When That's All There Is
I was listening to Death, Sex & Money, about which I've written, and I heard a quote that really stuck with me.
The guest was a burn-out funeral director making a comment about the testing of his faith. "Death is the muse of religion" he said. Perhaps a little pretentious, but a memorable quote.
It seemed too prepared to be thought up on the spot. Looking on Google, what I found was a quote from Schopenhauer's The World as Will and Representation worded that death was the muse of philosophy. Juxtaposing the two versions, it reminded me of an observation I tried to make sense of some time ago.
When I first read Charles Hirschkind's Ethical Soundscape, I was struck by the chapter on death and thanatological discourse in Islamic homiletics. As opposed to the people Hirschkind met, he argues that death and dying are entirely absent from Western liberalism, a departure from the way ethics and ultimate concerns have always been expressed.
Though the seclusion of injury and pain to medicine is a great historical change-and Hirschkind's idea of delicate, ignorant moderns comports nicely with our stereotypes-he isn't quite right, and neither is Schopenhauer.
Pace Hirschkind, the modern art adored by the liberal cafeteriat is obsessed with death, from Chekhov to Beckett to Francis Bacon; see Bergman above.
Modern thought is obsessed with death, from Kierkegaard to Sartre, to the contemporary debates on bioethics. This follows from the context in which Schopenhauer is correct: death is the muse to Western philosophy.
According to Plato, Socrates said philosophy prepares one for death and dying. And, after the 19th-century mass extinction, Western philosophy is what philosophy is, and a very limited branch of it at that.
Aristotle was not obsessed with death, and the Aristotelian tradition that flourished in the Islamic middle ages was not thanatocentric.
This brings me to the next point. Death isn't the muse of religion either. It's the muse, better central problem, of a religion: Christianity.
Though belief in the afterlife is common enough, Christianity made its hereafter and the redemptive death that guarantees it central.
As an illustration in contrast, Confucian scholars found the Jesuits' wearing of crosses with the corpus Christi grotesque and morbid.
As an artistic development, Christ on the moment of crucifixion was a vivid iconographic riposte to the reformation: death and life so depicted gave such a sharp and memorable point because of the particular esthetic and devotional tradition to which it belonged, as opposed to a general musing.
The death that is central to the Socratic-Christian tradition isn't the muse of Buddhism, concerned with suffering, and one could say that Confucianism is concerned with the problem of long life.
With this mind, I don't suppose my correction to Schopenhauer or the guy on the radio is anything more that to put an indefinite article in the dictum: death is the muse of a philosophy, a religion.
But for Hirschkind, whose work I know better, I would say that while death is in a mix whose constitution has changed, but remains central to the parochial tradition we speak of when we have our universal musings.