Over at Big Think, Hitch's Mortality is the book of the month. Peter Lawler homes in on this end-of-life fragment from the text:
Always prided myself on my reasoning faculty and my stoic materialism. I don't have a body, I am a body. Yet consciously and regularly acted as if this was not true, or if an exception would be made in my case. Feeling husky and tired and tour? See the doctor when it's over!
Lawler argues that Hitch's admirable stoicism can't really be supported by his materialism, as the above passage intimates – and that his courageous, freedom-affirming life betrays him on this point:
The stoic, from the Roman beginning, always claimed that a rational being had a kind of self-sufficiency—an inner fortress—that kept him from being governed by forces beyond his control. If I am a body, then I really am not free and am not responsible for myself.
And so Hitchens did not live as if he were a body.
He did not, God love him, live in fearful attentiveness to every conceivable risk factor that might extinguish his biological being. He smoked and drank heavily, and he ignored his body to enjoy life. From the point of view of the health-and-safety puritans around these days, he was pretty much a madman.
Hitchens admits he lived as if he would be an exception to the general rule that our intellectual freedom is dependent on bodily health. But we might say that his relative indifference to the body was one cause of his undeniable intellectual greatness, his courageous advocacy on behalf of human liberty everywhere. That indifference might be understood to be in the service of the truth, which is that a life without biological death couldn't possibly be one lived in personal freedom. Living well, after all, isn't all about living just a bit longer.
The Dish 