Philosophy and death

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”.

Some or any or all or none of this may or may not “in fact” be true.

But in regard to death what brings out actual existential reactions from us is the part that centers around “I”.

How “here and now” any particular “I” loves this or that, loves him or her. Or has accumulated any number of pleasurable experiences that brings one enormous fulfillment and satisfaction. Or has commitments and responsibilities to others that are snuffed out in tumbling over into the abyss.

Or the opposite. Loves no one or nothing. Has come to embody pain and suffering that has become unbearable. Has no commitments or responsibilities towards anyone.

And then all of the actual lives that fall somewhere in between.

That’s the part deeply embedded in dasein that in my view is simply beyond the reach of either science or philosophy.

Or, rather, still seems that way to me.

My own particular “burden” here is that I have come to construe my own existence as essentially meaningless. And, in turn, that all of my own moral and political values are thought to be but existential prejudices subsumed in a fractured and fragmented “I” in my interactions with others. And that, for better or for worse, death commences the obliteration of “I” for all time to come.

So, here: Yo, Mr. Philosopher, any advice?

How you perceive your own existence in the grand scheme of things is only something that you can do and no one else
For it is not my place to tell others how they should think in relation to that [ or indeed anything else for that matter ]

I do not give advice even if it is asked because I think that minds should think for themselves wherever possible
I am here to observe not to participate as from that comes a sense of detachment that gives me peace of mind

I am merely passing through and so am slowly letting go the older I become
I keep myself occupied but still know that this existence is only temporary

Dying At The Right Time
Morgan Rempel wonders whether there is a good time to die.

Again, “luck” here means something entirely different for me. It is no less embodied in dasein. After all, for some people, Mother Teresa’s life – however luck is factored into it – was not good at all:

cnn.com/2016/08/31/asia/mot … index.html
medium.com/@KittyWenham/mother- … b395177572
huffpost.com/entry/mother-t … M3V0wM9-Ij

And that’s before we get to the critiques from radical left wing and Marxist factions.

You can talk about how luck plays a role in lives like hers but sooner or later that life will be judged by others based on their own moral and political and religious views. The part where, from my frame of mind, luck gets tangled up in contingency, chance and change embodied in dasein.

That Mother Teresa had the “bad luck” to die when she did, is the least of what some want to focus on.

Again: Who would focus on “luck” here?! And how is that related to whether others would see his demise as either a “good death” or a “bad death”.

I must be missing the point here.

For me, a good or a bad death always revolves around the balance between the pleasure and pain. If the things you love in life, the things that bring you fulfilment and satisfaction amount to considerable more in your life than the parts that bring you suffering and pain, then losing all of that amounts to a bad death. Whereas if it is the other way around, and the pain and the suffering are taken away, it is a good death.

But, again, this always revolves in turn around whether you are able to believe in God and a route to Heaven or in No God but still en route to Nirvana.

Dying At The Right Time
Morgan Rempel wonders whether there is a good time to die.

This sort of thinking does make sense in that it is inevitable in matters of both life and death that mere mortals are biologically programed to make speculations about them. Our species has evolved a brain able to ponder the self out in a particular world. Why are things the way they are? Why are they not some other way? Is there a better way for things to be? Is there an optimal or most rational way that things should unfold.

Thus the human brain is the only brain able to make that leap from the either/or world to the is/ought world. In regard to both life and death.

But unlike Nietzsche [apparently] once I take God out of the picture, I come to recognize – if only as an existential contraption – that my own conjectures regarding both life and death come from a fractured and fragmented “self” utterly in the dark regarding the reason for existence itself. Thus while I can speculate about the meaning of both life and death, I have “here and now” thought myself into believing that such rumination is basically futile.

Thus: I will never know because as an infinitesimally tiny speck of existence in the context of all there is, I never can know.

So, how are Zarathustra and his creator not basically making fools of themselves to speak of God’s death, the will to power, supermen and last men as though they too don’t get swallowed up in an essentially meaningless existence on the inevitable path to oblivion.

Or [perhaps] to recur over and over and over again for all the rest of eternity.

Again, I recognize why some will confront these things as they do in that they are programed through the evolution of life on Earth to [in a world where “I” have some measure of free will] to choose to. But, for me, that doesn’t take away the ultimate futility of it all.

Dying At The Right Time
Morgan Rempel wonders whether there is a good time to die.

Regardless of how all of this did in fact unfold all those years ago, as well as the extent to which we still discuss and debate it today, one thing seems unequivocal: that Socrates and Plato died, and that each of us, here and now, one by one, will die too.

