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What Is Death?
From: Cambridge University Press
| By:
John Bowker |
EDITOR'S INTRODUCTION |
The inevitability of death and the burden of mortality have weighed heavily on human consciousness since we first became self-aware. Priests, poets and philosophers have all offered their reflections on the mysteries of our existence. But science, too, can provide us with certain answers. Here John Bowker tackles the main issues surrounding both the value and the necessity of death. |
 eath has been understood as everything, from defeat and punishment to release and opportunity. Frequently irreconcilable opposites are maintained between traditions, and even in conjunction in the same tradition. But that is not because, as sceptics suppose, the religions are yet again exhibiting their incompetent refusal to face facts, but because the facts of experience demand an attitude of both-and, not an attitude of either-or. In regarding death as both an enemy and a friend, the religions are, as ever, resisting the fallacy of the falsely dichotomous question. The meaning of that, and its importance in understanding religions, is discussed in my Licensed Insanities (London: DLT, 1987) pp. 101, 109. |
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| A spiral galaxy about 300 million light-years away. Not so very long ago (at least in the time scale of the universe) most of the atoms in your hand were burning in the depth of some distant star. | |
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But having said that, it remains clear that many of the propositions maintained by the different religions, in relation to human nature and to death, cannot possibly all be true. They may all be false, but they cannot all be true, at least as propositions about putative matters of fact. It is not possible for both a Hindu and a Buddhist to be correct in terms of what they propose about human anthropology (what it is that constitutes human nature and appearance). It is not possible for both a Muslim and a Christian to be correct in terms of what they propose about the death and resurrection of Jesus/Isa. |
Such differences undoubtedly make a difference. They are not negligible, in the way that a preference for yellow rather than green might be. Thus, Judaism and Islam agree in regarding humans as educable: they can learn from God (through Torah or Quran) what they should do, and receive help from him to do it; they thus have a relatively optimistic anthropology. But Christianity, in contrast, has a radically pessimistic anthropology: the subversions of evil lie at the root (radix) of the human enterprise, and we cannot be educated into salvation. The cultural consequences of such differences are obvious. |
The value of mortality
Yet even on such fundamental issues, it is essential to learn the lessons of this century in understanding more clearly the relations between language and reference, symbol and sign, icon and index. In particular, we now see more clearly that while all our languages, theories and pictures are approximate, provisional, corrigible and frequently wrong, they may nevertheless be wrong (on many occasions of our using them) about something; and that "something" then sets a limit on language by being what it is, even though we can never describe exactly or exhaustively what it is. This is even true of something so relatively obvious as the universe. Truth can therefore be told in fiction as well as in fact, by way of poetry as well as by way of proof. |
Those points, about critical realism and phenomenology, have been argued more fully in Licensed Insanities. What they imply in relation to religions and death is that the languages and pictures of death, and of what may survive it, may be approximate and mainly wrong as a matter of literal description, but they may be wrong or at least approximate about some fundamental (and universal) demand, arising in or from experience, or human intelligence, emotion and understanding. It is exactly as Simone Weil said of God: |
There is a God. There is no God. Where is the problem? I am quite sure that there is a God in the sense that I am sure that my love is no illusion. I am quite sure there is no God in the sense that I am sure there is nothing which resembles what I can conceive when I say that word. |
The pictures we use may thus reinforce each other, even though in detail they are incompatible. Issues of truth do not thereby disappear; it is simply that they are not foreclosed. Thus choices certainly remain to be made, far short of immediate verification or falsification, since that, in the nature of this case, cannot be other than eschatological (that is, since so many of the fundamental propositions have to do with the final state, nothing short of finality can verify or falsify what is proposed). |
But what is inferred in the meantime about human nature and its destiny is by no means trivial or ill-considered; still less is it only a product of abject wishful thinking, or of cynical exploitation of the credulous. The religious explorations of death, and of the continuities of consequence through death, emerge (both East and West) from very cautious explorations of what belongs to our experience within the boundaries of this body and this life. What is clear is that both major religious traditions, East and West, made exactly comparable extensions of belief and imagination in the two main areas of self and of salvation. Those explorations produced affirmations and concepts which are, in many respects, radically different. But their point of departure in the human experience of itself and its environment is the same; and they resemble each other in affirming through their different imaginations, first, that there is about us that which continues consequentially through the process of time; and second, that even though death may be regarded as an intrusion and perhaps even as a punishment, it is nevertheless also necessary as a means to life. It was, as we have seen, supremely through the category and actions of sacrifice that both traditions originally explored and expressed that truth. |
