The fear of death

In an article on death and the meaning of life, Kai Nielsen recounts a story about the Oxford philosopher J. L. Austin, who, when he was terminally ill with cancer, attended a talk on death given by the French existentialist philosopher Gabriel Marcel. Afterwards Austin is said to have remarked to the speaker, “Professor Marcel, we all know we have to die, but why do we have to sing songs about it?” (Nielsen 2000: 154).

What contrasts does this vignette point up? Oxford phlegm versus Parisian passion? Perhaps. The sober and reticent English approach to philosophy in the mid-twentieth century versus the more “engaged” philosophical style of the continent? Probably. Above all, the difference between regarding death as a ground of intense existential anxiety and seeing it as an unavoidable fact of life about which there is no point in making a fuss. Nielsen warns us against thinking that there was anything shallow about Austin's response to Marcel. The dying Austin did not take death to be trivial, nor, as we know from other sources, was he in denial about his own fatal illness. But he firmly believed that we do not make things better for ourselves by “singing songs” about our fate: a fate that no amount of breast-beating and lamentation will enable us to escape.

Austin's attitude may remind us of that of the Stoic philosopher and Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius: “Never, then, will a thinking man view death lightly, impatiently, or scornfully; he will wait for it as but one more of Nature's processes” (1964: 138).