days later. At their usual Monday–afternoon time the group
gathered at the coffee shop and shared the ceremonial
carrot cake in silent grief.
41
Death Comes to Arthur Schopenhauer
_________________________
I can bear
the
thought
that in a
short time
worms will
eat away
my body
but the
idea of
philosophy
professors
nibbling
at my
philosophy
makes me
shudder.
_________________________
Schopenhauer faced death as he faced everything
throughout his life—with extreme lucidity. Never flinching
when staring directly at death, never succumbing to the
emollient of supernatural belief, he remained committed to
reason to the very end of his life. It is through reason, he
said, that we first discover our death: we observe the death
of others and, by analogy, realize that death must come to
us. And it is through reason that we reach the self–evident
conclusion that death is the cessation of consciousness and
the irreversible annihilation of the self.
There are two ways to confront death, he said: the
way of reason or the way of illusion and religion with its
hope of persistence of consciousness and cozy afterlife.
Hence, the fact and the fear of death is the progenitor of
deep thought and the mother of both philosophy and
religion.
Throughout his life Schopenhauer struggled with the
omnipresence of death. In his first book, written in his
twenties, he says: «The life of our bodies is only a
constantly prevented dying, an ever deferred death....
Every breath we draw wards off the death that constantly
impinges on us, in this way we struggle with it every
second.»
How did he depict death? Metaphors of death–confrontation abound in his work; we are sheep cavorting
in the pasture, and death is a butcher who capriciously
selects one of us and then another for slaughter. Or we are
like young children in a theater eager for the show to begin
and, fortunately, do not know what is going to happen to
us. Or we are sailors, energetically navigating our ships to
avoid rocks and whirlpools, all the while heading
unerringly to the great final catastrophic shipwreck.
His descriptions of the life cycle always portray an
inexorably despairing voyage.
What a difference there is between our beginning and
our end! The former in the frenzy of desire and the
ecstasy of sensual pleasure; the latter in the destruction
of all the organs and the musty odor of corpses. The
path from birth to death is always downhill as regards
well–being and the enjoyment of life; blissfully
dreaming childhood, lighthearted youth, toilsome
manhood, frail and often pitiable old age, the torture of
the last illness, and finally the agony of death. Does it
not look exactly like existence were a false step whose
consequences gradually become more and more
obvious?
Did he fear his own death? In his later years he
expressed a great calmness about dying. Whence his
tranquillity? If the fear of death is ubiquitous, if it haunts us
all our life, if death is so fearsome that vast numbers of
religions have emerged to contain it, how did the isolated
and secular Schopenhauer quell its terror for himself?
His methods were based on intellectual analysis of
the sources of death–anxiety. Do we dread death because it
is alien and unfamiliar? If so, he insists we are mistaken
because death is far more familiar than we generally think.
Not only have we a taste of death daily in our sleep or in
states of unconsciousness, but we have all passed through
an eternity of nonbeing before we existed.
Do we dread death because it is evil? (Consider the
gruesome iconography commonly depicting death.) Here
too he insists we are mistaken: «It is absurd to consider
nonexistence as an eviclass="underline" for every evil, like every good,
presupposes existence and consciousness.... to have lost
what cannot be missed is obviously no evil.» And he asks
us to keep in mind that life is suffering, that it is an evil in
itself. That being so, how can losing an evil be an evil?
Death, he says, should be considered a blessing, a release
from the inexorable anguish of biped existence. «We
should welcome it as a desirable and happy event instead
of, as is usually the case, with fear and trembling.» Life
should be reviled for interrupting our blissful nonexistence,
and, in this context, he makes his controversial claim: «If
we knocked on the graves and asked the dead if they would
like to rise again, they would shake their heads.» He cites
similar utterances by Plato, Socrates, and Voltaire.
In addition to his rational arguments, Schopenhauer
proffers one that borders on mysticism. He flirts with (but
does not marry) a form of immortality. In his view, our
inner nature is indestructible because we are but a
manifestation of the life force, the will, the thing–in–itself
which persists eternally. Hence, death is not true
annihilation; when our insignificant life is over, we shall
rejoin the primal life force that lies outside of time.
The idea of rejoining the life force after death
apparently offered relief to Schopenhauer and to many of
his readers (for example, Thomas Mann and his fictional
protagonist Thomas Buddenbrooks), but because it does not
include a continued personal self, strikes many as offering
only chilly comfort. (Even the comfort experienced by
Thomas Buddenbrooks is short–lived and evaporates a few
pages later.) A dialogue that Schopenhauer composed
between two Hellenic philosophers raises the question of
just how much comfort Schopenhauer drew from these
beliefs. In this conversation, Philalethes attempts to
persuade Thrasymachos (a thoroughgoing skeptic) that
death holds no terror because of the individual`s
indestructible essence. Each philosopher argues so lucidly
and so powerfully that the reader cannot be sure where the
author`s sentiments lay. At the end the skeptic,
Thrasymachos, is unconvinced and is given the final words.
Philalethes: «When you say I, I, I want to exist, it is not
you alone that says this. Everything says it, absolutely
everything that has the faintest trace of consciousness.
It is the cry not of the individual but of existence
itself.... only thoroughly recognize what you are and
what your existence really is, namely, the universal will
to live, and the whole question will seem to you
childish and most ridiculous.»
Thrasymachos: You`re childish yourself and most
ridiculous, like all philosophers, and if a man of my age
lets himself in for a quarter hour`s talk with such fools
it is only because it amuses me and passes the time. I`ve
more important business to attend to, so goodbye.
Schopenhauer had one further method of keeping
death–anxiety at bay: death–anxiety is least where self–realization is most. If his position based on universal
oneness appears anemic to some, there is little doubt about
the robustness of this last defense. Clinicians who work
with dying patients have made the observation that death–anxiety is greater in those who feel they have lived an
unfulfilled life. A sense of fulfillment, at «consummating
one`s life,” as Nietzsche put it, diminishes death–anxiety.
And Schopenhauer? Did he live rightly and
meaningfully? Fulfill his mission? He had absolutely no
doubt about that. Consider his final entry in his
autobiographical notes.
I have always hoped to die easily, for whoever has been