Authors: Stephen Cave
When Greek philosophers took these ideas to Rome they found favor with an urban elite increasingly rejecting the family-based traditional religion, with its vague notions of biological legacy and a shadowy afterlife. A strong Wisdom Narrative subsequently thrived in Rome’s crowded marketplace of ideas, with Stoicism becoming something like the empire’s unofficial philosophy. Its heights were reached in the second century
CE
in the work of the emperor Marcus Aurelius, a thoughtful philosopher and committed Stoic.
But two centuries later, the Wisdom Narrative—temporarily—all but disappeared from view, as it was eclipsed by the powerful Resurrection Narrative promoted by the early Christians. Of course, it continued to be carried in those Hebrew wisdom books that the Christians kept in what they called their Old Testament. But Christianity’s main selling point as it swept to prominence across the Roman Empire in the fourth century
CE
was its promise of an imminent and tangible paradise to come.
With the revival of classical learning and the loosening of Christianity’s cultural grip during the Renaissance came the reemergence of the Wisdom Narrative tradition in Europe, with representatives such as the French essayist Michel de Montaigne. “All the wisdom and argument in the world eventually come down to one conclusion,” he wrote in 1580, “which is to teach us not to be afraid of dying.” At the same time, similar threads can also be found in other cultures, including Hinduism and especially Buddhism. Now in our much more secular and open age, these ideas are once again being explored as an alternative to the illusions of the immortality narratives.
There is therefore a long tradition of those who have challenged
the grip of the will to immortality and sought ways of tackling the fear of death that do not have us wandering the desert on a fool’s quest. In what remains, I will use the thinking of the Near Eastern wisdom literature and the philosophers of Greece and Rome to show that this alternative can help us to maintain both our sanity and our civilization even in the face of an existence that must end.
T
HE
immortality narratives take the problem of mortality at face value: death thwarts our will to live on; death itself is therefore the problem; so the solution is to deny death. Followers of the wisdom approach cannot do this: they have seen that immortality is the illusion; death is the reality. In order to succeed, they must therefore reach deeper—to undermine the causes that drive us to develop these comforting illusions in the first place.
The first step to undermining the will to immortality is to realize that genuinely unending life would most likely be a terrible curse—we looked at the reasons for this in previous pages. But although this might make us less keen to live forever, it is unlikely to persuade us that it is fine to be dead instead. The second step therefore tackles exactly this—and in this section we will explore the argument that the fear of actually being dead is nonsensical. The third and final step is to cultivate virtues that undermine those aspects of our nature that lead to both the will to persist forever and the corresponding existential angst.
Gilgamesh said to the barmaid that he was scared to look upon the face of Death. But later, having reached Utnapishtim, the wise man told him, “No one at all sees Death.” It is a mysterious comment, given that the old immortal had just explained how everyone (barring him and the gods) must die. One would think that we would
all
see Death. But Utnapishtim was right.
We have seen that the second part of the Mortality Paradox, the
inability to imagine our own nonexistence, leads us to see death as a kind of eternal darkness. Gilgamesh was terrified of exile in this “House of Dust … whose residents are deprived of light.” But he was wrong to see death this way—and this seems to be what Utnapishtim was telling him. We do not “see” or experience death; death is the end of all experience. Once we have rejected the immortality narratives, then we all know that this is the case—yet the impossibility of imagining it makes it very hard to accept. Predictably, it was a Greek philosopher who came along to spell it out for us: Epicurus.
“Death is nothing to us,” he wrote around 300
BCE
: “For all good and evil lies in sensation and death is the end of all sensation.” We cannot conceive of such a state, but we must try to understand and internalize it—only then can we live free of fear, he believed. Such fear, though natural, is irrational: “While we are, death is not; when death is come, we are not. Death is thus of no concern either to the living or to the dead. For it is not with the living, and the dead do not exist.”
Though much quoted, this idea is also often misunderstood. Many modern philosophers take it to mean we should be utterly indifferent to dying. But this is not Epicurus’s main concern. We might be anxious about the process of dying, fearing it might be painful (though many who have near-death experiences describe it as quite pleasant), and we might wish to prolong the pleasures of life, and so in that sense see death as unwelcome. Epicurus’s main point, however, is that we should not fear the state of
being dead
. He was addressing the anxiety that Shakespeare described when he wrote, “The weariest and most loathed worldly life / That age, ache, penury and imprisonment / Can lay on nature is a paradise / To what we fear of death.”
In seeing this, Epicurus was perhaps the first person in history to have overcome the lure of the second part of the Mortality Paradox, the trap of a self-consciousness that cannot see outside of itself. Until then, people could not help but see death as an eternity of
semiconscious being, as conjured by ideas of Sheol, Hades or the House of Darkness. Epicurus showed us how we might finally close the gates to the underworld.
His argument is exactly what the natural sciences also teach: that we are
essentially
living things. From this follows the explosive conclusion that neither you nor I can ever literally
be
dead. Living things cannot be dead things. To talk of someone “being dead” is just a shorthand for saying they have ceased to exist. Ludwig Wittgenstein, the philosophical giant of the last century, summed up what this means for us as conscious, experiencing creatures: “Death is not an event in life,” he wrote. “We do not live to experience death.” He concluded from this that in this sense “life has no end.” That is, we can never be aware of it having an end—we can never know anything but life.
We might compare ourselves to an ocean wave: when it breaks on the shore, its short life is over, but it does not then enter some new state of being “a dead wave” or “an ex-wave.” Rather, the parts that made it up are dissipated and absorbed back into the sea. Similarly with us: when the self-regulating, organized complexity of a human organism fails, then that person reaches a full stop; they have not entered into a new state of death. They have ceased, and their constituent elements slowly lose their human shape and are subsumed once more into the whole.
