PROFESSION: Philosopher
CLAIM TO FAME: Writer of "Very Little...Almost Nothing." Chronicler of dead philosophers
You say a philosopher’s job is to learn how to die. What do you mean?
Philosophy begins with a death: the trial and execution of Socrates. Socrates says a philosopher is someone who professes death. But our culture denies death in a massive, systematic way. We don’t know how to deal with it. We don’t have rituals around it. We don’t know what to do, what to say. We used to. People used to take their hats off when they saw a hearse.
And now?
Death has become an embarrassment—obscene, invisible. Now, the goal of human life is longevity at all costs, underwritten by science and technology. It’s an unquestioned good. What you don’t want is certainty when it comes to death. Most nauseating are all the peddlers of immortality, pushing the idea that the body will never die. If you want to get attention, tell people we’re going to live for 150 years.
Is that bad?
The idea that human beings can overcome the human condition has been with us a long time. What enslaves human beings is a longing for immortality. Paradoxically, freedom does not exist in the absence of constraint. To live a free life is to accept the limit of one’s human life, which is death. To live in perpetual hope of immortality is to be a slave.
What can the philosophy of death tell us about our lives?
Removing the longing for immortality turns the focus away from what may happen after our life and toward life itself, in all its rich complexity. The only way to attain some tranquility of soul is by removing the anxious longing for an afterlife.
Should we not search for a cure for cancer?
There’s progress in science and then there’s faith in progress. Faith in progress is theological, not scientific. Prior to the rise of the West, most cultures believed in time as a cycle. You stay in touch with the ancestors. In our progressivist way of thinking, you have to be on the right side of history.
How is a progressivist view bad for our minds?
It might be good for us, but to say that is also to say that illusion might be good for us. I guess I have an old-fashioned commitment to truth.
Are Eastern ideas of death better?
The Tibetan Book of the Dead says that, basically, we’re traveling through different stages of illusion. One day we might reach a stage of reality. My position is very simple. The world is real. So is our death. That’s a much less comforting thought than illusion.
When did you first think about death?
My earliest memory of death is my great grandmother’s, in Liverpool. There was an open-top funeral. You had to kiss the corpse. Then the curtains were drawn and people got drunk and talked. The function was to acquaint one with death. You don’t forget kissing the cold flesh of a corpse.
How would you like to see people change their views on death?
Many testimonies in the past make clear that death is accompanied by pain. The pain is felt, but one bears it. Today, we find pain unbearable. Most of us will die to the accompaniment of morphine. We’ll be unconscious, which is odd in the history of the human species.
What’s wrong with avoiding suffering?
Nothing, but the cost might be truth. To turn our back on the fact of suffering is to ignore what may be our greatest virtue: the capacity to empathize with others.
How should we mourn?
We tend to think of mourning as a kind of dirty private failing. It is not. In mourning, we use our memory to recall the dead and what was great about them and then try and move on in our own lives.
Why is it bad not to mourn?
It’s the idea that we have to get over it, get back to normal.
Horror films seem to be a way we allow death into our lives.