Consequently, the religious affirmation of value includes the reality of death, maybe as the last enemy, but also as the necessary condition of life. Attempts to evade death, or to pretend that it is not serious, or to deny its necessary place in the ordering of life, have almost always been regarded by the major religious traditions as false or dangerous or subversive of truth. If such enterprises as spiritualism or the cryogenic treatment of bodies give the impression that death is trivial or unimportant, then they will continue to be regarded by religions as destructive of a truth about ourselves. To the question, in contrast, which is at least as old as Socrates, whether death is so great an evil as many suppose, the religions answer emphatically, No. Through the category of sacrifice, they state dramatically that there are no other terms on which we can live except those of death. Sacrifice not only articulated that truth, it also made a virtue out of that necessity. |
But of what use or credibility is that now? Of all religious categories, surely that of sacrifice is the least viable in a world which has inherited a Frazer-like belief that magic is primitive and poor technology, and that sacrifice is a particularly savage example of magic? Of sacrifice, Frazer observed: |
If the test of truth lay in a show of hands or a counting of heads, the system of magic might appeal, with far more reason than the Catholic Church, to the proud motto, "Quod semper, quod ubique, quod ab omnibus," as the sure and certain credential of its own infallibility. It is not our business here to consider what bearing the permanent existence of such a solid layer of savagery beneath the surface of society, and unaffected by the superficial changes of religion and culture, has upon the future of humanity. The dispassionate observer, whose studies have led him to plumb its depths, can hardly regard it otherwise than as a standing menace to civilisation. (J.G. Frazer, Magic and Religion, London, Watts, 1944, p. 91.) |
Yet in terms of civilisation, it is exactly at this point of sacrifice that the religious and the secular evaluations of death meet and reinforce each other. In particular, the scientific recognition of the necessity for death is so close to the religious that both in hospital and hospice a shared assertion of the value of death is now possible. If we ask the equivalent question of the sciences (whether it is possible to have life of this carbon-based sort on any other terms than those of death), the answer is an equally emphatic, No. |
The necessity of death
The reasons why that answer is the same are many and various. But to give three related examples: the first can be apprehended by taking hold of your hand and looking at it. Not so very long ago (at least in the time scale of the universe) most of the atoms in that hand were burning in the depth of some distant star. You are literally a star child, a child of the universe. And you cannot be a child in any other way: to build your body, with its complex molecules, elements much heavier than hydrogen are needed--such elements as carbon, nitrogen, phosphorous, oxygen. Even to build a planet, let alone organic life, elements much heavier than iron are required. But those elements cannot be distributed without the extreme compression of collapsing stars and their explosion, because in that way the elements are fused and then scattered so that they become available for new architectures of energy. |
This means that we cannot arrive at a planet, let alone at the construction of living organisms, without the death of stars (their compression to form the heavier elements, and their explosion to scatter those elements for new architectures of energy): |
The tides are in our veins, we still mirror the stars,
life is your child, but there is in me
Older and harder than life and more impartial, the eye
that watched before there was an ocean.
(Robinson Jeffers) |
The second example of why there cannot be life on any other terms than those of death lies also in the palm of your hand--and in every other part of your body as well. Each cell in the body contains in the DNA the same programme, the same genetic information, which, if it could be replicated in the appropriate context, could produce another individual. This is the basis for cloning, which is in effect exact genetic copying; and it was this which led to the flurry of speculation that this perhaps could lead to a kind of provisional immortality, at least of an outward appearance. But despite The Boys from Brazil and the sensational claims of David Rorvik, this has not been achieved in the human case. Moreover, it seems likely, where humans are concerned, that it cannot be done (if, as is claimed, adult differentiated cells differ slightly in their DNA and cannot give rise to a viable embryo). Nevertheless, where the gene is concerned, people do talk about "the immortal gene." As Macfarlane Burnet put it, pondering the implications of genetics for human life: |
For someone still with a capacity for wonder, it can be fascinating to look through a microscope at one of his own white blood cells. He can see the round central nucleus and he knows that in the nucleus are strands of DNA. It is the literal truth that the patterned molecules in that DNA have come down in an immortal, unbroken sequence for 3000 million years from the single micro-organism within which the universal genetic code first took its definitive form. Life in that sense is immortal, and in the early stages, when reproduction was no more than growth and division into two, there was no immediate biological necessity for death. (M. Burnet, The Endurance of Life, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1978, p. 7.) |
