5. Fine for Caius

When I was once teaching a class about death, about Epicurus’ storied argument that “death is nothing to us,” I paused to let a student speak.  He’d raised his hand in urgency and I expected the sort of thing one does:  He’d have an objection to old Epicurus or a question needing answer.  But instead my student cried out in a kind of agony:  We’re all going to die!  Yes? I asked, in startled puzzlement.  No, but really.  I mean, we are ALL going to DIE!  He wailed it out again and more emphatically because, put plainly, we are.  And he abruptly understood this, understood it radically, existentially and viscerally.  I then had the splitting off experience common in my teaching career.  I externally carried on being the philosopher and intellectual, while internally I balked.  He’s right, I thought, we are going to die and what the hell are we doing here? 

 

In the 1950s, the sociologist Geoffrey Gorer published an article, called “The Pornography of Death,” in which he lamented the popularity of the horror comic and, more broadly, entertainments featuring violent death.  He claimed that violent entertainments indicate a “prudery” about death.  Like sexual pornography, he argued, fantastical simulations of violent death function as “substitute gratification.”  Both obscure the emotions and meaning we might assign to events in favor of what are merely bodily theatrics, unrealistic “fantasy” of ever escalating raw sensation.  He theorizes that the appeal of pornographies, whether of sex or death, arise where we have made the human experiences they purport to depict taboo.  He says that “people have to come to terms with the basic facts of birth, copulation, and death, and somehow accept their implications; if social prudery prevents this being done in an open, dignified fashion, then it will be done surreptitiously” – that is, through “pornography.”  Gorer himself, to be clear, is not a prude but, rather, recognizes that the death one encounters in violent entertainments is not the death that one encounters in life.  It is all and only sensation and sensationalized.  Death is frightening, but DEATH!!! affords a thrill and, if you see enough of it, can even become quite boring.  Being thrilled or bored by death are both a kind of power.  One need only to consider the experiential difference between watching a rip roaring shoot -'em-up film and one depicting a single slow death from cancer to catch at Gorer’s point.  DEATH!!! is fun; death is not.  And enjoying watching DEATH!!! can mislead you about death, make you think it less daunting than it is.  

 

Whatever one might make of Gorer’s argument, I prize its recognition that one of the headiest struggles in thinking about death is just trying to discern whether one is really thinking about death rather than a convenient counterfeit, some largely fictional substitute that is more easily managed than the thing itself.  When I read philosophy about death and when I myself have tried to write some, I often worry that whatever it is we philosophers are carrying on about, it isn’t really death.  To be sure, we don’t go in for the sensational and fantastical.  Instead, we favor high abstraction:  not death made bloody, but death made bloodless.  But like the horror comic that troubles Gorer, our style of death too often seems detached from all that might or could really come to pose a threat.  The philosopher’s death will never titillate and thrill, but it certainly can bore.  Turned into a concept, it hardly seems a thing to fear.  Perhaps this is but a hazard of the craft itself.  If one’s allegiance is to reason, you want a foe that reason can defeat, and death turned into concept seems like that.  

 

I consider that philosopher who so horrified my student, Epicurus, a kind of standard-bearer for the ways that clean abstraction can make good arguments that, for all of that, somehow miss their mark.  His argument that “death is nothing to us” is well-reasoned and, because of this, has long occupied philosophers who think on death.  Death can be “nothing” because it just is an end – of consciousness, of existence, of the person who, only while she lives, can find things bad.  Epicurus reasoned that since death will end me, I should not fear it:  It simply isn’t rational to fear what one will not experience.  The trouble I have with Epicurus is not the soundness of his reasoning, but instead all it leaves out.  

 

Death might be just a terminus but it’s one we travel toward, and I expect that how you get there matters.  All the stuff that precedes death, the dying, can go well or ill, and it may be hard to tell what “well” can mean here.  More emphatically, like most philosophy that grew out of Greece, Epicurus underestimates how death features in a life, understanding it as but my end.   I will die – of course I will – but before that comes, I will first suffer the deaths of others.  The reasoning that could help me meet my own end is of little use when others do.  When others die, it is not nothing.  The deaths of others are just those deaths we must and do experience, deaths one must survive and, somehow, endure.  They are a terrible, living something.  Where life is long enough, they are multiple somethings.  The problem here, I think, is not really death.  The problem is deaths, the serial losses a life accumulates, each so achingingly particular and each the start of some new loneliness.  I can’t quite convince myself that Epicurus ever felt this.  

