Death and Philosophy

DEATH AND PHILOSOPHY Thinkers such as Camus and Heidegger brought the idea of death to prominence in the twentieth century, but death as a topic has preoccupied philosophers since Greek times. This collection brings together well-known writers both from within philosophy and outside, providing a range of perspectives from the philosophical to the personal (including one account of a ‘near-death experience’) and the literary to the aesthetic. Death and Philosophy is a collection that encompasses a range of different approaches. Many of the essays show the influence of recent continental philosophy, the rejection of merely technical accounts of death, the idea that death in some sense gives value to life, the contrary idea that death renders life ultimately meaningless, the idea that death is part of a narrative that can be retold in many different ways. Several essays are concerned with Heidegger’s notion of ‘Being-unto-Death’; others are strongly influenced by Asian philosophy, bringing in Chinese, Japanese and Tibetan thought. Still other writers consider the analytic tradition, trying to get clear about a subject whose very nature invites denial and lack of clarity. For many of the essays in this volume, the significance of death is not to be found somehow in the cessation of existence but in the relation between death and a vital and fulfilled human life. Death and Philosophy is written with the general reader in mind. However, it will be of particular interest to philosophers, or those studying religion and theology. Jeff Malpas is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Murdoch University, Western Australia; he is currently Humboldt Fellow at the University of Heidelberg. He is the author of Donald Davidson and the Mirror of Meaning and editor of Philosophical Papers of Alan Donagan. Robert C.Solomon is Quincy Lee Centennial Professor of Business and Philosophy and Distinguished Teaching Professor at the University of Texas at Austin. He has published widely, including The Passions, In the Spirit of Hegel, About Love, A Passion for Justice, Ethics and Excellence, Up the University, and coedited with Kathleen M. Higgins the Routledge History of Philosophy volume on German Idealism.

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DEATH AND PHILOSOPHY Edited by Jeff Malpas and Robert C.Solomon

London and New York

First published 1998 by Routledge 11 New Fetter Lane, London EC4P 4EE This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2002. Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada by Routledge 29 West 35th Street, New York, NY 10001 © 1998 for editorial and selection matter, Jeff Malpas and Robert C.Solomon; individual articles, the contributors All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Death and philosophy/edited by Jeff Malpas and Robert C.Solomon. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. 1. Death. I. Malpas, J.E. II. Solomon, Robert C. BD444.D367 1998 128'.5–dc21 ISBN 0-203-19515-9 Master e-book ISBN

ISBN 0-203-26311-1 (Adobe eReader Format) ISBN 0-415-19143-2 (hbk) 0-415-19144-0 (pbk)

TO WHANGAITI

CONTENTS Notes on the contributors Preface 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12

vi viii

Death and philosophy: Introduction JEFF MALPAS AND ROBERT C.SOLOMON

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My death TEM HORWITZ

5

Against death REINHARD STEINER

15

On the purported insignificance of death IVAN SOLL

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Death and the skeleton KATHLEEN HIGGINS

35

Death, the bald scenario BETTY S.FLOWERS

45

Death as transformation in classical Daoism ROGER T.AMES

51

Death and enlightenment ROBERT WICKS

64

Death and detachment GRAHAM PARKES

75

Death and metaphysics PETER KRAUS

88

Death and authenticity JULIAN YOUNG

101

Death and the unity of a life JEFF MALPAS

108

13 14

The antinomy of death PETER LOPTSON

121

Death fetishism, morbid solipsism ROBERT C.SOLOMON

136

Notes

158

References

178

Index

184

THE CONTRIBUTORS Roger Ames is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Hawaii, in Honolulu, and editor of the journal Philosophy East-West. His books include The Art of Rulership: A Study of Ancient Chinese Political Thought and (with J.Baird Callicott) Nature in Asian Traditions of Thought: Essays in Environmental Philosophy. He is the author of numerous articles on aspects of Chinese philosophy and culture as well as the editor of a number of collections. Betty Sue Flowers is Professor of English at the University of Texas at Austin. She is the author of Browning and the Modern as well as of a number of volumes of poetry including Extending the Shade. Kathleen Higgins is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Texas at Austin. She is the author of Nietzsche’s Zarathustra and (with Robert C. Solomon) of A Very Brief History of Philosophy as well as editor (with Bernd Magnus) of The Cambridge Companion to Nietzsche. Tem Horwitz is the managing partner of Horwitz-Matthews, in Chicago Illinois, and, in addition to his business activities, has authored or edited several books on a variety of subjects, founded Cloud Hands, and been recognized for his photographic work. Peter Kraus is a recently graduated postgraduate student at the University of Auckland and is working on the philosophy of Martin Heidegger. He is also the host and organizer of the conference from which most of these essays originated. Peter Loptson is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Saskatchewan and the (English-language) editor of Dialogue: Canadian Philosophical Review. He is the author of Theories of Human Nature, and editor of Anne Conway’s Principles of the Most Ancient and Modern Philosophy. He has published many articles on a variety of topics including the history of philosophy, modal logic, philosophy of history, and metaphysics. Jeff Malpas is currently a Humboldt Research Fellow at the University of Heidelberg. He is the author of Donald Davidson and the Mirror of Meaning and the editor of The Philosophical Papers of Alan Donagan. He has published on a variety of topics in scholarly journals and has recently completed a book on the nature and philosophical significance of place. Graham Parkes is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Hawaii. He is the editor of Nietzsche and Asian Thought and Heidegger and Asian Thought, translator of The Self-Overcoming of Nihilism by Nishitani Keiji and Heidegger’s Hidden Sources: East-Asian Influences on His Work by Reinhard May, and author of Composing the Soul: Reaches of Nietzsche’s Psychology.

Ivan Soll is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Wisconsin at Madison. He is the author of An Introduction to Hegel’s Metaphysics and of a number of articles on Hegel, Nietzsche and others. Robert C.Solomon is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Texas at Austin and the author of numerous books and articles covering a wide range of philosophical topics. His most recent publications include Ethics and Excellence, A Passion for Justice and, with Kathleen Higgins, A Short History of Philosophy. Reinhard Steiner is Professor of Art History at the University of Stuttgart. He is the author of books on Leonardo da Vinci, Egon Schiele and the figure of Prometheus in art, as well as articles in aesthetics and art history. Robert Wicks is Senior Lecturer in Philosophy at the University of Auckland. He has written on the aesthetics of Kant and Hegel, and on Schopenhauer, Nietzsche and Foucault. He has a special interest in the experiential and psychological aspects of philosophical theories. Julian Young is Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Auckland and is the author of Heidegger, Philosophy, Nazism; Nietzsche’s Theory of Art and Willing and Unwilling: A Study in the Philosophy of Arthur Schopenhauer.

PREFACE ‘Call no man happy until he is dead’ wrote unhappy Aeschylus. ‘Death is nothing’ opined the much more contented Epicurus. ‘Death is not an event in life. Death is not lived through’ wrote the early Wittgenstein. Woody Allen, following similar logic perhaps, insisted that he was not afraid to die, adding ‘I just don’t want to be there when it happens.’ When the subject is death, bon mots and deep insights, witty wisecracks and gloomy reflections intermingle. Death may be a morbid subject, but conversations and shared reflections about death have a way of producing gaiety and good humour rather than gloom, of enhancing life and forging friendships. This collection has its origins in such a conversation. The setting was remarkable: a secluded location overlooking sea, sand and soft green hills in the Bay of Islands, north of Auckland, New Zealand. No less remarkable was the hospitality of our host, Peter Kraus, who organized the meeting, and who supplied seemingly endless enthusiasm as well as excellent food and drink. Most remarkable of all, however, was undoubtedly the spirit that developed among the participants over the few days the meeting extended. When our time together came to an end, we not only left with an intense feeling of intellectual exhilaration, and some vivid memories, but with new and strengthened bonds of friendship. Such an occasion can scarcely be done justice by any collection of scholarly papers, and so this collection stands, not so much as an expression of the occasion, as a memorial to it. Special thanks are due, not only to Peter Kraus for organizing and hosting the conference, but also to those who participated and whose contributions are not contained here—Anne Salmond and Bruce Cliffe—and to all those who helped make the conference such a success, especially Hannelore Kraus, Avis Mountain, Martina Lutz, and Rose Bradford.

1 DEATH AND PHILOSOPHY Introduction Jeff Malpas and Robert C.Solomon There is an ancient tradition that says that philosophy is essentially concerned with death—whether with understanding it, reconciling oneself to it or preparing oneself for its inevitable arrival. But if that is so then it seems much contemporary philosophizing has failed to fulfil one of its essential functions, since death is a topic that is seldom addressed in contemporary philosophical discussion. There are exceptions, of course. One of the reasons that a philosopher such as Martin Heidegger figures so prominently in this collection is that Heidegger is one of the few philosophers who has indeed had a great deal to say about death. For the most part, however, death appears as a subject for contemporary philosophical discussion only at the margins—say in the context of bioethics where technical definitions of death (for example, ‘brain death’) have become important in the negotiation of several legal and ethical issues. This collection is not, however, about death as it might figure in such ‘technical’ contexts. The concern of all the contributors, whether they are expressing their own thoughts directly or discussing the thoughts of others, is emphatically personal. Their concern is with death—one’s own death—as it figures in human life and in contributing to, or perhaps even detracting from, the meaningfulness of such life. In this respect, the idea that philosophy is somehow essentially concerned with death need not reflect some peculiar morbidity on the part of the philosopher who advances such a view nor in relation to philosophy in general. Instead, it can be taken to express a view of philosophy as a form of enquiry centrally concerned with the question of what it is to be human and with the nature and meaningfulness of human existence. Certainly death or the experiences and feelings that cluster round the concept of death— experiences, for instance, of loss and sadness, of fear and foreboding, sometimes of release and thankfulness—seem to be at the heart of what it is to live a human life and of what it means to be human. Thus, whether or not we accept the claim—present not only in Heidegger, but captured also in the ancient characterization of human beings as ‘mortals’—that to be human is indeed to be destined to live a life of only limited span, still we can appreciate that, as a matter of empirical fact, human lives are indeed lives in which death plays a central role. The question is: what are we to make of this? How should we understand the relation between death and human life? Is death a source of meaningfulness or does it represent the destruction of meaningfulness? Is the effect of death to render life as nothing but an absurd show—‘A tale/Told by an idiot…/Signifying nothing’1—or might the absurdity of life in the face of death itself provide a source of meaning?

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These are the sorts of questions that take centre stage in the discussions that make up this collection. We might say of such questions that they are ‘existential’ in character. Certainly it is characteristic of many of those writers and philosophers who are often bundled together under the existentialist label (though not all—Sartre is a notable exception) that they have taken the question of death as a central and defining one just in virtue of their preoccupation with human existence. But existentialist approaches are not the only approaches that figure in the following pages. Indeed, the range of approaches is large—including approaches that derive, not only from the work of philosophers such as Heidegger and Camus, but also English-speaking ‘analytic’ philosophers such as Bernard Williams, Derek Parfitt and Thomas Nagel; non-Western approaches such as are exemplified in the Tibetan Book of the Dead and in Daoist thought; and approaches deriving from the writings of figures within the history of Western philosophy such as Lucretius, Epicurus and Nietzsche. This collection thus includes a variety of different philosophical perspectives on death—in some cases perspectives strongly informed by literary and aesthetic considerations and, in one case, by especially close personal experience. The first essay by Tem Horwitz recounts one case of so-called ‘near death experience’ as undergone by someone with philosophical training and sensitivities. Although in some respects a personal memoir the essay is an especially appropriate starting place for the collection, for whatever else death may be, it is first and foremost something personal. Indeed, whatever our philosophical viewpoint, the personal face of death is something that cannot be avoided. Elias Canetti’s rejection of death, the subject of Reinhard Steiner’s essay, provides an instance of an extreme and very personal reaction to the fact of death. Canetti’s position bears comparison with Dylan Thomas’s exhortation to his dying father ‘Do not go gentle into that good night; rage, rage against the dying of the light’2 (though Thomas’s use of the phrase ‘good night’ to refer to death would seem to go against Canetti’s utterly uncompromising rejection of death). Canetti would have us rage against death and sets his face against those—Heidegger amongst them—who seem to want us to somehow ‘accept’ death and make it our own. For Canetti death is not impersonal, but represents the very destruction of personhood, of what is human and what is valuable. Of course the extremity of Canetti’s reaction against death is matched, at the other extreme, by the attitude of those philosophers—notably Lucretius—who have argued that death should be accounted as of little or no consequence. It is this tradition that is the focus for Ivan Soll’s discussion—does such an attitude, asks Soll, amount to anything more than a futile whistling before the darkness comes? Of course even those philosophers who would have us dismiss the significance of death as an event still emphasize, if sometimes only implicitly, the absolutely central importance of arriving at an appropriate understanding of death for a proper understanding of human life and for the proper living of such a life. In this respect these first three essays all share an affirmation of the possibilities of life that arise precisely out of our attitude towards death. Indeed, for many of the essays in this volume, the significance of death is not to be found in the mere fact of the cessation of existence that is death itself, but rather in the relation between the fact of death and the possibilities for vital and fulfilled human life. Thus Kathy Higgins’s skeleton is much more the merry figure to be seen in the Mexican festival of the dead than the ossified melancholic of Gothic horror or melodrama. Higgins’s essay also introduces a theme that is common to a

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number of the essays here—the idea of human life as constituted in terms of a narrative or story that, like all good stories, at some point comes to an end. Betty Sue Flowers picks up this idea in one form—as a source of creative possibility in the shaping and directing of a life. According to Flowers death itself brings its own stories with it and the narratives with which we present death to ourselves are narratives that also shape who and what we are or could be. The variety of narratives within which death can be presented is exemplified by the variety of different ways in which death is understood within different cultural settings. Thus Roger Ames provides us with a discussion of Daoist perspectives on death as they arise within the Chinese tradition—perspectives strikingly different from some commonly assumed ‘Western’ attitudes or, at least, from some commonly assumed accounts of those attitudes. Bob Wicks gives us an insight into the understanding of death—and the understanding of enlightenment—within Tibetan Buddhism as exemplified in the Tibetan ‘Book of (or for) the Dead’. Graham Parkes’s essay provides another opportunity to explore and compare different ways of thinking about death as Parkes juxtaposes Montaigne, Nietzsche and Heidegger with Dōgen, Shōsan, and Nishitani. The variety of ways in which death is understood and the variety of forms death may take on in different cultural or social contexts need not imply, however, that there is nothing to be said about death from a more purely ‘metaphysical’ perspective. Indeed, the essays of Ames, Parkes and Wicks are as much concerned with understanding death, as with understanding different attitudes towards death. The essays by Kraus and Young focus much more closely on death as such, however, and on the way in which death figures in the work of the philosopher who is often taken, at least in his early work, to exemplify a preoccupation with death, namely, Martin Heidegger. Kraus and Young both examine the role played by death in relation to a number of other central concepts in Heidegger’s thought. Kraus is primarily concerned with the relation between death, nothingness and being, and with the idea that the very possibility of metaphysics might itself be intimately tied to the possibility of death. Young focuses more directly on the relation between death and the Heideggerian notion of ‘authenticity’. In some respects Malpas’s essaycontinues the Heideggerian theme. Yet it does so by calling upon arguments to be found in the work of philosophers other than Heidegger, including those within the so-called ‘analytic’ tradition, in an attempt to clarify why death might be necessary for any properly human life. This is also an idea taken up, without the Heideggerian connection, by Peter Loptson. Combining Kantian and Darwinian ideas, Loptson argues that while death is surely an evil, it is an evil that is probably unavoidable for creatures constituted as we are. The final essay in the collection, that by Bob Solomon, returns us to some of the themes present in the earlier essays of the collection—to questions of how death should be approached, how it should be represented—and to the matter of the implications for our understanding of ourselves and the sorts of lives we live of our attitudes towards the fact of our dying. As an essay that is itself concerned to undermine a certain form of

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fetishism about death (a fetishism that may be thought to be expressed in the very idea that death somehow has a pivotal role in giving sense or meaning to life), Solomon’s discussion is not an instance of melancholic brooding on the fact of death nor of its heroic aggrandizement. Instead, as with all the papers collected here, it attempts, in its own way, to place death in the context of life and in so doing to render a view of death that paints it in the only colours available to us—colours that derive from a thoroughly human set of concerns, values and commitments. In this respect, too, Solomon’s essay can be taken to reassert a central theme throughout this collection—that the connection between death and philosophy is a connection established through recognition of the philosophical project as fundamentally concerned with the nature and meaning of what it is to be human.

2 MY DEATH Reflections on my journey into non-being Tem Horwitz It was perfectly clear to me what was happening. I was dying. Yet at the time of my death in September of 1995 there was no fear, no struggling, no desperation, no confusion and no bewilderment. Yet as I sit here reading my wife’s account of my death I am filled with terror. In the middle of the night, during the Labor Day weekend, I went into anaphylactic shock. Later, it would appear that this was induced by exposure to excessive moulds in the air in our country house, and by drinking beer preserved with sulphites. In my middle years I have become acutely sensitive to both. Our second home sits on high dunes above Lake Michigan on a lot that is a mile deep, heavily wooded and remote. A spectacular and private spot. A mile from a paved road. Ten miles from town. Waking up in the middle of the night, having great difficulty breathing, I realized that I was in trouble. I woke my wife and told her succinctly, ‘We have to go.’ She understood immediately. She jumped from bed, put on a few clothes, grabbed her backpack, and helped me as we stumbled in total darkness toward the parking lot. I told her to take her car. Her car has a car phone, mine does not. In the car I fought for my breath, for my life. I withdrew into myself. I knew that I was in the process of dying. I watched it happening. There was no fear; the experience itself was too compelling. During this period of time, which was probably less than ten minutes, all of my attachments to this world dwindled to nothing. Susan’s voice was distant, remote, removed from my experience. I could hear her talking to me and then I could no longer make sense of the words. ‘Hold on.’ ‘Holeone.’ ‘Hoooooooo.’ As I sat there struggling to breathe I watched the dashboard in front of me lose its definition. The lights lost their brightness. Everything turned a dark grey, and then black. My body began to feel very heavy. I could feel the weight in the middle of my back. I let everything settle down into my centre, not struggling with this feeling of heaviness. I responded weakly to Susan, partly because of the physical state that I was in but largely because I was totally absorbed in the process of dying. My head felt huge and heavy like a boulder. I felt my body toppling. I could not tell in which direction I was falling. Falling. My last breaths were shallow with long exhalations, and finally no inhalationsbut a long final exhalation that felt, from the inside, like a Disney cartoon of a fiery dragon belching fire followed by overpowering sound effects. Roaring. Thunderous. Tolstoy, in ‘The Death of Ivan Ilych’, writes as Ilych is dying ‘all that had then seemed joys now melted before his sight and turned into something trivial…’1 For me the experience was not of watching the rest of my life become ‘trivial’ but of having my attention totally focused on this experience.

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Tolstoy appears to have understood a great deal of what I experienced. Ivan Ilych, as he approaches death, watches as the external world of his home, family, doctors, retainers starts to fade away. There is an indifference to the world, and to his life as he had lived it. It ‘was all dropping away’. So for me, in a much shorter time frame, my life dropped away from me. It was remote and distant. Let me return later to the indifference. Ivan Ilych’s dying was slow and painful, yet as he gets closer and closer to death Tolstoy writes—‘“And the pain?” he asked himself. “What has become of it? Where are you pain?” “Yes here it is. Well what of it? Let the pain be.”’2 So for me too, there was pain and discomfort—after all I couldn’t breathe—however, it was isolated and detached from my experience of dying. Though I shared with Ivan Ilych his death rattle I did not see the ‘light’ and experience the death of death as Tolstoy writes. Perhaps here Tolstoy was wandering off into the theological, or conjuring up death as he would have liked it to be. It is ironic, as I sit here writing, that I am going to put my experiences into a chronology. I am about to write about the ‘dissolution of time’, yet I find myself organizing my experiences in time so as to make sense of them for you, and for me in the telling. As I stopped breathing and felt myself retreating further and further into another realm I was conscious of feeling tremendously heavy. My body accumulated a weightiness that was not attached to any sensation of solidity. There was just heaviness and the feeling of being down, down, down. My body was dissolving, leaving me free of any physical constraints. Was this the moment of my death rattle and the moment when I toppled over in the car beside Susan? I do not know. Though I was not conscious of it at the time, the experience of dying was so engrossing that it left me totally alone. There was no one present at my death—albeit Susan was at my side. This was a solitary journey. No company allowed. The part of me that has always stood aside as an observer of myself, as well as of the world, was left alone—free of distractions—to observe the process of death. This part of myself is quite familiar to ‘me’—excuse me, to whom? As a child I spent a great deal of time hovering between life and death. I was severely asthmatic, and at that time the treatment for asthma was extremely limited. The treatment consisted of medication designed to relax my lungs, cut with speed to keep me up there and a downer to ensure that I didn’t go too far. This is when I came to know intimately this part of myself and to become comfortable in this detached state. I remember many hours spent staring through lace curtains at the sky and at the branches and the leaves of an old, majestic maple tree outside my window. In later years when I began to take psychedelic mushrooms I was at once at home, having returned to a very familiar world—a world in which my consciousness was detached from my body and was free to roam about. As a young, healthy adult experimenting with drugs I had much more mobility, companionship and stimulation. I recall tripping with friends recently returned from spending three years in New Guinea, the first outsiders to live with a previously unvisited tribe. They had spent their time learning the language and studying with the local shamans and participating in the tribal rituals and ceremonies. As we stared at the shaman’s shield—a triangular shield, perhaps 3 feet tall with black and pale red triangles painted on it—we each had the experience of having part of ourselves drawn through the negative spaces in the shield into another world. There was an elasticity to our consciousness, we went through the shield and were

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pulled back into the room by conversation, music, movements. It was too scary for any of us simply to leave and possibly not return through that shield. Nevertheless it was too exciting and magical not to be drawn back into it. This consciousness or spirit or whatever we want to call it was the same observer who was present at my death. Digressing a little more, as a graduate student in the late Sixties at Columbia, in New York, I recall joking with some very bad Puerto Rican gang members in New York on 110th Street who had a knife at my throat and who wanted my money. I again experienced a splitting off of my consciousness from my body. I can still feel the sharp, cold point of the knife in my throat—it was a winter evening with light snow falling— while I joked around with them and explained why I wasn’t going to give them my money and why in fact they shouldn’t even want to take my money. After an eternity or a minute or a few seconds one of them removed the blade of the knife from below my jaw…The guy raised his head up in a sign of recognition, a sudden and complete relaxing of the tensions that had built up. Laughter. They turned and continued strolling down 110th Street. I continued on my way in the opposite direction. I was yanked back into time and my consciousness and body were in their everyday relationship, one to the other. More of this consciousness later. Let me keep up with my chronology. Sounds. There was only one sound component of this experience. At what I take to have been one of the stages of my biological death there was a tremendous roar that came from out of nowhere. It felt like I was hearing my body from the inside, listening to the roar of my heart and my vital organs. There was no beat, like the beat of the heart, just a tremendous all encompassing roar. The sound of water rushing through a gorge. I felt the fury and the rage and the potency of death, not my awareness of death, but the thing itself. At this point the heaviness changed to a feeling of immersion in a liquid far heavier than water, a blue-black solvent that seemed to dissolve the substantiality of the material world so there was no longer solidity, stability or substantiality. This medium, this solvent, dissolved the very adhesive that heldmy world together. This was the universal solvent. All of the connections in the physical world disappeared. Here I was in this great nothingness—no longer black or void or silent or heavy— nothing, nothing, nothing. The part of me that was experiencing this state was again too curious to be fearful or confused. There was nothing terrifying about this geography. I supposed that this is what death is—a realm without space, without time, without definition, without stimulation. In this realm there was no longer a sense of self, ego, consciousness, body. There was no longer the same observer to observe for there was no distinction between the me and the it, the place or non-place, the me or the not-me. Sorry. Still no feeling of bliss, of great peace, or of love. Emotionless. It was what it was. No boundaries, no beginning, no end, no starting point, no definition. Infinite, limitless, uncompounded, simple, clear unrestricted Space. When I was a child I had two dreams that recurred over and over for many years. In the first the creatures that appeared at the foot of my bed as day turned into dusk would try to abduct me in the middle of the night. They would drag me from my bed toward the stairs and then down the stairs. They would wrestle with me and I would struggle until I forced myself from sleep. In the beginning I would awaken myself by screaming. As time

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went on I learned to force myself out of sleep without screaming. The contest in my eyes was one of life and death. If they succeeded in dragging me down the stairs I would die. Some nights I would wake to find myself standing at the head of the stairs or part of the way down the stairs. Over time the struggle continued to have life or death as its end point, but it no longer had the component of fear. At times I would piss down the carpeted stairs as a sign to myself that I had triumphed. ‘Piss on them’, marking my turf, leaving a reminder to them that I had survived and was contemptuous of them. A warning to them to stay away. For better or worse this is how I learned to live my life. All contests involve life and death. All battles in life are to the death. That is the way it is for me. When I was 18 years old I stopped playing tennis. My father believes it was because I was not competitive enough. I will never be able to explain to him that tennis for me was a life and death contest, as was chess, or ping pong. At 18 it no longer seemed worthy of that intensity. The contest was not worthy of the prize. The second dream took place in unlimited space in which there was only myself and a massive ball. It was a ball whose mass far exceeded its size, like a giant ball-bearing made out of a dense and exotic metal. It moved without sound through a space that was undifferentiated—no foreground, no background. It moved without friction. Its presence was menacing in a non-specific way. It felt like all of the energy of the universe was contained within this sphere. The ball either drew me to it or prevented me from moving because of its mass and presence. Nothing more happened in this dream. There was no other activity, no passage of time, no differentiation of the space. There was no way to ignore the force of the ball nor the immensity of the universe in which it existed. It was a world that was menacing without being frightening. Let me return to my tale. It is very difficult to describe time through this sequence. It ceased to be the medium through which I was moving. There was no forward, no backward, no future, no past—only a present that contained everything. All eternity was in that present. Next. When? In time? In sequence? In space? Next, colours. One colour at a time. The colours blending into one another. Each colour occupied the entire field of my perceptions. Much like the space that was filled with energy that was in my dream, but here colour dominated. Each colour had a physical dimension and presence as well as a visual dimension. These colours were not bright primary colours, but the colours that you see, faded, on old plaster walls in Central European apartments. Muted colours. But energized. Absorbing colours—I was part of them, undifferentiated from them. There was no emotional content to this universe. The colours were complete and compelling and unrestricted. Each phase passed with no differentiation, no distinctions, and no boundaries. There both was and was not an observer. There was no distinction between the me, the perceiver, and the it, the place. I’m certain that there is some more elegant way of describing this experience which highlights the fact that wherever it was that I was, was part of me and yet not part of me. Perhaps not. There was something basically wordless about the experience. It was an environment, a universe—let me call it that—that was complete and all encompassing and yet the perceiver was part of the perception. It was some place, not ‘no place’, not an undifferentiated world of blackness, not a void, nothingness.

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What is the time frame with which we measure our lives? How do we account for time? The answer is slightly different for each of us. But death adds a potency and focus to this question. Our relationship and perceived proximity to death adjusts our clocks. It is the clock we watch to find out when the exam is over, when the workday comes to an end. ‘Lay down your pencils!’ Lay down your lives. Grab your lunchbox. Hold on for dear life. How does the world ‘feel’ once we have given it up, or once we have relinquished its delights and pleasures, its pain and irritations? Dying removed me from the clutches of time. There was no present for me—transient or otherwise—during this period. How can I describe it. As we sit here and as you read this you are aware to some degree of the passage of time. As post-industrial creatures we are always, on some level, aware of time. Even those of us who are habitually late are in fact habitually late. With my friends and associates I can tell when they are going to arrive at a meeting—some are on time, some are early, some are predictably late. How is it that most of us can wake up when we want to or need to? How many of us awaken exactly two seconds before the alarm goes off? Even my first wife—who amazed me, and others, for years, with her lateness—was predictable. We don’t encounter manypeople who are 5 or 6 hours late for a dinner party that they have gone to a great deal of trouble to arrange and to host. People generally don’t go away for the weekend and return six months later. This woman had a great deal to teach on the relativity and manipulation of time, and perhaps of people too. To describe time as I experienced it requires that I compare it to the ordinary time in which we lead our lives. Each state or place that I visited lasted forever. Look at this paper with these words printed on it for a moment and try to keep the image from changing. Not possible. My experiences were not experiences that were subject to time or change or transition. The colours and sounds were not diminished by time. The changes from one frame to the next were unconditional. There were no slow fades into another scene. What was, was—and that is all that there ‘was’—and then it was something else. Coming back I had great difficulty adjusting to the world of activities and time and appointments and schedules. I could not pay attention to clocks, to the time of day, to the light and darkness of the world. My life was out of the reach of time. Perhaps this is why after thirty years of not wearing a watch I now wear one—precisely to keep me attached to this world of time and schedules and activities. My death had the effect of placing me squarely in the present. What I experienced while dying or dead were ‘presents’, slices of time. On my return to the land of the living I retained this sense of the ‘present’. The first two days were perfect, clear, timeless states. The people around me came and went. The nurses changed. Susan was there and was not there. For the most part I was awake. The transitions from waking to sleep were seamless. Sleep was dreamless. Awake I was free of dreaming, wondering, speculating, fantasizing, analysing. My thoughts would rise up slowly and clearly. They would then dissolve into nothing. No residue. No recycling. No tapes playing the same thoughts over and over. Initially there were abysses between thoughts. Vast empty spaces between thoughts. Peace.

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There was a tremendous sense of freedom. These moments were what they were. They lacked nothing. They were complete in and of themselves. I could conceive of no happiness outside of these moments. There was no future. I could not for that first week focus on what was to happen the next day, the next week, the next moment. Without a future to think about there was also nothing to worry about. I could feel no anxiety because I was where I was, comfortable, healthy, warm, well fed. Trips to the hardware store, bank accounts, letters left unwritten all seemed remote and irrelevant. There was nothing that I wanted to do or felt that I had to do. There was no vestige of self-importance left. It felt like death had obliterated my ego, the attachments that I had, my history, and who I had been. Death had been very democratic. It had eliminated innumerable distinctions. With one bold stroke my past had been erased. I had no identity in death. It didn’t stay erased—some would say that this was the real tragedy—but it was erased for a time. Gone was my personal history with all of its little vanities. The totality of myself was changed. The ‘me’ was much smaller and much more compact than it had been. All that there was, was right in front of me. I felt incredibly light. Personality was a vanity, an elaborate delusion, a ruse. Let me describe it in another way. My clock had been reset. Time had stopped for me. I had died. I was no more. Time restarted when I was pulled back into this world in the emergency room of the hospital. Suddenly someone was calling my name, talking to me, I could feel the tube inserted painfully in my throat. Susan was present. From the sublime to the emergency room. On the one hand I felt that I had a glimpse of eternity and had abruptly been drawn back into a world in which time is measured from moment to moment, from breath to breath, from day to day, from year to year, from pay-cheque to pay-cheque. How does it feel once the elusive pleasures of the future have been stripped from us? Removed from time for those first days after my death, I felt a wonderful lightness. A feeling of relief at being able to drop the heavy bags that I had been carting around on an endless, repetitious voyage. Not even a backpack was required. I had been delivered from the petty aggravations and anxieties of my life. It was not glorious, filled with a love of all things great and small, or a world consumed by grace. It was emotionless, liberated from memory, light and airy. Things were what they were as they appeared to me in time and space. Having lost touch with the past, and not daydreaming into the future, I was lodged in the present. This present was peaceful, free of anxiety, free of discursive thinking, no tapes playing and replaying in my head. I was simply content to lie around in the emergency room, in the hospital, to sit around the house going about my business. My days were filled with a quietness and stillness and sweetness. Clear and timeless. There was nothing outside of the sweep of those days. I had caught a glimpse of eternity, and I was content to dwell in its embrace. I still feel touches of that embrace in my daily life, now, a year and half later. This may not be the ideal personality type and state to be in for a real estate developer, or it may be. I find myself spending more time waiting in the field of time for the players and events to approach me, in the proper configuration, before I take the trouble to act. Some things I feel that I can no longer accomplish. They require too much energy of a sort that I am not willing to expend and are far too aggravating. Many other things get done quickly, and cleanly, and seemingly without effort.

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My death clarified thoughts that I have had about time and human achievement since I was a child living in the shadow of my own death. My old life was over—it had come and gone and was no more. It was no longer mine, as it had been before dying. When I died it was the end, it was all that she wrote, the fat lady had sung. All of my work, my family, my creations and constructions, my achievements seemed of little consequence to me. They would continue to exist or not with or without me. They were not dependent on my presence any more. They were gone from me, beyond my grasp. They were no longer mine. Time, my time, was consequently as it was when I was a child without serious obligations and responsibilities. I could never conceive, when I was a child how it could ultimately matter if I lived or died. Life would go on without me. A few people would grieve. Then they too would be gone. I could not differentiate between dying as a child and dying as an adult. They both seemed like they would be the same after I had died. I remember thinking as a child that in either case I would still be dead for the same amount of time. I can still remember my mother’s shocked and perplexed look when I asked her, during one of my medically altered states of consciousness, if I wasn’t going to be dead for the same amount of time if I died now or in fifty years. In the eyes of eternity, and through my eyes as a child, a short life and a long life looked the same. Having come through the ‘cuisinart’ of death, for a time the world looked and felt more uniform, blended, undifferentiated, and much less substantial than it had before, and than it does now. People and things had an air of impermanence or permeability. I felt as if I was looking through things as much as looking at things. The space between and around people had as much definition and substance and importance as the people themselves. The emptiness had form and significance. I had a difficult time attaching the appropriate significance to the highly differentiated people and things in the world. The hierarchy was lost. I was still immersed in the whole and could not concentrate sufficiently on the parts. My sight, the way I saw the world, was radically altered. The material world no longer appeared to be solid. My perceived world was full of holes, empty spaces. The people around me, the walls, the chairs, the windows were no longer substantial in the way that they had been before my death. Months later I saw a cheaply printed black and white poster stapled to a telephone pole advertising a Seurat exhibit. The image from one of his paintings had been enlarged so that the gaps—the black holes between the dots that constituted the image—were prominent. This was very similar to the way that the world had looked to me in the period just after my death. Over the course of the next several weeks the world started looking more like a pointillist painting—dots of colour with smaller spaces between them. I wondered if it was my mind that was filling in the gaps between the dots, if part of this landscape was being created by me. Over a period of months I began to see more or less—more or less—as I had before my death. However, as I sit here writing, it is still possible to look at the scene in front of me and allow it to deconstruct. As a consequence of watching people deconstruct before my eyes, my attachments to the people whom I love are now to a lesser extent to their physical bodies. Indeed the whole physical world looks and feels much less substantial that it did before my death. Deep feelings remain but with less direct connection to loved ones’ physical manifestations and embodiments. I find myself looking at people with a curious

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detachment, trying to figure out what the connection is between their bodies and their non-body selves. In the process of dying I felt my attachments slipping away. I was alone. On my return I was free for a time of the cares and concerns and anxieties of this world. There was a lightness, which I have described, but there was also an indifference, a detachment from my world. Sartre, in ‘The Wall’, describes how his principal character loses interest in everything around him as he gets closer to his execution. Indifference replaces emotions like anger or hatred. He realizes that he is not even going to miss the things to which he thought he was most attached in this life. ‘Death had disenchanted everything.’3 Looking death in the eye, the world was no longer ‘enchanted’ or fascinating. Once he realizes that he is going to die, that he is not immortal, time loses significance. What is the difference between living a little while longer or a lot longer? He looks at his executioners and sees men, like himself, who are going to die despite their petty vanities and self-importance. Everyone is going to die. Everyone is dying, awaiting only the moment of their death. His fate, like ours, turns on a dime. The man whom he has tried to save is found where he was not supposed to be, and is killed, and he lives. He laughs till he cries recognizing the absurdity of what has happened. My experiences parallel these. But not completely. Indifference replaces other emotions, like anger and envy. The presence of death is an eraser that clears off much that is filling the blackboard. When life gets too cluttered and confused, when you have somehow strayed from the path, consult with death. Thoughts of death clarify and clear the blackboard of unimportant material. When I was in my mid-twenties and experiencing the angst and despair that sometimes appears at that age I took comfort in the thought that I was going to die, that no matter how horrible things felt and no matter how miserable I was and how filled with anxiety, there would one day be an end to the pain. The thought of death, and the relief that it would bring, always cheered me up. All pain was endurable if I knew that there was going to be an end to it. Much that had been grim or disagreeable or distressing could be viewed as scenes from the theatre. I was moved by events, but no longer so deeply attached to them. From this perspective most of life simply became live entertainment. Seeing the worst of it as entertainment allowed me to begin to discriminate and to see for myself what was of some significance and what was mere human folly. A different consideration of life began for me at this point. I had discovered the consolation of death. This great insight, which I felt compelled to share with my friends, appeared to leave them unmoved, confused or depressed. I concluded that the manner in which people try to understand death and life is dictated as much by temperament as by logic. My counter-phobic temperament is one temperament among many, but one which was very much at play in my experience of my death. Camus, in a style, or with a temperament, that strikes me as very French, looks at the ‘naked reality’ of this world and finds no consolation, no hope, no solace from the crushing certainty of fate. There is no reprieve in religion or in the philosophical thought that he has known. The answer for him to this central philosophical question about the meaning of our lives, lies in man’s revolt against the absurdity of his fate in this remorseless world. Revolt, creation, defiance, pride are the conqueror’s attitude and constitute the only triumph for man. Man triumphs over his fate by his lucid indifference

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to it, and exults in the freedom that comes from accepting life on these terms. The liberty of living life wilfully. This thought strikes a chord, though it does sound very tiring. Think of poor Sisyphus and his triumph—‘There is no fate that cannot be surmounted by scorn.’4 Creation, revolt, pride, will, freedom. Exhausting! Brilliant! Useful? To some, I suppose. Given Camus’s understanding of the vastness of time and space and the limitations of human achievement, he is forced, because of his own personal ambitions and seriousness, to create a dramatic juxtaposition in which heroism, romanticism, drama and a certain posturing provide the emotional and intellectual solution to the problem. Whatever else, Camus is never easygoing. For most of us it is not enough to think of ourselves as an infinitesimal part of a vast universe with an existence in time that is absurdly small. Because we find no consolation in this vastness, we attempt to find meaning in our lives that is somehow outside of our lives. When we begin to question seriously the meaning of our lives we are usually consumed by doubt as to its meaning. We confer meaning to our lives, we continue to work and to live beyond the requirements of providing a roof over our heads and food for our stomachs, because in addition to being creatures of habit our actions give us some pleasure. Our reflections and our scepticism add their own particular spice to each of our lives be it a gravity, a remoteness, an anger, an irony, a bitterness or a sense of humour. Each of these is a plausible response to our consciousness of the limitations of our existence. For myself, fear was never part of my thinking about death. I recognize that this is not a conventional response. Mention death and dying to people and you will see a good deal of cringing. As my mother was dying I recall the simple clarity of the situation. She was old, her body was worn out, and she was ready to die. For virtually everyone else there was a medical solution that was going to solve the ‘problem’. Somehow medicine was to grant her immortality. There was no fear in her, just a desire to die at home and not in a hospital hooked up to grotesque life support systems. All of the pithy homilies in the world may not be enough to eliminate a fear of death that is embedded in each of us to varying degrees and at varying depths. But an easy familiarity with death may be a fine relationship to have with this adviser. When we are the most despondent about our lives, we can look to death as our liberator and mentor. Nothing cures a diseased life as definitively as death. After my mini-death, overcome by feelings of emptiness and indifference, finding myself living in a body that was miraculously free of aches and pains, I wondered to myself, ‘And now what?’ What was to happen next? There was not much left to which to cling. With less to cling to I felt surprisingly strong and considerably less vulnerable. My only vulnerability, or sadness, or retroactive sense of loss, was that I might not have been able to watch my children grow up—largely selfish. And that they would not have their biological father around to bounce their identities off of, and to challenge through adolescence into adulthood. My feeling of indifference combined with a sense of sadness as the days wore on. I couldn’t look at anyone or anything without reflecting on impermanence. I saw my children growing old and decrepit and dying. I saw the buildings which I have constructed being torn down, or worse, becoming old and rundown and shabby. I kept

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thinking that all of our achievements, all our creations, all our labours, all our hopes and dreams of at least some limited immortality—all of this perishing in this vast ocean of existence. My sadness was in turn replaced by an old familiar sense of the simple enjoyment of life. I could love this life because I knew that it was rich in pleasures and whatever pain or deterioration or anguish or infirmity I was going to face, it would end. It would be extinguished by death. I had witnessed how my life could end at any moment. It was this fact that gave pleasure to my daily life filled with its trivial actions. Life is not ordinary or boring because of the mystery of death. My activities had meaning and were complete in themselves without reference to any external reference or justification because I was not immortal, because I was not going to live forever. I was alive and living my life. I needed no more. What makes my life interesting and confers some purpose to it is that my actions, any of which may be my last, are manifestations of my will in the face of my death. My battle with death is one that ultimately I will lose. All of my struggles are indeed struggles for life, but the ferocity of the struggle and the exercise of my will is what bestows interest and poignancy on life. I exercise my will in my struggle to live so as not to be taken by death passively or due to carelessness. All of my battles are indeed battles for life. My creations are the record on my journey into nonexistence. Any inattentiveness can result in death. Death adds a potency and concentration to life. It is a most reliable counsellor.

3 AGAINST DEATH The case of Elias Canetti1 Reinhard Steiner “Death is an insult”—but how to describe that?2 In the preface of a new edition of the notes and aphorisms, that appeared under the title The Human Province, Elias Canetti (winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1981) confesses that, with respect to the question that is the most important for him, namely the question of death, he had found, among other thinkers, only adversaries.3 It is not surprising, I think, that Canetti found himself in such an isolated position, for his view on this matter seems to me rather peculiar.4 To summarize: Canetti is neither interested in natural or biological death nor death by violence whether individual or collective5; unlike Epicurus he does not promote ataraxia toward death, nor does he recommend an ‘owning up’ to death in the manner of Heidegger or even Rilke;6 it is not his own individual death nor death of the species which truly preoccupies him neither is it that Death whose clutches we can never escape no matter the mythical powers or hippocratic tricks to which we resort; Canetti’s preoccupation is rather with that death to which we not only reconcile but accommodate ourselves—a death who does not come as an unexpected guest, a stranger suddenly at the door, but as a familiar acquaintance, one we invite in willingly, one whom we accept and indeed desire. This latter idea can be better understood by looking to some of Canetti’s own words on this topic. In The Human Province, for example, he writes: People always ask you what you mean when you rail against death. They want the cheap hopes from you that are droned about in religions ad nauseam. But I know nothing. I have nothing to say about it. My character, my pride consist in my never having flattered death. Like everyone else, I have sometimes, very seldom, wished for it, but no man has ever heard me praising death, no one can say that I have bowed to it, that I have acknowledged or whitewashed death. I find it as useless and as evil as ever, the basic ill of all existence, the unresolved and the incomprehensible, the knot in which everything has always been tied and caught and that no one has ever dared to chop up.7 There are two important points that are relevant here. First, the rather general attack upon all religion, which, in Canetti’s opinion, produces only vain hopes. Elsewhere in this regard he speaks of ‘thoroughly rigid conceptions’ and in doing so seems to indicate, on his part, an underlying rationalist critique of religious attitudes toward death. This

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critique should not, without doubt, be forgotten, and I will take it up later, but the second point is the more important: Canetti believes that the riddle of death is like a Gordian knot which no one, with the exception perhaps of Canetti himself, has ever dared to cut through. To put matters slightly differently, Canetti’s opponent is not so much death itself, as the tendency to accord death respectful recognition, even acceptance— something Canetti categorically opposes. ‘Ich anerkenne keinen Tod,’ he says, and it means ‘I do not acknowledge death in any form.’8 Canetti was of course completely conscious of the dilemma that he had created for himself. He was aware that this refusal to acknowledge death did not do away with the recognition of death as a basic evil and this is apparent in the following text: But what do you gain by the ceaseless wakefulness of this consciousness of death? Does it make you stronger? Does it help you to better protect others who are in danger? Do you give anyone encouragement by always thinking about it? This whole enormous apparatus you have erected serves no purpose. It doesn’t save anyone. It gives a false appearance of strength, no more than a boast, and is from beginning to end as helpless as any other scheme. The truth is that you have not yet found out what would be the right and valid and humanly useful attitude. You haven’t gone beyond saying no. But I curse death. I can’t help it. And if I should go blind in the process, I can’t help it, I repulse death with all my strength. If I accepted it, I would be a murderer.9 At first glance one may be tempted to offer a psychological diagnosis here and attribute to Canetti a rather serious case of repression in respect of death. Or, failing that, even a peculiar paranoia of a sort that occasionally clears, allowing him to recognize its futility, but from which he is then led to a phase in which he harbours feelings or fantasies of omnipotence when anything seems possible. And yet I believe that one should not interpret Canetti so superficially. Canetti’s last sentence, ‘If I accepted death, I would be a murderer,’ should make us consider whether, in fact, we do sometimes approach death in an all too complacent manner—whether, if we accept death as a normal and inevitable event, we do not indeed become killers. Before we can respond to such a suggestion in a satisfactory way, we should, however, give some attention to Canetti’s aforementioned critique of religion.

Canetti’s critique of the attempt by religion to give meaning to death It is clearly a fact, for Canetti, that religions have historically reacted to the unsatisfactory finitude of life by treating death either as a transition to another life or as a redemption of this one. ‘What religions do’, argues Canetti, ‘seems useful to some people. It is true that they mellow the dreadful edge of parting and give hope to those who are less affected, the ones remaining alive. However, religion’s chief sin is against the dead, over whom it decrees as if it had the right to do so and possessed some knowledge about their destiny.’10

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Here we find the idea—also to be found in Schopenhauer among others—of religion as providing an antidote to the fear of death. But more than this Canetti asserts that religion perpetrates, in fact, an injustice against the dead inasmuch as it treats the dead as beings who are at its disposal; it treats the dead as beings whose fate it is up to religion to decide; it treats them as beings who have no voice. Canetti bases this contention upon ideas present in the works of Confucius, which, along with similar ideas from the Epic of Gilgamesh and from parts of the Old Testament, he views as important predecessors to his own. So, from Confucius, ‘If one does not yet know life, how should one know death?’11 Canetti comments upon this sentence, which Confucius used to evade making any commentary upon death, in the following way: He (Confucius) knows very well that all such questions (concerning death) refer to a time after death. Any answer leaps past death, conjuring away both death and its incomprehensibility. If there is something afterwards as there was something before, then death loses some of its weight. Confucius refuses to play along with this most unworthy legerdemain. He does not say there is nothing afterwards, he cannot know. But one has the impression that he does not really care about finding out, even if he could. All value is thereby put on life itself; anything of radiance or earnestness that one has taken away from life by putting a good, perhaps the best part of its strength behind death is restored to life. Thus, life remains whole, it remains what it is, and even death remains intact, they are not interchangeable, not comparable. They never blend, they are distinct.12 It is clear from these sentences, that, even if Canetti had read Heidegger or Jaspers, he would not share their views. He rejects, not only religious conceptions, but also any philosophical conception that proposes the possibility of an ‘art of dying’ (ars moriendi). He even goes so far as to reject any view, such as that of Socrates or Sartre, that accepts the possibility of death as being, under certain circumstances, better even than a degraded form of life.13 Yet although the position here is clear enough, Canetti defends that position with arguments that are not easily comprehensible: ‘Why do you resist the notion that death is already present in the living? Is it not within you? It is within me because I have to attack it. It is for this and for no other purpose that I need it, for this that I got myself infected with it.’14 I believe that it is neither useful nor even possible to attempt to give a consistent reading of such paradoxical sentences. They are not logical and were never intended to be. Their real status, their force and direction, is of a quite different sort. These sentences have more the character of a moral appeal whose effectiveness does not rest on the logical soundness of any argument. The heart of Canetti’s approach, and indeed its underlying basis, is thus, in my opinion, best expressed in the following proposition: ‘I approve of any fiction that makes the living behave better to one another.’15 Taking seriously this Canettian strategy of giving primacy to the fictional in directing action, I now want to take a closer look at Canetti’s hatred of death.16

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The quixotic factor My point of departure is once again Canetti’s claim that the recognition of death that consists in an acceptance of death has dangerous or even fatal consequences. In Crowds and Power Canetti formulated this idea in a way that has, from a psychological point of view, much to be said for it. His position can be summarized in the following three theses: 1 ‘All man’s designs on immortality contain something of the desire for survival.’ 2 ‘The moment of survival is the moment of power.’ 3 ‘Horror at the sight of death turns into satisfaction that it is someone else who is dead. The dead man lies on the ground while the survivor stands.’17 Because Canetti considers the existence of this wish to survive to be a basic anthropological fact, it follows that any and every human being stands always in its shadow, always wanting, hoping, that it will be the others who die. And the more who perish, the stronger the feeling of survival. According to Canetti this wish has the consequence that tyrants, for example, rejoice in the death of others, because ‘the lowest form of survival is killing’.18 Moreover recognition of this universal wish to survive leads Canetti to conclude that every philosophical and religious system that acknowledges death as something positive19 thereby exerts a corrupting influence: ‘And since we acknowledge death, we use it.’ Canetti continues: ‘Why shouldn’t there be any murderers when we consider it fitting for people to die, when we are not ashamed of it, when we have incorporated death into our institutions, as if it were their best, their most solid and meaningful foundation?’20 As fascinating as this passionate account may be, it also marks the point at which ‘analysis’ turns into ‘fiction’. In common-sense terms the structure of Canetti’s argument is as follows. Man reacts to the horror of death by integrating it into his institutions, giving it a function, making it ‘meaningful’. This is anathema to Canetti: death cannot and must not be meaningful!21 So Canetti turns to fiction to suggest that, through the complete rejection of any accommodation with death, death can be fought and ultimately overcome. Canetti quotes with approval the words of Georg Christoph Lichtenberg: ‘I do not believe it would be entirely impossible for a human being to live forever, for constant decrease does not necessarily entail the concept of cessation.’22 The seriousness with which Canetti considers this idea is indicated by his own admission that ‘What I am after is not the abolition of death, which is supposed to be impossible, I want death to be held in contempt.’23 I do not think it would be wise to interpret Canetti’s claim that the abolition of death is only ‘supposed’ to be impossible, to imply that he would seriously challenge this impossibility—that he would claim that death can indeed be avoided or evaded. Rather, it is indicative of that which he takes to be the driving force of his project as a poet. For Canetti is, of course, well aware that it is not possible to actually do away with death and yet he is nevertheless committed to the belief that it is necessary always to fight against death:

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It cannot be the Dichter’s task to deliver mankind over to death. Not closing himself off to anyone, he will be stunned to learn of the growing power of death in many people. Even if all people consider it a futile undertaking, he will shake away at it and never, under any circumstances, capitulate. It will be his pride to resist and fight—with devices different from theirs—the envoys of nothingness, who are growing more and more numerous in literature…24 Common sense again tells us that since death is inescapable, it would be absurd to resist it. However, as a poet, one has, as Canetti has, the duty to reject all accommodations with death, all justifications of the acceptability of death, since all such accommodations achieve nothing less than the legitimation of death. And it is indeed only as a poet that one can oppose death, as one must, without falling into the trap of illusion or logical contradiction. Only through poetry and fiction can the battle against death be made a meaningful enterprise and have a real and indelible effect on our lives, even though, viewed from outside, it might seem easy to dismiss this enterprise as quixotic. Only in poetry and fiction does this enterprise end, not in jousting against windmills or the shattering of thought on the hard rocks of reality, but in its transformation into a type of heroism which finds its victory in defeat. I shall end with a passage that illustrates this central element in Canetti’s work: The value of the desire for immortality resides precisely in the conviction that it doesn’t exist. It is the impossible that is most intensely desired. One should whet one’s desire for it, whet it with every proof, prove a thousand times that it is incapable of fulfillment. Only a terrible, a ceaseless tension is worthy of man. To regard it as shadow-boxing is a sign of a contemptible mentality. It is pathetic to submit to the knowledge of one’s mortality. It is pathetic to pray to the gods who trample you with their strength. It is not pathetic to try to divest them of their immortality, precisely because this attempt is condemned to failure.25

4 ON THE PURPORTED INSIGNIFICANCE OF DEATH Whistling before the dark? Ivan Soll

The dialectics of dying Philosophical reflection upon the fact that we face an inevitable and unpredictable end has most often resulted in extreme positions. Consideration of the radical way in which death concludes life has regularly led to radical conclusions concerning the significance of our mortality. And it has produced with respect to the question of how much our mortality matters not only radical, but radically opposed positions, positions that confront one another dialectically at a distance. Both the idea, that there is no aspect of being human more hopelessly problematic than mortality, and the diametrically opposed idea, that one’s impending death should be a matter of complete indifference, have been well-represented in our tradition. In fact, these rather one-sided positions have been much better represented than more moderate and complex assessments of the way in which we are, and are not, oppressed by our mortality.1 A number of respected thinkers have insisted upon the uniquely catastrophic character of death, arguing that the mortality of human beings challenges and burdens them like nothing else. Tolstoy, Heidegger, Sartre, Camus and Ernest Becker, among others, have presented mortality as being perhaps our deepest and most worrisome concern.2 They tend to view death as an omnipresent and ineluctable shadow that darkens our existence, and whose constant threat is so intolerable that we inevitably tend to repress it. They consider the full acceptance of one’s own mortality, if possible at all, to be extremely difficult and rare. Nevertheless, they argue that such acceptance is a crucial condition of living in an authentic manner, and that it produces a deep and irrevocable transformation in anyone who manages to accomplish it. Since these writers could hardly have presented death in a more catastrophic light or coming to terms with it as being any more difficult, the question that naturally suggests itself with regard to them is whether they have not overstated the case. Once one frees oneself from the hypnotic charm of these dark, dramatic claims, a number of suspicions naturally arise: Even if death often is a catastrophe, it is far from clear that it always is. Even if death is a very bad thing, it still may not be the worst thing that might happen to one. Even if it is difficult to accept one’s own mortality, it still may be quite possible and more prevalent than these writers suggest. In general, one wonders whether these writers

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have not indulged in hyperbole concerning the catastrophic significance of our mortality, whether they have not made too much ado about the impending nothing. Though I strongly suspect that they have, I shall not attempt to argue this here. My critical attention will be focused instead upon the equally extreme, antipodal view, that death, rather than being our most fundamental concern and the most problematic feature of our existence is, or should be, a matter of little or no import to us. With respect to this totally dismissive view of the significance and balefulness of death, which has been prominently championed since classical times, one naturally wonders whether it represents an enlightening liberation from widespread fears without foundation or just a desperate attempt to deny the justifiable horror with which we generally approach death—just a defence involving bad faith and comforting rationalization, just a whistling before the dark.

