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.