The teachings that try to reassure us that death is just a transition—like shedding an old set of clothes for a new one, as the Bhagavad Gita says—are playing on our intuitive fear of death as a step into the abyss. But they could not be more wrong: a transition is exactly what death is not, whether into the abyss or anywhere else. It is an ending—and that, when properly understood, is exactly why we should
not
be afraid. This is something those Roman stoics understood who had inscribed on their tombstones “
Non fui, fui, non sum, non curo
” (“I was not; I was; I am not; I do not care”).
“I’m not afraid of death,” said Woody Allen. “I just don’t want to
be there when it happens.” He can rest assured: he won’t be. As Utnapishtim said, “No one at all sees Death”; when he reaches out for us, we are already gone. We therefore cannot miss, regret or suffer from that which is outside the bounds of our life. We do not linger like uninvited guests at our own funeral, nor are we plunged into the lonely void. We stop. The conscious experiences we have had
are
the totality of our lives; death, like birth, is just a term that defines the bounds of those experiences, like the frame of a painting that serves to delineate and accentuate the image within.
T
HE
second step along the path of wisdom is therefore this realization that we can never
be
dead, that fearing being dead is therefore a nonsense. Combining this with the first step—realizing the problems of immortality—we can now conclude that neither is living forever so good nor death so bad as our intuitions would have us believe. Still, powerful instincts are at work that distort our perceptions of mortality and the way we use what time we have. The third step of the Wisdom Narrative is to cultivate virtues that hold these instincts in check.
W
E
noted in
chapter 1
that we of all creatures have certain highly developed cognitive capacities, of which three in particular influence our view of life and death: a refined consciousness of self, an ability to conceive of an indefinite future, and the capacity to imagine possible threatening scenarios. These three faculties allow us to picture all the endless ways in which our cherished selves could be done grievous harm—which, as we noted, has considerable evolutionary advantages, as we can then plan to avoid such harms.
But these three capacities also come at a high price. They lead directly to the Mortality Paradox—awareness of our mortality and an inability to conceive of ourselves as not existing—and thus to the
fear of death. Instead of focusing on death itself, this next step of the Wisdom Narrative attempts to confront the way these three faculties lead us alone of creatures to so obsess about mortality. The aim is not to do away with these faculties, which are of course enormously useful, but rather to maintain them in a proper perspective.
So: awareness of self might be important, but excessive concern with the self only exacerbates the fear of death, or loss of self, and leads one to a life of self-absorption. In order to combat this, we should cultivate selflessness, or identifying with others. Similarly, picturing the future helps us to plan a successful life, but excessive concern with the future causes us to focus on the tribulations that lie ahead of us—and we forget to live now. Therefore we should learn to live more in the present moment. And third, imagining all the things that could threaten our existence might help us to avoid them, but in excess it leads us only to worry about what we might lose rather than appreciate what we have. Therefore we should cultivate gratitude.
In varying ways and to varying extents, I suggest these are the three main themes of wisdom literature from Gilgamesh through the Bible and the Greeks to the present day. It is worth looking at each of these in a little more detail to see how they together add up to a coherent Wisdom Narrative; then we will look at the effect they might have on civilization.
Excessive focus on oneself is a powerful cause of the fear of death. Concern for the self has of course evolved to help us perpetuate that self—if our ancestors were not concerned for themselves, they would likely not have lived long enough to reproduce, and we as a consequence would not be here. But in excess, this self-obsession can become morbid and debilitating. Unfortunately, just such excess is encouraged by modern societies.
The social psychologist Roy Baumeister, a leading researcher on
ideas of the self, observed that “the increasing use of selfhood as the major value base for legitimizing and justifying human striving is a trend that aggravates the threat of death.” In
chapter 6
, we saw that this obsession with the self grew out of the doctrine of the immortal soul. We in the developed world who have inherited this inflated sense of self but do not believe in the immortality narrative from which it comes are consequently in the worst possible position—we are effectively facing the end of the only thing we hold dear: ourselves. For us moderns, it is all the more difficult but all the more urgent that we actively seek causes and others with which or whom we can identify to help us get over ourselves.
Fortunately, in humans, as in other social animals, our concern for self is balanced by concern for offspring, family or tribe, and in humans in particular, by concern for other interests too, such as justice, science or the local football team. By focusing more on these other interests, the end of the individual self can come to seem a lot less important.
This is an important part of the barmaid’s lesson, expressed through her instruction to Gilgamesh: “Gaze on the child who holds your hand, / let your wife enjoy your repeated embrace!” And the poem ends with his returning to Uruk and finding pride and joy in his city. In the Greek tradition, this virtue was most prominent in Stoicism, which considered full engagement with the community and love of all mankind to be a foremost duty. This was partly a product of the cosmopolitan and empathetic outlook that this philosophy encouraged. Using phrases that would be familiar to any Taoist, Marcus Aurelius summed this outlook up so: “Think often of the bond that unites all things in the universe, and their dependence upon one another. All are, as it were, interwoven, and in consequence linked in mutual affection.”
The idea of identifying with others and engaging with wider interests sounds somewhat like the Legacy Narrative, and in a sense it is indeed taking what is insightful from that approach while leaving
behind its immortalist rhetoric. Neither the barmaid nor the Stoics were suggesting that this engagement would make you live forever; rather, their point was that it would make your own mortality seem less important to you. Bertrand Russell put it well in an essay on growing old (and he grew to be ninety-seven): “The fear of death is somewhat abject and ignoble. The best way to overcome it—so at least it seems to me—is to make your interests gradually wider and more impersonal, until bit by bit the walls of the ego recede, and your life becomes increasingly merged in the universal life.”