‘Experientialism’ The way in which we approach and view our mortality depends upon our views of what are the ultimate ends of our actions and desires, what offers us true satisfaction, and what is the source of the positive or negative value that anything may possess. Some have sought to integrate all three questions, by arguing that only what we ultimately want is also what really satisfies us and consequently what is good for us. In the search for the ultimate object of all desire, which is therefore also the only true satisfaction and source of all value, only a few viable candidates have presented themselves. First, and most prevalent, there is eudaemonism, which locates the ultimate aim of all action, the only real satisfaction, and the source of all value in happiness. Traditionally many of the proponents of eudaemonism have linked it with hedonism, by identifying happiness with pleasure and the absence of pain. Though one could certainly resist this hedonistic construal of eudaemonism by refusing to equate happiness with pleasure and the avoidance of pain, many have advocated a hedonistic eudaemonism.3 An alternative theory, that of Nietzsche’s will to power, locates the ultimate motive of all action, real satisfaction, and the source of value in power. Others have suggested that the basic human drive is for autonomy, meaning, or self-realization.4 These various theories about the ultimate aim of human desire and consequently the true source of satisfaction and value can be divided into two categories: those which claim the true goal of our striving is a kind of experience and those which claim it is a state of affairs in the world. Any state of affairs, when it obtains in the world, naturally provides the possibility of experiencing it, but it might obtain without the person who desires it being aware that it does. If what we really want is happiness, pleasure or the absence of pain, what we really want is a kind of experience, for these things are kinds of experience.5 But to want to be powerful, like wanting to be rich, respected, or loved, is to want a state of affairs to obtain, which, in the natural course of events, most often leads to our becoming aware of it—but need not. While one could, under certain conditions, be powerful or wealthy without knowing, experiencing, or enjoying it, one cannot be happy or have pleasure or pain without experiencing it, that is enjoying or suffering it.6 Let us call these experiential

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and non-experiential (or state of affairs) theories of the ultimate aims of action and sources of value.7 With respect to any desired state of affairs that might obtain without being experienced, however, one could argue that what is wanted is either simply that the state should obtain, e.g. that one be powerful, rich, respected, autonomous, or, alternatively, that what one really wants is to enjoy, that is, experience, the state in question.8 There is, then, always the possibility of transforming any non-experiential, state of affairs theory concerning the ends of human behaviour into an experiential variant of that theory. The distinction between the experiential and non-experiential variants of theories of motivation has been regularly ignored. With respect to the thesis that what we all want ultimately is pleasure or happiness, there is no non-experiential variant. Thus, with respect to what are perhaps the most prevalent theories of ultimate motivation, hedonism and hedonistic eudaemonism, there is no distinction to be drawn between experiential and non-experiential variants of the theory. Perhaps because of this, it is easier to overlook the fact that there is such a distinction to be drawn and consequently a decision to be made with respect to other theories, such as that which posits power as our ultimate motivation. Perhaps the distinction has also been somewhat obliterated, even where it can be drawn, by the fact that, to bring about the state (of being powerful or respected or rich) is also usually to bring about the experience (of feeling powerful, respected or rich). Conversely, except for cases of delusion, deception by others, or self-deception, the only way of bringing about the experience is to bring about the relevant state of affairs. And, because of the innate fragility of delusion and deception, realizing a state of affairs in which one is actually powerful or respected is arguably the only way to ensure a stable and extended experience of power or of being respected.9 Such considerations seem to undermine the importance of the distinction between wanting to create real conditions in the world and wanting to have certain kinds of experiences, and thus to remove the urgency of the question of whether we want to possess power or respect or wealth, or to experience them. Nevertheless the distinction proves to be significant. Although to bring about either some state of affairs in the world or a corresponding experience of it normally entails bringing about the other, we can still ask which of them do we want as an end in itself or as a good in itself and which do we want merely as a means to that end or good, or only inasmuch as it is a consequence of an end we really want. And the question of what we desire for its own sake, and what we want only inasmuch as it is a means to or consequence of something else that we do want for its own sake, is significant in trying to determine what is the true source and locus of the value that anything might have. The case of Nietzsche is instructive. He became engaged in developing a theory, in which power was posited as the ultimate motivation of all behaviour, the ultimate satisfaction of all desire, and consequently the source of all value. And he consciously offered this theory as a competing alternative to the hedonistic eudaemonism, which he viewed as having generally dominated our thinking about such matters for a long time. To distinguish his general thesis about the motivation of behaviour and the source of value from that of the prevalent hedonism, he initially argued that what we really want is power rather than pleasure, without specifying whether it is the state of being powerful or the experience of our own power that we want. As he continued to develop his thesis, however, he became aware of this distinction, which he had initially ignored, and chose

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to refine his thesis by opting for the experiential variant. What we want, he claims, is power, but more precisely, the experience of power.10 Why would Nietzsche opt for this refinement? More generally, what is the attraction of positing as the ends and motives of desire and behaviour types of experiences rather states of affairs in the world? Let us consider some of those many states of affairs that are thought to be desirable and that we normally enjoy as we become aware of them: having power, wealth, the respect, affection or love of others. Now imagine these states of affairs obtaining but in circumstances in which one’s normal awareness and enjoyment of them is blocked or unrealized. Suppose that, because of my blood ties with the royal family, of which I am ignorant, though others know about it without telling me, I have power that I do not realize I possess and thus do not exercise or enjoy. People would obey my orders and defer to my requests if it occurred to me to issue them, but because I am unaware of this situation, it does not occur to me to issue them.11 Suppose the woman I love adores me, my colleagues respect me, and my friends are fond of me, but because of their emotional reticence I never find this out. Suppose I believe that I am the cause of some calamitous event, the suicide, illness, or unhappiness of others, and wish that it were not so. In fact I am not the cause of the calamity, but no one, including myself, ever finds this out. Considering such scenarios, it is tempting to conclude that it is the experience and enjoyment of such situations that is desirable, not the situation per se. What good are power, freedom, wealth, respect, affection, or love if we never become aware of them? States of the world, viewed in this way, seem to be desirable only inasmuch as they tend to produce enjoyable experiences or are the necessary conditions for such experiences, that is, only as the means to such experiences. Since Nietzsche does not explicitly explain the refinements of his earlier formulation of ‘a will to power’ into ‘a will to the experience of power’, I assume that it was based, at least in part, on such considerations. And such considerations, if they have weight, would lead one to posit as the true goals of our desires not simply the state of being powerful, respected, loved or wealthy, but the experience of enjoying them. In locating the true value of all seemingly desirable states of affairs in the experiences that they occasion, or in embracing the general principle that the only things that, strictly speaking, could have positive or negative value in themselves are experiences, one adheres to what I shall call, for want of a better name, the principle of motivational or axiological (valuational) ‘experientialism’. Hedonism automatically conforms to experientialism. Proponents of other theories, such as one that posits power or autonomy as the motive of all action, need not adopt the principle, but they may, as Nietzsche seems to have done.

Experientialism and death The adoption of experientialism seems to have profound consequences for our attitudes toward death and mortality, for it is experientialism that constitutes the foundation for the Epicurean doctrine epitomized by Lucretius, that death, conceived as the cessation of all experience, should be ‘nothing to us, and matters not at all’,12 is neither good nor bad, and thus should not be an object of concern, fear, anxiety, hate, nor for that matter, of

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hope or joy. Although Epicurus’ view that death is nothing to us is usually understood to be a consequence of his hedonism, it is really a consequence, not of hedonism per se, but of the experientialism that underlies this hedonism. The view that death is nothing to us follows from the claim that the only things desirable or undesirable in themselves are experiences of some sort, whatever determines the goodness or badness of an experience.13 With respect to the issue of what imparts value to anything, hedonism entails experientialism, but experientialism does not entail hedonism. One may hold, as Nietzsche seems to do, that only experiences can be desirable and valuable in themselves without holding that it is pleasure and pain that determine which experiences are desirable and valuable. Since the thesis, that death is nothing to us, depends upon experientialism and not hedonism, the thesis is not undermined by any deficiencies in the hedonistic position that do not follow directly from its experiential assumptions. For example, Nietzsche’s many arguments to show that what we want is not pleasure and the avoidance of pain, but the experience of power, even at the price of experiencing considerable pain, do nothing to refute Epicurus’ experientialism or his position on death. If the only thing that can be good or bad is good or bad experience (experientialism), the cessation of all experience at death makes the state of being dead neither good nor bad (the Epicurean position on death). Whether good experience is the experience of pleasure or power, and whether bad experience is that of pain or impotence (whether hedonism or Nietzsche’s experiential variant of the power theory is correct), is irrelevant to this argument for the neutrality of death. Inasmuch as Nietzsche abides by his refinement of the idea of a will to power into the idea of a will to (the experience of) power, and this refinement is based upon the principle of experientialism, he opens himself, whether he realizes it or not, to the full force of Epicurus’ position on death.

Putting an end to the whistling: rejecting experientialism Not surprisingly, there have been attempts to resist the Epicurean argument and its counter-intuitive conclusion that death is a matter of complete indifference, and to supply intellectual support for the widespread feeling that death is something bad. Thomas Nagel, in order to combat the Epicurean position on death, attacks its experientialist foundation, by pointing out that we consider other things besides death to be bad for us that are not experiences. He maintains that ‘things can be bad for a man without being positively unpleasant to him’.14 He cites as examples of things that are bad without being unpleasant, being [unknowingly] betrayed by one’s friends and being ridiculed behind one’s back. Since these are states of affairs of which we are not aware, their badness does not seem to consist in their causing us to have negative experiences. If it is correct to consider these occurrences bad independently of our becoming aware of them, it would seem that events or states of affairs can have value in themselves, that is, apart from the experiences they engender, or even tend to engender. They would then stand as counterexamples to experientialism. Inasmuch as these events occur during one’s life, a defender of experientialism might attempt to account for their perceived badness in terms of their tendency to cause us to

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have unpleasant experiences, some of which would be the result of becoming aware of them. To undercut this sort of defence, Nagel argues, ‘that the natural view is that the discovery of betrayal makes us unhappy because it is bad to be betrayed—not that it is bad because its discovery makes us unhappy’.15 This point seems quite plausible at first, and if true, it would undermine the experientialist thesis that only experiences, not states of affairs, are good or bad. But there may be some sleight-of-hand in this argument. First, it presents us with an exclusive alternative, either the discovery of betrayal makes us unhappy because it is bad, or it is bad because it makes us unhappy, implicitly suggesting that the truth of one of these possibilities excludes the truth of the other. If the discovery of betrayal makes us unhappy because it is bad to be betrayed, then it is supposed to follow that it is not bad because its discovery makes us unhappy. But why not both? Perhaps if it has to be one or the other, Nagel picks the more plausible alternative. But what reason is there to think that we have to choose between them. Is it not an even more ‘natural’ response to affirm both assertions?16 The idea that it has to be one or the other derives some of its force from the commonly confronted situation in which there exists a relation of physical causation between two distinct events, where establishing that a caused b entails that b is the effect and thus not the cause of a. But not every case of one thing’s being the case ‘because’ of another involves this sort of causality. Consider, for example: (1) I am an animal (and a living being) because I am a human being. (2) I am my mother’s son because I am her child and male. Notice that in these cases, the ‘because’ does not refer to a causal relation between two distinct events, but to relations of logical implication. While causal relations are at least arguably asymmetrical, relations of logical implication are not. While it may be true that if a is the cause of b, b cannot be the cause of a, a may imply b and b imply a (as in example 2). When this is so, we have a relation of mutual implication or logical identity. Of course, one statement or state of affairs can imply another without being implied in return (as in example 1). Nevertheless, the ‘because’ of implication can go both ways. One need not argue that the relation between the badness of being betrayed and the unpleasantness of discovering that one has been betrayed is one of mutual logical implication, for these examples to be relevant. If it is possible for something to be the case ‘because of’ another in a way that does not involve physical causality nor the asymmetry entailed by relationships of physical causality, it throws into doubt the assumption that there are only two possibilities: either the betrayal is bad because of the unpleasantness of discovering it, or its discovery is unpleasant because it is bad to be betrayed.17 Second and more importantly, even if one agrees with Nagel, that when one becomes unhappy upon becoming aware of being in certain situations, it is because they are bad situations in which to be, rather than its being the case that they are bad because I become unhappy upon becoming aware of them, this does not clearly undermine experientialism. The reason for the apparent asymmetry may well be that the negative consequences of the situation, even considering just experiential consequences, are much wider than those connected with the discovery of the situation. Having been betrayed leads through various chains of cause and effect to negative consequences, that is, negative experiences for me, whether or not I ever find out about the betrayal. Because of an undiscovered betrayal, the person betrayed usually suffers bad experiences as the result of the

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behaviour of those who betray him. That is the nature of betrayal. It is what distinguishes being betrayed by others without knowing about it from being helped or supported. Even the committed hedonist or experientialist could admit that the fact of being betrayed is not bad because we become unhappy when we become aware of it, that is, it is not bad just for that reason alone. Rather, he might argue, it is bad because of all the negative experiential consequences it tends to have, the pain of discovery constituting just a part of them. Thus, one can account for the inadequacy of identifying the pain of discovery as the source of the badness of being betrayed, as the inadequacy of identifying what is only part of the story as the whole story, without at all rejecting one’s experientialism. Nagel’s argument thus does not take us where he wants it to take us, out of the clutches of experientialism, and away from the view of death dependent upon it.

Premortem concerns about posthumous events Apparently legitimate concerns about posthumous ills and evils pose a further, and perhaps greater, difficulty for experientialism. If my wishes are ignored by the executor of my will, or work that I have written and of which I am proud comes to be posthumously attributed to others or to be ignored, there is no possibility of these events causing me any unpleasant experience Yet it seems reasonable for me not to want this to happen and to feel strongly about it. The experientialist cannot account for one’s concern about posthumous events in terms of their possible consequences for one’s experience, as he can with respect to unknown events, such as betrayal, that take place during his lifetime. If he admits that such posthumous concerns are well founded, then it seems that experientialism must be rejected. To defend experientialism, he must deny the reasonableness of such concerns. The mere fact that many of us share these concerns is no more a proof of their reasonableness, however, than the mere fact of our widespread fear, anxiety, despair or anger at having to die is, by itself, a proof its reasonableness. Calling attention to the fact that we harbour negative feelings not only about death itself but about a great array of possible events in the world after our demise may be interpreted by the convinced Epicurean only as evidence of how widespread are our ill-founded concerns of this sort. Even though we are often concerned about such matters, they can argue, it is not clear that we should be. Those who have argued that death should be of no concern to us were not unaware that most of us are concerned about dying. What has to be shown is not just that such concerns are common, but that they are well founded. On the other hand, the legitimacy of concerns about posthumous conditions cannot be rejected simply by appeal to the principle of experientialism, for the principle is challenged by the apparent cogency of such concerns. Simply to appeal either to the existence of posthumous concerns to discredit the principle of experientialism or vice versa is to beg the question. Simply to appeal to the principle of experientialism to ward off the legitimacy of what are advanced as putative counter-examples to the principle begs the question of the validity of the principle. On the other hand, simply to appeal to the existence of concerns about posthumous possibilities to refute experientialism begs the question of the legitimacy of these concerns. Since the legitimacy of concerns about what happens after we die and that of the principle of experientialism are in opposition,

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one must, having weighed the evidence for each, which is indirectly evidence against the other, argue for one rather than the other in a non-question-begging manner. How we view these posthumous concerns is not completely unconnected to how we view the goodness or badness of states of affairs of the world during our lives. One is in a better position to argue against the well-foundedness of one’s concerns about events related to oneself in the world after one is gone, if one can account for one’s feeling that it is bad to be betrayed during one’s lifetime solely in terms of one’s actual and potential experience. Conversely, if Nagel had been able to show more convincingly that the badness of betrayal during one’s lifetime is intrinsic and not linked to the experiences it occasions or tends to occasion, he would have supplied a stronger impetus to view posthumous concerns as legitimate and as obstacles to experientialism.

Posthumous concerns versus negative attitudes toward death Moreover, even if such posthumous concerns are well founded, this does not imply that negative attitudes about death are; no more than the legitimacy of concerns about what will happen in or to the world after the year 2000 implies that we should have negative feelings about the impending millennium. Just as the legitimacy of my concerns about what I will do after graduation or retirement does not imply that I should have negative attitudes about graduating or retiring. The legitimacy of posthumous concerns would undermine at most experientialism and the view based upon it, that death is nothing to us. But this would show only that death may be something to us, and thus may be an evil (or, for that matter, a good)—not, as Nagel attempts to conclude, that death is an evil. In general, what is a legitimate object of concern need not be negative; it might be something open to several outcomes of (what seem to be) varying value. I might even be concerned about what might happen, even if I believe that all the possible outcomes are positive. Having heard that I have been awarded a prize, won a lottery, or received an unexpected inheritance, I may be legitimately concerned about the amount of money coming to me, wanting it to be more rather than less, though any amount would be a welcome boon. Even if I had reason to believe that after death everyone ends up in one of a variety of heavens, all of them superior to life on earth, but some superior to others, it would still make sense to be concerned about which would be my lot. Moreover, even if it does make sense to be concerned about what happens to our possessions and reputations after our death, and to accept the fact that bad things can happen in this regard, we should not forget, as Nagel seems to do, that these matters do not necessarily turn out worse because we die. My will and promises made to me may be broken after I die, but they may also be honoured, perhaps even more rigorously after, and even because of, my death than if I had lived. Reputations often gain rather than lose after—and even because—the person in question dies. Nietzsche, like many others, whose work was ignored during most of his life, was widely celebrated after his death.18 Even if it makes sense to be concerned about what happens after one dies, it is not because what happens then is necessarily worse than what happened before, or necessarily worse than what would have happened if one had not died.

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Death as the deprivation of life Another way to circumvent the argument, that death, as a cessation of both good and bad experience, must be neutral in value, is to focus upon the fact that it deprives us of life. Although death, as the cessation of all experience, cannot entail any negative experience, it can be argued that it is bad in depriving us of all experience. But death, in depriving us of further experience, does not appear to be a misfortune unless we are convinced that any kind of experience is better than none. While many have maintained this, they have usually done so without argument. This is not surprising, for it is unclear how one could go about trying to argue for a blanket endorsement of life over death. Socrates long ago argued against such general endorsements of life. He maintained that we can easily imagine forms of physical or spiritual degeneration that would make life not worth living.19 If he is right, death is preferable to some possible lives. Death would be a misfortune only when it deprived one of a life that is worth living, and this is, arguably, not always the case.20 If one feels compelled by such Socratic considerations to give up the idea that the loss of life is always a disaster, one might still feel that the prolongation of life is generally good and the loss of life is generally bad, not just most of the time, but in general, ceteris paribus (all things being equal), that is, unless some unusual condition overrides the normal course of events or standard case. This somewhat more conditional advocacy of the general goodness of life seems at first much more tenable than the unconditional endorsement that Socrates so effectively attacks. But it suffers from the fact with respect to lives, all things are never equal. There exist too many variables, too much variation and plasticity, for there ever to be a standard case. It may well be inappropriate to invoke ceteris paribus, that respected, implicit, general condition of scientific hypotheses, with respect to a thesis about the value of life and death in general. In some contexts, there seems to be far too much ceteris for it ever to be paribus.

Two kinds of neutrality: zero-sum games and radical incommensurability If we distinguish, as most of us do, between good and bad experience, not just between better and worse experience, but between experience which is worth having and that which it would be better not to have, where do we locate death? It is tempting to think of it as a point of complete neutrality on the spectrum running from the best and most worthwhile to the worst and most pernicious experiences, passing through a series of diminishingly good and then increasingly bad experiences. Conceived in this way, death is neither good nor bad, in the way a life would be whose positive and negative experiences perfectly cancelled each other out. Scales reach an equilibrium either when each bears the same weight or when both are empty. Conceiving of death as having this sort of neutrality presents problems not only for those who, like Nagel, want to argue for its general undesirability, but even for those, like the Epicureans, who want to argue for its being a matter of complete indifference. If the neutrality of death is equivalent to that of a life in which the worthwhile and undesirable experiences have balanced, then it would be better than lives in which undesirable

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experiences predominate, and worse than those in which desirable experiences predominate—and thus not at all a matter of indifference for the vast majority, in whose lives good and bad experiences are not in perfect equilibrium. To argue for the thesis, that death is nothing to us, on the basis of its being neither good nor bad, its neutrality cannot be conceived in this manner. It must be sharply distinguished from the kind of neutrality possessed by a life in which good and bad experiences are in perfect balance, for this kind of life is better than some lives and worse than others. The neutrality of death with respect to positive and negative experiences is not to be understood as a balanced account that is neither in the red nor the black and thus equivalent to certain sorts of lives, but as totally incommensurable with any life, including the balanced one. The notion of a balance only makes sense where there are positive and negative quantities which can in some rough way add up to a positive, negative or zero sum. Death is not a zero-sum game; it is not a game in which there are any such sums at all. If life is like a card game in which through skill and luck one can come out more of less ahead or behind, death may appear to be like leaving, or being barred, from the game. But if one does not play in the card game, one neither wins nor loses and thus comes out as one would emerged from having played the game with winnings that cancelled one’s losses. The case of death is, however, radically different from not participating in the game. One has no wins or losses, no debits or credits, not because they balance out, but because one has moved into a realm in which the notions of winnings and losses, of debits and credits, of good and bad, and of the balance or imbalance between any of these pairs, have lost all meaning. In death nothing has currency or value. Death is not to be located between good and bad experience or life, but in an entirely different space where there is neither good nor bad.

Deprivation: a Janus-headed misfortune In order to argue that we should consider death a misfortune because it deprives us of life, Nagel points out that we consider similar deprivations to be calamitous. He asks us to imagine the case ‘of a deprivation of a severity that approaches death’, an ‘intelligent person receives a brain injury that reduces him to the mental condition of a contented infant’.21 Though perfectly contented, the brain damaged adult is to be pitied. And though lacking the same capacities as the incapacitated adult, infants are not to be pitied. Why? Because the adult and not the child has suffered a deprivation of capacities formerly possessed and of the possibility to exercise these capacities in the future. This suggests, according to Nagel, that ‘most good and ill fortune has as its subject a person identified by his history and his possibilities, rather than by his categorical state at the moment’.22 Deprivation seems to refer, Janus-like, not just to one’s state at a particular time, but to that state in relation to one’s past and future. If we consider someone’s deprivations to be ills, and understand these ills as deprivations, we are considering more than ‘nonrelational properties ascribable to him at particular times’, and must acknowledge that ‘there are goods and evils which are irreducibly relational’.23 To understand this sort of misfortune we have to consider what the person was previously and what he might have been. And if the loss of capacity and possibility is a

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misfortune in the case of the brain-damaged victim, then death is also a misfortune, not because of the state of death viewed in itself, but because death deprives us both of the life that precedes it and of the possibility of further life.

Corpses are not persons But is the case of the brain damaged adult really like that of death? In the case of brain damage there remains a person who arguably underwent the loss and who is the object of the pity. As the Epicureans argued, however, in death the person ceases to be. Death seems to entail not only a loss of all further consciousness and experience, but also the annihilation of one’s self. While one might hold that death entails a loss of consciousness, but not complete annihilation of the person, the two ideas are nevertheless connected. The latter idea can naturally be argued on the basis of the former. Since one’s being a person arguably depends upon one’s having some sort of experience, the removal of all further experience at death would also be the end of the person. Though there is a person who dies, and there was a person who died, there is no longer a person who died. There clearly was a person who died, but there cannot presently be a person who is dead. Although we do say that someone, e.g. Abraham Lincoln, ‘is dead’, we do not mean by this that there now exists a person, Abraham Lincoln, who is dead, but rather that there was a person, who having died, no longer exists. Having died does not entail that one continues to exist in a state of being dead, any more than having been annihilated entails that what was annihilated exists in a state of annihilation. Although a corpus delecti is all that is needed to proceed with a criminal charge, we need more than a corpse to pity. We need a person, and a corpse is no more a person than a house is a home. Nagel confronts this sort of objection by arguing that, even in the case of brain damage, it is open to question whether the adult who existed before the brain damage is still there, suggesting that our pitying someone because of a deprivation, and hence because of death, does not depend upon that person’s continuing to exist after the calamity. In pitying a person who dies or who suffers brain damage, we arguably pity the living or fully functioning person who existed before the death or disability. If the only ills that could reasonably be ascribed to a person were ills that afflicted that person at a particular, specifiable time, it becomes a mystery how one could reasonably consider being dead as an ill ascribable to persons. It cannot be ascribed to the living because they are not dead, and it cannot be ascribed to the dead because those who have died are no longer persons. Nagel’s answer to such objections is that ‘while the subject [to whom goods and ills may be meaningfully ascribed] can be exactly located in a sequence of places and times, the same is not necessarily true of the goods and evils that befall him’.24 It is, he argues, ‘certainly not true in general that things that can be said of [someone]’ can be so located. ‘Abraham Lincoln was taller than Louis XIV. But when?’25 Since this relational fact about Lincoln refers not just to him, but to someone who lived centuries before he did, it seems impossible to locate it just within that time in which Lincoln was alive and had grown taller than Louis XIV. Indeed it is not immediately clear how to locate this relational state of affairs in time. Since the deprivation effected by death refers to

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unrealized possibilities that exist in a time after the person is dead and gone, it is, Nagel suggests, also ‘relational’ and without any clear temporal location. Thus the ills of death need not be temporally locatable within the lifetime of a person who dies, nor be temporally locatable at all, in order to be meaningfully ascribed to the living person. This assimilation of the ‘relational’ nature of dying to that of being taller than someone else is questionable. Being deprived of life through death is not ‘relational’ in quite the same way as is ‘being taller than’ someone else, in that it makes no comparison or reference to another entity. As in the case of growing older, wiser or less adventurous—in general, of being in the midst of any ongoing process or change— implicit reference is made not only to how that person now is, but to how he or she was and will be. All descriptions of people, or anything else, as undergoing, or having undergone, a process are ‘relational’ in the limited way that ascriptions of deprivation are. They implicitly refer whatever is undergoing the process to what it has been and will be, but not necessarily to anything else. Yet such processes are locatable in time, more specifically, as taking place over some part of the time that the subject of the process is in existence. But if ascriptions that are ‘relational’ in this limited way sometimes ascribe conditions that have a clear temporal location, then the apparent difficulty of locating the deprivation wrought by death cannot be, contrary to Nagel’s suggestion, simply a function of its ‘relational’ nature. And since the way in which the notion of such deprivation is ‘relational’ is substantially different from the way in which an explicitly comparative judgement is, the sort of difficulty attached to determining when Lincoln was taller than Louis XIV may not attach to determining when deprivations occur.

An experiential account of painless calamities The fact that we view the debilitated, but contented and non-suffering victim of brain damage as having ‘suffered’ a misfortune, does not really show what Nagel takes it to show. It does not show that what is good or evil is not limited to experience. It suggests rather that it is not limited to what is pleasurable and painful in experience; it furnishes an argument against hedonism rather than against experientialism. In locating the evil of painless brain damage in the deprivation it brings about, we implicitly compare, as we do in considering anything as a deprivation, a present state to a past one. Nevertheless, one might still argue that what we compare is the quality of the victim’s life before and after the mishap, and that this is essentially the quality of his experience. What the example shows is rather that the quality of one’s experience is not to be measured solely, if at all, in terms of contentedness, pleasure and pain. In addition, the example indicates that to understand what is good or evil in the condition of a person at a particular time one cannot consider merely the person’s state at that moment, cut off from what precedes and succeeds it. It suggests that it is inadequate to consider the present state of a person as conceptually isolable from its past and future, as simply preceded and succeeded by other states, to which it is tied only externally by bonds of causality. It suggests rather that each state of a person must be conceived as a part of a process that cannot be understood when abstracted from that process. Thus, it

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gives us some reason to reject the atomism of some standard hedonistic and experiential views. It calls for a revision of experientialism, but not its rejection. Perhaps we need to consider experience as a process, which cannot be analysed in the manner of classical British empiricism, as being composed of a series of temporally and spatially discrete and separable episodes, each of which can be conceived without reference to what happens at other places and times. But experientialism could be attached to a revamped conception of experience that does not fragment its flow or ignore its essential interconnectedness. If it were, the prospective and retrospective dimensions of the good and ill that befall a person would not be objections to it.

Dying versus being dead Any deprivation or ill that death brings about must be understood as afflicting living persons, if it is to be understood as an affliction at all. Corpses are not to be pitied. But it does not appear to be promising to base one’s justification for this, as Nagel attempts to do, upon the dubious claim, that a living being who ceases to exist at death can suffer from what we usually consider to be ‘posthumous’ ills, because these ills may actually have no temporal location at all. A more straightforward way to understand how death might be a misfortune depends upon the simple distinction between dying and being dead. The Epicurean objections to death’s being considered a misfortune focus upon the posthumous state of being dead. As we have seen, the Epicureans argue that this is a state in which the person in question has no experience at all and thus no bad experience. Moreover, it is a state in which the person in question has ceased to exist, and thus cannot be a subject of misfortune. The misfortune of death may be better understood if we consider its locus to be the event of dying rather than the state of being dead. With respect to the event there is no problem about there being a person to whom it happens, as there is with respect to the problem of who it is that suffers or endures the state of death. Since our talk of ‘deceased persons’ seems to amount only to talk of what formerly were persons until they died, strictly speaking, there are no dead persons.26 But while the notion of suffering or enduring the state of being dead relies upon the problematic notion of a dead person, the notion of suffering the event of dying does not. If anyone could suffer the state of being dead, it would have to be the dead, but it is the living, and only the living, who die. If death is a calamity, and calamity can meaningfully befall only the living, it is more promising to seek this calamity in the event of death than in any posthumous state, in which its putative victims no longer seem to exist. If death is a misfortune, it is not a posthumous misfortune. The event of death is itself never posthumous. If what makes death a calamity, in those cases in which it is a calamity, is its depriving one of unrealized possibilities, it is the event of dying that does this. If only the living can be afflicted, then only the event, not the state, of death can possibly be an affliction.

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Events and conditions The event of death, like all events, has a clear location in time. While Nagel may right in claiming that it is ‘not true in general of the things that can be said of [a person]’ that they can be located in time, it may be because what can be said of someone includes more than events. It includes not just what has happened to him or what he does, that is, not just events or episodes, but also conditions that, while true of him, are not episodic in nature. If Lincoln’s being taller than Louis XIV does not have any clear temporal location, it is not because it is ‘relational’, but because it is simply not episodic. His being a writer of graceful prose or an eloquent orator, or a profound thinker though containing no comparisons with things existing outside of his lifetime, are also difficult to locate precisely in time. Was he these things all the time or only when writing, orating, or thinking? Was he these things when having an off-day? Or when having a day off? Non-episodic conditions or qualities of a person or a life, whether categorical or relational, generally cannot be pinned down as easily as episodes and events in a life. Events in a life, even those that are relational in the strong sense of referring to other entities and times outside the limits of that life, are by their nature locatable in time. There may be no clear answer to Nagel’s question concerning when Lincoln was taller than Louis XIV. But there is an answer to the question of when he became taller.

Destruction is not change Although the event of death happens at a particular time and involves a living being, it might be argued that it is still not a calamity suffered, undergone or endured by a living creature, because by the time it has happened, the living creature no longer exists. How can someone undergo an event, when at its close there is no one who has undergone it? How can someone endure a calamity that no one endures? It may be helpful to point out that this problem is not peculiar to death, but of all annihilatory processes. How can a book be consumed in the flames, if there can never remain, after the conflagration, a book that was destroyed in this way? In general how can anything be destroyed, if afterwards there cannot possibly exist the thing that was destroyed? Death is simply one of many processes of destruction. It is a defining feature of processes of destruction that what undergoes the process does not exist as such at its completion. In this feature, all processes of destruction differ radically from processes of change, in which there must be something that retains its identity through the process as that which has undergone the change. It is easy to misconceive destruction as a type of radical change because there is change entailed by the process. Something changes whenever anything is destroyed. And something is destroyed whenever anything changes. It is natural to assume that what changes is what is destroyed, but this not true. If what changes must endure through change, albeit in a different state, what changes is never what is destroyed. Rather it has to be something else, larger complexes of things and characteristics in which whatever is destroyed is a part, and which can retain their identities even with the elimination of this

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part. When a person dies the world changes, the person’s family and other groups in which he is a member change, but, because he no longer exists, he cannot, in an important sense, be said to have changed. Also the stuff or matter that went into the person survives in some form, either as organic tissue, chemical components, physical matter or mass-energy, depending upon the nature and length of the physical breakdown. These can be said to change, but not the person as such. When a person dies, some things change, but, somewhat surprisingly, not the person who dies. Death, like other sorts of annihilation, should not be thought of as a kind of change, a particularly radical change in the person who dies. Though destruction entails change and change destruction, what is destroyed is not changed and what is changed is not destroyed. Whatever is destroyed (death is only one instance of this) cannot for that reason be coherently thought of as undergoing change. The failure to respect sufficiently the distinction between all forms of destruction and change has fuelled, I suspect, much confused thinking about the nature and significance of death. If we treat the destruction of death as a kind of change, we are likely to assume that something endures the process, and that what endures it is what suffers whatever misfortune death entails. We thus tend to confuse our legitimate concern about dying with a spurious concern about ‘the posthumous state’ of ‘being dead’, which is the condition of ‘the dead person’, notions whose ultimate coherence is suspect. Having disposed of the traditional notion of a life after death and of one’s immortal soul, we are still, in our thinking about death, haunted by its ghost, the ‘dead person’, the ghost of a ghost, who is often thought of as the repository of the misfortunes of death. It is high time for a postmortem on postmortem existence. We should not let ourselves be distracted, as we often have, from the simple truth, that to be dead is not to be at all.

In conclusion, inconclusion These thoughts do not aspire to any overall assessment of the meaning of our mortality. They do not achieve, or even try to achieve, closure on the eternal debate about the importance or unimportance of the fact that our lives come to a close. But while they do not reach a final conclusion concerning our final conclusion, they offer a number of considerations, and conclusions, that should provide some assistance in the endless process of determining the significance of the end that faces us all.

5 DEATH AND THE SKELETON Kathleen Higgins

Aestheticizing the skeleton One evening, several years ago, when I was having dinner with my friends the Ashers, 5year-old Alexis Asher asked me, ‘Do you know who lives inside you?’ A bit worried that Alexis was about to draw some inaccurate conclusions from sex education, I professed ignorance. ‘A skeleton!’ Alexis assured me. ‘A skeleton lives inside everybody.’ I had never thought of my skeleton as such an independent being before, but I rather liked the image of my slipping food to a skeleton as I ate. The idea of my inner self being not a child, but a skeleton, also had an oddly transforming effect on my dim consciousness of death. Instead of seeing it as complete deterioration, why not think of it as skeleton liberation? After all, the skeletons featured in Día de Los Muertos tableaux seem to be living it up. And skeletons dancing in fun houses and cartoons are able to manoeuvre themselves into fantastic arrangements. A series of body therapy sessions has convinced me that, even now, my skeleton is able to move more pliably than I used to imagine. I supposed that I formerly thought that skeletons were rigid bone-people, awkward as shadow-puppets in the hands of an untrained puppeteer. But now, imagining the skeleton living inside me, I think of it floating, ribs swaying as boats in a marina. When I dance, I try to let my skeleton move more freely now than I did before I’d given it very much thought. I think of freeing the inner skeleton, to some extent, now, while we’re still attached. The attachment of my skin to my skeleton, however, seems more variable all the time. On my fortieth birthday, the day I started writing this paper, I thought about revisioning wrinkles. (The time, it seemed, had come.) For a while before the big ‘Four-O’, I had been noticing wrinkles with more interest. Recognizing that my own were becoming definite entities, I started attending to those of others. At first, this was mostly an effort to convince myself that the rest of the world was ageing, too. But in time, I took more interest in wrinkles as patterns. During the Gulf War, I noticed that all the chief generals had multiple vertical lines between their eyebrows. I mentioned this to a friend who remarked, ‘Yes, they look like they’ve been contemplating evil for a very long time.’ At least, I thought, they must have destruction in mind. I was reminded of the Chinese motto, ‘After 30, you’re responsible for your own face.’ My own wrinkles were also most evident between the eyebrows, since I have the good sense to shelter the other main furrows under bangs. I began to notice, with a sense of reassurance, how many colleagues also had similar lines, which I’ve come to associate with years of concentration. Indeed, I started to imagine that people with wrinkle patterns like my own were probably quite intelligent. Maybe the wise and wizened Schopenhauer

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was so convinced by physiognomy for much the same reason—he lived long enough to develop a fine crop of wrinkles. Still, the notion that one has to turn the tables on wrinkles is surely a contingent myth of our culture. I started to imagine different ways to think of them besides occasions to buy new wrinkle-fighting cosmetics. I was intrigued to hear of an art professor who was contemplating getting tattoos to hide her cellulite. Why not enhance, I thought, rather than simply camouflage? The Japanese aesthetically value worn vessels for the tea ceremony all the more because they have developed the patina of age; and they even mend cracks in such vessels with pure gold, drawing special attention to their specific biographies. Why not a similar approach to wrinkles? Why not enhance them with gold, or some other indication of value? An even more intriguing theory was suggested to me by Leo Steinberg’s talk on Picasso’s self-portrait, delivered at the University of Texas in the spring of 1994. Steinberg pointed out that the line within the cheek of the self-portrait that seems to defy verisimilitude is appropriately termed an ‘arris’, the line marking the convergence of two planes. What better way to think of wrinkles? I was reminded of a friend who consoled me when I was nineteen by saying, ‘I know you’re annoyed by that pimple; but it actually draws attention to a completely different part of your face.’

Death versus the aesthetics of the life story I tell these stories to draw attention to the highly aesthetic concerns that surround our reactions to ageing and the approach of death. Death, for most of us, is a challenge to our sense of self as aesthetically valuable. We fear death as an endpoint, but also as a force that extends backwards, by means of ageing, to undercut the sense that we ‘walk in beauty’, as the Navajo describe the ideal of living well. Our aesthetic notions do much to structure the way we think about death, and this works against our having a coherent attitude toward death. Traditional Western aesthetics has trained our sensibilities to want artworks—and stories—to have clear boundaries and an evident curve of heightened tension, resolution, and denouement. We expect, in other words, that art and stories will exhibit ‘closure’, definition. But among the stories about which we make this demand are the stories of our own lives. We tend, in thinking about our lives so far, to tell them to ourselves as stories. Nietzsche, as so often with matters psychological, was well aware of this. In the dedication to his autobiography that he wrote on his forty-fourth birthday, he ended, ‘and so I tell my life to myself’.1 This gesture suggests an acceptance of the paradoxical position of launching a new year of life while also trying to sum up the contents of life lived so far. Given that Nietzsche’s insanity engulfed him only a few months later, one might doubt that he was fully successful in navigating this or any other paradox confronting him. However, his somewhat self-contradictory gesture strikes me as more apt as an indication of our position than does Hayden White’s denial that our lives have the ‘beginning-middle-end’ structure that we associate with narratives. ‘We do not live stories,’ he asserts.2 Indeed, I think we do live life as stories, but as several stories running simultaneously, each of which obscures in part the ‘beginning-middle-end’ structure of the others. I

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concur with Alasdair MacIntyre, who has formulated a theory of personal identity in terms of the human proclivity to understand ourselves in terms of stories: Unpredictability and teleology…coexist as part of our lives; like characters in a fictional narrative we do not know what will happen next, but none the less our lives have a certain form which projects itself toward our future…If the narrative of our individual and social lives is to continue intelligibly—and either type of narrative may lapse into unintelligibility—it is always both the case that there are constraints on how the story can continue and that within those constraints there are indefinitely many ways that it can continue…Man is in his actions and practice, as well as in his fictions, essentially a story-telling animal.3 Considering our lives as stories, however, results in mixed aesthetic motives when we envision our own deaths. We tend to impose the aesthetic principle of closure on our life story, as on all stories, envisioning death as the endpoint that establishes the story’s completion. However, even as we think of our deaths in this way, we are also thinking of ourselves as spectators or auditors of the story. Surely, the suicide who thinks of the effect this death will have on others is engaging in this mode of double-think. But so are we all on those occasions when we contemplate our own funerals. In order to think of our lives as stories, we have to continue living—but in order for the story to be satisfying, we have to envision our death. The result is that we have a rather schizophrenic attitude toward the idea of dying. We ‘rage, rage against the dying of the light’,4 but at the same time want to know how it all comes out. Schopenhauer contends that the reassurance that we know how things worked out is what enables us to feel nostalgia toward the past, even with respect to events that were uncomfortable at the time. But conversely, we often lack contentment with our lives because we are anxious about the future, as though we need the story’s finish to be certain of the significance of any part of it. ‘Call no man happy until he is dead,’ says Solon; and Aristotle observes that this maxim suggests a paradox. Now if we must see the end and only then call a man happy, not as being happy but as having been so before, surely this is a paradox, that when he is happy the attribute that belongs to him is not to be truly predicated of him because we do not wish to call living men happy, on account of the changes that may befall them, and because we have assumed happiness to be something permanent and by no means easily changed, while a single man may suffer many turns of fortune’s wheel.5 Aristotle resolves this paradox by defining happiness in terms of virtuous activity rather than the fortunes that a person might experience. Our aesthetic expectations ensure that we will have a paradoxical viewpoint toward our inevitable dying, like that suggested by Solon’s maxim, which we might call ‘the aesthetic paradox of death’. We both want an end to the story, as a necessary element for making it a story, and continued existence, as a necessary condition for experiencing it as a story. Our most primitive aesthetic sense is the ongoing experiencing of the present. But

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this primitive condition of sensing is incompatible with closure in the case of our own death. Yet our aesthetic sensibility is itself responsible for our expectation of closure. One might wonder at this juncture whether closure really is so fundamental to us. Our tradition, which has long valued the authority of Aristotle, has conditioned expectations of closure owing to his pronouncements in the Poetics that a good tragedy has a beginning, a middle and an end, and that it represents an action that is a complete whole. The thrust of this concern is that closure may be a matter of historical contingency—or a series of contingencies, since Aristotle’s requirements for tragedy came to be taken as requirements for successful art by many later generations in the West. The question as to why we should take Aristotle seriously with respect to art, let alone our lives, often strikes me as raising a concern akin to the central problem of Plato’s Euthyphro—is something good because it is loved by the gods, or do the gods love a thing because it is good? In the case of Aristotle, the comparable question is, do we prefer closure because Aristotle praised it, or did Aristotle praise it because it pleases us? I would opt for the latter interpretation, since Aristotle, as a biologist by instinct as well as practice, was always inclined toward empirical research and evidence. Moreover, Gestalt psychology suggests a basic human tendency toward closure in our modes of interpreting sensory information. K.Koffka elaborates the impact of Gestalt principles on our tendency to organize sensory stimuli into complete shapes: ‘Good continuation and good shape [are] powerful organizing factors, and both [are] in the true sense “understandable”: a line carries its own law within itself, and so does a shaped area or volume. Violations of this law due to external forces are felt as violations; they conflict with our feelings of the fit, hurt our sense of beauty.’6 I am persuaded by the view that our desire for closure stems from basic features of our psychology. Indeed, I would venture that there may well be a biological basis for this view, perhaps even the fact and the perception of the fact that we ourselves are mortal and that the ‘natural’ course of our lifespans involves growth to maturity as well as decline. To defend the view that a desire for closure is exhibited cross-culturally, however, is a project beyond the scope of this paper. Accordingly, I intend my reflections to apply only to Western reactions to the prospect of dying, leaving open the question of whether they might be more broadly applicable. The desire for closure may ensure our conflicted response to the prospect of dying, but it is not the only aesthetic basis for confusion. The various aesthetic reactions we have to the states that lead toward death—our responses to gore, disease, even wrinkles, for example—also work against our having a coherent attitude. Each of our stories tends to involve at least one of these in its denouement. Gore accompanies premature death in violence; disease is the most common preamble to ‘death from natural causes’; and if we are lucky enough to age, wrinkles are inevitably characteristic of our waning years. But we aesthetically react against these features, so much so that we rage against the denouement entirely. Our aesthetic demands on ourselves require, for fulfilment, that we maintain ourselves at the height of our story’s curve and avoid the denouement and culmination. But these are precisely what our aesthetic demand for a well-shaped story requires. At least in this respect, we have some contrary aesthetic urges. Octavio Paz reminds us that sometimes we prefer the aesthetic character of objects that age, as opposed to the timeless perfection that we associate with the fine arts. Handcrafted objects, he suggests,

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please us in part because they share our lives, ageing and developing character much as we do. The thing that is handmade has no desire to last for thousands upon thousands of years, nor is it possessed by a frantic drive to die an early death. It follows the appointed round of days, it drifts with us as the current carries us along together, it wearies away little by little, it neither seeks death nor denies it: it accepts it. Between the timeless time of the museum and the speeded up time of technology, craftsmanship is the heartbeat of human time. A thing that is handmade is a useful object but also one that is beautiful; an object that lasts a long time but also one that slowly ages away and is resigned to so doing; an object that is not unique like the work of art and can be replaced by another object that is similar but not identical. The craftsman’s handiwork teaches us to die and hence teaches us to live.7 Similarly, Leon Rosenstein links the appearance of ageing to the aesthetic appeal of the antique: Materially present…agedness (patina, and the like) has the…effect of increasing the object’s material (as opposed to purely formal) aesthetic appeal. Materially present agedness denotes the object’s historicality and stimulates the aesthetic response to its antiqueness. Patina becomes the peculiar modification of the object’s corporeal structure…in which we recognize the duration of the object’s existence through the durability of its materiality…It is at least as much in the duration of its materiality, noted by physical signs of agedness we can ‘touch’, as in style, noted by formal coordination of material elements we observe, that we experience the aesthetic enjoyment of the antique.8 The perspective on ageing that is suggested by such hand-crafted objects resonates with the Japanese perspective on the vessels used in the tea ceremony which I mentioned above. Our culture, nevertheless, idiosyncratically encourages extremely negative responses toward signs of human ageing. Karen Hanson has argued that our tradition’s bias toward stasis has encouraged somatophobia and Western philosophy’s discomfort with fashion and physical ornamentation; and she sees a direct connection between avoidance of death and the view that fashion is trivial: As our clothing is testimony to our embodiment, it can whisper of the actual material death that, as humans, we may rather seek, in vain, to avoid…Clothes, in their intrinsic and yet always breakable relation to our embodied life, can seem a memento mori. It is then no wonder if some may turn their faces from a notice of dress.9 Unfortunately, the fashion industry has often sided with the tradition’s philosophical outlook, encouraging the ideal of youthful looks as the paradigm of human beauty. The

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Western outlook, espoused by both the intellectual elite and Vogue, offers us only two options: either aesthetic self-contempt or identification with a particular stage of our physical development at the expense of identifying with our entire processual existence over time. (Are antiques, perhaps, our best hope for making peace with ageing and death?) In a third respect, too, our aesthetic expectations affect our thinking about death. We also expect the culmination of a life story to be consistent with the character of what has gone before, much as we demand consistency of characters in a novel. This expectation, similarly, leads to paradoxical, if not internally contradictory, attitudes on our part. We are especially startled when a formidable character dies at an elderly age. When my grandfather died at the age of ninety, I was more shocked than I had been by many deaths of younger relatives. The fact that he had been so wilful and had survived death for so long made me expect his continued survival more than his death. Part of his character, in my imagination, was his invulnerability. The contrary situation, too, seems to play tricks with our imaginations. Many mothers have also come to terms with the death of a frail child by means of the story that the child was ‘too delicate for this world’, its death to be expected. Alice Miller, for example, observes: If a child dies soon after birth, before the parents’ expectations are disappointed by the child’s desire for autonomy, the mother may idealize her lost child and thereby preserve its central importance for the rest of her life. Often after the death of an infant, there is no real period of mourning that runs its course; instead, the parents’ hopes become attached to an ‘if’: if only the child had lived, the parents think, their expectations would have been met…Superhuman, even divine, qualities are attributed to the dead child; at the same time, the other children in the family grow up in the shadow of this cult.10 So far I have focused on death as though it were a completely individual matter. Most important among these self-regarding considerations is the aesthetic paradox wrought by our sense of our own temporality. Approaching our own death, we find that our inherent temporality impels us to consider ourselves as approaching an eventual end. But because we are temporal, however, and in the midst of our own story, we also find this unimaginable. Our stories, however, are not solipsistic in nature. The structuring features of our stories arise from our interactions with the external world and the other beings we encounter. The other people involved in our stories lend structure to these stories and contribute to our sense of identity as individuals. Yet their role, too, confuses our thinking about our own death. A dream I once had gives a symbolic picture of what strikes me as paradoxical here. I dreamed that my grandmother and my greatgrandmother were lying on beds beside one another in the bedroom that had belonged to each of them, in turn, during the latter years of their lives. My grandmother said something to her mother, addressing her as ‘Sister’. ‘Why do you call your mother “Sister”?’ I asked her. ‘Because we are both dead,’ she replied, ‘so we’re the same age.’ The paradox indicated here is that our identities in life depend on other people, all of whom are as mortal as we are. If death is the great equalizer, it is also the role-defuser;

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and if our roles are undermined, can we meaningfully speak of identity after death? Does ‘my dead grandmother’ refer to my grandmother herself or only to an expectation in my psyche that a role she once played must still be occupied? This dream, in other words, raises the question of what death signifies for our earthly relationships. This is the implicit point of the question put to Jesus in the New Testament when he is asked who a widow’s husband would be in the afterlife if she had remarried several times in this life. Some societies have explicit theories about the relationship between the dead and the living. Mexican culture, for instance, emphatically insists that death changes nothing about the bond and treats dead loved ones as still literally part of the family. Anthony Appiah, in a recent speech on racism, contrasted the American view of ‘family’ with that typical in his native land of Ghana, where those using the term would be presumed to include the dead. American society, by contrast, does not seem to have a clear answer to this question, although certain religious subgroups do. The Mormons, for instance, feel a continued responsibility for dead relatives, to the extent of feeling an obligation to perform religious ceremonies on their behalf, in case the deceased failed to perform them during their lives. My dream, however, suggests that the nature of a personal relationship is altered by death, even if one considers it intact. If I find, as I do, that the age differences between me and my siblings diminish as we grow older, is the converse perhaps the situation when someone dies? Do those who are dead have something in common, akin to the commonality of those living individuals who were born in the same generation? And are those of us who are not dead vastly distant? At one particularly despondent moment, when I was saddened by the end of a romantic relationship, I remarked to my best friend that it wasn’t as though an actual relationship had been replaced by no relationship, since living at the same time was a fairly intimate bond by comparison with my relationship to most people through history. I’m sure that I went further in this maudlin mode, insisting that contemporaneity and acquaintance would seem even more remarkable if viewed from a future perspective, much as I am startled to reflect that St Augustine and Apuleius were not only contemporaries, but literary rivals. My friend’s response was that it was positively unwholesome to be thinking of the living as future dead people. I find her point compelling, and I think that it again suggests the confusion we experience when we try to make sense of relationships between living and dead people. And if we can’t make sense of these relationships, is it not as though those who live long enough have their identities and stories partially evaporate when people who matter to them die before they do? Or do dead loved ones perhaps become closer to us by dying, becoming part of us, as the Lion King’s deceased father lives on in him? Granted, this is a rather strange sort of immortality. One can ‘live on’ in one’s descendants; but one has little control of the ‘life’ that continues past one’s own. Still, most conceptions of immortality on earth are similarly strange, falling short of the reassurance that most of us seek from them. One can ‘live on’ in one’s works, the art, books, or institutions that one constructed while living; but again, a dead person can do little to assure that this continued ‘life’ continues as he or she would prefer. A dead person can’t ensure that such works continue at all, although wills provide some legal protections. Eternal life in some other realm might appear more secure; but the life envisioned elsewhere is strange in its own way. How do we live without bodies? Without bodies, in what sense can we experience anything? How do our

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individualities survive? The longer one meditates on these matters, the less clear our intuitions become.11 Whatever one makes of the idea of ‘living on’ in other people, we living still find ourselves to be related to dead people. But how? Do the dead transfer the responsibility for their continued existence to us, the living? The experiences we have of dead loved ones as active characters in our psyches suggests that most of us feel responsibility to them (perhaps independently of our religious beliefs). The Grim Reaper is, in our psychical lives, as little heeded as he is in Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life when he says, ‘Well, you’re dead now, so shut up!’ I frequently have dreams of a former teacher who died in violent circumstances, a shoot-out that he initiated, and discover that he really isn’t dead—he’s only been away and gone through hard times, from which he has partially recovered. Thinking of our own death, we cannot help but think of our own characters as similarly enduring—and thus, to imagine that the denouement of our life story does not coincide with the time of death. At the same time, such experiences tend to render our interpretation of the present, too, as conducted on a stage that transcends the boundaries of our physical lifespan. This interpretation is certainly implicit in some of our activities, for example our caring for those whose lifespans extend beyond our own.

Temporality and ethical thought To this point my discussion of our lives as narratives might seem to suggest that our thoughts about death are hopelessly incoherent. This is not, however, my conclusion. The narrative tendencies that confuse our thinking about death are the very tendencies that enable us to find meaning in our lives taken as wholes (or even as sets of episodes). Our aesthetic demand for closure, in particular, gives us the wherewithal to ‘frame’ our temporally extended experience, so as to focus on significant elements and to grasp the elements as forming a whole. Far from rendering our sense of ourselves incoherent, these tendencies themselves enable us to consider our experience through time as cohering. The question of how we should conduct our lives is the central concern of ethics. The tendency of much philosophical thought about ethics for the past few centuries has been to postulate a timeless context in which moral life is conducted. Ethical life is characterized as a series of more-or-less unrelated choices. Accordingly, philosophical ethics has recently paid little attention to the temporal substructure of all of our ethical choices, let alone to the broader temporal context in which we navigate our lives. I am convinced that more attention should be devoted to the ethically competent navigation of entire plots (and probably less to the momentary ‘ethical dilemma’). Ideally, well planned and balanced efforts to conduct one’s life as an ongoing project can largely avoid the collision-course approach to life, which I think is presupposed by ethical thought that focuses on the resolution of ‘moral dilemmas’. I subscribe to the minority view that ethical life is best understood in terms of temporal stories—and, as I have argued above, I think we actually do use such stories in making sense of our lives. In work that I have done on the grounds for associating music with ethics, I have argued that we ought to develop skill in shifting our focus from one ‘temporal picture’ of our experience to another, foregrounding and backgrounding various elements in various

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pictures. This ability to vary our focus helps us to recognize various concerns that all demand our attention but which cannot all be addressed simultaneously. It also serves as a navigational tool in our efforts to recognize tensions as they develop and to guide each of them to a satisfying (or at least satisfactory) conclusion. This ability can also help us to understand the paradoxes in our thoughts about death, as well as to apprehend the complex and moving structure of our lives as we live them. Indeed, the paradoxes involved in our thinking about death depend on our ability to shift our focus; but this ability is also instrumental for our making peace with finitude. Because we can apprehend any particular moment of life in the context of various frames, we can see it as dense with meaning. Moving to a new city to take a job, for instance, assumes a role in several of the component narratives whose combined texture makes up the story of my life. I can frame it in terms of tales of my career, my friendships (in both old locale and new), challenges that test me in various ways, accoutrements that travel with me, the changing stream of my social identity, etc. Every experience approached through various frames in this fashion reminds us that our finitude is not a monodimensional segment that can be measured in even increments as we measure a length with a ruler. Instead, our experience can have thick, reverberating significance for us if we develop skill in envisioning and reenvisioning it. Our tendency to seek closure when we scan our lives need not be frustrating or debilitating (as it might if we consider closure to be constriction). Instead, it gives us a means of focusing in various ways on those connections with other people and things that give our lives value and of relating those elements to each other. Perhaps when Heidegger urged our resolute ‘being-towards-death’ by keeping death always in view, he had in mind the way that aesthetic framing of our experience as an ongoing activity can assist our ability to find rich significance in living. Yet his formula is ambiguously stated. ‘Being-towards-death’ could be seen as obsessive focus on the endpoint, a point that secures the significance of each moment in an absolute fashion. If we adopt this interpretation, Heidegger’s account would seem but one frame among many and one that imperils others by its insinuation of itself as the linchpin of the hierarchy. If, however, our ignorance of the moment of death renders Heidegger’s formula a stimulus for continual re-envisioning of our stories and their struc-tures, the formula may itself be a tool for seizing the day, every day. This latter interpretation appears to coincide with Heidegger’s intended meaning. He warns that he does not mean by his formula ‘dwelling upon the end in its possibility’.12 Instead, he contends that the kind of awareness of death he has in mind draws attention to the particularity of one’s own experience that is usually obscured by self-interpretation in terms of public categories. We may…summarize our characterization of authentic Beingtowardsdeath as we have projected it existentially: anticipation reveals to Dasein its lostness in the they-self, and brings it face to face with the possibility of being itself, primarily unsupported by concernful solicitude, but of being itself, rather, in an impassioned freedom toward death—a freedom which has been released from the Illusions of the ‘they,’ and which is factical, certain of itself, and anxious.13

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To conceive of our lives as stories does not diminish each particular experience; nor does the role of death as the end of the story efface the series of experiences taken. Instead, to understand one’s life as a story is to apprehend each moment in relationship to the whole.14 Any particular way that we understand the story is one of the frames that we use to intuit our extended temporal experience; but it is only one. And the number and kinds of frames that we bring to our life stories may be limited only by our skill as imaginary novelists or playwrights. The thought of death is paradoxical, because we cannot bring death squarely within such a frame, death being a border. Yet the paradox we confront draws our attention to the flowing configuration of life, to which our framing efforts impart meaning. We can see death itself as meaningful, in this way, because it contributes to our valuing life. For us the living, this only seems appropriate.

6 DEATH, THE BALD SCENARIO1 Betty S.Flowers He kept on pointing out things that had to do with learning, and he did say that I was going to continue learning, and he said that even when he comes back for me (because by this time he had told me that I was going back) that there will always be a quest for knowledge. He said that it is a continuous process, so I got the feeling that it goes on after death. I think that he was trying to teach me, as we went through those flashbacks. near-death survivor as reported by Raymond Moody2 The final belief is to believe in a fiction, which you know to be a fiction, there being nothing else. The exquisite truth is to know that it is a fiction and that you believe in it willingly. Wallace Stevens3

The questions Death occupies a special position in our fictions about the future. We may fantasize about being married or not, having children, visiting Florence, or growing old; or we may invent any of a number of other futures—but the stark fact of our death appears to be the only ‘real’ future scenario, even though we may embellish this bald story with many fictional details about how or when we might die. The basic story, though, goes like this: The end of life is death—and nothing more. This bald scenario is not the only possible death story, of course: we have heaven and hell with levels (justice); heaven and no hell (equality); afterlife as a cultural myth (the Grand Inquisitor); reincarnation/karma (exact and continuing justice); life as school with graduate school to follow (the story as told by near-death survivors). Why does our public culture embrace the bald scenario? Need the philosophical scenario be bald, too? Why do we pride ourselves on its baldness? (Is there a relation between baldness and increased rates of suicide?) What do we lose when we abolish other kinds of death scenarios? In the past, for example, post-death fictions have typically served to shape social behaviour. Are we freer without them? Or—given that alternate death scenarios offer different possibilities for creating meaning—should we poets resist the current philosophic mono-myth in support of our freedom to increase the sense of the meaningfulness of life? (Wallace Stevens’s often-quoted line, ‘Death is the Mother of Beauty,’ is followed by the almost never-quoted lines: Within whose burning bosom we devise/Our earthly mothers waiting, sleeplessly.’4) Or—have we radical fictionalists at last been flung so far a distance from the academy that it makes no sense even to ask these questions?

