Heidegger and a Hippo Walk Through Those Pearly Gates Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  Introduction

  · I · - Dead! Whatcha Gonna Do About It?

  { 1 } - Surely There Must Be Some Mistake

  { 2 } - Let Your Angst Be Your Umbrella

  { 3 } - Death—The Way to Go!

  { 4 } - Heideggerty-Dog, Ziggity-Boom, What You Do to Me

  { 5 } - Spin Your Own Immortality

  · II · - Eternity When You Least Expect It

  { 6 } - The Eternal Now

  · III · - Immortality the Old-fashioned Way—On the Soul Train

  { 7 } - Plato, the Godf ather of Soul

  { 8 } - Heaven—a Landscape to Die For

  · IV · - Post Mortem Life: Postcards from the Other Side

  { 9 } - Tunnel Vision

  { 10 } - The Original Knock-Knock Joke

  · V · - Death as a Lifestyle Choice

  { 11 } - Beating Death to the Punch Line

  · VI · - Biotechnology: Stop the Presses!

  { 12 } - Immortality Through Not Dying

  · VII · - The End

  { 13 } - The End

  Acknowledgements

  NOTES

  SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER READING

  INDEX

  VIKING

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  First published in 2009 by Viking Penguin, a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  Copyright © Thomas Cathcart and Daniel M. Klein, 2009. All rights reserved

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  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS IN PUBLICATION DATA

  Cathcart, Thomas, 1940-

  Heidegger and a hippo : walk through those pearly gates : using philosophy

  (and jokes!) to explain life, death, the afterlife, and everything in between /

  by Thomas Cathcart & Daniel Klein.

  p. cm.

  Includes bibliographical references (p. ) and index.

  eISBN : 978-1-101-14076-5

  1. Death. 2. Future life. 3. Immortality. 4. Death—Humor. 5. Future life—Humor.

  6. Immortality—Humor. I. Klein, Daniel M. II. Title.

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  For our philosophical mentor,

  WOODY ALLEN,

  whose astute phenomenological analysis

  rings true to this day:

  “It is impossible to experience one ’s own death

  objectively and still carry a tune.”

  INTRODUCTION

  Excuse us, but can you spare a moment? We ’re taking a survey here and we’d like to ask you a question. It’ll only take a minute and we won’t even ask your name, okay? So here it is:

  Do you really think you’re going to die?

  Really and truly?

  Do you really think your life is going to come to an end some day?

  Take your time. No hurry to answer. Well, except for the fact that every moment that passes is one less moment in your lifetime.

  If you’re anything like us, you probably don’t totally believe that the final curtain will come down one day. We can sort of grasp the fact of death in general, but in particular? Not so much. We’re like the Armenian-American writer William Saroyan, who wrote in a letter to his survivors,

  “Everybody has got to die, but I always believed an exception would be made in my case.”

  On the other hand, we can’t quite get death completely out of our minds. Hard as we try to repress thoughts of our mortality, they keep popping up like those little furry heads in a Whack-a-Mole. That must be because death is one of the immutable facts of human life.

  We are the only creatures who comprehend that we are going to die and we are also the only creatures who can imagine living forever. It’s that combo that drives us crazy. Death scares the hell out of us. And a life that doesn’t clearly have a destination—except over a cliff—seems devoid of meaning. This is undoubtedly why human mortality is intertwined with the fundamental questions of philosophy.

  Questions like: What is the meaning of life—especially if it’s all going to end one day? How should our consciousness of death affect the way we live our lives? Would life have a radically different significance if we lived forever? After a millennium or two, would we be overcome by existential boredom and long for an end to it all?

  Do we have souls—and if so, do they survive our bodies? What are they made of? Is yours better than mine?

  Is there another dimension of time that cuts through the cycle of birth and death? Is it possible to “live forever” by always living in the present moment?

  Is Heaven a place in time and space? If not, where and when is it? And what are the odds of getting in?

  These are the kinds of questions that prompted us to sign
up for our first philosophy courses some fifty years ago. But for better or worse, we got sidetracked by professors who told us that before we could tackle the Big Questions, we had to clear up some mind-numbing technical minutiae. Questions like: Does Bertrand Russell confuse “possible necessity” with “necessary possibility”?

