David Egan Philosophy

I’m teaching a ten-week course on death this winter, so you might rightly surmise that death is a topic I’ve given some thought to over the years. Not everyone does. It’s an uncomfortable topic and some people would prefer not to think about it. But I also have some friends—intelligent, sensitive, thoughtful people—who just don’t seem particularly interested in it. They’re not hiding from a confrontation with their mortality as far as I can tell. They know they’re going to die someday. They just don’t take this knowledge to be especially important. There’s nothing I can do about it, a friend once said to me, so why dwell on it?

What is to be gained from contemplating one’s mortality? And are you missing out on anything if you don’t?

As a way of approaching these questions, I want to sidetrack into a different philosophical question: to what extent does a life have the shape of a story? The fact that people write and read biographies and autobiographies suggests at a minimum that lives can be the subject of stories. But there’s a stronger argument to be made that fitting lives into a story-like shape is the way that we make sense of them.

Life may just be one damn thing after another, as the saying goes, but stories have shape and direction. In a story, the hero works toward a goal. What that goal is may change over the course of the story, but narrative momentum and tension depend on the audience recognizing how events might bring the hero closer to a goal or throw up obstacles that make the goal seem more remote.

Our lives have goals and direction as well. From the humdrum goals of getting to work on time or buying groceries to the bigger picture goals of starting a family or combating racism, life for the most part is shaped by the things we are doing and the things we’re trying to do—so much so that we often need reminders to step back and be idle.

Not only that, but what it is that we take ourselves to be doing comes out through the story we tell about what we’re doing. Here are some descriptions of what I’m doing right now. I’m pressing my fingers on a keyboard. I’m fulfilling an obligation. I’m reflecting in writing on narrative and mortality. I’m writing a newsletter to sustain a business I started. I’m trying to engage you, the reader, in a philosophical discussion. All of these descriptions are true to the facts. But they situate what I’m doing within different kinds of stories, which in turn give my actions different kinds of significance.

A number of philosophers—among them Alasdair MacIntyre, Charles Taylor, and Marya Schechtman—have argued that storytelling is the primary means by which we make sense of our lives. What’s more, these philosophers say, that’s a good thing. It’s by understanding our lives in narrative terms that we give them shape and purpose. By thinking of ourselves as heroes in an unfolding story, we orient ourselves toward goals and articulate our vision of the good.

But might this whole life-as-narrative business be a self-aggrandizing sham? If we’re the ones telling the stories of our lives to ourselves, doesn’t this make room for boundless myth-making and self-deception? What’s more, all this storytelling can sour us on the here and now. If I insist of squeezing what’s happening in the present into a broader narrative, I might get frustrated with the ways that events fail to conform to my narrative expectations. If I drop my narrativizing pretentions, I can appreciate the present moment with greater freshness and vividness. You find an ancient version of this kind of argument in Epicurus and a more recent one in Galen Strawson.

Strawson divides humanity into what he calls “Diachronics” and “Episodics.” Diachronic people have a strong sense of narrative continuity in their lives. As a Diachronic, I understand myself to be the same person who started graduate school a decade and a half ago and the same person who might one day publish the book I’ve been working on. Episodics, by contrast, identify less strongly with their past and their future. They still remember the past and make plans for the future. But they’re less inclined to think of themselves as joined to their past and future by the thread of an unfolding story.

My conjecture is that mortality is more salient to people with Diachronic tendencies. For one thing, thoughts about the end tend to prompt us to reflect on the bigger picture. It’s so easy to get caught up in the day-to-day hustle and lose sight of the broader question of what you’re hustling for. Reminders of mortality put all of that in perspective—there’s that saying that no one on their death bed wishes that they’d spent more time at the office—and pushes you to consider what’s really important. Life is short, time is limited: how will you best make use of this fleeting and precious gift?

To the extent that you think of your life as an unfolding story, reflecting on your mortality might spur you to make the story a good one while you still can. On the other hand, the thought of death can undermine whatever sense of purpose you might previously have thought it held. Getting that promotion at work might seem trivial when seen in the harsh light of my inevitable extinction but so might finding a cure for cancer. Death, “the great leveller,” as Homer described it, might make all our activity seem equally futile.

A life may have a narrative structure, but death is not like the ending of a story. Stories work toward some kind of denouement and conclusion but lives just break off. There are the unlooked-for accidents and illnesses that can disrupt a life in midstream. But even a person who lives to a tolerably old age rarely has the luxury of tying up all the loose ends of life just in time for the final curtain. The thought of death may prompt you to take in the bigger-picture question of what your life is all about. But it also presents an unsettling challenge to the project of shaping your life into a satisfactory story.

The friends I know who seem untroubled by their mortality—and again, I mean untroubled and not just avoiding the subject—seem to conform more closely to Strawson’s description of an Episodic person. They think about the past and plan for the future but neither the past nor the future holds an especially strong interest to them. Nor do they feel any strong motive to make sense of their lives in terms of an unfolding story.

If you see your life as nothing grander than the sum of your experiences, there may still be reason to regret that sum being finite, or smaller than you would like it to be. But you don’t have further reason to feel anxiety about what those experiences all amount to or whether you’ll be able to give them a satisfying shape.

Would I be better off if I were an Episodic? Strawson seems to think so. One consequence, it seems, is that death would trouble me less. But I’m not sure that that’s a good thing. I’m troubled by death because I’m troubled by life. Working through a difficulty often yields rewards—rewards that require you to feel the difficulty in the first place. I look forward to spending ten weeks reflecting on death and its meaning because I expect I’ll learn and grow as a result. But as Strawson and some dear friends attest, you don’t need to encounter death as a problem in order to enjoy a rich and satisfying life.