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The fictions that shape us We humans create our sense of the present through two fictions: the story of the past that has shaped us and the story of the future into which we are living. These stories differ in their ‘rules’ of construction, in much the same way that news stories differ from novels. The fiction of the past, like journalism, may follow any of a number of plot lines, but the events it incorporates into these plots must be facts. We can cast ourselves, or anyone else in our story, as heroes or victims, for example—but the expectation is that whether we tell our story as a hero story or as a victim story, we will use real dates and places. Still, what determines the meaning of our lives is the story we tell about the facts, not the facts themselves. The story of the future is much freer in form for three reasons: first, it is not bound by fact, although most of us at least have some concern for plausibility if we use this fiction for planning purposes; second, it is usually more internal than the story of the past, for while the facts that make up our story of the past can be gleaned from school records and other people’s stories, the story of our future can only be told. Outsiders can make more or less educated guesses about what story we’re telling ourselves about our future, or they can tell their own story about our future by extrapolating from our past—a story that might be truer to what eventually happens than our own story about ourselves—but the facts of our past do not necessarily prescribe the story we tell ourselves about our future. Just as our personal stories shape us, so our cultural stories shape our personal stories. In a culture dominated by a hero myth, individual stories are told as failed or successful hero stories. In a culture dominated by a religious myth, the meaning of life is measured against a myth of salvation or adherence to duty.

How the democratic myth killed the afterlife Both the hero myth and the religious myth are still powerful in our culture and, for some people, form the basis for their personal myths. But beginning in the eighteenth century (and in the Renaissance for intellectuals), the public culture of the West turned from these two myths to what might be called ‘the democratic myth’. This myth lost the particularity of plot line to be found in the hero and the religious myth, substituting instead a new emphasis on the relation between facts and truth. Unlike the religious myth, in which truth was handed down from authority (the Pope or the King), in the democratic myth, truth could arise from any investigator. Journalism, science, democracy and the novel are among the artefacts of this new myth, grounded in facts derived from close observation of the material world. But this myth also made some stories more difficult to tell, notably those not grounded in facts—the divine right of kings, for example, does not stand up to logical scrutiny. More importantly, this myth undercut any story at all about the future that was not simply an extrapolation from the past. And an entire category of stories, one that had shaped human beings from cave dwelling days, began to disappear—stories of the afterlife.

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Two cheers for democracy Death and afterlife stories form specific sub-genres of stories about the future—death because it’s the only future we can be sure of; afterlife because it’s the only future our present never catches up with. Embedded in a religious cultural myth, the afterlife story can create powerful effects. Some inquisitors really did think that burning heretics was a benevolent thing to do because it gave the heretics a doorway to heaven they might not otherwise have. And those who have called religion ‘the opium of the people’ do so not because of moral injunctions like ‘Love thy neighbour’ but because the bribe of eternity in heaven is so large a reward and hell so terrible a punishment that behaviour can be shaped by anyone with the power to forgive sins or condemn to everlasting damnation. (‘…He seemed to feel his soul in devotion pressing like fingers the keyboard of a great cash register and to see the amount of his purchase start forth immediately in heaven…’5) Afterlife stories have functioned throughout Western history as one of our most powerful shapers of human action—in large part because unlike almost every other story about the future, stories about the afterlife are typically held as beliefs rather than fictions. This is an important distinction—the story that is held as a belief versus the story that is held as a fiction, or human construction. An example of the latter is the scientific method in which, ideally, stories are held as ‘true’ only provisionally—that is, until a better story comes along. These scientific constructions are powerful because: (1) they are created by a certain set of highly articulated and communally agreed-upon rules that require a constant interaction with observable facts; (2) the stories themselves are created and revised communally; and (3) these stories are not defended to the death, as beliefstories have often been, but are held and acted upon ‘as if’ they were true. This attitude of ‘as if’ is akin to Coleridge’s ‘willing suspension of disbelief’—knowing, intellectually, that the story is a fiction, but responding, emotionally, as if it were factually true—and, in the case of science, taking further action on the basis of the story, but acting selfreflectively, always ready to revise the story if necessary. Afterlife stories typically meet none of these criteria: (1) They are not embedded in observable facts, as science is, and they are not created by a set of rules—unless one is cynical enough to think that the rules by which they are created are simply the embodiment of the self-interest of those in power. (2) The stories are intended to last from age to age and are not open to revision—although, as the example of Dante’s Divine Comedy suggests, a powerful imagination can influence the story in significant ways. (3) These stories are held as true, not as if they were true; that is, they are held absolutely, not provisionally. In short, the democratic myth has undercut the afterlife by (1) undercutting the notion of God-given authority necessary to keep everyone telling the same future story; and (2) privileging the scientific method in which stories are held as active fictions rather than beliefs. The disappearance of the afterlife has increased human freedom; but, at the same time, it has decreased human meaning.

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My modest proposal Here I change voices—because here I leave the democratic myth, with its impersonal objectivity and philosophical detachment. In fact, I would argue that Western culture itself has left the democratic myth behind and is now happily splashing about in the chaotic baby pool of a new myth—the economic myth. It may seem strange to talk about an economic ‘myth’. After all, we usually think of a myth as an old fiction, like the Greek myth of Orpheus and Eurydice, or we use the word ‘myth’ when we’re talking about a belief that isn’t true. But another, more important, definition to be found in the dictionary under ‘myth’ is ‘a belief or a subject of belief whose truth is accepted uncritically’. This definition makes no claim about truth one way or another. The economic myth may be true, or it may not be. What makes it powerful is that we accept it as the matrix of meaning, as the way we explain what reality is and what is valuable. We live in an economic myth in the way that the fish swim in the sea—unconsciously. We appeal to ‘the bottom line’ to win arguments; we see the history of the world as an economic history, not as the march of great men across a stage (the hero myth) or as the working out of the plan of God (the religious myth); in the USA, we win elections by offering not ‘a covenant’ with America (a term coming from our religious myth) but a ‘contract’ with America. The economic myth is not synonymous with capitalism, although varieties of capitalism are its hardiest expressions, from the classically liberal US style to the social democratic varieties in western Europe to the socially authoritarian styles found in parts of Asia. Whatever form the economic myth takes, it displays three central characteristics: 1 Its medium is numbers and pictures. One of the reasons the economic myth is potentially the first truly global myth is that it is not bounded by the traditional fences of language. The numbers representing GDP apply to every nation, and the lifestyle shown on television programmes like Dallas can be seen on televisions all over the world. The fall of the former Soviet Union is not a triumph of democracy, but of capitalism and the economic myth—and the media that convey them; the numbers, that we cannot ignore; and the pictures, more powerful than thousands of words. 2 It is a horizontal, not a vertical myth. Like the democratic myth, the economic myth is non-hierarchical: My dollar is as good as your dollar. My worth is based on net worth, not on the nobility of my parents or the colour of my skin or my gender or even what country I’m from—all accidents of birth. But unlike the democratic myth, the economic myth counts rather than evaluates, locating value in the exchange function rather than in ‘truth’. In the democratic myth, truth can arise from any quarter; in the economic myth, truth does arise from every quarter, through counting or polling. Power lies in the numbers. 3 Its ideal is growth. The economic myth has at its base the ideal of growth: bigger—or more—is better. In addition, we tend to think of this growth as necessarily involving competition. As the T-shirt slogan says: ‘He who has the most toys when he dies, wins’. Implicit in much of our language about growth is a kind of early Darwinian notion of natural selection: the strong survive and grow, while the weak are inevitably, naturally (and therefore, rightly) weeded out.

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The economic myth is the first truly global myth, achieving its rapid dominance through the growth of worldwide communications technology. But from my perch in the birdcage of the poets, it appears to me as if the project of philosophy—at least as it has to do with death—is still captured by the democratic myth. Its methodology is still closer to the logic of science, and its search for ‘truth’ still yearning in the direction of a correspondence between ‘idea’ and ‘reality’, for knowledge rather than belief. I don’t see philosophers lining up behind Dewey to produce pragmatic guides to experience and action. And so, true to its home in the democratic/enlightenment/scientific myth, philosophy deals quite extensively with its great fact, Death, and not at all with the pragmatic and necessary fiction—or, as I should say, the necessarily fictional—afterlife. In fact, this consensus of silence looks suspiciously like a belief—or, at the very least, acts like a belief: the belief that there is no afterlife. Of course, by the rules of science, there neither is nor is not an afterlife, there being no material fact with which to dialogue on the subject—although some would argue that the traces of an afterlife are at least as observable, even if not as predictable, as the traces of the quark. Science simply has nothing to say on the subject; therefore, philosophy does not speak. But I think it should. We need some good communal storytelling about the kinds of fictions we can hold as if they were beliefs—and hold self-reflectively, willing to re-write as we see what influences on behaviour such stories have. Put another way, there is a space after death that has always been filled with belief. In the name of truth and freedom, we have destroyed that belief and the stories that have embodied it. This space, however, can never really be empty because we can never stop thinking about death as if from the other side—as if we were survivors—even though we don’t believe in an afterlife. This space after death is thus, even for postmodern minds, still filled with belief, namely the belief that there is no afterlife. This—the story that there is no afterlife—is the one mono-myth left in our culture, when all else is open to revision. This is the bald scenario, a story of nothing. But this space is precious, too precious for a philosophical mono-myth. It is the one space in which fact cannot dominate us. It is the one space in our economic myth in which, for a careful thinker, materialism cannot gain a foothold. This space is theoretically open for re-creation. Here we are free, not to pursue truth, but to create realities. Let me call such ‘as if’ realities ‘scenarios’ to differentiate them from theories in science. Like theories, future scenarios must be plausible and coherent and must arise from a base of present fact. But they should not simply be an extrapolation of the past because the one thing we know about the future is that it will be different—in unpredictable ways—from the past. Unlike theories, scenarios must be judged not primarily on how well they predict but on what kind of present they create when we live into them. For example, Mother Teresa’s present was shaped by her story of a risen saviour who presented himself in the face of every leprous beggar she embraced; the Unabomber’s actions were shaped by a story in which technology would destroy the world. Science speaks to neither story because neither is open for exploration for its ‘truth’ value. But both are open for examination as to the effects they help to create. Of course, what we typically do with characters like Mother Teresa or the Unabomber is to tell a psychological story about them as individuals. Such stories displace a

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communal myth of meaning. In fact, in our economic myth, our typical move is to analyse the ‘interior economics’—the subjective cost-benefit dynamics—of the individual. This means that our stories of meaning must of necessity be embedded in more-or-less scientific case histories of self-interest and norms of mental health. Such psychological stories are individualistic, pre-occupied with pathology, and oriented to the past. I’m arguing for another source of meaning, one that would become a matter of discussion for the community. Can we tell a better story about who we are and what we might want to become? This modest proposal is not about the re-invigoration of belief or the acceptance of fiction as truth, but about the possibilities inherent in certain forms of radical play. We know the difference between fictions and facts, even as small children, totally caught up in playing cowboys and Indians, or Ninja turtles, or house. Each scenario creates different energies, emotions, words, actions—but no child in the midst of such communal play, when stopped and questioned about identity, would say ‘No, I’m not John, I’m really an Indian.’ On the other hand, practising John-as-Indian creates observable effects on John, at least while he’s playing that game. Similarly, training for the Olympics—even if it’s unlikely that such a fantasy of the future would ever come to pass—creates effects that change our present, as anyone who has done so will attest. An afterlife story, for example, like the one told by near-death survivors, would have profound effects on the way we live now. For many of these survivors, a being of light accompanied by a feeling of intense, non-judgemental love came to them and asked them two questions during an overview of their lives. Looking back on their experiences, they were asked by this being of light: What did you learn? How well did you love? When these survivors re-entered our economic myth, their lives were changed in profound ways. Some have speculated that these experiences are simply the result of endorphins released under extreme physical stress or the result of chemically induced hallucinations coloured by religious belief. For the purposes of my modest proposal, the cause of these experiences is immaterial. It is the effect of the story that is important. As our world becomes more and more globalized, as nation states succumb to the coalescing forces of global financial markets, and as our cultures themselves begin to merge into one global ‘McCulture’, we must affirm our human freedom and strengthen our capacity to re-create ourselves, through the power of imagination, and in community with each other. My modest proposal is simply to use the fictional space of the afterlife, protected in principle as it is from both the democratic and the economic myth, to explore stories of meaning. Then, re-entering our global economic mono-myth, we can live in the as if stories of meaning we have created and test their results in our own lives and in the lives of our communities.

7 DEATH AS TRANSFORMATION IN CLASSICAL DAOISM Roger T.Ames

The unreality of death One familiar way of thinking about death is to deny it. There has been a thick strain of such denial in the narrative of Western culture. In the ‘received’ Plato,1 we begin from the assumption of an eternal and immutable formal order—the Realm of Forms. We then confine death by defining it as a kind of change that attends only the material aspect within the Realm of Appearance. In this Platonic model, the enduring identity of the human being—the immortal soul—is guaranteed by its affinity to what is Real. The particular human being might ‘die’ in the sense of undergoing accidental changes, but her essential ‘human being-ness’ is underwritten by the immutable ‘form’ of the human being, and its relationship with a transcendent principle that, in the interpretation of the Church Fathers, becomes the creator deity. Such a world view establishes life and death as dualistic categories in the sense that life stands independent and unaffected by death. The analogy is that life and death are as God and world, where the latter category is a temporary and imperfect reflection of the former. The human experience is stabilized and provided a cultural horizon by metaphysical and supernatural assumptions such as an immortal soul and a realm beyond. Essential change in this ‘One behind the many’ model, were it possible, would be cataclysmic. Friedrich Nietzsche, in his well-known ‘Madman’ passage, recounts the catastrophic consequences of rejecting the underlying formal principle of order in our killing of God: ‘Where has God gone?’ he cried. ‘I shall tell you. We have killed him— you and I. We are all his murderers. But how have we done this? How were we able to drink up the sea? Who gave us the sponge to wipe away the entire horizon? What did we do when we unchained this earth from its sun? Whither is it moving now? Whither are we moving now? Away from all suns? Are we not perpetually falling? Backward, sideward, forward, in all directions? Is there any up or down left? Are we not straying as through an infinite nothing? Do we not feel the breath of empty space? Has it not become colder? Is more and more night not coming on all the time? Must not lanterns be lit in the morning?…‘2 To kill God would not only eclipse Plato’s sun and place the responsibility for inventing those values needed to illuminate the human experience on our own shoulders, but would

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further require that we come to terms with the reality and inevitability of our own deaths, a realization that, for Nietzsche, would have a salubrious effect on the energy with which we live our lives.3

The correlativity of life and death An alternative, perhaps less familiar attitude toward death pervasive in classical Chinese philosophy, particularly the Daoist tradition, that has had an impact on Sinitic cultures broadly down to the present day is the opposite: to affirm death.4 This affirmation of death is captured in the Zhuangzi’s rather cryptic assertion: He who is able to take ‘nothing’ as his head, ‘life’ as his backbone, and ‘death’ as his buttocks, he who understands that life and death, existing and perishing, are one continuous unit—I would be his friend.5 An interpretation of this passage must begin from the observation that, unlike some representative texts in the classical Western tradition, the Theogony, Timaeus and Genesis, there is a marked absence of cosmogonic mythology in the classical Chinese sources. Where there are initial beginnings, a reasonable inference is that there will be final ends. Death, then, is the end of life. The dominant assumption in classical China, by contrast, is that the energy of transformation is not invested in some external efficient principle that stands independent of its creature, but rather that this energy for change resides within the world itself. The world is autogenerative and ‘self-so-ing (ziran )’, without initial beginning and without presumptive end. If there is an ‘ontological’ assumption here, it is that the cosmos is an ever condensing and expanding field of psycho-physical energy (qi ) that undergoes its own process of ceaseless transformation. In such a world, ‘things’ are radically situated. And situation has priority over agency. Sometimes called qi, , sometimes called ziran —this field of experience is the sometimes called dao locus from which agency is abstracted. Because the world is processional and because its creativity is ab initio rather than ex nihilo—a creativity expressed across the careers of its constitutive phenomena—phenomena are never either atomistically discrete nor complete. The Zhuangzi recounts: With the ancients, understanding had gotten somewhere. Where was that? Its height, its extreme, that to which no more could be added was this: some of them thought that there had never begun to be things. The next lot thought that there are things, but that there had never begun to have boundaries among them…6 In contrast to the ‘two-world’ metaphysical model of the Platonic-cumChristian cultural dominant, the classical Chinese tradition is a ‘this-world’ theory in which change and temporality are not to be denied. It is a ‘this-world’ rather than a ‘one-world’ theory because it is an unbounded process, and since we are inextricably embedded within it,

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there is no objective viewpoint outside of it from which it can be quantified or made into an object. Within such a world, this notion of the correlativity of life and death is anything but mystical or obscure. Quite simply, life and death have no separate status. The absence of cosmogonic thinking means that life and death are not distinguished as events distinct from the normal, more gradual processes of change. In the Zhuangzi’s philosophical reflections on death—a theme that commentators such as Fukunaga Mitsuji and Angus Graham take to be its major contribution7—it ‘naturalizes’ the process of dying by locating it among the other operations of nature familiar in everyday lives: The sun rises in the eastern quarter only to set in the distant western reaches, and all of the myriad things take their bearings from it. Those things with eyes and feet can only get their work done by relying upon it; they come out with it and disappear with it. The myriad things are all the same—relying on something they die, and relying on something they come to life. Having once received my present form, I persist and wait for it to be used up. On the model of other things, I move day and night without a break, never knowing where it all ends.8 Like ‘up and down’ or ‘left and right’, life and death are correlative categories which depend upon each other for explanation. They are thus merely explanatory rather than ontological categories required to describe a relative persistence within an unrelenting process of transformation. The formal aspect of order does not depend upon or appeal to metaphysical assumptions, but is discernable as the continuous patterns in the everyday world around us. It is a sense of order that is persistent while always being attended by an indeterminate aspect—it is at once a presencing and a dying away. The sun rises and the sun sets, yet always on a new day. And the previous day fades away. There is regularity as each set of waves emerges and falls, yet each wave in each set has its own distinct character. And the previous wave recedes from the shoreline. There is a pattern of granulation on each piece of wood, and yet each piece has its own unique signature. And it grows only to wither away. Formal order in such a world does not stand behind and independent of our experience as stabilizing metaphysical principles or assumptions. Rather, order is the sometimespersisting sometimes-receding traces left by the inscription of a continuous and complex pathway as we advance along it. Order, far from overcoming and defeating chaos, is in partnership with it in producing usually familiar yet always novel experiences.

The unremarkability of death David Keightley, in his reflections on the meaning and value of death in classical China, generally allows that death was perceived as ‘unproblematic’.9 Of course, he is not claiming that the end of life was not approached with some trepidation. He means rather that death was not considered unnatural, perverse or horrible, Chinese ‘natural’ death is contrasted with the enormity of death in the Judaeo-Christian tradition, where mortality is conceived as divine punishment meted out for human hubris and disobedience. While

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there is an uneasiness manifested in visions of the ‘Yellow Springs’, a name for the netherworld, there is a marked absence of the morbidity and gloom that we associate with the Greek, Roman and medieval European conceptions of death.10 There is a preponderant emphasis in the classical Chinese world view on ‘life’, with relatively little attention given over to the tragedy and poignancy of death familiar in classical Western sources. This emphasis on life is not only Daoist, but can be illustrated by such canonical texts as the Confucian Analects: Jilu asked about serving the gods and the spirits of the dead, but the Master replied: ‘If you are not yet able to serve other people, how can you serve the spirits of the dead?’ He then asked about death, but the Master replied, ‘If you do not yet understand life, how can you understand death?’11 Rather than a gruesome and morbid portrayal of death, there is the Chinese tolerance of death as a relatively unremarkable aspect of the human experience. Behind this, there is a recognition that life could not be what it is if it were not for the anticipation of death. Without death in its broadest sense, life would be static, transparent, predictable and tedious. Death is the indeterminate aspect that makes process, change, complexity and novelty possible. It can be understood as a positive, enabling presence rather than a negative, disabling absence. Death does not inhibit or subvert life, but stimulates and drives it, making it more intense and poignant. In explanation of this relatively accepting Chinese attitude, Keightley observes that ‘ancestor worship and the endurance of the lineage served to render the loss of the individual more palatable’.12 And further, Given the lack of divine animus, of immanent man-god hostility, it was natural that death in China should not have been regarded as an affront to mortals to the degree that it was in Mesopotamia and Greece; rather it was part of the inevitable and harmonious order.13 Certainly the cultivated awareness of continuity that is fostered by the cultural superstructure was an important factor in making death less terrifying than it would be otherwise.

Death as life The primacy of continuity in thinking about the transition from life in the hereand-now to life in the netherworld is not simply a philosophical insight. In her analysis of the conception of death in ancient China, Kang Yunmei points out the affinity that Zhuangzi’s ‘transformation of things (wuhua )’ has with the stories that abound in the popular mythology of this early period.14 This notion of continuity is further evidenced in the popular religious practices with the perception of the afterlife as simply an extension of this world. This extension is usually described in terms of the hun and

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the po —a person’s heavenly and earthly spiritual aspects. The assumption is that the hun’s departure signals the very moment of death, while the earthly po remains to lead a life similar to our own, within the social hierarchies and with all of the attendant problems that we must face. At the moment of death, the focus is on trying through prescribed ritual practices to persuade the hun to return to the body of the deceased. Attention then turns to the anticipated ‘life’ of the po. While types of talisman would be included among the funerary objects to provide the hun direction on its usually vaguely conceived journey, most of the tomb furnishings would be surrogate lodgings, servants, animals, and the chattel necessary to go about the business of the day. The tomb over time evolved in imitation of the houses of the living. Favourite articles of clothing, household items, and even drafts of preferred manuscripts, have frequently been found in the excavated tombs.15 Routine memorial observances for the deceased include the replenishing of foodstuffs, ‘banking’ a netherworld currency for the departed by burning it, and the provisioning of all the other daily goods needed to pay taxes and resolve anticipated problems in the land of the dead. While life on the other side was perceived as similar to this side, the passage from life in this world to the next would often entail a process of apotheosization—the deceased would take on superhuman powers that could be called upon for the benefit of their living descendants.16 This was true not only generally with institutionalized ancestor worship in which the lineage ancestors become a focus of deference, but was further evidenced in more specific instances in which temples would be built to celebrate local cultural heroes. Most importantly, the observance of religious practices, in seeking to propitiate the spirits of the dead, established a communication link between the world of the living and its extension into the world of the dead. The manipulation of this link was clearly directed at achieving happiness in the here and now, with the quality of future life in the netherworld as only a secondary consideration. Just as popular religion in China tended to be human-centred rather than god-centred, the objective of such practices was th e welfare of the living first, and more incidentally, the benefit of the dead. To take care of one’s dead was an encouragement for them to take care of you; to fail to take care of one’s dead could bring them back as a hostile influence on one’s own fortunes. Mu-chou Poo makes two interesting points with respect to this relationship between the living and the dead.17 First, the living mourned their dead, but were persuaded that the breach between life and death was sufficiently wide that no further direct contact with one’s deceased kinsmen was desirable. Second, there was more reason for the lower strata of society to be concerned about the conditions of the netherworld because they did not have descendants who had the wherewithal to provide for them first in the initial burial arrangements and then later in the regular sacrificial offerings. In the late Warring States and early Han periods, social mobility became increasingly a matter of personal merit. Achieved social status and material comforts would affect the enthusiasm with which persons were inclined to view their prospects, both while living and after death. At the end of the day, the living, through ritual observances and sacrifice, had a measure of power in dealing with death that gave them a certain sense of control. This is not to diminish the importance death occupied in popular religious practices nor to suggest that it was in any way ignored in the classical Chinese corpus. As observed above, a compelling argument can and has been made that coming to terms with death is

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a central concern of both the Zhuangzi and the Daodejing. Before turning to explore these central Daoist texts, we need to examine the language of death—the cluster of terms used to define this experience within Chinese culture broadly.

The language of death lexicon The term, si is usually translated as ‘death’. The Han dynasty Shuowen defines si paronomastically—that is, by phonetic and semantic association—as si meaning ‘to drain dry’, underscoring the sense of ‘expiring’ or ‘using up’ that is usually entailed in the Chinese notion of a natural death. Typically, the correlative term for si is sheng , ‘to be born, to live, to grow’, where sheng occupies the dominant position in the binomial, ‘life and death . Si has a positive aspect, meaning ‘natural end’. So , it means when the Daodejing 42 announces that violent people ‘bu de qi si that these persons ‘do not meet their natural end’ rather than that they ‘do not die’. They certainly do die, and sooner than they would have if they conducted themselves better. A second recurrent term is wang , which has as its primary meaning ‘to depart, to flee, to escape’ and then by extension, ‘to perish’. The Shuowen defines wang explicitly as tao , ‘to flee’, with a range of meaning including ‘to be exiled’ and ‘to disappear’. commentary adds that wang is a ‘combined meaning (huiyi The Duan Yucai ) character’, connoting the ‘entering (ru )’ into a remote and concealed place. Duan Yucai argues that the original meaning of wang is ‘to flee’, and that its association with death is an extension of this meaning: ‘to lose’ and then ‘to die’. He suggests that when a filial child cannot endure the death of his parents, he suspects they have simply quit the place. In correlative pairing, wang occurs in dyadic apposition with ‘to dwell, to ), ‘to have’ (you ), and ‘to get’ (de ), with wang be among, to preserve’ (cun always being the subordinate member.

Death in the Daodejing Important for understanding wang is its cognate relationship with wang , ‘to forget’, a relationship made explicit in the Daodejing. There is a strong sense that real dying occurs when one is forgotten. In a cultural tradition in which persons are understood to be irreducibly social, constituted by the pattern of roles and rituals of their lives’ narratives, the answer to the question: what is lost? and what is left? is important. As long as a person is remembered, he or she has a place and a life. The emphasis on genealogical continuity, the ethic of filiality, the cultural requisite of returning the body to the ancestors intact, the elaborate structure of Chinese funerary rites, and the role of ancestor worship as the primary religious observance, are all an expression of this social memory. On the other hand, ‘not being around’, ‘being exiled’, and ‘disappearing’ are all ways of dying while still being otherwise alive. Hence, the interchangeability of ‘to perish’ wang and ‘to be forgotten’ wang is found in alternative readings of Daodejing 33:

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Not losing one’s place is to be long enduring, Dying and yet not perishing (not being forgotten) is to be long lived. Wang —’being forgotten’—is a textual variant found on the Mawangdui manuscripts for the wang found in the received redactions. The acceptability of the variant wang here would suggest that ‘perishing’ and ‘being forgotten’ amount to the same thing, and that the line can be read either way.18 In looking at death in classical Daoism, Daodejing 50 is frequently cited:

In the process of coming out in life and returning in death, The travellers on the path of life are about a third, The travellers on the path of death are about a third, And those who have life But who shift over to the path of death Are also about a third. How so? Because of their excessive care for life. In the world that this classical Daoist text reports on, people can be expected to divide up into three fairly equal groups: those who live out their natural lives, those who because of disease, famine, war, or some other unfortunate circumstance succumb to death along the way, and finally those who would belong to the first group, but because of their excessive preoccupation with staying alive, join the second in meeting with a premature end. Excess is dangerous, and thus the sage ‘spurns the extreme, spurns the extravagant, and spurns the excessive’. Life and death, like all of the correlative relationships which organize our world, such as long and short, high and low, difficult and easy, old and young, and so on, are continuous and mutually entailing, so that being hung up on one at the expense of the other introduces an abnormality that challenges the natural balance and cadence of life. As the Daodejing 75 states, it is ‘simply that one who does not seek after life is superior to one who prizes it’.

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Death in the Zhuangzi The Zhuangzi moves in the same direction as the Daodejing, emphasizing the continuity between and the interdependence of life and death. But Zhuangzi goes beyond the mere acceptance of death. Since each moment is attended by a presencing and an absencing, by an emerging novelty and a dying away, to abstract the dying away aspect from this continuing process as ‘death’ and to consider the emerging aspect independent of it as ‘life’ confounds our experience in this world—it is a nonsense. The argument of the Zhuangzi is simple: the very reasons we have for being attached to one aspect are the same reasons we must appreciate the other. The problem is not death, but our fear of death, a fear that is unwarranted: How do I know that to delight in life isn’t being muddle-headed? And how do I know that to despise death is not the feeling of someone lost in his youth being unable to find his way back? Madame Li was the child of a border guard at Ai. When the state of Jin first captured her, tears flowed until her robes were sopping wet. It was only when she had reached the King’s quarters, shared his bed and eaten of his fine domesticated meats, that she regretted her tears. How do I know that the dead do not regret that they had once had longings for life?19 Within this world, death is equated with the process of transformation itself. As the Zhuangzi says explicitly: For one who realizes the enjoyments of Heaven, his life is travelling with Heaven, and his death is the transformation of things . 20 Once we have accepted the intuitively powerful assumption that we transform rather than disappear, the Zhuangzi wants to take us one rather large step further. One of the prejudices that this text repeatedly challenges is our uncritical assumption that in this ), it is better to remain in our human form than process of ceaseless change (wuhua to become something else: Before long, Master Lai fell ill. Wheezing and panting, he was on the brink of death. His wife and children gathered about him and wept. Master Li, having gone to enquire after him, scolded them, saying: ‘Get away! Don’t impede his transformations!’ Leaning against the door, Master Li talked with him, saying: ‘Extraordinary, these transformations! What are you going to be made into next? Where are you going to be sent? Will you be made into a rat’s liver? Or will you be made into an insect’s arm?… Now if a great ironsmith were in the process of casting metal, and the metal leapt about saying: ‘I must be forged into an Excalibur sword!’ the

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great ironsmith would certainly consider it to be an inauspicious bit of metal. If once having been cast in the human form, I were to whine: ‘Make me into a human being! Make me into a human being!’, the transformer of things would certainly take me to be an inauspicious person. Once we take the heavens and earth to be a giant forge and transformation to be the great ironsmith, where ever I go is just fine. Relaxed I nod off and happily I awake.’21 For the Zhuangzi, not only is the fear of death unwarranted, it is death as transformation that makes life deliciously anticipatory and inconclusive. Around each corner is the possibility of ever new and exciting experiences. Not long thereafter, Ziyu fell ill, and Zisi went to ask after him. ‘Extraordinary!’ said Ziyu, ‘The transformer of things continues to make me all gnarly and bent. He hunches me up so badly that my vital organs are above my head while my chin is buried in my bellybutton. My shoulders are higher than my crown, and my hunchback points to the heavens. Something has really gone haywire with the yin and yang vapors!’… ‘Do you resent this?’ asked Zisi. ‘Indeed no,’ replied Ziyu, ‘What’s to resent? If in the course of things it transforms my left arm into a cock, I’ll use it to tell the time of day. If it goes on to transform my right arm into a crossbow bolt, I’ll use it to shoot me an owl for roasting. If it then transforms my buttocks into wheels and my spirit into a horse, I will ride about on them without need of further transportation…What’s to resent?’22 The Zhuangzi locates the possibility of assuming a human form within the larger process of transformation. There is real comfort and indeed even a religious awe in the recognition that assuming the form of one kind of thing gives way to becoming another in a ceaseless adventure. Such a recognition also stimulates empathetic feelings and compassion for other creatures in a shared environment. It encourages an existential appreciation of the ‘very now’ by relocating the dying away in every moment and by redefining ‘life’ as ‘life-and-death’. Zhuangzi’s counsel is: rather than wishing to be one thing as opposed to another, enjoy the ride. Kang Yunmei suggests that the famous butterfly story really has as its subtext Zhuangzi’s dying out of one kind of life and his transformation into another.23 This interpretation is certainly reinforced by another lesser known anecdote which tells a similar story but in much greater detail: Liezi was having his lunch by the side of the road when he spied a hundred year old skull. Spreading back the reeds, he pointed at it and said: ‘Is it only you and I who know that we have never experienced either life or death? Should you then be anxious, and should I be glad?’

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Within the seeds of things there is something that triggers them off. In water, seeds become amoeba, and at the water’s edge they become a kind of seaweed. When they grow on a hillside, they become a hill-slipper grass, and when this grass is fertilized it becomes crow-foot grass. The roots of the crow-foot grass become beetle larva, and its blades become butterflies. Shortly the butterflies undergo a metamorphosis to become those insects which live under the stove and shed their skins—they are called house crickets. These house crickets after a thousand days become birds, and they are called ‘dried leftover bones’ birds. The spittle of these birds becomes simi bugs which become vinegar flies. Yilu bugs are born from the vinegar flies, and huangkuang grubs are born from jiuyou insects. Gnats are born from fireflies, and when sheep’s groom grass grows beside bamboo that has not sprouted for some time, it produces chingning bugs. Chingning bugs give birth to leopards which give birth to horses which in turn give birth to human beings. In due time, human beings revert to what triggered them off. All of the myriad things come out from what triggers them off and revert back to it.24 This passage uses specific plants and beasties familiar in their own specific time and place to describe the animated and linear process of transformation. One thing leads to another. Through the patterns of association that the reader brings to this everyday world, these various kinds of living things provide a bottomless resource out of which all things )’ is the in proper sequence emerge. The ‘something that triggers them off (ji indeterminate aspect that drives the ongoing reconstrual of the world around us. Perhaps the best known anecdote on death in the entire classical corpus is Zhuangzi’s response to the death of his own wife of a lifetime: Zhuangzi’s wife had died. Huizi went to offer his condolences, only to find Zhuangzi squatting on his heels, beating on a clay pot, and singing. Huizi admonished him, saying, ‘She has shared your home, raised your children, and grown old with you. Not weeping at her passing is more than enough, but beating on a pot and singing—this is too much!’ Zhuangzi replied, ‘Not so. When she first died, how could I not grieve like anyone would? But on looking back into her beginnings, I saw that she originally had no life, and not only was she without life, she had no bodily form, and not only was she without bodily form, she had no qi. Scattered amidst the muddle and confusion, a change occurred and there emerged her qi, the qi changing, she emerged in bodily form, and her bodily form changing, she emerged alive. Now, she has changed again, and has died. This is but to travel together with the passage of the four seasons from one to the next. When she was on the point of taking her repose in the great mansion of the world, I was in a state, trailing after her bawling and howling, but it then occurred to me that this was a failing on my part to understand her circumstances, so I gave it up.’25

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When we consider that religion in classical China as in Greece was constituted of solemn observances—orthopraxis rather than orthodoxy, what people do rather than what they believe—the parody of the funeral wailing by beating on an overturned pot becomes doubly serious as a kind of religious defilement. As we have observed, in the natural (rather than ‘supernatural’ or metaphysical) cosmology presupposed in classical China and expressed through this anecdote, the priority of process and change over stasis and form is assumed. This priority of process and change guarantees the irreversibility of order, defeats any globalizing assertions, and makes absolute predictability precarious. It is the conditions of this process that has provided Zhuangzi with a wife who has been unique and exciting. And the focus on cosmology rather than ontology places the onus on ‘how’ things hang together productively (he ) rather than on ‘what’ they really are. The question for Zhuangzi is not: what is her death? Rather, it is: how do we dispose ourselves so that we can continue to flourish within this process of transformation? Zhuangzi, in reflecting on the ‘loss’ of his wife, discovers that he has not really lost her at all. Her continuing participation in the process of change is guaranteed, and his mourning for her death becomes the celebration of her life. Even more important than this realization, however, is the notion that life and death are both contributory aspects of the process. What has made this wife a unique and cherished companion is dependent upon the mutuality of both change and persistence in the human experience. Every moment must at once be a living and a dying in order for the process to be vibrant and productive. This inseparability of death and uniqueness is reiterated with some poignancy after Huizi, Zhuangzi’s favourite interlocutor, has left this life: Zhuangzi was in a burial procession when he passed the tomb of Huizi. Turning around to address those following him, he said to them: ‘There was a man of Ying who, when finding a piece of mortar on the tip of his nose as thick as a fly’s wing, would get Carpenter Rock to swipe it off with his blade. Carpenter Rock wielded his axe like the wind, and doing as he was told, would cut the bit of mortar away cleanly without injury to the nose. And the whole time the man of Ying would stand there without batting an eye. ‘Lord Yuan of Song heard of this, and summoning Carpenter Rock to him, said, “Try to do this on me.” ‘Carpenter Rock replied, “As for me, I once was able to swipe the mortar off with my blade, but it has been some time now since my target died.” ‘Since Huizi died, I too have had no one as a target, no one to really talk with!’26 Huizi, a person of an analytical, positivistic bent, appears in several anecdotes throughout the Zhuangzi as a rather straight and humourless target of Zhuangzi’s many ripostes. In this particular reverie, Zhuangzi acknowledges that his own repartee—his ability to wield his wit like the wind—has been dependent upon his relationship with Huizi, who could stand his always logical ground without batting an eye. Death has made Huizi one of a kind, because in Huizi’s absence, there is no one who can take his place. Zhuangzi cannot

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carry the philosophical conversation on alone. Is there resentment in this passage? Such would be out of keeping with the spirit of the Zhuangzi as a whole. Rather than resentment, there is in fact a profound appreciation for the process that has made it all possible. As we have seen, the Zhuangzi emphatically rejects the notion that having a human form is preferable to any other. This is perhaps the theme on which the text must be most persuasive because it threatens what most people take to be an uncritical value. Zhuangzi was on his way to Chu, when he spied an empty skull which, though dried and parched, had its shape. Turning it over with his carriage whip, he addressed it with his questions. ‘Sir, was it that, being greedy for life you were led astray, and so have come to this pass? Or was it that, being caught up in the fall of your kingdom, you suffered the executioner’s axe, and so have come to this pass? Or was it that, having done some wicked deed, you were mortified at having made your parents and family heirs to your disgrace, and so have come to this pass? Or was it that, suffering the misery of hunger and cold, you have come to this pass? Or was it that, having lived out your full complement of seasons, you have come to this pass?’ On finishing his monologue, Zhuangzi laid hold of the skull and, cradling his head on it, went off to sleep. In the middle of the night, the skull came in a dream, and said to him, ‘What you were saying sounds like the prattle of a philosopher. Your words are all about being enmeshed in the world of the living; the dead have none of this. Would you like me to tell you about what it means to be dead?’ ‘By all means.’ said Zhuangzi. The skull replied, ‘For we the dead there are neither rulers above nor subjects below, and there is none of work brought on with the four seasons. Contentedly we take the heavens and earth as our playground. Even the pleasure of a king sitting on his throne does not surpass it.’ Zhuangzi did not believe him, and so asked him, ‘If I called on the Magistrate of Life to bring your body back to life, to restore your bones, flesh, and skin, and to return you to your hometown to be with your parents, family, and neighbors, would you want this?’ The skull frowned with annoyance, saying ‘How could I abandon the pleasures of a king sitting on his throne to again take on the toil and travail of life in the human world!’27 Zhuangzi apparently took this theme of ‘the transformation of things (wuhua) to heart, for when it was time for him to die, he upbraided his followers for assuming that sumptuous funeral trappings were able to enhance a not necessarily unfortunate transition from one form into another—what others might call the passage from life into death: Zhuangzi was on the verge of death, and his disciples were thinking of preparing a lavish burial for him. Zhuangzi said to them, ‘I have the heavens and earth for my inner and outer coffins, the sun and moon for

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my jade discs, the constellations of stars for my pearls, and the myriad things for my grave gifts. These burial furnishings are fully prepared for me—how can you add to them?’ The disciples replied, ‘We are afraid that the crows and kites will feed on you, sir.’ ‘Above ground I’ll be eaten by the crows and kites,’ Zhuangzi said, ‘and below ground I’ll be eaten by the ants and molecrickets. What is your bias in taking from one to give to the other?’28 As we have seen, a familiar refrain in the Zhuangzi passages that deal with death is the good-humoured expectation that death opens one up to assume a vast range of possible shapes and forms, and that far from privileging the human form, one is best to take them as they come. There is nothing of the pathetic fallacy in this tradition that makes something exceptional about becoming human. The text is devoted to stories of ageing adherents of Daoist ideas embracing the process of change with the firm conviction that its continuity and novelty requires one to esteem death in the same degree that one would exalt life.

8 DEATH AND ENLIGHTENMENT The therapeutic psychology of The Tibetan Book of the Dead1 Robert Wicks Although we usually conceive of death as the final moment of life, there is an important sense in which death, as an aspect of change and renewal, is ever-present throughout life: each passing moment ‘dies’ as it becomes past experience; each newly experienced moment is immediately ‘born’ as the future becomes present. From moment to moment, beginnings and endings perpetually coincide. At a less abstract level, we also meet with another form of death—a counterpart to our familiar conception: our habitual patterns of expectation and reaction to circumstances often produce a deathlike stagnation and unanimated redundancy within our experience. As a release from this benighted condition, there remains the permanent possibility of experiencing a liberating transformation of character and a ‘rebirth’ of personality. The implicit and explicit means to achieve such a personal transformation within our lives, as described in The Tibetan Book for the Dead,2 is the subject of this essay. My aim is to recall and reemphasize some of the affinities between the text’s therapeutic and liberating intentions and the goals of psychotherapy, in recognition of its practical, socially all-encompassing message. In the course of this enquiry, I will discuss how some authoritative commentators on the text, namely, Carl Jung and Lama Anagarika Govinda, have drawn our attention away from the text’s more pragmatic and existential value as a handbook for more insightful living. The Tibetan Book for the Dead is traditionally read aloud as part of a Tibetan Buddhist funeral ceremony: it speaks to the deceased who, as a disembodied spirit, is believed to persist within hearing distance in an after-death realm of transition, or bardo.3 This is a transitional realm through which a disembodied spirit passes between reincarnations. The text’s manifest purpose is to provide the dead person with repeated opportunities for enlightenment during the bardo experience, such as to prevent rebirth into a renewed condition of suffering. This transitional bardo experience, most importantly, is a period of decision-making: the dead person can choose either to become enlightened by giving up his or her ‘unconscious tendencies’ that have been the cause of suffering, or the person can choose to remain bonded to those dispositions and be fated to circle once more through the patterns of his or her past existence. The text’s guiding words urge the deceased to choose the path towards enlightenment. On the face of things, then, the text articulates the mechanisms which gravitate a disembodied soul towards reincarnation, and provides that soul with the means to avoid suffering through an enlightening personality transformation. The sequence of after-death experiences described within The Tibetan Book for the Dead begins with those immediately following bodily death, and ends with those

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occurring just before the disembodied person is reborn into a new physical body. The initial after-death experiences are the most profound moments of clarity. These are shortlived, however, and soon fall off into partially enlightened modes of consciousness, which themselves eventually degenerate into increasingly hellish and horrific experiences of bewilderment, selfishness and animal aggression. The latter, absolutely terrifying, states of consciousness arise as the disembodied consciousness, after having failed to forsake its unconscious tendencies time and time again in its descent through the stages of the bardo, approaches the moment of being reborn into a new physical body and the world of ordinary life. Though couched in religious terms, the underlying message is familiar and commonsensical: people who do not change their ways are fated painfully to repeat themselves. Since the after-death states of consciousness range from the heavenly to the hellish, individuals of different personality types can see themselves reflected in one or another of the bardo states. If one had died as a relatively enlightened person, then one will identify with the visions within the more peaceful bardos; if one had led a more violent and selfish life, then one will easily recognize the visions within the more hellish afterdeath states. The text assumes that no one to whom it speaks is a perfectly enlightened personality, so at each stage of the after-death experience, the deceased receives therapeutic advice on how to overcome his or her ‘unconscious tendencies’, whether these involve ignorance in general, overwhelming desire, envy, jealousy or aggression. At whatever mentality the dead person is at home, the text aims to release the person from the confines and sufferings which characterize that individual’s particular psychological condition. The manifest contents of the after-death states of consciousness are real-as-life visions of various Tibetan gods and demons. The text, however, instructs the disembodied consciousness to regard them as merely the dream-like reflections of its own personality and basic psychic tendencies. In this respect, the gods and demons of The Tibetan Book for the Dead embody a psychological typology which presents the principles of basic personality styles in a symbolic and condensed, yet fantastically realistic, manner. At each level of after-death experience, a key instruction is repeated, which, if acted upon, will generate a liberating personality transformation: whatever the contents of the particular bardo phase happen to be, the disembodied consciousness is to regard the objects experienced as nothing more than its own psychological projections. The hope is that upon experiencing one’s own godlike or demonic reflection as having no more substance than the moon’s shimmering image in a pool of water, the natural attachment to one’s ego-centred personality will soften. By interpreting the godlike and demonic objectifications of one’s personality as illusory in this manner, the anticipated consequence is that one will be able to see one’s own individuality itself as illusory. Forsaking one’s ego-centred self-conception is thus the fundamental means to enlightenment. With this, personal suffering is dissolved, since suffering is believed to be caused by egocentric forces such as ignorance, pride, jealousy, envy and desire—forces which are objectively embodied by the godlike and demonic visions. Regarding these visions as ‘empty’ is the first step towards recognizing that the psychological forces that generate personal suffering have no substantial reality.4 The above exposition broadly characterizes the manifest purpose and meaning of The Tibetan Book for the Dead—a meaning which admits after-death states of consciousness,

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images of gods and demons, along with rebirth into a new material body, either as a human or as some other form of sentient creature. Complementary to this meaning, however, is a more practical import—one which reveals how the book is pragmatically and existentially directed toward the ‘dead’ who are still living, and not especially towards those who are clinically dead. To reveal this less obvious meaning, we need to examine more closely some of the central features of the manifest meaning, for these indicate that both the existence of gods and the existence of an after-death bardo realm is merely psychological. With respect to the reality of the gods and demons that are experienced in the afterdeath state, we have noted how the text urges the disembodied consciousness to regard these deities as having no substantial reality. Indeed, this is the illuminating principle of The Tibetan Book for the Dead. Two memorable excerpts are as follows: Through the instruction of his guru he will recognize them [the visionary deities] as his own projections, the play of the mind, and he will be liberated. It is just like seeing a stuffed lion, for instance: he feels very frightened if he does not know that it is really only a stuffed lion, but if someone shows him what it is he is astonished and no longer afraid. So here too he feels terrified and bewildered when the blood-drinking deities appear with their huge bodies and thick limbs, filling the whole of space, but as soon as he is shown he recognizes them as his own projections or as yidams; the luminosity which arises later, mother and son, merge together, and, like meeting a man he used to know very well, the self-liberating luminosity of his own mind spontaneously arises before him, and he is self-liberated.5 …whatever you see, however terrifying it is, recognize it as your own projection; recognize it as the luminosity, the natural radiance of your own mind. If you recognize it in this way, you will become a buddha at that very moment, there is no doubt. What is called perfect instantaneous enlightenment will arise on the spot. Remember!6 These excerpts confirm that the deities experienced in the after-death state, although they appear with a reality equal to that of actual material objects, are nothing more than manifestations of the dead person’s own psychological states.7 They are merely symbolic forms that express either conditions of psychological liberation or conditions of bondage and suffering. The path to enlightenment thus depends in no way upon favours or obstructions issued from gods and demons which populate an after-death state; the path depends upon initially recognizing the images of the deities as manifestations of oneself in various possible and actual forms. Self-recognition alone illuminates the path to more satisfactory levels of consciousness. Although emotionally powerful in its employment of metaphors such as the reflection of the moon in water and the recognition of a fearsome lion as merely a stuffed animal, the text’s key instruction for enlightenment remains questionable. To see this, we can distinguish between the form and the content of the visions of gods and demons within the bardo. Their form is to ‘look real’; their content is the disembodied consciousness’s individual personality structure. Let us consider the deceptively realistic form of the

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visions. Although the dead person might feel vaguely at home within one of the bardos, it is not initially obvious to the dead person that what is being experienced is simply a projection of himself or herself, and not real gods and demons. The situation is comparable to a person who, asleep in the midst of a vivid dream remains unaware that he or she is only dreaming. What the key instructions do, is wake up the dead person to the true nature of the experience, such as to dissolve the experience’s objective form. When the visions are seen for what they truly are, they are appreciated as having no independent reality and hence, no power over the dead person, as would be the case if they existed independently. Revealing that the realistic appearance of the bardo visions is only illusory, however, does not entail that the psychological contents expressed by those visions are also unreal. If the objects in a dream, for example, are shown to the dreamer to be none other than a figment of his or her imagination (e.g. as when one teaches a child to see that the objects of a nightmare are simply imaginary), it does not follow that the psychological contents which that dream presents in an objective manner are also a figment of the imagination. An imaginary monster within a young child’s nightmare, for example, could very well express the child’s inner anxiety. So from the recognition that the objects of the bardo experience are illusory, it does not follow that the individual self which projects those objects is also illusory. One might conclude that the individual self is of no substance upon further reflection and in consequence of further argument, but this is not entailed by the recognition that the dream-like visions have no substantial reality of their own. These considerations lead us to examine another aspect of the dead person’s dispositions of character or ‘unconscious tendencies’ which the gods and demons symbolically express. Representative of the more enlightened states of mind are buddha figures expressive of compassion and knowledge; representative of the more animalistic mental states are flesh-eating demons who, screaming ‘strike’ and ‘kill’, tear corpses limb from limb. If one is to interpret the text in a practical and existential manner, it is important to determine whether there is good reason to regard these represented states of consciousness as after-death states occurring in an actual, after-death bardo, or whether it makes more sense to regard the after-death bardo itself as another projection of consciousness. If the latter is the case, then the after-death bardo would indeed represent a transitional condition, but one that would occur only within living experience. It would also follow that the consciousness that projects the after-death bardo could be none other than that of a living, flesh-and-bones person. It might be thought that a definitive interpretation of the after-death bardo realm, either as a literal or as a purely symbolic realm, would depend upon how the text characterizes the essence of consciousness, either as a this-worldly or as an other-worldly kind of being. We shall see, however, that the description of the essence of consciousness within The Tibetan Book for the Dead remains neutral with respect to the question of whether or not there are actual after-death states of consciousness. In view of this independency, it remains well within the text’s overall spirit to interpret its references to the after-death bardo as purely symbolic, and hence, as potentially quite meaningful to those who cannot acknowledge an afterlife. This, as we shall see, characterizes Lama Govinda’s view. Before considering his interpretation, though, we should briefly examine how the text describes the essence of consciousness, and note that this description neither implies nor precludes the existence of after-death states of consciousness.

