Coming Closer to Quietus
Every day, and indeed every passing moment, is a coming closer to quietus. You can avoid thinking about it, which is inadvisable, but you can’t avoid IT.
Suppose that death is the end for you. You not only cease to be alive, but you also cease to be conscious, and still more, one might argue, you cease to exist.* Permanently. The philosophical pessimist might even think: “Good riddance! Death is a release from the bloody turmoil of the human condition.”
There’s a problem. Assuming that human life, consciousness, and existence are intrinsic goods and that it is bad to annihilate what is good, then death is bad. (We can grant this assumption while also granting that the contingent objects and contents of our experience involve matters of turmoil in this nature of redness in tooth and claw that we inhabit with our vulnerable bodies and minds. In other words, human conscious life as such is good. However, some of the things we are conscious of — such as the fact that several people died during Hurricane Ian (2022), that 150 people died during the recent crowd crush in the Itaewon district of Seoul, South Korea, that the invasion of Nanking (1937-38) involved the brutal butchering and rape of tens of thousands of civilians, or that people were once burned at the stake merely for holding unorthodox theological views — are matters of horrendous suffering and/or moral atrocity.) In any case, you can’t solve the problem of death by dying, though perhaps by dying you can avoid having to deal with it any longer; that is, if dying is a permanent ceasing to exist, then since you won’t be around, death will no longer matter for you, though it will continue to be an axiological and existential problem.
But another problem arises. No one knows that death is a permanent ceasing to exist. Such matters are beyond our current ken. And there are reasons to believe that death is not a permanent end to one’s existence. I can’t go into the reasons here. Read Kant’s treatment of the afterlife, for starters.
Suppose instead that death doesn’t enable you to avoid the problem of having to deal with it. What if death is not the end for you? What if you continue to exist as a conscious, rational, and moral agent beyond death? Well then, asks Shakespeare, what dreams may come when we have shuffled off this mortal coil? What future might you face after you die?
Here’s how a practical person might make the point. If you are concerned about saving, say, for health insurance or for retirement, then a fortiori, you should be concerned about preparing for the possibility of an afterlife. And if the afterlife is unending, then this is a massive a fortiori.
You might respond: “Wait a minute! No one knows that there is an afterlife either! Why should I prepare for something about which I cannot be certain?”
The person of practical prudence says: “You can’t be certain that you will see retirement either, and yet it is reasonable to prepare for it.”
You reply: “Well, but I’m more confident that I’ll retire than that I’ll have a postmortem life.”
And I say: Understandably so. And yet there are adequate reasons to believe in a postmortem life, reasons that some of the brightest thinkers of history have taken seriously. If Socrates, Plato, Shakespeare, and Kant took the afterlife seriously, shouldn’t you? Do you know something about the afterlife that they didn’t?
* That is, on a view of time called presentism, roughly, the only temporal things that exist are those that exist now. Past things and future things don’t exist. Hence, on presentism, if death is the end for you, then once your death becomes part of the past, you no longer exist.
But if eternalism or the growing block theory of time is true, then it seems the dead continue to exist in some way.