Krasilov, 1997. Metaecology-25. Like a Dog. The Last Enemy. More Than One.

Zlataya (conclusion). Homo. Die! V.A. Krasilov. Metaecology. Moscow: Paleontological Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences, 1997. 208 p. Part 25. Like a Dog. The Last Enemy. More Than One. CONCLUSION. Metabiomass. Metamortmass. Like a Dog When life was only just emerging, the threat of its accidental destruction by some catastrophe was very great. There existed only one way to ensure life's preservation: to reproduce it in an endless number of copies. The simplest organisms reproduced by division — they died in order to give rise to two identical ones. With the advent of sexual reproduction, a new form of death also arose. Cells merged so that a different life could appear, one that immediately began reproducing. At this stage, the meaning of death as a condition of renewal is entirely evident. With time, however, a certain number of divisions intervened between fusion and reproduction — divisions that did not yield independent organisms. Daughter cells remained together and supported, defended, or nourished the reproducing cell. It is with such multicellular formations that the paradox of death begins, for nothing, it would seem, prevents them from living forever, producing ever new reproductive cells. Moreover, their death seems an unjustified extravagance, especially since each of them acquires, in addition to its genetic uniqueness, a unique life experience. Death, however, proves necessary, because in a multicellular organism, directed and random changes accumulate which affect the quality of the gametes produced and may lead to too great a deviation from the species norm. Death thus functions as a mechanism for species preservation. In essence, what is required is to limit not so much life as the duration of the reproductive period — which is precisely what occurs in nature. Many plants and animals die immediately after reproduction. In humans, the optimal reproductive period ends at thirty-five to thirty-seven years. For many thousands of years, the average life expectancy was the same. Jesus died a little before reaching this age, while Siddhartha became the Buddha at exactly thirty-five. Recalling many outstanding individuals who died, killed themselves, or were killed in duels (also a form of suicide) at thirty-seven, one can be convinced that this age remains a turning point in both physiological and psychological terms. Post-reproductive life cannot be too long, since non-reproducing individuals are a burden on the population. Natural selection does not control senile diseases, which render the organism non-viable. The natural limit of life is apparently set by the aging of cells and tissues and amounts to approximately one hundred years, fluctuating within rather wide limits. That is why we do not know when we will die. Simply, on a fine day, two gentlemen in frock coats, clearly of the acting profession, appear without warning, lead one to a secluded place and plunge a knife into the heart. "Like a dog," said K., evidently considering everything that was happening to be shameful. Indeed, is it not a shame that man — a being that is preeminently social and metaphysical — still depends on his biological past, and that it is precisely this wretched past that delivers a verdict admitting no appeal? However, if one is to be entirely frank, how long had K. intended to go on in the role of a bank clerk? Vladimir Solovyov observed that the eternal life of some lady or card-player would be impossible even to imagine, so absurd would it be. Social games appear to be calculated for a limited duration. Playing a role too long, a person becomes an appendage of it — in truth, a mere hollow vessel. The roles themselves age as well. Revolutions then occur precisely in order to finally allow them to die. But, according to Solovyov, the situation is no better with creative roles in the sphere of culture. Goethe, endlessly reproducing Fausts; Einstein, perpetually elaborating the theory of relativity — these are no less absurd than the lady or the card-player. The finest works are created during the optimal reproductive period, and if genius manifested itself later, it means that something had stood in its way in due time. Of course, a long life affords more opportunities, but not indefinitely. The Creator who created the world in a brief span must rest. His subsequent intervention in the affairs of that world is destructive (recall Sodom and Gomorrah, the Flood, the plagues of Egypt, and so on). Einstein rejected from the outset the idea of a universe expanding according to Friedmann, while Goethe with an unflinching hand placed the writings of young German Romantics in the drawer. Moreover, it is well known that the value of a work increases with the physical death of its creator. The Last Enemy When the Apostle Paul writes: "The last enemy that shall be destroyed is death" (1 Cor. 15:26), he seems to forget the Christian injunction to love one's enemies. Not everywhere and not always was death considered an enemy. There were times when people prepared for it as for a celebration, and even identified it with marriage, using in both cases the symbolic sexual language of flowers. The bride (and sometimes the groom), while being dressed, is mourned as if being prepared for death — although this custom has long received a different interpretation. In the similarity between wedding and funeral rites, in the anticipation of sacrificial death as the bride (in the Gospels), there is manifest a deep intuition that reveals the evolutionary connection between death and sexual reproduction. Organisms that reproduce