Earlier this year an older friend,
a philosopher, call him M, decided
to endhislife.He had beenveryill
formany months,andtheprognosis
was bad – only further decline and
then death. Worse perhaps, he had
become depressed, could no longer
concentrate enoughtoread,andhad
evenstoppedlisteningtojazz,which
had been his lifelong passion. For
thosewhoknewhim,theideaofM,
whoreadforeignnovelsintheorigi-
nal language for fun,and devoured
philosophical essays and books, not
reading or discussing philosophy or
listening and talking aboutjazz was
scarcely imaginable. M had been a
gentle, modest, sociable, generous,
andwittyfriendandteachertomany- Icanstillhearhimchucklingata
joke,hiswarmthwhenmeeting,and
hisdelight indescribinga jazztrack
heloved,orexplaininga logicalfallacy
thathewaswritingabout.Hevalued
hisfamilylifetoo– heleftbehinda
wife,a son,grandchildren.Yetinhis
final year he had lost so much of what
made him him, and he saw no serious
upside in prolonging his deteriorating
existence just for the sake of living.
M was an atheist, a humanist, a
materialist (in the sense that he be-
lieved that we are sophisticated ani-
mals, with no immaterial souls capable
of leaving the body after death), and
was under no illusion that taking his
own life would have consequences in
some imagined afterlife. Nor did he
believe that simple existence, no mat-
ter how painful or empty of joy, was in
itself valuable for its own sake. He was
well aware of and endorsed Epicurus’s
teaching that death itself is nothing to
be feared and not something we expe-
rience anyway since when we are alive,
it’s not present; and when we are dead,
we won’t be there to experience it.
There is a beautiful passage in the
work of the Venerable Bede, perhaps
inspired by Anglo-Saxon poetry, in
which he compares an individual’s
life to the swift flight of a sparrow
through a banquet hall full of people
who are gathered there at a feast. The
bird flies in one door, along the length
of the hall, and out at the other end.
Those within the hall have no idea
what happened to the sparrow before
it entered the hall, and know nothing
about what happened to it after it left.
Bede’s analogy is meant to underlineour ignorance about everything out-
side of our lived lives, and in particular
the uncertainty we have about what
will occur after we die.
M, a great admirer of David Hume,
believed that we should proportion our
beliefs according to the available evi-
dence and, like Hume, was extremely
sceptical (to say the least) about the
possibility of an afterlife. For M, such
a great weight of evidence pointed in
the direction that death is more like a
dreamless sleep (yet without a dream-
er) than it is like a journey into a new
realm, where people continue to exist
in some disembodied form at some
kind of never-ending party that is
constantly being joined by new guests- as if there were another mead-hall
the sparrow could fly in to, where all
its needs would be met, and where it
could flutter about happily for eter-
nity. There are different forms of igno-
rance: the ignorance when we have no
idea whatsoever about what is likely to
happen, and the ignorance that is sim-
ply lack of absolute certainty. For M,
a philosopher through and through,
as for Hume, there would have been
the outside possibility that there could
be some form of life after death, just
as there is the outside possibility that
one day someone will find a pig with
wings that can fly. But for M, the like-
lihood of this was miniscule – so tiny
by Nigel Warburton
Learning when to die
NewPhilosopher Learning when to die