Im Once Again an Aethist Until the.shooting Starts
Guest Essay
What I Learned About Death From 7 Religious Scholars, ane Atheist and My Father
Dr. Yancy is a professor of philosophy at Emory University and the writer and editor of many books on race, guild and religious faith.
But a few days before my begetter died in 2014, I asked him a question some might find insensitive or inappropriate:
"So, what are your thoughts now about dying?"
Nosotros were in the infirmary. My father had not spoken much at all that day. He was under the influence of painkillers and had begun the active phase of dying.
He mustered all of his free energy to give me his answer. "It's too complex," he said.
They were his concluding spoken words to me before he died. I had anticipated something more pensive, something more drawn-out. Only they were consistent with our mutual grappling with the significant of death. Until the very end, he spoke with honesty, backbone and wisdom.
I accept known many who take taken the mystery out of death through a kind of sociological matter-of-factness: "Nosotros all will die at some point. Tell me something I don't know." I doubtable that many of these same people have too taken the mystery out of being live, out of the fact that we exist: "But of course I exist; I'm correct here, aren't I?"
Confronting the reality of death and trying to understand its uncanny nature is part of what I practice equally a philosopher and as a human being. My father, while not a professional philosopher, loved wisdom and had the souvenir of gab. Our many conversations over the years touched on the being of God, the pregnant of beloved and, yep, the fact of death.
In hindsight, my male parent and I refused to let expiry to have the final word without first, metaphorically, staring information technology in the confront. We were both rebelling confronting the ways in which and so many hibernate from facing the fact that consciousness, as we know information technology, volition stop — poof!
We know the fact of death is inescapable, and it has been especially so for the nearly two-yr pandemic. As we begin some other twelvemonth, I am astonished once more and again to realize that more than 800,000 irreplaceable people have died from Covid-19 in the United states; worldwide, the number is over five one thousand thousand. When we hear about those numbers, it is of import that we become attuned to actual deaths, the cessation of millions of consciousnesses, stopped only like that. This is not merely about how people take died but also that they have died.
My male parent and I, similar the philosopher Soren Kierkegaard, came to view expiry as "by no means something in general." We understood that death is almost me, him and you. Merely what we in fact were learning about was dying, not death. Dying is a process; we become to count the days, but for me to dice, there is no conscious self who recognizes that I'thou gone or that I was even here. And so, yes, death, as my father put it, is too complex.
It was in February of 2020 that I wrote the introduction to a serial of interviews that I would subsequently conduct for The Times's philosophy series The Rock, called Conversations on Expiry, with religious scholars from a diversity of faiths. While my initial aim had little to exercise with grappling with the deaths caused by Covid-19 (like near, I had no idea only how devastating the disease would be), information technology soon became hard to ignore. Equally the interviews appeared, I heard from readers who said that reading them helped them cope with their losses during the pandemic. I would like to think that information technology was partly the probing of the pregnant of death, the refusal to look abroad, that was helpful. What had begun as a philosophical inquiry became a balm for some.
While each scholar articulated a different interpretation of what happens after we die, it was not long before our conversations on expiry turned to matters of life, on the importance of what we do on this side of the grave. Decease is loss, each scholar seemed to say, but it also illuminates and transforms life and serves as a guide for the living.
The Buddhist scholar Dadul Namgyal stressed the importance of letting get of habits of self-obsession and attitudes of self-importance. Moulie Vidas, a scholar of Judaism, placed more than emphasis on Judaism's intellectual and spiritual energy. Karen Teel, a Roman Cosmic, highlighted her interest in working toward making our world more just. The Jainism scholar Pankaj Jain underscored that it is on this side of the veil of death that one attempts to completely purify the soul through absolute nonviolence.
Brook Ziporyn, a scholar of Taoism, stressed the importance of embracing this life every bit constant modify, being able to let become, of allowing, as he says, every new situation to "deliver to us its own new form as a new good." Leor Halevi, a historian of Islam, told me that an imam would stress the importance of paying debts, giving to charity and prayer.
And Jacob Kehinde Olupona, a scholar of the Yoruba faith, explained that "humans are enjoined to do well in life so that when expiry eventually comes, one can exist remembered for 1's good deeds." The atheist philosopher Todd May placed importance on seeking to alive our lives along two paths simultaneously — both looking frontwards and living fully in the nowadays.
The sheer diversity of these insights raised the possibility that at that place are no absolute answers — the questions are "too complex" — and that life, as William Shakespeare'due south Macbeth says, is "a tale told past an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing." Still at that place is so much to learn, paradoxically, about what is unknowable.
Perhaps we should call up of death in terms of the parable of the blind men and the elephant. Just every bit the blind men who come to know the elephant by touching only certain parts of it, our views of death, religious or not, are limited, marked past context, culture, explicit and implicit metaphysical sensibilities, values and vocabularies. The elephant evades full description. Only with death, there doesn't seem to be anything to bear upon. In that location is but the fact that we die.
Even so as man beings, nosotros yearn to brand sense of that nigh which we may not be able to capture in total. In this instance, perchance each religious worldview touches something or is touched past something beyond the grave, something that is beyond our descriptive limits.
Perhaps, for me, it is merely besides hard to let go, and then I refuse to have that at that place is nothing afterward expiry. This attachment, which can function equally a form of refusal, is familiar to all of us. The contempo death of my honey friend bell hooks painfully demonstrates this. Why would I want to let go of our wonderful and caring human relationship and our stimulating and witty conversations? I'g reminded, though, that my father's final words regarding the meaning of expiry being too complex go out me facing a cute question mark.
My male parent was also a lover of Kahlil Gibran's "The Prophet." He would quote sections from it verbatim. I wasn't at that place when my male parent stopped breathing, but I wish that I could have spoken these lines by Gibran as he left us: "And what is it to terminate animate, but to free the breath from its restless tides, that information technology may rise and expand and seek God unencumbered?"
In this past year of profound loss and grief, it is hard to observe comfort. No affair how many philosophers or theologians seek the answers, the meaning of death remains a mystery. And however silence in the face of this mystery is non an selection for me, equally it wasn't for my father, perhaps because nosotros know that, while we may find solace in our rituals, it is besides in the seeking that we must persist.
The interviews from the series discussed in this essay tin can be read hither .
George Yancy is a professor of philosophy at Emory University and is the author, most recently, of "Across Black Spaces: Essays and Interviews From an American Philosopher." He has written and edited many books on race, Africana philosophy, religious faith and other topics.
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Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/01/02/opinion/death-religion-interviews-lessons.html
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