 

While generations of philosophers have since spilt lots of ink writing of death in ways that Epicurus would have liked, some others seem to have a trouble more like mine, a struggle to make the concept answer to the facts and to experience.  Lucretius writes as one who heartily accepts what Epicurus offers, but he writes it up in poetry rather than cool reason because, he says, bitter medicine goes down better with some honey brushed round the lip of the glass.  Despite his professed affinity with Epicurus, though, I think he ends up doing something else.  Where Epicurus can be dry as dust, Lucretius’ work is colored all through with vivid natural imagery that readily awakens both glorious awe and dreadful terror.  His is a world of both lambs at play and people dying of the plague, and it’s the latter that seem to carry the day.  His poem ends with graphic, aching scenes of awful human suffering – not just people dying miserably, but frantic mourners fighting over wood they need to burn their dead – and these are then just left there on the page.  Death is not defeated, even if the concept gets a trouncing.  Death abstracted might be nothing, but death in fact is not.  At the end of Lucretius’ poem, there is no salving comfort given, no sense that with a little more intellectual work this could all come right.  The end of that poem even led some to think Lucretius had gone mad.  Tennyson famously thought so.  He wrote a poem that has Lucretius reaching for a kind of rational peace, but instead of this Lucretius finds that an “unseen monster lays his vast and filthy hands upon my will, wrenching it backwards into his.”  Tennyson’s Lucretius stretches reason taut as it can go, but finds the answering snap back to experience more than he can bear.  Death turns out not to be a concept and, in the words of another Roman, Seneca, treating it as such can leave you “facing a lion’s charge armed with an awl.”  My student crying out in horror at our common doom could find no protection in the awl I was then handing him.

 

In Tolstoy’s The Death of Ivan Ilych, Ivan suffers the slow revelation that his end is coming on and all that he had before understood comes to seem like misplaced complacency – it is all falsehood and false confidence.  He recalls the well-worn syllogism he learned as a child:  “All men are mortal. Caius is a man.  Therefore, Caius is mortal.”  This is but the tightest logic, undeniable and right.  But it is also useless for Ilyich, for while Caius is a man, he is also and at once, just any man, a placeholder instead of person.  And none of us has yet lived as such a one, a fact that arrives for Ilych in all its horror.  Caius can be mortal, but only because he could be anyone and thus is really no one at all:

For the man Caius, man in general, it was perfectly correct; but he was not Caius and not man in general… Was it for Caius, the smell of the striped leather ball that Vanya had loved so much?  Was it Caius who had kissed his mother’s hand like that, and was it for Caius that the silk folds of his mother’s dress had rustled like that?... Caius is indeed mortal, and it’s right that he die, but for me, Vanya, Ivan Ilyich, with all my feelings and thoughts – for me it’s another matter.  And it cannot be that I should die.  It would be too terrible. 

Ilych is shocked to find that he must die not least because he carries within him all that is particular to him, all that refuses cool rationality and bland remove. 

 

Tolstoy presents Ivan Ilyich as something like a tragic fool, a man quite deeply self-deceived.  He has always been mortal, but declines to see this until his death is closing fast upon him.  Yet I’ve never been able to entirely begrudge Ivan his belatedness.  He’s late to knowledge, but, then, aren’t we all?  And maybe we can only be so?  I don’t want to think so, but still I have my doubts.  I can know, with reason made impeccable, that those I love will die, but it’s hard to make of this a fact that forms experience itself.  Reason tells me people die, but it cannot well assay what this is like.  

 

I have not yet found for death and loss a language that will suit.  Death seems a thing like love, the kind of thing that does not hold up well when stripped of all its particulars.  The devilry of both live in their details.  Abstraction renders both generic, but in experience, they are radically distinct and acutely specific.  We live in detail and so we have to die that way as well.  And because we also love in detail, we lose that way as well.  It doesn’t matter that people die; it matters too much that little Vanyas do.