Recently, I stepped back to contemplate the common thread between all the service-providers that I would be proud to be considered adjacent to. The emergent theme was that of “meaning makers” – professionals who help others find a sense of having made something meaningful of life. People can accomplish this feeling through their actions and perspective.
These professionals help us approach a sense of peace in the face of mortality.
For me, in part, philosophers are meaning makers.
Understandably, all this sentimental gobbledegook can feel overly conceptual, verging on irrelevant. But once upon a time, I listened to a podcast called “Philosophize This” while I was filing papers at a past office job. Oh, the irony. It helped me feel like I was doing something meaningful while time was passing, while I was alphabetizing papers that would likely never be seen again.
So, I recently revisited the podcast to explore episodes about how some of the most notable philosophers have made sense of death. These episodes held a contemplation on how to find peace.
On the “Philosophize This” podcast, host Stephen West began his discussion of death on episode 24. He said that he believes that most people are terrified of dying, but people ignore it with varying degrees of success.
People can adopt one of many philosophical approaches to achieve tranquility in the face of death:
– stoicism (characterized by being virtuous, in harmony with nature, and accepting of what cannot be controlled),
– Epicureanism (pursuing simple pleasures like friendship and accepting that death is only the absence of sensation),
– skepticism (accepting uncertainty by not making definitive claims), and
– cynicism (having a simple, self-sufficient life in nature while abandoning all unhelpful social constructs).
So, our own approach to coping with death can define our entire lifestyle, worldview, and personality.
“It’s funny how, as humans, we’re shaped by these traumatic experiences,” said West. “Most of the time, the things we’re the most passionate about as individuals and the things we care the most about are not really things that we’ve reflected on and arrived at introspectively; they’re passions that arose from moments in our life when life smacked you in the face.”
This is true for me, as I came to this calling (for Our Neighborhood) after a mortality crisis that began with the discovery of a brain tumor.
I am now soothed by spending my life trying to right that wrong.
The philosopher Montaigne had his own brush with death – he had a horse accident, he was badly mangled, he was vomiting blood, and everyone thought he was going to die. He made a full recovery, and he didn’t really remember the agony that he had apparently been in. Similarly, I don’t remember much of my low points.
Montaigne had an extreme fear of death up until that point. Facing it head-on ultimately settled him.
But how can that help us? Well, West says that Montaigne is a good introductory philosopher, because he’s less directive on how to live life, and he moreso attempts to understand life.
He believed in understanding things as an individual, through anecdotal experience. There will always be an exception to the rule, and conclusions keep being disproven, so why study data and make sweeping generalizations? He focused on practical philosophy and less on ethereal metaphysics – that which is impossible to understand.
Sounds less stressful, right?
But West also mentioned Pyrrho, who used a fundamental doubt about everything to achieve ataraxia, or freedom from disturbance.
At first, that didn’t make sense to me. I find doubt to be maddening. The point, it seems, is that Montaigne encouraged people to withhold exalting any one thing, be it life or death. I guess, in that way, we don’t put all our eggs in one basket. Instead, we find balance and joy in a little bit of everything.
Here lies the relief, as told by West… “To philosophize is to learn how to die, because through the introspection of philosophy, we realize how baseless it is to exalt these things. Instead of trying to endlessly rationalize things and instead of trying to have this intellectual approach to coming to peace with our death, we should accept that we just don’t know. Wise people accept their own intellectual limitations…”
Heavy stuff, huh? So much so that this reality usually goes unspoken. That’s a distinctly human choice. You see, unlike animals, people can feel embarrassed. It drives us crazy – being enslaved by social conventions because we’re yearning for others’ admiration.
Yet we are no better off for it. In fact, West says that if aliens visited us, they might think that dogs rule the Earth. After all, we humans go to work to earn the money that pays for their food and home. And dogs have peace of mind.
West then cites Montaigne: “Why may not a goose say thus: ‘…the earth serves me to walk upon, the sun to light me; the stars have their influence upon me; I have such an advantage by the winds and such by the waters; there is nothing that yon heavenly roof looks upon so favorably as me. I am the darling of nature! Is it not man that keeps and serves me?’”
How’s that for looking on the bright side?
Jumping ahead to episode 162 of Philosophize This, in the midst of the “Creation of Meaning” series, West says that in Western modernity, in a system of abundance, we are starved for existential identity and meaning.
