: loss of country, loss of one’s ideals. Even in the absence of death, for example, opportunities to show courage by sacrificing one’s allegiance to one’s country for the sake of protecting one’s friends would still exist, as in E. M. Forster’s famous declaration: “If I had to choose between betraying my country and betraying my friend I hope I should have the guts to betray my country.” Likewise, even without death, the opportunity to show courage by renouncing one’s cherished political ideals when they require one to engage in duplicity or brutality would still exist. In this way, too, life furnishes opportunities—opportunities to test our courage—every bit as substantial as death does.
33. See Simon Critchley, Preamble, Very Little . . . Almost Nothing (London: Routledge, 1997).
34. Heidegger, Being and Time, 289.
35. Mark B. Okrent, “The Truth of Being and the History of Philosophy,” in Heidegger: A Critical Reader, ed. Hubert L. Dreyfus and Harrison Hall (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992), 147; and Dorothea Freed, “The Question of Being: Heidegger’s Project,” in The Cambridge Companion to Heidegger, ed. Charles B. Guignon (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 63.
36. Martin Heidegger, What Is a Thing? (South Bend: Gateway, 1967), 21–22; 33.
37. Heidegger, Being and Time, 406, 437; Calvin O. Schrag, “Heidegger on Repetition and Historical Understanding,” Philosophy East and West 20 (1970): 289; Edgar C. Boedeker, Jr, “Phenomenology,” in A Companion to Heidegger, ed. Hubert L. Dreyfus and Mark A. Wrathall (Oxford: Blackwell, 2005), 167.
38. Carol J. White, Time and Death: Heidegger’s Analysis of Finitude (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005), 132–33.
39. William D. Blattner, “Existential Temporality in Being and Time,” in Heidegger: A Critical Reader, ed. Hubert Dreyfus and Harrison Hall (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992), 105.
40. Lilian Alweiss, “Heidegger and ‘The Concept of Time,’” History of the Human Sciences 15 (2002): 123.
41. Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 546.
42. Heidegger does discuss what he calls “clock time,” i.e., our ordinary understanding on which it is time that delivers and then snatches away possibilities moment by moment, instead of it being our possibilities that shape and deliver phases of time to us in succession. For him, clock time is inauthentic and cannot be motivating because as long as we see time as a series of undifferentiated moments, we will assume that they will go on forever. In other words, clock time can’t provoke us to act because, even though it keeps life’s possibilities momentary, it gets rid of the sense that we will die, and so we will assume that we have all the time in the world.
For the authentic self, then, death is necessary to provoke us to act because time can’t—it doesn’t bring possibilities to us and then snatch them away; rather our authentic possibilities create their own time. And for the inauthentic self, the self that does view time as a conveyor belt endlessly presenting and then withdrawing possibilities, the problem is that such a view dispels the sense that we will die, and so provides no goad to action. But either way for Heidegger, it’s death alone, not life or the evanescent possibilities it provides, that causes us to forge a self. See Heidegger, Being and Time, 424.
Chapter 5. Retiring Your Jersey
1. Jeff Twiss, National Basketball Association, “Remembering Reggie,” http://www.nba.com/celtics/news/070203_RememberingReggie.htm (accessed January 1, 2016).
2. National Basketball Association, “Brooklyn Nets to Honor Jason Kidd with Jersey Retirement,” September 9, 2013, http://www.nba.com/nets/news/brooklyn-nets-honor-jason-kidd-jersey-retirement.
3. Beth Harris, “Kings Retire Gretzky’s No. 99 Jersey,” USA Today, October 10, 2002.
4. Major League Baseball, “MLB to Honor Jackie Robinson with League-Wide Tribute and Programming Surrounding Jackie Robinson Day,” April 1, 2013, http://mlb.mlb.com/news/article.jsp?ymd=20130411&content_id=44509934&vkey=pr_mlb&c_id=mlb).
5. Ice Hockey Wiki, “Wayne Gretzky,” http://icehockey.wikia.com/wiki/Wayne_Gretzky (accessed January 1, 2016).
6. See blog commenter “Jackmanii,” The Straight Dope, “Baseball retired uniform numbers,” September 1, 2001, http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=33597.
7. Martin Dodge, “Do We Need an Ethics of Forgetting in a World of Digital ‘Memories for Life’?,” University of Manchester, http://personalpages.manchester.ac.uk/staff/m.dodge/forgetting_position_paper1.pdf (accessed January 1, 2016).