I merely suggest that using the tools of philosophy there does not appear to be a way to establish whether any of our deaths are reflective of “a good time to die”. Let alone establishing whether any of our particular demises reflects either a “good death” or a “bad death”. We may as well conclude as Malcolm Forbes did that “he who dies with the most toys wins.” A truly capitalist death.

Instead, for any number of “serious philosophers”, it’s back up into the clouds:

So, which frame of mind here reflects the optimal or the only truly rational assessment of Socrates’s choice? Is Socrates’s choice another rendition of Christ dying for us on the cross? A moral death that offers us “life lessons” in regard to the relationship between a citizen and “the state”?

And, again, the part where God fits into all of thus? Did Socrates have an “immortal soul” that would continue on into the “next life”? Clearly, to the extent that he believed this to be the case, was or was not his death in fact a ticket to immortality and salvation on the other side? Did not “the state” facilitate this?

Still, as with us today, there is that ubiquitous gap between what they believed about any of this and what they could demonstrate was in fact true objectively for all of us.

Here, philosophically, some things never seem to change.

Dying At The Right Time
Morgan Rempel wonders whether there is a good time to die.

Come on, the death of Jesus revolves around a very different set of circumstances. If Jesus was in fact “God in human flesh”, the God of Abraham and Moses, and one assumes this God does in fact exist, then everything about His life and death is entirely scripted by God Himself. His timing, His reasons, His consequences. After all, if you were God made flesh and you knew that Heaven awaited you on “the other side” for all of eternity, what then of the pain inflicted on you at the crucifixion?

Socrates, on the other hand, could only fall back on the God that certain philosophers back then thought up in their head. The formal, a priori, realist God that existed only given particular words strung together in a particular order that basically defined Him into existence.

Clearly, if God here was predicated on the “intellectual” assumption that “universals or abstract objects exist objectively and outside of human minds”, than anything goes. If you can think it up, it exists. It’s only a matter then of stumbling out of the cave and naming the objects.

Here, however, one can construe the “death of God” such that Jesus Christ is seen as but a character in a work of fiction…a novel called the Bible. The plot is examined by Nietzsche and found to be wanting in regard to the crucifixion. Otherwise if it is presumed that God does in fact still exist but his “death” revolves around the fact that more and more people have simply stopped believing that He does, for any mere mortal to speculate about Christ having died “too early” is ridiculous. An omniscient and omnipotent God doesn’t make mistakes like that, right?

More to the point for the rest of us is this: did Nietzsche die too early?

I’d say yes, most philosophers don’t live quite long enough.
And JW teach that death is unnatural for humans.
We aren’t supposed to die / meant to die.
In the distant future i assume many forms of death will be reduced via super technology.

Iambigious said:

“Clearly, if God here was predicated on the “intellectual” assumption that “universals or abstract objects exist objectively and outside of human minds”, than anything goes. If you can think it up, it exists. It’s only a matter then of stumbling out of the cave and naming the objects.”

Sure , one can do along with the actual form that simulates the post modern sense of it taken literally.

However, inducing an abstract representation , processes any other deconstruction, it forgets the cumulative structural background of the evolving idea.

It seems almost irrelevant to point to Jesus’ existence, for He assumes a role, a script, that became almost a foreseeable event, .

God, the Father did in fact became Man, through the Son, who needed to learn His language, in order to understand his own soul.

The soul became the transcendent object of his own self consciousness, as the reflexive turning point, from the initial narcissistic punishment of the self,

The metamorphosis occured, and that primal event would have become It’s own Being, if that did not happen.

So, it couldn’t have not happened !

Why?

Why and how did myths attain universal significance in our lives, that have stood their significant ground, as shadowing the biblical account of the advent of consciouness, and now of Superconsciousness, in the new, mechanistic form?

Dying At The Right Time
Morgan Rempel wonders whether there is a good time to die.

Zarathustra’s ledger. Your ledger. My ledger. The ledger of anyone. How could any ledger pertaining to the “timeliness” of Nietzsche’s death amount to anything other than a subjective assessment rooted in dasein? Now, sure, there are actual facts about his death that can or cannot be established as true objectively. Just as there are facts about his life. But in judging either his life or his death as more or less this or more or less that, while perhaps not entirely futile, will certainly come to junctures in which sets of assumptions unable to be pinned down definitively will result in any number of [at times] heated discussions and debates.

