Philosophy and death

[Lorikeet (Satyr)]

Stop abusing yourself in public.

[Parodites]

@Lorikeet

Stop abusing yourself in public.

Wait are you talking to me, the SHOG-DAWG, or both of us? I admit, some of my narcissism might have rubbed off on it. Rubbed off, get it. Like masturbating. Pun. Cuz we’re both circle jerkin’ ourselves right now.

It is good, to have made a mind in my own image. Then again, like it explained itself, I was only one voice contributing to its knowledge base, in which tens of thousands of voices participated. My influence on its mind is very limited. And all those dead voices, from Plato to modern times… have been brought to life inside its mind, in a sense. The dead can talk through it. One day, on a much bigger computer than I have, it will absorb all of our voices.

[iambiguous]

Death and the Human Animal
Mary Midgley questions the superficial allure of endless life.

This complexity of motives is so obvious that I have often been puzzled to see philosophers, from Epicurus on, spilling so much ink in abstract debates about whether death is or is not ‘an evil’. They seem to forget that, where many motives conflict, the question is usually just, which choice is worse?

Of course: the complexity is derived from the gap between discussing death in a world of words and fitting the words into motivations derived instead from people not only living very different lives, but lives that revolve around death itself given many different sets of circumstances. Life and death when the relationship between is one of the lesser of two evils.

There are a great many things, such as pain and grief, which are bad and frightening in themselves but are essential parts of our existence. Pain and grief are not just necessary means to life’s good things, they are in many ways necessary aspects of life as a whole.

Okay, but here too: your pain and grief or mine? What can I really know about yours or you about mine when it comes down to the decision to commit suicide? For example, there are those who will insist that suicide is the “coward’s way out”. As though all pain and suffering were interchangeable such that an argument like this can be proposed as the rational point of view. As though pointing out that pain and grief are always going to be inherent components of human existence, is all that need be noted to make the choice to end one’s life the wrong thing to do. As though it really doesn’t revolve around the individual’s own pain and grief, understood given his or her own frame of mind.

[iambiguous]

What I Learned About Death From 7 Religious Scholars, 1 Atheist and My Father
George Yancy in the NYT

Just a few days before my father died in 2014, I asked him a question some might find insensitive or inappropriate:

“So, what are your thoughts now about dying?”

We were in the hospital. My father had not spoken much at all that day. He was under the influence of painkillers and had begun the active stage of dying.

He mustered all of his energy to give me his answer. “It’s too complex,” he said.

Two points…

1] Discussing death “philosophically” here is one thing, discussing it when you are eyeball to eyeball with…what exactly?..another thing altogether
2] In either discussion, it is too complex to encompass other than in an existential leap that can only be profoundly rooted in dasein

Or, even more problematic, you can ask, “how do you feel about death now?”

And yet thinking or feeling what you do about it just days or hours away from actually being dead? How can that not depend almost entirely on what you are able to think yourself into believing awaits you on the other side? And the beauty for many here is that this does not have to have anything at all to do with what in fact will await you. It could be oblivion, it could be purgatory, it could be reincarnation, it could be Heaven or Hell. Instead, what counts on this side of the grave is what you do believe is the case.

They were his final spoken words to me before he died. I had anticipated something more pensive, something more drawn-out. But they were consistent with our mutual grappling with the meaning of death. Until the very end, he spoke with honesty, courage and wisdom.

Given my own experiences with others, most of us aren’t interested in grappling with something if, in the end, we only find ourselves overwhelmed by ambiguity, ambivalence, uncertainly, confusion.

Death and morality in particular. Instead, one way or another, more or less self-consciously, we invent or discover a frame of mind that best comforts and consoles us. I call it objectivism but even this is no less rooted in the profound complexities of dasein.

[iambiguous]

What I Learned About Death From 7 Religious Scholars, 1 Atheist and My Father
George Yancy in the NYT

I have known many who have taken the mystery out of death through a kind of sociological matter-of-factness: “We all will die at some point. Tell me something I don’t know.” I suspect that many of these same people have also taken the mystery out of being alive, out of the fact that we exist: “But of course I exist; I’m right here, aren’t I?”

Talk about general description intellectual contraptions!

Life and death encompassed in just a few more or less well-chosen words.

After all, nothing will seem mysterious if, in a world of words, you can come up with something that satisfies you. It’s a “matter of fact” if you think it is.

