Chapter 3

DEATH

“‘Why should I live? Why should I wish for anything? Why should I do anything?’ Again, in other words: ‘Is there any meaning in my life which will not be destroyed by the inevitable death awaiting me?’”

- Leo Tolstoy (1828-1910), My Confession (Tolstoy 1929:20)

            With luck, our deaths will be easy. Without luck, our deaths will be hard. However it happens, though, death is the end of life. It is over. We no longer exist. No more possibility, no more consciousness, only utter non-being. The world goes on without us. The sun still shines, nature is still beautiful, the children still play, but we are no longer there. Death is the end.

            Death happens to everyone. None of us is special. No miracle will happen. No cosmic force will come to our rescue. Much as our parents or spouse might be willing, no one can die in our stead. Inevitably, we will cease to exist. We cannot avoid our deaths.

            Is death, then, the ultimate foe of meaning? Is death the invincible dragon whose jaws doom every quest to failure?

Death and Eternity

            Distinguish, first, between death and dying. The process of dying is injury, infirmity or disease. Physical suffering and humiliation are involved in any ailment. Yet we would not say that ill-health always destroys the meaning in a life. Possibly such intense and protracted suffering fills some lives that this suffering outweighs all other values. Possibly these lives are not worth living. But such lives are the exception. Meaningfulness is not the same thing as absence of suffering. It is death, not dying, which is apparently the enemy of meaning.

            Distinguish, too, between death and its consequences. When we die, our loved ones will grieve, our projects will go unfinished, and our children will no longer have our care. These are not happy prospects. Nevertheless, they do not destroy the meaning of our lives. Is the grief of our loved ones not a sign that our lives were valuable and worthwhile? Our loved ones are sad because our lives were meaningful, not because our lives were meaningless. Do our unfinished projects and unfulfilled plans destroy the value of the projects we did finish and the plans we did fulfil? Do our deaths make the care we have already given our children no longer worthwhile? It is death, not its consequences, which is apparently the enemy of meaning.

            When we die, we cease to exist. We become nothing. What is it about this non-being that seems to destroy meaning? We are not going to suffer after death, for death ends all experience, both pleasurable and painful. Epicurus (341-270 B.C.E.) pointed this out in his Letter to Menoeceus.

Become accustomed to the belief that death is nothing to us. For all good and evil consists in sensation, but death is deprivation of sensation. . . . So death, the most terrifying of ills, is nothing to us, since so long as we exist death is not with us; but when death comes, then we do not exist. It does not concern either the living or the dead, since for the former it is not, and the latter are no more. (Epicurus 1940:30-31)

To suffer, we have to experience the suffering, and death ends all experience. Even if intense, protracted suffering were to destroy meaning, death itself would not.

            Something’s coming to an end does not usually destroy its value. None of us would refuse to go to a party simply because it ended at midnight. We would not avoid a movie because it was only two hours long. Nor would we refuse a good meal because we could only eat so much food. Would any of us seriously prefer never to have been born, just because our lives will one day end? We are quite right to be worried about our lives ending, and to be anxious and sad at this prospect. Still, does the fact that all our lives come to an end really make our lives meaningless?

             The universe has existed for about fifteen billion years. For nearly all of those fifteen billion years we did not yet exist. That fact does not disturb us. Nor does this fact threaten to make our lives meaningless. So why should its meaning be threatened by the fact that the universe will go on for billions of years after we cease to exist? In his On the Nature of Things, Lucretius (c.99 - c.55 B.C.E.), a Roman follower of Epicurus, reminded his readers:

Think too how the bygone antiquity of everlasting time before our birth was nothing to us. Nature therefore holds this up to us as a mirror of the time yet to come after our death. Is there aught in this that looks appalling, aught that wears an aspect of gloom? Is it not more untroubled than any sleep? (Lucretius 1940:134)

Think how quickly the fifteen billion years before our births seemed to pass. We did not even notice those years; we were not there to notice them. The hundreds of billions of years after our deaths will pass just as quickly for us. The meaning, value, and worthwhileness of our lives have not been destroyed by fifteen billion years of nonexistence before our births. Why should the meaning of our lives be destroyed by billions of years of nonexistence after our deaths?

