Senescence, the Last Half of Life

by G. Stanley Hall

Death in our unconscious is a wondrous masquerader and it very often appears as sleep. The grave is a bed; the churchyard, a dormitory; catacombs, berths. Water symbolism, too, is very common, for example, the crossing of a dark river to the other shore, a boat, a narrow strait, a stormy or a deep dark sea across which we pass to an island or a new continent, the abode of the dead; and we speak of going out with the ebb of the tide, shipwreck, stranding, etc. Death may also appear as a fire that consumes or purifies. Processions and even crowds may suggest burial or funerals; and so sometimes do festivals or even weddings. A chest or trunk may mean a coffin, and graduation or even promotion in school may stand for “passing out.” Sometimes the basis of the primitive impulse to kill, which made man a wolf to his fellow-man, may crop out in dreams or insanity without either camouflage or repression and the sleeper tries poison, pistol, dagger, knife, etc. Perhaps man still has in his unconscious, deep down at the bottom of his soul, the sin of father-murder, as some now tell us, and reaction to this brings remorse and later a sense of atonement from the original sin and guilt for which man has for ages sought remission and fancied resurrection. At any rate, many psychoneurotic souls seek to compensate for instinctive death wishes by excessive tenderness to friends and relatives, whose removal, they realize with horror, they have sometimes caught themselves desiring. Nietzsche says that we should never pity the old who are about to die; but under the law of bipolarity the worship and even the tyranny of the dead hand, or mortmain, has sometimes developed to such a degree that the dead have been or should be made to die again to free us from their control.

If these views are at all correct, our larger, older unconscious soul is still full of reverberations of suffering, inflicting, and observing death. Man became man when he knew that he must die, and to defer or escape death has been the basal motivation of all of his culture. That he might not starve he accumulated property, the primitive form of which, as Leternau has shown, was food. To escape death by the rigors of climate he devised clothing and shelter. To avoid it by wild beasts and human enemies he devised weapons and organized the hunt and warfare. To keep himself alive when attacked by disease, the medicine man and later the healing art were evolved. Now he insures not only against death but against the partial death involved in the loss of limbs, accident, and illness; he safeguards his person and his goods by codes and law courts; and regulates diet, regimen, mores, and social hygiene with a view to more and fuller life. All these institutions are impelled by the instinct of self-preservation, reinforced as it now is in man by the knowledge of his mortality. Man may thus be redefined as the death-shunner. He does not and cannot begin to realize how much he fears death and dreads it now and always has. The reason for this is that while the knowledge that he must die is so certain and ineluctable, the opposite impulse to forget, repress, and deny this fact also has behind it the momentum of ages. The rank, raw death-thought that our late dear ones are, and that we shall soon become, masses of rotting putridity, most offensive of all things to sense and sources of loathsome and mortal contagion, is so rarely allowed to escape its inveterate censorship that we are all liable to become neurotic toward it if it does so.

One envisagement of an erstwhile dear one who had become this most loathsome of all objects drove Buddha to renounce his throne, wealth, and family, and to become a mendicant and a seeker for, if not an antidote at least a palliative for the awful death-thought. The great religion he founded is essentially a religion of pity for man because he is doomed to die. Its founder aspired to be the world’s great consoler, accepting frankly the stark and gruesome thought of death with all its horrifying implications.

Schopenhauer, who had a very morbid fear of death till near the close of his life, when it seemed to quite abate, developed views about it that have had immense influence throughout the world, especially in Germany. He believed his views to be modern expressions of ancient Hindu philosophy and also that all systems of philosophy are primarily either comforts for or antidotes to death.[212] The power behind creative evolution he calls the will-to-live, which is blind and unreasonable. “It is not the knowing part of our ego that fears death, but the fuga mortis proceeds entirely and alone from the blind will with which everything is filled.” Only the will as it exhibits itself in the body is destroyed by death. We should no more dread the time when we shall not be than we regret the time before birth when we were not. The infinite time before us is no more dreadful than the infinite time that preceded us. As of sleep, we may say: Where we are, death is not; and where death is, we are not. “If one knocked on the graves and asked the dead whether they wished to rise again, they would all shake their heads.” We were enticed into life by the hope of more favorable conditions of existence and death is disappointment and return to the womb of nature, who is all the while entirely indifferent to both our birth and death. Only small minds fear it. It is to the species what sleep is to the individual. All that exists is worthy only of being destroyed.

