David Egan Philosophy

You’re probably familiar with the saying the coward dies a thousand deaths, but the brave die only once. It sounds great but I think there’s something to be said for dying a thousand deaths. I’ll explain what I think the original saying means and then I’ll explain my beef with it.

Like many famous sayings, this one derives originally from Shakespeare, albeit in slightly different form. Shakespeare puts these words in the mouth of Julius Caesar, who refuses to heed warnings about his impending assassination.

Shakespeare would have been familiar with the Stoic philosophy that had such a dominant place in Roman public life. Its most famous proponents are Epictetus, Seneca, and the emperor Marcus Aurelius.

A central feature of Stoic ethical instruction is to first distinguish what’s within your control from what’s not within your control. On the Stoic view, what’s within your control are the choices you make and the mindset you hold. What actually happens is beyond your control. “It’s not whether you win or lose but how you play the game” is sound Stoic advice. The outcome of a game isn’t entirely within your control and you shouldn’t fuss about it. Just make sure that you conduct yourself honourably.

Shakespeare’s Caesar isn’t a perfect Stoic—the tragic hero of the play, Marcus Brutus, is a better representative of Stoic philosophy—but his indifference to warnings that his life is in danger is classic Stoic sangfroid. Courage is one of the great Roman virtues and Shakespeare’s Caesar is speaking like a good Roman Stoic when he refuses to fret about the threats to his life. Maybe he’ll be killed in the Ides of March and maybe he won’t. He can’t control whether others conspire against him. He can only control his own choices: he can choose to live or die as a brave man.

The payoff of this mindset, according to the Stoics, is ataraxia, or freedom from disturbance. The coward who dies a thousand deaths is contemptible because he allows his fears to upset his composure. You can’t find peace so long as you let your mind range over matters beyond your control.

Many years ago, when I was learning rock climbing, I was told that it’s a good training precept to commit to keeping to the first grip you make on a handhold. The natural temptation is to feel around a bit with your fingers until you find a grip that gives you the best support and leverage. But if you make a habit of doing so, you’ll become reliant on that feeling about. As you get more advanced, and climbs get more difficult, you’ll sometimes need to lunge and grab onto a hold without the luxury of feeling about first. If you’re going to do that successfully, you need to build an instinct early on for how to find a firm hold right away.

I think there’s something of that spirit in Stoic resolve. Don’t grabble about in your imagination before taking action. Recognize what is to be done and do it. Don’t let worry or regret cloud the clarity of that choice. As another great Stoic philosopher put it: “Try not. Do. Or do not. There is no try.”

I can see the importance of not grabbling about for handholds while climbing but I’m less convinced of the importance of not grabbling about in the imagination. I’m not advocating fretfulness, exactly, but I do think there’s value in letting your imagination range beyond the road you’re walking down.

I don’t want to suggest that the Stoics reject the value of imagination outright. There are obvious practical benefits to the exercise of imagination that Stoic philosophers could endorse. Imagining our way into as-yet-unrealized futures can be a helpful tool in deliberation. We can imagine different possible outcomes of different possible choices and plan our course accordingly. As Karl Popper writes, “imagination permits our hypotheses to die in our stead.” Julius Caesar wouldn’t have been the brilliant general that he was if he wasn’t adept at this kind of exercise of the imagination.

But I think imagination has value beyond its practical benefits. I want to defend what I’ll call the idle use of the imagination, and here I diverge from certain hard-headed Romans. I’ve been thinking about imagination a lot during my travels this summer because travel is catnip to the imagination. I find myself in the midst of lives and ways of life that are radically different from my own: what is it like to live this way? I gape at majestic structures built centuries or even millennia ago: what went into making them and what would it have been like to be there on the construction site? I go hiking and my mind stretches itself to imagine the immense forces that thrust up the mountains or the relentless pull of time by which rivers carved canyons into the rock. Travel is enriching precisely to the extent to which my mind roams freely and far beyond the practical question of what is or is not within my control.

My disagreement with the Stoics comes down to a disagreement about what gives value to a life. Being a good person for the ancients was pretty much the same thing as being a good citizen. The person that you are is the public-facing self whose worth is measured by public deeds. As for your inner life, less is more. The ideal of ataraxia aspires to an inner life that’s subdued enough not to interfere with the public exercise of virtue and reason.

