Controlling death: philosophical thanatology meets pragmatism

Abstract

This essay examines philosophically the tension between controlling death and giving up or surrendering control. It can be argued that human mortality is the ultimate challenge to our attempts to maintain control over our lives. It is suggested that we may fruitfully respond to – while never fully resolving – this issue by integrating the approaches of transcendental philosophy and pragmatism. Some pragmatist thinkers (William James, Richard Shusterman and John Lachs) are briefly critically discussed in this context.

Keywords:

• death
• mortality
• control
• self-control
• pragmatism
• pragmatic method
• transcendental philosophy

Notes

1 Let me note that, for the purposes of this paper, I do not find it necessary to adopt any specific technical definition of either death or mortality. By ‘death’, I simply mean, in a standard sense, a permanent and irreversible termination of the vital processes of a being that was once alive. Much more detailed definitions could be given; moreover, keeping in mind the distinction between a definition and a criterion, it could be argued that, e.g. the permanent cessation of brainstem activity can function as a medical criterion of (human) death, while death itself means (or ‘is’) something different, that is, the termination of the processes of life. Furthermore, I must skip the traditional philosophical puzzles related to the concept of control. We need not, for instance, settle the perennial issue of determinism vs. indeterminism in order to use the notion of control in the everyday sense in which we talk about our being able, or unable, to control our actions and the events of our lives. Nor do we need to restrict our concept of control to, say, a scientific notion of causal influence; control in the relevant sense could be something looser and more comprehensive, e.g. something that we mean when saying that a person is ‘in control’ of her/his life. That is, I hope my reflections on death and control (in the more or less colloquial sense of these terms) may be philosophically relevant to people maintaining possibly quite different metaphysical views on the nature of death and/or control. For the conceptual and metaphysical issues of defining death, see, e.g. Luper (2009).

2 Again, even in the absence of a general philosophical definition of ‘control’, we easily understand what people mean when they say that they would rather choose a euthanasia than become helpless patients unable to control their lives any more. This way of speaking seems to have a role to play in our natural language games (to employ a Wittgensteinian expression).

3 In this paper, I avoid commenting on the details of the history of the pragmatic method. The classical texts by Peirce and James can be found in Peirce (1992–1998; see Vol. 1, Chapter 5 for the 1878 essay) and James (1907/1975), Lecture II.

4 Thomas Nagel’s 1971 essay, ‘Death’, reprinted as Chapter 1 of Nagel (1979), started the modern analytic discussion of death and the rationality vs. irrationality of the fear of death, later continued, e.g. in Fischer (1993). For a recent exploration of this and related issues not only in Anglo-American philosophy but in the ‘Continental’ traditions as well, see Schumacher (2010). The Epicurean position is in its best-known formulation available in the Roman poet Lucretius’s (n.d.) metaphysical poem, De rerum natura (‘On the Nature of Things’), ca. 50 B.C.E.

5 In this sense, my inquiry in (the rest of) this essay is not only about how to apply pragmatism to death and mortality but also about how to better understand pragmatism itself, or the pragmatic method, through its relation to mortality.

6 I am here indebted to Ulf Zackariasson’s (unpublished) contribution to the Nordic Pragmatism Network panel on ‘Pragmatism and (Im)mortality’ in the 39th Meeting of the Society for the Advancement of American Philosophy at Fordham University, New York (March, 2012).

7 This talk about reconstructing and resolving a problematic situation is, of course, Deweyan; cf., e.g. Dewey (1929/1986).

8 James’s Ingersoll Lecture, ‘Human Immortality: Two Supposed Objections to the Doctrine’, first published as an essay in 1898, is reprinted in James (1982), pp. 75–101.

9 For a discussion of this important point, see Hobbs (2011), especially p. 188.

10 James’s letter to Carl Stumpf, 17 July 1904; quoted in Perry (1964), p. 268. Cf. Myers (1986), p. 475. Here I am not going to deal with James’s ‘over-beliefs’ in there being something ‘more’ in reality in addition to what science tells us there is; such a discussion would also require a lengthy treatment of James’s Varieties (1902/1985).

11 In this regard, Miguel de Unamuno’s famous notion of a ‘tragic sense of life’ is (as Unamuno explicitly acknowledges) indebted to James. See Unamuno (1913/1954).

12 This essay, ‘The Sentiment of Rationality’ (1879), is reprinted in James (1897/1979), pp. 57–89.

13 See Shusterman (1997), pp. 42–50. For my engagement with Shusterman on life and death, see Pihlström (2012, with a response by Shusterman in the same volume).

14 Even so, Deweyan pragmatic naturalism can also be employed in philosophical discussions of death, as has been suggested by Charles Hobbs, who defends a naturalistic, ‘functional’ conception of immortality partly on Deweyan grounds. See Hobbs (2009). Cf. also, again, Dewey (1929/1986) for related discussions of precariousness, natural contingency and our dependence on natural forces greater than ourselves.

15 I am referring, of course, to Wittgenstein (1953). For discussions of these and other arguments as both transcendental and pragmatic, see, e.g. Pihlström (2003). For the entanglement of pragmatist and transcendental methodologies, see also Pihlström (2009).

16 This could, again, be understood as a version of the broadly Heideggerian conception of mortality as something that makes us ‘authentically’ individual.

17 Quoting again the famous title of Peirce’s ‘How to Make Our Ideas Clear’ (1878), available in Peirce (1992–1998), Vol. 1.

18 For an attempt to connect this notion with James, see Craig (2010), as well as Pihlström (2014).

19 Parts of this essay have been presented as guest lectures at the Johann-Wolfgang-Goethe Universität Frankfurt, Germany (February 2012) and Utrecht University, The Netherlands (February 2012), and as my contributions to the Nordic Pragmatism Network panel on ‘Pragmatism and (Im)mortality’ in the 39th Meeting of the Society for the Advancement of American Philosophy at Fordham University, New York (March 2012), the symposium, ‘Mortality, Death, and Dying: Philosophical and Social Perspectives’, at the Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies (August 2012), the conference, ‘Making Sense of Dying and Death’, in Salzburg, Austria (November 2012), and the workshop on pragmatism and death at the Max-Weber-Kolleg, Universität Erfurt, Germany (April 2013). I am grateful to all these diverse audiences for stimulating questions and criticism. In particular, I should like to thank Outi Hakola, Sara Heinämaa, Kristen Nielsen, Thomas Schmidt, Dirk-Martin Grube, Niek Brunsveld, Vincent Colapietro, Ulf Zackariasson, Henrik Rydenfelt, Heikki A. Kovalainen, Charles Hobbs, Andrea Esser, Jeff McMahan, Logi Gunnarsson, Hans-Peter Krüger and Marcus Willaschek. (Special thanks are due to Niek Brunsveld, who delivered a comment paper, ‘On Pihlström’s Pragmatist Philosophy of Death and (Im)mortality’, at our 2012 session in Utrecht.) I am also indebted to the very useful comments provided by two anonymous referees.