The Fear of Death
Shakespeare’s Hamlet advised us, “What dreams may come when we have shuffled off this mortal coil must give us pause.” Death, he soliloquized, is an undiscovered country from whose bourn no traveler returns, the thought of which makes us bear the woes of this life rather than take up our bare bodkins and end all our suffering in one decisive stab. Death, as the story goes, is something to be feared, not merely as an end to life, but as an intractably mysterious state into which individuals go when their earthly time is up, a state that might contain more of the same suffering and woe as our present situation, in greater or lesser proportion. This story of death as a change of state of an individual, as we shall see, begins to seem less and less plausible the closer one inspects it. If death is not a change of state or venue, but simply the annihilation of an individual, what attitudes might we rationally take towards death, and toward the fact of our own mortality?
The view of death as annihilation is in fact not newer than the one expressed by our friend Hamlet. The Greek atomist philosopher Epicurus once quipped “If I am, death is not. If death is, I am not. Why should I fear that which cannot exist when I do?” Since I could not be around to experience death as any sort of state, anymore than I could have had experiences before my birth, I should thus take no attitude, fearful or otherwise, towards it. It is this picture of death as a state into which we go which Hamlet paints, and which Epicurus rejects. Is death then nothing to us, as Epicurus’ remark would lead us to believe, or might there be some sense to be made of death such that it would be rational to take some sort of attitude towards this impending annihilation?
If we are to talk intelligibly about death, we must first become clear about what we mean by the word ‘death.’ We might use the word in several senses. We might perhaps speak of death as an event either within the history of an individual, or its terminal limit, or alternately as an ongoing state of individuals, or as the mere prospect of our own eventual mortality. Much of the bulk of our inquiry hinges upon these different uses of the term, and whether adequate sense can be made out of the various uses.
First, we might consider the death of a person as the terminal event of his or her life, after which that person is no more—the boundary of one’s life on the opposite end of the timeline as the boundary at which the person came into existence. If this is what we mean by death, several things follow. It is then the case that death is not a state that one can be in or experience, nor is it an event within the timeline of an individual that marks the transition from one state to another. Instead it is simply the event marking this individual’s annihilation. There is nothing that it is like for a person to be dead, as it is not a possible experience for an individual. The individual simply no longer exists. Epicurus’ statement expresses the heart of the matter: “When death is, I am not.”
Second, we might instead take death to be an event within the timeline of an individual person which marks a transition from some state of the individual to another, or a travel from the “realm of life” to some other realm—Hamlet’s undiscovered country, or some of the various religious conceptions of the afterlife, perhaps. Numerous questions arise upon inspection of this view, however, hinging upon precisely what constitutes an individual person. Since death, on any conception, entails the cessation of the physical processes of life and the eventual decay of the physical body, a physicalist understanding of a person is ruled out if one is to take this position. There are several other conceptions of an individual, however—those dualistic models involving the concept of souls, which we must now explore if we wish to make sense of this second understanding of death.
In Thinking Clearly About Death, philosopher Jay Rosenberg catalogues three theories regarding souls that might seem prima facie plausible. The first, the “having” theory, is derived from the way in which we often speak of individuals as having a muscular body or a generous soul. When we say however, that a person has a body and has a soul, what can we possibly mean by that. “Having” seems to imply possession, but what then constitutes this person that possesses both a body and soul?
If we identify a person as an entity that stands in this relation of having with both a body and soul, we are no closer to understanding what a person is than we were before, and thus have no more reason to accept the claim that a person continues to exist after death. For even if this soul were to continue to exist following the death of the person with whom it stands in this relation, it does not thereby follow that the person who currently has it will continue to exist after his or her death. The person and the soul, on this view are two separate entities standing in this particular relation of having, the one to the other. The fact that many things we possess may continue to exist after my eventual death sadly does not inspire very much confidence in our own prospects for survival.
What’s more, the linguistic conventions that first suggested the view are amenable to paraphrase into statements that do not presume entities such as souls or bodies separate from the individual itself. Statements like “He has a muscular body,” and “She has a generous soul” can be paraphrased into the more ontologically innocuous “He is muscular,” and “She is generous,” respectively, rendering the linguistic motivations for the “having” view illusory.
A second theory that makes use of souls is the composite entity or “team” theory. On this view, a person is not some sort of entity that has a body or a soul, but rather a composite entity, constituted by a body and soul joined together. We have a person if and only if we have a soul and a body united in the proper way. Now this theory has the benefit that, unlike the previous attempt, it does give us an idea of what a person is, yet upon inspection it leaves us unable to make sense of a person’s continued existence after bodily death. In fact, ex hypothesi, the view logically precludes the continued existence of a person after bodily death. If a person just is both a body and a soul conjoined together, then the destruction of the body and the concomitant dissolution of the union between the two entails the annihilation of said person.
The third theory, rather than defining a person as an entity that has both a soul and a body, or an entity composed of a soul and body united, defines a person as simply being a soul. Death, on this view, is the event at which the soul departs the physical body that the soul inhabits. Whether this soul will continue to exist after departing the body is an open question, however, as no answer is implied by the theory. What benefit this theory does have is that it does not logically preclude a person’s continued existence after bodily death. Still, it leaves this continued existence only as a mere possibility, and does not lend any added plausibility to the hypothesis.
