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Should We Assume that Death is Final?

If human existence obeyed the laws of rational logic, it would seem that those who live most intensely and love life most passionately would most fear death. For wouldn’t death terminate something very precious to them? On the other hand, the tired and discouraged, all those who find life a painful burden should welcome it as a deliverance from their miseries. But experience shows this not to be the case.

Ignace Lepp (psychiatrist)

According to the almost unanimous testimony of the ethnologists, primitive peoples rarely consider death the natural end of life. It is generally attributed to more-or-less fortuitous causes—the machinations of sorcerers, the ingratitude of a son, or malevolent spirits.

On the surface I seemed to have everything I could reasonably want—good health, energy, an adventurous life, rewarding friendships, exhilarating love affairs, success in my work, exciting travel, the sustained nourishment of music, theatre, reading—but in the middle of it all I was overwhelmed, almost literally so, by a sense of mortality. The realization hit me like a demolition crane that I was inevitably going to die. This feeling, when it came, was not an ordinary fear or anxiety but was hyper-vivid and preternaturally powerful. As in a nightmare, I felt trapped and unable to escape from something that I was also unable to face. Death, my death, the literal destruction of me, was totally inevitable, and had been from the very instant of my conception. Nothing that I could ever do, now or at any other time, could make any difference to that, nor could it ever have done so at any moment of my life. Not only would being brave make no difference: gibbering cowardice would make no difference either. I found this fact un-comeable-to-terms-with. I felt—as I imagine a lot of the people who have confronted firing squads must have felt—engulfed by mind-numbing terror in the face of oblivion. For several years this was my normal mode of existence, a nightmare from which it was impossible to awake because I was awake already

Bryan Magee

[Like so many others, Arnold Lunn considered himself an advocate of reason. He is emphatic that when feeling comes into conflict with reason, feeling must always give way. But when reason has nothing to say either way on an issue, then feelings may be taken into account, and perhaps even considered to have some evidential value, as he implies in the following episode from his career as an mountain climber. In your opinion is such a stance consistent with reason? Specifically, do you think that the feeling he describes in the fourth paragraph carries any evidential weight?]

I have survived five long falls among the mountains, and my memories of these falls are among the imponderables which have lessened my own fear of death because death never seemed to me less real than in those moments when death seemed inevitable. Nor can this apparent paradox be explained on the assumption that my reasoning power had been temporarily put out of action, for one can pack an amazing amount of concentrated thought into a long fall.

Falling is an emotional experience so intense that ordinary life seems unreal by comparison. The dominant sensation during my last fall was the feeling that the intervening years since I fell on Cader had been nothing but a dream, and that real life began again during the moments when gravity had taken complete control.

The strangest fact about these experiences was that never once did the possibility of extinction cross my mind, not even during a long slide down an ice slope towards a glacier many hundreds of feet below. The movement, though swift, was smooth. There was no violence to distract my thoughts. I remember an intense feeling of irritation against myself for slipping and with my companion for failing to check that slip. Two friends on another rope seemed curiously impassive and unsympathetic as we shot past them. There was nothing they could have done, but I felt that they might have made a gesture as we passed. Even a ritualistic gesture of farewell would have relieved their irresponsive immobility.

But I never said to myself, This is the end. In a few seconds my existence comes to a full stop. On the contrary, I felt that the experience through which I was passing was disagreeable but not decisive, an episode but not the end.

That particular slide was checked by a friendly little spike of rock which protruded a few inches above the ice. The rope between us caught on this rock, and some loose snow which had been swept off the ice by the rope packed between the rope and the rock, but for which the rope must inevitably have been cut.

Thoughts about Death

Because of death human existence has no meaning. All the crimes that men could commit are nothing in comparison with that fundamental crime which is death.

Albert Camus

*

Can you not see death as the friend and deliverer? It means stripping off that body which is tormenting you. What are you afraid of? Has this world been so kind to you that you should leave it with regret?

C. S. Lewis

Death is nature’s way of telling you to slow down.

*

Death is something so strange that in spite of our experience of it we do not think it is possible for those we cherish; it always surprises us as something unbelievable and paradoxical.

Goethe

I marvelled that other men should live, because he, whom I had loved as if he would never die, was dead. I marvelled more that I, his second self, could live when he was dead. Well has someone said of his friend that he is half his soul. For I thought that my soul and his soul were but one soul in two bodies. Therefore, my life was a horror to me, because I would not live but as a half. Perhaps because of this I feared to die, lest he whom I had loved so much should wholly die.

St. Augustine

Death must be distinguished from dying, with which it is often confused.

Sidney Smith

Either the soul is immortal and we shall not die, or it perishes with the flesh, and we shall not know then that we are dead. Live, then, as if you were eternal.

André Maurois

How oft when men are at the point of death Have they been merry!

Romeo and Juliet (Romeo)

*

I am a temporary enclosure for a temporary purpose; that served, my skull and teeth, my idiosyncrasy and desire, will disperse, I believe, like the timbers of a booth after the fair.

H. G. Wells

*

If some persons died, and others did not die, death would indeed be a terrible affliction.

La Bruyere

If you would have peace prepare for war, and if you would have life prepare for death.

*

In Simone de Beauvoir’s view it is good that man is mortal, for only on this condition can his existence be dramatic and intense.

It is not death I fear, but dying.

Montaigne

*

Jung said the psyche doesn’t pay any attention to whether you’re going to die or not. It goes on as if you were going to live forever.

Life is a great surprise. I do not see why death should not be an even greater one.

Vladimir Nabokov

*

Many people assume too easily that with five senses and a rather limited through remarkable intellect we can comprehend everything that happens and that ever will happen, and that there will never be a surprise for us.

Robertson Davies

*

Religion teaches the dangerous nonsense that death is not the end.

Richard Dawkins

The boast of heraldry, the pomp of pow’r, And all that beauty, all that wealth e’er gave, Awaits alike the inevitable hour: The paths of glory lead but to the grave.

Thomas Gray

The hour of departure has arrived, and we go our ways—I to die and you to live. Which is the better, only God knows.

Socrates

*

The new scientific society definitely discourages men from thinking about death; it is a fact, but it is considered a morbid fact.

G. K. Chesterton

To philosophize is to learn how to die.

Cicero

*

When life is intolerable the mind can be relieved by thoughts of death.

O, let him pass! He hates him
That would upon the rack of this tough world
Stretch him out longer.

King Lear (Kent)

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