Time Will Say Nothing by Ramin Jahanbegloo

Author:Ramin Jahanbegloo
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of Regina Press
Published: 2015-03-03T00:00:00+00:00

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AS HIGHLY VALUED AS PHILOSOPHY IS BY THOSE who practise it, sceptics continue to question its usefulness in our daily lives. Socrates is quoted in Plato’s Phaedo as saying, on the night before he died, that philosophy is practice for death and dying, which have to be confronted by everyone. And yet are we all capable of dealing with death as he did? Are we ever truly prepared to confront death? Throughout human history, from the time we became conscious of ourselves as thinking beings, we have either thrown ourselves impulsively into death or hesitated and pondered, fearing what there may be, or worse, may not be, after it overcomes us. Many of us have asked the same question as Hamlet in his famous soliloquy when he wonders “what dreams may come.” Some of us invent pleasant or fearsome fantasies about our afterlife, others resign themselves to the likely possibility that beyond death there is nothing at all. Yet if we accept this second possibility, then a maddening question arises: What meaning can life have if it suddenly ends, wiping away every memory, every trace of our knowledge, our wisdom?

Perhaps no writer has faced this question as boldly as Schopenhauer when he asks, “How can one believe that when a human being dies a thing in itself has come to nothing?” Clearly, death ends our life, but it does not end the memory of our existence. And what about the death of others, of loved ones especially? Though they are taken from us and we can never again feel their presence, something of them stays with us. Whoever does not acknowledge this must hold that life is no more than a nightmare and death is a sweet awakening from it. We can say that our business is not with death, but with what comes before and after death. The absurd reality of death has its roots in our need to exist simply for ourselves; all attempts to prove our existence stem from our need to ignore that we are tiny, transient beings of no importance in the immensity of the universe.

When my father died after a nine-month struggle with cancer, I was not quite sure what was happening. I had tearfully expected his death all through those nine months, and when death stepped forward I took it to be an end to his suffering. But however understood, death always brings the immense pain of loss. It is on these occasions that we come closer to the essence of life as pure accident. This was on my mind when I learned from two of my father’s friends that he had stopped breathing on the morning of June 20, 1991. My father was not afraid of death. His last days were as serene and peaceful as if he had courteously signed a contract with death. And yet my father never accepted life as a blessing. That is why he was interested in Manichaeism, the meditative religion that views human history as the struggle of goodness and light versus evil and darkness.

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