Consolation Of The Soul
Or On Death
Part 1 — On Death
“Let us learn to meet it steadfastly and to combat it. And to begin to strip it of its greatest advantage against us, let us take an entirely different way from the usual one. Let us rid it of its strangeness, come to know it, get used to it. Let us have nothing on our minds as often as death. At every moment let us picture it in our imagination in all its aspects” — Montaigne
When my father died of cancer one year ago, I remember being alone in the morgue and staring at his dead body for five straight minutes.
I stared at his pale, skinny face that didn’t even remotely resemble the person that I had known and loved.
All his pain was gone, all his troubles were gone, all his regrets were gone. Soon that body will become ashes, I thought. I will cherish the memory of my father until I die, and once I have children, I will probably be able to make them remember his name and who he was. But after they’ll be gone it will likely be as if my father had never existed…
When people think about death they usually try to dismiss the thought of it. They can’t deal with the inevitable anxiety that comes with the thought that, in the end, we are going to become nothing at some point.
Some may argue that we are creatures programmed for survival, and a fear of death is a great way for us to stay away from activities that might get us killed. True. But many modern cultures do everything they can to allow us to never have to think about the fact that we’re going to die someday. You are not supposed to talk about death, it’s taboo. We relegate death to these distant buildings called hospitals and morgues so that nobody ever has to stare the reality of it directly in the face.
There are currently 7 billion people on the planet. And approximately 107 billion people who ever lived. How many of them do we remember today? 1000? 10,000? I’m talking about people like Einstein, Caesar, Plato, Beethoven, Da Vinci. I don’t know, but whatever that number is, it is nothing compared to the totality of human kind.
And when the sun implodes in about 5 billion years, there will be no memory of even these few (P.S. maybe climate change will speed up this process…).
We overestimate our importance in this world…
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It is my firm belief that at the foundation of everything we do in life there is the desire to attain a feeling of importance.
“I have a huge, perhaps immoderate and insolent, desire for glory” — Giacomo Leopardi, 1817
Glory! Glory! Glory!
What else do human beings possibly strive for?
And if someone cannot achieve that then it might as well be the progeny of the species, the feeling that giving birth to a child will keep our name and the memory of ourselves intact through the years.
We meander through life as if we were some sort of supernatural creature that will go on to exist forever. Maybe we don’t admit this to ourselves and believe we are fully rational and aware of our limited time, but our actions contradict this.
Men conduct themselves as if at some point there will be a reward for all their sacrifices and sufferings.
You’re running around searching for some cosmically determined meaning to your life that the universe is going to guarantee for you, when the reality is that the universe doesn’t seem to have a meaning.
“Thinkest thou then that the world was made for thee? It is time thou knewest that in my designs, operations, and decrees, I never gave a thought to the happiness or unhappiness of man. If I cause you to suffer, I am unaware of the fact; nor do I perceive that I can in any way give you pleasure. What I do is in no sense done for your enjoyment or benefit, as you seem to think. Finally, if I by chance exterminated your species, I should not know it” — Dialogue between Nature and an Icelander, Leopardi, 1824
In The Myth of Sisyphus, Albert Camus compares the absurdity of man’s life with the situation of Sisyphus, a figure of Greek mythology who was condemned to repeat forever the same meaningless task of pushing a boulder up a mountain, only to see it roll down again.
As Camus would say, it doesn’t matter how hard you push the boulder, it doesn’t matter how much you agonize over trying to find that cosmic meaning. Eventually you’re going to die, everyone you’ve ever known is going to die, your name is going to be forgotten, the sun is going to inflate and explode and destroy any trace of you that could possibly be left. Ultimately, you have been condemned to a lifetime pushing a boulder up a hill only to find out that it was all pointless.
But you should laugh at it.
The Gods only condemned Sisyphus to push the boulder, they didn’t condemn him to resent the process. Camus says we should imagine Sisyphus smiling while pushing the boulder, understanding the ultimate futility of his efforts, but enjoying it anyway as much as he can.
“Man stands face to face with the irrational. He feels within him his longing for happiness and for reason. The absurd is born of this confrontation between the human need and the unreasonable silence of the world” — Camus
The true problem is with the disparity between your search for meaning and how the universe doesn’t seem to have one that you can arrive at.