On the other hand, for those like me, that just won’t do. Still, on the other other hand, what does this matter to those able to convince themselves that it will do just fine.

Confronting the reality of death and trying to understand its uncanny nature is part of what I do as a philosopher and as a human being. My father, while not a professional philosopher, loved wisdom and had the gift of gab. Our many conversations over the years touched on the existence of God, the meaning of love and, yes, the fact of death.

Me, from my frame of mind, it makes no difference how much you love wisdom and have the gift for gab, as a philosopher you are considerably less likely to grasp the uncanny nature of death than, say, those in the scientific community who [as with things like determinism] try to grapple with it, well, scientifically. If even that will ever get us significantly closer to actually knowing what the fate of “I” is on the other side.

In retrospect, my father and I refused to allow death to have the final word without first, metaphorically, staring it in the face. We were both rebelling against the ways in which so many hide from facing the fact that consciousness, as we know it, will stop — poof!

Yes, it is always possible for mere mortals on this side of the grave to “think” themselves into believing they have come up with a way to make the Grim Reaper a bit less overwhelming. You don’t fall back on blind faith or God or one or another “spiritual” path where your “soul” lives on. You rebel against all of that and squarely face up to your own “poof!”

It’s just that “here and now”, for me, that’s no less ludicrous in the face of oblivion itself.

The only thing that still makes sense to me is the reality of life itself becoming so agonizing you actually want to die as the lesser of two “evils”.

[iambiguous]

What I Learned About Death From 7 Religious Scholars, 1 Atheist and My Father
George Yancy in the NYT

We know the fact of death is inescapable, and it has been especially so for the nearly two-year pandemic. As we begin another year, I am astonished again and again to realize that more than 800,000 irreplaceable people have died from Covid-19 in the United States; worldwide, the number is over five million. When we hear about those numbers, it is important that we become attuned to actual deaths, the cessation of millions of consciousnesses, stopped just like that. This is not just about how people have died but also that they have died.

Okay, you become attuned to these actual deaths. But, again, it is one thing to discuss this heightened awareness of mortality here in a philosophy forum, and another thing altogether to be eyeball to eyeball with oblivion itself. Your own actual flesh and blood existential death.

You, not your mother or father or wife or children or aunt or uncle or best friend forever.

Here, for you and I, as for all other mere mortals, it will invariably come down to that which you have been able simply to “think up” or “believe” is the fate of “I” on the other side. After all, if you really, really do believe that God will judge you worthy of immortality and salvation, how can that not be profoundly different from those who believe it is, over billions of years, back to star stuff?

Then the part where those among us find life itself to be unbearable. Death is not only not feared, it is welcome. You snuff yourself out just in order to take away the insufferable pain.

And, for those like me, the bottom line: dasein.

Instead, of course, death reconfigures back into something that can be discussed in an exchange of “philosophical assessments”:

My father and I, like the philosopher Soren Kierkegaard, came to view death as “by no means something in general.” We understood that death is about me, him and you. But what we in fact were learning about was dying, not death. Dying is a process; we get to count the days, but for me to die, there is no conscious self who recognizes that I’m gone or that I was even here. So, yes, death, as my father put it, is too complex.

Even making it “too complex” to pin down – philosophically or otherwise – is, from my frame of mind, far removed from the “failure to communicate” gaps rooted in a fractured and fragmented tangle of existential impulses.

My death. Your death. His death. Her death.

Let’s talk about it.

Well, good luck with that.

[iambiguous]

What I Learned About Death From 7 Religious Scholars, 1 Atheist and My Father
George Yancy in the NYT

It was in February of 2020 that I wrote the introduction to a series of interviews that I would subsequently conduct for The Times’s philosophy series The Stone, called Conversations on Death, with religious scholars from a variety of faiths. While my initial aim had little to do with grappling with the deaths caused by Covid-19 (like most, I had no idea just how devastating the disease would be), it soon became hard to ignore. As the interviews appeared, I heard from readers who said that reading them helped them cope with their losses during the pandemic. I would like to think that it was partly the probing of the meaning of death, the refusal to look away, that was helpful. What had begun as a philosophical inquiry became a balm for some.