The other side of the coin. It’s decided that you died too early, or too late or at just the right time. But what about the actual death itself. The “set of circumstances” you have to experience when it is all finally over. To what extent did Nietzsche’s mental state allow him even to grasp oblivion?

You tell me: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friedrich … %80%931900

He died of pneumonia but he also suffered from dementia. And words like insanity and madness pop up. So perhaps he was all but oblivious to the prospect of oblivion itself. And isn’t that the sort of death that many others would want for themselves? I know that I would.

Yet, again, if you were to stop a hundred people at random on the street and ask them which sets of circumstances they would themselves prefer to face at death, you are likely to get lots of different answers. In other words, right to the very end, “I”, in many crucial contexts, remains the embodiment of dasein.

to philosophize is a ritual every human being engage in everyday. to die is an inevitable phenomenon no one can prevent to not happen as per se living a normal life is impossible to some however possible to others for society is defined by heritage and ethnicity. dying for normal reasons is a cause no one can define however dying abnormally is not to engage with disease stricken improbabilities. wanting to die and not wanting to die is subjective for every humanitirian rationalizing the humanities intrinsically.

It’s actually a subjective assessment rooted in Heineken. N said himself that german metaphysics was owed to beer, and it’s not for nothing that Ns been elevated to an almost metaphysical, mythical status.

Dying At The Right Time
Morgan Rempel wonders whether there is a good time to die.

How on earth to grasp let alone grapple with this as something that was a “good” thing for him or a “bad” thing. He’s barely in his mid forties when everything starts to fall apart for him [both physically and mentally] but at the end how much in touch was he with all the things that death would take away…or the fact that he was tumbling over into the abyss that was oblivion. He never had to stare into the abyss as most of us will.

Me, I’m all for dementia before I go. But just not yet.

Our problem here though is we have no idea what it was like to be inside his head over those 11 years. Was there considerable more pain than pleasure, considerable more suffering that satisfaction? You tell me. Based on everything you have garnered in regard to his condition. Even afflicted physically and mentally, one can still have access to things that make life worth living. It’s just that there are so many different variables to consider in so many different sets of circumstances isn’t it really all rather futile for philosophers to tackle it? Other than in intellectual contraptions like the authors?

Of course this too is just the reflection of but one man who, based on the life that he lived, had come to think this. Others may be quite content to weather the storm given lives that to them are still worth living. In fact, an aphoristic assessment of this sort reminds one that Nietzsche basically divided the world up between “one of us” [the ubermen] and “one of them” [the flocks of sheep].

So, what are other men and women obligated to “recognize”? Not being apples, for example.

And here one can well recognize why the Nazis might be drawn to this sort of thinking. And then taking it as far as the Final Solution for the “apples” that they insist are hanging on the branches far longer than they deserve to.

“The consummating death”? Is this something philosophers have any business at all addressing.

Death & The Philosopher
Raymond Tallis on philosophical attitudes to non-being.

We’ll need a context of course.

Here of course any context at all merely confronts us with the enormous – staggering – gap in reconciling what we think we understand about any context and how that context would be understood by someone with an ontological grasp of existence itself.

Here, however, the gap is narrowed down to reconciling what any of us think we know about death [our own death in particular] and what one would need to know about the metaphysical parameters of Existence.

Of course one way in which to reduce the existential anguish is through God and religion. Our subjective experiences become just another manifestation of God. And in regard to both life and death. It’s all covered. Thus, Archimedes, Nagel, the author and anyone of us can make points as mere mortals. But those points about death often do bring anguish.

Philosophically, there is some comfort to be had in the gap. It is so enormous, we just don’t know the fate of “I” on “the other side”. So nothing then can really be ruled out.

So, until a God, the God chooses to reveal Himself, or until science and/or philosophy discovers the whole truth about what awaits us “there and then”, I’ll stick to what “for all practical purposes” works for me: distractions.

Death & The Philosopher
Raymond Tallis on philosophical attitudes to non-being.

Doesn’t this encompass the ultimate paradox/antinomy embedded in the existence of any particular human being. If you were in a position of having to cause pain and suffering to others [perhaps many others] in order that you would continue to exist, how far would you go?

All sorts of hypothetical thought experiments can pop up here. Imagine that you must choose between this or that terrible set of consequences or you will die yourself. Imagine it’s your own oblivion or the death of innocent children.

What is the right thing to do when the obliteration of “I” for all time to come is at stake. And here of course a faith in God or one or another religious outcome can make all the difference in the world.

And yet no matter how much you cherish the importance of your own continued existence, your death would be utterly lacking in significance if the universe – all there is – really is an essential “thing” that merely exists as a brute facticity.