asexually are, in essence, immortal, since their offspring are entirely identical to themselves. In contrast, in sexual reproduction there occurs a recombination of genes; offspring are never identical to the parents, who can thus only partially extend their physical existence in their children, but as an individual combination of genes they vanish without trace — and this is precisely death. The higher the individuality, the more keenly felt the loss. Perhaps this is why the Stoics recommend simplification as a preparation for the encounter with death. Perhaps this is why soldiers are dressed in uniform, trained to fall into line, to march in step. It is not a matter of some poorly understood military necessity, but of the fact that it is easier for those who are alike to die. Man has tasted the fruits of the tree of knowledge, has acquired knowledge of death — which has deprived him of the blissful ignorance proper to animals — and has transformed his existence into a process experienced as a tragedy with a foreknown conclusion. Yet knowledge of the end remains incomplete. For no one possesses personal experience of death. All suppositions concerning it are unverifiable and belong to the sphere of pure metaphysics (naturally, one is not speaking here of the so-called clinical death, in which consciousness does not extinguish entirely and continues to generate certain narratives — ones suggested by mass metaphysics). Conceptions of death are for this reason extremely diverse and depend chiefly on the structure of the metaecological system in which they have formed under the influence of the universal spiritual need of humanity — the striving for freedom. As we have already noted, there exist two contrasting images of freedom. Platonic freedom accepts necessity, dictated by the logic of the system's development (its personifications being fate, the Demiurge, Ananke, and others). From this standpoint, death as absolute necessity is equivalent to liberation from the illusory passions and chimerical desires of a fleeting life. Death is an all-powerful lord whom it is impossible to disobey. It is better, therefore, to accept it with love, redirecting the aggressive response toward oneself and renouncing the joys of life in order not to be grieved by death. "The gods," Socrates said, "take from life as quickly as possible those whom they hold in high esteem." Necessity is a good, and consequently death is a good, for which one must pay (when dying, place an obol inside the cheek — otherwise Charon will not ferry one across to the other shore). In contrast to this, Romantic freedom is the negation of necessity, a stepping outside the bounds of the system. It impels a person to struggle against death as embodied necessity. In this difficult struggle, the individual relies on the assistance of the heavenly addressee of all unattainable desires. This powerful ally has already once defeated death, having risen from the dead. In one form or another, the individual attempts to repeat that feat. One may boldly advance toward the enemy, preferring voluntary death as the ultimate act of will over natural death — the manifestation of necessity. Within this system of views, a loving relationship with death is also possible. If the body is a prison for the soul, as the Orphics and Pythagoreans believed, then death is its deliverer. Since in the deep past the solar path was the universal model of the life path, death was likened to the setting of the sun, to a plunge into the abyss of waters — without which the luminary cannot shine again in all its glory. The archaic Old Germanic epic gives some impression of the idea of death that was original to the Indo-European peoples. In their endless wanderings, their nomadic ancestors were inspired by the dream of rich pastures that seemed impossible to reach in this world. But the warrior who had met death worthily and won glory was carried by the Valkyries to Valhalla (these words share a common root, since Valhalla was originally a pasture and the Valkyries were shepherdesses). Therefore the Eddic hero Gunnar makes his way through the forest in fine spirits — which is the equivalent of crossing "to the other shore" among the southern Aryans — to the court of King Atli, where death awaits him. Bound, placed in a pit of serpents, he plays a lute with his toes to the admiration of his enemies. The Elysian Fields were also a pasture, but already in Homeric times the idea of death had undergone substantial changes. Achilles, as if echoing the biblical Ecclesiastes, declares that he would sooner be reconciled to the lot of a hired laborer on earth than king in the underworld. The tragic intonation of the Iliad arises from Achilles' knowledge of the inevitability of his early death, and from the psychic fracture — those outbursts of unbridled murderous fury — that proceeded from this knowledge. Odysseus, for his part, prefers a return to his homeland over the immortality promised him by the nymph Calypso. This man, steadfast in trials, the embodiment of the Homeric philosophy of life, receives from the gods the highest reward — a natural death. Quietly death will descend upon you. And, overtaken by it, You will die in bright old age, at peace, surrounded by the happiness Of your peoples. Such too was the death of the biblical patriarchs. What was considered tragedy was not natural death — there was no tragedy of that kind in the repertoire — but premature death in the flower of one's years. Plato suggested (in the Timaeus) that the soul of Odysseus chose for its reincarnation the lot of an ordinary person, which it sought for a long time and barely found, lying somewhere