Quotes: Death and the Problem of Finitude

•"A god could save man by simply wishing it-from the farthest shore in the world...Though as for death, of course all men must suffer it: the gods may love man, but they can't help him when cold death comes to lay him on his bier" [Athena, Illiad, Bk III]

•"sum moribundus ['I am in dying']...I am moribundus. The MORIBUNDUS first gives the SUM its sense. -Heidegger [History of Concept of Time pg. 317]

•"Neither the sun nor death can be looked at for too long." -La Rochefoucauld [ Ely Black]

•“every poet begins (however 'unconsciously’) by rebelling more strongly against the fear of death than all other men and women do.”-Harold Bloom

•Becaus philosophy opens out onto the whole of man and onto what is highest in him, finitude must appear in philosophy in a completely radical way. [Heidegger, Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics]


•Quiere decirse que tu esencia, lector, la mía, la del hombre Spinoza, la del hombre Butler, la del hombre Kant y la de cada hombre que sea hombre, no es sino el conato, el esfuerzo que pone en seguir siendo hombre, en no morir....Es decir, que tú, yo y Spinoza queremos no morirnos nunca y que este nuestro anhelo de nunca morirnos en nuestra esencia actual. [-Unamuno]

•"Death, if that is what we want to call this non-actuality, is of all things the most dreadful, and to hold fast what is dead requires the greatest strength. Lacking strength, Beauty hates the Understanding for asking of her what it cannot do. But the life of Spirit is not the life that shrinks from death and keeps itself untouched by devastation, but rather the life that endures it and maintains itself in it. It wins its truth only when, in utter dismemberment, it finds itself. It is this power, not as something positive, which closes its eyes to the negative, as when we say of something that it is nothing or is false, and then, having done with it, turn away and pass on to something else; on the contrary, Spirit is this power only by looking the negative in the face, and tarrying with it. This tarrying with the negative is the magical power that converts it into being." -Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit

•'the more he is possessed of virtue in its entirety and the happier he is, the more he will be pained at the thought of death; for life is best worth living for such a man, and he is knowingly losing the greatest of goods, and this is painful' [Aristotle, NE, BK III, Ch. 9]

•"Was there ever a man more blest by fortune that you Akhilleus? Can there ever be? We ranked you with immortals in your lifetime...Think then Akhilleus: you need not be so pained by death" To this he answered swiftly: "Let me hear no smooth talk of death from you, Odysseus...better I say, to break sod as a farm hand for some poor country man, on iron rations, than lord it over all the exhausted dead."

•"Ancient philosophy was philo-sophia, not philo-theoria. It is to this original
understanding of the enterprise that Schopenhauer returns when he writes that
it is the chief task of philosophy, as it is of religion, to provide a ‘consolation’ inthe face of death. This, he says, is why Socrates was right to define philosophy as
a ‘preparation for death’. To this definition of the task he adds a further
specification: since death conceived as entry into a ‘dark’ and empty ‘nothing’,as absolute annihilation, is, for human beings, the summum malum, our worst fear,
any effective consolation must satisfy the ‘metaphysical need’; the need to be
assured of ‘the indestructibility of our true nature’ by death." [Julian Young]

•Eurete moi he entole eis zoen, aute eis thanaton. [and the commandment, which was ordained to life, I found to be unto death. ] [st. Paul]

Quotes: Nihilism as Problem that existence ought not to be

•If you imagine, in so far as it is approximately possible, the sum total of distresses, pain and suffering of every kind which the sun shines upon in its course, you will have to admit it would have been much better if the sun had been able to call up the phenomenon of life as little on earth as on the moon...[Schopenhauer, On the Suffering of the World]

•"The conviction that the world, and therefore man too, is something which really ought not to exist is in fact calculated to instill in us indulgence towards one another; for what can be expected of beings placed in such a situation as we are?...the appropriate form of address between man and man ought to be, not monsieur, sir, but fellow sufferer, compagnon de miseres...reminds us of what are the most necessary of all things: tolerance, patience, forbearance and charity...[Schopenhauer, On the Suffering of the World]

•"...does it not look as if existence were an error the consequences of which gradually grow more and more manifest?"[Schopenhauer, On the Vanity of Existence]

Quotes: 'Best never to have been born'

Now, then, Silenus, since you are so wise, come, tell me, is it really the best fate for a man to be drunk always?" ... "Not at all. Drunkenness is a joy reserved for the Gods : so do men partake of it impiously, and so are they very properly punished for their audacity. For men, it is best of all never to be born;but,being born, to die very quickly ."..."Ah, yes! but failing either?"..."The third best thing for a man is to do that which seems expected of him," -Silenus.

"Sophocles in Oedipus at Colonus...wrote the famous and frightening lines: 'Not to be born prevails over all meaning uttered in words; by far the second best for life, once it has appeared, is to go as swiftly as possible whence it came.' There he also let us know through the mouth of Theseus, the legendary founder of Athens and hence her spokesman, what it was that enabled ordinary men, young and old, to bear life's burden: it was the polis, the space of men's free deeds and living words, which could endow life with splendour..." [Arendt, On Revolution, final lines]

"An old legend has it that King Midas hunted a long time in the woods for the wise Silenus, companion of Dionysos,without being able to catch him. When he finally had caught him the king asked him what he considered man's greatest good. The daeomon remained sullen and uncommunicative until finally, forced by the king, he broke into a shrill laugh and spoke: 'Ephemeral wretch, begotten by accident and toil, why do you force me to tell you what it would be your greatest boon not to hear? What would be best for you is quite beyond your reach: not to have been born, not to be, to be nothing. But the second best is to die soon." [Nietzsche, Birth of Tragedy]

"If you could edit your past, what would you change?"

"My birth. I agree with Sophocles: the greatest luck is not to have been born - but, as the joke goes on, very few people succeed in it. [Zizek, interview]"

Technology and Social Relations--A defense

Building One Big Brain
by Robert Wright

http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/07/06/the-web-we-weave/?hp

Beginning to collect quotes

1. And worse I may be yet. The worst is not,
So long as we can say, "This is the worst."

Shakespeare, King Lear.
Found in Pippin's Modernism as a Philosophical Problem.

This passage gestures at nihilism as a problem of finitude: the worst would be if I were not alive to say this is the worst. Particular things I suffer in this world are of a different order than the suffering of death.

2. The greatest poverty is not to live
In a physical world, to feel that one's desire
Is too difficult to tell from despair...

Wallace Stevens, Esthetique du Mal.
Found in Butler's Subjects of Desire.

This passage gestures at nihilism as a problem of desire, or how desire is co-opted by despair. Insofar as satisfaction of one's desire is equatable to a) the depth of what will be loss in death, or b) the death of desire itself (desire is ephemeral, disappears, is not "physical"), it seems that desire itself produces despair and nihilistic suffering rather than pleasure. Here, the greatest poverty is articulated as living in a world of desire, which is so to speak cursed with producing despair, and this curse makes death a lesser poverty. Under world conditions where one cannot tell the difference, it would be better that the world was not. The question persists, is this inherent in the structure of desire itself, and if so, is there something else in existence, other than desire that can outweigh the despair.