HOW TO MAKE IT IN THE AFTERLIFE / THE NEW YORK TIMES

June 23, 2009, 10:00 pm

How to Make It in the Afterlife

By Simon Critchley

I am writing from Athens, doing what might loosely be described as “work,” with some rather bad news. Just when you thought it couldn’t get any worse — you’ve lost your job, your retirement portfolio has been exfoliated, Bernie Madoff has made off with your money, your pet cat Jeoffrey has left you for a neighbor and economic recession has become psychological depression — you discover the awful truth: you’re going to die.

Somehow, it was always expected, always certain, along with taxes. You’d even smiled weakly at that old dictum. Now and then you had heard time’s winged chariot drawing near, but had put it down to street noise and returned to your daily round of labor, leisure and slumber. Now, stripped of the usual diversions and evasions of life, the realization begins to dawn: no matter how healthily you eat, how much you deny your sedentary desires in the name of fitness, no matter how many sacrifices you make to the great God of longevity, you are going to die. Sooner or later, you are going to become worm food — unless, of course, you choose cremation.
Until you’re dead and buried, there’s always a chance for something to go wrong.

What, then, might be the relation between happiness and death? This topic has come up a couple of times in Happy Days, most palpably in Tim Kreider’s“Reprieve.” As is so often the case, the ancient Greeks, had a powerful thought, which to us seems counterintuitive: “Call no man happy until he is dead.” What is the meaning of this remark, often attributed to Solon, but different versions of which can be found in Aeschylus and Herodotus?

The idea here is that one can only be sure that one’s life is happy when it has come to an end. No matter how nobly one might have lived, however much courage one had shown in battle, however diligently one had served as a public citizen or privately as a paterfamilias in the rather patriarchal structure of ancient Greek family life, there was still the risk that life could end badly. One could die ignominiously or even worse in a cowardly or ludicrous manner: Heraclitus suffocated in cow dung; Xenocrates died after tripping over a bronze utensil in the night; Chrysippus died laughing after seeing an old woman feed figs to an ass. For the ancient Greeks, a life lived well was a life rounded off, consummated even, in a noble or appropriate death.

This means that happiness does not consist in whatever you might be feeling — after death, of course, you might not be feeling much at all — but in what others feel about you. It consists more precisely in the stories that can be told about you after your death. This is what the Greeks called “glory,” and it expresses a very different understanding of immortality than is common amongst us. One lives on only through the stories, accounts and anecdotes that are told about one. It is in this that happiness consists.

Happiness does not consist in what you are feeling, but in what others feel about you.
This has a very peculiar consequence for societies like the United States, so singlemindedly devoted to the pursuit of happiness. We assume that the question of happiness is a question of my happiness or, more properly, of my relation to my happiness. But why? Why doesn’t it make much better sense to live in such a way — to act kindly, fairly, courageously, decently — in such a way that happiness is something that others might ascribe to you after you are gone?

Having recently written a book on how philosophers die, and being a philosophy teacher myself (and yes, I too will die at some point.I am quite sure of it), I am often asked the question, ”Do you believe in the afterlife?” After mumbling something stupid on a few occasions, I have now learned to reply, “Yes, of course I believe in the afterlife. I believe in the life of those that come after, those we love, who are few in number, and those we don’t even know, who are obviously many more, a great many in fact.” People rarely seem impressed by this answer.

But why should we assume that the question of the afterlife must always be answered with reference to me? Isn’t that just a teensy bit selfish? What is so important about my afterlife? Why can’t I believe in the afterlife of others without believing in my own?

A skeptic might object that I am simply dodging the question. Of course, they might say, the question of the afterlife is about your afterlife. So, does it go on or not, this series of disconnected events that we call existence?
The only really philosophical reply I can give is, “I don’t know.”

After he had been condemned to death on the trumped up charges of corrupting the youth of Athens and failing to revere the local gods, Socrates began to ruminate on the afterlife before an audience of his judges.

He said that death is one of two possibilities. Either it is a long dreamless sleep and really rather pleasant, or it is a passage to another place, namely Hades, and there we’ll be able to hang out with Homer, Hesiod and rest of the Greek heroes, which sounds great. Socrates’ point is that we do not know whether death is the end or some sort of continuation. He concludes by saying only God knows the answer to this question. Of course, this makes it a little tricky if you don’t, like me, have the good fortune to believe in God.

Simon Critchley is chair of philosophy at the New School for Social Research and the author of several books, including his most recent, “The Book of Dead Philosophers.”