8. N. Katherine Hayles, How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature and Informatics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 38–39.
9. Clive Thompson, “A Head for Detail,” Fast Company Magazine, November 2006; Joseph Brean, “A Lifetime of Stored Bits,” National Post, December 21, 2009.
10. J. M. Coetzee, Elizabeth Costello (New York: Penguin, 2004), 77.
11. Vladimir Nabokov, Mary (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1970), 34.
12. E. M. Forster, The Journals and Diaries of E. M. Forster (London: Pickering and Chatto), 3:50.
13. Marcel Proust, Remembrance of Things Past (Ware: Wordsworth, 2006), 721.
14. Julian Barnes, Nothing to Be Frightened Of (New York: Vintage, 2009), 140.
15. Jenny Kidd, “Digital Storytelling,” in Save as—Digital Memories, ed. Joanne Garde-Hansen, Andrew Hoskins, and Anna Reading (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 177.
16. Coetzee, Elizabeth Costello, 77.
17. Ibid., 17.
18. Douwe Draaisma, Metaphors of Memory: A History of Ideas About the Mind (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 124.
19. To retrieve unconscious memories, Proust says, is to bring what was “hidden from our eyes” into the “broad daylight” of our consciousness (Proust, Remembrance of Things Past, 692). Likewise Henri Bergson, Matter and Memory (Mineola: Dover, 2004), 198: “recollections emerge into the light of consciousness.”
20. Philosophical Occasions, 1912–1951 (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1993), 447.
21. W. G. Sebald, Austerlitz (New York: Random House, 2001), 95.
22. Andrew Podnieks, International Ice Hockey Federation, “99 at 50: All-Time Top 10,” January 18, 2011, http://www.iihf.com/home-of-hockey/news/news-singleview/?txttnews[tt_news]=5269&cHash=266eaf82fc74b63c5f7f626768eae29d.
23. John Updike, Rabbit at Rest (New York: Fawcett Columbine, 1996), 436.
24. Stephen Cave, Immortality: The Quest to Live Forever and How It Drives Civilization (New York: Crown, 2012), 134–36; 175–77.
25. Vladimir Nabokov, Speak, Memory (New York: Vintage, 1989), 95.
26. Geoffrey H. Hartman, The Longest Shadow: In the Aftermath of the Holocaust (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996), 66–67.
Chapter 6. Regrets?
1. Kevin Maher, “Regrets, Here’s a Few,” The Times, November 26, 2012.
2. For a good exploration of this point, see Todd May, Death (Art of Living) (Stocksfield: Acumen, 2009), 59.
3. Or see Proust, Remembrance of Things Past, 924: “I could now sate my desire for [the girls] . . . hold it in reserve, among all those other desires the realization of which, as soon as I knew it to be po
ssible, I would cheerfully postpone.”
4. See the discussion in Alexander Nehamas, Nietzsche, Life as Literature (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1985), 149–50, 164.
5. George E. Vaillant, Spiritual Evolution: A Scientific Defense of Faith (New York: Broadway, 2008), 119; George E. Vaillant, Aging Well: Surprising Guideposts to a Happier Life from the Landmark Harvard Study of Adult Development (Boston: Little, Brown, 2002), 159.
Suppose you believe that to regret even one thing in your life is to regret your entire life. Does that mean that you cannot regret the fact that you will die, because that would entail also having to regret the fact that you were born in the first place? After all, if every thing is bound together in tight links of cause and effect, then the event of your particular death is irrevocably connected to the event of your particular birth. It’s a package deal. Regret neither—or regret both.
I wonder, though, whether the “to regret one thing is to regret everything” idea breaks down in the case of death. Look at it this way. As the screenwriter Charlie Kaufman puts it, “Death comes. That’s it. Soon, it’s as if we never existed” (Tad Friend, “Puppet Show,” New Yorker, January 4, 2016, 21). Certainly, as far as you are concerned, once you die it’s as if you never were born. To regret the fact that you must die, then, simply means to regret a state equivalent to your never having been born. That’s why you, like most of us, regret your inevitable extinction. But that poses a problem for the “to regret one thing is to regret everything” idea. After all, it implies just the opposite: that to truly regret the fact that you must die means to regret your ever having been born.