Aging gracefully (?) with Zhuangzi

Or, what we can learn from our spontaneous reaction to Bryan Johnson's Dorian Gray arc

Bryan Johnson, entrepreneur and multimillionaire has recently become a minor celebrity because of the wider media attention for his anti-aging regime. The tech mogul has been on an expensive quest to reduce his biological age, as a BBC article reads:

Supported by a team of 30 scientists, his daily life is dictated by a torturous exercise regime and diet, monitoring and numerous treatments. An all-over skin laser treatment he's been having has reduced his skin age by 22 years, the greatest age reduction in any part of his body.

However, a comparison of a photo of the now 45-year-old with a picture just taken 5 years ago (as shown above) makes us skeptical that Johnson is successful. He morphed from a charming-looking forty-year-old into the Dorian Gray uncanny valley.

Public reactions to these images were revelatory, especially the intensity of the condemnation. True, it's a bit unnerving that part his routine included, until recently, swapping blood with his 17-year old son. But surprisingly common was the reaction, “I hope he gets hit by a bus.” Wouldn't it be funny?, people wondered, eagerly hoping for an early demise. Wealthy people spend their money on worse things, for instance, superyachts. In that respect, I think a personal quest for eternal youth is misguided but not as harmful.

A lot of the reaction reminded me of the vanitas paintings and rings in early modern Europe, stark visual reminders of where we are all headed, no matter our wealth or (temporary) health. As people (at least, the owners of these paintings, rings and other memento mori) became wealthier, they wanted to remind themselves that material wealth and pleasure is temporary.

I think the gleeful predictions of the failure of Johnson's experiment aren't just envy or disapproval at his techno-optimism, but something more. Perhaps we feel aging, decline and death are the proper way of things, and we would find it objectionable if wealth could buy one out of it.

If you had a similar experience to mine, the pandemic prompted a lot of thinking about death.

I do not like the process of aging and I am sometimes taken aback when seeing someone I have not seen in twenty years. But I much prefer, so I found out in 2020, that I have a strong desire to stay alive. I prefer, all things considered (at least in this period of my life), aging to death. In an abstract sense, I do think that a short well-lived life is beautiful and worthwhile, and is not always the better for lengthening. And maybe if you zoom out to the wider scheme of things like a Stoic such as Marcus Aurelius, then it doesn't matter if you live to age 30 or age 90.

Still, I wonder if philosophy can help one deal with death, and the things that often accompany it: illness, aging, wasting away, suffering.

Let's look at Zhuangzi.

Throughout the many books of this pre-Qin Chinese classic, Zhuangzi is concerned with death. In several places in the book, Zhuangzi points out that death is a transformation that we mistake as the end, but that really is just a new phase in the existence of the matter that makes up human and other bodies. That realization should be give us peace of mind, while also recognizing that death of loved ones brings grief.

In a famous passage in Book 18, Zhuangzi sings and irreverently bangs a pot after his wife's death (a disrespectful, base form of music that is not at all suited for a funeral). Huizi, Zhuangzi's friend, chides him for this lack of respect, but Zhuangzi says

When she had just passed away, how could I not have felt anything? But I reflected on the commencement of her being. She had not yet been born to life; not only had she no life, but she had no bodily form; not only had she no bodily form, but she had no breath. During the intermingling of the waste and dark chaos, there ensued a change, and there was breath; another change, and there was the bodily form; another change, and there came birth and life. There is now a change again, and she is dead.

Her death is just part of life, of the changing of the manifold things. Does this make you feel better? Alexis Elder (2014) argues that Zhuangzi's perspective of everything being part of a big whole allows us to feel attachments (such as Zhuangzi's initial grief at his wife's death), without the loss typically associated with the death of close friends and family.

As Angus Graham (1989, 202-204) points out, there is an interesting contrast between Zhuangzi’s concept of death and that of medieval European writers and painters. The latter emphasized its gruesomeness, reminding us of the fate of our souls upon death. The aim of Zhuangzi, however, is not to shock, but rather, to look at the facts of death, including corruption and decomposition, without horror, so as to be able to calmly face it.

In chapter 32, Zhuangzi is on his death bed and overhears his disciples who are intent on organizing an elaborate burial to honor him: “‘I shall have heaven and earth,’ said he, ‘for my coffin and its shell; the sun and moon for my two round symbols of jade; the stars and constellations for my pearls and jewels; and all things assisting as the mourners. Will not the provisions for my burial be complete? What could you add to them?’ The disciples replied, ‘We are afraid that the crows and kites will eat our master.’ Zhuangzi rejoined, ‘Above, the crows and kites will eat me; below, the mole-crickets and ants will eat me: to take from those and give to these would only show your partiality’.” (Zhuangzi, chapter 32) Given how important the careful carrying out of burial rites was in ancient China, this is a subversive passage, as Zhuangzi says traditional burial rites would be denying food to crows and vultures, thus unfairly advantaging worms and ants.

Zhuangzi (and other Daoist philosophers) did not believe that our personal consciousness survives after death. Rather, the stuff of which we are made transforms into other things. This transformation is regarded as intrinsically good, as happening according to the Way. For example, Zilai, one of four friends is dying and muses with a friend how the stuff that forms him will be transformed: “while his wife and children stood around him wailing. Zili [one of his friends] went to ask for him, and said to them, ‘Hush! Get out of the way! Do not disturb him as he is transforming.’ Then, leaning against the door, he said [to the dying man], ‘Great indeed is the maker of all things! What will he now make of you? Where will he take you to? Will he make you the liver of a rat, or the arm of an insect?”

Zhuangzi, however, is always the skeptic. We can't know what it's like to be dead, the whole endeavor of trying to figure it out is pointless. Perhaps death is more akin to a transformative experience (in L.A. Paul's sense) Book 2 tells the tale of Lady Li, a daughter of a border guard who was taken captive and brought to the state of Jin,

she wept until her tears drenched the collar of her robe. But later, when she went to live in the palace of the ruler, shared his couch with him, and ate the delicious meats of his table, she wondered why she had ever wept. How do I know that the dead do not wonder why they ever longed for life?

I do think we have a kind of Zhuangzian intuition that aging and death are intrinsically the Way of things, the way nature should go, even though the prospect fills us with dread, and fills us with grief if it happens to those we care about.

Many stories play with a subversion of that idea, for instance, the European folktales of the man who became the godson of Death and used his connection to try to save people from dying (a disaster), or Oscar Wilde's Dorian Gray. Or maybe we have just resigned ourselves to the inevitable?

Still, I think Zhuangzi is right that although we strongly may suspect death really means the end of us as individuals, we cannot truly know, and there is some comfort in this.