[lit-ideas] Re: Life leads to death
- From: "Richard Henninge" <RichardHenninge@xxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: <lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Thu, 10 Sep 2009 05:19:55 +0200
----- Original Message -----
From: "Eric Yost" <mr.eric.yost@xxxxxxxxx>
To: <lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Sent: Wednesday, September 09, 2009 7:44 AM
Subject: [lit-ideas] Re: Life leads to death
Robert: Never said it. [The happy man is dead.] .... Brief version: we
can't judge a man's life happy until we have seen the whole of it, and we
cannot see the whole of it until it's finished.
That's how I understood "The happy man is dead." I checked Herodotus and
my translation reads, "Call no man happy until he is dead.” Aristotle
quibbles with this somewhere in the _Nichomachean Ethics_.
Robert: So, we judge retrospectively, but we do not call the dead happy;
we say that their lives were or were not happy, and as Wittgenstein says,
death is not an event in life; we do not live to experience death.
No so. I was with my father when he died. I held his hand as he died. His
death was part of his experience, and certainly part of mine. When he was
dead, it was no longer part of his experience. It was an experience that
stopped for my father at some point.
Wittgenstein is parsing death and dying along the lines of Marcus
Aurelius.
No, it is not Wittgenstein who is parsing death, but death that is parsing
us. The Grim Reaper knows no halves and maybes. The experience of dying is
not the experience of death. A person is dying before his death, but not
dead before his death. Because you can experience someone before and after
his death leads you to the misuse of the language as applied to yourself.
I think he is wrong to
do so.
Like, he should stop doing philosophy?
So did H. Broch when he wrote _The Death of
Virgil_.
That's a stretch. And whose side of the question was Faulkner on when he
wrote _As I Lay Dying_?
Richard Henninge
University of Mainz
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