27. DEATH AND THE PARADOX OF LIFE One of my students once defined silence as the state in which we no longer need to ask any questions. This suggestion sounds paradoxical, since one of the philosopher's main tasks is to raise questions whose answers are usually not immediately apparent. Yet I believe it expresses a deep insight into the nature and purpose of doing philosophy. If silence is actually a questionless state, then have we merely been wasting time raising so many difficult philosophical questions here in Part Four and throughout these lectures? Not at all! Such questions must be raised, or the deeper levels of silence can never be enjoyed: for the questions stir up in us the wonder that draws us out beyond the noise of the world to meet the meaning of the world. Wittgenstein expressed this basic paradox by saying the meaning of life is found outside of life--which is why he believed we could not speak about that meaning. Our inability to give scientifically verifiable answers to most philosophical questions does not, however, mean the questions (or our attempted answers) are meaningless. For their final purpose is not to be answered in words (which may or may not be possible), but to help us discover the meaning of life and of the world in the silence towards which the questions point. In the previous lecture we learned about the paradox of courage in the face of the dread of non-being. This leads us directly to the ultimate philosophical question, for the inevitability of our own non-being--that is, of our own death--raises the question of the meaning of life; and this question itself directs our attention towards the ultimate silence beyond life. As far as we can judge by what we observe when a person dies, death marks the end of our capacity to use words, and thereby ushers in a silence unlike anything we have experienced during life. The mystery of what, if anything, happens to us after we die is one of the primary sources of the "angst" which we all feel from time to time, and which was, as we have seen, one of the primary concerns of existentialist philosophers. This angst has therefore driven ordinary people--even those who know nothing about philosophy--to propose various ideas about what happens after death. Is there a life after death? If so, what is it like? There are four basic ways of answering such questions, though each type of answer, of course, has many variations. These four ways of envisioning the "after death" experience can be regarded as arising out of two questions: (1) Does our consciousness of our own identity continue after we die? and (2) Are we given a new body after our present body dies? With these questions in mind, we can map the four traditional answers to the question of life after death onto the 2LAR cross, as shown in Figure 27.1. This is probably not a "perfect" 2LAR, since it is highly unlikely that all four possible answers describe what actually happens after death. Although it is possible that two or three of these views might be simultaneously true, in different ways, most people feel constrained to choose only one as the best hypothesis. So let's compare these four possibilities in a bit more detail. The theories of extinction and reincarnation both agree that the part of me which enables me to remember who I am (often called the "mind" or "soul") will not survive my death; but they disagree as to whether or not I will be given a new body. If not, then I will simply cease to exist (--): my individuality will discontinue altogether. If so, then I will reappear as another person (- +), whose memory will be discontinuous with my present memory. People who believe in reincarnation often claim there are ways of learning to become conscious of memories from our "past lives". We must learn how to regain such memories precisely because there is normally no conscious continuity between our different reincarnations, even though there may be some deeper spiritual "core" connecting the lives of these apparently different persons. [Figure 27.1: Four Basic Ways of Conceiving Life After Death] Those who, like Plato, believe in the immortality of the soul are actually closer to those who believe in extinction than to those who believe in reincarnation. For, although the immortality theory disagrees with both of these two theories by claiming that we have a soul (i.e., a capacity for continuous, conscious memory) which survives our body's death (+-), it actually agrees with the extinction theory's claim that our dead body will not be replaced with a new one, as the reincarnation theory believes it will. This might seem rather surprising, especially to those who view Plato's belief in the immortality of the soul as the ancient Greek equivalent of the Christian belief in life after death. The latter, however, is not based on any logical arguments for the necessity of the soul's immortality, but on a religious hope that people will be saved from extinction through divine intervention in the form of resurrection. The theory of resurrection must be clearly distinguished from each of the other three theories. As the direct opposite of resurrection, extinction is properly regarded by those who believe in resurrection as being our natural fate, should resurrection not occur. By contrast, the other two theories share common factors with resurrection, which are sometimes used to overshadow their