Dying At The Right Time
Morgan Rempel wonders whether there is a good time to die.
As most of you would no doubt point out, my immediate reaction to this is the only reaction I have ever had here to things of this sort: that both a “good death” and a “bad death” in a No God world – a world in which value judgments of this sort are subjective – is but another in a long line of existential contraptions rooted in dasein.
And, therefore, “I” can only wait for the serious philosophers among us to come up with an assessment of the “good death” that may well be construed by all rational people as the bottom line in discussions of death itself.
Now, the science of dying or the philosophy of dying must sooner or later get down to the death of any particular one of us. How as a scientist or a philosopher might one differentiate a good from a bad death? If that is even thought possible at all. On the other hand, in focusing in on the “art of dying”, this lends itself far more to subjective/subjunctive reactions. But, in that case, “dying at the right time here” can amount to practically anything. Thus to suggest that Art Buchwald died a “good death” in that he mocked it all the way to the end, might certainly strike some as a fine example of it. But not others.
Still, I’m not entirely clear regarding the part about luck here. People are usually thought to be lucky when something happens or does not happen to them in such a manner that what does in fact happen is “beyond their control”. So, in regard to death, any particular one of us may “die at the right time” from our own point of view. And as a result [more or less] of luck. But the death itself and the reactions of others to it as a “good death” seems no less embedded in dasein to me. And philosophers seem no less able to establish that any particular death was in fact either a “good death” or a “bad death”.