Death viewed objectively seems normal, natural, and 'acceptable.' And not evil. Is it evil that the leaves of deciduous trees fall off and die in the autumn? There are more where they came from. It is nature's way. Everything in nature goes the way of the leaves of autumn. If this is not evil, why is it evil when we fall from the arbor vitae? Are we not just bits of nature's fauna? Very special bits, no doubt, but wholly natural nonetheless. Or so it seems when we view ourselves objectively, from the outside, as parts of the natural world. This way of viewing ourselves is not incorrect since it is plainly true that we are parts of nature insofar as we have bodies.
But who is doing this viewing? Well I am and so are you if you are thinking along with me. It is I as subject who views himself as just another object among natural objects, and dying as just another objective process, one that is natural, normal, and ‘acceptable.’
Viewed subjectively, however, our dying looks decidedly different. Gaze at someone you love at a moment when your Pascalian “reasons of the heart” for loving the person are most in evidence. Then give unblinkered thought to the proposition that the dearly beloved child or spouse or friend will die and become nothing, that the marvelous depth of unique interiority that has revealed itself to your love will be annihilated, utterly blotted out forever, and soon. To borrow a thought from Josiah Royce, it is the loving attitude that first discloses the irreducible individuality, the haecceity and ipseity, of the beloved.
Now turn your thought back on yourself and try to confront in all honesty and without evasion your upcoming annihilation as a subject of experience and not as just another object among objects. Focus on yourself as a subject for whom there is a world, and not as an object in the world. Entertain with existential clarity the thought that you will not play the transcendental spectator at your demise and cremation if death is annihilation of the person and not just destruction of the person’s body.
The horror of nonexistence from which Epicurus wanted to free us comes into view only when we view death subjectively: I as subject, not me as object, or as 'one.' No doubt one dies. This is true, but involves false abstraction. For it is not possible that one die unless it is is possible that I die or you die, where ‘I’ and 'you' are in use as irreducibly singular terms. Viewing myself objectively, I am at a distance from myself and thus in evasion of the putative fact that I as subject will become nothing. (Lev Tolstoy makes essentially the same point in The Death of Ivan Ilych, section VI.)
That the self as subject should be annihilated ought to strike one as the exact opposite of normal, natural, and acceptable. It should strike one as a calamity beyond compare. “The heart rebels against this, and feels that it cannot be true.” (Arthur Schopenhauer, “The Vanity of Existence” in Parerga and Paralipomena.) For there are no more where the dearly beloved came from. The dearly beloved, whether self or other, is unique, and not just in the one-of-a- kind sense. For there is no kind whose instantiation is the dearly beloved. If I am right, each one of us, as a person, as a subject of thinking and doing, is uniquely unique, which is to say: not merely one of a kind, but so intimately unique as to transcend the distinction between kind and instance.
Which way of viewing things is true, the subjective or the objective? One, the other, both, or neither? Can they be 'mediated' by some dialectical hocus-pocus or integrated in some other way? These are further questions. And they are very difficult. Here are some very tentative answers, simply stated, without elaboration and without justification.
a) Both points of view are warranted.
b) Neither can replace the other.
c) Neither can dominate the other.
d) The two points of view cannot be rationally integrated.
e) Whether or not death is an evil is (therefore) an insoluble problem.
