Facing death can be a key to our liberation and survival.
By Simon Critchley
April 11, 2020
From the NYT philosophy series The Stone
We’re scared. We’re on edge, unable to concentrate. We can’t find focus. Our minds flit and float around flealike from one update to the next. We follow the news, because we feel we should. And then we wish we hadn’t, because it’s terrifying and sad. Daytime naps seem involuntary and fitful. Sleep will often not descend. But when it does, we sometimes wake, in a mortal panic, with hypochondriac symptoms we feel to be real but we know are not; and then we feel selfishly stupid for having them in the first place. We take our temperature. We wait. We take it again. It goes on. Feelings of powerlessness and ennui slide into impotent rage at what is being done and, most of all, what is not being done, or is being done poorly, irresponsibly, dishonestly.
Clearly, these are frames of mind that are all too familiar to anyone who tends toward introspection in their lives. Sometimes it's directed more toward the parts that involve living and sometimes more toward the parts that involves dying. And sometimes [all the more problematically] at the parts where they are clearly intertwined. Like living smack dab in the middle of a worldwide viral pandemic.
The thought of dying alone with a respiratory sickness is horrifying. The knowledge that this is what is happening to thousands of people right here, right now, is unbearable. Lives are being lost and livelihoods ravaged. Metaphors of war feel worn out and fraudulent. The social structures, habits and ways of life we took for granted are dissolving. Other people are possible sources of contagion, and so are we. We advance masked and keep our distance.
Unless, of course, like some here, these are not your thoughts at all. In fact, you are actually pumped up about it all. This is precisely the sort of calamity you have been waiting for. The crisis that will bring "the system" crashing down, allowing for the possibility [however remote] that the world will finally come around to your own political agenda.
Or, perhaps, you are among those who eagerly embrace schadenfreude as the appropriate reaction. Let others suffer as you do for a change.
Or, based on my own signature threads narrative, all the folks who over the years have been configured to see the world around them today in a very different way from the author or from you and I.
So, when someone speaks of philosophizing in order to learn how to die, I'm skeptical right from the start.