neglected, passed over by all. This karmic motif attests to a powerful incursion of Eastern metaphysics of death — one that wholly transformed the classical Homeric variant. The Eastern conception of death teaches not heroism but humility. It suggests a negative answer to the question of to be or not to be. Being, an episodic non-equilibrium state, inevitably tends toward non-being, the normal state of eternal repose. In the classical West, these ideas found their fullest expression in Stoicism. Death, Seneca held, exists only as a thing-in-itself, but not as a thing for us. For as long as a person is conscious of anything, he has not yet died; and when he has died, he is already conscious of nothing. Consequently, the fear of death is an absurd prejudice. Death brings deliverance from suffering, which makes it not only inevitable but desirable. In accepting death, follow the example of Hercules: - Cease, — he said, — your weeping, and do not dare To make the death of Hercules unseemly! You see Alcides: how he awaits the pyre? Look! Let your spirit be as firm as his gaze! But, having flung heaven open, my father calls me. I come, father! These words recall another Stoic death. The resemblance is scarcely accidental: the refined Stoic metaphysics of death revives the crude barbaric one, and all this converges in Christianity — only then to separate once more after having been intermixed. From the powerful syncretic current of Christian metaphysics there separate streams of revived barbarism, renewed Epicureanism, and faded Stoicism. Now one current, now another proves the more powerful. If the Middle Ages represented the triumph of barbaric eschatology — both in the matter of individual death (the welcome end of trials and the sufferings bound up with them) and in the question of the end of the world (the twilight of the gods, transformed in the Apocalypse) — then the Renaissance was first and foremost a revival of Epicureanism. At times the path to grace through guilt and suffering (F. M. Dostoevsky) intersected, within a single culture, with the Epicurean "satiation with life" (I. I. Mechnikov) and the Stoic simplification (L. N. Tolstoy). The epic War and Peace opens with the death of the Epicurean Bezukhov and concludes with the Stoic death of Prince Andrei. Along the way there die the little princess, Petya Rostov, Count Rostov, old Prince Bolkonsky, Platon Karataev, Helene Bezukhova — a full spectrum of variants (the mortality of Tolstoy's characters reaching up to 30%, against a statistical average of approximately 3% over five years, which makes death the main heroine of the novel). The fruit of this investigation was the resolution of the Hamletian dilemma by means of a convergence of its alternatives. The dilemma loses its meaning when being is brought as close as possible to non-being. In other words, the simpler the life, the easier the death (it seems that not all Tolstoyans understood the eschatological meaning of simplification, although Tolstoy illustrated it not only with the literary examples of Karataev, Prince Andrei, and Ivan Ilyich, but with his own death — conceived as the unobtrusive end of an obscure old man). However, if life is reduced to the preparation and organization of a painless death requiring maximal simplification, would it not be simpler not to be born at all? Precisely so, confirms Posidippus of Alexandria, a disciple of Zeno: "Either not to be born at all, or to die as quickly as possible." More Than One Tolstoy's victory over death through simplification returns us to the most elementary forms of life — practically devoid of individuality, reproduced in large numbers of copies, and therefore immortal as long as the template is preserved. The problem of individual death arises in the course of evolution with the emergence of individuality, which is in turn closely linked to sexual reproduction, in which the offspring receives sets of genes from two parental individuals and is not an exact copy of either, and in turn cannot be exactly copied itself. The transmission of genes by inheritance is now insufficient to ensure immortality, and death is perceived as a loss — one felt more acutely the higher one ascends the evolutionary ladder. Even animals suffer from the loss of individuals to whom they are bound by kinship or sexual love, but they are ignorant of suffering over their own death. Only the human being, projecting onto themselves the feelings aroused by the loss of loved ones, suffers in anticipation of an inevitable end. Due to this self-identification with the deceased, death leaves a double trace in consciousness and is not soon forgotten. The deceased continues to exist stably in the memory of the living. The ancients did not separate mental images from physical ones: if something lives in memory, it lives somewhere — if only as a phantom, a bodiless double. Having acquired the experience of death, the phantom possesses special knowledge inaccessible to those who have not yet died. This gives it great power over the living. The dead become gods, like Heracles or Persephone. The notion that immortality can be obtained only after death becomes so firmly rooted that not only Heracles but virtually all divine sons (Enlil, Dionysus, Hephaestus, Christ) pass through death — or, as a special distinction from ordinary phantoms, through two deaths. Thus the Norse god Odin underwent a twofold death by spear and by noose. The image, constantly present in Norse legend, of a hanged man pierced by a spear refers either to Odin himself or to the human sacrifices offered to him. Perhaps the twofold death was the very reason for the exaltation of this somber deity. But Christ too, crucified on the cross, was pierced by a spear. The evangelists offer on this point rather confused explanations that efface the memory of the ancient twice-killed god, for whom the spear in the side was so essential an attribute that it was preserved as an atavism in later metaphysics. The dead only occasionally entered into contact with the living, dwelling in a special world separated from this one by a river or a forest. The world of the dead could be a beautiful pasture, a garden, or some other improved version of the world of the living — or its antipode (where, in the words of the evangelist, the last shall be first and the first shall be last) — or worse than it (the Homeric kingdom of Hades) — a place of retribution for good and evil deeds, as the Orphics believed — or, finally, a realm in two categories, for the righteous and for the sinners. In any case, it was the place where the individual attained metaphysical immortality. As such, the otherworldly realm was an object of special attention: it was enriched with new images, its boundaries expanded, and its structure grew ever more complex — since it was destined to receive so many. Its harmony gave form to musical consonances; its verbal embodiments, the oldest of which is the Egyptian Book of the Dead, served as a model for books about the living; its depictions on the walls of caves became the prototype of painting. This realm is now called the world of culture — the third reality. But the genetic connection has not been lost, and its purpose remains the same: life after death. As Oscar Wilde wrote, one who has lived more than one life will die more than one death. But before every living person there stand three kinds of death — biological, social, and metaphysical — and, correspondingly, three kinds of immortality. Biological immortality is achieved by the transmission of genes to offspring. In this sense, Don Juan had secured himself and could fearlessly challenge the otherworldly realm. But would his exceptional masculine qualities be repeated in his descendants? Specialized research (in particular, that conducted in the 1920s by Yu. A. Filipchenko) has shown that the children of outstanding individuals are, as a rule, distinguished by nothing (as in the case of the Erasmuses and the Charles Darwins — the spiritual heir more often proving to be the grandson than the son). A population of sexually reproducing organisms, as it were, socializes all genes into a single gene pool, in which it is difficult to preserve individuality. The latter is determined not only by the genotype but also by life experience, which to a greater degree than genes prepares a person for their social role and is inherited through learning. Social roles periodically go extinct, although most pass from generation to generation as long as the social order endures. Finally, the spiritual dimension of the personality — the meta-ego — remains in culture as long as at least someone in subsequent generations finds in it material for the construction of their own ego-system. It is desirable to combine all three kinds of immortality, but in practice this proves impossible owing to the limitations of resources and the constant conflicts between doubles. If an increase in offspring is favorable for biological immortality, then in the metaecological system quality is inversely proportional to quantity. Well-known examples confirm that immortality requires self-sacrifice. In essence, altruism is a sacrifice for the sake of attaining immortality — which at all levels (biological, social, cultural) is achievable only on the condition that the system is preserved. Genes will not survive outside the population, the fruits of social activity outside the social order, works of genius outside culture. The altruist, who strengthens these systems seemingly at his own expense, acts entirely rationally from the standpoint of his own immortality. Rebellion against the system in the name of freedom — as the spiritual experience of existentialism demonstrates — leaves the individual face to face with the last enemy, and the individual capitulates before it. For only the system affords relative freedom from death; but if one wholly accepts its rules and submits to its necessity, that same system deprives one of that freedom. The fear of death is a biological feeling that has proved extraordinarily productive in terms of metaphysical enrichment. The diversity of forms of compromise with the last enemy opens up freedom of choice where, it would seem, no freedom of any kind could be spoken of. One such form consists in the maximal approximation of being to non-being, when the transition from one state to the other does not present a great problem. Or one may repeat the sacred syllable "aum" until the soul's enlightenment — its complete merging with the infinite. Physical suffering assists in the achievement of this goal, and therefore there is no point in evading it. Perhaps it was in search of a Stoic death that the young Francis of Assisi decided to become a soldier. But on closer acquaintance the Stoic variant proved less attractive, and only sharpened his sense of blood kinship with the sun, the wind, and all that moves, grows, and breathes. The soldier fled from the field of battle and spent the rest of his life in the forest, preserving nature and preaching to the birds. This path to immortality proved to be the more promising one. Zlataya (conclusion). Homo. Die! V.A. Krasilov. Metaecology. Moscow: Paleontological Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences, 1997. 208 p. Part 25. Like a Dog. The Last Enemy. More Than One. CONCLUSION. Metabiomass. Metamortmass.