We come into life buoyant and happy but before leaving it have to pay for all the joy by pain enough to compensate. True, the intellect, which is an individual acquisition, is sloughed off by death, while the will is given its freedom again. “The will of man, in itself individual, separates itself in death from the intellect,” so that new generations get new intellects. This is the truth that underlies the doctrine of metempsychosis or palingenesis and is the faith of half the world. Here, too, roots the philosophy of eternal recurrence. The present generation in its inner metaphysical nature, that is, in its will, is identical with every generation that has preceded, but we do not recognize either our previous form of existence or the friends we once knew in a former state because the intellect, with its memory and perceptions, is only phenomenal and individual. Christianity gave itself a needlessly hard task in representing the soul as created de novo and in failing to recognize that pre- and post-existence support each other. “Death is the great reprimand which the will-to-live, or more especially the egoism which is essential to this, receives through the course of nature, and it may be conceived as a punishment for our existence. It is the painful loosening of the knot which the act of generation has tied with sexual pleasure, the violent destruction coming from without of the fundamental error of our nature, the great disillusion. We are at bottom something that ought not to be; therefore we cease to be.” The loss of our individuality is thus only apparent or phenomenal. “Death is the great opportunity to be no longer I.” “During life the will of man is without freedom. Death looses his bonds and gives him his true freedom which lies in his esse, not in his operari.” Individuality is one-sided and “does not constitute the inner kernel of our being” but is rather to be conceived as an aberration of it. Thus death is a “restitutio ad integrum.” The wise man wishes to die really and not merely apparently and so desires no continuation of his personality. “The existence which we know we will all give up; what we get instead of it is, in our eyes, nothing because our existence with reference to that is nothing” (Nirvana).

It is an illusion to place the ego in consciousness because in fact “my personal phenomenal existence is just as infinitely small a part of my true nature as I am of the world.” “What is the loss of this individuality to me who bear in me the possibility of innumerable individualities?” Individuality is thus “a special error, a false step, something that had better not be, nay something which it is the real end of life to bring us back from.” Death is, thus, the awakening from the dream of life, which is made up of trivialities and contradictions, time being only one of the principles of individuation and having no absolute existence but being merely a form of knowledge of it. Will is the true thing itself. It is human nature that is perdurable. It is true that we know only even our will as phenomenon and not what it really and absolutely is in itself. Knowledge is entirely distinct from will but the latter is always and everywhere primal. The inveterate blunder of philosophers is to place the eternal element in the intellect while in fact it lies solely in the universal will and struggle to live, which is indestructible. We cannot know it because of the essential limitations of consciousness per se, but in the true being of things free from these forms the latter distinction between the individual and the race disappears and the two are identical. The continuation of the species is really the image of the indestructibility of the individual.

We are lured into life by the hope of pleasure and retained in it by fear of death; but both are equally illusions. It is strange that the only thing in us that really fears death, namely, the will, is precisely that which is never affected by it. “Thus, although the individual consciousness does not survive death, yet that survives it which alone struggles against it, namely, the will.” Neither the intellect nor anything in it is indestructible for knowledge is only secondary and derived from the objectivizations of the will. “The intellect is dropped when it has served its purpose. Death and birth are the constant renewal of the consciousness of the will, in itself without end and without beginning, which alone is, as it were, the substance of existence.” When in death the will is separated from the intellect, it feels lost because it has so long depended on it, and hence we fear. Life is only a heavy dream into which the will-to-live has fallen. To the dying we may say, “Thou ceasest to be something which thou hadst done better never to become.” Thus generations of individuals are constantly reappearing, each fitted out with new intellects. But every new form of life is only an assumption in another form of the same will. Thus for Schopenhauer death is emancipation of the will from its slavery to consciousness, a breaking down of the wall it has erected between individuals, a regression to the ultimate momentum that underlies evolution, so that new individuals made of the same will, but disencumbered of the limitations life and mind impose, are ever starting again. The race is immortal and even back of that nature herself is still more so. The rhythm of life and death does change the nature or the form of the eternal currents of existence.

