Author: Bill Vallicella

There is dying, there is being dead, and there is the momentary transition from the one to the other.  

While we rightly fear the suffering and indignity of dying, especially if the process is drawn out over weeks or months, it is the anticipation of the moment of death that some of us find horrifying.  This horror is something like Heideggerian Angst which, unlike fear (Furcht), has no definite object.  Fear has a definite object; in this case the dying process. Anxiety is directed — but at the unknown, at nothing in particular.

For what horrifies some of us is the prospect of sliding into the state of nonbeing, both the sliding and the state.  Can Epicurus help?  

If the Epicurean reasoning works for the state of being dead, it cannot work for the transition from dying to being dead.  Epicurus reasoned: When I am, death is not; when death is; I am not.  So what is there to fear?  If death is the utter annihilation of the subject of experience, then, after death, there will be nothing left of me to experience anything and indeed nothing to be in a state whether I experience it or not.  Clearly, a state is a state of a thing in that state.  No thing, no state.

This reasoning strikes me as cogent.  On the assumption that physical death is the annihilation of the person or self, then surely it is irrational to fear the state one will be in when one no longer exists.  Again, no thing, no state; hence no state of fear or horror or bliss or anything.  Of course, coming to see rationally that one's fear is irrational may do little or nothing to alleviate the fear.  But it may help if one is committed to living rationally.  I'm a believer in the limited value of  'logotherapy' or self-help via the application of reason to one's life.

I suffer from acrophobia, but it hasn't kept me away from high places and precipitous drop-offs on backpacking trips.  On one trip into the Grand Canyon I had to take myself in hand to get up the courage to cross the Colorado River on a high, narrow, and swaying suspension bridge.  I simply reasoned the thing out and marched briskly across staring straight ahead and not looking down. But then I am a philosopher, one who works at incorporating rationality into his daily life.  

Why then do so many find the Epicurean reasoning sophistical?  To Philip Larkin in "Aubade" it is "specious stuff":

This is a special way of being afraid
No trick dispels. Religion used to try,
That vast moth-eaten musical brocade
Created to pretend we never die,
And specious stuff that says No rational being
Can fear a thing it will not feel, not seeing
That this is what we fear — no sight, no sound,
No touch or taste or smell, nothing to think with,
Nothing to love or link with,
The anaesthetic from which none come round.

It seems clear that our boozy poet has failed to grasp the Epicurean reasoning.

Still, there is the moment of death, the moment in which the self helplessly dissolves, knowing that it is dissolving.  My claim is that it is this loss of control, this ego loss, that horrifies us.  Ever since the sense of 'I' developed in us we have been keeping it together, maintaining our self-identity in and through the crap storm of experience.  But at the moment of dying, we can no longer hold on, keep it together.  We will want to cling to the familiar, and not let go.  This I suggest is what horrifies us about dying.  And for this horror the reasoning of Epicurus is no anodyne.

So I grant that there is something quick and specious about the Epicurean cure. If one is rational, it has the power to assuage the fear of being dead, but not the fear of dying, the fear of ego loss.

I consider it salutary to cultivate this fear of dying.  It is the sovereign cure to the illusions and idolatries of worldliness.  But the cultivation is hard to accomplish, and I confess to rarely feeling the horror of dying.  It is hard to feel because our natural tendency is to view everything without exception objectively, as an object.  The flow of intentionality is ever outward toward objects, so much so that thinkers such as John-Paul Sartre have denied that there is any subject of experience, any source of the stream of intentionality.  (See his The Transcendence of the Ego.)

Everyone knows that one will die; the trick, however is not just to think, but to appreciate, the thought that I will die, this unique subjective unity  of consciousness and self-consciousness.  This is a thought that is not at home in the Discursive Framework, but straddles the boundary between the Sayable and the Unsayable.  My irreducible ipseity and haecceity of which I am somehow aware resists conceptualization. Metaphysics, just as much as physics, misses the true source of the horror of death.  For if metaphysics transforms the  I or ego into a soul substance, then it transforms it into an object.  (Cf. the Boethian objectifying view of the person as an individual substance of a rational nature.) An immaterial object is still an object.  As long as I think of myself from the outside, objectively, from a third-person point of view, it is difficult to appreciate that it is I, the first person, this subjective center and source of acts who will slide into nonbeing.

Now we come to "that vast moth-eaten musical brocade," religion, "created to pretend we never die."  Although this is poetic exuberance and drunken braggadocio, there is a bit of truth that can be squeezed out of Larkin's effusion.  The religious belief in immortality can hide from us the horror and the reality of death.  It depends on how 'platonizing' the religion is.

Christianity, however, despite its undeniable affinities with Platonism (as well appreciated by Joseph Ratzinger, the pope 'emeritus,' in Introduction to Christianity), resolutely denies our natural immortality as against what is standardly taken to be the Platonic view.  On Christianity we die utterly, and if there is any hope for our continuance, that hope is hope in the grace of God.

Is there then any cure for the horror of death?  In my healthy present, my horror is that of anticipation of the horror to come.  The real horror, the horror mortis, will be upon us at the hora mortis, the hour of death, when we feel ourselves sliding into the abyss.  

In extremis, there is only one cure left, that of the trust of the little child mentioned at Matthew 18:3.   One must let oneself go hoping and trusting that one will get oneself back.  Absent that, you are stuck with the horror.

Nothing would be more foolish and futile than to take the advice of a different drunken poet, and "Rage, rage against the dying of the light."  The dim light of the ego must die to rise again as spirit.  In fact, it is the ego in us that 'proves' in a back-handed sort of way that we are spiritual beings. Only a spiritual being can say 'I' and saying it and thinking it isolate himself, distancing himself from his Source and from other finite selves even unto the ultimate Luciferian conceit that one is self-sufficient.  

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