CONFRONTING THE REAPER

Mysterious and Evil

In art and mythology, death is sometimes represented as a ferry man, eager to take his passengers to the other side. It is also sometimes represented as a moth, fluttering mindlessly into the flame of a candle.

But the most compelling, the ancient image of death is provided by the Reaper—the hooded skeleton bearing the huge curved scythe.

Myth of Creation

Monty Python: The Meaning of Life

He’s ugly, he’s menacing

The Reaper is ugly and menacing. He stares directly at us, and with an outstretched bony finger, he beckons us to come to him. He is patient. If we escape today, surely he will have us tomorrow. He is democratic.

But, can you cope with him?

Can you kill death?

The Scythe

A man for all seasons

Or sometimes a woman

5 stages of death in death?

In Art

Pop Art

He Strikes on Land and He Strikes on the Seas

He lurks in the shadows

He is mysterious. This is illustrated by the fact that the Reaper's face is often hidden in the shadows of his hood.

Death is taken to be weird or uncanny—something about which we have no real understanding.

He is the subject of humor.

And the weird

And politics

And Sex

Death and the Maiden

He plays chess

He comes in style

No one is immune

Social-Medical ad from Australia

He is personified

He waits for no one

Even to the practical joke level

He’s even in Children’s Cartoons

And adult cartoons

He danses

He appears at Super Bowls and goes with Taxes

Sometimes he wears white.

He’s used for pranks

And more pranks

Is he a racist?

Death wish?In a remarkably sensible paper by Paul Edwards, he suggests that if you seek more knowledge about the nature of death, you may seek something that does not exist.

1.Some apparently want to know what it feels like to be dead.

2.Since no one returns from death, the living apparently have no informants who can tell us what death is like.

3.Thus, according to these people, a certain important aspect of death remains mysterious. We cannot know what it feels like.

Other philosophers argue that the Reaper is not really evil.

1.Epicurus—perhaps the most eloquent spokesman for this position—says in effect that we have an utterly failsafe way of protecting ourselves from the evil of death.2

1.At the very moment when the Reaper clutches us in his bony embrace, we go out of existence.

2.Since the nonexistent cannot be harmed, death cannot harm us.

1.Epicurus summarizes this point by saying that "death ... is nothing to us, since so long as we exist death is not with us; but when death comes, then we do not exist.

1.It does not concern either the living or the dead, since for the former it is not, and the latter are no more."3

Death comes quickly an unexpectedly.

Many modern philosophers, biologists, and theologians have defended similar

positions.

1.They have claimed that death is neither so mysterious nor so evil as the naive would suppose.

1.The Reaper, according to these thinkers, is really no more mysterious or evil than the stork who symbolizes birth or the flowing stream that symbolizes life.

2.In each case, all we have is a biological phenomenon that has by now been thoroughly studied in the full light of day.

Yet, we will also show how death can be a great evil, especially for its victim.

What would it be like without death? Is he really the enemy?

What is the nature of death?

Dying is a process

1.Our fifth section will concern "Dying as a Process."

1.Roughly, the idea seems to be that something is dying if it is still alive, but on an irreversible downhill path that will soon terminate in death.

2.We will review the Western Concept of Death.

The skull of Adam at the foot of the Cross: detail from a

Crucifixion by Fra Angelico, 1435

"The Survival of Death,"

1.When Hamlet says, "To be or not to be, that is the question," he really means "To die or not to die, that is the question."

1."Alas, poor Yorick! I knew him, Horatio; a fellow of infinite jest. . ."

2.He urges the skull to “get you to my lady’s chamber, and tell her, let her paint an inch thick, to this favor she must come”

A Materialist Conception of Death

1.Can a person survive death? Can a person die more than once? Can a person get out of life without dying?

2.Can something die if it never lived? This chapter provides a summary of a proposed materialistic conceptual scheme for death.

1.We will question the value of death. 1.The central ethical problem, as I see it, is

whether death is bad for the one who dies. 2.Will my death be a misfortune for me? Epicurus

and Lucretius presented a famous argument designed to show that since I will not exist after death, and will not then suffer any pain, my death cannot be bad for me.

And, Death means Business

The End