Confronting Mortality

 

Plato thought that doing philosophy prepares human beings to face their own deaths. He thought that in death, the human soul would be freed from the prison of the body and apprehend the true nature of things, rather than the dim shadow reality to which embodied beings are limited. During our lives, Plato argues that it is in doing philosophy that we can get the closest to truth. By following through with philosophical inquiry we can begin to see the vague contours of things as they really are, even if their true nature ultimately remains inaccessible to us while we are living. We see Plato's views on the relationship between philosophy, death, and reality in his portrayal of the death of Socrates. Socrates is not afraid of death, indeed he welcomes it. The attitude Socrates has towards death is not straightforwardly suicidal. Rather, at least in Plato's rendering, he looks forward to death as union with truth.

I don't personally think about the relationship between death and philosophy in the way that Plato did. I don't see embodiment as a prison at all. I love my body and the capabilities it affords me for interacting with other beings and the world at large. Indeed I doubt that anything properly called "me" will exist after the decay of my body.

That said, I do believe that philosophy does have important connections to mortality. I think that one of the greatest and most important challenges that we face as human beings is to genuinely confront our own mortality before it is too late. Confronting the reality of our own death allows us the possibility of confronting our own death with grace. With eyes wide open to our own mortality, we can approach death without denial, without lying to ourselves about what is really happening. And knowing on a deep level that we will die heightens our love of life, while we have it.

Atul Gawande has written compellingly about how our collective and individual unwillingness to face our own mortality has led to a medical crisis in the United States. Ignoring our mortality, we perpetually put off the difficult work of preparing for death, for introspecting about our own priorities during the dying process, for getting our affairs in order, and for tending to our relationships with others until it is too late. Unprepared, many dying people find themselves panicking, overloaded with resource-intensive medical interventions that will not ultimately save them, and with many regrets and unfulfilled wishes. 

How can philosophy help? 

In a recent opinion piece for the New York Times, philosopher Simon Critchley endorses an ancient view: "To philosophize is to learn how to die." Critchley argues that freedom is embracing our own mortality. He suggests that the anxiety--the diffuse and unsettling feeling of the strangeness of reality--that many of us have felt in pandemic times points to a deeper fact: the fact of our mortality.

I think Critchley is definitely onto something here. Otherwise healthy people who have very little experience with death have been thrown into circumstances where they are bombarded with the very real possibility of being hospitalized on a ventilator, or worse--needing a ventilator but not being able to access one. In addition to the vivid and relentless reminder of our own mortality, and that of our loved ones, which the pandemic has furnished us, there are also lessons upon lessons about the existing structural inequities of our society--our own racism, our own disregard for the humanity of those who are not affluent, our disregard for fellow creatures and the planet as a whole. The power of the pandemic in underscoring these existing and exacerbated evils also feeds anxiety, the sense of it all being too much.

I agree with Critchley that it is vitally important that we humans face mortality, and that this responsibility is particularly evident in pandemic times. As he says, we have here an opportunity to embrace that anxiety full-on and thereby to work towards our own liberation. I do think that philosophy has a role in this. Philosophy asks us to examine our views, our lives, to question our own assumptions and to improve and refine them. If we are lying to ourselves about our own mortality, philosophy can help unearth those lies and set our views aright. Philosophers since antiquity have been struggling with this very problem--perhaps the philosophical problem. However, I disagree with Critchley about what we discover through philosophical inquiry on these issues. He says what we discover when we face up to mortality is that we are weak and wretched and that our "weakness is our strength" and "our wretchedness is our greatness." I think, upon philosophical reflection, that we find we are vulnerable and interdependent, sure. But not wretched. Human beings, mortal bodies and all, are worthy subjects of awe, just like the rest of the incredible universe we inhabit and to which we bear witness.