Thomas Nagel Death HW Response PDF

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reading response - Prof. Kaleena Stoddard...

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Zoe Green PHIL1010-01 12/6/19 Thomas Nagel: Death HW Response

In Thomas Nagel’s “Death”, Nagel discusses the idea of being alive versus being dead and focuses in particular on the statement of “it is good simply to be alive”. In terms of this statement, I think Nagel believes that it is important as humans to focus on the good things we have, one of the best things simply being the ability to live every day. Many people focus too much on the negative aspects of our lives and what we are not able to have without realizing just how good we actually have it. The simple gift of life is often taken for granted and Nagel is emphasizing the importance of being grateful for this ability to live that many people are often taken from too soon. When Nagel says that “there are goods and evils which are irreducibly relational”, Nagel means by this that throughout everyone’s life, there are going to be good things and evil or negative things that will always be connected and there is no other way to get one without the other or disconnect the two. Because of this, we need to be able to accept the evils for what they are and learn that life cannot be solely good. Whenever a bad thing happens, it has the possibility to open a door in your life to something good of any level that is not meant to or is unable to happen any other way; In order to get to and enjoy the good things in life, we need to endure, accept, and learn from the evils that come beforehand. Nagel also discusses the asymmetry in people’s attitudes toward the time after we die and the time before we born. Nagel explains that people often put a largely negative emphasis on dying because it takes life away and our ability to experience things. Nagel claims for this to be important because he points out

that this attitude is not apparent when discussing life before birth. With this in mind, Nagel theorizes that people discuss death so negatively in this way not because we are afraid of the physical state of being dead, but because of what death takes away from us and what we will miss out on because we are dead. I think this explanation is somewhat adequate but I am still more curious about the background of why people don’t see missing out on life before birth as being just as bad as the time after we die and where this concept of death being so bad developed from. Another explanation to this asymmetry may also be that we are conscious, thinking human beings by the time we die, so we are able to recognize that there will be things after we die that we will miss out on. When we are born, it takes many years for us to develop and grow before we can fully immerse ourselves into this world and experience all that there is to experience. Because of this, the idea of missing out on things before birth does not seem as detrimental as missing out on things after we die when we are fully developed, conscious, living beings that have already experienced so much and crave to experience more. According to Nagel, the most serious difficulty with the view that death is always evil is that we are left with the question of whether the non-realization of this possibility of death is always a misfortune to everyone or if it depends on what can naturally be hoped for. Nagel considers this a difficulty because he explains that even if it is possible for us to get rid of any objections against admitting misfortune, limits still need to be put in place for how possible something is to occur or how unfortunate something can be before it switches over to be considered normal....