Methuselah's premature death

—What did he die of?? 

—From nothing. His health is over.

Clarice Lispector: The hour of the star

The day came when Methuselah, the archetype of longevity, eventually died. Whether the cause was natural or supernatural, it is almost the same thing, because when we consider life as a non-negotiable right and death as the enemy par excellence of life, we always die prematurely and old age, the final phase of our journey on earth, always takes on the character of a sad and unjust stage. Now, whether or not the cessation of vital functions means the extinction of the person, fortunately, we verify it after death, never before. Pascal says: "I do not know who brought me into the world, nor what the world is, nor what I am myself; I am in a terrible ignorance of everything (...) The only thing I know is that I am going to die soon, but what I am most ignorant of is this very death that I am unable to avoid". And he asks: "Why is my duration limited to a hundred years and not a thousand? But what difference does it make? Whatever the maximum duration of human life, it would seem to us, firstly, natural, and, secondly, insufficient, man being as he is: split, dual, contradictory, insecure, agonising, eager to be/to want/to know, impotent, unsatisfied and insatiable. "There is no man so decrepit that, as he sees Methuselah ahead of him, he does not think that he still has twenty years left in his body" observes Montaigne. From our spatio-temporal and comprehensive limitation, our hopes are so boundless that for their realisation "Methuselah himself would have died too young" (A. Schopenhauer); and the feeling of precocity accompanies us to the most extreme old age, for, however long we have lived, we never cease to feel (and to be) new-born and childlike. Marcus Aurelius observes: "Look behind you into the abyss of eternity and before you into another infinity. In view of that, how does the child who has lived three days differ from the child who has lived three times as long as Gereneus?". It is not only that life never seems enough, but that one always realises too late what one thinks one should have started from. Husserl himself, no less, at the age of 70, declares himself "a true beginner" and adds that, had he been granted "the age of Methuselah, he would almost dare to glimpse the possibility of becoming a philosopher". In fact, the spark of philosophising goes back to the first wonder at what is there, and this wonder becomes a person's existential and spiritual regulator. "The more vulgar man is, the less enigmatic the world seems to him", Schopenhauer rightly pointed out. 

"No matter how long we have lived, we never stop feeling (and being) newborns and children".

This world that has been given to us is full of mystery, yet despite its utterly indecipherable, contingent and "arbitrary" character, we have no choice but to accept its conditions and laws as they are implemented on Earth, which represents our only possibility of life. The earthly presence is experienced as something totally unintelligible and at the same time familiar, as something gratuitous and at the same time absolute. This "schizophrenia" eloquently reflects the profoundly metaphysical dimension of existence, the oblivion of which generates the greatest of human anomalies in not marvelling at it and by extension degrading it from mystery to "problem" and immediately demanding "solution". On this scale, is anything solved by living longer, much longer or forever: for example, "is an enigma solved because I live forever" (L. Wittgenstein). It turns out that the mystery does not consist in what we do not yet know, but in what the human intellect, despite its incredible advances, will never explain. 