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The Tibetan Book for the Dead states that in the experiences immediately following death, our consciousness becomes present to us in its absolute purity. This lucid condition of consciousness is taken to be the ground of all experience. We can consider three alternative translations (1927, 1975, 1994, respectively) of a central passage: Thy breathing is about to cease. Thy guru hath set thee face to face before with the Clear Light; and now thou art about to experience it in its Reality in the Bardo state, wherein all things are like the void and cloudless sky, and the naked, spotless intellect is like unto a transparent vacuum without circumference or centre.8 As soon as your breath stops, what is called the basic luminosity of the first bardo, which your guru has already shown you, will appear to you. This is the dharmata, open and empty like space, luminous void, pure naked mind without centre or circumference.9 Just as your breath stops, the objective clear light of the first between will dawn as previously described to you by your teacher. Your outer breath stops and you experience reality stark and void like space, your immaculate naked awareness dawning clear and void without horizon or center.10 These passages maintain that at the very point of death, a person experiences what consciousness essentially is, namely, a ‘shining void’ or ‘luminous emptiness’ of utter clarity. Soon thereafter, the dead person loses contact with this, its own universal nature, and begins to experience more idiosyncratic objectifications of itself in the form of godlike and demonic projections—projections that reflect the unconscious tendencies of his or her personality. The experiential pathway of the book is thus from a universal and liberated consciousness that presents conscious reality in itself, to more and more particularized and restricted forms of consciousness, representative of more egocentric mentalities. These latter, more selfish, forms do not represent consciousness in its luminous purity, but consciousness as ‘karmically obscured’ in its more familiar and bewildered forms—ones which we can recognize as typical of ordinary consciousness. Although the text maintains that the gods and demons experienced in the after-death states are the projections of the dead person’s consciousness, the status of consciousness as a ‘luminous void’ remains open. It could be that, although the gods and demons are illusory, the experience of the ‘luminous void’ is not. On the other hand, it could be that the experience of the ‘luminous void’ is also illusory, in so far as it is taken to represent an actual, after-death state of consciousness. There are thus two questions to be distinguished: (1) Does a reasonable reading of the text need to recognize any after-death states of consciousness at all? (2) If one acknowledges after-death states of consciousness, which, if any, reveal either consciousness as it is in itself or reality as it is in itself? The text’s manifest meaning suggests that there are after-death states of consciousness, and that only the experience of consciousness as ‘clear and void’ is truly revelatory. It remains unclear whether what is revealed is the nature of consciousness, as it stands quite independently of the nature of reality, or the nature of consciousness as identical to the nature of reality, but the spirit of the passages suggests the latter. We thus have two philosophical alternatives: (1) reality is consciousness, and this is immediately known when consciousness is in the state of luminous emptiness, either

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during this life and/or during the initial after-death bardo state; (2) reality in general is indeterminate or indeterminable, but the reality of consciousness in itself, whatever its relation to reality in general happens to be, is a luminous emptiness. Both are consistent with the existence of after-death states of consciousness; both are also consistent with the non-existence of after-death states of consciousness. With regard to (1), some further explanation is appropriate, since it is easy to believe that ‘reality is consciousness’ entails the existence of after-death states of individual consciousness. However, there need not be after-death states of an individual’s consciousness (i.e. a dead person or ‘ego’ who has after-death experiences), since at the moment of actual bodily death, every individual consciousness completely and without a moment of personal reflection, might simply dissolve into the universal consciousness, just as a raindrop dissolves into the ocean. We must subsequently approach the question of whether there are after-death states of individual consciousness from a different angle, one of which is through an enquiry into the universality of the states of consciousness described in the after-death realm. It would be surprising, if not fantastic, that anyone in a place communicationally dissociated from Tibet in either time or space (e.g. ancient Peru), would have visions of Tibetan Buddhist gods during their death-related experiences. Even supposing, quite remotely, that such a person had experiences of the kind described by The Tibetan Book for the Dead, the symbolic meaning of the gods would probably remain unrecognized. This thought alone leads us to question the universality, not to mention the very reality, of the after-death visions of gods and demons described in the text. If we were to acknowledge the existence of after-death states of the very general kind which the text describes, however, then perhaps a plausible position would be to maintain that after one dies, one experiences a series of basic human personality structures in some symbolic form or other.11 Without some guide to the experiences, though, there would still be little possibility for salvation or enlightenment. The possibilities for the dead person’s enlightenment depend so heavily upon the instructions given in The Tibetan Book for the Dead, or upon some comparable text or person who can fully communicate those instructions, that without such guidance, the person is likely to regard the symbolic forms as realities, and not as projections of his/her own personality. Moreover, there remains the issue of whether there is indeed any communicational interface at all between the world of the living and the world of the dead, let alone one which can be crossed simply by means of inspired vocalization or mental concentration. Such complications suggest a more prudent approach, namely, that we interpret the text as directed more towards this-worldly psychological realities than towards otherworldly metaphysical ones. This issues in an orientation towards the text that highlights its actual therapeutic value. Quite consistent with this is the essential spirit of Buddhism as a practice-centred, and not speculatively-centred, outlook. Chandradhar Sharma describes this well: [Buddha] repeatedly told his disciples: ‘Two things only, my disciples, do I teach—misery and the cessation of misery.’ Human existence is full of misery and pain. Our immediate duty, therefore, is to get rid of this misery and pain. If instead we bother about barren metaphysical speculations, we behave like that foolish man whose heart is pierced by a poisonous arrow

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and who, instead of taking it out whiles away his time on idle speculation about the origin, the size, the metal, the maker and the shooter of the arrow.12 Buddhism in general issues from the perception and experience of suffering in this world of the living, and is grounded upon fundamental prescriptions to alleviate this suffering. This pragmatic emphasis at the core of Buddhist insight itself suggests that we interpret The Tibetan Book for the Dead as predominantly written for the ‘dead’ of this world— those whose lives have been deadened by cycles of desire, jealousy, envy, hatred and aggression which generate continual suffering. This would include everyone at one time or another during their lives. The existence of suffering within this life is an absolute certainty; the existence of after-death states of consciousness is a matter of speculation and interpretation.13 It is commonly said that The Tibetan Book for the Dead is a book for both the dead and the living. The present interpretation suggests that it is certainly a book for the living, and only maybe one for the dead. If we consider The Tibetan Book for the Dead as essentially a book for the living, then Carl Jung’s authoritative and respected psychological commentary on the text should be re-evaluated.14 This is not because Jung acknowledges the existence of an afterlife; it is because his interpretation draws the reader away from those very parts of the text which address living people who now suffer. This, as we shall see, is partly due to Jung’s interest in showing how his own psychological theory fits the text more comprehensively than Freud’s, despite the text’s confirmation of Freud’s insights. Before considering Jung’s psychological commentary, it is important to note why either Jungian or Freudian psychology is compatible at all with the spirit and meaning of the text. This arises from the above-mentioned affinity between the character of ordinary dream consciousness and the after-death experiences described in The Tibetan Book for the Dead. It is well known that both Freud and Jung interpret dreams as symbolic of fundamental psychic contents. For Freud, these are instinctual, predominantly sexual, tensions; for Jung, they are collectively shared, mythic thought structures, or ‘archetypes’. Both believe that although the items experienced within dreams have no objective reality of their own, they nonetheless symbolically reveal a person’s psychic nature. Similarly, with the possible exception of the initial experiences of the ‘luminous void’, the after-death states of consciousness described in The Tibetan Book for the Dead represent symbolically the dead person’s personality, as represented by deity-like objectifications of his or her ‘unconscious tendencies’—tendencies which lead the person into cycles upon cycles of rebirth and suffering. This affinity between ordinary dream states and the after-death states of consciousness described in The Tibetan Book for the Dead establishes a bond between the Western practice of psychotherapy and the Tibetan Buddhist concept of rebirth: successful psychotherapy entails a rebirth of personality. The goal of psychoanalysis, specifically, is to restore an individual’s psychological health by revealing to a person his or her basic psychic structure and constella-tions of inner conflict. Within Freudian and Jungian analysis, this structure is discerned through an examination of the person’s dreams (among other methods), since dreams are regarded as the symbolic manifestations of the person’s psychic energy. The Tibetan Book for the Dead comparably aims to restore a person’s psychic health (i.e. bring them closer to enlightenment), by displaying the

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person’s ‘unconscious tendencies’ symbolically and objectively, such as to allow that person subsequently to render those forms ineffectual within his or her psyche. If an individual is angry and violent, for example, the text powerfully and shockingly illustrates the world of angry and violent people for the individual to contemplate, and then urges the individual to reinterpret that world as akin to no more than an empty reflection in a pool of water. The procedure aims to dissolve the meaning and reality of the person’s former world by detaching him or her from involvement in that world, and by allowing that individual thereby to become ‘reborn’ into a more enlightened condition as a new personality. In these basic ways, both the psychoanalytic method of dream interpretation and the modes of visionary interpretation and liberation expressed in The Tibetan Book for the Dead have the same therapeutic purpose: they aim to alleviate psychic suffering and to restore mental health. In his psychological commentary to The Tibetan Book for the Dead, Jung points out how the text first describes the highest stage of consciousness in the experiences immediately following death, and then continues on to describe more and more animalistic forms of consciousness. Addressing the Western reader, and intending to offer a more familiar orientation towards the text, he offers a ‘reverse’ reading that begins with the more common states of consciousness and gradually advances towards the more enlightened states. Reconceptualized in this Jungian way, the series of bardo experiences forms an ascending path reminiscent of the Christian conception of spiritual development—a path that begins with imperfect and finite humanity and extends towards a perfect and infinite God. Dante’s influential Christian epic, The Divine Comedy (1308– 21) clearly exemplifies this conception, as it begins with a description of hell, and then progresses to descriptions of purgatory and heaven.15 Complementary to his intention to provide the Western reader with a more familiar orientation towards the text, Jung urges a ‘backwards’ reading for the more specific purpose of subordinating Freud’s psychological theory to his own. Near the very end of the after-death experience (which Jung reads as the ‘beginning’), the text most intriguingly describes the psychological effects of assuming a specifically male or female identity: the assumption of a male identity generates love for one’s mother and aversion towards one’s father; the assumption of a female identity generates love for one’s father and aversion towards one’s mother. Since The Tibetan Book for the Dead was composed as early as the eighth century AD, quite independently of the development of Western psychoanalysis, these observations offer some startling confirmation of Freud’s core insights into the mainsprings of sexual identity. Rather than wholeheartedly acknowledging that The Tibetan Book for the Dead anticipates and confirms some of Freud’s pivotal ideas, Jung points out that the sexual attitudes noted by Freud originate and operate only within what the text describes as the most primitive and unenlightened form of consciousness (i.e. in ordinary, day-to-day consciousness). Jung takes this as evidence that, with its strong emphasis upon sexuality, Freud’s psychological theory penetrates only into the elementary layers of the psyche. He adds that when we progress to the less instinctual, and more enlightened, conditions of consciousness, we reach levels that are better comprehended by his own theory of archetypes. Due to Jung’s orientation towards higher levels of consciousness and his interest in criticizing Freud’s psychological theory, his commentary on The Tibetan Book for the

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Dead turns the reader away from the text’s vivid descriptions of the less enlightened forms of consciousness. The problem with this, however, is that it fails to recognize that almost everyone, at one time or another, lives within these more animalistic stages of sensual pleasures, sexuality and desire, and that by down-playing the text’s prescriptions for overcoming psychic bondage within such conditions, one undermines the potentially widespread effectiveness of the text’s practical application. As a handbook whose intention is to reveal the path to enlightenment to everyone, The Tibetan Book for the Dead speaks to those who start along this path from one of the lower realms. The text itself acknowledges that only a mere handful of people—those who have practised meditation their entire lives—end their life in a highly refined psychological condition. Since most people do not live with a consciousness of this quality, there is an important sense in which the basic orientation of Jung’s interpretation is implicitly counterproductive: it draws our attention away from the sections of the text which speak to most people. This suggests that reading the text from its natural beginning is the most appropriate way to experience the work: the reader begins with a description of the ideal, enlightened state of mind, and gradually descends into more and more hellish conditions until—if one is a typical person whose daily consciousness is informed with reports of, and perhaps experiences of, wars, sickness, poverty and crime—one encounters a reflection of one’s daily world of ignorance, envy, jealousy and violence mirrored near the end of the book. The experience of reading the text in this way reveals to the reader exactly how far he or she actually is from an enlightened condition, and allows the reader to interpret his or her present condition (assuming that the person is in a condition of ordinary consciousness) as the culmination of many levels of spiritual loss. Such an experience of self-recognition is exactly what the text intends to generate in its readers. Similar to Jung, Lama Anagarika Govinda offers a psychologically centred interpretation of the text, maintaining that ‘the different bardos…represent different states of consciousness of our life’.16 In this respect his account is directed towards the living, and less towards disembodied spirits. Nonetheless, we can ask how many of the living are taken into consideration within his view. This question arises, because Lama Govinda’s attitude towards the text’s essential meaning is clearly aristocratic: he refers to the text’s true meaning as accessible only to ‘initiated disciples’ in Tibetan meditative practice. Although he regards the text as a psychological document—as ‘a key to the innermost recesses of the human mind’—he maintains that this ‘key’ is held by only a very few: Only he, who has ears to hear, i.e., who has prepared himself in life for the call of liberation and has made himself receptive for it by training his inner organ of hearing, can respond to the call and follow it. Only he who has opened his inner eye can see the redeeming visions. Those, however, who have neither developed the faculty of inner hearing nor that of inner vision, cannot be benefited by merely listening to the recital of the Bardo Thödol.17 As does Jung’s, Lama Govinda’s approach towards The Tibetan Book for the Dead draws our attention away from its generally applicable therapeutic aspects. He directs our

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attention towards the more enlightened states of consciousness, but precludes the experience of those states to all but the properly initiated. In so far as only a small group of people practise Tibetan meditation, the true meaning of The Tibetan Book for the Dead will, in his opinion, remain a ‘secret’ doctrine.18 The Tibetan Book for the Dead may indeed contain subtleties of meaning which are accessible only to those who have practised Tibetan meditation for decades. To privilege this level of knowledge as the essential meaning of the text, however, draws one away from the less enlightened states of consciousness—those which are typical of the majority of the human population. Just as Jung down-plays the more instinctual and bewildered states of consciousness due to his interest in revealing the limits of Freudian psychology, Lama Govinda, due to his keen interest in the meditational experience of higher states of consciousness, similarly focuses on the more elevated and more inaccessible states of human awareness.19 The prevailing spirit of The Tibetan Book for the Dead, however, opposes aristocracy and elitism. It is clearly a book addressed to everyone, independently of the reader’s capacity for profound insight or abstraction. The book offers a series of opportunities and procedures for achieving enlightenment, such that if a person fails to comprehend the path to enlightenment at some given level, then that person receives another chance at a level whose symbolism more closely reflects his or her psyche. The book begins by addressing the most receptive people, and directs them simply to consider their experiences in a certain way (namely, to regard their experiences as the result of their own psychological projections). If they can do so, then enlightenment immediately follows. If the text’s instructions are impossible to follow with such ease, then the reader moves into a less enlightened condition and receives the same directives as before, with some added incentive. Sometimes more gods appear to assist the person, with the hope that the increased social presence of the gods will cause the person to apply the text’s directives. If this effort to enlighten the person again fails, then the same message is introduced once more, except accompanied by more and more terrifying imagery. At some level of consciousness, it is hoped that the person will finally be able to interpret his or her world in a more enlightened way. At every level of consciousness, then, there is a prescription for enlightenment. At every level of consciousness it remains possible—if only the correct mode of interpretation were to be adopted—to instantaneously spring into an enlightened condition.20 The following passage unequivocally displays this socially all-encompassing interest of the text: Up to now there have been seven stages in the dangerous pathway of the bardo of the peaceful deities, and by being shown at each of the stages, even if he has not recognized at one he will have at another, and boundless attainments of liberation occur. But although many are liberated like this, sentient beings are great in number, bad karma is very strong, the neurotic veils are heavy and thick, the unconscious tendencies last for a long time, and this cycle of confusion and ignorance neither wears out nor increases, so there are many who are not liberated but wander downwards, although they have been shown accurately in this way.21

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Addressed here is a far more widespread audience for The Tibetan Book for the Dead than is acknowledged by either Jung or Lama Govinda. Both interpret the text convincingly in their efforts to understand its profound psychological import, but in terms of the text’s function as a therapeutic tool to lead any person to enlightenment, independently of whether that person is intrinsically closer or further from an enlightened condition, Jung and Lama Govinda offer interpretations which leave most suffering people behind. The Tibetan Book for the Dead is a book written especially for benighted and bewildered souls. It acknowledges that enlightenment is difficult, and that it takes many repetitions of the key message for there to be any significant spiritual effect. It repeats its message that we, and only we, are responsible for the meanings of our desires, our interpretations, our evaluations, our pleasures and our fears, and that we can render such sources of suffering ineffectual, if we were only to interpret the apparent seriousness and significance of the world as the play of our own creation. In this respect, The Tibetan Book for the Dead is a book of practical wisdom comparable to Epictetus’ Handbook; it offers a set of advisories intended to reduce suffering and to guide all people, and not just the select initiates, towards a rebirth of personality and composure. Its message directs us towards a rebirth to take place, not after clinical death, but within the immediacy of the inescapable present moment—the bardo that is lived.

9 DEATH AND DETACHMENT Montaigne, Zen, Heidegger and the Rest Graham Parkes It is all over. Montaigne1

Socrates’ characterization of the philosophical enterprise as ‘practising dying’ epitomizes a major way of understanding the phenomenon of death in the Western tradition. This way, I evade death’s sting by dying to the world in advance, dissociating myself from the body, so that when physical death arrives I am no longer home to receive it. Indeed according to the Orphic strain of thinking, so prominent in Plato’s Phaedo, as soul I am never really at home in the body. Similar strategies are employed by several schools in the Asian traditions, where the idea is to die away from the world and detach from the body in order to identify with the ultimate, transcendent Reality, to be reborn into the world beyond, or cross over to the yonder shore of Nirvana. While this shift in my way of being offers, when well executed, a satisfactory way of dealing with my mortality, it is obvious that the victory over death is Pyrrhic—in so far as it deprives me of the full enjoyment of life. In both Western and Asian traditions, however, we find ways of understanding death that are opposed to these modes of transcendence, and for which death is to be understood as an integral part of life, an ever-present aspect that is normally kept hidden. What is recommended is a detachment from life that somehow reverses itself, such that one re-enters life with heightened vitality—as in the Zen master’s exhortation to ‘live having let go of life’. The ability to live ‘having let go of life’ (to live, rather than merely exist) turns out to depend on an understanding of the radically momentary nature of human existence.2 Though it is not immediately obvious how one could be fully in this world having taken one’s leave of it, or live a truly vital life after severing one’s attachments to the body, a number of thinkers have developed such an existential conception (and practice) of death: namely, Montaigne, Nietzsche, and Heidegger in Europe, and Dōgen, Shōsan, and Nishitani in Japan. Comparisons admittedly lose some of their force when the thinkers and ideas are abstracted from their historical contexts, and scepticism is generally justified in cases where disparate philosophers are said to be ‘saying the same things about the same things’. But even though death can be regarded as a cultural construct, the similarities in attitude and response to the prospect of death are striking. There is a sense in which the engagement with death as what Jaspers called a ‘limitsituation’ reaches something basic in human existence.

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A matter of life-and-death A cursory survey of philosophical views of death in the Western and East-Asian traditions reveals a general contrast between regarding death as an event external to life and which brings it to an end, and seeing it as a constant complement or concomitant to life. In classical Daoism, for example, life and death are considered interdependent opposites that belong together as yang and yin. In the Daodejing ordinary people are said to miss these close relations, ignoring death or treating it lightly because of their preoccupation with life and its largess.3 The interdependence of life and death is a prominent theme in the Inner Chapters of the Zhuangzi, as exemplified in the line ‘Simultaneously with being alive one dies’, in the words put into the mouth of Laozi concerning ‘recognising death and life as a single strand’, and in the attribution to death and life of ‘the constancy of morning and evening’.4 There are some remarkable parallels to these ideas in the thought of a nearcontemporary of Laozi’s in Greece, namely Heraclitus, where life and death figure prominently among various pairs of independent opposites. Fragment 88 (Diels), for example, reads: ‘The same: living and dead, and the waking and the sleeping, and young and old. For these transposed are those, and those transposed again are these.’5 But although Plato adduces some Heraclitean arguments from opposites in his discussion of the immortality of the soul in the Phaedo, the general drift in subsequent Western thinking has been away from understanding existence as a continual cycle of generation and destruction (as seems natural to Buddhist as well as Daoist thinkers) in the direction of seeing death as something absolutely other than life. This drift was encouraged by most Christian thinking on the topic—though it was resisted by a few heterodox figures, some of whom were influenced by Presocratic thought. In Buddhist philosophy one of the ‘three characteristics of existence’ is impermanence (Sanskrit: anitya; Japanese: mujō); a refrain that echoes throughout the tradition being: ‘All dharmas [elements of existence] are impermanent.’ All existence—human life naturally included—is understood as a beginning- and endless cycle of arising and perishing, generation and extinction, being born and dying away (what the Japanese call shōmetsu) at every moment. This idea, as expressed in the dictum setsuna-shōmetsu (‘Everything perishes as soon as it arises’), is central to the philosophy of Dōgen Kigen (1200–53), who reiterates frequently: ‘Life arises and perishes instantaneously from moment to moment.’6 Regarded as the founder of the Sōtō School of Zen Buddhism, Dōgen is perhaps the profoundest thinker in the Japanese tradition. Given the centrality of the idea of arising-perishing, when Dōgen says that ‘to understand birth-and-death [shōji] clearly is the matter of the greatest importance for a Buddhist’, he means that birth-and-death is to be understood not only on the traditional model of samsara as the ‘macro-cycle’, as it were, of death-and-rebirth, but also as conditioning every moment of each human life.7 This means that life and death (the Japanese shō means ‘life’ as well as ‘birth’) are not mutually exclusive opposites but are rather deeply interfused: There is life in death, and there is death in life…This is not contrived by man wilfully but acted by Dharma [cosmic law] naturally… Although we have not left life, we already see death. Although we have not yet

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discarded death, we already meet life. Life does not obstruct death, death does not obstruct life.’8 One finds a similar emphasis on death in the teachings of a later Zen master, Suzuki Shōsan (1579–1655), who became a monk only in his forties, having lived the first part of his life as a samurai, during which time he served and fought in the army of the great Tokugawa Ieyasu. Though he himself was ordained—he ordained himself in fact—he did not especially recommend the reclusive life to his audience, advocating the practice of Buddhist compassion in a more secular form of Zen. Thanks to his earlier career as a warrior during one of the bloodier periods in Japan’s history, and since his primary audience consisted of the common people, Shōsan made the engagement with death—as something every human being has to face—central to his teachings. He exhorts his students to ‘rouse death-energy [shiki]’ since this process can be ‘the beginning of freedom from birth and death’.9 The juxtaposition of shi (death) with ki (energy) is striking, in so far as ki (Chinese: ch’i, or qi) is the vital energy that sustains the living body. However, since ki animates not just human beings but the entire universe, the dissolution of a living body signifies (as it does for the Daoists) a reconfiguration rather than an extinction of vital energies. It was perhaps thanks to the revisioning of death that had taken place during the Renaissance in Europe that the ideas of a near-contemporary of Shōsan’s, Michel de Montaigne (1533–92), should have been so revolutionary in that context. Montaigne’s Essays are remarkable not only for the existential attitude toward death they embody (a stance strikingly similar to Shōsan’s), but also for the author’s conception of human existence as a flux of discontinuous moments or instants, on which consciousness imposes an appearance of duration (a conception strikingly similar to Dōgen’s). Although the title of Montaigne’s classic essay ‘That to philosophize is to learn to die’ invokes the Socrates of the Phaedo, and most of the many quotations are from the Stoics, there is a distinctive strain in his thinking about death that, as it were, brings it back to life. Near the end, the voice of ‘Nature’ takes over and addresses Montaigne’s audience, as she has presumably advised the author: Death is the condition of your creation, it is a part of you; [in being frightened by death] you are fleeing from your own selves. This being of yours that you enjoy is equally divided between death and life… The constant work of your life is to build death. You are in death while you are in life…during life you are dying.10 There is a remarkable anticipation here of a modern conception of death that is quite different from ancient and medieval understandings of the phenomenon. For the ancients, in the words attributed to Thales, to pan empsuchon: the entire universe is ensouled, animated by life; and thus death is the puzzling counterweight to the vital thrust of the cosmos. But, as Nietzsche observes of us moderns: ‘Our “death” is a quite different death.’11 Since Descartes deflated the world soul, anima mundi, by denying that even animals (let alone plants and stars) had souls, clearing the way for the modern scientific conception of the cosmos as lifeless particles in motion, the universe has become a less hospitable place. As one of Nietzsche’s crazier characters asks of the inhabitants of the

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post-Copernican world: ‘Are we not wandering as through an infinite nothingness? Do we not feel the breath of empty space? Hasn’t it become colder?’12 After such a shift it is life rather than death that seems to call for an explanation—or perhaps only if one insists on understanding them as opposites. ‘Let us be wary of saying that death is opposed to life. The living is merely a species of the dead, and a very rare species.’13 Nietzsche suggests that we misunderstand the nature of the dead world because we consider it only from the perspective of the sentient beings we ourselves are. From the proper perspective, the prospect of our return to the inorganic state becomes the opposite of depressing—as is clear from a number of notes Nietzsche wrote around the time he was working on the The Gay Science: The ‘dead’ world! eternally in motion and without erring, force against force!…It is a festival to go from this world across into the ‘dead world’…Let us see through this comedy [of sentient being] and thereby enjoy it! Let us not think of the return to the inanimate as a regression!…Death has to be reinterpreted! We thereby reconcile ourselves with what is actual, with the dead world.14 If we see through the comedy of human existence to its inorganic backdrop, we realize that the return to the inanimate is not a regression that takes place at the end of life but rather a recurrence going at every moment. One of the heirs of Nietzsche’s thinking about death is Heidegger, even though he rarely mentions Nietzsche in connection with that topic. The early ‘existential conception’ of death developed in Being and Time may be summed up in the statement: ‘One does not look far enough when “life” is made the problem and death considered occasionally in addition.’15 And in a later essay Heidegger cites a poetic evocation of the complementary relationship between life and death, in the form of a passage from a letter of Rilke’s from the early twenties. Like the moon, so life surely has a side that is constantly turned away from us, and which is not life’s opposite, but its completion to perfection, to plenitude, to the truly whole and full sphere and globe of Being. I shall not say that one should love death; but one should love life with such magnanimity, and without calculating exceptions, that one involuntarily always includes death (as the averted half of life) and loves it along with life…It is thinkable that death stands infinitely nearer to us than life itself.16 One is reminded here not only of Heidegger’s contention that what is nearest to us (das Nächste) is not beings but Being, or Nothing, but also of the Buddhist conception of nothingness that is central to the work of Nishitani Keiji—for whom ‘the field of emptiness’ opens up on the ‘absolute near side’ of human existence.17 Correspondingly, there is nothing nearer to life than death: From the very outset life is at one with death. This means that all living things, just as they are, can be seen under the Form of death…The aspect

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of life and the aspect of death are equally real, and reality is that which appears now as life and now as death.18

The death in-breath Dōgen is known as an ardent advocate of sitting meditation, which he calls ‘zazen-only’ (shikantaza), as an indispensable element in Buddhist practice. He instructs his students to sit in an upright position, with ‘ears and shoulders, nose and navel’ vertically aligned. ‘After the bodily position is in order, also regulate your breathing. If a thought arises, take note of it and then dismiss it.’19 Although Dōgen does not himself draw the analogy, the rising and falling of the breath and the arising and subsiding of thoughts—a primary focus of awareness in many forms of Buddhist meditation—are mimetic of the continual birth and death of human existence as well as the generation and extinction of the cosmos in general. As Nietzsche notes, in a brief meditation on night: ‘As soon as the night breaks in, our sensation of the nearest things is transformed…The breathing of the sleeper, its terrifying rhythm…[in which] when the breath sinks and almost dies out into the stillness of death…night persuades us to death.’20 The utter contingency of the breath, its rise and fall; its inevitable, final fall; the lack of necessity linking exhalation and the next breath, which may always be the last. The moment between, the still, turning point between in and out, shadowed in the chiasm—and always potential chasm—between systole and diastole, and the on that comes after an off in the firing of neurons. (‘Brain death’ as a criterion, all systems stop— just as one is said to ‘breathe one’s last’.) And so the alternating current of life appears to flow on, oscillating over the abyss, and flowing off continually. If meditation practice often focuses on the breath, it is not exclusively the breath of life. Shōsan, for instance, talks of being on occasion ‘oppressed by death-energy’ such that it is ‘difficult to breathe’.21 In describing the phenomenon of Angst, in which one comes face-to-face with the nothingness of one’s existence, Heidegger says that it ‘constricts and oppresses one’s breathing’.22 (Similarly, for Freud, anxiety stems from a constriction of the flow of vital forces or a blockage of sexual energies.)

Death in life When Nietzsche wrote that we should be wary of saying that death is opposed to life, this advice is based on his readings in the biology of his time; and advances made in the biological sciences shortly after his death appear to have corroborated and encouraged further philosophical thinking about death along existential lines. In the course of characterizing in Being and Time what he calls ‘biological-ontical’ research into death, Heidegger cites a work from 1924 by a former colleague at Marburg, Eugen Korschelt, Lebensdauer, Altern und Tod (‘Life-span, ageing and death’), which argues for the essential ‘immanence’ of death in higher organisms.23 This idea, which appears to be confirmed by subsequent biological research, makes nonsense of the view that would see individual life as only contingently limited by death in the faith that progress in medical technology might come up with means to prolong life indefinitely.

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Nietzsche was intrigued by the power that the shift from a fantasy of mere contingency to a conviction of absolute certainty lends to ‘the thought of death’ (the title of one of his most moving aphorisms): ‘It gives me a melancholy pleasure to live in the midst of this jumble of little lanes, of needs, of voices: how much enjoyment, impatience, and desire, how much thirsty life and intoxication with life comes to light at every moment!’24 He was living in Genoa when he wrote this, having come to appreciate the exuberant vitality of life on the Mediterranean coast, which contrasted so strongly with the more sepulchral tone in his original home in the north of Germany. But the contrast with the goal toward which that exuberant life is headed is even greater: And yet it will soon be so still for all these noisy, living, life-thirsty people! How his shadow stands behind each one of them, as his dark fellow traveller! It is always as in the last moment before the departure of an emigrant ship: there is more to say than ever before, the hour is at hand, and the ocean and its desolate silence are waiting impatiently behind all of this noise—so covetous and certain of their prey. We are shadowed all along the way by this silent fellow traveller, though we prefer to ignore its presence, though ever surrounded by the ocean of death.25 This thought is echoed by Nishitani in a discussion of the Zen saying, ‘Death’s heads all over the field’ (of existence), which alludes to the skull possessed by all living humans. Nishitani invokes a ‘double vision’ of places burgeoning with life, such as the Ginza in Tokyo or Broadway in New York, as being simultaneously fields of death: ‘A hundred years hence, not one of the people now walking the Ginza will be alive, neither the young nor the old, the men nor the women…We can look at the living as they walk full of health down the Ginza and see, in double exposure, a picture of the dead’26. He goes on to quote the lines from Eliot’s The Wasteland that allude to the procession of the dead in Dante’s Inferno: Under the brown fog a winter dawn, A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many, I had not thought death had undone so many.27 In the not too distant future, it will surely have undone us all: the departure is already underway, and soon we all join the ranks of the departed, flowing over to the dead world. And each and every one of them supposes that the heretofore means little or nothing and that the near future is everything: hence this haste, this clamour, this drowning out and overreaching of each other! Everyone wants to be the first in this future—and yet it is death and deathly silence that are alone certain and common to all in this future!28 It is as if we trip over our own skulls in our clattering eagerness to get to that state. ‘One does not look far enough,’ as Heidegger says. And yet Nietzsche is bemused by the way most of us ignore the opportunity for solidarity that our common mortality provides:

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How strange that this sole certainty and commonality do almost nothing for people, and that nothing is farther from them than the feeling that they form a brotherhood of death! It pleases me to see that people want at all costs to avoid the thought of death! I should very much like to do something toward making the thought of life a hundred times more thoughtworthy for them.29 The expression of pleasure is ironical: the point is that if people were to stop avoiding the thought of death they would find that their lives provide far more food for thought than they ever imagined.30 As Nietzsche wrote earlier, addressing ‘the priests’ on the salutary effects of thanatonic contemplation: ‘The certain prospect of death could infuse every life with a delicious and fragrant drop of lightheartedness—and you wonderful apothecarysouls have turned it into a bad-tasting drop of poison which then makes the whole of life repugnant.’31 Such an infusion throughout the whole of life is encouraged by one of the best known proponents of ‘life philosophy’ (Lebensphilosophie), Georg Simmel, who argues on the basis of contemporary biological discoveries for the immanence of death in all living organisms. In an essay from 1918 entitled ‘Death and Immortality’ he writes: In actuality death is bound up with life from the very beginning and from within…[Death] this opposite of life derives from nowhere else than life itself! Life itself has produced it and includes it…In every single moment of life we are the ones that will die, and that moment would be different if this [dying] were not our co-given condition that is somehow at work in the moment. Just as we are not already there [da] at the instant of our birth, but rather something of us is born continuously, so we do not first come to die in our last instant.32 Heidegger cites this essay in developing his ‘existential conception’ of death—and indeed the discussion of death in Being and Time is very much grounded in this idea of Simmel’s.33 Anticipating Heidegger’s understanding of death as an indeterminable, everpresent possibility rather than a future actuality, or certainty, Simmel considers the way death gives form to life: ‘It is not that [death] limits or forms our life only in the hour of death, but it is rather a formal moment of our life which colors all its contents: the limitation by death of the total life affects each one of its contents and instants.’34 He sums up this theme with the statement: ‘Death reveals itself as that apparently exterior to life which is actually interior to it.’35 It is interesting that Simmel should later refer to Buddhism, and to the ‘profound teaching’ of later Buddhism concerning karma and rebirth, which denies the existence of an I persisting through various configurations of actions and effects: ‘There are only thoughts and deeds, natural and impersonal as it were, which come together in a given moment into an aggregate. A later aggregate, connected with the earlier by a causal nexus, consists of precisely the ensuing effects of those earlier elements or states.’36 This is the Buddhist teaching of anatman, or no-self, expressed in terms of the idea of the ‘codependent arising’ (pratītya-samutpāda) of all phenomena. This idea is equivalent to the Mahayana Buddhist notion of emptiness

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(śūnyatā, nothingness), which is connected with the conception of the momentary nature of all existence. For Heidegger it all hinges on our understanding of time and human ways of being in time. Our being is a ‘stretching’ (Erstreckung) through time, in so far as we always exist ‘between birth and death’.37 It is not, he stresses, that we exist ‘actually’ at one point in time and are in addition ‘surrounded’ by the nonactuality of our birth and death. Rather we exist ‘natally’ and are always ‘already dying natally in the sense of being toward death’. We are thus always open in the present to the temporal horizons of the past and future; in particular, our birth and death are here now, too. For a full understanding of our being here and there—what Heidegger calls Dasein—as a spatio-temporal ‘clearing’ (Lichtung), we have to understand our death not as an actual event that will take place at some time in the future (and not right now), but as an ever-present possibility (a phenomenon possible at every moment). In other words death is not something we have to wait for: it already ‘stands into’ (hereinsteht) our present existence, and is ‘always already included [einbezogen]’ in our being here now.38 As Nishitani puts it, at the beginning of his major work: In the case of death, we do not face something that awaits us in some distant future, but something that we bring into the world with us at the moment we are born. Our life runs up against death at its every step; we keep one foot planted in the vale of death at all times. Our life stands poised at the brink of the abyss of nihility, to which it may return at any moment.39

Departing life Nietzsche formulates one of the basic principles of hermeneutic distance as follows: ‘Whatever you want to know and measure, you must take your leave of, at least for a while. Only when you have left the town do you see how high its towers rise above the houses.’40 The idea is that to properly understand something one needs to distance oneself from it, at least for a time. But this is especially true of life itself: if I want to know and measure my life, I must depart it, take my leave, at least for a while. Again there is no need to wait for the end, since it is already here. This is why Nietzsche’s Zarathustra is not talking about literal reincarnation when he speaks of the ‘bitter dying’ and being ‘born anew’ that are necessary for creative existence: ‘Truly, through a hundred souls I went my way, and through a hundred cradles and pangs of birth. I have already taken many a farewell; I know the heartbreaking final hours.’41 And those final hours come at any and every moment. Similarly, for Montaigne, there may be no need actively to depart, since we are already leaving at every moment as it is: ‘Every minute I seem to be slipping away from myself.’42 The appropriate response to this condition is after all to take one’s leave: ‘I unbind myself on all sides; my farewells are already half made to everyone except myself. Never did a man prepare to leave the world more utterly and completely, nor detach himself from it more universally, than I propose to do.’

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But the remarkable effect of such detachment—at least as practised by Montaigne, for whom ‘Death mingles and fuses with our lives throughout’43—is that one finds oneself come back fully to life. ‘When I dance, I dance; when I sleep, I sleep,’ he writes, in the manner of a Zen master. As Jean Starobinski puts it: ‘Montaigne, having taken his leave, is able to see human life and this world in a new light: while still alive he enjoys a posthumous pleasure.’44 Indeed the interplay here between letting go and retaining, and between numerous other contrary movements, is remarkably reminiscent of the attitude adopted and advocated by Dōgen in his affirmation of this ephemeral world of phenomena as Buddhanature: Just understand that birth-and-death itself is nirvana, and you will neither hate one as being birth-and-death nor cherish the other as being nirvana…This present birth and death itself is the life of the Buddha. If you attempt to reject it with distaste you are thereby losing the life of the Buddha. If you abide in it, attaching to birth-and-death, you again lose the life of the Buddha.45 We find a fuller description of the process of departure and return in the writings of a later Zen master, Hakuin Ekaku (1686–1769), who constantly urged his readers to see into their own true nature by seeing through the illusory nature of the ego-self: If you are not a hero who has truly seen into his own nature, don’t think that [non-ego] is something that can be known so easily…you must be prepared to let go your hold when hanging from a sheer precipice, to die and return again to life…Supposing a man should find himself in some desolate area where no one has ever walked before. Below him are the perpendicular walls of a bottomless chasm. His feet rest precariously on a patch of slippery moss, and there is no spot of earth on which he can steady himself. He can neither advance nor retreat; he faces only death.46 The abyss gapes. One is reminded of Heidegger’s account of Angst in the essay ‘What Is Metaphysics?’ where he says: ‘There is no hold left…Anxiety reveals nothingness. We ‘hover’ in anxiety…Only pure being there [Da-sein] in the shaking of this hovering, in which there is nothing to hold on to, is still there…Being-there means: being held out into nothing.’47 But if one sustains that hovering, letting the question ‘Why is there anything at all, and not rather nothing?’ pose itself, there comes a turn, or return, in which the terror of the experience is transformed. ‘For close by genuine anxiety as the terror of the abyss dwells awe. This clears and protects that realm of human being within which the human being dwells at home in the enduring.’48 For Hakuin, too, the suspense, or fall, brings one—miraculous to relate—back to life: ‘Then when suddenly you return to life, there is the great joy of one who drinks the water and knows for himself whether it is hot or cold…This is known as seeing into one’s own nature.’49 Seeing that one is, at bottom, ‘held out into nothing’, as Heidegger puts it.

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Learning dying In line with his predecessors in the Zen tradition, Hakuin takes impermanence as basic and so understands our ‘own nature’ as essentially mortal: If you should have the desire to study Zen under a teacher and see into your own nature, you should first investigate the word shi [death]. If you want to know how to investigate this word, then at all times… merely investigate the koan: ‘After you are dead and cremated, where has the main character gone?’ Then…you will obtain the decisive and ultimate great joy.50 In the course of a prolonged meditation on death elsewhere in his writings, Hakuin quotes Suzuki Shōsan’s exhortation to concentrate on the Chinese character for ‘death’ (shi, Chinese si). ‘Make the one graph death master in your heart,’ writes Shōsan, ‘observing it and letting go of everything else.’51 Shōsan often speaks of ‘learning death’ (shi o narau) as well as of ‘guarding death’ (shi o mamoru). As with Heidegger, who stresses that ‘understanding death as an everpresent possibility’ does not refer to some abstract process of thinking about or contemplating death, in talking of ‘learning’ death Shōsan means an experiential ‘learning how’ rather than an objective studying. Commenting on the use of the term narau by the poet Basho , who advocates learning of the pine tree from the pine tree itself, Nishitani observes that ‘it carries the sense of “taking after” something, of making an effort to stand essentially in the same mode of being as the thing one wishes to learn about’.52 This is just what Shōsan means by exhorting his readers to ‘learn death’: we can learn from death by entering into its way of being, its falling away at every moment, and thereby come to ‘live having let go of life’.53 Aware of how easy it is to be distracted from one’s focus on death by the attractions and obligations of everyday life, Shōsan exhorts his students: ‘Don’t forget death and lose yourself to this world!’54 For Heidegger, it is anxiety in the face of the nothingness of our death that brings us back from our absorption and self-dissipation in the world of our concerns.55 ‘Your vital energy wanes because you forget about death,’ Shōsan tells his students. ‘At this moment,’ he reminds them, ‘death is right before your eyes.’56 Montaigne arrives at a similar conclusion regarding the need to familiarize death, to become a familiar of the shadow fellow traveller through a radical departure from life for its supposed opposite: Let us rid death of its strangeness, come to know it, get used to it. Let us have nothing on our minds as often as death. At every moment let us picture it in our imagination in all its aspects…It is uncertain where death awaits us; let us await it everywhere. Premeditation of death is premeditation of freedom…He who has learned how to die has unlearned how to be a slave. Knowing how to die frees us from all subjection and constraint.57 These are anticipations of Heidegger’s notion of the optimal way of being toward one’s death. For Heidegger the engagement with death as ever-present possibility liberates one

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from superficial and self-deceptive conceptions of life. It is above all a dynamic encounter in which we are said to ‘precur’ or ‘preempt’ death, not just by looking forward but by running forward to it—an activity that goes hand in hand, or step by step, with the ‘openedness’ (Erschlossenheit) which ‘grants death the possibility of assuming power over’ our existence and ‘destroying every self-concealing at its root’.58 And yet there is hardly a need to run forward to death since it already ‘stands into’ the clearing of our being here. Just as in Zen the ‘Great Death’ leads to the ‘Great Liberation’, so for Heidegger when one ‘lets death assume power’ in one’s existence, one can understand oneself ‘free for death, in the preponderant power of one’s finite freedom’.59

Back to the moment The crux, then, is to understand the time of our lives as momentary. In Nishitani’s words: ‘Life consists of a chain of “births and deaths” and in every moment arises anew and again perishes.’60 Something very like this basic insight of the Zen tradition—that frustration comes from the attempt to hold on to the arising and dying moment, to forge the successive instants of existence into a continuity, or to impose duration onto the radically episodic flux of life—is expressed by Montaigne in terms of the illumining pulsations of human awareness. They say that the sun does not give off a continuous light, but that it incessantly darts new rays so thick on one another that we cannot perceive the intervals between them…Just so our soul diversely and imperceptible darts its rays…[Various things] seize our imagination and get it passionately involved for the moment, according to their character; but the turn is so quick that it escapes us…For this reason we are wrong to compose a continuous body out of all this succession of feelings.61 This is how human beings constitute a world of enduring things, things that might help foster the illusion that we, too, the composers, are enduring. This process is a topic of frequent reflection for Nietzsche, who returns again and again in his thinking to the radically momentary nature of existence. Whereas the animal is fully absorbed in the rise and fall of the elements of existence, the human being has the capacity to remember, to experience connections between moments: It is a wonder: the moment [Augenblick]—in a flash there, in a flash gone, before it nothing, after it nothing—nevertheless comes again as a ghost and disturbs the peace of a later moment…The human being says ‘I remember’ and envies the animal, which forgets immediately and sees every moment really die, sink back into mist and night and be extinguished forever.62 The notion of the moment is crucial to Nietzsche’s most important (and most affirmative) idea, the thought of the eternal recurrence. Understood existentially, Nietzsche’s first public intimation of this thought (in §341 of The Joyous Wisdom) formally anticipates

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Heidegger’s account of the encounter with the nothingness of death in the experience of anxiety. The crucial question there, after the demon has confronted us with the prospect of the eternal recurrence of our lives as we have lived them so far, is whether we would understand that thought as crushingly nihilistic, or else: ‘Have you ever experienced an enormous moment in which you would reply to the demon: “You are a god and I have never heard anything more divine!…”’63 The question, at every moment, is essentially: ‘Can I act now in such a way, with an open perspective and clarity of insight into who I am, that I can will the eternal recurrence of this next moment and the entire sequence of moments that may succeed it?’ It is significant that when Nietzsche first announces this thought, in a letter to a friend, as something ‘the like of which [he has] never seen before’, the experience seems to instigate an unstable oscillation between life and death: ‘I will have to live at least a few years longer! But at the same time, my friend, it occurs to me that I am actually living a highly dangerous life, for I am one of those machines that could blow apart! The intensity of my feelings makes me tremble and laugh.’64 At the first mention of the thought of eternal recurrence in the unpublished notes, Nietzsche asks, as if enlightened by a confrontation with death: ‘What are we going to do with the rest of our life—we who have passed most of it in a basic state of unknowing?’65 A number of subsequent notes from this period deal with the moment and death, which prompts one to consider how this ‘highest formula of affirmation’ depends on a conception of time as the continual ‘birth-and-death’ of moments and the codependent arising and perishing of all phenomena. In a draft for the first published announcement of the thought of eternal recurrence66 Nietzsche imagines the cosmos as a dynamic ‘world of forces’ that suffers neither diminution nor equilibrium: ‘it never has a moment of peace, its force and movement are equally great at all times’.67 Assuming the cosmos is an eternal dynamism, we have to say of ‘this moment’: ‘It was already here once, and many times before, and so will recur again, with all forces distributed exactly as they are now: and just the same for the moment that gave birth to this one, and for the moment that is the child of this one’. Here we have a vision of a world in which each moment is born from the preceding moment and dies as it gives birth to the next moment. As if with the voice of God Nietzsche proclaims to his fellow human beings ‘a great minute of time’ before ‘all the conditions from which you arose, in the cyclical course of the world, come together again. And then you will find again…the entire concatenation of all things.’ Two notes later, he derides the human inability to think of ‘becoming’ as anything other than ‘the transition from one enduring “dead” condition to another enduring “dead” condition. And we call what is “dead” motionless! As if there were anything motionless! The living is not the opposite of the dead, but a special case of it.’68 Becoming is rather the arising and perishing of the entire concatenation of dynamic forces at every moment. We are given a more vivid picture of individual existence within such a cosmos when Nietzsche invokes: ‘[T]he mystery that there is no individual, that in the smallest moment it is something different from in the next moment, and that its conditions of existence are those of countless other individuals: the infinitely small moment is the higher reality and truth, a lightning-image out of the eternal flux.’69 This seems like such a classic presentation of the Buddhist idea of codependent arising that Nietzsche may be recalling

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something from his earlier readings in Buddhism. In Nishitani’s formulation of the Zen standpoint: ‘Under every moment is…the eternity of nothingness…of death [but also] the field of emptiness as the field of the mutual interpenetration of all things.’70 Subsequent passages in Nietzsche’s notebook expand on our relation to the ‘dead’ world of the inorganic. Our physical constitution as living organisms makes us from the start intimate relations of this dead world: ‘How distant and superior is our attitude toward what is dead, the anorganic, and all the while we are three-quarters water and have anorganic minerals in us that perhaps do more for our well- and ill-being than the whole of living society.’71 An idea that should make us slower to discriminate the quick from the dead. As ‘our mother Nature’ says, according to Montaigne: ‘Water, earth, fire, and the other parts of this structure of mine are no more instruments of your life than instruments of your death.’72 Nietzsche again: ‘The inorganic conditions us through and through: water, air, earth, the shape of the ground, electricity, etc. We are plants under such conditions.’73 And the next note: ‘My task: to dehumanize nature and then the naturalization of human beings, after they have attained the pure concept of nature.’ Nietzsche was deeply concerned with the task of renaturalizing the human being until the end of his career. In yet another passage from this notebook, he characterizes this process in terms of a realization of the imminence and immanence of death and of the momentary nature of existence in general. We can protect ourselves only a little in the great matters: a comet could smash the sun at any moment…To the naturalizing of the human belongs readiness for the absolutely sudden and thwarting… The sudden is continuously there in the smallest thing, in every nerve; and it is precisely regular, even though it appears to us in time incalcu-lable. What has duration is simply that whose changes we don’t see, because they are too gradual and minute for us74 At any moment to be ready for the absolutely sudden is to be, as a being with a nervous system, ready for life—as for death. Such readiness involves renouncing the immortality of the soul and also the substantiality of the ego by seeing through the illusion of duration, so as to realize our implication in the utter momentariness of natural processes, the constant Heraclitean flux of arising and perishing. Heidegger calls it ‘readiness for anxiety’ and a ‘giving up of the self’ in the realization that ‘the uttermost possibility of existence’ (the possibility of the absolute impossibility of any possibilities) is the innermost, the nearest possibility that stands into our existence at every moment, in the light of which all our other possibilities may be clearly distinguished.75 If, finally, we map onto one another the views of death of the European and Japanese thinkers we have considered, a common pattern appears. Since death and life are inextricably intertwined, the best way to die is the best way to live: that is, to realize (in the dual sense of becoming aware of and making real) the radically momentary nature of our existence. If one refrains from grasping and trying to hold on, loosing attachments, the movements of departing and returning to life take place naturally. It is all over, as Montaigne says; but somehow—so far, at least—it is all back, too. And so for another moment, it is granted to us to be able to choose ourselves, in the light of the possibility of its being our last and of its eternal recurrence, once again (da capo).

10 DEATH AND METAPHYSICS Heidegger on nothingness and the meaning of Being Peter Kraus The issue of death is central to understanding Heidegger’s lifelong enquiry into the ‘meaning of Being’. For Heidegger, however, death does not constitute a subject in itself and it would be wrong to say he developed a philosophy about death. Yet understanding his view of death is nevertheless the key to understanding Heidegger’s philosophy of Being. Moreover this cannot be done without also understanding the connection between death and nothingness. In understanding this connection, and the connection between nothingness and Being, we come to see the way in which understanding the meaning of Being, and with it metaphysics, itself depends upon an authentic grasp of death.

Authenticity and inauthenticity Being and Time is the principal text in which Heidegger addresses the issue of death. In this work the quest to understand Being is approached through a study of the human way of ‘being-there’, to which Heidegger gives the name ‘Dasein’, and through an analysis of the structures of such ‘being-there’. He makes a famous distinction between authentic and inauthentic modes of Dasein. These two modes are best understood by thinking of ‘authentic’ as signifying that individual character of human being that is compromised by submersion in conventional behaviour and forms of life, which in turn are the result of unqualified conformity to inherited social structures. To be inauthentic means to live merely according to these pre-determined structures and to behave in accordance with everyday conceptions of appropriate social intercourse. Heidegger denies that the terms ‘authentic’ and ‘inauthentic’ have ‘ethical significance’, claiming that they are purely descriptive, signifying two alternative modes of being a human being. The inauthentic mode covers up the true character of its own being, a being given recognition in authenticity. In Being and Time Heidegger ‘deconstructs’ Dasein from its ordinary inauthentic average everydayness to arrive at Beingtowards-death as the determining feature of Dasein’s existence. Authentic Dasein accepts that authentic death is not an occurrence that will happen sometime in the future, but is a fundamental structure inseparable from its Being-in-the-world. As such, death is not a mark at the end of our existence nor some event for which we can prepare ourselves, but an intrinsic existential structure that is constitutive of our very existence: ‘With death, Dasein stands before itself in its ownmost potentiality-for-Being…Thus death reveals itself as that possibility which is one’s ownmost, which is non-relational, and which is not to be outstripped [unüberholbare].’1 In recognizing its Being-towards-death, and

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recognizing thereby that its own Being is essentially defined in relation to nothingness, to its own not-Being, Dasein is able to be authentically.2

Anxiety—nothingness and death It is the grasp of our own ‘being-towards-death’ that, according to Heidegger, underlies the fundamental experience of existential anxiety. And this encounter with death is also an encounter with nothingness. In Being and Time Heidegger writes that: ‘The “nothing” [das Nichts, nothingness] with which anxiety brings us face to face, unveils the nullity by which Dasein, in its very basis, is defined; and this basis itself is as thrownness into death.’3 It is in anxiety, and the encounter with death, that we realize the reality of nothingness, or, better, the nothingness of ‘reality’ (Wirklichkeit—the world of things subject to causal laws), as well as our own essential nullity. In anxiety the world of beings, the world on which we base our daily life, on which we rely, and by means of which we ordinarily define ourselves, slips away and our attitude becomes one of indifference to the world of beings—an indifference in which ‘we can get no hold on things. In the slipping away of beings only this “no hold on things” comes over us and remains. Anxiety reveals the nothing.’4 The encounter with nothingness occurs in the mood of anxiety when our enthralment to beings is broken; when ‘all things and we ourselves sink into indifference’5 and ‘beings do not respond any more’ (‘das Seiende spricht nicht mehr an’).6 This means that in the state of anxiety the usual concerned relationship between Dasein and beings is broken down—Dasein does not respond to beings or even to itself in the usual manner. ‘One’, that is, Dasein, feels abandoned and not at home. It is not the particular ‘you’ or ‘I’ that feels ‘unhomely’ in this way, rather it is the mood as such that makes ‘one’ feel ‘ill at ease’. Dasein in the mood of anxiety is distanced from beings and hovers above beings which, in virtue of the absence of meaningfulness, cannot be held onto any longer.7 In anxiety and the encounter with death Dasein is forced to stand alone and unrelated to beings, and in this position nothingness appears out of the ‘collapse’ of the totality of beings. In this fundamental mood, nothingness appears to be the only phenomenon that remains as having significance. Such confrontation with nothingness in anxiety robs us of speech and we are stunned by its nearness. Indeed, in the face of this confrontation the point of view of logic, as traditionally understood, is dissolved. In the face of nothingness we come to see, in fact, the limitations of reason and logic. In the face of nothingness reason and logic are impotent, for nothingness is precisely not something which reason or logic can take as an object. In this respect, it is quite clear that, for Heidegger, the kind of knowledge we have of beings—a knowledge demonstrated in everyday life and epitomized in the scientific attitude—cannot include knowledge of that which is not a being, nothingness. We cannot, therefore, encounter nothingness on the basis of such ordinary knowledge nor as that which is the object of such knowledge (in the way we might encounter ordinary beings). Much the same considerations would also seem to apply to the idea of death understood, not as a biological phenomenon, but as our ‘ownmost possibility’. Death

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cannot be known or understood in the way that any ordinary event is understood— indeed, death is not even an event in this sense. It is notable that Dasein does not grasp its own death as simply the negation of its existence—instead death is understood as that which marks Dasein’s ‘ownmost possibility’. Similarly, Dasein does not grasp nothingness merely as the negation of beings, for instance, in the sense that beings cease to be any longer of interest. Rather, nothingness itself comes to the fore, no longer hidden by our usual enthralment with beings and their Being. The proximity of Dasein and nothingness in the state of anxiety is made vivid by the idea that the ‘thing’ about which one was anxious was really—nothing. ‘Indeed: the nothing itself—as such—was there.’8 The very insubstantiality of all beings, including one’s fellow-humans and one’s self, shines through in this witnessing of nothingness. In this witnessing of the nothing, Dasein transcends the level of its usual concern with the world, and this transcendence allows the grasp of a more primordial reality. Dasein perceives a more basic condition of the world that allows it to consider beings—including its own being—in their totality and so in their intrinsic ‘non-being’ as well.

What is nothingness?—nothingness and Being The encounter with nothingness and death makes Dasein realize that it is essentially Being among beings, and that as Da-sein9, that is, ‘being-present’ in the world, it always exists in relationship to nothingness, including its own death and so it’s own non-Being. It appears that this self-realization occurs when anxious Da-sein sees the world of its concern and itself, that is to say its ‘I’, emptied of significance. This leads to Dasein standing alone and unrelated to the world of its daily concern, absorbed by nothingness. This absorption into nothingness Heidegger sees in terms of Dasein ‘being held out into the nothing’.10 The ‘nihilating’ absorption that occurs in anxiety is not an annihilation of beings such as occurs, for instance, when salt is dissolved in a liquid or when a black hole swallows a comet. And as we noted earlier, neither is it based on a mere negation—the conscious intellectual act of being aware that something is not—for in the case of the anxious perception of nothingness this would amount to the judgement that actually nothing, including oneself exists, and this is a judgement that is abhorrent to the intellect. Beings are thus not negated or nihilated in the experience of nothingness, instead beings are no longer encountered in their modes of being ready-to-hand (Zuhandenes)11 or present-at-hand (Vorhandenes). In the experience of nothingness beings are, indeed, transcended, and this transcendent relation to nothingness is more fundamental than the relationship to beings as such. Moreover, Dasein’s relation to beings becomes authentic only in the face of its own being-towards-death when it realizes the fundamental truth that the ground of beings, including its own ground, lies in nothingness. The nothingness that anxious Da-sein experiences is thus equiprimordial with and fundamental to Dasein’s existence. This means that as soon as Dasein exists it is in relationship to nothingness— nothingness confronts us independently of logic and is no mere projection of consciousness. Nothingness, as understood by Heidegger, is always part of the very nature of things and as such is constitutive of the world. And this is also the case with respect to the experience of one’s being-towards-death: this is not identical with the

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experience of dying or of one’s own ceasing-to-be, but is precisely a confrontation with that which is part of, and indeed, constitutive of, our very existence—with the essential finitude of that existence. Yet if it is not beings as such, nor even Dasein, that are nihilated in anxiety (for beings do not thereby disappear and Dasein itself remains), then what is nihilated? What is nihilated is just that aspect or side of beings on which ordinary life is reliant and that is relevant to scientific research—being as ready-to-hand (Zuhandenes) or present-at-hand (Vorhandenes). In anxiety the totality of beings, and thus everything that can be subject matter to the scientist, or the object of everyday activity and concern, is nihilated. For the philosopher, however, who is interested in ontology and the ground (the fundamental basis, Grund) of beings, such nihilation also illuminates and reveals this very ground of beings—reveals it as nothingness. The stripping away from things, in anxiety, of the qualities and aspects that make those things relevant to Dasein’s scientific and practical concerns is simultaneously a revealing of that which is the proper concern of philosophy, namely nothingness. In this sense, in its concern with nothingness, philosophy is something essentially ‘otherworldly’ or ‘unhomely’. In the encounter with nothingness, and with its own being-towards-death, Dasein’s world is overturned as things of ordinary significance lose their significance, and nothingness, which in our ordinary attitude is neglected, becomes significant. But what does it mean for nothingness to become apparent in this way? What does it mean for us to grasp our own nullity in the confrontation with death? What is ‘the nothing’? Heidegger describes what he considers to be the essence of nothingness, in what has been taken by some to be a paradigm example of obscurantism, as follows:12 This wholly repelling gesture toward [verweisen]13 beings that are in retreat as a whole, which is the action of the nothing that oppresses Dasein in anxiety, is the essence of the nothing: nihilation. It is neither an annihilation of beings nor does it spring from a negation. Nihilation will not submit to calculation in terms of annihilation and negation. The nothing itself nihilates [Das Nichts selbst nichtet].14 The phrase ‘the nothing itself nihilates’ refers to Heidegger’s idea, encountered earlier, that neither intellectual negation nor a wilful act can disclose the essential meaninglessness of beings (in respect to ontology), and that nothingness itself is the agent of the nihilation of the relatively superficial aspects of beings—their readiness to and presence at hand. Heidegger implies also that nothingness is itself the basis for that anxiety by which nothingness is disclosed to Dasein. Nothingness thus appears to function in two ways: first, in nihilating the ‘ordinariness’ of beings, it points to beings; and second, it points to ‘something’ transcending beings, something more primordial than beings. The latter, ‘more primordial than beings’, would surely be that which grounds nihilation—which makes possible the nihilation of beings in their ordinariness as a whole and makes anxious Dasein encounter nothingness. But what is this ground? Could this be Being itself? In the characterization of nothingness as the source of the ‘retreat’ (nihilation) of beings in anxiety we find expressed a fundamental relation between nothingness and Being. Heidegger says as much in an important handwritten remark, in his own exemplar

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(Handexemplar) of the Wegmarken in which he tells us that the repelling force of nothingness points to the ‘Being of beings’.15 This means: the nihilating character of nothingness pulls aside the veil that covers beings and lets us see beings as ephemeral, finite and empty. The comment also indicates an intrinsic kinship between Being and nothingness in that nothingness is what brings into view the ‘Being of beings’. Indeed, nothingness and Being stand together in what is brought into view beyond beings when the ordinary meaning of beings is nihilated in anxiety. What is nihilated by nothingness are the attributes and the thing-hood of beings that also constitute that dimension or aspect of Being that is the subject matter for science as well as for much of everyday life. This means that the aspect of beings which is of no concern to science and daily practice is brought to light by the nihilation of that with which science and daily life are preoccupied. Does this mean that science and life are now in contact with Being? No, because the scientific attitude, and the attitude of daily concernful activity, inhibits both from any direct encounter with Being—neither Being nor nothingness is an issue for the scientific and the everyday—and therefore neither Being nor nothingness can be the subject of scientific scrutiny and manipulation nor of everyday concern. Anxious Da-sein has a different attitude from that of the scientist (or, indeed, of the person going about their everyday activity) to the world of beings. In such an attitude of anxiety Da-sein encounters the ‘tran-scendental traits’ of beings, of which nothingness is one face, and Being itself the other, so that in ‘the clear night of the nothing the original openness of beings as such arises’.16 Anxious Da-sein encounters the world in its basic condition in which the attributes of beings are stripped off by the nihilation of their inessential or ephemeral features. What remains, and is essential, is Being itself. That it is indeed Being that remains is indicated by some of Heidegger’s own comments following on from the lines just quoted. Heidegger writes Nihilation is not some fortuitous incident. Rather, as the repelling gesture toward the retreating whole of beings, it discloses these beings in their full but heretofore concealed strangeness as what is radically other—with respect to the nothing. In the clear night of the nothing of anxiety the original openness of beings as such arises: that they are beings—and not nothing. But this ‘and not nothing’ we add in our talk is not some kind of appended clarification, but [Being]17 which makes possible in advance the revelation of beings in general. The essence of the originally nihilating nothing lies in this, that it brings Da-sein for the first time before beings as such.18 The contrast between nothingness and beings brings to light that ‘not-Being’, i.e. Dasein’s mortality and inevitable being-towards-death, is the ground on which Dasein’s own Being is founded. Because Dasein is living temporally and as such has an understanding of time, it can grasp both its intrinsic possibility of actually not-Being and its own nothingness. That aspect of its temporal awareness that is projected to the future as possibility discloses to anxious Dasein that its past, present and future are based in a nullity that is contrasted to its actual world of beings. Authentic Dasein, however, realizes that a future based in a mere nullity cannot be the ground of its own Being, as otherwise

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there would be no foundation for beings and no underlying universal structure that nihilates the qualities of beings. As such a ground, the nothingness revealed in anxiety cannot be mere ‘nothing’ but something that is structurally ‘deeper’ than the attributes and qualities of beings. It must be an intangible ‘quality’, a feature that transcends the tangible structures of beings and which endures when they have been nihilated. Thus the experience of nothingness points to Being by disclosing itself—nothingness/Being—as the underlying structure of beings and Dasein’s own Being.

