Death
-Gerald Alper
“Everybody dies but not everyone agrees on what death is,” so says NYU Professor Emeritus of Philosophy, Thomas Nagel. In his ’87 gem of a book, What Does It All Mean?; after stating the problem succinctly, “Some people believe they will survive after the death of their bodies; going to Heaven, going to Hell, becoming a ghost, or returning to live in another body. Others believe the self is snuffed out like a candle. Among those who believe this, there are those who believe this is a terrible thing.
Questions such as these resonate with me as they do not with others. As with “Barry”, a former classmate of mine from Bridgeport, Connecticut, who incredibly fell to his death in a climbing accident. What was clumsy, un-athletic Barry doing climbing a mountain? Could he possibly have chosen to climb the mountain, or had he been driven by demons? My adolescent mind, inspired by the dramatic tales of Dickens’ and Dostoevsky’s “brave young boys,” to whom I’d been introduced in English Class, leaned toward the latter. And, in a flash of youthful inspiration, I had the key. Three weeks before the summer break, Duncan, the self-appointed class cut-up, managed to smuggle a full water gun into class and began selecting his victims, who endured being doused laughing and without protest. Duncan was known to be a hothead who could fight, so they pretended to laugh. This would not be the case with Barry. He became more aggressive and his anger increased. So did the look of indignation and outrage on his face, after being deliberately doused by a classmate whom he clearly considered to be beneath him. “So what are you doing!?” His face was white with what he felt was coming; and Duncan, not expecting but enjoying the challenge, leveled the gun at Barry’s face. He slowly squeezed the trigger; “I’m shooting you in the face!” For what had seemed like minutes, but had only been a few seconds; Duncan completely emptied the gun into Barry’s frozen face. For 50 years, I’ve replayed that scene. Is it possible that that single horrible incident- no matter how, could have goaded an emotional youth into an ill-advised display of bravery and onto a treacherous mountain slope that would take his life? Not likely by itself, but now I could add to this countless indignities; feelings of inadequacies large and small, mounting rage, and perceived bullies both real and imagined.
As psychoanalyst Masad Khan once noted, “ Most suicides are accidental.” It is just too hard to snuff out one’s existence in a fell swoop and just too easy to get inebriated, slide behind the wheel, and drive down an empty highway at 90 miles an hour… How can anyone accuse that person of harboring a death wish? You’re being reckless and upset, but so what? You’re just living dangerously. You’re not killing yourself, but playing a high-stakes game. It takes guts to cold, or hot-bloodedly take a life. From that perspective, we can see how in some respects, playing Russian Roulette is so compelling. It contains so many of the elements that comprise a wish to end it all. That it presents itself as a game, the risk could not be greater: six bullets, five-to-one odds that you’ll die if you continue pulling the trigger… Few people squeeze the trigger until the end (what’s the end?). If you pull the trigger four times with no results, you have a fifty-fifty chance of surviving. One more squeeze; if the gun doesn’t fire, then what? Walk away? Or get the license? You get to live knowing that you played the most high-stakes game, or is that not enough? Does it contain a morbid kind of death wish, that compels one final squeeze? I don’t know the rules of the game.
Certainly, cinema does not portray heroes as losing the game. The game, it should be noted, is something played with two people. Rarely does it end with someone killing themselves. I’m happy to say that fortunately, in my 30-plus years as a practicing psychotherapist, no one really tried to kill themselves. Far more common is what’s called the suicidal gesture: not as a prophecy, but a warning of what could happen unless more attention is paid. I always wince when there’s a suicide of a young adolescent explained away by the parents saying they had no idea; in protestations of how happy and fulfilled the child seemed, “there were no signs.”
On the contrary, hindsight shows there are always signs, but not always readers. In Elisabeth Kübler-Ross’ famous Five Stages of Dying, there’s always, by the end, an acceptance of death. I have to say, like every professional therapist, I’ve worked with patients who’ve died by natural causes. All of them have claimed, to a greater or lesser degree, that as their own end neared, they’d reached a stage of acceptance. In no case did I find claims of such acceptance very credible. Of course, I have no way of knowing whether my own reflex skepticism is a projection of my own failure to submit to the inevitability of my own demise. Which is part of the fascination of watching a great figure such as Thomas Nagel grapple with this question, “is there an afterlife?” How could one ever know what the unbiased truth was?
Imagine, for example, dying and almost immediately encountering an apparition- more real than any you’ve encountered when dreaming or awake- who tells you you’ve arrived in the afterlife and are about to enter a new and far greater reality than you’ve known. How could you tell whether you’re looking at a product of your own decompensating, hallucinating mind- or are experiencing, now, for the first time, how a world freed of the chains and biases of through and through physicality, really looks? Ok. That’s the problem.
Rather than try to paraphrase analytic geniuses like Nagel, who speak in their own voices- in the time-honored Socratic form of Q&A- at the end of which, the voice we hear will be from behind the couch; it will be that of your humble correspondent, YHC:
Q&A -
It is sometimes said, no one can conceive of his own non-existence. We can’t really believe our own existence will come to an end with our death. “To imagine something it is not necessary to imagine how it would feel for you to experience it. Or, to put it more exactly, mental life after death would require the restoration of biological, physical life. It would require that the body should come to life again. But even if renewal after death, the same you in the same body would come back just as you were, that’s not what’s ordinarily meant by life after death. Life after death means life without your own body.
“If we go only by ordinary observation rather than religious doctrine or spiritualist claims, to talk to the dead; there is no reason to believe in an afterlife. Is that, however, a reason to believe that there is not an afterlife? I think so, but others may remain neutral.”
Still, others may believe in an afterlife on the basis of faith. In the absence of evidence, I myself don’t understand how this kind of faith-inspired belief is possible, but others evidently can.
The fear of death is very puzzling in a way that regret about the end of life is not. It’s easy to understand we might want more life and all of the things it contains so that we see death as a negative end. But how can a prospect of your own non-existence be alarming in a positive way?”
But if we really cease to exist, there’s nothing to look forward to. If one thinks, it seems as though death is something to be afraid of, this is true only if we are going to survive it. But, that doesn’t prevent many people from thinking annihilation is one of the worst things that could happen to them.
The View From Behind the Couch
The one thing missing from philosophy- its Achilles Heel- Disclosure-
-see my article “If Wittgenstein Were a Patient.” See my review, just written of Sabine Hossenfelder’s Existential Physics. -
- What is philosophy? Why do Philosophers struggle for thousands of years, to modern times, through the analytic tradition, without solving a single problem? The simplest and most telling response is because philosophy is not looking for answers- or just answers. It’s looking for answers and questions. Philosophy is not like Richard Feynman once said, “If I can’t build something, I can’t understand it.” A philosopher is someone who’s interested in hypotheticals that, by themselves, by nature, cannot be answered. If you had a brother, what kind of relationship would you have with him? As a discipline, philosophy is averse to real-world data. It’s like taking a break from reality. It’s playing with hypotheticals. The most effective real-world response to the melancholic fact of eventual annihilation is engagement in real-world, life-enhancing activities, as a limited reminder, in the pleasures of life.
Gerald Alper is the author of Portrait of the Artist as a Young Patient (Psychodynamic Studies of the Creative Personality). His new book is God and Therapy (What We Believe When No One is Watching).