Basically, religion and science have the same metaphysical origin and share the same respect for the unknown and the unknowable, but over the centuries, the scientistic - and lately economistic - mentality has been displacing the basic forms of spirituality, which - regardless of their "practical verifiability" - keep man in close relation to his transcendental dimension, which transcends - and in part belies - their definition in exclusive terms of matter, mechanics or biology. In reality, this historical turn (the gradual elimination of the sense of mystery) has brought about an unprecedented anthropological alteration, and to it we owe much of the supposedly new or casual human misfortunes and crises. According to G.K. Chesterton's diagnosis: "As long as there is mystery there is health, and when mystery is destroyed, disease appears". The reins of the planet, progress and the well-being of humanity have passed into the hands of people - according to Unamuno - "devoid of any philosophical culture (...) who believe too much in science, and more than in science itself - for this faith is all very well - in the less than absolute value of its aspirations and in the fact that science makes progress - this other fetish - and progress makes human happiness". One of the consequences and watchwords of progressive enthusiasm has been the entrenchment of the optimistic faith that all problems can be solved and that scientific and technological development will correct all the hardships afflicting the species, not only political, economic and social, but also existential ones. Unwilling to meditate on the abysmal and holistic nature of its problems, the new science rushes with too much self-confidence and haste to solve them. The situation becomes more complicated when we deal with issues involving facets, perspectives and dynamics whose thoughtless treatment may have irreversible effects on the species or the planet itself. This is the case with pain, ageing and death, which for the dominant anti-metaphysical mentality, i.e. the agenda of the Zeitgeist that sets the standards and imposes its measures and priorities, represent unpleasant flaws to be fixed, while for the deeply humanistic sensibility they are unfathomable mysteries to be experienced and probed. Today's world, with its individualistic, materialistic, hedonistic, utilitarian, consumerist, ultra-productive, quantitative, gregarious, pressing and so on, shows little interest in the eternal questions and in no way recognises them as unconditional and invariable factors - similar to physical constants (e.g. gravitation, the speed of light) - of supreme symbolic and vital relevance, on whose vigour the totality of human activities depends. Among these constants which man can neither elude nor interpret, temporality stands out, for Unamuno "the terrible mystery of time, the most terrible of all mysteries, the father of them all", one of the "elements" of Being, no less incomprehensible and mysterious than Being itself, linked more than any other to the most firm, palpable and anguished experience of time as finitude, expiration, irreversibility, fleetingness and brevity. 

The first of the four noble truths of Buddhism, dukkha (= suffering), goes like this: "Birth is suffering, old age is suffering, sickness is suffering, death is suffering". Although the Western worldview is at the antipodes of India, it shares with it all these premises except the first one, because for us birth is the supreme gift and life the absolute value; so absolute that we do not consent that it should end so soon or even end at all. (Western) man carries in his core a longing for permanence, expansion and propagation, hence he opposes death, which, denying him this instinct, sows and strengthens in him the agony of his overcoming. Having received Being, or rather Becoming, he wants to retain and conserve that which has once been given to him: he clings desperately to his gift and does not let go of it. Dilthey alludes to the "profound enigma of the expiration in time and of the sameness of our existence, which calls for the cancellation of becoming in being".

For very different reasons Christianity and scientism share the same goal of dealing with pain, ageing and death. For both, psychic and bodily discomfort, progressive biological deterioration and mortality are an evil. For the former, however, they are a "metaphysical evil", hence their therapeutic tools are exclusively spiritual, while for the latter they are medicine, pharmaceuticals, chemistry, dietetics, surgery, physiotherapy, nanotechnology, cryonisation, etc.; "an incurable evil", laments Jean Améry, whose only cure comes to an end after death. The transhumanist project, in particular, is not content with offering an image of the world, but is determined to reshape nature by seeking the remedy for all "metaphysical ills" while we are alive, in effect proposing an "anti-human" anthropological model, devoid of any possibility of existential self-justification. For transhumanism, which unearths old and repressed reveries of humanity, "Nature is the old age that weakens us and it is death that ends our life" (Michael Hauskeller). Happy immortality or eternal youth (let's not forget poor Titono!) has always been dreamt of through mythological and religious narratives, which have endowed life with values, meanings, interpretations, motives and ends, as well as constituting whole systems of liberation and deification. Since the paradigm shifted, and metaphysics (and religion) began to recede from the scene, the dream of paradise has been succeeded by utopian fantasies, and the yearning for salvation has been replaced by a concern for mere survival. Modern man, while repressing the image of his imminent end, opts for the illusion of an unlimited continuation of life, "an unusual occupation that does not correspond to any meaning or end" (M. Scheler), based more on the rejection of finitude than on an ideal of existence. The gerontologist Leonard Hayflick spoke of an "attempt to deceive Mother Nature", an enterprise with no chance of success or equivalent to a Pyrrhic victory. For the moment, Nature, God willing, does not seem willing to be fooled. No matter how much life expectancy increases, the maximum lifespan remains eternally "stuck" at around 120 years. But even if it is extended by a few more years, it will always be regarded as hopelessly short. And from the point of view of faith, almost ridiculous, as St. Basil of Caesarea notes in his discourse To the Young: "Even if I am told of the old age of Titonus or of Argantonius or of our very long-lived Methuselah, who is said to have lived nine hundred and seventy years (...) I shall laugh as at a child's witticism, as I look on eternity, long and without old age". In any case, the determination of scientists and entrepreneurs committed to the bio-onto-logical transformation of the species is frightening; the absence of philosophical reflection, bioethical responsibility and social conscience in their strategy to carry out such an existential and political, moral and demographic nightmare is frightening. Saving distances, it would not be an exaggeration to affirm that, if on a historical level the imposition of paradise on earth meant totalitarianism, on a biological level the bionic metamorphosis would be equivalent to a second original sin.    