But, leaving Schopenhauer, we must go back to the very beginnings of humanity to realize all that the death-thought has done in the world and to understand how man has always wrestled with it, tried to fight it down, and devised so many ways and means of escaping from it. Probably there was never a stage of human life so low that corpses were not separated from the living and put away by themselves, so that necrophilism hardly seems to be an atavistic psychic rudiment. Man disposes of corpses by fire, water, or inhumation, towers of silence, tombs, cemeteries and other homes set apart for them, while animals do nothing of this kind. He alone cannot endure the spectacle of the fate that nature provides and so shroud, coffin, flowers, monuments, shrubs, trees, serve to divert attention from what is going on in the sepulchre below.

But the great diversion, coeval with the beginning of corpse disposal, was the conception of a soul separable from the body and surviving it, and this is as old as animism. Other factors, of course, contributed to the primitive belief in souls but when and wherever it arose it became the chief distractor from and the great negator of the death-thought. Now, as the body is not all, death is not complete and some part of us, however tenuous, lives on. Let the carcass rot. We can now focus our attention upon a spirit that outlives the flesh and this invention is the chief panacea mankind has found against the most gruesome of all its ills. In the very crudest and crassest form of belief in a separable soul lie the promise and potency of all the quellers of death-thoughts that have arisen from it; and so, when in the course of time it came that the air was becoming as full of ghosts as the earth was of corpses, they too had to be partitioned off from the living and given their own abode beyond some river, sea, mountain or other barrier, or beneath or above the earth. Whatever betide, the souls of the departed must be driven and kept away by apotropic rites or by sacrifices, the motto of which was do ut abais. Thus the living had to herd the souls of the dead as they had their bodies in order that they themselves might be free and sane. This was a great achievement, which spiritists and psychic researchers tend to undo, for ghosts must be laid just as bodies must be buried and the decomposing souls that appear in seances are only less offensive to common sense than the mouldering bodies are to sense.

Thus the fear of death has always called attention more strongly than anything else to the soul and to psychology. Something leaves the human body at death and has some power of independent existence; but just as the body must be put away so ghosts must be laid or driven off. In primitive culture the souls of the dead tend to linger near the body. Sometimes widows are plunged into water to drown off the souls of their dead husbands before they can marry again. Some tribes turn out en masse at stated times to frighten away the spirits, as they do to get rid of vermin and rats or to clean house. Ghosts may be burned in effigy. A window or hole in the roof must be opened for the soul of the dead to escape and afterwards closed. The body is carried several times around the house so that the soul cannot find its way back. Those unjustly treated or not buried may return for vengeance. Some think tombstones were primitively to hold down the souls of the dead, just as the Tiber was turned and Attila buried in its bed and it was then made to flow back again so as to keep him in the land of spirits. In Gurney’s Phantasms of the Living ghosts have their chief power at or near the moment of death. It is one of the great functions of the medicine man to dispose of the spirits of the dead and many rites were devised to relegate them to some place appointed. The living have their own domain and their own rights, which the dead must respect. Only the witch makes havoc with this order by bringing back the souls of the departed. Thus many kinds of barriers grew up between the living and the dead—distance, oblivion, a stream, a belt of fire, a deep chasm, a high divide, etc., so that the ghost world became hard to get to or from. Thus, in general, man does not wish to go to the realm of ghosts or to have them trespass upon his preserves. The New Zealanders conceived such preserves for their dead over the precipice of Reinga; the Fiji Islanders in their deep and fiery cañons; the Sandwich Islanders in the subterranean abodes of Akea; the Kamchatkans in an underground Elysium; the Indians in a Happy Hunting Ground; the Greenlanders deep under the sea; the old Teutons in Walhalla, the temple of the slain with its columns of spears and roof of shields; and the Greeks and Romans in the realm of Pluto. There are many roads and many ushers to conduct souls to their own home—sunbeams, the Milky Way, paths through caverns, or over the rainbow bridge Bifröst; while in Greece Charon and in Egypt Anubis carried souls across or through the interval or partition. In all these ways man has sought to conceive of the souls of the dead as effectively shepherded in folds of their own.