Wollheim: The Thread of Life

"Death may be expected to figure as phenomenon, and it may be expected to figure as thought." [257]
"[it] exerts a large and creeping influence over the process of living" [257]
"What I am denying is that we have knowledge of death based on intuition." [259]
"The concept of death in its application to persons is a hybrid or impure concept."
"Until then we must think that we die when our bodies die, and we must find this a misfortune."
"Of all the beliefs we have about the future, about our future, the hardest to accept is that we shall die...we cannot previsage the moment of death." [264]
"That death is a misfortune, is compatible with three considerations: that life without death would be a meaningless kind of existence for a person, or that we just couldn't live like that. That circumstances can arise in a persons life when death is preferable, or we would rather die. That death is not something that a person endures or suffers. If none of these upset the view that death is a misfortune, they should deepen our understanding of how we must think about it. " [265]
"It is natural to think that the point at which deathlessness would most strikingly affect the character of life is at the moment of choice." [265]
"on the level of character and behaviour, which is all that choice can control." [266]
"If choice has a value it appears to depend on the irradiation of choice through our lives."
"Choice is valuable for what leads up to, or surrounds it." [266]
"The fact that death is a misfortune ...is a view that goes deep; it is not...sensitive to circumstances." [267]
"It deprives us of our phenomenology, and having once tasted phenomenology, we develop a longing for it which we cannot give up: not even when the desire for the cessation of pain, for extinction, grows stronger."
"extreme situations...not only test friendship, they test accounts of what friendship is." [275]
"Friendship lies in a response to the singularity of persons, and a persons' friendship extends only as far as such singularity engages him." [276]
"It is of the essence of friendship that it requires us to abandon the beguiling satisfactions of moralism."
"How can we help one another? What uses are we to each other?...Apart...from need and passion, the profounder ways in which we impinge upon one another are two in number, and both are indirect in their workings..." [278]
"Through constant restraint we place upon our urge to control, manipulate, to change, other. so that...their awareness of our awareness and acceptance, both of them and of their singularity, becomes a source of strength to them." [278]
"The other way...is through the part that we, or rather our internalized counterparts, come to play in the inner worlds of others..."[278]
"Love and Friendship stand contrasted. They differ in the feelings, emotions, and beliefs that they draw upon, and...in their characteristic histories." [279]
"I may loves someone whom neither I nor anyone else can like." [279]
"love and friendship differ in their origins. Love...does not presuppose an attitude on the part of the lover towards his beloved. It is a response-a response, not the response-to a felt relation. initially to the relation of total dependence, and then to whatever we come to substitute for it." [279]
"By contrast, friendship must require an attitude. Being a response to the singularity of others, it is possible only with those whose singularity we are able to respond to appropriately."
"Hence we choose our friends, and we choose them for what we take them to be, which, if it is a case of true friendship, must approximate how they actually are."[ 279]
"Once we have chosen our friends, then friendship in certain ways assimilates itself to love." [279]
"We accept our friends, once they are our friends, for what they are or what they make of themselves. If they change, this will make no difference if the friendship is well established." [279]
"By contrast, love, once it is established, starts to generate attitudes toward the beloved that it did not require in order to arise."
"For unlike friendship. love does not have a history of accumulation, it has a history of substitution. We add one friend to another, but we tend to substitute one lover for another. And this means that love is permanently susceptible to the making of comparisons, the experience of disappointment, the desire to alter, and the insensitivity to differences." [280]
"At the core of friendship...is acceptance....a friend accepts another in the hope that he may thereby come to accept himself." [280]
"...allow him to feel that death is only an ordinary, unremarkable happening in life, which is the one thing death isn't. " [281]
"acceptance of the death of a friend or a lover involves at once the acceptance of death and the acceptance of the death of that particular person.
"The acceptance of a death of a particular person is the acceptance of a fact. However the acceptance of death as itself is more pervasive, there is no fact on which it is focused, and it therefore involves acceptance in an enlarged sense..." [281]
"within the acceptance of our own death the acceptance of death itself spreads its wings."
"At the core of the fear of death is...an appetite and a belief. The appetite is the thirst, the insatiable thirst, for phenomenology, and that belief is a belief about one essential feature of our natural specieshood." [282]
"What the acceptance of death, and by extension a person's acceptance of their own death, must consist in the harmonization of the appetite and the belief...what must take place is the transformation of all desires and all emotions so that there is nothing left to prevent a person from experiencing phenomenology as something inherently, essentially, terminable. He enters into his mental states not just as a person, but as a mortal person." [282]
"To accept death requires that we should live each moment of our life as though it could be our last, or as though the possibility of death was implicit in living." [282]
"Death is a misfortune. It is calculated only to make us feel that the very thing that makes death a misfortune-in effect living, living as a person- is not dissociable form death." [282]
"But does not such a transformation as I talk of, or as the acceptance of death calls for, simply generate an illusion? For is it veridical for us to experience phenomenology as inherently terminable?" [282]