Confessions of a Philosopher: A Personal Journey Through Western Philosphy From Plato to Popper by Bryan Magee

Author:Bryan Magee [Magee, Bryan]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Philosophy, Biography, History
ISBN: 9780375750366
Amazon: 0375750363
Barnesnoble: 0375750363
Goodreads: 23256
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

15

Mid-Life Crisis

I must not give the impression that in my terror of oblivion my gaze was fixed chiefly on books. I did not expect to be able to read my way out of my death sentence. Far from it. For most of the time I was racked with unliterary and unintellectual thoughts about the direct realities of my situation: that my death was inevitable; that there had never been a time when this was not so; that death, for all I know, might be total oblivion, eternal or timeless nothingness; that although I could not be certain that this was so it seemed to me likelier than any alternative I could think of, and was therefore what I felt most inclined to believe; that compared with an eternity of nothingness the length of a human lifetime was not even so much as the twinkling of an eye; that if I was about to be swallowed up by an everlasting void, nothing I did was of the slightest significance, whether I went on to write great books or become Foreign Secretary, or get happily married or unhappily married, or prove a failure at everything—none of it would make the slightest difference to me or to anyone else when all of us were nothing, as everyone was going to be, including everyone not yet born; that it could therefore make no difference when I died, and would have made no difference if I had never been born; that I was in any event going to be for all eternity what I would have been if I had never been born; that there was no meaning in any of it, no point in any of it; and that in the end everything was nothing.

There are, evidently, contemplatives who would agree with all this and view it with calmness and serenity. I have never been one of them. I was terror-stricken by these thoughts. I felt like someone standing on the gallows with the noose round his neck, and the trapdoor under his feet about to open; or like someone facing a firing squad. I was on the point of being flung into eternal night. I raged against it with the whole of my being. And the impossibility of doing anything about it came close to sending me off my head with frustration and panic.

I used to look at people going about their normal lives with everyday cheerfulness and think: "How can they? And how can they suppose that any of what they're doing matters? They're like passengers on the Titanic, except that these people know already that they're headed for total and irremediable shipwreck. In a short time every one of them will be dead, either a heap of grey ash in an urn or a corpse rotting underground with worms wriggling in and out of its eye sockets. And that situation will be every bit as real then as their situation now is now; and it will last for very much longer.

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