But in fact the word "immortal" is being used wrongly. In a trivial sense, if all living organisms (built by the genes and replicating genetic information) came to an end, so too would the genes. They have at most only a provisional immortality, of a Vedic kind. But more importantly than that, although the genetic information is extremely stable, there must be some opportunity for changes, since otherwise no advance could be made to different and more complex organisms. It is true that the evolutionary process is immensely conservative--so much so that it led Eigen to observe that what really needs explaining and accounting for in evolution is not change but stability (see, for example, M. Eigen and P. Schuster, The Hypercycle, Berlin, Springer-Verlag, 1979, p. 7). Thus every living organism, from the simplest bacteriophage to human beings, uses an identical set of triplet codons to translate the base sequence of messenger RNA to the amino acid sequence of a polypeptide chain. So, to give an example, a codon AUG universally specifies methionine, and UUU universally specifies phenylananine. Commenting on this, Suso Ohno has argued that the codons are universal, not because the triplet coding system represents an ideal solution to the problem, but because the first self-replicating nucleic acid, which was formed those many millions of years ago, was constrained into the coding system because it happened to be able to do the job. Once that had happened, at the very beginning of life, that coding system had to be conserved. As Ohno put it: |
Once the coding system was established, at the very beginning of life, there was no choice but to conserve it in toto in all the myriad descendants of that first creature. Any subsequent attempt to change the coding system would necessarily have made a mockery of all previous messages that were encoded within the DNA, thus resulting in the immediate extermination of any organism which dared to attempt a change. In this manner, all organisms are bound to the past. As they evolve, their past history becomes an increasing burden which progressively restricts their future evolutionary possibilities. As hard as modern man strives to be free he is a slave chained to the past. ("The Development of Sexual Reproduction," in C.R. Austin and R.V. Short, The Evolution of Reproduction, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1976, p. 22.) |
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| Human DNA ensures that our life cannot exist on any other terms than those of death. | |
But if evolution is so conservative, how, then, can any advance be made towards more complex organisms? It is possible because, principally, some changes or mutations are advantageous: they introduce changes which help an organism to sustain itself better for the replication of its DNA. In this sense, the whole road to human life has been a catalogue of errors. Of course, most mutations are harmful (or at best neutral), so that for every mutation which allows a better hold on the exploration of environments and in the competition for energy or food, there will be many that disadvantage an organism to the extent that it dies prematurely. Already we begin to see that there cannot be life of this complex, evolved kind without death. There is a price to be paid within the disadvantageous mutations. |
From generation to generation
But there is a further and much stronger sense in which death is necessary. Mutations, to be of any use, require a succession of generations. Mutations and diversity are of no advantage to any except the individuals in which they occur unless they can be transmitted and thus spread into a further population. Death is necessary so that one generation can make space for the next, in which such changes as have occurred can be tested. This means that the process from mosses to mushrooms to me (to paraphrase Samuel Wilberforce) absolutely depends on generations succeeding each other, and that requires death. |
So we begin to see the price that has to be paid, in terms of death, if there is to be a universe and if there is to be self-replicating, self-conscious life within it. It is in the succession of generations that the slight mutations in the genetic information occur which allow development and change. There can be no development of life without evolution: |
Children, behold the chimpanzee:
He sits on the ancestral tree
From which we sprang in ages gone.
I'm glad we sprang. Had we held on,
We might, for aught that I can say,
Be hairy chimpanzees today. |
It follows that there could not be a you, and there could not be a universe, without death, the death of stars and the death of succeeding generations of organic life. If you ask, "Why is death happening to me (or to anyone)?," the answer is: because the universe is happening to you; you are an event, a happening, of the universe; you are a child of the stars, as well as of your parents, and you could not be a child in any other way. Even while you live, and certainly when you die, the atoms and molecules which are at present locked into your shape and appearance, are being unlocked and scattered into other shapes and forms of construction: |
Dearly beloved brethren,
Is it not a sin
To peel the potatoes
And throw away the skin?
For the skin feeds the pigs
And the pigs feed us,
Dearly beloved brethren,
Is it not thus? |
What that means, in relation to death and why it occurs, becomes very clear: it is not possible to arrive at life except via the route of death. That means, in turn, that the price which has to be paid for any organisation of energy in a universe of this kind is very high indeed. It is not possible to acquire new energy out of nowhere from nothing--as it is equally true that it is not possible to lose energy. What is happening is that available energy is constantly being used and reorganised to build whatever there is--planets or plants, suns or sons. But as energy is used, so it is increasingly unavailable to do further work. |
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