  Whaa??

  Meanwhile, time was passing and we were still going to die. Eventually, we found our way back to those Big Questions in courses in metaphysics and theology, ethics and existentialism.

  But immediately another obstacle arose: honestly contemplating our own death scared us to death. We couldn’t look the Reaper straight in the face without, well, fear and trembling. But we couldn’t avert our eyes either. Death: you can’t live with it, you can’t live without it.

  What’s a person to do?

  How about telling a joke? Hey, it couldn’t hoit.

  Millie accompanied her husband Maurice to the doctor’s office. After he had given Maurice a full checkup, the doctor called Millie into his office alone. He said, “Maurice is suffering from a serious disease brought on by extreme stress. If you don’t do the following, your husband will die. Each morning, wake him up gently with a big kiss, then fix him a healthy breakfast. Be pleasant at all times and make sure he is always in a good mood. Cook him only his favorite meals and allow him to relax after eating. Don’t burden him with any chores, and don’t discuss your problems with him; it will only make his stress worse. Don’t argue with him, even if he criticizes you or makes fun of you. Try to relax him in the evening by giving him massages. Encourage him to watch all the sports he can on TV, even if it means missing your favorite programs. And most importantly, every evening after dinner do whatever it takes to satisfy his every whim. If you can do all of this, every day, for the next six months, I think Maurice will regain his health completely.”

  On the way home, Maurice asked Millie: “What did the doctor say?”

  “He said you’re going to die.”

  Somehow hearing about mortality from Millie makes it more bearable. Jokes are funny that way: they can make a devastating point while defusing anxiety at the same time. That’s why there are so many jokes about sex and death—both of them scare the pants off us.

  Happily, we happen to know a lot of jokes. In fact, we once discovered that jokes are a neat way to clarify general philosophical ideas, and we even wrote a book about that. So could jokes also illuminate philosophical concepts about life and death, Being and Non-Being, eternal souls and eternal damnation while at the same time alleviating our death-angst?

  You betcha!

  And that’s a good thing, because the time is nigh (we’ve both recently attained our biblically allotted three score and ten) for us to take an unflinching look at Death and what the big thinkers have to say about it, so we’re going to need all the laughs we can get. We’ll be prying open all the coffin lids on this issue, looking not only at the Big D but also at its prequel, Life, and its sequel, the Sweet Hereafter. We’ll be looking for clues.

  We’ll start off by taking a look at the fabulous ways civilized societies have come up with to deny our mortality, especially through that perennial diehard, organized religion. In particular, we’ll check out Freud’s theory of how we create religions—as well as havoc—in order to support our illusion of immortality.

  Next we’ll check in with some nineteenth-century philosophers from northern European countries. (Why aren’t there any philosophers on the Italian Riviera who write about death?) We’ll visit with that melancholy Dane, Søren Kierkegaard, who thought the only way to transcend our death-anxiety is to go through it. For Kierkegaard, all of our attempts to suppress our thoughts of death are counterproductive. The one way to get in touch with the eternal is to take the anxiety of nothingness into ourselves. Say it ain’t so, Sø!

  Then we’ll see what that grim German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer has to say. He virtually patented the concept of Weltschmerz (free translation: “The world makes me want to hurl”). You might think his attitude toward death would be super-schmerzy, but Schopenhauer, no fan of Life, regarded Death with utter apathy. He wrote that the “death of an individual is of absolutely no consequence” and therefore “our deaths should be . . . a matter of indifference to us.”1

  Indifference to death? That ’s not real helpful, Artie, and the needle on our angst-meter is going crazy. Quick, we need a good indifference-to-death gag.

  So Ole died, and his wife Lena went to the local paper to put a notice in the obituaries.The gentleman at the counter, after offering his condolences, asked Lena what she would like to say about Ole.

  Lena said:“You just put ‘Ole died.’ ”

  Perplexed, the man said, “That’s it? There must be something more you’d like to say about Ole.You lived together fifty years, you have children and grandchildren. Besides, if it’s money you’re worried about, you should know that the first five words are free.”

