I am a philosopher. It is my habit, I might even say my compulsion, to turn Big Questions over and over in my head until I think I've got them figured out, then take my shiny new perspective and apply it to every other Big Question I can think of until it falls apart. Sometimes this takes a while, and often I am frustrated to find that a years-long train of thought, an idea I've nurtured and raised and been comforted by in my darker moments, evaporates in a moment of novel experience which contradicts it.
Death, I think, qualifies as a Big Question, one I've done little more than skirt around in my time here thus far; I'm young yet, and I believe such a topic, like legacy or declining vitality, to be the province of the old. Mortality, however, has recently been thrust unceremoniously into the forefront of my speculations. As such, I feel it may be of use to review my few thoughts to date on the subject, and see if there is any foundation between them for supporting a coherent theory.
I was raised Episcopalian, which I remember fondly as a sort of survey course in religion: the fundamentals were laid out, but no particular emphasis was placed on taking them seriously. And, while I nevertheless Did take them seriously at first (God, Heaven, etc., were Real things, everyone said so), the existence of other religions, and the simple geographical coincidence that I possessed the one I did(because I happened to be born here, rather than India, Africa, China,...), quickly disabused me of my convictions.
What remained were naive metaphysical speculations, what one might call a return to basics. Aside from all the trappings and elaborate back-stories of popular spiritual thinking, I wondered, from my own experience, just what I could say about my own existence. This gave rise to my conception of the life-pool, an idea whose development I've outlined elsewhere, but will sketch briefly: I am a community of microorganisms working toward our continued individual existences as far as possible, but chiefly toward the continuation of the whole. The particular organization of this community (i.e, my body) I called a life-structure; death its collapse. On dying, these constituent body cells and bacteria would return to the life-pool, or nature, to merge into other life-structures and continue the processes they carried out in my body, mostly without interruption.
I found, and continue to find, this perspective on life and death fascinating and wonderful, if perhaps simplistic; to be fair, I was a child when I designed it. Where it fails, however, is in accounting for individual identity, the actual subject of a collapse. While I need entertain no concern for the fate of my body, or its role in the grand scheme of things, I lack any idea of what I, as something more than the sum of my parts, am to experience or undergo when I die. And for good reason: I'm not quite sure just what an "I" is; identity is another Big Question, but one inexorably tied up with any ideas I hope to create about death. So, that first.
Is there something continuous about me, something permanent? What relationship do I have to my previous incarnations, those children, adolescents, and young adults I vaguely remember being? What is it we have in common? In the above-linked post I developed somewhat the idea of a soul, but that seems more like a description of our differences and Their process; while it's a metaphysical assumption I live by to this day, on its own this idea of a soul renders death irrelevant by making it a constant: if all we are changes moment-to-moment, how is that last moment different from any other?
I have strong intuitive objections to this, however, because that last moment is different. It affects us differently. One might feel some trepidation at the approach of a life-changing experience, but they still expect to emerge more or less intact on the other side of it, if perhaps a bit wiser or more scarred. Death, though, is the big fear to end all fears, the great unknown men have built pyramids and bred like bunnies trying to come to terms with. Is all this concern just so much irrational babbling, or does the change in that moment have some special significance for who I am?
Back to basics. Why do I believe that there is something permanent about me, something unchanged in my 27.315-odd years of being me? This is a bit of what they call question-begging: I say I began 27.315 years ago, then wonder what it is about me that began Just Then, and at no other time since or before. If I chose to identify with my 27 year old self, I would have to wonder just what it is about me that hasn't changed since my last birthday; if I identify with the salts in my brain cells, I'd be wondering the same, but on geological time-scales.
But then that's the difference, isn't it? What I choose to identify with, and how long that lasts. If I think of myself as a particular organism, this human typing on a keyboard, then yes, when it collapses I will die. If I think of myself as my lineage, however, my parents and children, ancestors and descendants, then it is my family whose rise and fall determines my own. And of course this method may be extended smoothly as far as I care to take it: I am, not just the few generations surrounding my body's conception, but all the generations, the whole human race; I'm the numerous species that preceded humanity and may follow it; I'm the organic molecules born in the violence of proto-Earth, child of ultraviolet radiation and basic chemistry; I'm the light that first shone down on that same troubled ball of cooling fires and acid oceans.
It all contributed to these typed words, after all, and I can't honestly claim one particular event in history to have determined my present identity more than any other, except by getting arbitrarily closer to the present. My bodily conception(or birth, depending on your politics) is as good a starting point as any; just no better. More useful, perhaps, if I am to take my usual activities (eating, sleeping, fucking, working) seriously, but that's just pragmatism talking, not truth.
No, death is very definitely an ending, just not a particular one. Everything ends; you die when the time comes for what you love most, what you've put the most of yourself into.