With all this panic-stricken or otherwise "positive" culture, in which we move "from happiness as a right to happiness as an obligation" (Pascal Bruckner), not only does the obsession with not growing old or dying go down the drain, but the original pleasures that life has to offer are spoiled; in other words, we kill ourselves to live longer, to recall Barbara Ehrenreich's beautiful book. As Bruckner notes in An Eternal Instant. Philosophy of longevity: "The important thing is no longer to live to the full the time allotted to us, but to stay alive as long as possible: the notion of successive stages of life has been replaced by that of longevity". We have thus moved from a framework where the natural and existential constants of pain, ageing and death were treated as "meaningful mysteries to be discovered" to being treated as "meaningless problems to be eradicated". Unfortunately, the position that is gaining ground is that of the view that does not suspect that the "obstacles" of finitude, suffering, ageing or death are indispensable conditions for meaning. All the "enemies" that today's dominant science (and economy) insists on neutralising are in fact the principles that guarantee the value, meaning and beauty of life itself. "Finitude, temporality, is not only an essential characteristic of life, it is also a constitutive factor of the very meaning of life. The meaning of human existence is based precisely on its irreversible character," says pain expert Viktor Frankl. The fact of being short-lived and passing quickly is the quintessence of life, the foundation of its preciousness. Otherwise, warns Savater: "Perpetual life would lose any meaning (...) because we would have plenty of time to undertake everything, achieve everything and renounce everything. The only intelligible interpretation of what we call giving meaning to life is the this-or-that administration of the scarcity of time available to us". If we were immortal, would we be in a position to act or would we be condemned to absolute laziness and the most radical meaninglessness? The great Khankelevitch says: "Death is the condition of life, insofar as it is paradoxically the negation of that life (...) without death life would not be worth living (...) an everlasting duration, an indefinitely prolonged existence would be in a certain sense the most characteristic form of damnation". And, echoing Seneca, he concludes: "He who does not live, a fortiori does not suffer, knows neither illness, nor ageing, nor the anguish of agony, nor the supreme tearing apart (...) there is no advantage without a counterpart, let us answer without hesitation: yes, a thousand times yes, to know the inestimable treasure of life, it is worth accepting at the same time the bitter trial of death"; and of old age, "the metaphysical illness of temporality". In fact, "science and culture do not think of death as a metaphysical mystery, and certainly do not consider it to be the origin of the meaning of life. Rather, for modern people death is a technical problem that we can and should solve" (Yuval Noah Hariri). This would not be possible, if what Ivan Ilyich called "medical civilisation" had not prevailed, which tends to turn pain into a technical problem, depriving suffering of its personal meaning and undermining the ability of individuals to face their reality, to express their own values and "to accept such inevitable and often irremediable things as pain and disability, ageing and death". It is not only the suppression of resistance that undermines the vital compensations that produce meaning and the universe of values, elements that make life worthy and worth living. The relentless race towards perfection makes us forget that euphoria in intramundane terms never fills us to the brim. As long as our antinomic structure remains unchanged, desire is never definitively satisfied; and it is precisely this structural dissatisfaction that is the inexhaustible source of our actions.

