Is Deathbed Perspective Special?
Near the end of Heart of Darkness, Conrad narrates the death of Kurtz, suggesting that some who are close to passing have singular insight into matters concerning the meaning of human life. Conrad poetically styles his character’s epistemic privilege as a “supreme moment of complete knowledge.”
“One evening coming in with a candle I was startled to hear him say a little tremulously, ‘I am lying here in the dark waiting for death.’ The light was within a foot of his eyes. I forced myself to murmur, ‘Oh, nonsense!’ and stood over him as if transfixed.
“Anything approaching the change that came over his features I have never seen before, and hope never to see again. Oh, I wasn’t touched. I was fascinated. It was as though a veil had been rent. I saw on that ivory face the expression of sombre pride, of ruthless power, of craven terror—of an intense and hopeless despair. Did he live his life again in every detail of desire, temptation, and surrender during that supreme moment of complete knowledge? He cried in a whisper at some image, at some vision—he cried out twice, a cry that was no more than a breath:
“‘The horror! The horror!’”
Yet, in this article, philosopher Neil Levy doubts such deathbed clarity. I share his skepticism, though I am open-minded to the idea that in some cases, deathbed perspective might be of exceptional epistemic value. Levy gives three reasons to support his doubt: first, the dying person might suffer from hindsight bias, which could involve various kinds of mistaken thinking, such as romanticizing the past; second, dying persons do not face the same pre-mortem stakes as do those who might receive their advice; third, those whose demise is at hand might have a motivation to speak insincerely, or might follow a culturally influenced script of what dying people should say rather than offer wise words based on their own reflection. I’ll add my own point as a fourth reason to doubt: generally, what a person has to say about important issues comes from the intellectual and moral character he has cultivated; hence, one shouldn’t expect sagacious commentary on the human experience from a person who has not lived in a manner that corresponds to such sapience. (Although one should remain open to the possibility of insight from unlikely sources.)
It’s important to state that Levy does not claim that dying words are false or unreasonable. They might be true. Instead, Levy is reasonably skeptical that such words possess special status merely because they are spoken by a dying person.
Levy closes by distinguishing between telic and atelic activities, noting that many stages of human life contain both but that people on the deathbed have only atelic activities. Thus, their speech might provide insight concerning this point.
It should be emphasized here that Levy seems to assume that there is no afterlife. At least, he doesn’t mention it as a possibility. But if there is an afterlife, one might continue to have telic activities in mind despite impending death, as Socrates reported having when anticipating his postmortem conversations with wise and righteous persons.
A return to Conrad is apt here. He speaks of the possibility that the dying Kurtz possesses both truth and sincerity in virtue of his “stepping over the edge.”
“True, he had made that last stride, he had stepped over the edge, while I had been permitted to draw back my hesitating foot. And perhaps in this is the whole difference; perhaps all the wisdom, and all truth, and all sincerity, are just compressed into that inappreciable moment of time in which we step over the threshold of the invisible.”