He references Ernest Becker’s book, Denial of Death. West encourages us to ask, “Why even care about creating a system of meaning in the first place?”
Seeing as animals don’t care if their lives count for anything.
West specifically says that humans have the power to see billions of light-years away, yet we also never know when we might get stuck on an elevator and starve to death. Our lives are awesome and fragile. We are overwhelmed with meaningful beauty every day, yet our biological reality tells us that we’re meaningless.
We have to feign ignorance of death just to deal.
West describes Becker’s perspective thusly… “Once you become aware of your own mortality, if you don’t do something about it, [then] you’re gonna be living in an almost constant state of dread … Terror induced by the realization that we are limited animals with unlimited horizons.”
So, people don’t fear death itself so much as we fear not living.
Upon that realization, everything we do in our lives becomes an attempt at self-soothing – religion, entertainment, etc. Surprisingly, this isn’t an insult.
Ever the rebels, people engage in a “defiant creation of meaning”. We are “cultural heroes” on a journey to complete an “immortality project”. We’re running away from the reality of existential dread towards a symbolic forever. We are even kind to one another in hopes of leaving a lasting impact.
To ease us along, society offers readily-available molds to fill. These templates for life help us quickly escape terror and contribute to the fabric of existence. These larger identities feel significant and everlasting.
We’re even encouraged to figure out how to use illusions to compartmentalize our neuroticism. In the least, these illusions are good for our senses of morality and purpose.
So, even our most orderly systems are just an escape from chaos. By knowing that, we set fire to our security blanket. But somehow, we have to learn to live alongside our trauma!
In the next episode, 163, West explains that Becker called this coping mechanism “transference”, moving the intense fear of death to something else – like the idolization of a leader or the deification of a coveted shoe collection.
Further still, evil is a product of conflicting attempts at transference. It can be hard to reconcile human differences of will, as they threaten our very concept of living and the things that we cling to so we can feel permanent.
According to one study, people who were first reminded of their death were then far more critical of people they perceived as an “other” in follow-up questions. For example, on average, judges set higher bond amounts for criminals after they were made to think of their own inevitable death.
Hence, fear breeds interpersonal conflict.
Thankfully, Becker believed in the potential for transcendence, or a higher state of being – if we surpass our tribal impulses and think about death just long enough.
We have to make peace with the fact that even though our actions are significant, we’ll never know exactly how. This shared trauma brings us all closer together.
At the same time, Becker said, “If God is hidden and intangible, all the better: that allows man to expand and develop himself.”
Here, meaning is within us, so we are free of the burden of finding the “ultimate meaning” out there somewhere.
Another philosopher, Camus, said, “accepting the absurdity of everything around us is one step, a necessary experience: it should not become a dead end. It arouses a revolt that can become fruitful.”
The solution is somewhere between (1) completely giving up and (2) becoming blindly indoctrinated into a purpose-giving philosophy. The solution is in facing the frightening reality of a fleeting existence every day and rebelling by choosing optimism anyway.
Then comes the freedom to finally live fully in the present.
We need to learn to let go of the striving to find meaning in existence. It’s a process!
“Becker is not saying that we need to be okay with the fact that we’re going to die. He doesn’t think we should learn to live without illusions. The point that we can take from his work is that, maybe, just being aware of these illusions can help us learn to contend with them … maybe we can learn to differentiate between which of these illusions … are life-affirming, which ones serve others, which ones are not in fact a direct threat to our existence, which of those promote the freedom, dignity, and hope of other people…and then on the other hand which of those illusions are just about us being immortal, a desperate attempt to calm a scared monkey that doesn’t like the idea of not being the most important monkey in the world.”
After all, death is the great equalizer. And although it’s scary, it’s our greatest opportunity for growth. It defines us and brings us closer together.
By having limited time, we have to choose what to do with our time, and that imbues meaning. The limitation of life creates the concepts of sacrifice and priority. We have to try to accept that. Just trying is enough. We can see the darkness, sit with it, and then find light in spite of it.
So, what does all this do for me? Yes, I am happy to serve others, and I do think that facing death has helped me find my meaning of life. I have fought for peace. But unexpectedly, peace is found, in part, in the humility of knowing that our shared exercises in soul-searching are not the be-all, end-all for either of us.