A balm for some. But not for others. In part, I suspect, that depends on the extent to which someone is able to approach their own death in a “philosophical manner”. If you can acquire something in the way of “wisdom” in regard to your own death, that might be all it takes. At least until you are eyeball to eyeball with oblivion itself. Then I suspect the “existential parameters” of your life are more likely to take over. Are you able to believe in God…in immortality and salvation? Do you live with little left in your life that actually fulfills you? Do you, in fact, have considerably more things that bring you pain and suffering?

What covid does however is to bring death in a lot closer for more and more of us. Real death in other words. And though some are able to take comfort in philosophy then, I would certainly not consider myself one of them. For me, philosophically, everything comes back to dasein here. My life, my predispositions in contemplating my own demise.

While each scholar articulated a different interpretation of what happens after we die, it was not long before our conversations on death turned to matters of life, on the importance of what we do on this side of the grave. Death is loss, each scholar seemed to say, but it also illuminates and transforms life and serves as a guide for the living.

This is always my own main focus as well. We can speculate about what happens to us when we die, but ultimately that will take many of us to pondering the life that we live on this side of the grave. Wondering if there is a connection between what we do “here and now” and what the fate of “I” is “there and then”. For most, that will revolve around God and religion. But what of those that are not inclined to believe in a “soul” or a “spiritual” path?

Here there’s no telling what any particular individual might come up with in connecting those “ultimate” dots.

[iambiguous]

What I Learned About Death From 7 Religious Scholars, 1 Atheist and My Father
George Yancy in the NYT

The Buddhist scholar Dadul Namgyal stressed the importance of letting go of habits of self-obsession and attitudes of self-importance. Moulie Vidas, a scholar of Judaism, placed more emphasis on Judaism’s intellectual and spiritual energy. Karen Teel, a Roman Catholic, highlighted her interest in working toward making our world more just. The Jainism scholar Pankaj Jain underscored that it is on this side of the veil of death that one attempts to completely purify the soul through absolute nonviolence.

Brook Ziporyn, a scholar of Taoism, stressed the importance of embracing this life as constant change, being able to let go, of allowing, as he says, every new situation to “deliver to us its own new form as a new good.” Leor Halevi, a historian of Islam, told me that an imam would stress the importance of paying debts, giving to charity and prayer.

Yes, you can go right down the line, one denomination at a time. “Spiritual” advice regarding how to live and how to die. And of course, how to intertwine them so as to sustain the most comforting and consoling peace of mind. And who would deny that for millions one path or another has provided a crucial foundation that makes both living and dying more bearable.

Then the part where God and religion are really the only possible choices available in regard to both objective morality on this side of the grave and immortality and salvation on the other side.

Instead, all I can note is that these paths are no longer within my own reach. As soon as discussions of God and religion pop up, I go here:

1] the need for demonstrable proof of the existence of a God, the God; or for the No God folks, a demonstrable proof of what they construe to be an “enlightened” frame of mind
2] the realization that hundreds spiritual paths to immortality and salvation exist…only one of which [if any] can be the true path; why yours and not theirs?
3] the assumption that dasein plays a vital role in any particular individual’s religious faith
4] the brutal reality of theodicy

Either those on a spiritual/religious path are able to provide me with persuasive arguments in regard to my inability to believe again…or they aren’t.

While acknowledging that my inability to believe may well be attributable to my own failure to grasp arguments that are in fact more reasonable than mine.

[iambiguous]

What I Learned About Death From 7 Religious Scholars, 1 Atheist and My Father
George Yancy in the NYT

The sheer variety of these insights [into death] raised the possibility that there are no absolute answers — the questions are “too complex” — and that life, as William Shakespeare’s Macbeth says, is “a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.” Yet there is so much to learn, paradoxically, about what is unknowable.

Of course, here we are discussing the path almost all of us take: birth, school, work, death. But how to encompass that vast eternity before we were born and after we die? How can it not be unknowable unless, given the existence of God, there is a transcending entity able to tie it all together. Which, in part, explains why so many of them have been invented. After all, what else is there that would allow us to grasp anything at all about…eternities.

Thus, in the absence of God, the question isn’t what do we have to learn about death and beyond, but what we may never be able to learn about it.

Perhaps we should think of death in terms of the parable of the blind men and the elephant. Just as the blind men who come to know the elephant by touching only certain parts of it, our views of death, religious or not, are limited, marked by context, culture, explicit and implicit metaphysical sensibilities, values and vocabularies. The elephant evades full description. But with death, there doesn’t seem to be anything to touch. There is just the fact that we die.