Nothingness and Da-sein In order to explore the depth of its own ground, Dasein, as we have already seen, transcends beings in the disclosure of their Being. Accordingly, Heidegger asserts that: Only on the ground of the original revelation of the nothing can human existence approach and penetrate beings. But since existence in its essence relates itself to beings—those which it is not and that which it is—it emerges as such existence in each case from the nothing already revealed. Da-sein means19: being held out into the nothing [Da-sein heisst: Hineingehaltenheit in das Nichts].20 We can find an explanation as to what Heidegger means by the last sentence here by considering again the handwritten note he entered within the above quotation in his own copy of the first edition of ‘Was ist Metaphysik’ and which I have entered in bracketed translation above. By saying that Da-sein is ‘held out into the nothing’, he means that Dasein persists as existence even in confrontation with nothingness; that is, unlike things that are nihilated in connection with nothingness, Dasein persists and retains its meaning as a self-defining Being. ‘Being held out into the nothing’ means that Dasein, as well as being a being among other beings, is also standing out from an ocean of nothingness. When the ordinary meaning of beings is nihilated, Dasein remains existing, and remains as that being which can disclose Being. The capacity of Dasein to endure in nothingness as an existing entity capable of disclosing its own ground attaches, in some sense, a meaning to Dasein’s existence. The meaning is the fulfilment of Dasein’s unique capacity for disclosing Being. Nothingness is thus significant to authentic Dasein, inasmuch as it is the fate of human existence always to remain amidst that which is ephemeral and insecure. In this sense nothingness is on the one hand the horizon of all there is—of the totality of beings—and on the other hand it confronts Dasein with Dasein’s own finitude and that of all beings. From this we can again recognize the difference between Dasein and other beings: Dasein is the being for whom its own Being is an issue, and, further-more, for whom its own nothingness has meaning, because, without Dasein’s own possible nothingness, all meaning is obliterated. Dasein’s recognition of its own intrinsic nothingness, as beingtowards-death, is necessary for Dasein to persist in its authentic relationship to nothingness—and thereby to Being. Accordingly Heidegger was indeed justified in annotating his own copy of ‘Was ist Metaphysik?’ with the remark that: ‘Da-sein [beingpresent] means:…take on and hear beings, Being and finitude.’21 When Heidegger says

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that Dasein can ‘hear beings, Being and finitude’, he refers us to Dasein’s capacity for ‘unconcealing’ beings—for disclosing them in their Being and thereby disclosing Being. To ‘hear’ in beings their veiled nothingness and hence Being itself is, to coin a phrase, ‘primordial hearing’. This is another aspect, another ‘meaning’, of the Being of Dasein. ‘To hear the voice of Being’ is, according to later Heidegger, an ‘appropriation’ (‘Ereignis’) or unfolding of Being in which Dasein is open to perceive the ‘voice’ of Being in its own language.22 Consequently, for Dasein, the meaning of its Being is listening to the voice of Being. The connection between Being and nothingness is a connection that becomes manifest only in relation to Dasein and this is also true of the relation between beings and nothingness and so of that between beings and Being. But the exact relation between Dasein and nothingness (and Being), and between Dasein and beings is not yet entirely clear: how is Dasein to be understood in relation to nothingness and to beings? When Heidegger says Dasein holds itself out into the nothing and is always ‘already beyond beings as a whole’,23 he indicates that Dasein’s Being does not require beings, which means that Dasein is more primordial than beings. This does not mean that Dasein is not ‘dependent’ on things that are essential for its physical survival, such as food and drink. What it means is this: beings are inconsequential to the ontological meaning of Dasein’s existence (its capacity to disclose Being). In keeping with this point Heidegger explains, in regard to Being and Time, that ‘the sentence: “man exists” means: that man is that particular being whose Being stands into the openness of unconcealed Being and its “being-present” is marked by Being itself.24 Heidegger reasons that man (or Dasein) can consciously perceive and conceptualize beings, which distinguishes man from other beings.25 Dasein’s openness to Being and its capacity to understand, perceive, and conceptualize beings enables it to grasp the ‘meaning of Being’ and by extension the ‘truth of Being’.26 The claim that Dasein’s ‘Being stands into the openness of unconcealed Being’ is reminiscent of and similar to Heidegger’s talk of ‘being held out into the nothing’, but, taken together, they suggest that Dasein is to be understood as both dwelling in nothingness and in Being. If this is the case, however, then there appears to be a logical contradiction here: Can Dasein be at the same time in Being and in nothingness? Of course part of the difficulty here concerns Heidegger’s apparent identification of nothingness and Being (‘nothingness and Being are the same’27)—an identification that seems to defy the law of non-contradiction that nothing can be both A and not-A—both be and not be. But this ought to indicate the extent to which Heidegger ought not to be read as simply deploying concepts in the conventional way. Nothingness does not, for Heidegger, mean something equivalent to the ‘not-Being’ of traditional metaphysics. For Heidegger, nothingness is that which remains when beings are nihilated—this nothingness is certainly not a being but neither is it ‘nothing’ in the colloquial, or indeed the usual metaphysical, sense. Furthermore, Heidegger does not conceive of Being as just the Being of beings, or as a being. Being is not a being, but beyond beings, and Being is not exhausted by beings and so is not to be understood just in terms of the Being of beings.28 There need not, then, be any contradiction either in identifying the ground of Dasein in both Being and nothingness nor in identifying these latter two. In his introductory comments to ‘What is Metaphysics?’ David Farrell Krell writes that: ‘“The nothing” comes to be a name for the source of not only what is dark and

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riddlesome in existence—which seems to rise from nowhere and return to it—but also of the openness of Being as such and the brilliance surrounding whatever comes to light.’29 Such comments are in keeping with the understanding of ‘nothingness’ in Heidegger as a concept that is quite distinct from the usual idea of non-being. Nothingness is to be understood, not in terms of the blankness of some metaphysical void, but rather as tied to mystery and also to transcendence. As Heidegger writes in the passage to which he appends the remark concerning the identity of Being and nothingness: Holding itself out into the nothing, Dasein is in each case already beyond beings as a whole. This being beyond beings we call ‘transcendence’. If in the ground of its essence Dasein were not transcending, which now means, if it were not in advance holding itself out into the nothing, then it could never be related to beings [which means, nothingness and Being are the same,]30 nor even to itself.31 The identity of Being and nothingness thus represents no failure of logic on Heidegger’s part, although it does demand of us a form of thinking that goes beyond the conventional. The identity of Being and nothingness turns out, in fact, to be crucial in understanding the structure of the revealing that occurs in anxiety. We have seen that in anxiety Dasein comes to see that no thing is of relevance to its Being and that finally only nothingness and Being endure. However, even though this reading of the Heideggerian position appears to be correct, it nevertheless still does not encompass the full truth (to be ‘correct’, as Heidegger would say, is not yet to penetrate to the essence of the matter). Ultimately the unveiling of the mystery surrounding Being must occur through Being itself—for there is certainly nothing other than Being through which such revealing could occur in any fundamental sense. To put the point slightly differently: Being in its mysteriousness must be able to render things, including itself, intelligible (and this must be so, notwithstanding Being’s own tendency, emphasized in Heidegger’s later thought towards self-withdrawal and self-concealment). Such disclosure of Being, however, happens, not on Being’s own account alone, but is instead conditional upon Dasein’s confrontation with nothingness. When that condition is realized, Dasein and Being are positioned to unveil beings and Being is able to reveal itself to Dasein. From this perspective—a perspective that incorporates the fact of Dasein’s own disclosive capacity in relation to Being—we can offer some further elaboration of the phrase ‘nihilation of the nothing’. The ‘nihilation of the nothing’ is not a process of destruction, as one may think if one attends only to the word ‘nihilation’, but is rather an opening up in which beings are seen differently and yet not as mere ‘nothing’. And by what is this ‘nihilation’ ‘brought about’? Nihilation is just the revealing of the nothingness that grounds beings; a revealing that in nihilating or ‘destroying’ beings as they ordinarily appear and ordinarily preoccupy us, also unconceals Being by disclosing it as ‘something’ beyond beings. Moreover, since Being and nothingness cannot be separated, neither can we treat one or the other as exclusively that which is revealing or that which is revealed. In the interplay between Being and nothingness, both are revealed, and revealed as two aspects of the same ground; a ground that is revealed in the nihilating of the everyday appearance of beings and, more positively, in the shining forth of Being as transcendence; a ground that can be understood both as nothingness and as Being.

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Yet what now remains of the role of anxiety? Why should the revealing that is at issue here occur only in the mood of anxiety? In ‘What is Metaphysics?’ Heidegger insists that anxiety is indeed the only mood in which Dasein can explore the meaning of nothingness. Certain moods, profound boredom, for instance, or joy of the presence of someone one loves, may enable a sense of the totality of things, and participation in that totality,32 but such moods are incapable of enabling a grasp of the essential nullity and finitude of Dasein—they provoke no encounter with Dasein’s being-towards-death—and so are inadequate to the disclosure of nothingness. Moreover, the disclosure of nothingness is not something that can occur through any particular being to which Dasein might be related : ‘The nothing comes forward neither for itself nor next to beings, to which it would, as it were, adhere. For [not ‘through’]33 human existence the nothing makes possible the openedness of beings as such.’34 The encounter with nothingness would thus seem to occur only in anxiety since only there is it possible for Dasein to experience nothingness, and its own nullity, as something that does not attach or ‘adhere’ to beings, but points beyond them, and beyond Dasein. Although the disclosure of nothingness requires Dasein, nothingness does not itself come about ‘through’ human existence. Indeed, the reverse is in fact the case, and it can rightly be said that it is Dasein that is dependent on nothingness.

Nothingness and autonomy Being is disclosed by anxious Dasein through Dasein’s confrontation with nothingness and with death. Moreover, we have also learned that Dasein is held ‘out into’ nothingness and thereby reaches into, and is part of, the realm of nothingness—reaches into, and is part of, the ground of beings, including Dasein’s own self as being-towards-death. This transcending of beings—a transcending that goes beyond the ready-to-hand and the present-at-hand—positions Dasein authentically in relation to Being. Thus Dasein is released from its inauthentic reliance on—or ‘lostness’ in—beings, which is the pursuit of the ordinary concerns of daily life. Transcendence allows Dasein to be free and ‘independent’ of beings, and positions it to see the world as it is and not as the world imposes itself upon Dasein. Dasein in its transcendence is thrust to a vantage point from which it sees the ‘totality of beings’ in the context of nothingness and thus of Being itself. The relation between Dasein and nothingness thereby renders Dasein free for itself—free to be authentic—as in the anxious state it is unrelated to the world of conventional meanings to which it is normally confined. This is reminiscent of the account, in Being and Time, of Dasein’s mode of ‘anticipatory-resoluteness’35 in which the world as defined by public opinion is transcended and Dasein is free to see itself as autonomous Being. Thus Dasein is liberated and conditioned to accept that its ‘existence’ ‘is the null basis of its own nullity’.36 Indeed, it is clear that in ‘What is Metaphysics?’ Heidegger often restates and elaborates upon ideas already taken up in Being and Time. Thus Heidegger comments that ‘existence’ in Being and Time is nothing but a designator for the Being of man: existence is a manner of Being which is available to the ‘openedness’ of Being. He writes that Dasein endures this ‘openedness’ which is experienced as care.37 Care is manifested as (Dasein’s) concern with its world and with its own Being as being-towards-death, and

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it is also the basis on which it can transcend beings and thus be open to encounter Being. Thus Dasein transcends its normal concernful attitude for beings and realizes that their underlying ground is nothingness. That in this authentic realization Dasein is most available to the openness of Being is what Heidegger propounds in the lecture on the significance of nothingness. Dasein realizes that its ordinary world of beings is limited and less meaningful compared with the more fundamental condition of authentic existence in relation to Being that is revealed through the encounter with nothingness. The ordinary world is then seen as ‘empty’ and ‘nothing’ (in the ordinary, deficient, sense) compared with the sublime richness of Being. Nothingness (in Heidegger’s sense) is the ‘agent’ of Being in opening Dasein to the revelation of Being by stripping away the conventions in which inauthentic Dasein is immersed and, one could even say, trapped. But is not any encounter with Being—including the encounter with the different kinds of Being of different kinds of beings—and not just the encounter with the Being of Dasein (namely, existence) potentially the disclosure of Being (if in anxiety we penetrate to nothingness)? And might this not raise the question whether there could be different ‘forms’ of nothingness for different kinds of Being. In fact, just as Heidegger asserts that Being lies ‘beyond’ every entity38 and thus ‘beyond’ the different kinds of Being of different beings, so nothingness equally lies ‘beyond’ the different kinds of Being of beings. Certainly, in ‘What is Metaphysics?’, the transcendence of beings can occur only in that state of anxiety in which Dasein realizes that the underlying nihilation by nothingness is grounded in Being itself. This points us again to the nihilating effect associated with anxious Dasein’s encounter with nothingness. Anxious Dasein takes part in nihilating what is essentially nothing by nothingness and hence lets beings appear as ‘mere’ beings. Through the realization that nothingness ‘is’ Being and that beings are commonly mistaken as a reliable source for determining our existence, the way is free to encounter the truth and ontological ground of beings and Dasein’s own Being as Beingtowards-death—its essential nothingness. The realization that ‘the nothing itself nihilates’ gives Dasein the necessary independence to be free for itself, as it is detached from its usual reliance on beings. Such detachment is the foundation of self-determination and autonomy. This selfdetermination defines Dasein’s authentic Being. As such, authentic Dasein is liberated to die alone, independent from its usual reliance on beings, rather than living as another being that some day will perish. Dasein’s authentic Being is based on accepting its own nothingness and its independence from its world of daily concern. The authentic realization of Dasein’s mortality and consequently its own nullity is necessary for it to grasp that nothingness is not merely an aspect of the world that makes possible the apprehension of beings and Being. Furthermore, and most importantly, Dasein’s own nullity and autonomy must be considered as a fundamental trait of Being itself, which is the underlying ground of the whole process of nihilation. Recognizing this condition Heidegger can announce that: ‘Without the original revelation of the nothing, no selfhood and no freedom.’39

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Being and nothingness It is through anxiety, and so through the encounter with nothingness and death, that Dasein is able to gain insight into its own Being and so into Being as such. Thus, as Heidegger writes, ‘we have arrived at that occurrence in human existence in which the nothing [and, it would seem, Being] is revealed and from which it must be interrogated’. But then Heidegger asks ‘How is it with the nothing?’40—And, we might add, with Being? And what of metaphysics? Notwithstanding the fact that Dasein is that being that enables Being itself to be disclosed, still it is obvious that the existential mood of anxiety necessary for the encounter with nothingness, and so for the revealing of Being, cannot be had on demand. That this is so is indicative of Dasein’s finitude and suggests that only in rare moments of vision can nothingness be encountered. It indicates that Dasein’s autonomy and selfdetermination, as authentic-being-towards-death, is limited by the apparent arbitrariness of the encounters with nothingness. We have seen that Dasein in this sense is delivered over to nothingness—it is ‘held out into’ it.41 In connection with this idea Heidegger writes that: Being held out into the nothing—as Dasein is—on the ground of concealed anxiety makes man a lieutenant of the nothing [Platzhalter des Nichts, literally, placeholder of nothingness]. We are so finite that we cannot even bring ourselves originally before the nothing through our own decision and will. So profoundly does finitude entrench itself in existence that our most proper and deepest limitation refuses to yield to our freedom. Being held into the nothing—as Dasein is—on the ground of concealed anxiety is its surpassing of beings as a whole. It is transcendence.42 Heidegger proclaims that the transcending of beings in the encounter with nothingness ‘should bring us face to face with metaphysics itself’.43 So, what is metaphysics? ‘Metaphysics is inquiry beyond or over beings [into Being] which aims to recover them as such and as a whole for our grasp. In the question concerning the nothing such an inquiry beyond or over beings, as being as a whole, takes place.’44 The aim of ‘metaphysics’, then, is to make Being as such intelligible by looking to that ground of beings that is open to us to be encountered by us. In a letter to Jünger, Heidegger wrote that ‘the lecture “What is Metaphysics?” thinks…“nothingness,” that is Being, in respect to its essence.’45 Grasping the significance of our own mortality by confronting nothingness is in essence a grasping of the meaning and truth of Being and this, it would seem, is just metaphysics. Thus the possibility of metaphysics is, one might say, founded in that grasp of death in which Dasein’s essential nothingness, and the nothingness of beings, comes to light. Heidegger claims, indeed, that ‘genuine’ metaphysics is founded in nothingness and that this is so even in relation to the Christian concept of God. The notion that God as Creator created everything out of nothing is essential to the Christian understanding of God and of beings

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and shows that ‘the interpretation of the nothing designates the basic conception of beings’.46 Heidegger notes, however, that in the Christian consideration of beings ‘the nothing [is shown as] the counter-concept to Being proper, that is, as its negation’, and ‘[t]he questions of Being and of the nothing as such are not posed’.47 In this way the treatment of the nothing also indicates the limit of Christian theological thought and of all previous metaphysics. But if the concept of the nothing becomes problematic in traditional metaphysics, then the opposition between beings and the nothing ‘awakens for the first time the genuine formulation of the metaphysical question concerning the Being of beings’.48 According to Heidegger, ‘metaphysical discussion’ is rightly concerned with Being and not just beings and it is through the opposition of nothingness to beings—and the attempt to think nothingness—that the proper concern of metaphysics, namely Being, comes into view. Heidegger insists that: ‘The nothing does not remain the indeterminate opposite of beings but reveals itself as belonging to the Being of beings.’49 Although Heidegger declares that nothingness belongs to the Being of beings, yet he is also in agreement with Hegel that ‘pure Being’ and ‘pure Nothing’ are actually the same.50 What is implied here is that Being belongs to the Being of beings. And while the implication that Being belongs to the Being of beings sounds like a platitude, it nevertheless indicates the way in which nothingness, as itself belonging to the Being of beings, and Being must be understood together. Thus Heidegger is content to write that: ‘Pure Being and pure Nothing are therefore the same.’ This proposition of Hegel’s (Science of Logic, vol. I, Werke III, 74) is correct. Being and the nothing do belong together, not because both—from the point of view of the Hegelian concept of thought—agree in their indeterminateness and immediacy, but rather because Being itself is essentially finite [weil das Sein selbst im Wesen endlich ist] and reveals itself only in the transcendence of Dasein which is held out into the nothing.51 Dasein’s crucial role in disclosing ‘Being and the nothing…[which]… belong together’ is made evident in Heidegger’s claim that Being is ‘finite’. It is ‘finite’ in the sense that it requires a finite being for it to come to light. Heidegger noted in his discussion of Christian dogma that ‘if God is God he cannot know the nothing, assuming that the “Absolute” excludes all nothingness’.52 Only a finite, mortal being can know nothingness and so only in relation to a finite being can Being itself be disclosed. The question of Being is, Heidegger tells us, ‘the encompassing question of metaphysics’ and he concludes further that ‘the question of the nothing proves to be such that it embraces the whole of metaphysics’.53 Thus Heidegger suggests in the ‘Introduction’ to the lecture on nothingness that the question ‘what is metaphysics?’ demands thinking about the fundamental question of metaphysics from the ‘truth of Being to nothingness’.54 What does the ‘truth of Being to nothingness’ mean with regard to the function of Dasein? It means that ontology, which discovers the truth of Being, gives a meaning for life and as such it ‘is in itself the original ethics’.55 Thus thinking ontologically and thereby attaining a meaning for life is at the same time ‘practising ethics’. David Krell similarly concludes: ‘Nihilism does not result from excessive

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preoccupation with the nothing. On the contrary, only by asking the question of the nothing can nihilism be countered.’56 As Heidegger writes: The old proposition ex nihilo nihil fit [from nothing nothing comes] is therefore found to contain another sense, one appropriate to the problem of Being itself, that runs: ex nihilo omne qua, ens fit (From the nothing all beings as beings come to be). Only in the nothing [death] of Dasein do beings as a whole, in accord with their most proper possibility—that is, in a finite way—come to themselves.57

11 DEATH AND AUTHENTICITY Julian Young Nothing concerning Being and Time1 is better known than that it talks a great deal about death, and about authenticity, and that the two discussions are intimately linked. But just what is the connection between the two phenomena that Heidegger proposes? Here is a familiar account of the discussion that runs from about §27 to about §60, a discussion in which (if anywhere) the answer to this question is to be found. The individual, ‘Dasein’, is, suggests Heidegger, complex. It comprises an ‘I-self’ and a ‘One-self’. Mostly it is inauthentic. Its actions, that is, are ‘driven’, determined, not by autonomous choice but by public opinion, by, as Heidegger calls it, das Man—‘the They’ or (better) ‘the One’. In inauthenticity the One becomes the self. In thought, feeling, desire, judgement and action the I-self is ‘dissolve[d]’2 away so that one becomes a mere function of the One, a pure conformist: ‘we take pleasure and enjoy ourselves as One does; we read, see, and judge about literature as One sees and judges; likewise we shrink back from the “great mass” as One shrinks back; we find “shocking” what One finds shocking’.3 The reason we are mostly inauthentic is twofold. First we are subject to a ‘levelling’ pressure from the One, a pressure to conform. Das Man seeks to exercise a kind of ‘dictatorship’,4 to ensure that each individual remains ‘average’. But second, the individual itself has a distinct inclination to go along with the demand for averageness, to think, act and feel as a function of the One. For we are subject to an intense concern for our ‘distantiality’,5 a concern that we should never stray far from social norms. This might be regarded as simply a brute fact—as social beings we just are norm-followers— but is not so regarded by Heidegger. Our concern to submit to the pressure to conform is based on the pay-off that we receive: giving in to the pressure is ‘tranquillizing’6 since in becoming a function of the One one is ‘disburdened’7 of a disturbing weight which anyone who lives as an ‘I-self’, as an individual, must bear. This weight, says Heidegger, is death; the inexorable mortality of every individual. In its most fundamental description, therefore, inauthentic life is a flight from death. But while ‘tranquillized’ inauthentic life is not properly tranquil, for the I-self, though repressed, is not eradicated. It makes its claim on Dasein’s being, calling out to it as what Heidegger calls the voice of ‘conscience’,8 calling it to accept its mortality and its individuality. Hence Dasein is always in a state of more or less explicit ‘turbulence’.9 For it must choose either to drown out the quiet call of conscience by plunging with renewed desperation into the noisy bustle of ‘fallen’, inauthentic life, or else to listen to the voice and accept the prospect of death and of a tense relationship with the One. If Dasein represses the call it remains inauthentic. If, on the other hand, it chooses to listen then various things happen to it. First it is plunged into a state of ‘anxiety’. This is a mood in which one is plunged into an existential ‘solipsism’.10 One is, that is to say, alienated

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from das Man, from its norms, and from one’s previous life as its devoted disciple. For one realizes that, in fact, ‘all being-with-others will fail us’ when the ‘issue’ is death.11 One realizes, that is, that the tranquillizing illusion of oneness with the One is just that. One is ‘wrenched away from the One’, ‘individualize [d]’ down to ‘oneself’.12 In anxiety, life, the world, the claims of das Man become—to use the term richly explored by Camus—absurd. They appear, says Heidegger, as ‘insignificant’, they become as ‘nothing’ to one.13 But as anxiety grows one confronts a second nothingness. One discovers not only that the world is ‘nothing’ but also that one is nothing over and above it. One sees that one’s death is not merely a future event but, more fundamentally, a symptom of the ‘nullity’ of any being one might be thought to have over and above one’s being-in-the-world.14 But this second nullity banishes the dark impression of the first. Nihilism fully grasped overcomes nihilism. One sees that there is no essential self existing outside of one’s mundane world and so one returns to one’s life in that world reinvigorated, passionate, for the first time fully committed. One ‘takes over’ one’s ‘thrownness’15 since one no longer experiences one’s world as alien, as a thrownness. Since there is no absolute, no transcendent place of belonging, so home, we see, is where we are. Yet one does not return unmarked by one’s brush with death. For one returns no longer the slavish devotee of the One—one no longer, as Heidegger puts it, makes it one’s ‘hero’.16 One inhabits, rather, a state of critical detachment from the One, prepared to ‘disavow’ whatever in one’s society presents itself as ‘fallen’ or craven.17 One returns no longer as a follower of public opinion but as, potentially, its (spiritual) leader.18 Dasein has become in short, a fully autonomous, ‘authentic’, or, as Heidegger also says, ‘resolute’, being. This, as I said, is a familiar kind of account of the connecting of death and authenticity that is made in Being and Time. It is, to be sure, severely abbreviated, obscurities are provided with an interpretation and the order of presentation is partially reorganized in the interests of a smoother read than is provided by Heidegger himself. Nonetheless something close to this account is what one standardly finds in attempts to explain what is going on in the heart of that far from self-explanatory work.19 Notice that on this standard understanding, the connecting of death and authenticity occurs in and through a kind of story, a temporal progression, a Bildungsroman or pilgrim’s progress. It is a story of the Heideggerian hero’s progress from its—as Heidegger indeed says—‘fallen’ condition of ‘lostness’ in the One through a kind of agony ‘ownmost’ self that is constituted by authenticity. This understanding of the form of Heidegger’s discussion provides us with an answer to the question of the relationship between death and authenticity with which I started. Genuinely facing up to death (‘anticipation’ or ‘authentic being-towards-death’ Heidegger calls it) is a temporal, more specifically, causal, and, more specifically still, psychological, antecedent of authentic living. It is a stage on the—apparently, the one and only—path to authenticity. As with psychoanalysis, the idea seems to be that if one faces up to the repressed trauma of mortality and nothingness then, but only then, does one achieve authenticity or, as we might also be tempted to say, psychic health. In brief, then, the standard answer to the question of the relationship between death and authenticity seems to consist in two propositions: 1 If one fully faces up to death then (as a psychological consequence) one’s life

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becomes authentic. 2 If one fails to face up to death then (it is psychologically necessary that) one remains inauthentic. ‘Authentic being-towards-death’ is, in a word, a psychologically necessary and sufficient condition for authenticity. This familiar reading of Being and Time opens it up to equally familiar objections to both the necessity and sufficiency claims. To proposition (1), the sufficiency claim, it may reasonably be objected that many people face up to death in the most vivid, direct and literal way possible without it making any appreciable difference to their lives. A more refined formulation of this objection proceeds as follows. Let us for the sake of argument grant, it says, that the moment before the car hits the wall is indeed, in Heidegger’s language, invariably an Augenblick, a ‘moment of vision’ in which one grasps the essence of one’s life as a simple, unified totality. Nonetheless, authenticity as Heidegger understands it is not a matter of having experiences. One of the fundamental aspects of the anti-Cartesianism that dominates Division I of Being and Time is the thesis that when it comes to the question of one’s being, what is decisive is action. ‘One is’, as Heidegger declares, ‘what one does.’20 It follows that being authentic is a matter of there becoming established in one’s life a pattern or style of action, a style Heidegger refers to as ‘resoluteness’. (I shall say more about this style below.) But the fact is that the ‘moment of vision’ at the point of anticipated death by no means suffices to alter one’s life-style, for typically, after a brief interruption, things go on just as they did before. A variant on this objection appears in Sartre’s short story The Wall. The anticipated execution in the morning produces, Sartre attempts to show, not resolute commitment, but rather a Hamlet-like paralysis of action (and reaction); in terms of the Heideggerian equation between being and action, it produces a suspension of being.21 Of proposition (2), the necessity claim, it may reasonably be asked why anxiety should be the only mood or emotion capable of generating authenticity. What, for example, about love? What about Romeo and Juliet each of whom, through the passion of true love, come to reject the norms sacred to their respective communities? What about anger, hatred or sheer bloody-mindedness? Granted Zarathustra’s point that the lion which slays the dragon ‘Thou shalt’ is still locked in combat with the old norms and so is not genuinely autonomous, still, why could not sheer stubbornness be at least the beginning of a path to authenticity? Facing up to death, then, the objection concludes, while perhaps a, way to authenticity, is surely not the (one and only) way. There are, then, compelling objections to both the sufficiency and the necessity claims. Applicable to both, however, is an objection in a way more fundamental than any yet considered. What, it may be asked, is a book dedicated to ‘fundamental ontology’, a book dedicated to uncovering the ‘being’ of Dasein, its fundamental, a priori, universal, necessary structure, a book which emphatically forswears all concern with ‘anthropology’ and ‘psychology’,22 what is such a book doing delving in the murky waters of (empirically false and hence) empirical psychology? This question, which is couched in the form of an objection, gives rise to a different thought. Is it perhaps the case that there is some misunderstanding involved in both the standard reading of Being and Time and the standard objections to it. Is it perhaps the

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case that Heidegger himself is not entirely clear as to the nature of the project in Being and Time? Let us survey the options. What might be the point of Heidegger’s discussion of death and its confrontation supposing it not to be the case that that discussion features as an identification of the crucial moment in a psychological explanation of how one becomes authentic? There seem to me two possibilities which I shall examine in turn: the deathdiscussion might figure in what is really a description of authentic life, or it might figure in what ought to be understood as justification of authentic living. Or the discussion might constitute both of these things at once. How could the notion of authentic being-towards-death figure in a description of authentic life? How might we construe Being and Time so that acknowledgment of death appears not as a means to but as constitutive of authentic living? Heidegger says that inauthentic Dasein, though ‘certain’ of death (lacks ‘being-certain’23—Heidegger’s emphasis). Since, as we have already observed, being is, for Heidegger, equivalent to acting, what this means is it fails to act in the way that is ‘appropriate’24 to its verbal affirmation of its own mortality. Inauthentic Dasein, we may say, affirms mortality verbally but not practically. Does it or does it not believe that it will die? We face split criteria. If we favour, in Wilfred Sellars’s terminology, its ‘language-language moves’ it does, if we favour its ‘language-exit moves’ it does not. Heidegger’s highly plausible view is that in cases of conflict the latter are decisive. (Chekhov’s characters who ‘must go to Moscow’ but remain seated as the curtain falls on play after play do not really want to go to Moscow at all.) Our cognitive no less than our conative being is revealed, ultimately, by our deeds. Hence inauthentic Dasein failing practically to affirm mortality can be said, from a Heideggerian perspective, to lack ‘real belief in its own mortality. Though divided within itself, containing, as it were, the dissenting voice of the ‘I-self’, ‘the “who” of everyday Dasein is not the “I myself”’25 but rather the ‘one-self’, the self that believes not in mortality and hence individuality but rather in one’s oneness with the One and hence in immortality (or at least unlimited tenure). By contrast, then, if inauthentic Dasein lacks real belief in mortality authentic Dasein possesses it. It possesses it because it affirms its mortality practically. More exactly, it affirms it in that it lives its life authentically. Facing-up-to-death, then, just is acting authentically. What is it to act authentically? Authenticity is a matter not of life-content but of lifestyle. This style may be captured in terms of two notions which I shall call ‘autonomy’ and ‘focus’. Autonomy is the practical affirmation of one’s individuality, one’s distinctness from das Man. Since, in virtue of my mortality, I am not ‘the One’ it follows that its ‘will’ (its norms) is not, a fortiori my will. As autonomous, I do not automatically swim against the tide of public opinion. But I am always prepared to do so. My life exhibits critical distance from the norms of contemporary public opinion, a readiness to ‘disavow’26 whatever in publicity life strikes me as craven or ‘fallen’. I am, in short, not a follower but rather a potential leader of public opinion.27 ‘Focus’ is the practical affirmation of one’s finitude. To live a life that is fully appropriate to finitude is to be ‘liberated’ from ‘those possibilities which may accidentally thrust themselves upon one’, liberated in such a way that one can ‘authentically understand and choose among the factual possibilities lying ahead of…[death]’.28 The practical affirmation of finitude, that is, is a life that is appropriate to

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the fact that we do not have unlimited time at our disposal and so must reject ‘accidental’ and confine ourselves to living out our central, essential life-possibilities. It is a life which, as it were, grasps the script of itself as a ‘totality’ and lives out that script with an urgent, (though not inflexible) intensity. It is a life in which is immanent a sense of ‘closure’, or, as I prefer to call it, focus. Focus and autonomy combine to constitute a life that is, in contemporary psychojargon, ‘centred’. In the richer language of an earlier generation they add up to ‘character’. To live fully in the light of one’s mortality, to affirm it in one’s practice, is to be a person of character. In Heidegger’s language, to fully acknowledge one’s mortality is to be ‘resolute’. It seems, then, that if we pick up on certain leads, ‘anticipation’ of death presents itself not as the psychological explanation of and prerequisite for becoming authentic but rather as constitutive, of, analytically equivalent to, being authentic. Looking at the discussion in this light is helpful in explaining an otherwise quite puzzling phenomenon: Heidegger’s rejection of the foolhardy courting of, and melancholy ‘brooding’ over, death. Neither of these life forms, he emphasizes, has anything to do with what he calls ‘anticipation’.29 Michel Foucault (a self-confessed Heideggerian) spent his final years, it is reported, courting death by AIDS. Only thus, he seems to have felt, could he give his life the right kind of character. If we read Heidegger’s discussion of death in the psychological way Foucault appears as a Heideggerian hero. If ‘anticipation’ is the psychological condition of being and remaining authentic then it seems entirely reasonable to conclude that a regular diet of bungy-jumping, sky-diving, white-water rafting, Russian or sexual roulette is the life form appropriate to becoming and remaining a Heideggerian hero. But Heidegger emphatically rejects such life forms. The conclusion this suggests is that anticipation is not a means to authenticity but something else. That it is a description of the condition presents itself as a plausible alternative. If we understand the relation between death and authenticity in this way then the overall conclusion arrived at by Being and Time is that it is authentic life which constitutes the practical affirmation of—i.e. real belief in—mortality while inauthentic life is, in fact, a practical—i.e. real—disavowal of mortality. Authentic Dasein really believes it will die, inauthentic Dasein does not. Of this conclusion one might be inclined to ask: so what? Granted that it is true that each of us will die so that authentic Dasein has true belief while inauthentic Dasein is gripped by falsehood, still, so what? Given the enormous length and complexity of Being and Time does it not turn out that a very large sledgehammer has cracked a very small nut? One response to this might be: so nothing! To demand more than this is to misunderstand the character of Being and Time. For what it is is a work of first philosophy, pure ontology, interested in, and only in, botanizing the categories of being. And what we see, at the end of the day, is that authentic being is, in the language of §44, being which is ‘in the truth’, while inauthentic being is ‘in untruth’. To expect something more or other than this is to misunderstand the nature of ontology. There are two reasons for rejecting the response. One is that, as Heidegger told Karl Löwith in 1936, his own involvement in Nazi politics was grounded in Being and Time’s conception of authenticity.30 So, evidently, in Heidegger’s own judgement, Being and

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Time is not a work of mere ontology. The second point is that in the Letter on Humanism31 Heidegger specifically confronts the change that as a work of pure ontology Being and Time contains no ‘ethics’.32 Heidegger’s response is that the distinction between ontology and ethics (between the ‘is’ and the ‘ought’) is a fake one invented ‘for the first time in the school of Plato’33—in other words, by academics. In reality, ontology and ethics are one, so that the ‘fundamental ontology’ of Being and Time is at the same time a fundamental ethics.34 What this retrospective account of Being and Time introduces is the idea that what we fundamentally, metaphysically, ‘ontologically’ are determines how, in the most general and fundamental way, we ought to live. We find ourselves, on this reading, in the midst of a rather traditional philosophical enterprise, the attempt to discover what Kant called a ‘metaphysical foundation of morals’. And this brings us to the second of the possibilities canvassed earlier, the idea that the relation in which death is to be seen as standing to authenticity is one of justification. What we fundamentally are, according to Being and Time, is mortal—and hence individual. If, then, we read Heidegger as grounding a kind of ‘ethics’ in this fact then, since if any life form is to have prescriptive force attached to it by Being and Time it is obviously authenticity, Heidegger must be arguing that from the ontological truth that one is mortal it follows—logically or conceptually—that one ought to be authentic, live that is, a life that is focused and autonomous. Why should this entailment (this denial that the ‘naturalistic fallacy’ is a fallacy) hold? The thought, I believe, is the following. One way of explaining entailment is to say that if A entails B then you cannot affirm A and deny B. Consider for a moment the proposition that if X is a god then X ought to be worshipped. You cannot here deny the consequent and affirm the antecedent. The reason is that accepting the consequent is a conceptual condition of accepting, indeed of understanding, the antecedent. It is the same (such I believe to be Heidegger’s point) with mortality and authenticity. Accepting one’s obligation to authenticity is a condition of accepting one’s mortality, of genuinely believing that one is a mortal. It follows that Being and Time is not a mere ontological botanizing of different modes of being. As indeed most first-time readers naively understand it, it offers authenticity as an account of the ‘good’ life.35 There remains, however, the Sartrean point about illusion.36 Why accept one’s mortality? Why not live under the ‘illusion of immortality’? The Heideggerian reply has, I think, to do with consistency. However much side-lined by the One-self, the I-self in all of us knows its own mortality. Even those ‘in untruth’ are always, Heidegger emphasizes, also ‘in the truth’. It follows that the price of inauthenticity is ‘turbulence’, confusion, dis-ease. There is, of course, no incompatibility between the idea that Heidegger’s discussion of death figures in a description of authentic life and in a justification of it. It can obviously be the case that that which constitutes the right way to live also constitutes the proper acceptance of the truth of our ontological predicament. The ideas are, indeed, in perfect harmony, for what follows if both the descriptive and justificatory readings of Being and Time are correct, is that the life of authentic Dasein embodies both the true and the good—a conclusion of impeccable Platonic provenance. I have, in this essay, distinguished three ways in which death may be seen as related to authenticity in Being and Time: it may figure in the explanation of how one becomes

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authentic, in a description of what it is to be authentic, or in a justification of why one ought to be authentic. Heidegger, I believe, is not really clear about this trichotomy. His language—the language of ‘anticipating’ death, being ‘in the truth’ and so on—has a plasticity that allows it to be used, without modification, in any of the three ways. Whatever Heidegger’s intentions, however, (we now know, of course, how irrelevant these are to the meaning of the text) the truth of the matter is that the descriptive and justificatory discussions constitute the gold, the psychological explanation, relatively speaking, the dross. It is the task of great minds to deposit gold, the privilege of lesser mortals to discover it.

12 DEATH AND THE UNITY OF A LIFE Jeff Malpas ‘Eternity is a terrible thought,’ says Rosencrantz in Tom Stoppard’s alternative view on Hamlet, ‘I mean, where’s it going to end?’ And Guildenstern adds a little later ‘Death followed by eternity…the worst of both worlds. It is a terrible thought.’1 Death, as they say, is forever, but if the same were true of life—if one could live a life without end— would this be any less terrible? Some philosophers have argued that life in the absence of death would indeed be terrible—it would be a life, according to Bernard Williams, for instance, devoid of interest, devoid of meaning.2 I think there is something important, and right, about this view. If it is flawed it is only so, I will argue, in so far as it does not give enough weight to the importance of death in giving meaning and significance to life. For it is not merely that a life without end would be a life of tedium—of endless ennui—but to have a life, and this is not the same as merely to live, is indeed to be capable of death.3 What do I mean by distinguishing the having of a life from merely living? As a characteristic of the living, life is ubiquitous. We find it exemplified in all things that are capable of sustaining themselves in existence, of nourishing themselves, of reproducing themselves. But in the sense that I intend it here, the having of a life is something much more specific—rather than mere continued, self-sustaining existence, the having of a life involves the grasping of one’s life as indeed one’s own, as something that one lives, as something for which, to a greater or lesser degree, one takes responsibility. In this sense my cat asleep on the sofa, while undoubtedly alive (as any attempt to displace her will soon make clear), cannot be said to have a life. This does not mean that she lacks ‘interests’ or desires or has no strong attachments to places and people (for she certainly has all of these) or indeed that she has no ‘personality’, but that the having of a life is more than this, for it involves the ability to grasp one’s life as, in some sense, one’s own. And this is something of which, notwithstanding her many other accomplishments, my cat is quite incapable. It is the having of a life in this sense that is one of the things that marks out creatures such as ourselves from other living things. This is not a biological difference between ourselves and others (although it is a difference that is certainly not independent of biology) but a difference that is, let us say, ontolog-ical—human beings, and any beings sufficiently like us in the relevant respects, are in the world in a way that is very different from other beings, living or unliving. Indeed, it is perhaps only creatures that can be said to have a life in the sense I have outlined here that can be said to have any grasp of the world as such, since to be in the world, and to grasp one’s being in the world, must involve both a grasp of the world and of one’s life within that world—a grasp both of the world as world and one’s life as one’s own. It is, indeed, only through being able to locate oneself within the world that one can order one’s experience so as to be able to grasp oneself as the subject of that experience; equally it is only through a grasp of the

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order of experience, and so of oneself, that one is able properly to grasp the world and the objects and events within it. In these respects it would seem that to have a life is to have a world and to have a world is also to have a life. Thus, in having a sense of one’s life or a sense of the world, one does not merely have a grasp, separately and discretely, of the various elements that are part of the world and that also go to make up a life. My cat has a grasp of aspects or features of the world much as I do—although we have very different reactions to its presence, and may even ‘understand’ its presence in very different ways, we are both, for instance, aware of the wattlebird that drinks from the pool outside the window where I work—but my cat cannot properly be said, on the account I have given here, to have a life or to have a sense of the world. The having of a life or a world involves more than just a capacity to grasp and react to aspects of the world. Instead it is indeed a matter of grasping the whole within which those aspects are placed. In this respect the sight of the bird drinking is, in my own case, located within a larger horizon that encompasses myself and other persons as well as other events and objects—a horizon that, like the horizon of the visual field, bounds, and so unifies, that which lies within it, while also stretching out to the manifold possibilities that lie beyond those bounds.4 Since the having of a life and a sense of the world consists precisely in having a grasp of this larger horizon of possibility—of the limits and range of possibilities—then, in so far as my cat lacks a grasp of such a horizon, she does not properly have a life or a sense of the world. Just as the world consists in more than just a concatenation of features, but has a unity integral to it, so a life is not merely a collection of events or experiences nor is its continuity a matter just of the physical continuity of a single body. Events may be unified by being part of a single temporal or causal sequence and yet those events need not be part of the same life; a body may continue in existence—for instance in the case of a body kept alive in the absence of significant brain activity—even though the life associated with that body has ceased to be. The unity of a life is something over and above mere causal, temporal or even bodily continuity. It must be a unity internal to the life—a unity worked out from within it and intrinsic to it—a unity that is paradigmatically expressed through the capacity of the creature whose life it is to grasp that life as its own. A life is consequently something that can be grasped as a whole, as having a certain shape, and as being in some important sense self-directed. In this latter sense a life is undoubtedly something on which one can ‘work’—as one can work on the way one’s life is oriented, on the way it exemplifies certain ideals or traits of character, on the sorts of possibilities that it enacts—and in working on one’s life one also, of course, shapes and moulds one’s own identity. The very idea of a life, then, carries with it a sense of self-awareness, self-conception and self-direction—perhaps something of this is suggested in the injunction, typically directed at someone who seems to have no sense of what is important or who lacks any meaningful or ordered way of living, to ‘get a life!’—and so the having of a life is also a matter of the having of a sense of self-identity. It is indeed through one’s ability to recognize one’s life as one’s own that one is able to shape and direct that life, and so establish it as a having a unity that is integral to it. And in so far as the having of a life and of a sense of the world are also tied together, so the unity of a life and of the self is a unity necessarily worked out in terms of a particular locatedness and orientation within

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the spatial and temporal frame of the world—it is a unity established and maintained in relation both to past and present actuality and future possibility. The emphasis on temporality here is especially important, since a life is essentially a temporally extended structure, the unity of which is a unity over time as much as it is a unity at a time. In this respect the set of actions and attitudes that constitute a life must be a coherent set, even if that coherence is not perfect, and grasping the unity of one’s life must be a matter of grasping the way in which one’s past actions and attitudes are connected to and consistent with one’s present and future actions and attitudes. Memory, along with purposiveness and imagination, are necessary elements here, since it is both through one’s memory of the past and through one’s projections and anticipations of the future that one’s life is integrated and unified over time. Moreover, this capacity to grasp oneself as existing over time is necessary, not merely in order to have a conception of the unity of one’s life, and of the unity of the actions and attitudes that are the constituent elements of that life, but also for the very existence of such a life and for the existence of those elements. A sense of time and possibility is essential both to the capacity for complex, integrated action and to the having of those attitudes on which action of this sort is grounded—that is, complex forms of belief, desire, intention and so forth. To be capable of belief, for instance, is to be capable of having an attitude that one can recognize as related to other attitudes one holds, an attitude that may be based on past experience, may influence present actions, and may also be open to modification in the light of future events. Indeed, the very concept of attitudes such as belief or desire is closely connected with the idea of an enduring subject to whom those attitudes belong and who is capable both of being acted upon and acting in ways largely determined or mediated by those attitudes; it is also connected with the idea of the world as that which both constrains us and yet also offers new possibilities.5 The skein of connections here is tangled: to have a life is to have sense of that life as one’s own and a sense of the world in which that life is lived; and these notions in turn mutually imply a grasp of oneself as existing in and through time and so as having a life grounded in past and present actuality and projected into a future of possibility. And to this tangled skein two more connections may be added. First, to have a life is to have a sense of one’s life as one’s own and part of the having of a life in this sense is that one’s life is something for which one takes responsibility. But since one can hardly take proper responsibility for that over which one has no control, so one component in the having of a life would seem to be just the ability (albeit constrained by circumstances) to shape and direct that life. Here, once more, we are forced to recognize the close interdependence that obtains between the capacity for self-reflection and self-recognition, the capacity for coherent action, and the grasp of temporality, possibility and history. Second, since the grasp of a life—indeed, the very living of a life—involves a grasp of both past and present actuality and future possibility, so one can say that to have a life is knowingly, on the basis of the already determined actuality of the life, to hold oneself open to the possibilities of that life and to be aware of the possibilities that it presents—including the limits to those possibilities. To have a life is precisely to have a sense of the bounds of that life, of what is part of it and what is not, of what is possible within it and what is not so possible. And since this grasp of possibility and of limit may be put in terms of a capacity to question, so one might say that to have a life is to be capable of putting that life in question. This brings to light the close connection between the capacity for

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questioning and the capacity for recognition of oneself. Only in so far as we have a sense of ourselves can we put ourselves or our world into question. And only in so far as we can put ourselves into question, can we be said to have a sense of ourselves. In having a life one has a sense of one’s self-identity and to have this is to have a grasp of one’s life as consisting in more than the bare causal or logical connectedness of the elements that make up that life or the simple acquaintance with those elements. It is precisely to have a grasp of one’s various actions and attitudes as unified parts of a single, temporally extended, rationally connected and (though I have not made much of this point) causally integrated structure. Since the unity that is at stake here is indeed a complex unity over time, it is also a unity that is able to tolerate a certain degree of disunity. Every life is but imperfectly integrated and the connections that go to make up a life, any life, always display an element of fragmentation. Even the best of us act foolishly, contrary to our interests, in ways that seem to us irrational or mistaken; we do not always well understand our own desires and motives; we forget, we disappoint ourselves, we feel regret. Conceivably a life could become so fragmented that it would cease even to be a life (and indeed such a possibility will be important later in this discussion). For the most part, however, our lives retain an ordering and unity, even in the face of the always-imperfect coordination of those lives. And such unity is exhibited in and maintained by means of our own sense of self—by means of our own capacity for self-conceptualization, self-reflection and self-direction. The unity of a life is thus neither pre-given—it does not exist prior to the actual articulation of that life—nor does it consist in the unity of some simple self—it does not consist in anything independent of or apart from such articulation—even though it can be expressed through the idea of the self or person whose life it is. The unity of a life is precisely something to be articulated or worked out through the actual living of that life and the complex ordering in time of the actions and attitudes that make it up. As a direct consequence of this, the unity of any particular life is inseparable from the unity, both at a time and over time, of a particular structure of activity. It is the fact that one’s actions and attitudes constitute an integrated whole, even though that imperfection is always, necessarily, imperfect, that those actions and attitudes can count as part of a single life. Although the integration at issue here is not that of mere causal or logical continuity, it is nevertheless grounded in the complex causal and rational interconnection of actions and attitudes: one’s attitudes need to be causally related to one’s actions and to other attitudes, while one’s attitudes need to be generally consistent with one another and with one’s actions. Such integration is most clearly evident in the integrated, organized operation of a living body. Indeed, it is through the way in which we operate as embodied agents that we can be said to be the sorts of creatures that believe, desire, hope, fear and the rest, since it is the active body that is the primary focus for our involvement with things and other persons—in truth it is the proper ‘locus’ for such involvement—and it is primarily through practical involvement with things in the world that attitudes are themselves constituted. Attitudes, whether of belief, desire, hope or fear, are identified through relations to specific contents—one fears that interest rates will rise, one hopes that the weather will be fine, one believes that Fred is an honest man, one desires that one’s friends should come to dinner. And those contents are themselves dependent, first, on the interconnection of attitudes themselves—so that the belief that Fred is an honest man

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depends on other beliefs about what it is to be honest, about who Fred is, and on other beliefs following on from these—and, second, on the interconnection of attitudes in general with the world. Although one may be mistaken in believing that Fred is honest, one cannot believe that Fred is honest if one is mistaken about Fred’s identity and about what it is to be an honest man—or, at least, the more error that creeps in here, the less clear it will be just what one does believe. The point is that one cannot divorce questions of the content of attitudes from questions about the relation between those attitudes and their objects—most importantly, one cannot separate questions about the contents of beliefs from questions about the truth of those beliefs. And not only must our attitudes in general stand in the right relation to those worldly things and happenings that are their objects, but in the case of the vast majority of the contents of those attitudes, those contents are consti-tuted in terms that are quite specific to our particular activities and surroundings. Thus one grasps concepts of identity and honesty, of weather and dinner, friendship and finance only in so far as one can apply those concepts to one’s own concrete experience and in so far as those concepts can be employed in a coherent fashion in organizing and directing one’s own thinking and acting. The grasp of concepts, therefore, and with it the possibility of content, is thus closely tied to the capacity to interact with things and other persons in the world and so to the possibility of organized, embodied agency.6 The conclusion to which this line of reasoning inevitably tends is that the very having of a life may be dependent on one’s existence as an active, embodied creature. Our selfidentity is consequently bound up, as is the possibility of contentful experience, with our organized activity in the world—we might say that our self-identity is bound up with the worldly projects in which we are engaged. Such projects establish both an ordering of the world and in establishing such an ordering they also establish a certain self-identity. One should understand a life as given its identity, then, not in virtue of the person whose life it is—for to be a person is indeed, in the sense I am using here, just to have a life—but through its being a particular ordering of the world, a particular way of being-in-theworld, that is grasped as such by the creature whose life it is. A life is not something independent of such ordering, but constituted through it. So my own identity and existence is established through my active involvement with the objects and events around me rather than being something given prior to and independently of those objects and events.7 The unity of my life and of myself as a person is thus the unity, always incomplete, of an ongoing and interconnected set of projects—a unity that is recognized as such by myself as the one whose life it is. Of course in so far as one’s self-identity is indeed tied to one’s active, embodied involvement in the world and so to a certain sort of projective activity, the idea of a life as involving a recognition of future possibility can itself be seen as tied to the idea of a life as a matter of self-aware, projective activity. The capacity to form a conception of oneself and to grasp one’s life as one’s own is thus not a capacity to grasp something independent of or distinct from the particular connection of objects and events that go to make up a particular life—it is indeed just the capacity to recognize those objects and events as being connected in a certain way, namely, as part of that life that is one’s own and so as part of the projects that make up that life, and to act in a way that, for the most part, preserves that integrity.

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In so far as the unity of a life is such that it can be represented within that life (through the concept of self) and that representation can itself function in the maintenance and formation of a life’s unity (as the concept of self is part of that by means of which one’s life is unified), so it seems proper to say that the unity of a life, for a creature that can properly be said to have a life, is indeed a unity intrinsic to that life—it is part of the very nature of the sort of life that it is that it be capable of forming a concept of itself as a whole. A creature that has a life in the sense I have employed it here is also a creature that has a conception of itself, that can refer to itself using the first-person, that can take itself as an object of its own reflections and whose life can therefore be said to belong to it and to it alone. Such a creature can be said to have a capacity for self-knowledge that is itself closely tied to the creature’s having of a life. The idea of the ‘ownness’ of a life— whether put in terms of my life as ‘mine’ or as ‘belonging to me’—is therefore closely tied to the idea of unity. Precisely because the unity of a life is not a perfect unity, but one that must include within it a degree of disunity, so the unity of a life can only be grasped through the idea of the person whose life it is and through that person’s own capacity to grasp that life as their own. This is not, however, to make the identity of a life dependent on some prior notion of ‘person’ nor to appeal to the sense of ‘own-ness’ as the criterion of identity for lives. Rather it is to point to the way in which the unity of a life is tied to the capacity for a certain sort of self-recognition and self-conceptualization within that life. Since the unity of a life is not merely a matter of the unity given by certain connections (causal or otherwise) among the elements of a life, but is a unity that consists in the self-presentation of the life as a whole—in the creature whose life it is having a grasp of that life as indeed its own—reductionist accounts of the self, of which Derek Parfitt’s may be taken to be exemplary,8 and that treat the self as able to be reduced to a mere concatenation of psychological states, cannot be adequate as accounts of the unity of a life. Such accounts cannot, for instance, and indeed do not even attempt, to explain the way in which the unity of a life can be preserved in a manner consistent with the often imperfect integration of the elements of that life. And while this might be taken to be a simple consequence of the fact that such accounts have little regard for the concept of a life as such, at least as developed here, such disregard suggests a failure to understand the way in which that concept, and the unity that it implies, is intimately connected with the very possibility of the having of contentful attitudes and of organized activity. Moreover such accounts also sever the connection between the notion of a life and of self or person and the use of the first-person. For just as the having of a life and the having of a grasp of one’s life are connected so too is the notion of a life or of the self closely connected with the use of sentences containing ‘I’, ‘me’ and ‘mine’. In the use of such first-personal language we refer to and also elaborate on a form of self-identity that is not captured in any mere continuity of body, of causal or temporal connection, or of prepositional content. Such reductionism also fails to capture the connected sense in which the having of a life, and presumably the existence of a self, is tied to one’s capacity for recognition of that life as one’s own and is tied, indeed, to one’s capacity for self-recognition and self-conceptualization. On a reductionist account there is no real sense in which my life is my own, and while this enables such as Parfitt to render death as thereby something of little consequence, it is only by having abandoned the very idea of a life or a self of which death is the ending.

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The organization and unity of a life is essentially a matter of the organization and unity of the projects that make up that life and the integration of those projects as part of a larger project that may be understood as the life itself. And the sense in which we can understand the unity of a life in terms of the unity of a project—say the project of living well (although one must be careful to avoid such a characterization becoming too empty) or of living well given a particular situation—then one can also understand the unity and integrity of a life in terms of the unity and integrity of a particular life-story. Indeed the sort of unity that is at issue in the unity of a life is not the unity of some self distinct from a set of experiences and involvements, but is just the unity of an integrated form of operation in the world—a project—and that may also be said to consist in a form of self conceptualization paradigmatically expressed in the form of narrative. In this latter respect the unity of a life can also be understood in terms of the unity of a narrative and this is so both with respect to those smaller projects in which we are always engaged, as well as with respect to the project of a life as a whole within which those various projects are integrated and of which they form parts. Certainly in narrative we have an excellent example of the sort of complex unity over time that seems appropriate to the understanding of the unity of a life. The story itself provides such an example through its own unity over and above the elements that make it up—for a story to be a story is precisely for it to combine different events and characters in a way that is not a mere relating of causal connectedness, but is a combining of those elements so as to allow them to be seen and to be understood in quite specific ways. But not only does the story exhibit its own unity, through its telling it also unifies the events and actions on which it focuses and so exhibits those events and actions as themselves having a certain unity of their own. Through narrative, then, we come to understand, not only the nature of a character or of some event, but we also come to see how the character or the event is exhibited, develops and is articulated through a manifold of particular happenings, relationships and actions. In fact, one might claim more generally that, when it comes to an understanding of human lives and the human significance of events, it is through narrative that such understanding is primarily to be achieved, for only through narrative can an appropriately rich interconnection of elements over time be achieved. The idea that narrative may have an important role in the understanding of the unity of a human life can be seen to lie behind the view of many of those historians who have objected to the simple application of deductive-nomological models to historical explanation. And perhaps the idea that notions of rationality have a ineliminable role in explanations of human action, so that those explanations cannot be reduced to purely causal accounts, can also be seen to suggest a similarly ineliminable role for narrative in such explanations also—to cite a reason for an action, it might be said, is also to place that action within a particular narrative space and to indicate a particular kind of story that can be told about the actor. But it is not just that narrative is an important tool in the understanding of human life from ‘the outside’. Our own understanding of ourselves would seem to be bound up with our ability to tell stories about ourselves and to construct narrative accounts of our lives. Indeed, it may be that only through such stories can we bring order into our lives to begin with. Thus Bruno Bettelheim and others emphasize the role of the fairy story in enabling young children to give meaning to the world into which they are growing9 and both Paul Ricoeur10 and Alasdair MacIntyre have pointed to the

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way in which narratives and narrative figures provide the means by which we bring order to our lives and by which we can assign value and significance to events—in MacIntyre’s case they provide the cultural schemata by which we make sense of the world.11 Thus while Louis Mink and Hayden White tell us that stories are not lived and lives are not told,12 the truth, perhaps, is that only a life about which stories are told is a life that is lived. To live a life is also, we might say, to be involved in telling and retelling the story of that life. Of course, since none of us can know the real ending to our lives, and for the most part we have only the haziest memories, if any, of the beginnings of our lives, the stories that we tell provide ways to unify our lives on the basis of a particular position within those lives. So the stories we tell ourselves are projections of our lives rather than being necessarily factual accounts of that in which those lives consist. In this respect we can see how the capacity for storytelling is actually quite closely connected with the capacity for agency, since the coordination and purposiveness necessary for action, as well as the appropriation of a past context that provides the grounding for such action, is dependent on just the ability to grasp the way in which actions fit within larger narratives. It is through narrative, then, that we are able to project our lives from the past and present into the future and in so doing we are also able to explore and map out possibilities for action. In narrative one is able, not only to project one’s life forward, but to understand one’s life as an ongoing project and so as constituted with respect to certain central aims and values. Indeed, given the necessarily temporal dimension to the project and projection of a life, and the complexity of the connections that go to make up a life, then it would seem that only a narrative structure would be sufficient to capture the sort of unity at stake. Understanding a life as a project or as a narrative can thus be seen to be closely related ideas—projects can be seen to have a structure exemplified through narrative and one may view the project of a whole life as just the formation of a life that carries a certain sort of narrative integrity. In this respect, the having of a life is not only a matter of grasping one’s life as one’s own, but is also a matter of one’s own making of that life, both of which converge in the capacity to understand that life within some narrative frame. To have a life, one might say, is to be a creature that makes itself through its ability to tell stories about itself and to shape its life through those stories.13 For there to be a life there must be the capacity to achieve some grasp of the life as a whole—such is indeed implied in the idea that to have a life is to be able to grasp that life as one’s own. And of course this means having a grasp of a whole that extends over time—having a grasp of the past background to current actions and events and having a grasp of the extension of those actions and events into the future. The grasp of one’s life as a whole is thus also a grasp of the perspectival and situated character of one’s life—of the way it is indeed lived on the basis of a certain past and extends into certain particular future possibilities. For creatures that are finite, having a grasp of their lives as a whole in this way must ultimately mean having a grasp, no matter how rudimentary, of the way in which their lives extend from their birth to that end of possibilities that is their death. But what of creatures that have no such end in view—because either they do not die or because, for whatever reason, they cannot grasp their own deaths? What of the possibility of a life that was lived without the idea of its own ending? Can one properly have a life that is understood to stretch endlessly into the future in this way?