Death and Purpose

            In the last chapter, we saw reasons to abandon the whole conceptual framework of looking for purposes. That conceptual framework is a projection of our own psychology onto the universe. That way of thinking misleads us, too, in our reflections on death. Death appears to make life meaningless if we continue to understand purposes as the sources of meaning.

            Assume, for the sake of the argument, that the source of an activity’s meaning is always its purpose. Its purpose is some goal that it accomplishes. Generally the goal of an activity occurs as a result of the activity and so occurs after the activity in time. So an activity is meaningful only if it accomplishes some future goal.

            Yet, not just any goal can make the activity meaningful. For example, someone whose goal was to count all the grains of sand on a beach might have a lifelong purpose, but it is not a meaningful purpose. The route to meaning which I advocate stops here. It evaluates goals independently of their further purposes. It asks the question, “Does accomplishing this goal truly matter?” We have not yet seen how to answer this question, but we at least know that the answer will not involve looking for further purposes.

            However, the purpose-framework does not stop at this point. It can only evaluate goals as meaningful in terms of their further purposes. So the purpose-framework goes on to ask, “What is the further purpose of achieving this goal?” The purpose of achieving this goal will, in turn, be another future, meaningful goal that it helps to achieve. This second goal will, itself, only be meaningful if it helps to achieve yet a third, larger, meaningful goal still further in the future. And so on. We can see that the purpose-framework leads as to worrying about a chain of purposes stretching ad infinitum.

            Eventually this chain of future purposes will pass beyond the life span of the human beings who initiated the activity. Only if we lived forever, it seems, could we accomplish something inherently meaningful. Otherwise, everything we do seems only to be instrumental to something meaningful in the future, never now. The source of meaning seems always to be something occurring after our death. Death appears to end our participation in this chain of purposes. Death appears as an end to life’s meaning.

            We get into this intellectual trap by continuing to think of meaning as some purpose that is external to life. The purpose view is a holdover from the theistic perspective. God, were He to have existed, would have ended the chain of purposes. However, we have looked at the conceptual framework of purposes, and concluded that to make progress we must abandon it. If we confine ourselves to goals and projects that we can achieve within our lives, then we escape the trap. Many of our projects do come to fruition in the present and immediate future. Others will remain unfinished when we die, but that does not prevent the ones we have finished from truly mattering.

            Sometimes it seems that, though each individual activity, experience, and relationship within life has a point, life as a whole does not. Each of our activities, experiences, and relationships is just part of a whole, and it seems that the whole thing is going nowhere. (Nagel 1987:96) If we give portions of our life to a social cause, then this time has value only if the cause has value. If our cause proves a false one, then we have wasted our time. Our effort has been part of the cause, and it only has value if the whole thing has value.

            However, not all value is instrumental like this. Some activities, experiences, and relationships are inherently valuable; they do not depend for their value on any whole of which they are a part. For example, someone’s relationship with her children, while important to their growth, is also valuable for its own sake. Some things just matter in themselves and not because of some further goal they accomplish. We are misled, as before, by understanding meaning as purpose.

            Allegiance to the framework of purposes was behind Tolstoy’s complaint that death prevents life from having meaning. We must relinquish this comfortable, but misleading, conceptual framework, and search, instead, for what inherently matters.

The Immensity of the Universe

            People come to believe that no meaning can be found in life for many reasons connected to human finitude. All these reasons are fallacious. They are cognitive distortions standing in the way of our search. Consider some examples:

            One, people are often impressed by the thought that, not only will they die, but also the universe itself will come to an end. In billions of years the sun and stars will become supernovae and then collapse into black holes. In hundreds of billions of years, the black holes themselves will radiate their energy, and the now dark universe will consist only of a vast, thin trickle of neutrinos. All records of human projects will be lost. Nothing will be left that will care, or even wonder, how human beings lived.

            However, the inevitable end of the universe billions of years in the future does not prevent the present from having meaning and value. All it shows is that the search for a cosmic purpose will fail. We have already abandoned the search for cosmic purpose for other reasons. The death of the universe poses no more of a problem for the meaningfulness of life than do our personal deaths.