When one considers what the life of a disembodied soul might consist in, it begins to seem less and less plausible or indeed desirable. Without eyes, ears, and other sense organs, it would have no incoming sensations of the sort that make up the bulk of human or animal phenomenal experience. Without the neural structures responsible for the formation and storage of memories (or something analogous), it would seem to be a permanent amnesiac. Without something like a motor cortex and the muscular system, it is hard to imagine it able to manipulate the physical world or communicate with its inhabitants in any manner. If we go on like this we are liable to reduce the possible abilities of a disembodied soul to nothing. For if the soul is supposed to be the subject of experiences, it is unclear what sort of experience this soul could possibly have absent a body causally embedded in the world. Can there be a subject of experience if there is nothing left to be experienced by it?
If one wishes to dispute these claims, and to advance the view that a disembodied soul would be perfectly capable of sensing, thinking, remembering, communicating, and the other activities that seem to be characteristic of persons, then he or she will be at pains to explain whence comes the need for a physical body in the first place. It seems it must become a mere redundancy. Furthermore, if these abilities of the soul, and thus of a person (on this view) are independent of the physical body, then what sense can we make of those with brain damage who exhibit marked changes in personality and deficiencies in these various abilities? One would have to surmise that the person in actuality retains these abilities, and that these observable physical behaviors, which suggest the contrary, are illusory. When a person suffering from a damaged Wernicke’s area of the temporal lobe appears to everyone involved not to comprehend language, the soul theorist must explain such observations away, holding that the person, i.e., the soul, retains the ability to comprehend, although the testimony of the physical body says otherwise. These are most unparsimonious assumptions, which add nothing in the way of explanatory value and which require much in the way of ad hoc justificatory gymnastics to sustain. For these reasons, among others, the view of person as soul seems implausible at best.
What then are we left with? We can return to our original conception of death of a person as the cessation of existence of that person, where “person” refers to a kind of physical entity possessing certain special abilities. Death is neither an event within the timeline of a person, nor an ongoing state into which a person may enter, but rather the boundary or terminal limit of a person’s life. “Being dead” is not a state to be predicated of an individual, rather, once an individual has died, the person is no more, and a corpse or remains, which does not possess the special abilities of persons, is all that is left in its place. Death marks a change in kind, from person to corpse, rather than a change in state or venue of the person in question.
If we give up the dualist theories of souls and bodies, and revert back to our physicalist account, what sort of rational attitudes can and should we take towards our own impending mortality? Was Epicurus right to withhold any evaluation of the prospect of death? On certain interpretations the answer is a definite yes. Death, conceived as a dreadful state that must be endured cannot possibly be something to be feared, as we have established that death is not a state that it is possible to experience at all. When death is, a person is not, to use his turn of phrase. There is of course, no reason to fear, dread, or possess any emotion whatever regarding a state that is simply impossible to experience.
One might not fear or dread death as a state, but rather as the process of dying. Often dying is a protracted, painful, and undignified affair, burdensome to loved ones and emotionally taxing to all involved. Of course, this does not apply to all deaths. Many people die painlessly in their sleep, never the wiser. But these are exceptions. Most deaths, or ‘dyings’ to avoid confusion, do involve some degree of pain, incapacitation, and indignity, and thus it seems reasonable to, in a general sense, view the process of dying with some trepidation and dread.
Of course fear of dying does not quite encompass what we often speak of as our fear of death. This more general anxiety seems to be something rather deeper and puzzling. The question then becomes whether the fear of dying is the only fear of death we can make rational sense of, or might we sensibly describe this more general fear and dread associated with the prospect of our own annihilation? Why does the eventuality of our own non-being often trouble us so? As we have seen, it cannot be because we fear the experience of non-being, for that is senseless, as it cannot be experienced. If death is properly thought of only as the limit or the boundary of a person’s timeline, what is there then in this picture to attach any emotional significance to?
What is striking about this boundary point is that it starkly limits our possibilities, it is the mark of our finitude and contingency. It thwarts our future plans and makes us regret all of our unfinished business and unrealized dreams. We seek to extend our agency into nature, to mold and shape the world according to our values. We seek, in short, to have an impact upon the world—to achieve those things we find worthwhile and important. Death impending threatens to reduce all of our uncompleted endeavors to ruin and makes us regret our unfulfilled dreams. We mourn in advance for the loss of a future we’ll never see, and for the loss of possibilities and experiences we shall never realize—possibilities and experiences often involving those people and things we hold dear. It is not then the senseless conception of death as a state to be experienced or endured that we may dread and despise, but rather death as the agent of finitude, as the destroyer of unrealized dreams and unactualized possibilities. Death is the manacle that binds our will within time and sets our life’s accomplishments and failures in stone for eternity, never amenable to revision or redress in the future. We strive to mold our lives according to our wishes and values, to make our mark upon the world as we see fit—and death, the event horizon, marks the temporal limit of our power to do so. It is from this, our own finitude, that death brings its sting, and with which we mortals must ultimately reckon.