Undoubtedly, the improvement in the quality of life thanks to scientific and social advances in nutrition, hygiene, public health, health care and working conditions has led to a significant increase in life expectancy. However, the drive to increase and prolong life expectancy at all costs and with a thousand sacrifices has not at all brought the desired results. Because, beyond the need to meet certain basic material-economic requirements, the balance and happiness of the elderly depends on non-material things, such as family and friendship ties, hobbies, personal legacy and, above all, world view, the degree of spirituality. Cicero, the first gerontologist among philosophers, states: "Would old age be milder if one lived 800 years instead of 80? However long one's life may have been, no consolation could have softened foolish old age". It is often forgotten that old age is forged from youth; as well as that every old man has been fully young; and that a life devoid of spiritual, ethical and aesthetic values and concerns, and above all indifferent to the mystery of the world and ungrateful to the gift of life is doomed from very early on to meaninglessness; which with the years leads gradually to despair (depression or hysteria). Shipwreck is inevitable when the young do not learn to be grown up and the old do not accept the hard fate of being grown up. This becomes even more dramatic depending on which form of non-acceptance is chosen; the range extends from the beautifying masking of the calamities of senescence (Norberto Bobbio) to the misery of the will to imitate youth (Hermann Hesse), frustrated ways of repressing both the truth and also the justice of nature, since decline and death affect everyone indiscriminately; all - it goes without saying - those children, young people and adults who are fortunate enough not to die before their 60th birthday.

"We do not know who we are if we do not know what we will be: let us recognise ourselves in this old man, in this old woman. This is how it has to be if we want to assume our human condition in its entirety", says Simone de Beauvoir in her famous study on old age. Considering the former cult of youth, nowadays rampant, a symptom of alienated and ageing societies, the position of the elderly today in the West symbolises an unsuspected failure, which, in addition to displaying the monstrous dimensions of a pathogenesis, is a real catastrophe for the human species, according to Frank Schirrmacher and his book Methuselah's Plot. Gerontophobia and ageism consolidate a kind of "racism against old age", and apart from marginalising the elderly, condemning them to indignity and shame, they are responsible for a misrepresentation of unprecedented anthropological consequences: forgetting that "perhaps one day I too will be old" (Norbert Elias), cultivating the illusion that the old are the other, even feeling disgust for the elderly, which is equivalent to being disgusted with oneself in advance. The reintegration of the elderly into life depends more on the authorities, institutions and the self-respect of society than on the effort of the elderly to tune in to the exaggerated demands of the times. There is no doubt that the technological/digital literacy of the older generations is urgently needed, because the world, "bewitched by the demon of speed" according to the octogenarian Ramón y Cajal, is advancing and progressing vertiginously and mercilessly; Meanwhile, for its part, society, no less urgently and as a first step, needs to learn slowness from its older citizens and to recover what Byung-Chul Han calls "the aroma of time", which is to reclaim the contemplative in the maelstrom of the hyperactive in this age of haste. Humanity will never mature until it takes care of its parents/progenitors and makes use of their experience, wisdom and wise ignorance. Humanity's days or centuries - it makes no difference - are numbered if it continues to neglect the highly mysterious and marvellous condition of the world, the awareness of which separates us from the risk of falling into animality. What is always at stake is meaning, which lies not in eugenics and biological duration but in euthanasia and biographical quality. Humanity has to reintegrate the "negative" in the past and accept it as an essential part of the gift of existence. And to continue to compensate for it with deep gratitude or - why not - by celebrating it, as Philostratus tells of the inhabitants of ancient Gades (today's so jaded Cadiz), who had an altar to Old Age and honoured Death with hymns.