Topics Death

Question Does the expression "Lose your life" imply dualism? Consider the expression "to lose your life" and related ones, "to be robbed of your life", "to have the rest of your life stolen from you". To lose something makes a division of time into a 'before' and an 'after' the loss. The effects in terms of dismay, grief and pain obviously belong to the after. Experiencing this loss requires the presence of an affected subject. This is all quite clear for the loss of everything, from a key to a beloved spouse. Everything, except if the lost object is your own life. Because if you are a materialist, there is no experiencing subject in the after when life has ceased. This means that expressions like "losing your life", "being deprived of the rest of your life" etc, all seem to presuppose a dualistic attitude, creating images of an after-life spirit sitting on a cloud mourning its lost earthly life.

Accepted:
September 5, 2013

Comments

You've offered a literal reading of the phrase that does, indeed, seem to imply dualism or something like it. Whether the expression was originally intended that way would be something that calls for etymological digging. However, I think it's safe to say that these days, when many people use these words, it's simply another way of talking about death, with no commitment to anything like dualism. Indeed, it seems fair to say that whatever the words "lose your life" once meant, these days, the primary meaning is simply "die." Language is full of expressions whose "literal meaning" is not a good guide to what they actually mean. If I say "John blew his top," actual explosions or lost skulls aren't part of what I mean, nor what most users understand me to mean.

I think you are right, and Freud says that we can never really think of ourselves as completely dead in the sense that there is nothing of us left. I suppose the good thing about the losing life idiom is that it leaves open the possibility that there is more to us than just this body, and perhaps a soul or something similar continues to exist, or has that possibility. In fact, your comments remind me of those philosophers like Epicurus who argued that death is not to be rationally feared since after it occurs there is nothing to experience the absence of life.