Ed McMahon, Farrah Fawcett, and Michael Jackson have all just died. I'm sorry they died and all, just as most other people are sorry as well. But it's not exactly as if any of us, as Jim Morrison once sang, are getting out of here alive either!
Death is naturally something we fear, since it is a great mystery (from the point of view of the survivors, that is). But it is inevitable, so we shouldn't mourn too much at the inevitable loss of those we know, either personally or through the media. Still, the pain of knowing that these people will no longer be around is understandable. And since we only know for sure of this one chance at life, we should take care to value it, both for ourselves and others.
Anyway, if we were to define death as the state of not being alive in our bodies, then all of us had already been dead for, at last count, some 15 billion years before we were conceived and born! So regarding death, one may say, "Been there, done that!"
Naturally, all of this excludes supernatural interpretations of death, which the reader is certainly free to indulge in or reject.
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I really like (or at least like thinking about) the dead-before-we-were-born interpretation. I took a philosophy class once where we spent a while discussing a scenario where humans hatched from spores, and whether it would be morally obligatory to cause spores to hatch early if one had the means, assuming people died at a predetermined time regardless of hatching.
ReplyDeleteFrom that same class I have a book of essays by Thomas Nagel called 'Mortal Questions.' (The spore big is actually in a footnote in there, and attributed to Nozick.) The first chapter is called "Death," and in it Nagel writes:
"If it is good to be alive, that advantage can be attributed to a person at each point of his life. It is a good of which Bach had more than Schubert, simply because he lived longer. Death, however, is not an evil of which Shakespeare has so far received a larger portion than Proust. If death is a disadvantage, it is not easy to say when a man suffers it."