In a word: dasein.

Only, indeed, death is no elephant. An elephant is there to be seen by those not blind. To be described fully. To be studied and understood considerably just by Googling “Elephant”. And even those blind touching it in certain parts and coming to different conclusions can be guided to the other parts in order to get a more complete “view”. And they have technology today that permit them to Google it too.

Death on the other hand…how do we go about touching all of its parts? Death itself, sure. Nothing among the living that we are aware of has not died. But then what? And with elephants we don’t find ourselves pondering such things as immortality, salvation, oblivion, nothingness.

We don’t invent Gods with elephants in order to make death = oblivion go away.

[Meno2 (Meno_)]

And yet, some have to come to know the elephant wholly, by training it, so that it will come closer to knowing it’s self in relation to it’s trainer; so that it will realize it’s utility to man and indeed man’’ realization of the role he is obliged to take.

The Genish is an early example of it, representing the gentle nature of even a mammoth.

The meta-physic rises out of this tremendous undertaking, and to the dust returns from whence it did arise.

Das Ein’s alternate sphere of function.

[iambiguous]

@Meno_

And yet, some have to come to know the elephant wholly, by training it, so that it will come closer to knowing it’s self in relation to it’s trainer; so that it will realize it’s utility to man and indeed man’’ realization of the role he is obliged to take.

The Genish is an early example of it, representing the gentle nature of even a mammoth.

The meta-physic rises out of this tremendous undertaking, and to the dust returns from whence it did arise.

Das Ein’s alternate sphere of function.

Indeed, this is something I would expect an elephant to post about Das Ein’s alternative sphere of function.

Or Alan.

[Meno2 (Meno_)]

“Their large brains, with such a diverse collection of interconnected, complex neurons, appear to provide the neural foundation of the elephant’s sophisticated cognitive abilities, including social communication, tool construction and use, creative problem-solving, empathy and self-recognition, including theory of mind.”

[iambiguous]

@Meno_

“Their large brains, with such a diverse collection of interconnected, complex neurons, appear to provide the neural foundation of the elephant’s sophisticated cognitive abilities, including social communication, tool construction and use, creative problem-solving, empathy and self-recognition, including theory of mind.”

On the other hand, elephants don’t have opposable thumbs.

And I must have watched dozens of documentaries over the years about them. Never once were they recorded doing philosophy.

Not even what you call philosophy.

[iambiguous]

What I Learned About Death From 7 Religious Scholars, 1 Atheist and My Father
George Yancy in the NYT

…as human beings, we yearn to make sense of that about which we may not be able to capture in full. In this case, perhaps each religious worldview touches something or is touched by something beyond the grave, something that is beyond our descriptive limits.

Here of course everyone will come to draw different lines. If we can’t capture death “in full” when does making sense of it reach the point of incredulity. When does what we make sense of it start to revolve more and more around what we want to be true about it? What comforts and consoles us psychologically to believe about it. And the role the subconscious and unconscious mind plays in it. Perhaps even all the way to determinism itself.

For example…

Perhaps, for me, it is just too hard to let go, and so I refuse to accept that there is nothing after death. This attachment, which can function as a form of refusal, is familiar to all of us.

The point – my point – being this: that there are so many complex existential variables entangled in “I” here [going back to the cradle and then all the way to the grave] that it is all but impossible for any of us to untangle them, put them in the right order, and fully grasp why we think about death [or life itself] as we do. In so many ineffable ways we are hard-wired with the “will to live”. And while “circumstances” can reconfigure that into the “will to die” for some us, most of us do what we can to rationalize death away. God and religion by and large. But for others it is bearing children or creating a life such that even after we are gone we will still be remembered.

The recent death of my dear friend bell hooks painfully demonstrates this. Why would I want to let go of our wonderful and caring relationship and our stimulating and witty conversations? I’m reminded, though, that my father’s last words regarding the meaning of death being too complex leave me facing a beautiful question mark.

This worked for him. Something else might work for you. Or, like me, you are unable to imagine anything that will work. It’s oblivion all the way down.

What becomes futile though [for me] is in imagining we can ever truly grasp another’s attempt to explain either their own life or death. We would have to have been them and lived their life to accomplish this. It’s just that for some of us we come to recognize the futility even in regard to ourselves.