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Before going on a brief matter of clarification is necessary at this point. There is a difference, or so it would seem, between having a grasp of one’s mortality and the fact of such mortality. After all, one’s grasp of the facts of one’s life may be mistaken, and it might be that one conceives of one’s life as having a finite span and yet one’s life never actually comes to an end. The questions that I put in the preceding paragraph took no account of the difference that is indicated here between having a grasp of the possibility of one’s death and the fact that one can die and the discussion that follows will also tend to ignore this difference. In doing so it might appear that an important distinction is being left to one side. Maybe to have a life it is necessary that one have a grasp of that life as having a limit in death and yet it is not necessary that such a limit actually be reached— not necessary for there to be a life that it should indeed come to an end. In fact, as may already be evident and as I hope will become clearer in the course of the discussion below, any creature that can have a grasp of its life as a whole will be a creature that dies, since the having of a grasp of one’s life is not independent of the unity of that life itself, a unity which is such that it is necessarily localized in space and time. The unity of a life on which the having of a life depends is something that cannot be maintained without limit. The distinction between the having of a grasp of one’s mortality and the fact of such mortality is thus not a distinction that is relevant to the questions at issue. In order for a creature to be said to have a life it must, I have claimed, have a grasp of that life as its own. The question before us now can thus be put as the question whether a creature that does not die or that has no concept of its own death can be said to have a grasp of its own life. We might also ask whether such a creature could be said properly to have a sense of itself. Ordinarily this question might seem peculiar, arbitrary even. For why suppose that one’s mortality or one’s grasp of one’s mortality would have anything at all to do with one’s grasp of oneself or one’s self-identity. Surely whether one dies and whether one has any conception of one’s own death is a purely contingent matter unrelated to whether one can be said to have a life or to have a grasp of that life. Although he raises the matter in a rather different form, Sartre puts a rather similar point in arguing against any attempt to tie finitude to mortality. ‘Since death is always beyond my subjectivity,’ he writes, ‘there is no place for it in my subjectivity,’14 arguing that: Ordinarily the belief seems to be that it is death which constitutes our finitude and which reveals it to us. From this combination it results that death takes on the shape of an ontological necessity and that finitude, on the other hand, borrows from death its contingent character…But if we consider the matter a little more closely, we detect their error: death is a contingent fact which belongs to facticity; finitude is an ontological structure of the for-itself which determines freedom and exists only in and through the free project of the end which makes my being known to me. In other words human reality would remain finite even if it were immortal, because it makes itself finite by choosing itself as human.15 Death is thus understood to be a contingent matter, while both our finitude, as well as our having of a life, are not. And so whether we are finite creatures, and whether we are

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creatures that can be said to have a life, is not, according to Sartre, dependent on whether we are capable of death. An immediate problem with this account, however, is that ‘death’ may refer to one of at least two logically distinct events: the ending of the integrated functioning of the body or the ending of a life. Sartre does not himself distinguish between these two events, and ordinarily, of course, the events coincide, but they need not do so. Indeed the fact that we can conceive, as we sometimes do, of the possibility of increased human longevity through the replacement of bodily parts, and, in the case of some science fiction possibilities, of a whole body, suggests that we do not need to identify the ending of the body with the ending of a life. This is not to say that the identity of a life is in no way dependent on the identity of the body. But one can grant that a particular life might have a special relation with a particular body (in so far as that body is a part of the set of objects and events with respect to which a particular life is constituted) without having to admit that the span of a particular life through time is logically indistinguishable from the span of a particular body’s continued existence through time. The question as to whether a creature can be said to have a life if it is not capable of dying, or if it lacks any grasp of the possibility of its own death, is thus not a question about whether a creature must have a body that can die if that creature is to have a life. Rather the question is whether a life that has no end is indeed a life or whether a creature can have a grasp of its own life in the absence of any grasp of the ending of that life. Once the question at issue is put in these terms then we can begin to see that the connection between the having of a life and the capacity for death need not be so arbitrary or contingent after all, for if the having of a life is the obtaining of a certain unity among the elements of that life (among a set of experiences, behaviours and attitudes), then it seems reasonable to ask whether such a unity can obtain over an unending span of time. And here we arrive at another consideration to which the sort of account offered by Sartre apparently pays scant attention. For if a life is constituted as an ongoing set of projects, and if such a life, and the projects in which it consists, are constituted through the ordering of objects and events in the world, then it is hard to see how there could be the right sort of unity or integrity to a life that was understood as spanning an unending period of time and as consisting in what would presumably be an unending series of projects. The immortals described in one of Borges’s stories are indeed creatures in whose infinitely extended lives everything is possible and consequently nothing is significant. As Borges puts it ‘No one is anyone, one single immortal man is all men. Like Cornelius Agrippa, I am god, I am hero, I am philosopher, I am demon and I am world, which is a tedious way of saying that I do not exist.’16 How could one conceive of a life without end as constituting a whole? Not only might there be quite radical discontinuities between a portion of this ‘life’ lived over one period and a portion lived over another, but it is hard to see how, from within that life, any project could possess significance in giving identity to that life as such. Our lives are largely constituted by the projects in which we engage and so are constituted in terms of the particular orderings of the world that we establish. But for a life without end there need be no limit on the orderings that are possible within that life and no sense in which that life need depend on any finite number of choices. Given an endless span of time, the possibilities that a particular life might encompass are themselves endless. In that case it seems that the Sartrean claim that death, as the ending of the span of a life, bears no

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essential relation to finitude would seem to be simply false. Finitude is the finitude of my projects, and this does not mean simply that those projects are finite in their scope, but that those projects cannot be projected endlessly. The same is true for the project that is my own life. In so far as I can grasp it as my own, and in so far as this is necessary for me to have a life, such a life cannot be projected forever. It is precisely because we cannot play through an endless series of choices, an infinite series of possibilities, that the choices we do make become so important to us: those choices establish the character and identity of our lives; they allow certain things to show up as valuable; they establish a certain ordering of and orientation within the world. It is perhaps for this reason that the idea of immortality can seem to entail a loss of meaningfulness, even a form of boredom. For a life without end would be a life in which the framework within which value and significance was established or within which it was able to appear was absent. This seems to be one of the inconsistencies in any sort of reductionist approach to the self and so another problem for such an account. Parfitt, for instance, argues that death should hold no fear for us, since what is important for identity is just the continuation of certain attitudes and values and these may continue independently of the existence of any particular embodied creature.17 But by removing any sense of self-identity Parfitt also removes any sense in which things can matter just in so far as it removes the sense in which they can matter to me or to any other individual. And just as content is itself constituted through the unitary activity that makes for a life, so value can only appear within the context of such an integrated, organized unity of projects. But the possibility of such a unity requires recognition of a unity and identity that is more than just a matter of the persistence of certain attitudes or values. As Paul Ricoeur asks ‘For really, how can we ask ourselves about what matters if we could not ask to whom the thing mattered or not? Does not the questioning about what matters or not depend upon self-concern, which indeed seems to be constitutive of selfhood?’18 One way of understanding the nature of a life is through the idea of a certain unity of projects. Such a view seems to present problems, however, for any account that takes the temporal finitude of a life to be merely contingent and allows the possibility of a life without end. And if we look to conceive of the unity of a life through the idea of the unity of narrative, then similar problems arise: Does a story that lacks an ending, a narrative that goes on forever, really constitute a story? Does it constitute a single story? One can certainly conceive of stories that go on, perhaps, forever. But such stories are surely understood better as sequences of stories, sequences that may be unified in only an attenuated sense that is given warrant, perhaps, by the presence of some connecting thread (perhaps some loose continuity of content or theme), rather than as a single story. Maybe an unending narrative should be understood as, not one story, but an infinite sequence of stories in which there is always, rather like the tales of Scheherazade, another story to come.19 Maybe a ‘life’ without end should be similarly understood as, not a single life, but an infinite sequence of lives. Of course in such an unending sequence, not only might we be left with a multiplicity of finite lives rather than a single infinite life, but the sense in which we have even a single sequence might itself be quite tenuous— perhaps the only unifying principle would be that the various lives are part of a single causal chain, and this hardly seems to make for a unity in any appropriately significant sense.

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The existence of a life is a matter of the existence of certain sorts of connections between objects and events—to live a life is to impart a certain ordering to the things in the world. In this respect one cannot divorce a life from the objects and events in the world with respect to which that life is constituted. And if a life has its character in a particular way of being in the world—in being in a particular relation to objects, events and places and to other persons, other lives—then one cannot separate the life from the relations that constitute it. Thus the character of a life, and so the life itself, cannot be grasped independently of a grasp of the relations that are constitutive of that life; independently of the concrete particularities of the life that is lived; independently of the particular involvements and commitments in which that life consists. A life cannot be understood as the life that it is other than in relation to the particular persons, objects, events and places that make up that life. This is not to say that the relations that are part of a life (or the persons and objects that are implicated in those relations) cannot change without the life of which they are a part also being destroyed, but that there must always be a certain continuity in those relations and some sort of integration between them. Too great a breakdown in the integration of a life or between elements of a life—say a breakdown that occurs in such a way that it separates what might otherwise have been a single life into two quite separate wholes—may itself constitute the ending of one life and the start of a new. We often talk of beginning a new life, of breaking with the past, of becoming a new person (even of being ‘born again’), when we mean to indicate the way in which our lives, though still the same lives, have nevertheless undergone some radical or important change. But such turns of phrase can also apply to cases where we really do mean that there has been a change in the seeming identity of the life that is being lived—in relation, for instance, to catastrophic breakdowns or changes in personality or character. Thus someone who undergoes a severe trauma of the sort associated with some form of neurophysiological damage may well be said literally to cease to be the person they were previously. It is hard to comprehend the phenomenology that might be involved in such a breakdown, but it may well be appropriate in such cases, and reactions from relatives and friends may bear this out, to regard such a breakdown as no less the ending of a life than the death of the body. And this may be so even if the person concerned remains a functional human being, simply because the involvements, commitments and attitudes that previously made up that person’s life have been completely altered. If the ending of a life is essentially a matter of the breakdown in the integrity of the life—a breakdown in the ongoing projects, in the involvements, commitments and attitudes, that make up that life—then a life may indeed end without the ending of the body with which that life is associated. And similarly the idea of a life that never comes to an end may be better expressed in terms of the idea of a project that never breaks down or whose breakdown can never be envisaged, rather than in terms of the death of some particular body. Yet future possibilities always carry the possibility of ceasing to be because they carry with them the possible destruction of what we are (and we are not just this set of bodily parts or even this set of dispositions), because they carry with them the possible destruction of those objects and events, those projects, with respect to which our identity is established. Thus, in so far as my worldly surroundings and activities are contingent, so my continuity and identity is a contingent matter also.

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That our self-identity is indeed connected with the identity of our surroundings is indicated by the way in which the desire for a continuation of our projects (immortality) and of ourselves can be manifest in a desire to make the world around us as permanent and unchanging as possible. But this desire, common though it may be, represents a failure to understand the nature of our projects themselves and of our involvement in the world. An unchanging world would be a world that made no demands on us, in which we would no longer have any significant involvement and in which there would be no life to live. To wish for such permanence, and for the immortality that it might bring, is therefore also to wish, paradoxical though it may seem, for a certain kind of ‘death’. The possibility of the kind of ending that comes with the fragility of our projects and our lives is thus intrinsic to the possibility of self-identity and to the having of a life. The having of a life requires a grasp of that life as a whole. Grasping a life as a whole requires grasping it in terms of the ongoing unity and integrity of a set of projects. But the identity of those projects and of the life as a whole cannot be separated from the particular objects and events in the world with which those projects and that life are involved. A life that continued endlessly would be a life that was capable of continuous mutation. But such a life would not be a single life at all. At most it could be a succession of lives. Not only would such a life lack the requisite identity over time, but such a life could not be something about the shape of which one could care—in fact such a life would have no shape. In that case we can say that immortality (and this includes the sort of quasi-immortality that reductionism offers) means a dissolution of identity and this hardly seems like immortality at all. To be a creature that has a life, to be a creature that has a world, to be a creature that has a sense of value and significance, is also to be a creature that has a grasp of the possibility of its own ending. It is, in other words, to be a creature capable of death. As Heidegger comments: The mortals are human beings. They are called mortals because they can die. To die means to be capable of death. Only man dies. The animal perishes. It has death neither ahead of it nor behind it. Death is the shrine of Nothing, that is, of that which in every respect is never something that merely exists, but which nevertheless presences, even as the mystery of Being itself. As the shrine of Nothing, death harbours within itself the presencing of Being. As the shrine of Nothing, death is the shelter of Being. We now call mortals mortal—not because their earthly life comes to an end, but because they are capable of death as death. Mortals are who they are, as mortals, present in the shelter of Being. They are the presencing relation to Being as Being.20

13 THE ANTINOMY OF DEATH1 Peter Loptson Some of the phenomena that our lives present to us pose themselves as problems or challenges to make sense of, and to fold into a coherent overall conception of our identities and our possibilities. These challenges may be personal, and parts of endeavours to arrive at a life-mode that may be as satisfactory as life circumstances permit. And they may be conceptual and theoretical, parts of attempts to devise a unified ontological and normative conception of what it is to be a human being. For the philosophical mind they may—arguably, should—be both. An obvious salient such challenge is posed by the ineluctable fact of our deaths. The present paper argues that two independent lines of thinking about death combine to produce a kind of antinomy: they box the attempt to understand the significance of death into a kind of corner from which no adequate emergence seems possible. On the one hand death is a genuine evil and a tragedy. Arguments for these old views are set out, and reconsidered and defended in partly novel ways.2 The tragedy of death is masked by the accommodations to death that different kinds of philosophy, allegedly hardheaded common sense, and—probably—natural selection itself have produced. These accommodations can be unmasked. When they are, the irredeemable badness of the deaths of human beings confronts us remorselessly. On the other hand human beings are not designed for literal immortality, i.e. a literally unending condition of having experiences. It is probable that no prosthetic revision or extension of the human system could be devised, in a world with our natural laws, that could preserve the experiential unity of a (human) self for more than a handful of (not significantly interrupted) centuries, at most. Eventually, in a very finite number of years—even if it were thousands—human information storage capacity, and anything resembling what we know or can imagine as a coherent and unified life of a person, would disintegrate. Eventually a later self, if there were one, would be effectively indistinguishable from a numerically distinct person. This supposed immortality would be hardly different, ontologically and axiologically, from achieving an alleged immortality through one’s descendants. Yet this reality does not ‘solve’ the problem and the tragedy of death. The extinction of the human experience machine, whenever it occurs, and whether by degrees or all at once, is no less tragic, for the reasons that make it so will apply in all cases where the life extinguished has had value. These reasons are not functions of the length of time one has been a person, but rather of the fact that one has been a person. Thus the antinomy, or box. The central idea intended in these pages is that it is impossible for us to arrive at a satisfactory general account, theory, systematic rationale, of my death, human death in general, or that of other persons (if there are any). The relevant sense of ‘account’ is a Kantian one, a ‘sufficient reason’ that would explain human death as suiting a rational

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world. It is also existential, an account that could explain my death as suiting my world. The problem of the deaths of persons is like a mathematical function that doesn’t compute; we cannot get our minds around it in a way that will, or could, ‘solve’ or ‘settle’ how we ought to view death, how we ought to think about its meaning or place in the life of a serious person. According to the view defended here, it is untrue that anyone’s culture, or historical or philosophical tradition or location, or any argument that can be devised, can in this sense solve or settle the problem of death for any human individual. Death is a real and important life-problem, for every person, trans-culturally and trans-historically, and an insoluble one. Among the assumptions I make here is that ethics and axiology—the theory of value—are conceptually distinct from each other. I also assume axiological objectivism, but not ethical objectivism. That is, I am assuming that some things have intrinsic or objective value, worth or importance—some things matter—and others have intrinsic or objective disvalue; but I am not assuming any ethical objectivity, or any other ethical objectivity (if axiology is not regarded as wholly separable from ethics). Further, I assume that conditions of objective value and disvalue are independent of people’s subjective valuations—i.e they can diverge from them. Intrinsic value and disvalue need not coincide with value and disvalue for me. Something might matter or be important even if I or someone else do not see or acknowledge that this is so; indeed, something involving or about an individual might matter or have value (or disvalue) even though that individual denies that it does, or denies that it has value for them. I assume as well that among the items with intrinsic value are various psychological states—more accurately, facts consisting of various persons or minds being in certain psychological states—among them states of knowledge or rationally grounded belief, and states of feeling, these in turn including experiences of love and of beauty. So the basic idea then is that knowledge, love and beauty have intrinsic value or importance; though this is not to be understood as implying that all cases of these three commodities will necessarily or automatically have intrinsic value; nor that there won’t be other things that also have this value. I will also assume that some states of knowledge and experiences of love and beauty, have not merely intrinsic value but very great intrinsic value. Also of great intrinsic value is a person’s life, conceived in a particular way: namely, as something that is metaphysically unique, empirically non-replicable, and that constitutes a unified personal trajectory of experiences that in some degree expand upon themselves, accumulate, or aggregate. Although the model or analogy of a story or narrative for this developmental structure is currently widely used, I don’t myself think this is quite the right metaphor for a personal career. There are—of course—many things right about it, but not enough. It also, I think, to some degree trivializes or infantilizes persons, therefore human persons, and their ‘careers’, with its implicit assumption that significant lives must conform to the contours delineable in a narrative structure; for many free persons may consciously or unconsciously defy or bypass these contours or structures. I won’t expand upon this; I will speak though of a person’s life or existence, and of how their understanding may encompass it. Although I do not share his views as to the possibilities or otherwise of a science of consciousness, I want to utilize Thomas Nagel’s, and other philosophers’, notions of facts of experience as being sui generis, quite unlike any others, and intrinsically part of the world; and utilize along with this the imaginatively entered into phenomenological sense

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of a self, and its perspective, that is a constituent part of these notions. Doing so is, for me, without prejudice with respect to full or final stances on personal identity, just as what-it’s-likeness is without prejudice with respect to the full or final story of the latter’s relations to the other parts and states of the world. At any rate, I sense, and dwell within, myself experiencing an ongoing world-for-me, and so do large numbers of others, many of whom are parts of my world-for-me, as I am for theirs. I want in fact to expand this idea to a version of the view taken by Schopenhauer, and which (evidently under his influence) appears in Wittgenstein’s Tractatus, that there is something true, and important, expressed by the claim that the world is my representation. I think Schopenhauer actually meant (in part) something like the idea I will attach to this expression, but it is not important for my purposes whether this is so, or not. Taken literally—and, perhaps, noting its source—it is easy to construe the Schopenhauerian dictum as a piece of colossal egoism; or as a misguided word magic, that has landed its advocate in formal solipsism. And I myself want to say that there is a sense in which it is as though the world were my representation, even though (in that sense of the sentence) it literally is not. All of the foregoing acknowledged, there is something true, however difficult to articulate, in the claim that the limits and horizons of the world-for-me are boundaries of the world, and that when I cease—or cease having a world-for-me, cease being conscious, and self-conscious—the universe has ended. A somewhat Nagelian take on this idea may help make it come a little closer to literal articulation, and plausibility—even if only a little. If we adopt with Nagel (and Kierkegaard) the idea of two basic kinds of facts of the world, the impersonal ones (even though some of them are about persons) of the natural world, and facts of subjective consciousness, the what-it’s-likenesses, we can discern a great cosmic duality, with all of the natural and objective facts on one wing and my world-for-me uniquely occupying the other. All the worlds-for-others are, for me, parts of the observed or observable natural world, the world yonder. The idea expressed in the second pole of facticity is precisely what I look out upon, and sense within; even if this is so for all others also, from their perspective. The second pole is irreducibly indexical, we may say. So, when I come to an end, a full half of the world—so to speak—comes to an end also. My death is quite a big deal; as, for you, is yours. I want now to switch gears, terrains, and idiom radically; and take up a naturalistic, and Darwinian, perspective. There is no doubt that there operates in the lifeworld, including the human lifeworld, a cunning of reason, in Hegel’s phrase. Mother Nature tricks us, and other creatures, bending us to patterns we don’t generally see, and all, or largely, to the end of genetic, or individual, or species survival or flourishing. Of course there isn’t really a Mother Nature, any more than there is a Weltgeist; it is just, again, as though there were (to make further use of Vaihinger’s brilliant idée fixe). At any rate, we are naturally selected, among other things, to have ideas that will serve the biological imperatives, and help cause them to be obeyed, though we at best haphazardly register the fact. Among them is a certain healthy set of fears: of enemies, pursuers, pain, suffering, dying, death. Of more or less equal adaptive utility, it seems clear, are psychological mechanisms of avoidance or self-soothing type: various sorts of repression and denial, amnesiac capacities for dismissing what is painful or disequilibriating, self-mesmerizing dispositions to forget, ignore, be inattentive, and to restore a sunny calm. We could not live—could not manage

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to find food, much less eat it, or have appetite for breeding—if we went around in frantic panic about the brevity or other miseries of life; or indeed if imaginative apprehensions of our dying, or our death—the world lacking us—were not successfully kept distant. Control management is something we need to succeed at in our individual lives, and generally do, and were likely naturally selected to do it. And for the whole of the fact of such ‘denial’—to use the contemporary jargon—there would be found philosopher-apologists for our doing so. One of the social and personal roles philosophy has played, since Socrates at least, is of providing pre-emptive comfort to the potentially anxious. Often anxieties are groundless, or anticipate possibilities that are distinctly improbable and can be known to be. When a philosopher, or anyone else, sees that this is so, and applies such knowledge in cases of advice giving, he or she may well be aiding the cause of rationality, general or specific. But in the case of death (and some other events in our futures) those considerations do not apply. The probability of our death is 100 per cent. In this case, I contend, performing the anxiety-allaying office is mostly the weaving of a kind of superstructural or higher order—an intellectualized— comfort blanket, of just the sort (by the way) that nature induces throughout the species, and other species, in much less grand form. The idea of an ideal of wise calm rational maturity—taking it on the chin, being realistic, acceptant—may have survival value—it may help us, enablingly, to eat and breed—but it is only spuriously a matter of anything genuinely rational. Some will hold that the facilitation of successful adaptation to the world we inhabit, getting through a life, will almost define (practical) rationality as far as they are concerned. But they are wrong. They sell us too cheap. We can be cajoled, cosseted, mesmerized, into a placid quiescent acceptance of our death; it is unclear that this is, existentially, different or better than opiating ourselves (in one way or another) to not think of our death much at all, as we inch or rollick our way through life. It may be said that, with death inevitable, it is better to be tranquil about it, or even oblivious of it. Less pain may be incurred between any occasion of its contemplation and its actual occurrence, just as a calm tranquil cow may be better off en route to the slaughterhouse than one in a state of apprehensive panic, i.e. than one that refuses to ‘go gentle into that good [sic] night’. But it is absurd to say, in either the human or the bovine case, that the tranquil state is the more rational one. Our actual case is rather that captured darkly by Pascal: Let us imagine a number of men in chains, and all condemned to death, where some are killed each day in the sight of the others, and those who remain see their own fate in that of their fellows, and wait their turn, looking at each other sorrowfully and without hope. It is an image of the condition of men.3 Whether we ought to adopt sorrowful attitudes towards this condition I will address below. But that we should be in a literal sense without hope—i.e. of a repeal of our death sentence—definitely does seem what the evidence, honestly considered, indicates. My point in this part of the argument is that Pascal’s image represents our real situation, but temporally telescoped, as it were. Using our imperfect powers of memory, our flickering attention spans, and our facility in distracting ourselves with what we think are pleasures,

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nature induces in us a dulled awareness, only occasionally appearing at all, of the truth Pascal vividly conveys. It may be added that there is a set of folk psychological beliefs and attitudes, arguably little other than applications of the narcotized suspension just referred to, that seeks to provide solace in the idea of the natural: natural rhythms, and patterns, of growth and decay. According to this widely held (I almost want to say ‘scam’, but will settle for) scheme of folk philosophy, and folk wisdom, one can and should have a rounded fulfilling life within a span of seventy or eighty years, with desires for more not only graceless and greedy but ‘out of synch’ with a certain natural teleological order. It is unclear why anyone should regard such teleological views as any more plausible in this case than one would the idea that the warp and woof of life should include slavery or suffering great pain without anaesthetics. The natural teleological view will see death in early life as tragic. But if death is ever tragic for human beings, it is no less so when it arrives by gradual stages of atrophy and decline than when it is sudden or ‘premature’. There is in any case an important distinction to draw between what may be a minimally unpleasant state or condition within which to contemplate something— something objectively unpleasant, say—and what we see as the objective reality of the thing contemplated. Thus, we may do well, now, to tranquillize ourselves with respect to some surgery we must have, and which will unavoidably involve a considerable degree of discomfort or pain as we recover from it, and what we acknowledge—as the description just given indicates—as its inherent unpleasantness. The philosophers (and others) who argue that death is nothing, or is natural and of value for that reason, or is to be welcomed, are sleight of hand artists who often deceive themselves as part of the process of deception of others, and who seek to transfer anodyne desiderata of the attitudinal state to the reality that state anticipates. I want to utilize the naturalistic and Darwinian perspective in yet another way; this time in conjunction with the axiological objectivism I have assumed. A human being is a magnificent piece of equipment. We can certainly be self-infatuated, over philanthropical (in an etymological sense), and speciesist. Yet it seems reasonable, and accurate to say: a fully functional operational adult human being is a fine, fine bit of machinery,4 a splendid conjunction of cognitive and affective systems, working with amazingly elegant intricate harmony. This seems substantially supported by the continually stalling efforts of artificial intelligence projects to replicate, or even interestingly model, the human mechanism. This does not point, in my view, to a non-natural causal background for the human machine. Evolutionary processes, operating on a highly intelligent social animal, took off. Darwin lays the theoretical ground for these natural operations; Dawkins gives a reasonable case for their stunningly rapid high success. My focus here though is not on the beauty of the process but rather of its product. The idea of focus is of the human being as Rolls Royce, or top-of-the-line Sony sound system. These lines of reflection united, we reach both an imaginative sense of and a good case for the utter, total, bleak disvalue of a human being’s death. From the internal perspective, the world and my life as lived by me, it is the end of the universe. It is not a condition of permanent sleep, or of my river rejoining the ocean of being. These are allegedly comforting lies, more shameful when they or their like come from philosophers. The world as my representation, my projects and the unity of experience I may have

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formed or been in the course of forming, flies into the brick wall, the black hole, of nonbeing. From the external perspective, such deprivations as my departure may make for others’ lives, possibly wrenchingly severe or cruel ones, combine with the objectively wanton, stark absurdity of a superb, sublime bit of machinery left to rot or rust in the desert. Equipment so good for knowledge, love and beauty, deactivated, useless, crumbling. I should say that this part of my argument does not depend on regarding every individual human being as a magnificent specimen. Some human beings, of course, never have the opportunity to develop into the fully realized human beings they might have become, or would have become, but for social, economic, or other external barriers or constraints that stood in the way. Moreover, there are defective Rolls Royces, some so impaired they aren’t even sent back to the factory for repair (at least, I will assume this is so; it is true of most manufactured items, even if Rolls Royce standards are so exacting it never is of theirs). There are physically and mentally dysfunctional human beings. My argument does not assume either that they nonetheless have a potential, as human or as person, that makes their loss, when it occurs, as tragic or bad as that of fully functional humans, or that they do not. It is also to be observed that, clinical pathology of one kind or other aside, many human beings waste or throw away their lives. Many human beings seem to be, and many of them perhaps really are, non-serious as ontological projects or voyagers. The magnificent possibilities of knower, of the world and of beauty, and of lover, appear quite lost on some whose lives seem vacant, silly, shallow, trivial, or brutally criminal. Some will view these lost sheep (or sharks) as nonetheless of enduring and never-lost (or even loseable) human potential. Others will think some people pass thresholds that sever their existential worth or value irredeemably, or at least make their deaths without existential disvalue. Again, I take no stand one way or the other on this matter. At least, my argument requires no settled view on this theme. I want to argue that some person’s death has intrinsic disvalue, is an evil, not just for that person, but non-relatively. (I say some because it may be that not everyone’s death is evil.) Part of such an argument will depart from the claim that if a person’s death is a bad thing, its badness is not diminished by the fact, if it is a fact, that the person is replaced by someone of equivalent worth. It may be that a certain magnificent person has a child, who will come to comparable magnificence. But though it may be a good thing that a new magnificent person comes to the world, this is not compensation for the loss of some other magnificent person. Part of what is involved in holding that there is intrinsic value in this person knowing, and sensing love and beauty, is not something that can be achieved just as well by some other person doing so. I won’t explore metaphysical options of exact replicas or perfect clones of human individuals. It might be argued that a perfect clone could compensate for the loss of a certain individual. I don’t myself think this is so, but I don’t wish to take a stand on this very non-standard possibility. The case is comparable, I think, to that of works of art held to have intrinsic worth. If a genuinely exact replica of the Mona Lisa could be produced, would it matter if the original were destroyed, so long as the perfect copy survived? I think it would, but I’m not certain I am right about this.5 In any case, persons, magnificent persons, at least, are like individual works of art, of great worth. However grand it might be that there be more magnificent art, this does not confer diminished worth on those already there.

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Matters of intrinsic value seem definitely to involve the particularity of things, and networks of individual history and intersection. In fact, we think there is something morally dubious about views, and behaviour, that reward or punish individuals independently of what they may have done, or independently of whom they may be in relation to the administrator of good or ill. Reprisals against individuals chosen by lot from a population illustrate this idea. I turn to the second half of the argument. This involves trying to figure out—trying to come to a serious view—as to whether truly indefinite existence as a human person is conceptually coherent, and then whether, if it is, it could be so in a form that could have value, could matter. As for the first, it may seem obvious that indefinitely continuing existence as the human person one (now) is is at least conceptually possible, thinkable. This is after all the assumption and goal of Christianity, and of a large number of other religions. The idea has of course had its philosophical critics. These have usually been specially concerned with problems allegedly posed by the idea of personal survival of bodily demise. But from my present point of view this is not a primary or central concern. I want to consider whether the idea ‘works out’, is fully coherent within a framework of plausible beliefs about human beings and the world they are part of, of an embodied human being going on and on, living not through mere decades, but centuries, millennia, then whole geological epochs, and beyond. A number of fanciful, legendary or science fictional stories take up the idea of someone who is fated, typically, cursed, to be ‘unable to die’. The legend of the wandering Jew, of the Middle Ages, was one such story: a Jew (usually, one who has mocked Christ on the way to Golgotha) is made to stay alive until Christ’s second coming. This is, to be sure, mere thousands of years, at most, of more or less normal biological human life; but the idea is of course that this span will be followed by the immortality all humans are destined for; and anyway the Jew of the story is plainly regarded as able to go on and on, carrying out his peculiar burden of destiny. This is thought of as a burden, in the story, a curse, not something anyone really would want to happen to them. Somewhat similar to the Wandering Jew is the Elina Makropulos of Karel Capek’s play (The Makropulos Affair) and Janáçek’s subsequent opera. She is given an elixir at sixteen, which keeps her youthful for three hundred years. It then needs renewal, by which time she has acquired what is supposed to be the wisdom to decline, ending her life. From a philosophical point of view these stories are imperfect or impure, since in both the non-ageing character is solitary, and exists in more or less hidden contrast to the rest of humanity. They live with an important guilty secret, preventing or complicating humanly meaningful interactions with other persons, who have the usual lifespan. It is unclear then whether the authenticity, tedium, or wrongness-for-a-human of indefinitely continuing terrestrial life isn’t a function of the deceit and solitude of the condition of the central character of these stories, rather than a consequence of the idea of an indefinite human term as such. I want to suppose instead then something like such a term for a whole human community, then probe whether—and in fact argue that—this burden or fate really would start to fall apart as history prolonged itself in a quite major way. Let us suppose that biotechnology developed in such a way that there was a complex drug that could be administered to people that essentially suspended the ageing process,

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regenerated cells and restored damaged rundown tissue. I am not imagining an agereversing drug, the Fountain of Youth in a pill, but an age-suspending one, that could maintain someone in approximately the physical state and condition they were in from the time of first, then continuous administration. (This is somewhat as in the Makropulos story.) Someone on this drug might still die by accident, suicide, lack of essential nutrients, the violent attentions of others, etc., but otherwise there would be the potential of indefinitely continuing life. For the sake of simplicity (or other, irrelevant, factors) let us further suppose that this drug could not successfully be administered to someone until they had reached their middle thirties. We are imagining then a world of 34-year-olds, 37-year-olds, etc., together with their progeny. Let us suppose further that a medical procedure is developed which implants the anti-ageing substance in the body, in an everregenerating form, so that following this procedure no pill-taking, injections or other medical interventions are needed to enable the individual to continue with the body they have at thirty-seven, indefinitely. Human evolution will presumably continue, and a considerable range of human performance enhancements is naturally, or empirically, possible. Some such possible enhancements will, we may suppose, extensively augment human strength, endurance, cognitive capacity, and other human traits. That much affirmed, there seem to be very good reasons to believe that there will be limits to what can be done with the fundamental human biotype. Within recognizable and accessible range of the current human being, a doubtless highly impressive superior human is possible; and there will be extraordinarily many kinds of tasks and states possible and conceivable that a human will not and (naturally) cannot attain. It is not my purpose here to argue for a particular theory, or set of views, on personal identity. It could even be a little at odds with what my purposes are even to state in any detail what my views of personal identity happen to be. For the results I am arguing for should be compatible with a variety of metaphysical stances, including stances on persons. At the same time some engagement with personal identity is quite unavoidable for my argument. In fact, it would be easy to take the position I am defending as refuted if certain metaphysical views on persons were adopted. So I have got to say some things about what does or may sustain numerical metaphysical identity for persons over time. As it happens I think that human being and human person are exactly coextensive terms.6 One is a human and a person at all and only the same times. At least this is how it is with us. But there likely are persons that aren’t human, elsewhere in the universe if not also here on earth. And—according to me—it would be possible for a human being to become, change into, something that wasn’t a human being, something that wasn’t even a living being at all, but remain the selfsame object or being or substance. It is also possible, I think, for a living human being to become a dead human being, the latter numerically identical to the former. Not only is this possible, it is, I think, the actual fact in most human lives (the exceptions being people whose death is simultaneous with their bodily disintegration—people killed in explosions, etc.). My materialism is however a mitigated or qualified one. I think it is metaphysically possible, even though non-actual, for persons to exist in totally disembodied and nonphysical form, as continuing subjects of consciousness. Moreover I think, with Descartes, that if continuing personal consciousness occurred after someone’s death, while that

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someone’s body also continued, as a corpse, the corpse would not be the person, and the non-embodied subject of consciousness would be the person. I won’t enlarge upon any of this, especially as I have already said that most of it, at least, is strictly irrelevant to my argument. But it is meant in part to indicate that I do suppose that in one sense at least someone might manage to be immortal, or at least of indefinitely long-lived existence, as a person. Maybe there could be a technology that would keep a corpse in indefinite existence, sufficiently intact that, with enough confidence that there is no survival of consciousness following death, we could, should, and would cheerily say that that corpse was John Smith, or Martha Jones, continuing on and on. Perhaps Jeremy Bentham still exists in this way. Some may suppose so. Not only this: possibly a technology could succeed in unendingly injecting living cells, or living tissue—living human cells, even cells from the original person, continually replicated— into a dead body, kept in existence in the manner (whatever it was) just alluded to. So there would be then—in a sense—a living human being existing indefinitely as a person, indeed, as the person they had always been. If so, however, this possibility would not refute what I have in mind as the claim that we are not designed for indefinite, or even a quite long term of existence. Let me introduce the term unified personal existence. A unified personal existence is one whose subject recognizes itself in an ongoing present, and in an imaginative projection to earlier and potential future occasions of experience as that same subject, at least many of those projections to the past being veridical ones, and with an overarching or comprehensively embracing state, ongoing with the successive development of conscious experience, of the subject’s life (or existence) as theirs. Obviously this must allow interruptions due to sleep, illness, and one sort or other of dysfunctionality from externally caused sources. Never-terminating comas, or permanent extreme-case instances of Alzheimer’s disease, or other irreversible long term memory-cancelling conditions, may be held to conclude what had been a unified personal existence, but pathologies short of these may make it unclear, or fuzzyboundaried, whether and in what degree unified personal existence obtains. The claim, then, will be that a person’s living will have value, or matter, only so long as their unified personal existence continues; and that it is empirically impossible that unified personal existence last, for an actual human being, longer than a very finite period of time. Hence, my imagined community of Makropulos-like human beings, earlier, would be one whose inhabitants not only would not, but empirically could not sustain unified personal existence for themselves indefinitely. Accordingly—if these claims are correct—all such stories of human beings living for many centuries, or forever, are merely metaphysical stories, conceptions that would not obtain in any world with the natural laws of ours. I want to suggest that the ease with which indefinitely continuing personal existence is often supposed to be imaginable—hence, presumably, the ease with which literal immortality is supposed to be conceivable—is a case of what Daniel Dennett calls intuition pumps.7 Dennett argues that many philosophical thought experiments do not prove what their advocates claim for them, and that there is in general an over-confident, even indolent or self-indulgent, character to their methodological deployment. Someone describes or imagines a situation from which a strong general conclusion is supposed to spring, or be justified, but neglects to fill in enough detail, or to extend the thought

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experiment in directions that would adequately take account of the space, time, other people, or relations to other phenomena that an actually realized possible case would involve. So, I might imagine indefinitely continuing personal existence as a series of pictures or vignettes, or five-minute videos, that simply never cease. There I am, in Valhalla, discussing the large questions with Plato, and Kant, then later in turn checking out what happened to childhood chum Fred who went missing, continuing to hold hands and commune with Mildred, doing another round on heaven’s golf links, etc., etc. But every second between the mini-movies must also be incorporated, and an ongoing constitutive understanding of who I am, who the others important for me in my world are, and what my and our experiences have been as they aggregate and modify a total ongoing life conception. I claim that it is quite difficult to sustain or balance the thought experiment of what my life might be like, with possible details supplied, much beyond a few centuries; sufficiently difficult and unwieldy that one ought to pause, confidence shaken, and ask, do I really grasp what I think I am trying to imagine here? My purpose throughout is not science fictional. I want essentially to be talking about human beings as we find and know them, as we find and know ourselves; with a certain imaginative latitude for extended, enhanced, augmented versions of what we find and know, and allowing that future biotechnology might have capacities that would now seem quite impossible. I think it is reasonable to affirm with some confidence that humans are capable only of so much cognitive storage, and performance generally. Moreover, eventually a human being, no matter how prosthetically extended, would lose personal unity, would ‘transcend’ the transcendental unity of apperception. Not even highlights of earlier stages and phases of existence would shape a unified individual that could know itself, or have been itself, over that long a run of experiences. How long is that? I don’t know, and for the purposes of my argument it doesn’t very much matter. I think humans could preserve their unity (as opposed to their identity) as persons for much longer than any current lifespan; probably for several centuries at least, even if the laws of nature made it empirically impossible to last that long. I think the unity of a human person could not still be there ten million, or even ten thousand, years after the human being came into existence. It might be argued that indefinitely continuing personal existence could be sustained in the following way: it could be argued that individual unified identity is established in the first several years of life, in the first six or seven years, as for Freud, or the first thirteen or fourteen, or the first eighteen, or twenty-one, or even thirty. By some very small finite number of years one has become the person one is in a more or less stable and consolidated way, and all subsequent experience is simply the interaction of that person—indeed, of that personality, temperament, stylized acculturated, psychosocial presence—with varying externalities. Conceived in this way, the externalities could fade, blur, even wholly disappear from recollection—one’s memory files be deleted, wiped clean, say, every ten thousand years or so—as aeon followed upon aeon, with a selfsame single core human individual staying constant. There are I think two difficulties with this model. One is that the hermetically separated bodies of information—one constituting a core personhood established in early life, the other indefinitely replaceable bodies of interactive experience with self, others and surrounding environment—does not seem accurately or plausibly to fit what an ongoing single human identity can be. The supposedly replaceable post-identity-

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formulating files would not include merely external registers of surrounding data, but also how one felt about such data, and how one felt about oneself. Can it still be me if, as would eventually need to become the case, how I was feeling about myself, how I was feeling about the world and me, over a preceding 10 billion years, say, would wholly disappear from my memory—not just from my apparent and accessible memories, but from any even possibly retrievable or accessible memories? Moreover, there seems reason to think that even the most rigidly Freudian, or similar early life deterministic, conception, involves, at any rate requires, some specifics of the subsequent life experiences it is applied to and that give it shape and contour. The second part of the case against this model is that eventually those early life files would go too. This is not the place to attempt even sketchy investigations of possibilities for the hardwiring or housing of memory or other psychological templates. There seems little doubt though that some continuity of a hardware/software unit is requisite for sustained human identity. Dealing fully and adequately with the issues posed here would require a more developed account of personal identity than, as already indicated, I want to attempt in this context. One will be reminded of cell replacement phenomena in the actual human life history; and human identity does seem in many ways aptly compared to a spatio-temporal rope, no strand in which is to be found both at the beginning, and the end. I think though that if files are copied enough times, over time, one has reason, without surrendering the transitivity of identity, to dispute that the numerically same information-transmitting object or system survives the process. The distinction between genuine and merely mimetic memory traces disappears if there is not a certain kind of causal chain, and not mere copying of contents into successor storage bins, from original memory occasion to present recollection. The argument, such as it is, is supposed to be empirical, and to yield a result of natural necessity: a human person is not built or designed for indefinitely continuing existence. Eventually identity with an earlier conscious being would be severed, and a mere successor, a numerically distinct genetic replica of an earlier self would be there. As remarked at the beginning, the being that would eventually occupy the spatio-temporal and phenomenological locations one had had would be ontologically, axiologically, and morally, the equivalent of a descendant of the original individual. To amplify: we are not designed for immortality in two senses. One is bodily, the other is psychological. In the bodily sense: the actual human body could not survive, alive, with a conscious individual aboard, for more than—let us say—two hundred years. I think one could find physiological, medical accounts of our constituent physical subsystems and of the composite aggregate that would claim, with confidence, and with grounding in the relevant physics, that this can be more or less demonstrated to be so. It is not my purpose to provide such an account, or case. But it is there in the—nonphilosophical—literature, and it is powerful. We fall apart, break down, crumble, rust, disintegrate, eventually, all of us, and there is nomic inevitability in this. Now it might be argued that prosthetic revisions of human systems could augment and extend a human lifespan quite considerably. The right implantations of copper, silicon, plastic, and other materials, could give us—to some degree now already do give some of us—hearts, lungs, and other organs that might enable humans to leave two hundred behind. The hard case is of course the brain. Could a human person survive the

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replacement of a natural with a synthetic brain? Would such a survivor, that is to say, be me, or you? Others are not but I am quite prepared to say yes. I think being a human being, or a living thing, in biological senses, could become mere phases or stages of the existence of actual human beings; and this would include or imply, in the world we know, non-living replications of our brains. What does not seem possible is that our metaphysical identity survive indefinite replacement or transformation of the total set of subsystems that make us up, over time. Moreover, in the actual world there seems little reason to believe that the science fictional prosthetic extension possibilities will or could have other than a somewhat prosaic future. Maybe humans will (or with the right material resource allocation could) come to have two hundred plus year-lives. They will not have four hundred plus year-lives. On the psychological side we probably could handle-even a longer span than that; but not likely a very much longer span. Historically, positions we think of as Kantian, transcendental—in Kant’s sense—and conceptual have been in the background of discussions of a projectible unity of a self. I think these ideas have merit, but see the issues as more empirical than Kant did. A unified self—one that we can understand, and identify versions of ourselves in—requires an ‘I think’, of the Kantian transcendental unity of apperception sort, to accompany and fit into things recollected or imagined. For experiences to be mine they must have a location in an ongoing temporal structure that I can call my history. I can err about some of that history, but I must at least have an overarching collected apprehension of what events in which I was participant or affected, and what other selves, were to me. According to me, this need not all be conscious, or under my management or mastery. It will suffice if in fact causal chains from significant past experiences proceed to present ones, with some narrative management on a conscious level. Some beings could handle, coordinate, or have coordinated for them, significant experience structures that encompassed many millions of important other selves, and trillions of important experiences. Only such beings would not, and empirically could not be humans. Some Heideggerians, and others, see finitude as an essential dimension to the human condition; the narrative structure of a life must have closure, and this is argued for as a matter of conceptual necessity. Perhaps the original version of such positions is Hegel’s idea that adult or serious fully free self-consciousness, in the only form that we can really understand it, must know and live with the fact of annihilation. Such views are not incompatible with the one advocated here, even if they seem to me to accord too much probative force to the conceptual, or the intensional. At any rate, I simply point out that something’s being necessary does not of course make it good, or axiologically neutral: there are, or at least can be, necessary evils. In affirming this possibility, we return to the axiological perspective. It will be clear that some conditions of existence are without worth or value even where the object in question can or otherwise does exist in a state having worth or value. If some corpse is some human person, the condition that person is now in confers or involves no intrinsic value. There is no axiological recompense or mitigation in continuing to exist, if it is as a corpse. Obvious in this instance, this will be only a little less so in many others— irreversible coma, irreparable very severe brain dysfunction, etc. There are also cases of

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dispute, and of doubt, in this matter—conditions hardly better than being dead, some will hold, where others will see it differently or be unsure. At any rate the idea of having a life that has, or potentially can have (where ‘can’ is an empirical one) intrinsic value or worth, seems clear enough. My claim in this regard is that a life that is not still the unified personal existence of someone, who knows himself or herself as that someone, cannot have intrinsic value or worth. Recalling the rope metaphor, it may be asked whether there might be over-lapping unified personal identities housed within the same person over time; or discrete unified persons, one succeeding the other as a ‘reborn’ person, continuous with a predecessor person. If the second were possible it would at any rate pose no difficulty for what is argued here; for this would be compatible with the idea that one person had been dissolved, possibly because unable to sustain itself further. The first is more complicated. I would say, though, that if it were possible we would confront with it the idea of a kind of monstrosity, in an Aristotelian sense: a beast neither quite you nor me nor anyone else—not, in short, a genuinely unified person. There might be intrinsic value in parts of its experiences, but a new branch of our axiological logic would be required to be able to say, and to calibrate such value as was here, if any. Again, I think no counterexample or ground of objection to the view defended here arises. How, it may be asked, do the two halves of my discussion of death produce antinomy, or even a sort of antinomy? Why not just say that it is a pity that life is so short, that if we all had six or seven centuries or so, then faded away as, or just before, our unity as persons began to dissolve, we would have as much of our lives as we were capable of having (whether we put them to good use or ill), and could go to extinction with no particular tragedy or disvalue involved at all? While I think a considerable augmentation of the human span would be splendid, I don’t think this would meet the stark character of our case, and our fate, that is to be found in all scenarios. Why is death bad? Even granting that there is a sense in which the universe comes to an end when I do, there is another plainer, clearer, more literal sense in which this is not true at all, in which the universe goes along quite handily without me. Why is my death, or anyone’s death, bad, against this backdrop (and even assuming, or granting, that the death of everyone—the extinction of persons as a kind—would be bad)? Suppose I have had my hour (as it were) upon the stage, and, perhaps, have known, and loved deeply and well. Then I cease. What is bad about or has disvalue in this? The answer I give is not original with me. Many others have given versions of it. One recent philosophical version is Fred Feldman’s8 (though he relativizes bad to bad for—or to). I will put my version in an idiom I find congenial, or useful. Death (my death) is bad because it ends the constructibility of an edifice of value, part of which is not just individual value-items or value-units, but an interwoven or interdependent dynamic, diachronically sustained value-locus, a personal existence in ongoing trajectory. If anything has value, that does; and if anything has disvalue it is ending such a thing. Why?—Because it prevents the completion of that dynamic value edifice. It is an open question whether such constructions—a person’s life, as a whole, as a project of cumulative, enriching experience—can be completed. In any case ending someone’s life is shattering this dynamic locus of ethical and aesthetic value. Still more: it is snuffing out something unique. We are each of us a distinctive (and endangered) species (as it were), and when we die an experiment in the world, which literally cannot be repeated

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(for it could never be literally me there again), has come to an irre-versible end. Further, this is something which comes to me intrusively, violently, from without. It is something—indignity, and worse—visited upon me. There is no necessary or particularly obvious or natural linkage between any span of life and a condition of ageing or decline, physical or mental. Ageing is a kind of disease, which might or might not be curable. We easily come to think of death as a kind of (extreme) ‘cure’ for this disease (and for others). But a little reflection shows that conceptually they—ageing and death—are wholly independent. They wouldn’t need to have anything to do with each other. (We could imagine all humans going through a rapid ageing process between the ages of twenty and twenty-five, say, from which they recovered and were cured, staying in much the same general physical condition thereafter.) The eventual dissolution of the self, if one lived long enough, would not necessarily be, or be manifested by, a sort of senility. Only with the assumption of the so-called natural teleological perspective referred to earlier would notions of a natural plateau, with appropriate rising to and decline from it, be plausible; and we saw that the conception of a natural life trajectory, suited to our personhood, has nothing to recommend it. We could be found in a condition of youthful splendour, or any other, on the last day of our personal unity, as on any earlier one. Whenever our unitary personhood ceased, even in a best case scenario, reality snaps, we are cut off, we are in vital order, then terminated. But one may have lived a long time? So what? The value of personhood is conceptually independent of its term. My argument has been, in any case, a more heavily empirical one than a conceptual or science fictional one. We do not of course have anything remotely like the six or seven centuries imagined above. We have, as we always have, something in the vicinity of the threescore and ten (or twenty) of biblical phrase. There is no point in railing against this fate, and I would be deeply misunderstood if I were thought to be recommending a condition or attitude of cosmic resentment or complaint. Such resentment or complaint would be particularly inappropriate if, as I believe, there is no cosmic king to whom to bring one’s grievances. I simply take them as heavy facts, difficult to compute, or from which to assemble an overall perspective on life and death, and—for each individual— my life and my death. The view argued for here is that natural selection has happened to produce, on earth, a species of what we may almost call demi-gods, or beings with the potentials of demi-gods, at least often actualized—namely ourselves—and coupled this with the condition of an extremely severe finitude. It is a kind of cosmic rotten trick. Yet no trickster was responsible for this fact. From the fact (if it is a fact) that death is bad, evil, or of intrinsic disvalue, it does not of course follow that one ought to be afraid of death, or anxious about it. The axiological state of something is one thing, and the attitude or policy it is reasonable or advisable to have towards it is something else. This seems especially so in the case of something that is wholly unavoidable. However terrible or unpleasant death (or something else) might be, if we can’t do a thing about it, we ought possibly, if we can, to adopt just the sort of attitude Epicurus and the Stoics said we should have in its regard. Indeed, there seems to be nothing formally—or informally, or existentially—inconsistent about having Nagel’s (or Unamuno’s or Canetti’s) view on death, and Epicurus’ on how we should feel, and act, in so far as it impinges on our lives. Otherwise put, just because something is bad (even quite bad) and inevitable provides no compelling reason to get into a snit about it; one might choose instead to be stoical, or defiant, or indifferent, or even humorous about it. (Indeed, one might hold that it is

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precisely because death is so bad that something like an Epicurean attitude—the resolve to behave with respect to it such as Epicurus says we should—is so desirable.) At the same time, the inevitability or necessity of something doesn’t make it good, and there is no point pretending that it does. Death is as terrible a thing as there is. And human beings have a shelf life of very finite span.