Some try to acquiesce this with hope in a celestial world. That hope, that constant looking to some other world robs you of so much in this one. Hope may be calming to that state of absurdity but it robs us of the here and now. And although some may feel much more helped by the Christian view than by the wisdom of all philosophers, the philosophical courage to treat man as a finite thing is the only approach that can unlock the infinite.
Part 2 — On Despair
“Every man who has not tasted the bitterness of despair has missed the significance of life, however beautiful and joyous his life might be. By despairing you do not defraud the world in which you live, you are not lost to it because you have overcome it” — Kierkegaard
By now you must think this is the rant of a depressed person struggling during the pandemic. That is wrong. I have achieved everything that a 30-year-old raised by working class parents in the outskirt of Rome could possibly achieve. I am my best self-projection. But I’m also someone who has been deeply depressed on multiple occasions in his life. Ultimately when I saw my father being consumed by cancer until he passed away.
One thing our society teaches us is that depression and despair, just like death, is something to be ashamed of, something to repudiate, to hide, to fight. We don’t think of despair as a necessary state of our existence.
I myself had always felt guilty about feeling depressed. And every time, I felt like I had to fight it, relegate it to a corner of my soul and pretend to hide it there, so that I could fool myself that there was a way out of it…
This time I stayed still, I savoured it, until I embraced it and made it mine. I conquered it not by fighting it but by allowing it in. I went to the bottom, the abyss, I casted myself into the ocean of despair until I found the absolute. And in doing so I overcame it, I was past depression, I made it an inevitable condition of life. I smiled.
Night falls, hurry! Everyone under the blankets!
But the same demons that will come knocking on the door will find it open this time…
Despair is a necessary step in the acceptance of death. Despair is the necessary condition of the acceptance of our finiteness. Not the Christian promises of life beyond death, but only this acceptance can allow men to overcome the world, to become the eternal. Only this consciousness can give men immortality.
“Despair with all you soul and with all your mind. [..] One cannot despair at all without willing it, but to despair truly one must truly will it, but when one truly wills it one is truly beyond despair; when one has truly willed despair one has truly chosen that which despair chooses i.e. oneself in one’s eternal validity” — Kierkegaard
This acceptance is not blind disregard of one’s problems, it’s not passive surrender to not strive to be the best one can be.
It’s about awareness.
And so I do get anxious whenever I check how much money I’m losing on the stock market. And I do strive to be great at my job and build a successful career in my field.
But this awareness makes it so that I don’t attach myself to any of these things, not only the bad ones but also the good ones.
And so I enjoy my ride, make the best of what I have, try to solve life’s problems, strive to become a better person, but constantly having the thought of death to remind me that everything is either attainable or alternatively too trivial to attach myself to, as it won’t be a burden forever. And in this process, I have learnt not to despair anymore over any particular thing. It is important to will one’s despair, to will it in an infinite sense, in an absolute sense. If, on the other hand, as Kierkegaard said, someone wills despair in a finite sense, then they suffer damage to the soul, for then the inmost being does not undergo its transformation in despair; on the contrary it shuts itself up, it is hardened, so that finally despair is obduracy, whereas the absolute despair is an experience that infinitizes.
“So, then I bid you despair, and never more will your frivolity cause you to wander like an unquiet spirit, like a ghost, amid the ruins of a world which to you is lost. Despair, and never more will your spirit sigh in melancholy, for again the world will become beautiful to you and joyful, although you see it with different eyes than before, and your liberated spirit will soar up into the world of freedom” — Kierkegaard
Conclusion
“All the wisdom and reasoning in the world boils down finally to this point: to teach us not to be afraid to die” — Montaigne
Every time I’m afraid to do something, I think of death.
Every time something causes me anxiety, I think of death.
This is not about not fearing death; it is about not fearing the thought of death. The fact that I’m not scared of death doesn’t mean I would walk across a highway; in fact I’d be…scared to death to do it! It is acceptance of the fact that we will effectively be nothing after we part, and there’s therefore no point anxiously putting aside the thought of one’s death.
And within these boundaries imposed by reason I am then able to live fervently.
If everyone were to have the constant thought of death in the back of their mind, more risks would be taken, more creation would happen, more love would spur.
And only that seems to assuage my soul.
You can’t fully be alive until you embrace the beauty of death, and knowing that whatever happens in your life it won’t be a burden forever. And the despair that comes from this realization, the awareness about our very finite essence, should prompt you to realize that you have nothing to lose in being bolder, in taking more risks.
Embrace death, only by doing this you will fully embrace life
