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6 J. Value Inquiry 1 (1972)

handle is hein.journals/jrnlvi6 and id is 1 raw text is: I PHILOSOPHY, AGING AND THE AGED HORACE M. KALLEN It is ancient wisdom that for most humans existence is - Thomas Hobbes had said it - nasty, mean, brutish and short. After Darwin, this was resaid, and morally mitigated, by recognizing that existence is struggle for ex- istence which only the fittest survive, to embody that which the strug- glers struggle for, whatever it be. Among the knowing it became a cliche that life is a struggle for life, and living a struggle to keep on living, so that not to struggle is to die into the nothing from which the struggler entered upon life. The global name for this nothing is Death. Yet, a living person cannot and does not experience Death in and of himself. If he did, he would be conscious of being unconscious - aware of being unaware - he would have to be alive and dead at the same time. There are arguments, mostly philosophic or poetic ones, more recently by existentialists, that this may be so. But all in all, the deaths we become aware of can be only the deaths of others. Those, we perceive as the utter passivity, the sheer irre- sponsiveness of the rigid corpse like a stone's, now a person no longer but a poor stiff that must be buried or burned or eaten as well as mourned over, while the person that was is imaged and remembered by his survivors. We who live on come nearest to death when we faint or fall asleep, or are thrust by the anaesthetist into a resisted, utterly dreamless sleep. We wake from such interruptions of our struggle to keep on struggling into a new present without a past that quickly flows into and suffuses the past which, when awake, we already are, and our future follows. We resume our becoming. That is, we resume enlarging and diversifying our personal history, the stretch of which is the substance of our selfhood that the interruption broke into. With its return, the interruptions become as if they never were; the new joins the old as though no break had happened. The interval between them has not been experienced. Only the process of its coming has been experienced, and we presume that its nullity consummates this nullification. We experience our horizon contracting, our conscious- ness failing, our awareness dimming and our intent lapsing; we feel our senses diminishing and failing. We feel ourselves dropping toward the heedless inertia of inanimate things. This startles us. We fight it off: all of a sudden we resist falling asleep; we intensify our strivings to keep ourselves from sinking into the unconsciousness of a faint. We strive and strain to stay awake, to reverse that inner lapsing, to overpower its outer causes. The experience we resist and fight off as fall into utter sleep or true faint has quite a different feel from our normal goingto sleep. That dimming and extinction may well have its parallel in the visible processes

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