14 DEATH FETISHISM, MORBID SOLIPSISM1 Robert C.Solomon I have often heard people say that death is the ultimate tragedy. This seems to me to be trite but also false. One might well fear (and rightly) that the death of his or her spouse or the death of one’s child would be much more of a tragedy than one’s own death (restricting the field to just one’s own immediate tragedies and ignoring, for instance, mass murders, nuclear accidents and holocausts). I suppose that one might hold out that it is the last (and in that sense ultimate) tragedy that happens to one, but even this seems to me to be false without trivializing qualification. Aristotle, in a famous passage quoting Solon, argued that ‘no man should be called happy until after his death’. At first glance, this seems like nonsense to the modern reader, both as a statement about happiness and as a statement about death. What sense could it possibly make to speak of a person’s happiness after his or her death? And what would it mean to call a dead man happy? But Aristotle’s argument, rendered in full, makes good sense. Once we have given up our modern hedonistic sense of ‘feeling happy’ and taken up Aristotle’s much more embracing sense of ‘living and having lived a good life’, then we realize that tragedy is by no means limited to the living. Humiliation and scandal that affect a person’s ‘good name’, even after death, nevertheless reflects back on that life and the way it was lived. ‘X must be rolling over in his grave’ is but one of several poor poetic allusions to this obvious fact, which has nothing whatever to do with any more ambitious belief in immortality, reincarnation or life after death.2 One’s own death is not the ultimate tragedy. There may be much worse, whether before or after one’s death, even from the perspective (vicarious though it may be) of the dead. It is also said, equally unthinkingly, that death is the ultimate punishment, and this, of course, is the justification typically given for ‘capital’ crimes, ‘heinous’ enough to deserve the death penalty. But death is by no means the ultimate punishment, except, again, in that trivial sense that it is the last punishment. (In fact, even this is not so. When Israeli soldiers bulldozed the houses of the Palestinian family of a deceased terrorist, this was supposed to be further punishment of the terrorist. When posthumously awards and honours are stripped, death is not the last punishment but, one might say, one of a series of humiliations.) There are many things worse than death. Painful, debilitating, terminal illness is worse than death, which is why we will always have rightful demands for the legitimacy of suicide and consensual euthanasia. Torture is often thought to be worse than death. The result of medieval executions, long drawn-out affairs in which the victim was castrated, drawn and quartered, sometimes flayed and disfigured, all in the utter humiliation of a public spectacle, was to render death a merciful respite. Prisoners with life sentences sometimes insist that death would be far preferable, and, occasionally, they

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get their wish. Gary Gilmore in Provo, Utah, demanded the death penalty for his crimes in 1965, initiating the long, bloody carnival of executions that Americans alone, among the ‘advanced civilized’ nations, seem to demand and enjoy.3 The suicide rate in those same advanced industrialized countries, not all of them with Scandinavian winters, attests to the popularity if not the rationality of preferring death to any number of social, economic, family, professional or psychological humiliations and failures. Death is not the worst punishment or the worst thing that can happen to someone. Indeed, there is such a thing as a good death, ideally at the end of a good life, which is something we must keep in mind.4

Thinking death in the face I have only twice looked death in the face (not counting numerous close calls in cars and on motorcycles, too quick to provide much of a confrontation). As Heidegger says, though obscurely, such experiences bring one face to face with oneself, whether or not they provoke, much less assure, any kind of ‘authenticity’. But I often think about death, as I presume Heidegger did, which is not the same thing as facing it. Confronting death is a very emotional experience, to say the least. Thinking about death, by contrast, seems curiously detached, abstracted, out of touch with the phenomenon it ponders. As Descartes so clearly noted, one never knows better that one is alive—or finds it more inconceivable that one should not be—than when one is thinking. Consequently, I find it almost impossible to talk, think or write about death without becoming facile, even giddy. It all seems so abstract, even when, as happened this week (and, in these times, seemingly quite often), a good friend or acquaintance has suddenly died. But is it always so sudden, or is it just the news that is always a shock? Even the word, the dull phonetics of ‘dead’, the hissing lisp of ‘death’, conveys the unreality of it all.5 And then there is the idea of death, dreadful and incomprehensible both at once. Without going into the details of my autobiography, I have been avoiding death all of my life, evidently successfully, not always responsibly. I suspect that I am not alone in this. But as a child who was born and raised with a medical death sentence over his head, and as a philosopher, who has had ample occasion to reflect on such matters, I have not been able to avoid thinking about death, and consequently the meaning of life. I could never long ‘lose myself’ in the hustle and bustle of the everyday world in order to evade the question, although, to be sure, I often do. Philosophy has provided me with a means to cope with the issue—if not to evade it altogether—in a subtle, perhaps hypocritical way. Most people, it seems, feel uncomfortable talking about death. In philosophy, one can do so quite comfortably, but is that because we ‘face up’, or because we insulate, perhaps inoculate ourselves from really thinking about it? And, needless to say, as the language becomes more abstruse and further away from everyday ‘chatter’, the chances of self-deception on this score become greater, not less. But by talking, thinking, and writing about death, I have at least managed to face up to death as an abstraction, and philosophical ideas, I believe, can actually have some impact on one’s feelings and behaviour, on one’s actual life. Both Kierkegaard and Heidegger warned us against confusing the crude syllogism ‘All mortals are going to die, I am mortal…’ with actually facing up to death. But where the abstract

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thoughts become palpable and passionate, where the mere thoughts become an actual facing up to, that is where we find the hard ‘meta-’ question for philosophers. There is no necessary connection between those very sophisticated abstractions afforded only to those who can spend their time reading Heidegger and Sartre or chuckling their way through Zhuangzi or skimming the Tibetan Book of the Dead and coming to terms with death. But neither is it the case that not thinking about death and simply admitting one’s incomprehension is for that reason a more honest way of sharing a seat on the Grim Reaper’s subway. When I am being honest with myself, it becomes clear that all of this talk about ‘one’s own death’ has nothing to do with me at all. This lends my glibness a scholarly as well as slightly hysterical air, like a dervish dancing in order not to fall down. How could one possibly be ‘clear’ on such matters? I read through treatises on death and dying—that is, on other people’s deaths and dying—and I am astounded by the idea that such matters should be so scientifically debated and catalogued. Not that such work is unnecessary. Somebody has to do it. But I remember when I was in medical school—a long, long time ago—and watched my young colleagues become initiated into the insulating practice of dealing with death by not dealing with it, by making it part of a routine, by casting themselves always in the role of ‘other’, whether hero, helper or mere spectator. But I am even more fascinated when I read through the (few) analytical philosophical writings on death, where so much careful and sensitive thought has been forced through the screen of jargon and technical puzzles. But there, too, insulation has become a practice. The technique is the familiar one, of turning a brute fact into a paradox, and then focusing all of one’s attention on resolving the paradox.6 And, so, despite the subject matter and the writer’s proximity to it, it is hard to regard such thoughtful analysis as other than one more form of evasion, more cerebral but no less evasive as a way of insulating oneself from the very facts one is considering or ‘losing oneself’ in the hustle and bustle of the everyday intellectual world. I do not know how to avoid this problem. The truth is that in this, as most of my favourite philosophical questions, I like to play with death, or the idea of death. (Damn those deconstructionists, who have turned the word ‘play’ into yet another piece of pretentious jargon.) I do not know how to avoid being facile or hypocritical on this impossible but seemingly simple question: What is death? Or rather, what is my death to me? I think that these are two quite distinct questions, one concerning one’s (in each case ‘my’) own death and another concerning the death of others. The relation between the two is problematic, to say the least. Concerning other misfortunes in life, pain or poverty, for instance, one can appeal (still problematically) to that often-confused notion of ‘empathy’, that is, ‘putting oneself in the other’s place’. One can imagine oneself with a similarly excruciating injury, comparable, perhaps, to the injury one suffered several years ago. Or one can imagine, perhaps with some difficulty, what it would be like to not be able to afford medicine, decent food, a car, books, a cheap computer. But when the issue is death, it is not at all clear what this could possibly mean. It is sometimes said that the ideal attitude to maintain regarding one’s own death is a somewhat modest, not necessarily dark, sense of humour, of which ‘gallows humour’ is the most obvious, most morbid and most extreme example. (There, however, the elements of resentment confuse the picture. To joke about one’s death to one’s executioner is to suggest that the punishment is not being taken seriously, in other words, it is that much less of a

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punishment.) But to adopt a joking attitude towards another person’s death—even the death of an old enemy or someone who is evil—is utterly unacceptable. The asymmetry here is overwhelming, more, perhaps, than in any other philosophical question.7 I do not want to be callous, but in writing glibly about my own death I cannot help but seem to be writing glibly about other people’s deaths as well. But writing and thinking about someone else’s death, even someone very close to you, is a very different matter than writing and thinking about your own. I hope the reader will appreciate this autobiographical quandary, and my refusal to take the usual philosophical way out, which is to reduce the issue to a series of non-perspectival epistemological and metaphysical puzzles that avoid offence only by avoiding the issue. I do not know how to analyse that which is, in more senses than one, simply nothing. Indeed, my thesis here, to be teasingly obscure in the fashion of the occasion, is that death is not nothing, but it is not something either. I hope that does not sound too profound. I do not know how to be ‘profound’, that is, ‘deep’ (a metaphor that naturally leads us toward the grave). Profundity is all-too-easily confused with gloom, but the truth, I would argue, is more usually on the surface. In a slapstick comedy (Charlie Chaplin, the Three Stooges, Monty Python, Mel Brooks, take your pick), humour like truth begins with the recognition of the inevitable. From the very first moment that the plate of glass, the huge wedding cake, or the man on the ladder appears on the screen, one anticipates what will eventually, necessarily, happen. In the development in between, in the various close-calls and near-misses, in the distractions of artistry and the build-up of suspense, therein lies the humour. So, too, from the moment we are born, the end is given, not perhaps as metaphysical necessity but as the essence of the human narrative. What makes us human is the fact that we recognize the situation not just in general or in others but in ourselves, even if we repress that recognition and deny that knowledge as best we can. Accordingly, what I am trying to do here, as Montaigne and Camus and others have done before me, is attempt an ‘essai’, that is, attempt an attempt to be honest. I can only try—or try to try—to express my thoughts and feelings, no easy matter, as the former are confused and the latter vibrate between numbness and hysteria. As an antidote to both, I try to manufacture a sense of humour, I try to keep in mind a phrase that our gracious host Peter Kraus kept suggesting, as we gathered in the paradise of northern New Zealand to do collective justice to both the most beautiful New Year that any of us had ever experienced and, at the same time, death. His phrase was, ‘a holiday from death’. I’m not very good at holidays (even my honeymoon was a ‘working honeymoon’), but the idea hit home. I’m now thinking of my life as a ‘working holiday’, and writing about death is (for a philosopher) an essential part of it. So, what follows is an ‘attempt’ to come to terms, to say what cannot really be said, not for any deep post-modern or Wittgensteinian reasons but just because it is too intimate, by its very nature indeterminate and disorderly. Death seems to be a distraction, an interruption of life. Even the word, compared to the vibrancy of ‘life!’ is dull. ‘Dead’. Even in italics, the word just stops, and sits there, motionless. Activity ceases. There is only silence. An essay on death is an attempt to overcome those dull dentates and flat phonetics and move beyond the hissing lisp of ‘death’ to say something lively and perhaps even enjoyable about what such morbid terms mean to me, both as a ‘unique’ individual and as a product of my peculiar culture. And, perhaps, it is to say something, with all due apologies, about what it is to be human.

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The denial of death: a brief history Almost thirty years ago, Ernest Becker wrote his classic treatise—as he was dying—on The Denial of Death. The phrase and the theme quickly became a watchword of the more depressed intelligentsia and found its way into several (almost all) Woody Allen films. Becker’s thesis, in fact a familiar existential thesis, was that we Americans had so busied and buried ourselves in the everyday world that we had not so much lost as purposively denied the basic facts of life, death in particular. Becker, who succumbed to cancer, busied himself with his book through his final days, almost as if living out his own thesis. But the word hit home, and intelligent, healthy Americans started worrying more and more about whether or not they should be worrying more about their eventual demise. Incipit Woody Allen. Of course, there were good reasons, not at all metaphysical or spiritual, why Americans should have been timid about facing death. The late Jessica Mitford wrote her wonderful and horrifying exposé of the funeral industry in 1963. The death scam was not confined to America, of course. (A good cynic could no doubt trace it back to the Egyptians.) Evelyn Waugh had satirized the same industry in The Loved One in 1930, which was made into a high-gross movie in 1965 (screenplay by Terry Southern and Christopher Isherwood). By the mid-1960s, with Vietnam looming in the background, death had come of age in America. ‘The denial of death’ had become virtually a cliché, but like most oft-spoken denials, it seemed to be contradicted by its very exposition. One of the most popular music groups of the era, ‘The Grateful Dead’, was in this as in so many matters perfectly tuned to the times. What began as a lament became a celebration, not of death but of the denial of death. Indeed, all of the talk about the denial of death itself became a convenient way of ignoring death. In place of existential angst and reflection, it became—sociology. And in the wake of the accusations (‘Americans won’t face up to mortality,’ ‘Analytic philosophers are denying death,’ ‘Television and movie producers are trivializing death’) questions about the meaning of death just seemed to melt away. There were increasingly heated arguments about the depiction of lethal violence in movies and cartoons and, as the ‘baby boom’ got older, ever more concern about retirement and social security. People exercised more, ate healthier, stopped smoking and started to plan to live to ninety and a hundred. Death, according to contemporary thinking, is deferred. Perhaps that is not the same as denial, but it seems to me rather close. But then, just what does it mean to ‘deny death’ anyway? Elsewhere in the world, and throughout most of history, death was anything but denied. Ever since the discovery of death (and when and how would that have been?), the denial of death—death once and for all—has been an unavoidable temptation. One hundred thousand years ago, the Neanderthals practised ceremonial rituals for the dead. We have no way of knowing what they believed, but it is not unreasonable to suspect that they were hedging their bets, both appealing to and protecting themselves from the dead, who may have remained among them. Death was as significant as birth, often more dramatic and almost always more of a disruption for the survivors. Children were left without parents, tribes were left without leaders, hunters were left without trackers. Whether one feared one’s own death or just acknowledged and coped with the mortality of others is a question we cannot answer. What must have been absolutely clear was that death was a part of life. It had to be dealt with. Presumably there were no nurses,

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hospitals or undertakers to hide or remove that unpleasantry from daily life. Nor were there lawyers to further complicate matters. Death was death. But, even then, maybe not. So-called ‘primitive’ people since at least the Cro-Magnon have developed detailed strategies for placating and warding off the spirits of the dead. The dead, in other words, were not wholly dead, even after giving up some of their earthly pleasures and powers. The oldest known epic (at least a millennium before the Hebrew Bible), the Babylonian tale of Gilgamesh, is largely set in the land of the dead. The Egyptians were exemplary but not unique in their fullscale preparations for the afterlife. They looked forward, not to death, perhaps, but to the life that followed. But death and its details, accordingly, were given enormous, even obsessive amounts of attention. On the other hand, the ancient Hindus of the Vedas and later the Buddhists and the Jains were concerned that the soul (or jiva) would not die but would continue to carry on (in some other body) well into the future. Unlike their colleagues to the west, they were not delighted by this prospect. They viewed life as suffering, as a burden to be relieved by ultimate ‘liberation’ (which was very different from mere death). Nevertheless, death was taken quite seriously, as if something of a mix of cosmic graduation and karmic condemnation. The Greeks assumed the survival of that pathetic shadow called the ‘breath’ (psyche), banished from the body but nevertheless not nothing. Nevertheless, the depictions of Hades are by no means enticing, and though the Greeks did not deny death they certainly did not celebrate it either. Friedrich Nietzsche would speculate two millennia later that the great virtue of the Greeks was their fatalistic acceptance of death and suffering as the ground of human existence. And it was because of this acceptance, he enthusiastically proclaimed (in 1872), that they and their lives were so beautiful!8 It was Socrates who transformed the soul into a philosophical phenomenon, as he fantasized being free from the body and doing nothing but thinking for the rest of eternity. In Plato’s Apology, he more or less obliges the jury to give him the death penalty, declaring that he would rather be dead than forced to stop doing philosophy. Socrates’ (Plato’s) vision of the soul is a matter of much philological debate, but what is amply evident is that he believed in the soul, and a mighty substantial soul at that. He imagined that, as an unencumbered soul, he could think nothing but philosophy, forever. In this he broke ranks with most of his predecessors and opened the way to a rich life after life. (He also hinted at some form of reincarnation, which he probably got from Pythagoras, who in turn borrowed it from the Egyptians.) In Palestine to the east, the Pharisees believed in an afterlife, although the full significance of this belief was largely unspecified until the Christians came onto the scene. Indeed, one of the most appealing promises of early Christianity was Christ’s anticipated ‘conquest of death’. This went far beyond the hopes of any previous peoples. Not only was there life after death, life eternal, but it would be more glorious, more righteous than even the greatest of great empires, and it would be free of suffering. The travel brochures made the promise of Heaven irresistible. Life was but a short sentence, and death was barely even punctuation. Given the pervasiveness of such thinking, one might almost conclude that death would no longer be an issue. It was only a ‘gateway’ to the kingdom of God. What does it mean to deny death? I asked that question before, but as a rhetorical tease. But now it is time for an answer. To deny death is, first of all, to refuse to believe that ‘it’ will ‘happen’ to you. Alternatively, to think of death as an ‘it’, and to think of yourself as its victim, is but another strategy of denial, another way of putting it at one

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remove, of abstracting it, of denying responsibility, if not for one’s death (which is more often the case than one thinks) then for facing up to one’s death. In its most mundane but pervasive strategy, to deny death is to focus on the hurly-burly of the everyday world and not ever look up to the horizon, to one’s own mortal limits. I suspect that we all do this (I more than most, perhaps). We plan our projects, stretching indefinitely into the future. (How could one do otherwise?) We believe, every day, that ‘tomorrow will be another day’. We act and feel as if we have all the time in the world. We simply say, ‘it will come when it comes’. (Again, to think of death as an ‘it’ and yourself as its victim is but an alternative strategy of denial.) This comes out in our priorities, putting off the truly important until we ‘clear the path’ and ‘put out a few fires’. But the path is never clear, and the fires keep burning, and some day there is no tomorrow. Then, of course, the denial of death can also take the form that death is not really death, that life goes on, in some more or less self-identical medium. This might be the survival of the soul pure and simple. It might be the survival of one’s mind, one’s memories, one’s sense of self. It might be the reincarnation of the soul into another creature, perhaps another person. It might be something much grander, unification with the Godhead or joining the divine Inner Circle. I watched the Reverend Billy Graham’s son on television recently, and he was asked by his interviewer what he would feel when his father died. He carefully explained that he would feel terribly sad when his dad retired from the ministry, but he would feel nothing but joy when he ‘departed’, knowing that he would then be far happier than he had ever been before. That, surely, is the denial of death plain and simple. But what, you might ask, could possibly be wrong with that? I do not doubt the appeal of such beliefs, nor do I have any good arguments that they are not true. Indeed, I worry a bit about those who take it as their mission to debunk such beliefs. New York philosopher Paul Edwards, for example, who is best known for his Encyclopedia of Philosophy, has spent much of his career refuting first the Heideggerian view of death and, more recently, the idea of reincarnation.9 Who reads these books? Certainly not the believers. Nor the non-believers either. As an existentialist of sorts, I rather agree with at least some of Heidegger’s insights, and as an old biologist and animal lover, I am rather fond myself of the idea of reincarnation, whatever its implausibility. Nevertheless, I want to suggest that belief in an afterlife might well be considered yet another form of the denial of death. There may be full acceptance of the death of the body, but in some important sense the person is said to survive. Personally, I doubt it, or, let me just say, I do not believe it, but this, I would be the first to insist, is of no importance or interest to anyone but myself. Indeed, it may well be my loss. But my own belief is that this just defers the question, which is, afterlife or no afterlife, ‘What is death and how should I think about it?’ What happens after death is another matter, perhaps (in my case) almost anything would be a rather remarkable surprise. But ‘What happens after death?’ is not a substitute for the question, ‘What is death and how should I think about it?’ To think that it is, is just another form of denial.

From the denial of death to death fetishism What is death? Death has often been considered a trial, a test, a definitive event in a life that often flirted with fatalities. In Homeric ethics, notably, the mode of a man’s death

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was considered a definitive mark of his character. To die bravely in battle was virtuous. To die of the flu or pneumonia was—not to be too unkind—pathetic. (Alexander the Great is a case in point.) To die of old age was commendable, but only if one had the full background of battle-scars and near misses. In classical cowboy ethics, to jump thirty centuries, it was considered essential ‘to die with one’s boots on’. Death was a ritual, and if it meant that you lost the fight, it also signified that you put up a good one. (Being shot ‘in the back’ meant not only cowardice on the part of your assassin. It also deprived you of your chance for an honourable death.) Southern American duelling rituals and contemporary urban gang fighting maintain similar codes of honour, loyalty and death, where death is not only a part of life but also its ultimate test. How one dies means everything. The biology of death is of little importance. In much of the Christian tradition, the aim is to die with a clear conscience, whether by reason of right behaviour or by way of a well-timed confession. Throughout the Middle Ages, warrior ethics joined the ethics of salvation in an uneasy collaboration, in both Christianity and Islam, joined in battle in the Holy Land. To kill and be killed for God but die with absolution was as much of the chivalric ideal as the languor of love and the oath of undying loyalty. Nevertheless, death remained something of a highlight of a person’s life, because of the significance of the manner of exit as well as the promise of another life to come. A woman’s death, through much of the same history, was thought to be a simpler thing, preferably quiet and uncomplaining, or tragically in childbirth. Just as women were denied the right and the capacity to a full life, they were denied the right and the capacity to a full death as well. Only rarely was a woman’s death an exceptional act of honour, heroism or patriotism (Joan of Arc, for example). One of the dubious achievements of the women’s equality movement is that women are inching closer to combat positions in the modern military, while their street-fighting sisters in urban gangs are now accumulating rap sheets as horrendous as their male comrades. From such evidence, one might well conclude that at least some young people have seemingly lost their fear of death and do not, in any sense, deny death at all. One might too quickly conclude that this is a phenomenon to be explained by socio-economic disadvantage and hopelessness, in other words, as a class phenomenon, but the evidence points elsewhere, that this ancient love affair with death transcends class and signifies something more. In recent philosophy (and in a great deal of avant-garde poetry, theatre and life-style pretensions), death has become the ultimate experience. One thinks immediately of the French: Foucault, depicted so graphically by Jim Miller in his recent biography; Artault, so celebrated by Susan Sontag in some of her more intoxicated writings of the Seventies; Rimbaud and his exalted status among French poets, mainly because of his deliciously early death.10 One thinks of Heidegger and his always to be carefully qualified notion of ‘being-towards-death’. For Heidegger himself, of course, this was emphatically not to be thought of as an ‘experience’—indeed, Heidegger had not much to say, except sarcastically, about ‘experience’ in general. But as Heidegger has been read, first by the French and now by the Americans and some Australasians, ‘being-towards-Death’ has certainly become the focal point for a certain kind of experience, an ‘authentic experience’, perhaps also a certain kind of mood, not just in the rather abstract Heideggerian sense of that term, but as a palpable affect, a feeling of nihilistic depression mixed with an exhilarating sense of freedom. (That false sense of freedom—and the

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sense of irresponsibility that tends to go with it—is the proper target of Jean-Paul Sartre’s put-down of that philosophy.) Strictly speaking, the idea of death as the ultimate experience may be nonsense. Death isn’t an experience. As Epicurus assured us two millennia ago, it is ‘nothing’. But now nothing too has been elevated into a life-defining experience, and the process of dying, the moment of dying, the keen awareness of one’s dying, the recklessness with which one lives in anticipation of dying, all of this has come to be regarded with a kind of heroic sensibility. Of course, all too often the most dramatic characters exit prematurely in a drug-induced haze, like the artist Basquiat or Kurt Cobain, the lead of the rock group Nirvana a few years ago. A great deal of emphasis has been put on the notion of choice in dying, inspired in part, perhaps, by the dehumanizing medical and hospital practices of the past few decades, but more profoundly, part of the Heideggerian emphasis on making one’s death ‘one’s own’. This, I think, is the more philosophically significant explanation of the explosion of youth violence around the world. In a world without jobs, in which relationships are problematic, in which full-screen heroes come to life by continuously facing death, facing death and even dying become not so much escape as modes of selfexpression. Stunt pilots crash alone in the mountains on a drunken or foolish run and come to be seen as heroes, not fools. Criminals throw their lives away in a hopeless shoot-out and are lionized. (Consider the undeniably charming characters in Breathless, or Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.) To be sure, there are many sociological and psychological dimensions to such phenomena, but the philosophical rage for free will, for dying on one’s own terms, even by one’s own hands, is something that too few sociologists and philosophers understand. Making death one’s own, savouring (or believing that one will savour) the experience has become a powerful existential motive. In his very important book, After Virtue, Alasdair MacIntyre bemoans the fact that his contemporaries generally express the opinion that they would prefer to die instantly, without warning and not suffer the slow lingering death that allowed people in earlier times to reflect and ruminate on their lives and on their sins, to put together the story and meaning of their existence. This topic has become part of popular discourse. In the wake of the explosion of TWA 800 out of New York (in July of 1996), the conversations were revealing. On the one hand, the passengers were said to be victims. (It is a degradation of the language and not an expression of sympathy to insist, as politicians often do, that they are ‘heroes’.) Nevertheless, most of the dialogue, characteristically—and all of the lawsuits—focused not on the victims but on the families and friends of the victims, who, because they were still alive, became victims themselves. This is easy to understand, and it is but one more example of how we deny and refuse to deal with death as such and (rightly) turn our faces back to the living. But, on the other hand, there were many anguished, quasiempathetic discussions about what it would mean to be such a victim. What is often commented on, given the suddenness of the explosion, is the awful fact that (for the victims) not only was there no choice but there was no time. No time to savour or anticipate the experience. No time for anything more than shock and fear, if that. And then the news was released that some of the passengers (those towards the back of coach) continued to fly through the air, presumably in full consciousness, for another ten to twelve seconds. That, too, inspired horror of exactly the opposite kind. Some people insisted that it is better to just go ‘all at once’ (‘not knowing what hit you’). Others

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declared it far preferable to have those precious seconds—to come to an understanding, to collect one’s soul, so to speak, and to live if not savour the experience. In this detached, petty squabble on the heels of a horrible tragedy, one can see the whole history, indeed the very nature, of the human preoccupation with death. How should we think about death? What does it mean to ‘prepare’ for death? Or would it be better not to think of it at all, even when it is immediately upon us? The phenomenon I have been describing—the glorification of the death experience— might be called death fetishism. It is the extreme but perverted version of the heroic, warrior mentality in which death is the critical moment in life. But the hero and the warrior do not think of death as an ‘experience’. For death fetishists, on the other hand, it is the ultimate (and not just the last) experience. It is a familiar ingredient in some of the more dangerous, even lethal sexual practices of the S-M crowd. It certainly followed, though it probably was not a cause of, the deaths of Basquiat and Cobain. It threads its way through the later works of Michel Foucault, and, if one accepts James Miller’s telling of that tale, it provided the motivating force behind his last works and years. Quite the contrary of Epicurus, death fetishism utterly rejects the view that death is nothing and insists, with considerable enthusiasm, that it is something, something essential, something to be celebrated, something even to be loved. It is, its proponents are only to eager to argue, the very opposite of the denial of death. It is the refusal to trivialize death or to explain it away with an appeal to continuing existence of whatever kind. Death fetishism epitomizes the heroic facing up to the one essential fact that we are all going to die. Unlike the heroes who face death in battle, however, the death fetishist flirts with death in his or her own terms. Indeed, the verb ‘flirt’ seems perfectly proper to the phenomenon, both because death fetishism is, undeniably, an erotic if not also a sexual phenomenon and because one is never quite certain of one’s intention to go through with it. Death fetishism is, whatever else it is, a distilled example of what Heidegger suggested when he wrote of ‘making death one’s own’, and of human existence as ‘being-towardsDeath’. No doubt this was not Heidegger’s view. He was a man who lived (like Nietzsche) quite free of the temptations of physical danger, however dramatic his writing, and (unlike Nietzsche) he lived quite healthily well into his eighties. But he is, I think, the patriarch of death fetishism in philosophy. Most of the history of philosophy, perhaps, tended to deny death its proper place in human life. But it was Heidegger, most prominently, who embraced death and gave it its due. Leave it to the French, however, to turn it into a fetish. A fetish, in many religions, is a sacred object, perhaps one endowed with magical powers. Since Freud, it is also an erotic and arousing object, although one could argue that the distinction between the religious and the erotic is itself the product of JudaeoChristian mischief and Freud one of its latter-day seducees. But mainly, in secular and quite sexless terms, a fetish is any object of excessive attention and devotion. Thus Marx quite rightly pointed out the fetishism for money and commodities in present-day capitalism, and pop-culture historians talk with considerable nostalgia about that allAmerican fetish, the automobile (at least before the 1980s, when most of the cars became not only Japanese or German but so loaded with computer gadgetry that intimacy under the hood was no longer possible for most people). In America then—and now in the rest of the world—the automobile is not only useful and sometimes necessary, not to mention a sign of status. It also represents the concretization of one’s powers, one’s personality,

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one’s very self. And yet, it is just a piece of machinery. Death fetishism is converting death from the inevitable end of life into the meaning of life, the ultimate test of life, even the point of life. At the very end of The Stranger, Albert Camus’s character Meursault declares, ‘There was only one class of men, the privileged class. All alike would be condemned to die one day.’ Meursault goes on to note that nothing else, none of a person’s choices, none of his or her actions, made any difference in that ‘dark horizon’ from whence a ‘slow, persistent breeze had been blowing toward me, all my life long’.11 In his essay written at the same time, The Myth of Sisyphus, Camus similarly notes, in his own voice this time, that ‘by the mere activity of consciousness I transform into a rule of life what was an invitation to death’.12 Refusing to commit suicide, according to the young Camus, is what gives meaning to life. And if Camus’s philosophy is throughout a kind of celebration of life, one cannot help but notice that it is always also a fascination with death, as he more or less admits himself in his most autobiographical works.13 The ‘passion for life’ he so celebrates is often indistinguishable from an obsession with death, not unlike the great Jim Morrison song, ‘don’t you really love her/(pause) as she’s going out the door?’ One cannot ultimately ignore or deny death, but just as one can try to ignore it, deny it, belittle it or render it Hollywood, one can also make too much out of death. Death is not the focal point of our existence. We are not ‘being-towards-death’, despite the inevitable fact that we are going to die. Death is one fact of life among many (birth, the appetites, excretion and, according to common folk wisdom, taxes14). Refusing to deny death does not mean viewing everything else in its shadow. Too often, in Camus, in Foucault and Artault, perhaps also in Heidegger, too much is made of death. Death fetishism deserves recognition as a rebellious opposition to the denial of death, but it turns out to be not only the acceptance but the celebration of death. Death is exciting, something to savour. That is death fetishism, and if it is not as marketable as the more long-standing and obviously persuasive views of death as nothing and of death as a gateway to the afterlife, it nevertheless serves an important role in getting us to see just what is significant and what is not about death. No doubt, beneath the bravado of death fetishism, there is terror and irresponsibility. But there are also some serious questions that the death fetishists face head on, with a bit too much fervour, perhaps, that the rest of us would just as soon ignore.

The Grim Reaper has no clothes: ‘Death is nothing’ Most people, it can be argued, do not think much about death—that is, their own death— at all. The well-to-do may engage in a prudential modicum of estate-planning and almost everyone is now encouraged to draw up a will.15 But such planning says much less about the anticipation of death than it does about the average citizen’s attitudes toward lawyers and the government. It is an ideological refusal to give over one’s hard-earned money to those one despises. Indeed, ‘estate planning’ can even be the vehicle for denying death, again, putting it at a distance, absorbing oneself in the business matters of the world. My own father—an old-fashioned attorney who still thought that being a lawyer was a gentlemanly way of helping people with their lives—dutifully loaded himself down with life insurance and other protections for the family, should anything ever happen to him.

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When, inevitably, something did, my mother found that he had neglected to mention just where most of these policies could be found. Actually thinking about death, as opposed to responsible family planning, was something that he dared not to do. The refusal to think about death—that is, one’s own death—is what Heidegger, following Kierkegaard, was on about. And, undoubtedly, there is an important sociological as well as existential truth to this. The sociology is distinctively EuropeanAmerican and modern. The existential point is that the denial of death is, in some hardto-pin-down way, a denial of life as well. Nevertheless, there is another kind of existential truth that lurks here, one that is much more appealing and attractive. It says, in simple classical prose, that ‘death is nothing’. And therefore, it follows, there is nothing to fear. Whole schools of philosophy have been dedicated to this simple pair of propositions, denying the significance of death. The most famous, of course, is Epicurus (340–270 BCE), followed by his Roman successor, Lucretius (98–55 BCE). Thousands of miles to the East, Zhuangzi (369–286 BCE) and other Taoists also insisted that death was ‘nothing’, a view defended later by many Buddhists. For the Epicureans, death was nothing in a rather straightforward way: ‘Accustom yourself to the belief that death is of no concern to us, since all good and evil lie in sensation and sensation ends in death. While we exist death is not present and when death is present we no longer exist.’16 One might note the negative twist to Epicurus’ philosophy, ignored by those who treat him as a hedonist and who use ‘epicure’ to refer to those who know only how to enjoy themselves. Epicurus did not focus on pleasure but rather on the awfulness of pain. Indeed, ‘pleasure’, for him as for many philosophers, simply means the absence of pain. Lucretius, like Epicurus a follower of Democritus, suggested that the human soul was nothing more than an arrangement of atoms, which on death dispersed, leaving nothing. Zhuangzi endorses a similar image, even though Daoism is a holistic as opposed to an atomistic philosophy. Like the Western philosophers, the Daoists placed enormous emphasis on the idea that human beings are part of nature. Our individuality is something of an illusion, and one of the ideals in life is to regard both life and death with equanimity and serenity. Zhuangzi leaves us with a series of beautiful images, for example, depicting the death of an individual as a drop of water joining all of the other drops of water in a stream. Thus death is nothing and nothing to be afraid of. This is not, one could argue, another version of the denial of death. It accepts death, and it accepts death as death, not as a gateway to an afterlife. It is not as if the Epicureans and the Daoists denied that death was inevitable (although some later Daoists, nevertheless, toyed with the idea of personal immortality17). It was just that death did not matter, and, in some sense it was unreal. The dispersal of atoms, or the merging of what was never really disconnected in the first place, why should such matters matter to us? So, I think, the usual charge of ‘denial of death’ does not apply here. But a more serious and much more difficult question may be whether the view that death is nothing feeds on the idea that life is nothing or nothing significant, or even that life is a burden, something unwanted. This comes across clearly in the four ‘Noble Truths’ of Buddhism, and it sometimes seems to be lurking in Daoism as well. It is central to the notion of ‘liberation’ in all three of the great South Asian religions, Hinduism, Jainism and Buddhism. The idea of life as pain is not at all hidden in Epicurus, and in the Judaeo-ChristianIslamic tradition, there is the continuing urge to transcend suffering and ‘conquer’ death.

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Thus, death is not even death, a very different way of saying that ‘death is nothing’. But isn’t this, too, a way of demeaning life? The Christian soul is not part of nature. It is outside of time, ‘in the world but not of it’ (in the New Testament formulation). It is one’s ‘eternal life’ that counts, not mere life. This, Nietzsche charges, is the ‘Nay-saying’ of ‘otherworldly’ thinkers, beginning with Socrates, who hated life and invented other, better worlds instead. The Epicurean and the Daoist, by contrast, do not promise any such Otherworld, but they similarly remove the sting of death. But doesn’t this also threaten to eliminate the vitality of life? If we view life not as pain but as promise—and not the promise of another life to come—then does it make sense to say that death is nothing, even if it is also the dispersal of atoms or the substance of our bodies or our souls rejoining that nature from which they have never really been separated? The idea that death is nothing is a newer idea than the idea that death is really something. The Neanderthals, from all evidence, recognized the significance of death and practised not only burial but also ceremonies and mourning. Virtually every culture, even California, has its ceremonies and expectations surrounding death, the proper disposal of the body, the itinerary of the soul and the correct feelings and behaviour of the survivors. The idea that death is nothing is, accordingly, a reaction to the idea that death is something to be taken seriously, something to worry about. Epicurus taught and wrote against the worry and ceremony surrounding death in the context of religious fanaticism. So, too, the Stoics in Rome preached a similar lesson in the midst of a carnival of crackpot religions. Pushing the significance of death to the extremes—and by no means was nascent Christianity the most extreme—popular attitudes toward death naturally inspired an opposite if not equal reaction. Epicurus’ comment, ‘Death is nothing’, is the bumper-slogan of that reaction. In place of increasing panic about the nature of the afterlife and the punitive nature of the gods, Epicurus’ comment is a sign of sanity. But the comment is taken out of context. The longer phrase is in itself already significant, ‘death is nothing to us’, leaving open the possibility that death nevertheless might be of considerable importance for the survivors. But the larger passage makes clear Epicurus’ deflationary intention. In fact, Epicurus’ comment was not aimed so much against death (or the concern with death) as against the gods and worry about the gods. Epicurus simply insisted that there were no gods, as well as no afterlife in which gods could act on us, so there was, in this context, ‘nothing’ to worry about. One can only imagine, against this terrifying religious backdrop, that what Betty Sue Flowers calls ‘the bald scenario’ must have been a tremendous relief.18 More important, I think, is Epicurus’ emphasis on the social significance of death. This is a point I want to come back to in some detail, and it is not to be confused with the obvious comment that death affects the survivors as well as the deceased. Although his name and the noun derived from it (Epicurean) has become synonymous with hedonism, he carefully distinguished (as would John Stuart Mill two millennia later) between ‘qualities’ of pleasures, insisting that honour (or what we would call ‘integrity’) was of the greatest importance. Quite contrary to the thrill-of-death fetishists of his own time, Epicurus recommended ataraxia, or peace of mind. Not worrying about death was one aspect of not worrying in general, but ataraxia, could not and should not be purchased through oblivion or irresponsibility. Living a good, virtuous life was the ticket, a life in which the very highest values were friendship and community. Unlike the caricature that has been made of him, Epicurus was not a pleasure-seeking solipsist, and his insistence

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that death is nothing ‘for us’ should not be read in the impersonal plural, that is, ‘for each of us’. Rather, one’s own death is nothing, no experience, no event worth noting in itself, except in so far as it brings to an end a life filled with virtue and friendship. When we think of death, we often think of what we will miss. Dead, one might miss the party, but that is no longer a concern. Nor should your friends worry, not that they don’t care or miss you, but, you aren’t ‘missing’ anything, since you are nowhere, nor are you liable to any harm, since you are nothing. That is enough for your friends not to worry about you, and if the Epicureans could not indulge themselves in the often fatuous thinking that the dead are, after all, much better off and happier than we are, they could at least in good conscience feel tranquil about the fact that the dead were no worse off or unhappy. As, some day, they would be themselves.

The Reaper redux: death as paradox The Epicurean antidote has been a source of considerable wisdom and peace of mind throughout Western philosophy and religion. David Hume, for example, in many ways an Epicurean, adopted this philosophical strategy.19 On his deathbed, he repeated an argument borrowed from Epicurus’ Roman disciple, Lucretius. Boswell reports the conversation: ‘I asked him if the thought of Annihilation never gave him any uneasiness. He said not the least; no more than the thought that he had not been, as Lucretius observes.’20 So stated, the argument has two parts. The first is that ‘death is nothing’. The second, unfortunately, is an infamously bad ‘symmetry’ argument, which asserts that the ‘nothing’ that follows my death is no different than the ‘nothing’ which preceded it. I find this dreadfully confused. Tom Nagel argues, rightly, I think, that death is not ‘simply the mirror image of the prior abyss’.21 He writes, ‘the time after [a person’s] death is time of which his death deprives him. It is time in which, had he not died then, he would be alive.’22 But we cannot say that the time prior to a man’s birth is time in which he would have lived had he been born not then but earlier. For aside from the brief margin permitted by premature labour, he could not have been born earlier: anyone born substantially earlier than he was would have been someone else. Therefore the time prior to his birth is not time in which his subsequent birth prevents him from living. His birth, when it occurs, does not entail the loss to him of any life whatever.23 One might well probe into the notion of ‘deprived’ in this context. In what sense are the dead ‘deprived’ of time? Deprivation implies a loss, perhaps even a cheat, a betrayal, and an injustice. But in what sense does one ‘have’ or ‘deserve’ the time which is then lost? Purveyors of death (Hollywood and the military, for example) are fond of saying, ‘it’s time’, or ‘it’s your/my/his/her time’. In which case, there is no loss because nothing was to be expected. This is callous, of course, but one finds much less callous though equally uncompromising conceptions in many religions, often collected under the easily misunderstood notion of ‘fate’. Fate, one might say, is allotted time. To die is simply to have used up one’s time, no matter how ‘cut short’ it may seem in the light of one’s projects, one’s expectations, one’s hopes, one’s health. From this perspective, one might say that a person’s death is indeed like his or her birth in that both before and after, he or

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she is ‘out of’ time. One does not exist, and the difference between ‘not yet’ and ‘any more’ turns out to be no difference at all. But what bothers me about this way of thinking is not only its potential callousness. What is troublesome, as in so many such arguments in philosophy, is that the argument seriously confuses the first and third person cases. To be sure, for me there is (at the moments referred to) no difference between the void that preceded my birth and the void that will follow my death. In the world, however, there is at least one critical difference: after my death, as opposed to more than a few months before my birth, people will miss me. (Someone in the unfortunate position of having no one to miss them revealingly say to themselves, ‘it’s as if I never was born’.) But, as ‘void’, there is no difference, there could be no difference. (A hole in a piece of cheese is different from the hole in the ozone layer, but the difference is the difference between cheese and the ozone layer, not between voids.24) For me, there is no difference. WHO is it that is describing the void, and from what perspective? It surely cannot be ME. But then, NO ONE can be describing the similarity between the prior and the posterior abyss. To me, it is all the same, in the utterly trivial (but extremely problematic) sense that it is nothing at all. But if I am doing the description from the present, that is, while I am alive, the difference between the emptiness before my birth and the emptiness that I anticipate after my death is an enormous difference. The former is simply a past without me, and (except under the most extraordinary circumstances) a past in which I and my specific roles are in no way anticipated. The latter is filled with my hopes, fears and expectations, both up until the moment I die (my projects, ambitions, social status, the possibility of injury and disease, the manner or mode of my death) and further hopes, fears and expectations pointing after my death, how I am remembered, the fate of my children, what will be done with my property, whether my books will still be read, whether my body will be properly respected, or abused, or used for science, or recycled for some unseemly purpose. But all of these future-oriented intentions essentially involve me, and could not be described except in terms of who I am and the nature of my living existence. That is not true of the past, except, again, by way of some very creative hyper-teleological storytelling.25 A different kind of argument, but similar to Epicurus, might be called the ‘phenomenological’ argument. It is impossible to imagine one’s not being, from the first person point of view. One can all too easily imagine not being, of course, but there is always that nagging perspectival question, from where is one imagining his or her own non-being? Thus Freud imagines himself at his own funeral, not there but aware nonetheless. So, too, Sartre’s characters in No Exit watch and comment on the behaviour of their friends at and after their funerals, no longer present but aware all the same.26 Jimmy Stewart’s character in It’s a Wonderful Life gets to see what his world would have been without him, but he nevertheless gets to be there, see it, walk through it, drive a car and even connect up with his old friends and neighbours (who do not remember him) and his wife (who, of course, is an ‘old maid’ without him).27 It is Jimmy Stewart, playing himself, not as no one but as a stranger. But the phenomenology is phoney. There is no perspective for us to occupy when we are dead. Therefore, it is too easy to conclude that death is nothing, that is, no experience whatever. What is seriously wrong about this whole line of argument, from the ancients to the New York and Parisian moderns, is that it really evades the poignancy, if not the point, of the question. The question, not ‘what is death?’ but ‘what is my death to me, and why

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should I fear it?’ gets reduced to nothing. One can appreciate the contexts in which Epicurus and Zhuangzi tried to neutralize the hysteria that surrounded death in their cultures, but in the contemporary contexts of the denial of death and death fetishism, I think a very different dialectic is in order. What happens, particularly in contemporary Anglo-American attempts to argue that ‘death is nothing’, is that the natural perplexity and confusion surrounding the question is supposedly resolved by ‘clarifying the question’. Indeed, many philosophers I know would say that the whole business of philosophy is to clarify confusing questions. But some questions cannot and should not be clarified, and this is one of them. What we see here is an analytic philosopher’s trick: First, eliminate everything that isn’t death as such, for example, the pain and suffering of dying, all questions about how one dies, where and with whom, eliminate all consideration of future potentialities (since, once dead, the person no longer has any such potentialities), remove the fear of death and any hopes for an afterlife (no matter how conceived), and, Bingo!—there’s nothing left. Death is nothing. One would like to say, ‘this misses the point’, but a ‘point’ is precisely what there is not. There is rather a network of concerns and confusions, not only about the possibility of an afterlife but about the life that is brought to an end in death.

Fearing death: What’s to be afraid of? Why should we fear death? If we start by taking the analytic, reductionist route, we will end up with such a thin concept of death that, by necessity, it will come to nothing. Let’s look instead at the equivocation and confusion the question engenders. Looking at death as an event, as a moment, as merely ‘the end’, belies the place of death in a life. We do not think of our death that way, nor can we, except perhaps as philosophers. Death is bound up with dying and being dead, which in turn are comprehensible only in terms of life and the living of it. It is our concept of ourselves as persons, as students, professors, lovers, husbands, wives, friends, parents, children, grandparents, citizens, authors, authorities, athletes, gourmets, property owners that informs our concept of death. Camus and all of the others are just plain wrong when they suggest that death is the same for all of us. Like Tolstoy’s unhappy families, all of us, doomed livers, have our different stories, and it is in terms of those individual stories that death must be understood. First, of course, there is the fact of death as ending the aspirations, plans and hopes that make up a life, whether these are grand and global, like Alexander’s ambition to conquer the world, or modest and limited to the living room sofa, like wanting to see who wins the year 2000 (number XXXIV) Superbowl or the triathlon at the Sydney Olympics. To understand death is to understand each and every death as the frustration of such desires, particular to the person, the family, the community and the culture. Death, in that sense, is always untimely. It always, even at the age of ninety-nine, cuts life ‘short’. The fact that death is sometimes ‘timely’—just following the achievement of some lifelong ambition, some great celebration or milestone—is a special case, a case in which the most basic desires are not frustrated. But, usually, such a vision is a falsification of the always multiple aspirations and pleasures that invigorate most people. Such comfort comes usually from the mouths of the survivors, only occasionally coming from the person dying. (‘Now, finally, I can die happy.’) To be sure, such occasions are inspiring and well

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worth remembering, if only as a reminder that lives can be more or less completed as well as ended and that death does not have to be the ruination of life. A good death, almost (but not quite) by definition comes at the end of a good life. Memorable too, however, are all of those people—most of us—who do not ‘die at the right time’. Friedrich Nietzsche, who famously insisted on this, is perhaps the most poignant example. This most dynamic philosopher and man of letters lingered for more than a decade in a state that only occasionally made him more exciting than a vegetable, thus darkening a life of brilliant polemics under a lasting shadow of insanity and pathos. The idea of death as putting an end to life’s plans and projects should not be interpreted as simply self-interested, as putting an end to my projects. Many of my plans and projects essentially involve other people, not just their connection with me or their opinions of me or their affections for me but rather their own plans and projects and, in general, well-being. Thus, however unphilosophical this might seem, one central concern in the fear of death is what will happen to them? Now, to be sure, such protectionism may be self-aggrandizing. One may not be as necessary as one thinks, and there is a too plausible chain of thoughts that goes from ‘my family will starve without me’ to the somewhat reassuring ‘someone else will take care of them’ to the deflating realization that ‘someone else will take my place’ to the awful ‘they will eventually forget about me’. And, of course, this is so. One does tend to become a mere memory, and, eventually, not even that. It is probably a good thing for most of us that we are not left around to see that this is so. (We would all be like that Jimmy Stewart character, screaming ‘don’t you know me?!’ in desperation.) This is a probable disappointment looming in the afterlife that all of those tales of ‘eternal bliss’ and ‘heavenly delights’ typically fail to mention. Sartre had it right. His unforgettable characters ‘lived’ to rue the day they could overhear the posthumous gossip about them. But, then, as a matter of psychological truth as well as poetic licence, Sartre soon rendered it impossible for them to do so. Perhaps the most human of our fears about death is this: that we worry about other people. Our primary and most easily justified concerns about death involve just this, our roles in families, in communities, in organizations, in projects, in groups, in causes where other people have come to depend on us. We also worry about the adequacy of our lives, how our story will be told, when the narrative is completely out of our hands. (How many dull autobiographies have been written in the attempt to prevent this loss? And how many muckraking biographies just to assure the subject’s now total loss of control.) If such thoughts are not adequately ‘philosophical’, because they ignore the logic of nothingness and the solipsism that the ‘death is nothing’ scenario tends to presuppose, then so much the worse, we might say, for philosophy. But philosophy is not just logic, and the self is not just that solipsistic atom portrayed by some philosophers and by the occasional sociopath. The philosophical question about death is not just about the logic of nothing but about the self and the end of the self in all of its trappings and details. Being human—not just being philosophical—involves having some complex set of beliefs, expectations, hopes, worries and fears about death, death as death, death as disappearance, death as absence, death as the frustration of ideals and desires. It is not so clear whether human beings are the only creatures who know about or worry about death. It is often argued that elephants have some such understanding and other ‘higher’ mammals too.28 It is probably true that all human beings, whatever and no matter how fervid their beliefs, share some apprehension about death, or, at least, some

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apprehension about dying. Heidegger’s notion of ‘Dasein’ as ‘being-towards-death’ taps into an essential aspect of our existential make-up. One never knows, until it is Time, whether one’s Being will go quietly into that ‘good night’ or ‘rage’ against it. One never knows, in the heat of battle or with the pain and fever of disease, whether he or she will die a noble or a pathetic death. This uncertainty, not knowing how it will be, how we will be and what we will do or suffer, is surely an enormous part of our concern about death, perhaps inordinately so.29 I suspect that much of the seemingly metaphysical fear of death is really a much more personal fear of dying, not the suffering part of it, which, I think, is often overrated, but the personal character part of it, the nobility of it, so celebrated in other cultures, in Homer, in Mishima, even in Dickens, less often in America. (With the insistence on ‘happy endings’, the question of a heroic death need not be raised.) The fear of death also has to do with the question of ‘what happens after death?’ not in terms of those difficult questions about the afterlife but the far more tangible question of the fate of the body. Hector did not die badly, but being dragged around behind Achilles’ chariot was humiliating. Indeed, there is probably no culture on earth that has not thought long and deeply about the proper disposal of the body after death, the corpse, and it is certainly worth asking (an empirical question) how much of the fear of death is fear of neither death nor dying but the vain fear of how one’s face and body will look once one is no longer alive. I think that this question, of vanity and death, is too often overlooked in the overly metaphysical and religious discussions about the significance of death. For Hector, the horror of death was not an experience and neither, presumably, was his dying—which (we read) was quick and probably painless. It was the humiliation of death that was the horror, the fact that he lost the fight, the even more humiliating fact that his body was denied a proper burial. Indeed, one suspects, the apparatus of burial and cremation (the two primary forms of disposal) has as much to do with hiding the fact of death as it does the compulsory hygienic safeguards. In (newer) Westerns and in gangster movies (as in real life) there is a special fear of being shot in the face. The pain is negligible, but the threat to one’s vanity is overwhelming. (One of the favourite forms of male suicide is a pistol or shotgun barrel in the mouth, blowing out brains but leaving the face untouched.) The fact of death does not just include the ‘bald’ fact that someone has died. It also includes the disgusting embellishing details of death, details that are quickly glossed over in most discussions of the resurrection of the body. Thus William Miller, writing about death and disgust in the Middle Ages, suggests that death was horrible not because it was an event that ended consciousness, but because it was part of oozing, disgusting, uncontrollable biological process. Death thus horrifies and disgusts not just because it smells bad, but because it is not [italics mine] an end to the process of living…The having lived and the living unite to make up the organic world of generative rot, rank smelling and upsetting to the touch. The gooey mud, the scummy pond are life soup, fecundity itself: slimy, slippery, wiggling teeming animal life.30

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And for good measure, Miller leaves us with a few lines from Spencer’s Faerie Queene: ‘Huge heaps of mudd he leaves, wherein there breed/ten thousand kindes of creatures…such ugly monstrous shapes elsewhere may no man reed.’31 This is disgusting, but I think it is also essential. In (most) movies, where the dead simply fall down or disappear, death itself is not to be feared, only the end of one’s role and possibly one’s contract. The awful truth is, that when we die we do not just disappear, but rather lie around for some period of time, a source of disgust and horror for those around us. We all say, of course, that we would rather die surrounded by friends and family. But behind this wish is usually another, more often unspoken, that we should die in a decent manner, preferably well-dressed, make-up unsmeared, face undistorted by pain or unbroken by violence, still pink and flushed and untainted by anything quite so offensive as blood. A moment’s reflection, however, may make us rethink this scenario, and understand why some people, like elephants, go off by themselves to die. What happens to the body, as well as what happens to the soul, is of considerable fascination and importance to us. Not surprising, some religions (for instance, orthodox Judaism) and many individuals baulk at the idea of ‘using’ the dead body for any purpose whatever, whether it is for the education of future physicians (it is hard not to think of one’s self lying there on the dissecting slab) or the saving of another’s life with a still healthy heart or liver. Our sense of bodily selfhood may end with death, but while we are alive it is projected forward after death. It may be vanity but it is hardly foolish, and it is hard to see how it could be ignored or denied. Talk as we like, filled with bravado, about ‘dust to dust’ or the victory of the worms, the humiliating circumstances that surround being dead are a good reason indeed for being concerned about death, and not dismissing it as nothing. Fortunately or unfortunately, we (in some sense) do not become nothing, but rather quite something, an object of revulsion and disgust, nourishment for another round of nature. The future of the soul, the ethereal self, is but one of many questions about death and the only one that seems to be metaphysically detached from the concerns of life itself. Socrates envisioned his death as an uninterrupted continuation of the one thing he loved to do most,32 and Islamic heaven is much more explicitly depicted than the Christian heaven as a ‘Garden of Delights’, all the pleasures most treasured in life. But, of course, one never knows, however strong one’s faith, what will happen afterwards, to the soul, to the spirit, to one’s mind, to one’s memories, to one’s memory among others. All but the last is no more than metaphysical speculation, devoid of evidence or testimony, despite familiar comments from those who have claimed to have already ‘been there’. But the future of the self or soul can be much more than this, even if, from the grand theological perspective, somewhat less. I began by quoting Aristotle, quoting Solon: ‘call no man happy until after he is dead’. A person’s desires may end with death, but the satisfaction of those desires does not. A couple wish nothing but the best for their children and their grandchildren. When they die, the wishing ends but the wish remains, and may be satisfied or thwarted only years later. A poet wants his poetry appreciated, but dies when he is still unknown and unrecognized. Years later, perhaps even centuries later, he is ‘discovered’, and his wish is fulfilled. There are many meanings of ‘afterlife’ and ‘immortality’, not all of them so separated from life. Socrates points to Homer’s ‘children’ (the Iliad and the Odyssey) in the Symposium, as well as to all children everywhere, as the meaning of immortality. Next to that concrete sense of life’s

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continuation and meaning, Socrates’ esoteric and rather Egyptian view of the immortality of the soul pales by comparison. Even if one does believe in an afterlife, the question of death—and with it the question of life—will not go away. All too often, the promise of the afterlife is used to eclipse the more immediate questions of ethics and attachment, to minimize the importance of relationships and trivialize obligations. Almost always, however, even in the most eschatological thinking, the Socratic question ‘how to live’ sneaks in under the hem of religion, indeed, becomes part of its very fabric (and how could it not be otherwise?). Thus Spinoza tells us, A free man, that is to say, a man who lives according to the dictates of reason alone, is not led by the fear of death, but directly desires the good; that is to say, desires to act, to live, and to preserve his being in accordance with the principle of seeking his own profit. He thinks, therefore, of nothing less than of death, and his wisdom is a meditation upon life.33 In Christianity, the ultimate goal may be entry into heaven, but one’s status as a righteous person, as one of the ‘saved’, remains an independent and all-important issue. Whether Jewish or Christian or Muslim or Hindu, questions of the afterlife are ethically if not ontologically secondary to questions of life. It is no quirk of history that Saint Thomas found his ultimate model for Christian behaviour in the pagan Aristotle, or that the ‘Peripatetic’ Persians saw Islam as first of all a life of ‘submission’ and only afterward in terms of heaven. Thus death refers us not to the afterlife but to life, and life refers us not to but away from death. To live and die is the way things are. To live for death—death fetishism—is a denial of life, which is much more serious than the denial of death.

The social dimension of death The fear of death easily presents itself as a metaphysical or logical perplexity, as a dread of the unknown, as a confrontation with nothingness. The truth, I think, is much less flattering. We worry about the pain of dying, or the pain that precedes dying. We vainly worry about the disposition of our bodies after death. We worry about the people we care for, but then we also worry that they will be fine without our care, indeed, that they will not even remember us without our constant, even if kindly, reminders. The idea that death is nothing, too, may not be so much a matter of metaphysics as an awkward sense of absence. Put in the least flattering way, we might say that my death is a bad thing because it deprives the universe of me. I picture the world, without me, like Sartre’s characters in No Exit. I see them talk about me, laugh about me, pity me. I watch someone date and marry my wife, raise my children, refute my books. Death may be nothing, but it is a nothing that hurts. All of this is not grand metaphysics or ‘fundamental ontology’ but petty selfishness wrapped up in enigma. It is what I call morbid solipsism, an image of death solely in terms of the self. What I have been arguing toward, and what I believe has been neglected in philosophy, is the social dimension of death. To appreciate the importance of this, it is

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not necessary to abandon the first-person posture that is basic to the philosophical question, nor is it in any way to compromise our robust sense of individual life and the personal concern about death. But it is to say that we are, first and foremost, phenomenologically and ontologically as well as biologically, social animals. One’s own death is always, except in the most lonely of cases, a disruption (one hopes, not too minor) of a network of relationships. And even in those lonely cases, one’s death is, in one’s own thinking, a disruption of past or possible relationships, or, at the outer reaches of pathos, a lament that one is, quite unnaturally, dying all alone. What Heidegger marks off as the ‘uniqueness’ of being-towards-death seems to me to be a version of morbid solipsism, a denial of the obvious in favour of an obscure and mock-heroic philosophical theory. And Sartre, too, as much as I agree with him, seems to me to be falling into the same solipsistic trap, talking of ‘my projects’ and juxtaposing my mortality with that of ‘the Other’. When I think of my death, I cannot help but think of what others will see in me, how others will see me, how others will think of and remember me. When I imagine myself at my own funeral, à la Freud, it is the eyes of others I am imagining, not my own, whether or not ‘my perspective’ is, logically and irreducibly, mine and mine alone. When I imagine my body on a slab, or bloodied in the street, or frozen from terminal pain, it is others I imagine thus seeing me, not I. When I worry about how I will die, bravely or badly, it is for others that I am concerned. Of course, it is my reputation, my character, my ego that concerns me, but here, more dramatically than anywhere else, the social nature of the self is in evidence. After all, what difference could it make to me, in that attenuated philosophical sense, whether I exit the hero, the coward or the clown?34 Most societies, of course, would consider this obvious. Their mourning rituals take it for granted. But in our advanced decadent philosophies, such thinking is all but ignored, or explicitly denied. How many philosophers (outside of this volume) have looked at grief and mourning as aspects of death, rather than as mere cultural artefacts that belong rather to the anthropologists? How many philosophers have taken nothing less than the whole narrative of a life as the essential ‘moment’ in death (apart from morbid Silenus, for whom all of life was dying)? (In cartoon wisdom, on the other hand, it has long been a cliché that, as one is dying, the whole of one’s life flashes before one’s—inner—eyes.) In place of the ‘death is nothing’ argument, philosophers should argue that it makes a difference to me whether I live or die not because of the phenomenology of experience but because of the particular phenomenology of social experience.35 I want to live because of other people. I want to live because I love, because I am steeped in my projects—social projects, as Sartre above all would be the first to appreciate. I want to live, perhaps because others need me, but, for most of us, because we care for and about others. I am part of their world as they are part of mine. What I really care about are the people I leave behind, in part for the sake of myself, my pride, my vanity. How will my death affect them? This is not altruism. It is also selfinterest, vanity, pride, shame, and the fear of loss of control (the real horror of No Exit). Death is what individuates us only in so far as it targets the vulnerability of intimate and significant relationships. In itself, death is nothing and dying nothing worth celebrating. If dying is a test, a challenge, an occasion for bravery, it is so only in the category of ‘being-for/with-others’, not ‘Being-for-Itself’ or ‘being-towards-death’. Death is not nothing, but it surely can be made into something. A noble death, a death not just ‘one’s

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own’ but with others in mind, for the sake of others, an ‘inauthentic’ death such as the Homeric heroes might have contemplated. That is the way our philosophies should once again take us—away from morbid solipsism, away from death fetishism, away from nothingness.

