Apocalypse Now! begins with Jim Morrison singing “This is the end.” The 19th Century German philosopher G.W.F. Hegel begins his Science of Logic with an essay called “What What Must the Science Begin?” and there, similarly, it seems to me that, in some ways, his answer is that it is only with the end that the beginning can be made. I have myself been thinking a lot about aging lately, and here, too, I have been toying with the idea that it is only with the end–in this case, death–that our life properly begins. Let me explain my idea.
When we are growing up, we take the world for granted. Certainly as children, but also as adolescents and as young adults,we rely upon the surrounding world–and especially other people in that world–to ensure that there is a “place” for us, to ensure that routes and resources are available to us to move forward. As we grow, we work at making our way in the world: we struggle to define ourselves, to learn how to cope with things, to get ourselves into a satisfactory living situations, (sometimes at a comfortable pace, if others do in fact make a secure setting for us, and sometimes at an overwhelming and crippling pace, if we find ourselves unsupported materially or psychologically and we have to “fend for ourselves” prematurely). Even as we work in and with the world, however, we are not questioning the world, that is, we are accepting as “given”–“taking for granted”–the fact that the world is there and that we are there in it. It is precisely this “taking for granted,” I think, that our aging can bring us to challenge.
In youth, the world is a world of possibility, and our own life similarly appears to us in terms of possibility: What will I become? Who will I be? As we age, we develop ourselves, and, over time, we establish an identity. While it always remains true that we can change, our developed adulthood marks nonetheless our having become someone specific: I have shown myself to be someone through my history, my actions, my accomplishments, and, though I can still go through important transformations, I cannot in good faith disavow this “who” that I have become. It seems to me that this establishing of a developed, specific identity can bring with it a particular, important recognition: this life is mine to live only once, and, though as a free being I am fundamentally a being of possibilities, I am also, most basically, this one and only actuality that can never be effaced, never be repeated, never be revised. This recognition of the irremovable uniqueness of my life is essentially the recognition of death: it is the recognition that this is my only chance to be me: it is happening now, never to be repeated.
This recognition of our mortal uniqueness, it seems to me, can be a life-transforming recognition, for it is the recognition that puts one, for the first time, into the position of seeing her or his situation in its true terms. Up until this time, one has taken many aspects of one’s existence for granted, living as if it were simply a permanent truth that “there is a world” and “I am there in it.”
In recognizing my mortality, however, I recognize that the world will not always be “there” for there will be no me for whom there will “be” anything at all, and I thus come to appreciate the intrinsically finite terms of my own reality for the first time. For that reason, it is only with this recognition that one really begins, we could say, to live one’s own life.
Such a recognition can be psychologically terrifying; indeed, it is probably some version of this recognition that lies behind the common experience of a “mid-life crisis.” This recognition need not be something bad, though. On the contrary, such a recognition can be our first real opportunity to appreciate our existence, and to appropriate courageously our own freedom. In our culture, we are often led to think that it is in youth that life is rich and full, and that aging is simply deterioration. This reflection on death and beginning perhaps suggests instead that we should think of life as only beginning in our later adulthood, only beginning, that is, when we have come to see ourselves as defined by the end.
Participants in these
seminars consistently have the experience of growth in their conversation and
conceptual abilities, and typically leave with a transformed sense of the nature
and possibilities of philosophy.
6 Comments
I have just begun reading _The Tibetan Book of the Dead_–an entire practice, as far as I can tell so far, of reading and reflecting and meditating on death (and also identity) and its relation to our living and ending of life. I am curious.
I’ve just spent a couple of days with some juvenile lifers–that is, people who are serving a life sentence and have been doing so since they were juveniles. It strikes me that your analysis of the new beginning that takes place once one is experientially defined by the end might help make sense of who they have become. They are folks who have quite powerfully been defined by their end–an end that they have every reason to expect will take place in prison–and they have had to struggle with the sense that their identities have been fixed once and for all–as criminals. Perhaps this helps to understand why they stood out as some of the most mature, responsible, thoughtful, socially committed, and alive people I’ve met–even though some of them are still only in their twenties.
We have a great many forces in our lives that work to deny our limitations. Telephone, television, and especially the internet conceal the distance that inherently poses a restriction to our bodies, which must always occupy a specific place. Compulsory schooling habituates us to a sense that everything is known, encouraging us to believe that if we adopt an appropriately passive and obedient attitude, everything will eventually be revealed to us, (and, indeed, that we will naturally find our way into a satisfying, pre-established career). In fact, though, the world is a difficult, resistant place, inherently obscure, and unforgiving in its demand that we conform ourselves to its hard surface. I was suggesting in the post that the experience of aging can be what breaks through our insulated self-conception and lets the reality of our situation reveal itself. Other situations, too, can have this impact, though, and I think that the situation of imprisonment you describe can be one. The point you make reminds me very much of things my father said, over the many years he spent working as a psychiatrist for penitentiary inmates. I think there are many other cultural situations–past and present–that offer fewer of the illusions I mentioned, precisely because they are more difficult and threatening, and we shouldn’t be too quick to assume that our own highly “buffered” existence is more desirable.
Marginalization, like accumulated life experience, might excuse a person from a rote, intersubjective phenomenology developed socially, prompting a more independent reassessment and reconstruction. Someone who suffers disillusion mindfully may indeed, given the potential to do so, become very powerful spiritually.
I think that’s true. I mention Hegel in this post, and there is another thing he wrote about that I think connects to your point very well. He looked at the experience of being a slave and showed that, while this is an unjust and unfair situation to be in, it is also a situation that can give the oppressed person or the marginalized person the possibility of learning something (perhaps about self-reliance, perhaps about discipline) that is not easily available to the oppressor or the member of the “mainstream” group. I think there are lots of comparable situations where people can learn–often about independence–from the burdens and exclusions they’ve had to deal with.
A prisoner or a slave forced into a pattern of philosophical self-reliance is perhaps granted, in that respect, an ironic sort of freedom.