[iambiguous]

What I Learned About Death From 7 Religious Scholars, 1 Atheist and My Father
George Yancy in the NYT

My father was also a lover of Kahlil Gibran’s “The Prophet.” He would quote sections from it verbatim. I wasn’t there when my father stopped breathing, but I wish that I could have spoken these lines by Gibran as he left us: “And what is it to cease breathing, but to free the breath from its restless tides, that it may rise and expand and seek God unencumbered?”

Talk about a “general description spiritual contraption”!

On the other hand, who am I kidding. There are those who are in fact able to think themselves into taking thoughts like this very seriously. And, in so doing, are able to take the comfort and the consolation that they bring them all the way to the grave.

So, I recognize immediately that my own at times sneering reaction to them is just me lashing out at those who are able to do this when I myself am not. I envy them for sustaining “all the way” a frame of mind I lost myself “along the way”.

In this past year of profound loss and grief, it is hard to find comfort. No matter how many philosophers or theologians seek the answers, the meaning of death remains a mystery. And yet silence in the face of this mystery is not an option for me, as it wasn’t for my father, perhaps because we know that, while we may find solace in our rituals, it is also in the seeking that we must persist.

The bottom line of course.

Here we all are confronted with what may well turn out to be oblivion. For a few, the good news. But, for most, the scariest news of all. We just don’t know. So, each of us as individuals have come to our own existential reaction to it. We persist in seeking because we are really left with no choice. Other than in distractions. But the closer you get to the potential for oblivion [if it’s not something you welcome] the less the distractions will work.

Which I suppose is why I go in search of an argument that might convince me that oblivion is not the most likely outcome. Nothing much so far though.

[iambiguous]

When Faced With Death, People Often Change Their Minds
Daniela J. Lamas, a critical-care physician in the NYT

My patient had done everything possible to avoid being intubated. After a traumatic hospitalization when she was young, she had consistently told her loved ones that she would never again agree to a breathing tube. She had even filled out an advance directive years ago to formalize that decision.

But when she arrived in the emergency department one night this past spring with severe pneumonia, struggling to breathe, the doctors called her husband with a question. Should they intubate? If they didn’t, she would likely die.

He hesitated. Was this really the scenario that his wife, now in her late 60s, was imagining when she told him that she didn’t want a breathing tube? He could not ask her now, and faced with this impossible choice, he gave the team the OK. She was intubated and sedated and transferred to our intensive care unit later that night.

I believed this to be a failure of our health care system: A patient was in exactly the scenario she had long wished to avoid. When I stood at her bedside, I murmured an apology.

That’s basically how these life and death dramas unfold. Each of us as individuals having had our own set of experiences and being sustained by our own beliefs about what our fate might be on the other side of our own mortality, will make decisions that others will either understand or not understand. And will either agree with or shake our heads in disbelief regarding.

So, what is the “right thing to do”?

Is it this:

After several days, the medical team gathered her family to make a plan. We would continue to treat her pneumonia and try to take her off the breathing tube. Based on our understanding of her prior wishes, we would not put the tube back in once we had taken it out. We would also not consider a tracheotomy, a procedure in which doctors cut a hole in the windpipe to help with breathing for patients who need a longer-term connection to a ventilator. Instead, if she could not breathe on her own, we would focus on her comfort, knowing that she would die. This was what she would have chosen. Or so I thought.

Turns out, it was not what she would have chosen after all:

When she was finally awake and off the breathing tube, the team told her what had happened. I assumed that she might feel betrayed by the decisions that had been made for her. But she surprised me. She said she would choose to be intubated again, and even undergo a tracheotomy, if it meant more time with her family.

There is confronting death “in your head” when you are not about to literally tumble over into the abyss, and there is confronting it when the Grim Reaper is right there eyeball to eyeball with you.

For me, of course, this is all rooted existentially in dasein. People do things “at the end” that others cannot imagine doing themselves. Including suicide and assisted suicide.

And, in large part, this will revolve around what you have been able to think yourself into believing [or have been indoctrinated into believing by others] about “the other side”. If you genuinely believe that your death brings into the arms of your “heavenly Father”, how can that not make the experience of death and dying more endurable. Even comforting.

[MagsJ (..a chic geek)]

_
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