            Two, people are often impressed by the sheer physical vastness of the universe and with the billions of years for which it exists. A hundred million stars just like the sun exist in our galaxy. Hundreds of millions of galaxies exist in the small portion of the universe which astronomers have so far examined. How can a human life, which takes place in an absurdly tiny bit of space and time, have any significance?

            However, it is not clear how being larger in space and time could make a human life more meaningful. The argument works just as well the other way round. Suppose our lives are meaningless in their seventy-odd years of duration. Would they not just be infinitely meaningless if they lasted for all eternity, or were spread across all of space? (Nagel 1979:12) Living larger and longer would not, by itself, make our lives any more meaningful.

            Three, people sometimes reflect that nothing that they do now will matter to anyone in a thousand years’ time. In a thousand years, our descendants will no more remember us than we remember our own ancestors of a thousand years ago. Our businesses will have passed a way. People will no longer read our books. No matter how famous any of us are now, our accomplishments will be no more than footnotes in obscure history texts.

            However, this argument works the other way round. Assume the argument’s claim that an event will not matter to people across a thousand-year gap in time. Notice that this thousand-year gap exists in both directions. For example, our particular lives now did not much matter to our ancestors of a thousand years ago. If something does not matter to us because it happened a thousand years in the past, then, by the same process of reasoning, something that happens a thousand years in the future also should not matter to us. One thing that will happen in the future is that our lives will cease to matter to our descendants. Because of the thousand-year gap, however, this should not matter to us now. It should not matter to us now that our lives will not matter to our descendants in the future. Whether or not our lives will matter to our descendants is not something about which we should care. The argument works equally well in both directions. (Nagel 1979:11) The meaningfulness of life is not something to be found only in its future consequences. It is something inherent in life in the present.

            Four, people often think that because valuable things come to an end and pass away, this destroys their value. Our activities finish, our good experiences only last so long, and our relationships finish. The good things of the world always perish, and it seems their meaning dies with them.

            However, though good things end, the fact that they were valuable remains. The grass was green and alive last spring. Now, in winter time, it is brown, dead, and covered with snow. The green grass has perished, but it remains true, now, this winter, that the grass was green and alive then, last spring. Things perish; the fact that they were once valuable does not. Think, too, of parents, grandparents, or family members whom we loved and who are now dead. Their lives were worthwhile and valuable. It is sad that they are dead, but did death destroy the value of their lives? Are rocks more valuable than roses because rocks are almost eternal, while roses bloom for, at most, a week?

The Perspective of the Universe

            People sometimes reflect that their lives, which seem so important to them, really matter very little under the aspect of eternity. From the point of view of the universe, our everyday lives seem silly, our concerns seem petty, and our lives seem meaningless. Worse, we can adopt two perspectives on our lives – both the perspective of our usual, self-centred, self-important point of view and the perspective of the universe. It is a cruel and tragic joke that we can take on both these two perspectives simultaneously. Absurdly, we can see our selves as both important and of no account. (Nagel 1979:14-15)

            However, it is not as easy to take up the point of view of the universe as it may appear. Fully taken on, whose perspective could it be? For nothing to matter from the perspective of the universe, it would need to be a complete, but totally cognitive, perspective without any emotional involvement at all. It might be God’s perspective. However, this suggestion is wrong because, in most accounts, God cares about people’s lives; it matters to Him what kind of lives people lead. In any case, God does not exist, so no such perspective exists either. It might be the point of view of science. However, science is a collection of theories, and theories have a perspective only metaphorically. It might be the perspective of professional scientists. However, scientists have perspectives very much like ours. They have families, careers, and obsessions as we do.

