LIFE AND DEATH

The idea that religion contains a literal, not a symbolic, representation of truth and life is simply an impossible idea. Whoever entertains it has not come within the region of profitable philosophizing on the subject.

George Santayana, The Sense of Beauty, 1896

Each of us has to die. Someday I will die. I hope to be ready.

Naturally I don't want to die in pain. Ideally, I would just fall asleep after a satisfying day and never wake up. A massive heart attack. A massive lethal stroke.

That's the way to go.

No lingering. No slow decline. No expensive treatment. Just die.

I don't believe I'm coming back. No metempsychosis, no reincarnation, no resurrection. Just a massive failure of systems.

A human being, in my view, is an evolved animal. Not much different from any other -- except for a paltry number of genes. Not much different from any other earthly system of electrochemical biological systems. At some point, one or more of these systems fails.

Usually, other systems compensate.

But sometimes they can't. The initial failure causes other systems to fail. If still other systems cannot compensate, the cascade continues.

If crucial systems fail -- for example, the major organs, like the liver, lungs, heart, or brain -- the cascade of system failure becomes irreversible. Circulation of the blood with its necessary oxygen for the brain may fail. Respiration may fail. Starved of oxygen or clogged with wastes not removed by the liver, finally, brain function ends.

When brain function flatlines, life ends.

Life may continue for a few minutes after flatlining in the deepest unconscious part of the brain. Occasional patients who have been pronounced dead but then revived often report dreaming experiences and awareness of their surroundings even as they "died". Brief survival of their inner brains may account for near-death experiences.

Occasionally life may be restored to a flatlined patient, but this is rare. Soon after flatlining, the brain and other tissues begin to rot and disintegrate, eaten by microbes usually kept at bay by the body's immune system. But the immune system too has probably failed by this point.

So at some juncture -- approximately this one -- you're dead. Period. And you aren't coming back.

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We often talk as if we have souls or spirits, cloud-like interior non-material things that contain or are our life-forces or consciousness. These entities (presumably) enter our bodies before or during birth, and leave our body after death. To many, the soul or spirit is the mechanism of survival -- of salvation in fact -- the means by which they hope and suppose they will go on living after bodily death.

(For an interesting science-fiction novel about the possibility of an immaterial soul's surviving death, read my friend Robert J. Sawyer's novel The Terminal Experiment.)

I don't believe in such entities. I believe I am a body. When I use terms like "soul" or "spirit" I am speaking metaphorically. When I speak of my soul I mean the absolute vital centre of my convictions, of my being: what I'm about, really, as a person, a man, a life. When I speak of my spirit, I mean the way I do things, the kind of actions I perform, the kind of person I am: the "spirit" in which I do actions.

My soul is my mind and my convictions. I have a thoughtful, observant spirit.

In my life I have found it most useful to rely on the evidence of my senses as interpreted by my mind. The evidence of my senses, alas, does not confirm contemporary ideas of soul or spirit to be factual.

So I don't believe in souls, spirits, or resurrection. I'm not dogmatic or argumentative about it. If other people want to believe in them, or in their coming salvation from death, fine. I can't prove a negative.

I spend my time enjoying my remaining life; trying to do something meaningful in the time remaining. I am 52 years old. I am, as ancient people used to say, "composing myself for death".

Three Philosophies of Life and Death

Stoicism

Lately I have been re-investigating certain philosophies of the ancient world. One is the philosophy of Stoicism, that ancient-world belief beginning, about 300 B.C.E., with the Greek philosopher Zeno of Citium. Zeno and the Stoics believed that pain and death are inevitable: the wise person -- seeing through illusion -- has to prepare him- or herself for death. Stoicism believed in souls, but thought that they were material -- made of a combination of air and fire. Stoics believed that the soul survived for some time after death.

Stoicism was in some ways a sophisticated and urbane philosophy. Stoics believed that all people were ultimately alike, and that each person should therefore regard himself not as a citizen of a particular city but a citizen of the world (i.e., a cosmopolitan). This idea is clearly one of the forerunners of the concept of universal love, as for example in the thought of Jesus of Nazareth.

It makes sense to do this, I think, especially in the latter half of one's likely lifespan.

Stoicism -- considered as action to control or limit pain, to deal with the inevitable pain of life -- seems to me to be wisdom. But Stoics in the ancient world seem to me to have over-emphasized moderation and temperance. This was probably because they lived in an unsafe, primitive world where most people died very young, of incurable diseases or recurring wars and violence. The Ancient Stoics really should have loosened up. One who has accepted the limiting circumference of pain should then become an enlightened hedonist, enjoying all the pleasures life affords. Time enough to surrender some of them when the body can no longer bear them.

Stoicism that emphasizes limitations and tries to ignore pain seems to me a mistake, rather like too much of Norman Vincent Peale's Positive Thinking or the Christian Science religion of Mary Baker Eddy. Unlike Christian Scientists, I believe that evil and pain are very real. Unlike the good Doctor Peale, I believe that Positive Thinking can be only of value as an interim procedure: it is for situations when one is uncertain whether one's life is proceeding smoothly. At that point it is only rational to be optimistic. But when evidence indicates that one's situation is pressing or dangerous, one must accept the evidence of one's senses and act accordingly to counter the negative situation.

We live, we age (if we're lucky), we begin to disintegrate, and we die. That's the way it is.

The whole trick of life is in enjoying it while it's here.

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It is often objected to this view of life that it gives no hope, that it is too bleak, that it gives one no reason to get up in the morning, that it is too depressing. But confronting the existential reality of things without comforting oneself in illusions seems to me to confer meaning on everyday moments, to make our lives matter -- to ourselves, if not necessarily to anyone else. There is something bracing and enriching in facing the Truth of Things, outstaring the emptiness and dealing with it however one can.

I wouldn't mind if I were wrong and there were a kind God to give me eternal life, hopefully in a young and virile body and with my friends in a pleasant place. But where is the evidence that this is going to happen?

In the absence of this evidence you and I must fend for ourselves. As Moses says at the end of English playwright Christopher Fry's play The Firstborn, "Each of us must find meaning / in our days and ways."

Epicureanism

Besides Stoicism, In the ancient world there was also a philosophy called Epicureanism. Epicurus (341-270 B.C.E.), a Athenian, taught in Lesbos, Lampsacus, and Athens. He believed that pleasure is the supreme good and ultimate goal of life. Perhaps it would be more accurate to say that, like the Stoics, he thought that avoiding pain was the chief goal. Like the Stoics, Epicurus believed in leading an intellectual life, and in moderation to avoid pain. Love and other non-intellectual pleasures, he thought, often lead to anguish and pain. But an intellectual life would best prepare one for one's inevitable death.

Stoics were often admired by certain Christians, especially in the Renaissance. Stoics like the Roman general Cato the Younger (95-46 B.C.E.) were thought to be among the best and most honorable of pre-Christian pagans. But Epicureans were usually maligned and misrepresented by Christian thinkers, who were repelled not only by their (in my opinion, somewhat insufficient) interest in bodily pleasures but also by another of their doctrines: atomism. The Epicureans believed in the blind swirl of atoms and in (I think) determinism.

This brings me to a third and final school of ancient Greek thinkers.

The Cyrenaic Philosophy

The Cyrenaics were named after Cyrene, the birthplace of their founder Aristippus (435?-360? B.C.E.), a disciple of Socrates. Aristippus

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[To Be Revised]

Sources

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Last modified: 11:27 AM 23/03/2003