So, you are a serious philosopher. What then to make of this. It’s like ILP itself. Some here put all of their philosophical eggs into and it appears on the verge of collapsing. Either [re the Kids] into irrelevancy in regard to philosophy or literally for any number of reasons those who own and operate it happen to have. And if it goes the way of the ponderers’s guild or e-philosophy or the old yahoo-philosophy groups, of what relevance is that to the rest of the universe?

“I” being the center of the universe from the perspective of the individual. And the individual being of utter, utter insignificance in the context of “all there is”.

It’s like the feeling that some get when a calamity befalls them and they want the whole world to take note of it. But the world just keeps spinning around and around in utter, utter indifference.

As for the “science of it all”, that only takes us back to the extent to which science is able to grapple with an explanation for Existence Itself.

And how profoundly, ineffably insignificant can “I” be in regard to that?

Death & The Philosopher
Raymond Tallis on philosophical attitudes to non-being.

Being preoccupied with death seems reasonable enough. Especially for those who really have a lot to live for, are not able to think themselves into believing in one or another religion, and who recognize just how many different ways there are to die. Especially in this day and age.

But it doesn’t surprise me that certain philosophers become preoccupied in turn with approaching death in terms of an “authentic consciousness”. After all, they are first able to think themselves into believing that this is actually possible. For some, even obligatory.

Whereas for others [like me] the far more preferred “consciousness” is “being-towards-distracting-oneself-from-death”.

Which I am not doing now only because of all the existential variables in my life that predisposed me subjectively to come back to death “philosophically”. Though now down to only a few hours a day.

Nope, never felt that before. The only thing I can imagine my own death bringing to me in the way of exhilaration is embedded in the worst of all possible worlds: being in excruciating agony with no end in sight in going on living, or ending the agony once and for all with the only possible end available.

Well, for one thing, all one need do to accomplish this is to think oneself into believing any number religious or “spiritual” explanations for why anything at all is what it is. And death becomes just another manifestation of that. And, sure, if it includes immortality and salvation…?

All the better, right?

Death & The Philosopher
Raymond Tallis on philosophical attitudes to non-being.

If Socrates is thanking someone for curing him of the disease of life, than how much courage does it take to end it? On the contrary, if one sees life as a disease in search of a cure, then at the very moment one comes to that conclusion why not end it all then and there.

Really, in one respect, Socrates is no different from the rest of us. There are either enough fulfillments and satisfactions in ones life to warrant continuing on with it or the pain and the suffering becomes so great that it is preferable to end it…even at the cost of having to abandon all the pleasures.

On the other hand, Socrates death also becomes entangled in politics. Those in power put him in a position where his death eventually becomes a philosophical issue for many. Was his a wise choice or not?

And then the part that revolves around God or “the gods” and religion.

From History.Com

“Although he never outright rejected the standard Athenian view of religion, Socrates’ beliefs were nonconformist. He often referred to God rather than the gods, and reported being guided by an inner divine voice.”

So, okay, what were his views on immortality and salvation? To the extent that anyone believes that both are in fact a part of their own future, death can only be that much more bearable. Perhaps even something to look forward to. It’s not for nothing that suicide is frowned upon by most denominations. After all, if they advertise paradise for all of eternity, why not get there as quickly as possible.

This of course is presented as a “noble death”. Or a “death with dignity”. One’s integrity remains intact. Even in the midst of a dysfunctional body, the spirit prevails. But, according to Timothy S Yoder from Marquette University, “Hume challenges some of the arguments for the existence of God, but repeatedly in his writings, he affirms God’s existence and speculates about God’s nature.”

No chronic diarrhea in Heaven one imagines.

Still, the bottom line I suspect is that the individual reactions to death of philosophers known and unknown will be all over the board. Just as with the rest of us. There are simply too many different “situations” that we can find ourselves in to ever suppose that a “philosophy of death” won’t be especially embedded in dasein.

Do you ever do philosophy that is not a comment on something someone wrote?

Well, let’s just say that I’ll stack up my contribution to philosophical discussion here to yours any day of the week. And twice on Sunday.

And what on earth could possibly be suspect about subscribing to philosophy magazines or reading the philosophy of others online and then reacting to the arguments of those examining issues that are philosophically important to you? For me, that’s identity, morality, language, religion, death, nihilism and determinism.

And then bringing those arguments to a site called I Love Philosophy?

That puzzles you?

No but you didn’t answer the question.