differences. Like immortality, resurrection assumes a person's conscious powers will continue, more or less uninterrupted, after death. And like reincarnation, resurrection assumes a person will be given a new body after the present body dies. But in opposition to Plato, resurrection focuses primarily on the body, assuming like Aristotle that, without a resurrected body, the soul itself would also die. And in opposition to reincarnation, resurrection views the new body as a new kind of body, not just another body of the same kind. The pictures sometimes given in religious literature, of bodies floating out of their graves up into the sky, totally misrepresent the real meaning of resurrection. For in the New Testament, a person's earthly body is described as a mere "seed" in comparison to the fully matured "spiritual body" to be given after death (see 1 Corinthians 15:35-44). In other words, our conscious life in the present body will somehow be united in a continuous way with this new spiritual body (++), so that all our unrealized potentials in this life will blossom and bear fruit in the life to come. Because we actually experience death as the ultimate end of life as we know it, none of us can know for certain until after we die which of these four views best describes what lies on the "other side". For this reason, philosophers are often interested not so much in the questions death raises about life after death as in the questions it raises about life. Plato, for example, insisted that the fear of death is appropriate only for those who are still bound to the "cave" (cf. Figure 4.3). Transcending this fear by "learning how to die" is one of the basic tasks any good philosopher must perform. Plato was referring here, I believe, to the lifelong task of learning how to live with the darkness of the unknown, even before we die; for when we do so, we discover that this absolutely real mystery paradoxically sheds light on how we should live our life. In other words, by raising the question of the meaning of life, death points us directly towards the need to live what existentialists call an authentic life. The psychologist Abraham Maslow referred to the authentic or truly human life as the life which works towards "self-actualization". This now common term has often been wrongly criticized for promoting a selfish, "do your own thing" lifestyle, which permits a person to ignore the needs of other people. However, this is a gross misunderstanding. For Maslow and many others have been careful to point out that the inward focus of self-actualizing people does not mean they care only about their own egotistical interests, but that they are self-transcending people, whose understanding of themselves has led them to reach outward to others in love and compassion. Interestingly, the source of the misunderstanding of such terms is that the self-actualizing life is itself essentially paradoxical. The more he studied self-actualizing people, the more Maslow came to realize that they are people who can resolve paradoxes within themselves: instead of being either selfish or unselfish, they are somehow both (see e.g., Toward a Psychology of Being, p.139). Socrates' famous "know thyself" carries essentially the same message: we know ourselves not in order to become self-enclosed solipsists, but in order to become self-giving saints. And the more we know ourselves (i.e., the more apparently selfish we are), the more we are capable of knowing others (i.e., the more unselfish we can be). Learning to transcend ourselves in this way will prepare us to accept death with open arms as a gift. For we can view death as the ultimate gift only if we have learned to live with death--that is, to live with our own non-being through such acts of self-transcendence--while we are still alive. As we saw in the previous lecture, the importance of recognizing the presence of non- being in all beings was one of the key insights of the existentialists. The ancient Chinese philosopher, Lao Tzu, expressed a similar insight when he claimed non-being is actually more useful than being (Tao Te Ching, section 11). For example, a window would be useless for seeing through if not for the blank space in between the edges of the frame. And a cup would be useless for holding liquids if it were not hollow inside. Such examples show that what is would often be unable to fulfill its proper function if it did not make use of what is not. Likewise, people should view their own death as a natural part of the life process. There are, however, two distinct ways in which the "natural" relationship between life and death can be viewed. I would guess nearly all of us feel more inclined to hold one or the other of these two views. According to Lao Tzu, a person who treats death as a natural part of life will no longer need to search for the "infinite", or "eternal life". Since he viewed death as the ultimate end of all life, he believed such a search is bound to fail, and will only succeed in producing anxiety (see Figure 27.2a). Yet the anxiety we feel at the prospects of our own death need not cause us to give up the search for the infinite, provided we view death as a boundary, on the other side of which lies the object or purpose of our quest (see Figure 27.2b). Only in this latter sense, in fact, does it make sense to regard death as a gift that can truly be affirmed as a natural part