Fear of Death

 In his book on Lucretius, Dante, and Goethe—whom he groups together as "philosophical poets"—George Santayana discusses at one point those famous arguments in Lucretius's On the nature of things devoted to dispelling the fear of death. 

We have nothing to fear from dying, Lucretius assures us. Through a number of arguments, he seeks to persuade us that the soul cannot be immortal. It must, in fact, perish with the body. 

And I'm inclined to agree with him at least that far. Bodily afflictions would not alter our consciousness as much as they do if the latter were really separable and capable of surviving independently of our fleshy envelope. 

And if our minds are no more after we die, then we quite literally have nothing to fear from death—Lucretius argues. Nothing can reach us or hurt us after we die. 

"Death is by definition a state that excludes experience"—as Santayana summarizes the argument—"If you fear it, you fear a word." 

We have nothing to fear from death; sure. But—that is just what we do fear from death: Nothing. We could easily turn that prior sentence around in its sense, with a mere shift of emphasis. We have nothing to fear from death!

Philip Larkin, in a famous poem, refers to that "specious stuff that says No rational being / Can fear a thing it will not feel,"—perhaps having Lucretius in mind. 

But he next points out the fallacy in this argument: that nothingness is precisely what we do fear: "no sight, no sound, [...] The anaesthetic from which none come round."

Santayana observes that Lucretius's argument works well enough if the only thing we had to fear from the afterlife was a permanent room in Dante's Hell—

—what Boswell called, as quoted in a capsule biography by Lytton Strachey, that dread of "being thrown into some horrible state of being."

But this is not so, Santayana observes: "it is hardly fair to assume that hell is the only prospect which immortality could possibly open to any of us[.]"

Likewise, even if all we feared was the physical pain involved in dying—then, Heine's "Morphine"—gentler brother to death; comforter to us in affliction—has an answer to that. 

"[T]he radical fear of death, I venture to think, is something quite different," Santayana writes. "It is the love of life." We want to go on seeing and tasting and touching. We have a will to live that "cannot be argued away."

But it is perhaps possible for the will to life to find an outlet in something other than the perpetuation of our individual selves: the perpetuation of the generative process as a whole. Lucretius's Venus Genetrix. 

I was talking to my dad the other day about his cancer diagnosis. I at first tried to cheerlead. My early reaction to the terrible news—as this blog will attest—was to shout: "we can beat this! Let's fight! Rally the troops! Rah rah!" 

My dad, though, told me that he doesn't really relate to all this language about "fighting" and "winning" against cancer.  

The goal for him, he said, is not really perpetuating his individual self on just any terms. 

"But, dad" I said: "It's about buying time!"

But time, he replied, was likewise not an end in itself, for him. Quality time, maybe—but not mere time for its own sake. 

I thought of another observation from Santayana—in his rejoinder to Royce's view that evil in the world is justified by its capacity to call forth good in reaction to combat it. 

Not all goods, Santayana gentle suggested, answer to that "bellicose description." And indeed: this was my dad's point. 

What he is really looking for is not more life in the sense of the mere prolongation of his individual consciousness for its own sake—but Life in the fullest sense. Life writ large. 

"There is not some void at the end," he told me, "because the larger process of life goes on." 

I thought of Whitman's lines in the "Song of Myself"—about how "The smallest sprout shows there is really no death."

I thought too of what Samuel Butler had to say on this subject, in his "God the Known and God the Unknown": 

If we could hear the leaves complaining to one another that they must die, and commiserating the hardness of their lot in having ever been induced to bud forth, we should, I imagine, despise them for their peevishness more than we should pity them. We should tell them that though we could not see reason for thinking that they would ever hang again upon the same—or any at all similar—bough as the same individual leaves, after they had once faded and fallen off, yet that as they had been changing personalities without feeling it during the whole of their leafhood, so they would on death continue to do this selfsame thing by entering into new phases of life. True, death will deprive them of conscious memory concerning their now current life; but, though they die as leaves, they live in the tree whom they have helped to vivify, and whose growth and continued well-being is due solely to this life and death of its component personalities.

This, too, is a comfort offered by Lucretius—and one that perhaps can better withstand our psychological scrutiny. As Santayana explains, for Lucretius, Venus and Mars—creation and destruction—life and death—are two sides of the same process. 

Neither could last without the other. 

And so, if we have a will to life, we must accept death. Though we may die as individual leaves, as Butler puts it—the tree of which we are a part grows on.