Nietzsche’s Death
As surely as bad timing compromises the death of Jesus according to Nietzsche Zarathustra, I propose that the matter of timing likewise causes Nietzsche’s own death to fall on the bad side of Zarathustra’s ledger. For dying too early is only one way that poor timing can make for a less-than-successful death, according to Zarathustra. The other, of course, is dying too late.
While Nietzsche in fact died at the age of 55 in 1900, it is the sad circumstances surrounding his illness and death which bring to mind Thus Spoke Zarathustra’s admonitions to those who “hang on… too long” and as a result, fail to master “the difficult art of going at the right time.” As is well known, Nietzsche was plagued by steadily deteriorating health since his youth. A litany of physical symptoms: acute myopia, ever-worsening bouts of nausea and other gastro-intestinal problems, and agonizing headaches, contributed to him resigning his promising professorship in 1879, at the age of only 34. By the mid-1880s, Nietzsche’s wretched condition, compounded by his ongoing efforts to self-medicate, left the increasingly isolated philosopher bed-ridden for days at a time. In January 1889, at the age of 44, Nietzsche collapsed on the streets of Turin, and lapsed into madness for the rest of his life [see p.38].
How could any ledger pertaining to the "timeliness" of Nietzsche's death amount to anything other than a subjective assessment rooted in dasein?
What brings to mind Zarathustra’s warnings about the ‘too late’ deaths of those who “hang on… too long” is the fact that the insane Nietzsche went on to live for another eleven years, with each year bringing greater mental and physical incapacity. By 1900, the year of his death, the 55-year-old Nietzsche was barely able to move, and had essentially no knowledge of where he was, who he was, or who he had been.
While no-one wishes death upon a 44-year-old, it seems clear that according to Zarathustra’s criteria, Nietzsche would have died a better death had he expired in the streets of Turin in 1889 rather than only end his sane life there.
Recognizing this, Nietzsche’s Zarathustra, comparing men to apples, prophetically proclaims:
“Many too many live and they hang on their branches much too long. I wish a storm would come and shake all this rottenness and worm-eatenness from the tree! I wish preachers of speedy death would come! They would be the fitting storm and shakers of the trees of life!”
Unfortunately, even if Nietzsche had died in Turin in 1889, his noteworthy lack of immediate intellectual heirs would seemingly still have prevented him attainting the consummating death Zarathustra lauds and Socrates embodies. But at least he would have been spared the ‘double death’ that was his fate. At least, to use Zarathustra’s imagery, the long-suffering philosopher would not himself be counted among those who hang on to the branches of life so long as to become ‘rotten’ and ‘worm-eaten’.
I have recently been rereading Thomas Nagel’s The View from Nowhere (1986). In the more than thirty years since its publication, the standing of this relatively slim volume has grown steadily. To borrow a metaphor that George Santayana applied to Spinoza, “like a mountain obscured at first by its foothills, he rises as he recedes.” Yet it is dispiriting how many contemporary intellectual trends – materialist theories of the mind and evolutionary epistemology to name only the most fatuous – have continued to flourish despite Nagel’s demonstration of their inadequacy.
At the heart of The View from Nowhere is one of the key issues in philosophy, and, indeed, in our lives. It is that of reconciling our necessarily local, even parochial, subjective viewpoints with the objective standpoint whose most developed expression is science. How do we square – or even connect – the view from within, according to which we are of overwhelming importance, with the view from without, which sees us as insignificant in a vast universe? Nagel pursues his response to this existential challenge, that “reality is not just objective reality” (p.87), with consummate skill, imagination, and much self-questioning.
Even if we admit the irreducible reality of our subjective experiences of ourselves and of what is beyond ourselves, the tension between those experiences and the objective view remains. It becomes a source of anguish when we look at our lives from the Archimedean point of our own death. It is this to which Nagel devotes the final section of his masterpiece. He writes:
“The ultimate subject-object gap is death. The objective standpoint simply cannot accommodate at its full subjective value the fact that everyone, oneself included, inevitably dies”
Nothing could matter to us more than our death, which brings all possibilities to an end; and yet nothing, so far as the universe is concerned, could be less important.
As Nagel puts it, “the vanishing of this individual [for example, your columnist] from this world is no more remarkable or important than his highly accidental appearance in it”. Indeed, according to Anaximander, in the first preserved written fragment of Western philosophy, “Where things have their origin, they must also pass away according to necessity; for they must pay the penalty and be judged for their injustice, according to the ordinance of time.” It is our lingering not our transience that is a scandal. This scandal is expressed in the modern acknowledgement that life, particularly the complex life of human beings, exists in defiance of the second law of thermodynamics.
Philosophers have often been preoccupied with death. Acknowledging our finitude is the mark of Heidegger’s authentic consciousness, as being-towards-death.
To look at ourselves from the ultimate outside of our non-existence may sometimes be curiously exhilarating. The darkness of death’s dateless (and dataless) night, the undifferentiated Nothing that awaits us – or rather, doesn’t even bother to await us – highlights, by contrast, the multi-layered richness of our ‘ordinary’ days.
A glimpse of our objective insignificance enhances our awareness of the spaces, times, places, lights, and shades, the joys and sorrows, the n-dimensional complexity, of the life and world we are living. And the very knowledge that reveals itself as minute and short-lived is itself deeply mysterious, being sustained by unfathomable networks of concepts. How did we wake out of ourselves sufficiently to see what (objectively) we are?