  “Okay,” Lena said. “Put down, ‘Ole died. Boat for sale.’ ”

  No look at philosophies of death would be complete without a visit to the twentieth-century existentialists, who saw not-existing as a companion piece to existing—sort of like a matched set. So we ’ll check in on Martin Heidegger and Jean-Paul Sartre, who tried to look unflinchingly at deadness. Heidegger claimed that we actually need the anxiety of death to keep us from falling into “everydayness,” a state in which we’re only half alive, living with a deadening illusion. And Sartre told us to consider the alternative: the only beings that don’t have death anxiety are those that are already dead as doornails—like doornails, for example. Get real, they admonish us. We’d like to, but first we have to stop shaking.

  So we’ll take a short break from all this heavy philosophizing to examine a popular form of death-denial: reassuring ourselves that we will live on in the hearts of those who knew us. This strategy assumes a certain sentimentality on the part of our loved ones that may or may not be, you know, there.

  Old Sol Bloom lay dying in his bed, when he suddenly smelled the aroma of his favorite strudel wafting up the stairs. He gathered his remaining strength and lifted himself from the bed. Leaning against the wall, he slowly made his way out of the bedroom and forced himself down the stairs, gripping the railing with both hands. With labored breath, he leaned against the door frame, gazing into the kitchen.

  If it weren’t for the pain in his chest, he would have thought he was already in Heaven. There, spread out on paper towels on the kitchen table, were literally hundreds of pieces of his favorite pastry. Sol smiled; this was one final act of love from his devoted wife, Sophie, seeing to it that he left this world a happy man.

  With quivering hand he reached for a piece of the strudel. Suddenly he felt the slap of a spatula.

  “Stay out of those,” Sophie said. “They’re for after.”

  From here to profundity, as we grapple with twentieth-century theologian Paul Tillich’s answer to the question, “When is eternity?” (Turns out it’s now.) But “now” keeps shifting to “then.” So how about now? Slippery stuff.

  We feel the need for something more solid to hang onto, so we’ll inspect the ancient Greek arguments for the immortality of the soul. But first we need to get clear on what we mean by a soul, how it differs from a mind, how both mind and soul differ from a body, and how all three differ from a zombie.

  After laying the Greeks to rest, so to speak, we’ll look at Heaven and other destination spots for the afterlife.

  Fred and Clyde had had many conversations over the years about the afterlife. They agreed that whoever died first would try to contact the other and tell him what Heaven was like.

  Fred was the first to pass on. A year went by. One day the phone rang, and when Clyde answered, it was Fred!

  “Is that really you, Fred?” he asked.

  “You bet, Clyde. It’s really me.”

  “Great to hear from you! I thought you’d forgotten. So tell me! What’s it like there?”

 
“Well, you won’t believe this, Clyde. It’s absolutely wonderful! We’ve got the most delicious veggies from the lushest fields you have ever seen. We get to sleep in every morning, have a fabulous breakfast, and then make love the rest of the morning.After a nutritious lunch, we go out in the fields and make love some more.Then it’s time for a gourmet dinner and some more love-making until bedtime.”

  “Omigod!” said Clyde. “Heaven sounds fabulous!”

  “Heaven?” said Fred. “I’m a rabbit in Arizona.”

  Then we’ll wrap it all up with a peek at near-death experiences, séances, suicide, and some wild new ideas on how to avoid death altogether.

  Hold it right there, guys. This is starting to sound like much ado about Nothingness.

  Who said that?

  Me, over here. Daryl Frumkin from down the block. I was walking my dog Binx when I heard you guys talking. And all I’ve got to say is this death thing is pretty simple, isn’t it? First you’re alive, then you’re dead. End of story.

  Really, Mr. Frumkin? That’s all there is to it? So can we ask you a question?

  Do you really think you’re going to die?

  · I ·

  Dead! Whatcha Gonna Do About It?

  { 1 }

  Surely There Must Be Some Mistake

  Uh, Daryl, we’re still waiting for an answer here. Do you really think you’re going to die?

  Well, sure, I know everybody dies. Frank Sinatra’s gone. So is Norman Mailer. Not to mention Napoleon, Harry Truman, Genghis Khan, and my wife’s Aunt Edna. So logically it stands to reason that one day I will be dead too. I know that as sure as I know apples fall down instead of up.