            The point of view of the universe is simply a metaphor for a point of view like ours but with no emotional involvement. When we try to cash out the metaphor, we find that we cannot do it. What would it be like to see the world without being moved by it emotionally in any way? This perspective would be that of someone who is emotionally blind. A possible example is someone who has suffered the destruction or surgical removal of parts of the brain that process emotional response. Such destruction or removal can make the experience of emotion impossible. In his book, Emotional Intelligence, Daniel Goleman describes a young man missing his amygdala – a part of the mid-brain of animals required to process fear responses – who, though capable of conversation, withdrew by himself, showed no interest in his relatives, and “remained impassive in face of their anguish at his indifference. Without an amygdala he seemed to have lost all recognition of feeling, as well as any feeling about feelings. The amygdala acts as a storehouse of emotional memory, and thus of significance itself; life without the amygdala is a life stripped of personal meanings.” (Goleman 1995:15)

            Now the question is this: Would it be useful to ask an emotionally blind person, no matter how well informed, whether or not life had a meaning? No one would ask someone who was visually blind their opinion on the artistic merit of a painting. She could perhaps give an answer, but it would, of necessity, have to be hearsay. Nor would we ask a deaf person his opinion on a piece of music. Why, then, should we ask someone who was emotionally blind whether or not anything mattered? Emotional blindness is as close as we can come to understanding the metaphor of the point of view of the universe. On reflection, however, we see no reason to care about the perspective of the universe. It is not a perspective that should particularly matter to us. Our human perspectives are what matters.

Giving Death its Due

            People often experience a loss of meaning whenever they feel a loss of their individuality. For example, at lunchtime, in the crowded concourse under an office tower, we may be struck by the existence of so many people similar to ourselves. They are all concerned about their families, their sex lives, their clothes, and their careers, just like we are. In no important way are we different from all the rest. We can sometimes experience this lack of specialness as a lack of meaningfulness.

            However, we should argue back to this feeling. If what we are doing with our lives truly matters, then the fact that others are doing the same makes our lives no less worthwhile. It just does not matter to the meaningfulness of our lives that others’ lives are similar. If their lives are also meaningful, then so much the better for them.

            Nevertheless, the loss of specialness raises an important concern. Existential psychotherapists have discovered that many people defend themselves against their anxiety about death by denying its reality. Denial, as a defence mechanism, takes two forms: First, people often believe, in a deep and unarticulated way, that they are in some almost magical way special and, though everyone else will die, they will not. Second, and perhaps as well, people often have an underlying belief in an ultimate rescuer, who will magically save them from the fate of everyone else. (Yalom 1980)

            In the crowded concourse of an office building, we are brought face to face with our lack of specialness, and with our vulnerability to death. This can be a good thing. Being mindful of our mortality is right. Forgetting our mortality, paying it no attention, will make our lives inauthentic. We cannot go through life pretending that we will never die.

            On the other hand, obsessive thoughts of death can also cripple a life. Some people, once they truly realize that they will die, cannot stop brooding about death. They may brood so much that it interferes with living. This is just as wrong. Death is a limitation on our lives, but we are familiar with limitations. Just as no one lives as long a life as they would wish, no one is as good looking or as talented as they would wish. Brooding, however, about the limitations to our looks or talents is wrong; we must get on with life and do the best that we can. (Edwards 1981:125) Not denying the reality of death is important, but not letting an obsession with death interfere with our lives is just as important. We must find the mean between denial and obsession.

            That we will one day die is a basic, fundamental truth that is always relevant to our quest for what truly matters. Irving Yalom writes, in his text, Existential Psychotherapy:

A confrontation with one’s personal death . . . has the power to provide a massive shift in the way one lives in the world. “Though the physicality of death destroys an individual, the idea of death can save him.” Death acts as a catalyst that can move one from one state of being to a higher one: from a state of wondering about how things are to a state of wondering that they are. An awareness of death shifts one away from trivial preoccupations and provides life with depth and poignancy and an entirely different perspective. (Yalom 1980:159-160)

Awareness of death helps us to see clearly and to evaluate properly what is important, worthwhile, and valuable. We must be mindful of our deaths to see what is truly meaningful in life.

             For each of our sakes, I hope that our deaths, when they come, will be a loss both to us and to the world. It is entirely appropriate that we should all feel anxious and sad at the prospect of this loss. We should all feel regret that we are going to die, but all we can do is live well and face our deaths courageously. Remember, though, death does not destroy meaning in our lives, and mindfulness of death will even help us find it. Give death its due, and no more.