Refusing death

1. Nothing makes death acceptable: it annihilates a unique being, beyond return or repair. Beauvoir, at her dying mother's bedside, refuses the word that consoles: "there is no natural death," every death is an undue violence, even when one knows it is coming and consents to it.
2. The wisdoms of acceptance, by calling it "nothing," "passage" or "the course of nature," grant it the victory in advance: they soothe the dying by disarming their protest. But to come to terms with what negates us is to betray what is irreplaceable in life.
3. The response of a lucid consciousness is therefore neither illusion nor resignation, but revolt: with Camus, to keep one's eyes open on the scandal and refuse to be reconciled with it, from the inner refusal that blesses nothing to the concrete fight to push death back.

Therefore So to refuse death is not to deny it: it is the only fidelity possible to the life it threatens, the "no" that gives our "yes" its form.

1. Revolt presupposes an adversary that can be swayed. But death is not an injustice a court could overturn: it is a law of nature, as deaf to our anger as the rain or old age.
2. To rise up against the inevitable is to wage a battle lost in advance. Epictetus said it: it is not things that trouble us but our judgments about them; to demand that nature be other than it is condemns us to suffer.
3. Worse: by fixing on death as an enemy, we let it devour every present moment. The rebel suffers twice, from having to die and from his rage at having to die, when wisdom would be to consent in order to live.

Therefore So revolt may be no more than a sterile agitation: it does not push death back by a single hour, and it robs the present of the serenity that alone depends on us.

1. Nietzsche saw in the revolt against time and the irreversible the "spirit of revenge": the rancorous refusal of what was and of what must end. To revolt against death would be to hold existence against its very condition.
2. But mortality cannot be detached from the rest: it is the same finitude that bounds our days and gives them their savor, their urgency, their weight. To say no to death is to say no to life as it is, the only one there is.
3. The refusal then takes on the face of what it fought: no longer a love of life, but a grudge against it. Strength, says Nietzsche, is not to curse what ends, but to love it enough to will it eternally: this is amor fati.

Therefore So your revolt calls for self-examination: is it the height of the love of living, or a ressentiment against life that, in refusing death, also refuses the worth death gives to our days?