of life. If there is nothing after life but death and extinction, then it makes no more sense to regard death as a natural part of life than it does to regard the wall as part of the window, or the space outside the cup as part of the cup. A boundary is part of the thing it defines; but the space outside the boundary is wholly other. (a) Anxiety as the Boundary (b) Death as the Boundary [Figure 27.2: Two Views of Life and Death] Whichever view of death is correct, the issue raised by Lao Tzu highlights the central paradox of life itself: an essential part of the human task is to seek after the infinite, and yet this search is bound to fail because death makes life itself finite. But the search "fails" only if success is judged in terms of analytic logic. If we affirm the paradox, if we affirm (with Lao Tzu) the presence of non-being within all being, if we affirm (with the existentialists) our finitude in the very process of seeking the face of the infinite, then we have grounds for hope that meaning will break through in the midst of our struggle. Even if this breakthrough occurs only after our death, it legitimates the search within this life. Indeed, I believe Lao Tzu's real point is not that the search itself is wrong, but that it is wrong to expect to discover the infinite in a form we can grasp within this life. We must therefore always be careful not to think we can resolve the paradox of life by making something less than infinite the source of our life's meaning. For example, I cannot count the number of students who have written insight papers claiming "happiness", or perhaps "satisfaction", is the purpose for which people ought to live their lives. Yet the problem with this view is that, as we learned from Tillich in Lecture 25, once happiness is reached, it ends. Those who live their lives in order to fulfill their own desires inevitably end with a sense of emptiness and meaninglessness, even if they are lucky enough to have those desires fulfilled. Satisfaction is not ultimately satisfying. So the paradox is accentuated to the point of absurdity if we direct our lives towards a finite end. Lao Tzu's advice, coming from a person whose basic message was that we must live in the presence of the mysterious (i.e., infinite) "Tao", should not be taken to imply that there is nothing infinite worth searching for; rather, it implies that the ultimate goal of the quest for the infinite is to teach us that it is present now in the midst of our finitude, so that we can give up the quest in order to rest in that presence. The lesson we learn by facing the paradox of death, in other words, is that the search for the infinite must be pursued in the context of a recognition of the finitude of life as we know it. The need for a recognition of both human finitude and an eternal context beyond human life is an insight recognized by most religions. For example, one of the many ways in which the Bible expresses this paradox comes in Isaiah 40:6-8: .. All flesh is grass, and all its loveliness is like the flower of the field. The grass withers, the flower fades, When the breath of the Lord blows upon it; Surely the people are grass. The grass withers, the flower fades, But the word of the Lord stands forever. This "word" is, of course, the same word of which John spoke at the beginning of his Gospel; and it is, paradoxically, a word that can be heard only in the depths of silence: "'In the beginning was the Word....' The Word did not come into being, but it was. It did not break upon the silence, but it was older than the silence and the silence was made of it." (N. Scott Momaday, House Made of Dawn (New York: Harper & Row, 1966), pp.90-91.) The latter quotation suggests that life is to death as words are to silence. Similarly, just as life ends in death yet draws its meaning from the mystery which death veils, so also, as I mentioned at the beginning of today's lecture, the questions of philosophy end in a silence that no longer has use for questions. Life is, in fact, full of such mysteries and paradoxes. The few we have touched upon here in the fourth part of this course only represent the tip of the iceberg. Our dreams, for example, put us in touch with a huge area full of mystery and paradox. If we had more time we could look in greater detail into some of these other dark and interesting aspects of our lives. But instead we will return in our final session to the question with which this course began and examine the way it too reveals the paradoxical mystery at the heart of human experience. QUESTIONS FOR FURTHER THOUGHT 1. Could resurrection and reincarnation both be true? 2. What would a "spiritual body" be like? 3. Could there ever be real empirical evidence for or against life after death? 4. How could an unhappy person live a meaningful life? RECOMMENDED READINGS 1. Plato, Phaedo and Republic (especially Book X), in Edith Hamilton and Huntington Cairns (eds.), The Collected Dialogues of Plato (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1961), pp.40-98, 819-844. 2. Abraham H. Maslow, Toward a Psychology of Being2 (New York: D. Van Nostrand, 1968), especially Chapter 10, "Creativity in Self-Actualizing People", pp.135-145. 3. William Kluback, Toward the Death of Man (New York: Peter Lang, 1991). 4. Roger J. Woolger, Other Lives, Other Selves: A Jungian therapist discovers past lives (New York: Bantam Books, 1988).