I’m very much a product of modernity where the inner life has its own distinctive value. The modern appreciation of imagination comes to prominence in the Romanticism of the nineteenth century but its roots are much deeper. It’s part of a broader valorization of inwardness that the philosopher Charles Taylor traces as far back as the fourth century philosopher, theologian, and saint Augustine of Hippo.

In defending what I called the idle use of the imagination, I’m defending the idea that there’s more to my life than meets the public eye. What matters isn’t simply what I do but how I experience what I do—and how I imaginatively experience the many things that I don’t do. An imaginatively dense life feels like a richer one to me, one that contains so much more than the public deeds of the one life I do get to live.

In short, the imaginative person lives a thousand lives and the unimaginative only one.

The thousand lives lived by the imaginative person come with a catch: you only get to actually live one. The reach of the imagination will always exceed its grasp. I feel very fortunate in the life I’ve lived so far but I’m haunted by the many lives I’ve imagined but don’t get to live. I can’t both teach philosophy in Istanbul and work as a nurse in British Columbia. I’ve seen a lot of the world but that only makes me more keenly aware of how much I haven’t seen, and how much I’ll never see. And even if I never travelled again and just chained myself to a desk and wrote, I wouldn’t have enough time to write all the things I’ve dreamed of writing, let alone read all the things I want to read.

I can imagine a Stoic reading that last paragraph with an I-told-you-so smirk. You only get to live one life, so why are you idly indulging disappointment by imagining others that you can’t have?

I wouldn’t say I’m indulging disappointment but I grant that I’m courting it. But I also don’t think that’s such a bad thing. There are better things to do with a life than to doggedly stave off disappointment at all costs—and sometimes I suspect that this is what Stoicism amounts to—and I’ll gladly mourn the lives I don’t get to live as a price for being able to imagine those lives vividly. The thousand deaths I die along the way only make me a coward if they inhibit me from living. 

1. Gangs in Peru and Colombia are now thought to make more money off illegal gold mining than they are off the sale of narcotics. (source)
2. If you’ve ever noticed that the thirteen-digit ISBN of most books begins with a 978 (and if you haven’t, why aren’t you examining your books more closely?!), that’s a code that marks them out as originating in the fictional country of Bookland. All products with barcodes have a thirteen-digit International Article Number (aka European Article Number or EAN) where the first three digits encode the product’s country of origin. When books were incorporated into this system in the 1980s, they already had ten-digit ISBNs that encoded a country of origin. So instead of redundantly listing the country of origin twice, the thirteen-digit EAN for books lists them as originating in “Bookland.” (source)  
3. The plastic buildup in the average human brain has increased by 50% in the last eight years, so that there’s now about the equivalent of a plastic spoon’s worth of plastic inside your skull. (source)
4. Sorry, more plastic facts: in 2020, humans produced 547 million tonnes of plastic, which is nearly one and a half times the total mass of humans on the planet. (This comes via Elizabeth Ryzner who pointed me to this for the plastic and this for the humans)
5. Canada’s domestic tourism industry is projected to earn $8.8 billion CAD (or about $6.36 billion USD) more this year than last—that’s more than $200 per Canadian—due to Canadians boycotting travel to the United States. (source)
6. The Zionist movement has its origins in the late nineteenth century. But Jewish Zionism was preceded by, and partly inspired and encouraged by, an earlier Christian Zionism. Many Evangelical Protestants and Puritans, especially in Britain and the United States, saw the re-establishment of a Jewish state in Israel—and the conversion of the Jews to Christianity—as a necessary precursor to the Second Coming of Christ. (source)
7. The streaked shearwater, a large seabird, excretes about 5% of its body weight every hour. (source)
8. The first serious attempt to communicate with aliens was conceived by the mathematician Carl Friedrich Gauss in 1820. He proposed laying out a colossal diagram of the Pythagorean Theorem, using pine trees and wheat fields and stretching across hundreds of kilometres, which would be visible to inhabitants of the moon or possibly even Mars. (source)
9. The main factor that determines whether a lake has salty or fresh water is whether it has any outflow. Water that flows into a lake generally carries mineral deposits with it. If those minerals don’t flow out of the lake, they form salt deposits in the lakebed that turns the water salty. (And the sea is salty because, obviously, it doesn’t have any outflow either.) (source)
10. In the year 1300, about half the world’s horses belonged to the Mongol Empire. (source)