Of course, some philosophers have had exemplary deaths. Socrates’ courage as the hemlock worked its way through his body has left a 2,500 year contrail of inspiration. His final words “Crito, I owe a cock to Asclepius; will you remember to pay the debt?” expressed his wish that Asclepius, the god of medicine, should be thanked for curing him of the disease of life.
David Hume’s serene passing, beautifully recorded in a long letter from his friend Adam Smith, is even more impressive, given that his last days were troubled by “an habitual diarrhoea of a year’s standing.” While his life drained away in this most unbecoming fashion, and the very special ‘I am’ of David Hume was squeezed to extinction by the dysfunctioning ‘it is’ of his body, he received his friends, discussed philosophy, worried over the welfare of his family, and impressed all who met him with his dignity and courage.
Pedro I Rengel wrote:Do you ever do philosophy that is not a comment on something someone wrote?
iambiguous wrote:Well, let's just say that I'll stack up my contribution to philosophical discussion here to yours any day of the week.
Pedro I Rengel wrote:iambiguous wrote:Well, let's just say that I'll stack up my contribution to philosophical discussion here to yours any day of the week.
No but you didn't answer the question.
Pedro I Rengel wrote:Do you ever do philosophy that is not a comment on something someone wrote?
Pedro I Rengel wrote:Pedro I Rengel wrote:Do you ever do philosophy that is not a comment on something someone wrote?
And what on earth could possibly be suspect about subscribing to philosophy magazines or reading the philosophy of others online and then reacting to the arguments of those examining issues that are philosophically important to you? For me, that's identity, morality, language, religion, death, nihilism and determinism.
And then bringing those arguments to a site called I Love Philosophy?
Pedro I Rengel wrote:Do you ever do philosophy that is not a comment on something someone wrote?
Pedro I Rengel wrote:Pedro I Rengel wrote:Do you ever do philosophy that is not a comment on something someone wrote?
?
Pedro I Rengel wrote:Pedro I Rengel wrote:Do you ever do philosophy that is not a comment on something someone wrote?
?
Pedro I Rengel wrote:Pedro I Rengel wrote:Pedro I Rengel wrote:Do you ever do philosophy that is not a comment on something someone wrote?
?
It's a simple question really.
Pedro...
Here is my very first thread at ILP: https://www.ilovephilosophy.com/viewtop ... 5&t=173346
It has nothing to do with death but that won't stop you from making some inane comment about it. And it brings it back to the top today, right?
Then going back to to all of my earliest threads -- https://www.ilovephilosophy.com/search. ... start=1450 -- one by one make more inane comments about them. And bring them all back to the top again here and now.
You'll have literally hundreds of opportunities to make completely inane comments!!
And all of my threads will be reborn!!!
Thanks in advance buddy.
Pedro I Rengel wrote:That was neither a yes nor a no....
...cultivating awareness of mortality and the habit of ‘living each day as if it were thy last’, as the hymn exhorts us, tries to overlook the actual process of dying – that time when, more than any other, “our flesh/ Surrounds us with its own decisions,” as Philip Larkin put it in his wonderful poem ‘Ignorance’. To retain the metaphysical purity of the idea of death, we naturally prefer to think of the process of our extinction as a simple, if total, cancellation; a painless, even featureless, passage from RT to not-RT.
Some secular philosophers claim to find reassurance rather than a validation of our sense of tragedy in the thought that there will be no afterlife. Images of eternity may more often bring terror than consolation. Why fear being dead, the Stoic philosopher Lucretius famously argued, since there is no-one to experience the state?:
“Since death forestalls [grief and pain] and prevents any existence into which such misfortunes might otherwise crowd, we may be sure that we have nothing to fear in death, and that he who is no more cannot be wretched, and that there is not a scrap of difference to him if had never at any time been born, when once immortal death has stolen away mortal life.”
(On the Nature of Things, translated by Cyril Bailey, 1910)
Our non-existence after death, Lucretius further asserts in an argument discussed by Nagel, is a mirror image of our non-existence before we were born, and the latter is hardly something we regret. I am not concerned, even less upset, by the fact that I was not around when Shakespeare was writing his plays or dinosaurs were walking the earth.
Unfortunately, this mirror image analogy does not hold up. In my pre-natal existence, I am not in a state of privation, because there is not yet anything or anyone to house my lack of being. Before I am born, I am only a general possibility, not an individual to whom any subtraction – never mind the comprehensive subtraction of death – can be applied. My pre-natal, unlike like my post mortem, non-existence, is not the result of loss.
Besides, if death does not matter, then nor do our lives. And among those things that do not matter must be included our relationships with each other, most importantly, love and friendship.
Lucretius, it seems, forgets that death breaks off all our connections with those who mean most to us, and also that the world does not come to an end as our participation in it does. While each of us may adopt a non-tragic attitude to our own death, and to the general fact of mortality, tragedy is still alive in those we have left behind. While I will not miss myself after I have died, there will (I hope) be others who will miss me.
After Death
If philosophers have sometimes guided us in the art of living, and have occasionally provided us with exemplars to inspire us in the art of dying, they have little to offer us on the art of outliving – on how to cope with the loss of others.
Dr Johnson reflects on this in Rasselas (1759), the allegorical novel he wrote at high speed in a state of overwhelming grief after the death of his mother, to pay for her funeral. Rasselas is impressed by a philosopher preaching Stoic values. Imlac his mentor warns him that “they discourse like angels but they live like men.” Rasselas soon discovers how true this is when he finds the Stoic philosopher weeping in a darkened room, poleaxed by the death of his daughter.
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