NOTES 1 DEATH AND PHILOSOPHY: INTRODUCTION 1 Shakespeare, Macbeth, Act V, Scene v, ll. 26–8. 2 Dylan Thomas, ‘Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night’, in The New Oxford Book of English Verse, 1250–1950, ed. Helen Gardner, New York, Oxford University Press, 1972, p. 942.

2 MY DEATH 1 Tolstoy, The Death of Ivan Ilych and Other Stories, trans. Louise and Aylmer Maude, London, Oxford University Press, 1971 (orig. pub. 1886), p. 63. 2 Tolstoy, ibid., p. 73. 3 Sartre, ‘The Wall’ in The Wall and Other Stories, trans. Lloyd Alexander, New York, New Directions, 1969, p. 11. 4 Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus, trans. Justin O’Brien, Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1975, p. 109.

3 AGAINST DEATH 1 I would like to thank Mathieu Carrière, Jeff Malpas and Ivan Soll for help in translation and correction. 2 Elias Canetti, The Secret Heart of the Clock: Notes, Aphorisms, Fragments 1973–1985, trans. J.Agee, New York, Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1989, p. 131. 3 Canetti, The Human Province, trans. J.Neugroschel, New York, Seabury Press, 1978, p. vi. 4 On the problem of death in Canetti’s work, see W.Hädecke, ‘Die moralische Quadratur des Zirkels. Das Todesproblem im Werk Elias Canettis’, in Text+Kritik 28, 1982, pp. 27–32; E.Piel, Elias Canetti, München, Beck, 1984, pp. 89–133; H.Orlowski, ‘Öffentlichkeit und persönliche Lebenserfahrung bei Elias Canetti’, in Elias Canettis Anthropologie und Poetik, ed. S.H.Kaszynski, Poznan, Universitätsverlag, 1984, pp. 35–46; F.Eigler, Das autobiographische Werk von Elias Canetti, Tübingen, Stauffenburg, 1988, pp. 51 ff. 5 Although it is clear that the Holocaust became central to his obsession with death, as is indicated in Crowds and Power, trans. Carol Stewart, New York, Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1984 (originally published in 1960 as Masse und Macht) or in the play The Numbered (originally Die Befristeten written in 1956, eng. trans., London, Martin Boyars, 1984, also published under the title ‘Life-terms’ in Comedy of Vanity and Life-terms, New York, Performing Arts Journal Publications, 1983), death was a preoccupation for Canetti even in his 1936 article on Hermann Broch (in Canetti, The Conscience of Words, trans. J.Neugroschel, London, Andre Deutsch, 1986, pp. 1–13). But also see the entries from the year 1945 in The Human Province, op. cit., for example p. 68: ‘Anything you may ever have thought of death is no longer valid. With an enormous leap, he has achieved a power of contagion such as never before. Now he is really omnipotent, now he is truly God.’ 6 See Die Aufzeichnungen des Malte Laurids Brigge, the so-called ‘Tagebuchroman’, pub. 1910, in Rainer Maria Rilke, Werke, vol. III, Frankfurt am Main, Insel, 1986, pp. 113–15. 7 Canetti, The Human Province, op. cit., pp. 127 ff. 8 Canetti, The Agony of Flies: Notes and Notations, New York, Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1994, pp. 80–1. 9 Canetti, The Secret Heart of the Clock, op. cit., pp. 141–2.

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10 Canetti, The Human Province, op. cit., p. 138 (translation amended). 11 Canetti, ‘Confucius in his Conversations’, in Canetti, The Conscience of Words, op. cit., pp. 94 ff. 12 Ibid., p. 95. 13 The Human Province, op. cit., p. 271: ‘The philosophers who would like to give death to one, as though it were always one’s own, as though it were inside one from the very start. They cannot endure seeing it only at the end, they prefer prolonging it back to the beginning…They prevent the one struggle worth waging. They declare surrender to be wisdom. They talk everyone into their own cowardice’ (translation amended). In The Agony of Flies, Canetti’s antagonism toward philosophers becomes very clear: ‘A pack of philosophers spells death for the poet’ (op. cit., p. 37). Of course, Canetti also rejects psychological explanations: ‘These people who, with a smile, make use of a death drive in defense of death. What else are they saying than that the resistance against him is too small in any event?’ (The Human Province, op. cit., p. 249). 14 Canetti, The Secret Heart of the Clock, op. cit., pp. 3 f. 15 Canetti, The Human Province, op. cit., p. 138. 16 Canetti, The Secret Heart of the Clock, op. cit., p. 22: ‘No death has yet taken from me my hatred, wherever I have truly hated. Perhaps that, too, is a form of nonrecognition of death.’ 17 Canetti, Crowds and Power, op. cit., p. 227; see Tolstoy, The Death of Ivan Ilych, trans. Louise and Aylmer Maude, London, Oxford University Press, 1971, p. 2: ‘Well, he’s dead, but I’m alive!’ 18 Canetti, Crowds and Power, op. cit., p. 227. 19 Canetti, The Secret Heart of the Clock, op. cit., p. 22: ‘There is no honor in death accepted’ (‘Der hingenommene Tod hat keine Ehre’); The Human Province, op. cit., p. 233: ‘We would still have to see what kind of faith arises in the man who sees and acknowledges the enormity of death and denies it any positive meaning. The incorruptibility premised by such an attitude towards death has never existed: man is too weak and gives up the struggle before he even resolves to begin it.’ 20 Canetti, The Agony of Flies, op. cit., p. 103. 21 Canetti, The Agony of Flies, op. cit., p. 81: ‘All the dying up to the present was nothing but judicial murder, carried out thousands and thousands of times and for which I cannot find any legalization.’ 22 Canetti, The Secret Heart of the Clock, op. cit., p. 120. 23 Canetti, ibid., p. 66 (translation amended); in the German: ‘Es geht mir nicht um seine Abschaffung, die nicht möglich sein soll. Es geht mir um die Ächtung des Todes.’ 24 Canetti, ‘The Writer’s Profession’, speech given in Munich in January 1976, in Canetti, The Conscience of Words, op. cit., p. 166. 25 The Secret Heart of the Clock, op. cit., p. 90.

4 ON THE PURPORTED INSIGNIFICANCE OF DEATH 1 In this essay, the reflections upon mortality considered, my own and those of others, all take the notion of human mortality in its fullest sense, as the idea that death really ends our lives and does not usher in any continuation of life after death. This is an investigation of the significance that such a definitive death would have for our lives. One can pursue this question without having first to confirm the widely shared suspicion and fear that death is the definitive end of life. 2 See: Leo Tolstoy, ‘The Death of Ivan Ilyich’ in The Death of Ivan Ilych and Other Stories, trans. Louise and Aylmer Maude, London, Oxford University Press, 1971; Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. J.Macquarrie and E.Robinson, Oxford, Blackwell, 1973, Part One,

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Division Two, ‘Dasein’s Possibility of Being-a-Whole, and Being-towards-Death’, §§46–53; Jean-Paul Sartre, ‘The Wall’ in The Wall and Other Stories, trans. Lloyd Alexander, New York, New Directions, 1969; Albert Camus, The Stranger, trans. Stuart Gilbert, New York, Vintage, 1954 and The Myth of Sisyphus, trans. Justin O’Brien, Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1975; Ernest Becker, The Denial of Death, New York, Free Press, 1973. In the classical world, Epicurus and his followers propounded hedonistic and hedonistically eudaemonistic views in an emphatic and tenacious manner, but elements of hedonism and hedonistic eudaemonism are implicitly present in the work of many others in both classical and modern times, even among the major rivals of the Epicurean school, the Stoics. Psychological hedonism in one form or another, the notion that what we ultimately desire is pleasure and the avoidance of pain, has arguably been the dominant conception in our culture of what are the ultimate aims of human action and sources of value. A particularly clear, concise, and complete expression of hedonistic eudaemonism in modern times is to be found in John Stuart Mill’s Utilitarianism: ‘The creed which accepts as the foundation of morals “utility” or “the greatest happiness principle” holds that actions are right in proportion as they tend to promote happiness. By happiness is intended pleasure and the absence of pain; by unhappiness, pain and the privation of pleasure…Pleasure and freedom from pain are the only things desirable as ends; and…all desirable things…are desirable either for the pleasure inherent in themselves or as means to the promotion of pleasure and pain.’ (‘What Utilitarianism Is’, in Utilitarianism, New York, Library of Liberal Arts Press, 1957, p. 10. Hegel, (in The Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. J.N.Finlay and A.V.Miller, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1977) argues that both individual action and the development of human culture throughout history, which he somewhat personifies as a ‘world spirit’, is ultimately motivated by a drive for ‘self-consciousness’, which turns out to be a drive for an autonomy that shuns all dependence upon external objects. The subject adopts a series of ‘forms of consciousness’, which include forms of acting in the world. The conscious subject or agent repeatedly tries to achieve truer or higher forms of autonomy or self-consciousness by appropriating its objects, or becoming its own object. Sartre (in Being and Nothingness, trans. Hazel E.Barnes, New York: Washington Square Press, 1966) argues in a similar fashion that ‘the basic project’ of human beings, which fundamentally motivates all of their behaviour, is to become an ‘in-itself-foritself’, a subject which is its own exclusive object and thus a ‘causa en sui’,—something which is the cause of itself. Viktor Frankl maintains that a will to meaning is a primary human drive (in Man’s Search for Meaning, New York, Washington Square Press, 1984), while Karen Horney has posited a basic drive to self-realization (in Neurosis and Human Growth: the Struggle toward, Self-realization, London, Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1952). Classical and modern hedonism and hedonistic eudaemonism are clearly experiential theories. Aristotle’s eudaemonia, though standardly translated as ‘happiness’, seems in some passages to refer to a state of well-being rather than something constituted by experiences. In the Nichomachean Ethics, for instance, he suggests that the fortunes of one’s descendants, after one’s death, have some effect upon one’s eudaemonia (I.10:1100a). This suggests that eudaemonia is for Aristotle not a purely experiential concept. The fact that these considerations have prompted some commentators to recommend translating eudaemonia as ‘flourishing’ or ‘well-being’ rather than ‘happiness’, is evidence that our notion of happiness is an experiential one. In this essay I am using ‘eudaemonism’ to refer to a theory that posits happiness as our ultimate motivation and value, and is thus an experiential theory. It is not my present concern to determine whether Aristotle’s eudaemonism is either experiential or non-experiential, or whether it is either a brilliant synthesis or a garbled confusion of the two kinds of the theory. One could, of course, be happy (or unhappy) without reflecting upon it. One might, only upon taking stock of one’s life, come to realize how happy or unhappy one has been. But the possibility of one’s not reflecting upon one’s own happiness, or one’s fear or weariness, does

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not make any of these states any the less a matter of the quality of one’s experience. Being happy, like being frightened or weary, is a function of one’s experience, even though it does not consist nor depend upon the realization that one is happy, scared or weary. This terminology is preferable to that of ‘subjective’ and ‘objective’ theories, because of the inherent ambiguities of these latter terms. Whether any of one’s own experiences is more pleasurable or painful than another, is a subjective matter in that it pertains to a particular subject. Yet it is also an objective matter in that a person may be mistaken in comparing his own experiences, for instance, because of bad memory or simply by mis-speaking. Much of psychology is constituted by hypotheses that are both subjective and objective in this way. Just because a judgement pertains to an experiencing subject, it is not for that reason alone necessarily subjective in the sense of not being amenable to any procedures of scrutiny and correction. My terminology avoids the ambiguities and potential confusions involved in the notion of a ‘subjective theory of motivation’. Although the central meaning of ‘enjoying’ (or ‘suffering’) some state of affairs in the world refers to experiencing that state in a certain way, there is what I take to be an extended use of the term that does not refer to experience. In this extended sense, someone may ‘enjoy’ a good reputation (or ‘suffer’ calumny), but not become aware of it. I am using the notions of enjoying or suffering in their experiential sense. Freud advanced the idea that the original desire of human beings was for the experience of gratification, which they initially seek through fantasy: the baby fantasizes the mother’s breast rather than trying to find the real one. It is forced to deal with the real situation only because the phantasy cannot be maintained. This line of thinking places Freud squarely in the experiential camp. See Interpretation of Dreams, trans. James Strachey, Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1976 (VII, C: ‘Wish Fulfilment’), pp. 720–1, where he discusses ‘hallucinatory fulfilment’. Nietzsche (in Beyond Good and Evil, trans. Walter Kaufmann, New York, Random House, 1966, §230) speaking of ‘the basic will of the spirit’, begins by saying generally that it ‘wants to be master in and around its own house and wants to feel it is master’. But then continues, ‘Its intent in all of this is to incorporate new “experi-ences” to file new things in old files—growth in a word—or, more precisely, the feeling of growth, the feeling of increased power.’ The possibility of possessing power (i.e. any capacity) without being aware of it (or exercising it) is attested to by the meaningfulness of the common expressions, ‘I didn’t know my own strength,’ or ‘She did not realize how talented (attractive or influential) she was.’ Lucretius, de rerum Natura, III: 830. The Epicurean view, that death does not matter at all, makes sense only if it is restricted to the person who dies. It is perfectly consistent with the experiential premises of this argument that the death of someone else matter to me, or my death matter to someone else. The death of anyone clearly may have experiential consequences for those who survive him. But this implicit restriction of the discussion is not unique to the Epicurean position on death. Most discussions of death, particularly those defending the opposed view that it is the greatest calamity, focus exclusively upon the significance of one’s own death for oneself. But even accepting this common restriction, a further problem arises. Since my death has consequences for the experience of others, including those whose well-being is of concern to me, how can my death not be of concern to me? To defend against this objection, an egocentric corollary to experientialism is needed: that the only thing good or bad for me is the quality of my experience. It would entail locating any goodness or badness that accrues to one through the good and bad fortune of others solely in one’s own experience of others, and not in their experience per se. Thomas Nagel, ‘Death’, in Mortal Questions, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1979, p. 4.

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15 Ibid., p. 5. 16 In presenting us with a somewhat obscure and insufficiently analysed, purportedly exclusive alternative, Nagel’s argument is reminiscent of the notoriously perplexing argument in Plato’s Euthyphro, which asks us to decide whether something is in a state of being carried, seen or led because it is carried, seen, or led, or it is carried, seen or led, because it is in the appropriate state (Plato, Euthyphro, XII). 17 It was the awareness, however obscurely sensed and expressed, that such non-causal ‘because’ relations had been often misconceived and treated as causal (and thus asymmetrical) relations between two, distinct events, that motivated Hegel and others to stress the importance of the notion of Wechselwirkung (a reciprocal causality) between two entities. One should not, however, think of this sort of reciprocal causality as the sole alternative to normal, nonreciprocal causality. Often, when one thing is the case because of another, neither a relation of asymmetrical causality between two distinct elements nor of symmetrical reciprocal causality is involved, but rather some sort of identity, as in those cases that involve logical implication. 18 If he was legitimately concerned about his posthumous reputation, it turned out well for him. If what happens in the world after my death is something, and not simply nothing, to me, it may be something good. 19 In Plato’s Crito, VIII. 20 Thomas Nagel concludes his essay: ‘If there is no limit to the life it is good to have, then a bad end is in store for us all’ (Nagel, op. cit., p. 10). But if Socrates is right, some sorts of life may not be good to have, and thus a bad end is not in store for us all. Nagel does not really address the Socratic argument. There are even bleaker views of life, that suggest that death, rather than being the deprivation of a good, is the escape from a condition that is inevitably bad. For example, that view epitomized by the legendarily wise satyr, Silenus, responding to King Midas, who asked him what is most desirable for human beings: ‘What is best of all is utterly beyond your reach: not to be born, not to be, to be nothing. But the second best for you is—to die soon’ (Sophocles, Oedipus at Colonus, ll.1224 ff.; the passage is cited with approval by Nietzsche, in The Birth of Tragedy—see The Birth of Tragedy, trans. Walter Kaufmann, New York, Random House, 1967, §3. The logic of Nagel’s conditional conclusion is unassailable, but the truth of the condition upon which it rests is open to attack, and he does nothing to defend it. 21 Nagel, op. cit., p. 5. 22 Ibid. 23 Ibid., p. 6. 24 Ibid., p. 5. 25 Ibid. 26 Once we realize that a ‘deceased person’ is not a person existing in a special state, but a person who does not exist any longer, we see how the notion of a deceased or dead person is potentially misleading. Similarly, once we realize that the ‘state of death’ is not really in a state of the person in question, we see how that notion is also potentially misleading.

5 DEATH AND THE SKELETON 1 Friedrich Nietzsche, Ecce Homo, trans. Walter Kaufmann (together with On the Genealogy of Morals, trans. Walter Kaufmann and R.J.Hollingdale), New York, Random House, 1967, p. 221. 2 Hayden White, ‘The Historical Text as Literary Artifact’, in Tropics of Discourse, Baltimore, Johns Hopkins University, 1978, p. 90. 3 Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory, Notre Dame, Indiana, University of Notre Dame Press, 1981, p. 201.

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4 Dylan Thomas, ‘Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night’, in The New Oxford Book of English Verse, 1250–1950, ed. Helen Gardner, New York, Oxford University Press, 1972, p. 942. 5 Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, trans. David Ross, London, Oxford University Press, 1954, 1100a35. 6 K.Koffka, Principles of Gestalt Psychology, New York, Harcourt Brace & Company, 1935, p. 175. See also Leonard B.Meyer, On Emotion and Meaning in Music, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1956. Meyer uses principles of Gestalt psychology to explain why we have predictable expectations for continuation in the case of music. 7 Octavio Paz, ‘Use and Contemplation’, in Philip Alperson (ed.), The Philosophy of the Visual Arts, New York, Oxford University Press, 1992, p. 408; previously published in Octavio Paz, In Praise of Hands: Contemporary Crafts of the World, trans. Helen R.Lane, New York, World Crafts Council, 1974, pp. 17–24. 8 Leon Rosenstein, ‘The Aesthetic of the Antique’, in Philip Alperson (ed.), The Philosophy of the Visual Arts, p. 398; originally published in The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 45, 1987, pp. 393–402. 9 Karen Hanson, ‘Dressing Down Dressing Up: The Philosophic Fear of Fashion’, Hypatia 5 (Special Issue: Feminism and Aesthetics, ed. Hilde Hein and Carolyn Korsmeyer), 1990, pp. 114–15. 10 Alice Miller, ‘Käthe Kollwitz: A Mother’s Dead Little Angels and Her Daughter’s Activist Art’, The Untouched Key: Tracing Childhood Trauma in Creativity and Destructiveness, trans. Hildegarde and Hunter Hannum, New York, Doubleday, 1990, p. 28. 11 I would like to thank Paul Teller of the University of California, Davis, for his colloquy presented at the University of Texas at Austin in the spring of 1994. This paper dealt explicitly with the oddity of the notion that one’s personal identity continues beyond death in an afterlife. 12 Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson, New York, Harper & Row, 1962, H261. 13 Ibid., H266. 14 If this sounds reminiscent of Nietzsche’s theory of eternal recurrence, this is no accident. For further discussion of this theory in connection with the effort to see the whole in each moment, see Kathleen Marie Higgins, Nietzsche’s Zarathustra, Philadelphia, Temple University Press, 1987, pp. 159–201.

6 DEATH: THE BALD SCENARIO 1 Portions of the last section of this essay were adapted from my monograph, ‘The Economic Myth’, published by the Center for International Business Education and Research, Graduate School of Business, University of Texas at Austin, 1996. 2 Raymond Moody, Life After Life, New York, Bantam, 1976, pp. 67–8. 3 Stevens, ‘Adagia’, Opus Posthumous, New York, Knopf, 1975, p. 163. 4 Stevens, ‘Sunday Morning’, The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens, New York, Knopf, 1968, pp. 66–70. 5 James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, New York, Viking, 1956, p. 148.

7 DEATH AS TRANSFORMATION IN CLASSICAL DAOISM The translations of the classical texts are by the author; other published translations have sometimes been referenced for the sake of comparison. The references to Zhuangzi are to the Chuang Tzu: Harvard-Yenjing Insitute Sinological Index Series, Supplement 20, Peking, 1947. 1 In fairness to Plato, it is necessary to distinguish between the ‘received’ Plato as metaphysician

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and abstract formist, a product of Christianization and twentieth-century scientism, and the much more interesting Plato as mythologer, playwright, artist that is being rehabilitated in our present moment. R.J.Hollingdale (trans.), The Nietzsche Reader, London, Penquin, 1977, pp. 202–3. See the essay by Graham Parkes in this same volume for a discussion of Nietzsche’s attitude toward death. Again, see the examples of Japanese philosophers referenced by Parkes, and their affinity with early Daoism. Zhuangzi 17/6/46; cf. A.C.Graham (trans.), Chuang-tzu: The Inner Chapters, London, George Allen & Unwin, 1981, p. 87 (hereafter Graham, Chuang-tzu). Zhuangzi 5/2/40 and commentary on it in 63/23/58; cf. Graham, Chuang-tzu, pp. 54 and 104 respectively. See A.C.Graham, Disputers of the Tao: Philosophical Argument in Ancient China, La Salle, Ill., Open Court, 1989, pp. 202–4. He observes ‘Nothing in his unusual sensibility is more striking than the lyrical, ecstatic tone in which he writes of death.’ See also A.C.Graham, Chuang-tzu, pp. 23–4 and his Studies in Chinese Philosophy and Philosophical Literature, Albany, State University of New York Press, 1990, pp. 295–6, and Fukunaga Mitsuji, Sōshi, Tokyo, Asashi Shinbun Chugoku kotensen series, 1966, commentary on chapter 6. Zhuangzi 55/21/19; cf. Graham, Chuang-tzu p. 168. David Keightley, ‘Early Civilization in China: Reflections on How it Became Chinese’, in Paul S.Ropp (ed.), Heritage of China: Contemporary Perspectives on Chinese Civilization, Berkeley, University of California Press, 1990, p. 33. A.C.Graham, Disputers of the Tao, p. 203, makes this same point. Zhuangzi’s discussion of confronting death ‘is quite without the morbidity of the stress on corruptibility in the lateMedieval art of Europe, which reminds of the horrors of mortality for the good of our souls’. Analects 11/12. Keightley, ‘Early Civilization’, p. 33. Ibid., p. 34. Kang Yunmei, Zhongguo gudai siwanguan zhi tanjiu (An Exploration of the Ancient Chinese View of Death), Taibei, National Taiwan University History and Chinese Literature Series No. 85, 1994, chapter 2. Mu-chou Poo, ‘Immortality, Soul, and the Netherworld’, in In Search of Personal Welfare: A View of Ancient Chinese Religion, Albany, State University of New York Press, 1997, chapter 7; and Michael Loewe, ‘Services to the dead’, in Chinese Ideas of Life and Death: Faith, Myth and Reason in the Han Period (202 BC—AD 220), London, George Allen & Unwin, 1982, chapter 11. Mu-chou Poo, Personal Welfare, pp. 214–15. Ibid., pp. 172–9. See Robert G.Henricks (trans.), Lao-tzu: Tao-te Ching, New York, Ballentine, 1989, p. 274 n. 162. Zhuangzi 6/2/78; cf. Graham, Chuang-tzu, p. 59. Zhuangzi 34/13/14; cf. Graham, Chuang-tzu, p. 260. Zhuangzi 17/6/53; cf. Graham, Chuang-tzu, p. 88. Zhuangzi 17/6/47; cf. Graham, Chuang-tzu, p. 88. Kang Yunmei, Zhongguo gudai siwangguan zhi tanjiu, pp. 21–2. Zhuangzi 47/18/40; cf. Graham, Chuang-tzu, p. 184. Zhuangzi 46/18/15; cf. Graham, Chuang-tzu, pp. 123–4. Zhuangzi 66/24/48; cf. Graham, Chuang-tzu, p. 124.

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27 Zhuangzi 46/18/22; cf. Graham, Chuang-tzu, pp. 124–5. 28 Zhuangzi 90/32/47; cf. Graham, Chuang-tzu, p. 125.

8 DEATH AND ENLIGHTENMENT 1 This essay is dedicated to Kylie Duncan. An earlier version has appeared in Philosophy EastWest. 2 Although the English translation of the Bardo Thödol (The Great Liberation Through Hearing in the Bardo) has been entitled The Tibetan Book of the Dead, it is not quite a book ‘of’ the dead, but rather a book ‘for’ the dead. Since the latter is more aptly descriptive, I will refer to the Bardo Thödol as The Tibetan Book for the Dead throughout this essay. 3 In Robert Thurman’s translation of the text, the bardo is simply referred to as ‘the between’. See Robert A.F.Thurman (trans.), The Tibetan Book of the Dead, London, The Aquarian Press, 1994. 4 For example, both desire and hatred betray a deep attachment to objects. By eliminating this bondage to objects, the person is freed from compulsions and aggressions. 5 Francesca Fremantle & Chögyam Trungpa (trans.), The Tibetan Book of the Dead, Boston, Shambhala, 1987, p. 64. Since The Tibetan Book for the Dead is meant to be read aloud, a more authentic experience is provided by the audio version of this translation: The Tibetan Book of the Dead: The Great Liberation Through Hearing in the Bardo, read by Richard Gere, Boston, Shambhala Lion Editions, 1990. 6 Francesca Fremantle & Chögyam Trungpa (trans.), The Tibetan Book of the Dead, op. cit., p. 68. 7 The analogy between the experience of the visionary deities and the experience of ordinary life is obvious, since both are regarded within Tibetan Buddhism as having no more substance than a dream. Just as the reality of the visionary deities issues as an effect of consciousness’s own activity, so does the reality of ordinary life. 8 W.Y.Evans-Wentz (ed.), The Tibetan Book of the Dead, 3rd edn., Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1960, p. 91. 9 Francesca Fremantle & Chögyam Trungpa (trans.), The Tibetan Book of the Dead, op. cit., p. 35. 10 Robert A.F.Thurman (trans.), The Tibetan Book of the Dead, op. cit., p. 122. 11 Lama Kazi Dawa-Samdup approaches this view. See W.Y.Evans-Wentz (ed.), The Tibetan Book of the Dead, op. cit., pp. 33–4. 12 Chandradhar Sharma, A Critical Survey of Indian Philosophy, Delhi, Motilal Banarsidass, 1964, p. 70. 13 In his introduction to The Tibetan Book of the Dead, Chögyam Trungpa, himself a respected representative of Tibetan thought, mentions that ‘one never knows’ whether or not the meditative experiences which indicate the existence of after-death states are indeed veridical. See, Francesca Fremantle and Chögyam Trungpa (trans.), The Tibetan Book of the Dead, op. cit., p. 12. 14 Jung’s psychological commentary first accompanied the 1938 Swiss edition (Das Tibetanishe Totenbuch, Zurich, Rascher Verlag, 1938) and later, the 1957 English edition. 15 We should note, however, that this progression from finite humans to an infinite God is an abstracted segment of a larger pattern. The Old Testament initially describes a perfect condition (Adam and Eve before the Fall) which degenerates into a more painful condition (Adam and Eve after the Fall). The fuller conception thus involves an initial descent/departure from a divine condition, and a subsequent ascent/return to this condition. In this respect, the sequence of psychological states described in The Tibetan Book for the Dead is not as foreign to Western sensibilities as it might as first appear, since it compares to the biblical episode of the Fall.

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16 Lama Anagarika Govinda, ‘Introductory Foreword’ in W.Y.Evans-Wentz (ed.), The Tibetan Book of the Dead, op. cit., p. lxi. 17 Lama Anagarika Govinda, Foundations of Tibetan Mysticism, New York, Samuel Weiser, 1974, p. 123. 18 This aristocratic conception of ‘secret’ is described in Alexandra David-Neel, The Secret Oral Teachings in Tibetan Buddhist Sects, San Francisco, City Lights Books, 1967, p. 3. 19 Lama Govinda comprehensively described these various realms of inner experience in Creative Meditation and Multi-Dimensional Consciousness, Wheaton, Illinois, The Theosophical Publishing House, 1976. 20 See the excerpt cited in note 4 above. 21 Francesca Fremantle and Chögyam Trungpa (trans.), The Tibetan Book of the Dead, op. cit., p. 57.

9 DEATH AND DETACHMENT 1 Montaigne, Essays, 1:20. All references to Montaigne will be made by book and chapter numbers, using the translation by Donald Frame in The Complete Essays of Montaigne, Stanford, Stanford University Press, 1958. Montaigne’s ideas about time and death are illuminatingly discussed, in the context of a masterful exposition of his philosophy in general, by Jean Starobinski in his Montaigne in Motion, trans. Arthur Goldhammer, Chicago, Chicago University Press, 1985. 2 A graphic, though quite secular, example of this is to be found in Akira Kurosawa’s magnificent film Ikiru (Living). 3 Daodejing, chapter 75—available in numerous editions, but see the translation by Robert G.Henricks, Lao-tzu: Tao-te Ching, New York, Ballantine, 1989. 4 Zhuangzi, chapters 2, 5, 6—see the translation by A.C.Graham, Chuang-tz: The Inner Chapters, London, George Allen & Unwin, 1981. For more on the Daoist understanding of death, see Roger Ames, ‘Death as Transformation in Classical Daoism’, this volume. 5 Fragment 93 in Charles H.Kahn, The Art and Thought of Heraclitus, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1979. In the same text, see also fragments 79 (Diels 48), 89 (D21), 92 (D62), 102 (D36) especially, as well as Kahn’s helpful commentaries. 6 Dōgen Kigen, Shōbōgenzō, ‘Shukke-kudoku’ (Merits of monkhood) fascicle; as translated by Hin-Jee Kim in his Dōgen Kigen—Mystical Realist, Tucson, University of Arizona Press, 1975, p. 198. 7 Dōgen, Shōbōgenzō, ‘Shoaku-makusa’ (Not to commit evil), cited in Kim, ibid., p. 214. 8 Dōgen, Shōbōgenzō, ‘Yuibutsu-yobutsu’ (Only between Buddha and Buddha), and ‘Shinjingakudō’ (Understanding the Way through body-mind), both cited in Kim, ibid., p. 226. 9 Suzuki Shōsan, Warrior of Zen, edited and translated by Arthur Braverman, New York, Kodansha International, 1994, pp. 30–1. This is a selection from Roankyō (Donkey-saddle bridge), a compilation of Shōsan’s talks and stories about him by his disciple Echū. 10 Montaigne, op. cit., 1:20. 11 Nietzsche, The Gay Science, §152. All translations from Nietzsche are my own and are based upon the texts in the Sämtliche Werke, Kritische Studienausgabe, Munich, De Gruyter, 1980. 12 The Gay Science, §125. 13 Ibid., §109. 14 Nietzsche, Nachgelassene. Fragmente 1880–1882, Sämtliche Werke, op. cit., vol. IX, §11:70 (1881). The image of the festival appears in another passage from the same notebook: ‘To be released from life and become dead nature again can be experienced as a festival—of the one who wants to die. To love nature! Again to revere what is dead! The dead is not the opposite

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but rather the womb, the rule that has more meaning than the exception…’ (§11:125). 15 Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson, New York, Harper & Row, 1962,. H316 (emphasis in original). This existential maxim of Heidegger’s is parallel to the ontological question he poses in ‘What Is Metaphysics?’: ‘Why is there anything at all, and not rather nothing?’ (‘Was ist Metaphysik?’, Gesamtausgabe, vol. IX, Wegmarken, Frankfurt am Main, Vittorio Klostermann, 1976, p. 122). 16 Letter of 6 January 1923, in Rainer Maria Rilke, Briefe, Wiesbaden, Insel-Verlag, 1950, pp. 806–7; Heidegger quotes the first sentence only in ‘Wozu Dichter?’ Gesamtausgabe vol. V, Holzwege, Frankfurt am Main, Vittorio Klostermann, 1977, p. 278 (‘What Are Poets For?’ in Poetry, Language, Thought, trans. Albert Hofstadter, New York, Harper & Row, 1971, p. 124). 17 Nishitani Keiji, Religion and Nothingness, trans. Jan Van Bragt, Berkeley, University of California Press, 1982; see the references to ‘near side’ in the index. 18 Nishitani, ibid., pp. 50 and 52. 19 Dōgen, Fukan-zazengi (General advice on the principles of zazen), cited in Kim, op. cit., p. 72. 20 Nietzsche, The Wanderer and his Shadow, §8. 21 Suzuki Shōsan, Warrior of Zen, op. cit., p. 50. 22 Heidegger, Being and Time, op. cit., H186. 23 See David Krell’s discussion of Korschelt’s work, in his Daimon Life: Heidegger and LifePhilosophy, Bloomington, Indiana University Press, 1992, pp. 91–3. 24 Nietzsche, The Gay Science, §278. 25 Ibid. 26 Nishitani, op. cit., p. 51. 27 Nishitani, ibid.; the quoted lines are from T.S.Eliot, The Wasteland, ll. 60–2. 28 Nietzsche, The Gay Science, §278. 29 Ibid. 30 Walter Kaufmann, in a note to his translation of this aphorism, misses the irony, since he asks the reader to note ‘the contrast with existentialism’ (The Gay Science, trans. Walter Kaufmann, New York, Vintage Books, 1974, p. 225). This idea of Nietzsche’s seems perfectly congruent with Heidegger’s ‘existential conception’ of death, at least. 31 Nietzsche, The Wanderer and his Shadow, §322. 32 Georg Simmel, ‘Tod und Unsterblichkeit’ (‘Death and immortality’), in Lebensanschauung: Vier metaphysische Kapitel, Munich, Dunker & Humblot , 1918, pp. 99–153, and pp. 100–1. Parts of this essay are cited and discussed by David Krell in the second chapter of Daimon Life, a rich source for thinking about Heidegger on the topic of death. 33 Heidegger, Being and Time, op. cit., H249. Heidegger’s ideas about death may also have been influenced by his conversations with the Japanese philosophers who visited and worked with him during the Twenties: see my essay ‘Rising Sun over Black Forest: Heidegger’s Japanese Connections’, in Reinhard May, Heidegger’s Hidden Sources: East-Asian Influences on His Work, trans. Graham Parkes, London, Routledge, 1996, especially the section ‘Tanabe Hajime and a Philosophy of Death’. 34 Simmel, op. cit., p. 102. 35 Ibid., p. 107. 36 Ibid., pp. 144–5. 37 Heidegger, Being and Time, op. cit., H374. 38 Ibid., H248, H259. 39 Nishitani, op. cit., pp. 3–4. 40 The Wanderer and his Shadow, §307. 41 Nietzsche, Zarathustra, §2.2 (‘On the Blessed Isles’).

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42 Montaigne, op. cit., 1:20. 43 Ibid., 3:13. 44 Starobinski, op. cit., p. 242. The whole section entitled ‘The Masterpiece of Living’ is a superb exposition of Montaigne’s attitudes toward death and life. 45 Dōgen, Shōbōgenzō, ‘Shōji’ (Birth-Death), in Kim, op. cit. 46 The Zen Master Hakuin: Selected Writings, trans. Philip B.Yampolsky, New York, Columbia University Press, 1971, p. 135. 47 Heidegger, ‘Was ist Metaphysik?’, op. cit., pp. 114–15. 48 Heidegger, ‘Nachwort zu: “Was Ist Metaphysik?”, (1943)’, in Wegmarken, op. cit., p. 103. 49 The Zen Master Hakuin, op. cit., p. 133. 50 Ibid., p. 219. 51 Suzuki Shōsan, op. cit., p. 61. 52 Nishitani, op. cit., p. 128. 53 Suzuki Shōsan, op. cit., p. 59. 54 Ibid., p. 61. 55 Heidegger, Being and Time, op. cit., H40. 56 Suzuki Shōsan, op. cit., p. 75. 57 Montaigne, op. cit., 1:20. 58 Being and Time, op. cit., H310. 59 Ibid., H384. 60 Nishitani, op. cit., p. 181. 61 Montaigne, op. cit., 1:38. 62 Nietzsche, On the Advantage and Disadvantage of History for Life, §1. 63 Nietzsche, Gay Science, §341. 64 Nietzsche, letter to Heinrich Köselitz of 14 August 1881. 65 Nietzsche, Nachgelassene. Fragmente, op. cit. §11 [141]. 66 Nietzsche, The Gay Science, §341. 67 Nietzsche, Nachgelassene. Fragmente, op. cit., §11 [148]. 68 Ibid., §11 [150]. 69 Ibid., §11 [156]. 70 Nishitani, op. cit., p. 230 and p. 159. The best source on Nietzsche’s acquaintance with Buddhism is Freny Mistry, Nietzsche and Buddhism, New York, Walter de Gruyter, 1981. See also my essay ‘Nietzsche and East Asian Thought: Influences, Impacts, and Resonances’, in Bernd Magnus and Kathleen M.Higgins (eds), The Cambridge Companion to Nietzsche, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1996, pp. 356–83. 71 Nietzsche, Nachgelassene. Fragmente, op. cit., §11 [207]. 72 Montaigne, op. cit., 1:20. 73 Nietzsche, Nachgelassene. Fragmente, op. cit., §11[210]. 74 Ibid., §11 [228]. 75 Being and Time, H264, H302.

10 DEATH AND METAPHYSICS 1 Being and Time, trans. J.Macquarrie and E.Robinson, Oxford, Blackwell, 1973, H250–1. Numerals prefixed by ‘H’ refer to the pagination of the seventh German edition given in the margins of this translation. 2 For a more detailed discussion of the role of death in making possible Dasein’s authentic

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existence see Julian Young, ‘Death and Authenticity’, this volume. 3 Being and Time, op. cit., H308. 4 ‘What is Metaphysics?’, trans. David Farrell Krell in Martin Heidegger: Basic Writings, ed. David Farrell Krell, New York, Harper & Row, 1977, p. 101—further references to this translation are given using the English title, ‘What is Metaphysics?’. 5 Ibid. 6 Martin Heidegger, Gesamtausgabe, vol. IX, Wegmarken, Frankfurt am Main, Vittorio Klostermann, 1976, ‘Was ist Metaphysik?’, footnote a, p. 111—further references to this version of Heidegger’s lecture will be given under the German title, ‘Was ist Metaphysik?’ whereas the English translation, as noted above, will be referred to using the English title. 7 ‘What is Metaphysics?’, op. cit., p. 101. 8 Ibid. 9 Heidegger uses here the spelling ‘Da-sein’ instead of ‘Dasein’ to emphasize its ‘being-present’ indicating a function of Dasein in contrast to its just ‘being-here’. I will continue using ‘Dasein’ instead of ‘Dasein’ when I find it appropriate in the context. 10 ‘What is Metaphysics?’, op. cit., p. 103. 11 One of Heidegger’s major contributions in Being and Time was that of distinguishing three kinds of Being. The Being of Dasein as Existence, the Being of things ready-to-hand and the Being of things present-at-hand. Dasein’s existence is marked by its self-defining features. ‘That kind of Being towards which Dasein can comport itself in one way or another, and always does comport itself somehow, we call “existence” [Existenz]’ (Being and Time, op. cit., H12). Things subsumed under ready-to-hand is that ‘kind of Being which equipment possesses—in which it manifests itself in its own right—we call ‘readiness-to-hand’ [Zuhandenheit]’ (Being and Time, op. cit., H69). For instance, a bicycle that takes us from A to B is understood to be equipment. To encounter things present at hand our attitude changes from using the bike as means for transport towards an interest in the bicycle itself. Such a change of attitude happens, for instance, if the bicycle breaks down. We change towards a scientific attitude in which we are interested in the functioning of the bicycle or, better, why it is not functioning. ‘To lay bare what is just present-at-hand and no more, cognition must first penetrate beyond what is ready-to-hand in our concern’ (Being and Time, op. cit., H71). 12 See Thomas A.Fay, Heidegger: The Critique of Logic, The Hague, Martinus Nijhoff, 1977, p. 37. 13 Here one must take note of Heidegger’s handwritten remark which is explanatory to the above quotation. He writes: ‘re-pelling: the beings for itself; pointing to: the Being of beings’ (’abweisen: das Seiende für sich; ver-weisen: in das Sein des Seienden’). I take the italicization of ‘Being’ (Sein) to emphasize what is at issue, namely, Being itself (see Martin Heidegger, ‘Was ist Metaphysik?, op. cit., p. 114). The handwritten remarks to which I refer here appear only in Heideggger’s Gesamtausgabe. For the interpreter of the lecture on nothingness these notes are of great importance—made over a long period, they are witness to Heidegger’s thoughts about this controversial lecture on nothingness even after its publication in 1929. Accordingly, von Herrmann writes that these notes are ‘illuminating text-immanent explanations’ although they neither go critically beyond the horizon of the work nor expand its thoughts (FriedrichWilhelm von Hermann, ‘Nachwort des Herausgebers’ [‘Afterword of the Editor’], Gesamtausgabe, vol. IX, op. cit., p. 487) and so reflect Heidegger’s original thought. It seems to me that as such these remarks are a reliable source of clarification of Heidegger’s own understanding of this vital text on nothingness and well qualified to contribute to a balanced interpretation. For a full explanation concerning Heidegger’s explanatory handwritten remarks see: von Herrmann, op. cit. 14 ‘What is Metaphysics?’, op. cit., p. 105. 15 ‘Was ist Metaphysik?’, op. cit., footnote a, p. 114.

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16 ‘What is Metaphysics?’, op. cit., p. 105. 17 See ‘Was ist Metaphysik?’, op. cit., footnote a, p. 114. The published translation of this line reads ‘…is not some kind of appended clarification. Rather it makes possible…’. My translation here includes Heidegger’s handwritten annotation in square brackets (the single word ‘Being’) and amends the translation slightly to enable this annotation to be incorporated. 18 ‘What is Metaphysics?’, op. cit., p. 105. The German original for the whole sentence is as follows: ‘Dieses von uns in der Rede dazugesagte “und nicht Nichts” ist aber keine nachgetragene Erklärung, sondern die vorgängige Ermöglichung [d. h. Sein] der Offenbarkeit von Seiendem überhaupt.’ (‘Was ist Metaphysik?’, op. cit., p. 114). 19 A handwritten remark by Heidegger is inserted at this point: ‘1) among other things, not only, 2) following on from this: therefore everything is nothingness, but contrariwise: to take on and hear beings, Being and finitude [1.) u. a. nicht nur, 2.) daraus folgern: also ist alles Nichts, sondern umgekehrt: Ubernehmen und Vernehmung des Seienden, Sein und Endlichkeit]’ (‘Was ist Metaphysik?’, op. cit., footnote a, p. 115). 20 ‘What is Metaphysics?’, op. cit., p. 105. 21 ‘Was ist Metaphysik?’, op. cit., footnote a, p. 115. 22 Martin Heidegger, ‘Der Weg zur Sprache’, Gesamtausgabe, vol. XII, Unterwegs zur Sprache, Frankfurt am Main, Vittorio Klostermann, 1985, pp. 253–5. 23 ‘What is Metaphysics?’, op. cit., p. 115. 24 Martin Heidegger, ‘Einleitung zu “Was ist Metaphysik?” (1949)’, Gesamtausgabe, vol. IX, op. cit., p. 375.—my translation. The original reads: ‘Der Satz: “Der Mensch existiert” bedeutet: der Mensch ist dasjenige Seiende, desen Sein durch das offenstehende Innestehen in der Unverborgenheit des Seins, vom Sein her, im Sein ausgezeichnet ist.’ The essay appears in an English translation by Walter Kaufmann as ‘The Way into the Ground of Metaphysics’ in Kaufmann (ed.), Existentialism, New York, Meridian, 1956—this passage appears on p. 214. 25 Martin Heidegger, ‘Einleitung zu “Was ist Metaphysik?” (1949)’, op. cit., p. 375. Kaufmann translation, ‘The Way into the Ground of Metaphysics’, op. cit., pp. 214–15. 26 ‘Einleitung zu “Was ist Metaphysik?” (1949)’, op. cit., pp. 373–7. Kaufmann translation, op. cit., pp. 214–17. 27 ‘Was ist Metaphysik?’, op. cit., footnote a, p. 115, ‘d. h. Nichts und Sein das Selbe’. 28 There is an important difference, one clearly implied by the terms of the discussion here, between Being and the Being of beings. The difference should not be forgotten—indeed, to do so would be to commit a fundamental ontological error for which Heidegger coined the term ‘oblivion of Being’ (‘Seinsvergessenheit’). Seinsvergessenheit is that mode of Being in which we behave like the scientist and see nothing but beings and in them their being. In this mode, however, the Being of beings is considered to be nothing more than being available for scientific investigation and technological manipulation, whereas Being as ‘transcendens pure and simple’ remains in oblivion (the same point can be made for the being of things in their everydayness). To maintain the difference is crucial, since only through recognition of that difference is there any possibility at all that Being might be revealed as such. Otherwise Being would be indistinguishable everywhere—Dasein would be overwhelmed by beings and unable to trace their roots. 29 David Krell in Martin Heidegger Basic Writings, op. cit., p. 93. 30 ‘Was ist Metaphysik?’, op. cit., footnote a, p. 115, ‘d. h. Nichts und Sein das Selbe.’ 31 ‘What is Metaphysics?’, op. cit., pp. 105–6. 32 See ibid., p. 101. 33 The square brackets enclose Heidegger’s annotation as given in ‘Was ist Metaphysik?’, op. cit., footnote e, p. 115, ‘nicht “durch”’. 34 ‘What is Metaphysics?’, op. cit., p. 106.

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35 Being and Time, op. cit., §62. 36 Ibid., H306. 37 Martin Heidegger, ‘Einleitung zu “Was ist Metaphysik?” (1949)’, op. cit., p. 374. Kaufmann translation, op. cit., p. 214. 38 Being and Time, op. cit., H38. 39 ‘What is Metaphysics?’, op. cit., p. 106. 40 Ibid., p. 104. 41 Ibid., p. 108. 42 Ibid. 43 Ibid. 44 Ibid., p. 109; in this case the square brackets contain my own clarificatory additions. 45 Martin Heidegger, Gesamtausgabe, vol. IX, op. cit., ‘Zur Seinsfrage’, p. 420. 46 ‘What is Metaphysics?’, op. cit., p. 109. 47 Ibid., p. 110. 48 Ibid. 49 Ibid. 50 Ibid. 51 Ibid. 52 Ibid. 53 Ibid. 54 Martin Heidegger, ‘Einleitung zu “Was ist Metaphysik?” (1949)’, op. cit., p. 381. In Kaufmann translation, op. cit., pp. 219–20. 55 Martin Heidegger, ‘Letter on Humanism’, in Martin Heidegger: Basic Writings, op. cit., pp. 231–6. 56 ‘What is Metaphysics’, op. cit., p. 93. 57 Martin Heidegger: Basic Writings, op. cit., pp. 110–11.

11 DEATH AND AUTHENTICITY 1 Trans. J.Macquarrie and E.Robinson, Oxford: Blackwell, 1973. Numerals refer to the pagination of the seventh German edition given in the margins of this translation. 2 Ibid., H126. 3 Ibid., H126–7. 4 Ibid. 5 Ibid., H126. 6 Ibid., H177. 7 Ibid., H128. 8 Ibid., H277. 9 Ibid., H178. 10 Ibid., H188. 11 Ibid., H264. 12 Ibid. 13 Ibid., H267. 14 Ibid., H287, H306. 15 Ibid., H382. 16 Ibid., H321.

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17 Ibid., H386. 18 See note 27 below. 19 See, for example, R.Waterhouse, A Heidegger Critique, Brighton, Harvester Press, 1981; M.Gelven, A Commentary on Heidegger’s ‘Being and Time’, New York, Harper & Row, 1970; T.Rentsch, Martin Heidegger: Das Sein und der Tod, Munich, Piper, 1989. 20 Being and Time, op. cit., H239. 21 Sartre overstates his case by suggesting that action requires the ‘illusion of being eternal’. But all it, in fact, requires is that death retain for one its status as, while ultimately inevitable, for any given time, a mere possibility. Heidegger himself makes this point in his discussion of ‘brooding’ over death (Being and Time, op. cit., H261). 22 Being and Time, op. cit., H10. 23 Ibid., H258. 24 Ibid. 25 Ibid., H115. 26 Ibid., H386. 27 Spiritual-intellectual leadership, geistige Führung as belonging to the fully developed concept of authenticity, is briefly alluded to at Being and Time, op. cit., H384–5, where Heidegger commits fully authentic Dasein to ‘communicating (Mitteilung) and struggling’ to make its community live up to its historical ‘destiny’. It is also central to his self-understanding of his involvement with Nazi politics in 1933. See my Heidegger, Philosophy, Nazism, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1997, chapter 4. 28 Being and Time, op. cit., H264. 29 Ibid., H261. 30 See Karl Löwith, Mein Leben in Deutschland vor und nach 1933, Stuttgart, Metzler, 1986, p. 59. 31 Reprinted in Martin Heidegger: Basic Writings, ed. David Farrell, Krell, New York, Harper & Row, 1977, pp. 193–243. 32 Ibid., p. 231. 33 Ibid., p. 232. 34 Ibid., p. 235. 35 Of course authenticity, as I have emphasized, is a matter of style not content. So the ‘ethics’ of Being and Time is in a sense merely ‘formal’. How I, in my particular cultural situatedness fill out the form of authenticity, is, says §74, a matter of the deep values, the cultural ‘heritage’ into which I find myself ‘thrown’. I have discussed this topic at length in Heidegger, Philosophy, Nazism, op. cit., chapters 2 and 3. 36 See note 21 above.

12 DEATH AND THE UNITY OF A LIFE 1 Tom Stoppard, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, New York, Grove Weidenfeld, 1967, pp. 71–2-Act Two. 2 See Bernard Williams, ‘The Macroupolos case: reflections on the tedium of immortality’, Problems of the Self, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1973, pp. 82–100. 3 While Williams’s account is perhaps one that does not go quite far enough, Jorge Luís Borges advances a view of the connection between mortality and the having a life that is much closer to that which I advance here. In his short story ‘The Immortals’ (in Labyrinths, New York, Modern Library, 1983) he describes those who have drunk from the river of immortality as having lost, not merely lost their appetite, but their very capacity for properly human life. Although focusing much more directly on the ethical character of a life, some of Martha

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Nussbaum’s work is also suggestive of a strong connection between the possibility of human life and the mortality and contingency of that life—see ‘Aristotle on human nature and the foundations of ethics’ in J.E.J.Altham and Ross Harrison (eds), World, Mind and Ethics, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1995, pp. 86–131 (I am particularly grateful to Pedro Tabensky for drawing this to my attention) and The Fragility of Goodness, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1986. The idea that human life is necessarily a mortal life, and that its value and significance is inseparable from its finitude, is, of course, a widespread theme in much art and literature. Of course in so far as I do locate the sight of the bird within such a worldly frame, then my experience of the bird, though it is an experience of the same bird as that in which my cat shows such keen interest, is also a very different experience. And in this latter sense I may be said to have a different ‘grasp’ of the bird from that of my cat. Since the account offered here does, of course, tie the having of complex attitudes such as belief and desire, and the capacity for a certain sort of complex, purposive behaviour, together with the having of a sense of one’s existence as a temporally extended creature located within a larger world, so this account must be committed to the denial, not only that my cat (and creatures like her) can be said to have a life, but also that my cat can be said to possess beliefs, desires and the rest. On the face of it this might seem counter-intuitive. Yet just as I resisted, at the outset, the idea that my cat can be said to have a life in quite the same way that I can be said to have a life, so I would resist the idea that belief (or any of the other crucial terms here) can be applied univocally both to myself and my feline companion. Indeed, while ‘belief’ may be applied analogously to myself and my cat in a way that is consistent with the equivocal nature of the term, still my belief that there is a wattlebird outside the window is a different state—and not just numerically different—from my cat’s ‘belief’ that there is a wattlebird outside the window. This difference is exemplified in the fact that there is no clear sense in which my cat believes that the bird outside the window is a wattlebird, or that it is outside my window, or that, in so far as it is outside the window, it is outside the house, that it is therefore in the garden and so on. It is precisely the way in which, as we can see here, my belief is implicated in a vast mass of beliefs and other attitudes that implicate in turn a notion both of myself and of the world in which I stand, that marks my belief as a state different from the state my cat might be said to be in when she also sees the very same bird. The account of content that is assumed here is one that treats content as necessarily holistic in its constitution and as tied to the objects and events in the world. Such a view of content is an important feature in the work of Donald Davidson (for an account of the Davidsonian position see Malpas, Donald Davidson and the Mirror of Meaning Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1992). In Place and Experience: A Philosophical Topography, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, forthcoming, I develop an account of content and conceptuality that emphasizes, not only its holistic character, but also its necessary interconnection with embodied agency. For further discussion of this issue see my ‘The Nature of Cognitive Connection: Kant, Davidson and the Unity of Consciousness’, International Journal of Philosophical Studies, forthcoming, 1998 and also my Place and Experience, op. cit. See Derek Parfitt, Reasons and Persons, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1984. See Bruno Bettelheim, The Uses of Enchantment, New York, Alfred A.Knopf, 1976. See Paul Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, trans. Kathleen McLaughlin and David Pellauer, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1984–8 and Oneself as Another, trans. Kathleen Blamey, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1992—see also Ricoeur, ‘Life in Quest of a Narrative’, in David Wood (ed.), On Paul Ricoeur, London, Routledge, 1991, pp. 20–33. See Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue, Notre Dame, Indiana, University of Notre Dame Press, 1981; see also MacIntyre, ‘Crises, Narrative and Science’, The Monist 60, 1977, pp. 453–72.

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12 See Louis O.Mink, ‘History and Fiction as Modes of Comprehension’, New Literary History 1, 1969–70, p. 557 and Hayden White, ‘The Historical Text as Literary Artifact’, in Tropics of Discourse, Baltimore, Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978, p. 90. 13 The idea of a life as a narrative, and as a work constructed through narrative, suggests that we might conceive a life as a sort of aesthetic object (a ‘work of art’) inasmuch as to have a life is to exist in such a way that one’s life can indeed be understood as organized according to the aesthetics of narrative and that is shaped and moulded according to the art of the storyteller whose life it is. 14 Being and Nothingness, trans. Hazel E.Barnes, New York, Washington Square Press, 1966, p. 700. 15 Ibid., p. 698. 16 Borges, op. cit., pp. 114–15. 17 See Parfitt, op. cit., pp. 281 ff. 18 Ricoeur, Oneself as Another, op. cit., p. 137. 19 Of course it is notable that even the stories told by Scheherazade come to an end, as they are framed within the story of Scheherazade’s own life; moreover it is only the story of Scheherazade, and her royal husband, that provides the unifying link that makes the stories of the Thousand and One Nights part of a single story at all. 20 ‘The Thing’, Poetry, Language, Thought, New York, Harper & Row, 1971, pp. 178–9. That I have chosen to mention Heidegger only at the very end of this discussion should not be taken to indicate any lack of sympathy for or appreciation of the idea of mortality as it appears in Heidegger’s work. In fact, as the attentive reader may already have surmised, my aim has been to develop an argument for what is essentially a Heideggerian conclusion, but without reliance on explicitly Heideggerian premises.

13 THE ANTINOMY OF DEATH 1 Thanks to David Crossley, and to participants in the Bay of Islands death conference, for helpful comments on earlier drafts of this paper. 2 Similarity may be noted between the view of death argued for here and that of Unamuno, in The Tragic Sense of Life, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1972. Another writer of kindred perspective is Elias Canetti (see Reinhard Steiner, ‘Against Death’, this volume). Still another is Thomas Nagel. 3 Blaise Pascal, Pensées, trans. W.F.Trotter, London, J.M.Dent, 1908, 199 (Brunschvicg edition numbering system). 4 I should perhaps note emphatically that I do not mean hereby to affirm literally that a human being is a machine, or something very closely or importantly resembling a machine. (Nor for that matter is this denied.) 5 It may be argued that part of something’s value is comprised by the history it has had. Many who collect antique objects, for example, express pleasure and seem to attach value to the idea that people of earlier times (in some cases much earlier times), with the perspectives and cultural character of those earlier times, held, viewed or used those objects. An exact replica cannot have had that history. An argument along these lines might be developed for all items in which aesthetic or other intrinsic value is held to reside. It is tangential to my purposes here to develop such an argument; which is just as well, since I am uncertain how, in detail, it would go, and whether I would want to defend it. 6 I take a person to be the same thing as a self. Person is a term for a non-biological kind whose exemplars characteristically are, become, or were intelligently conscious. Many (possibly all) of these exemplars are members of biological kinds, while some possible exemplars are not members of biological kinds (possible machines that are persons, for example). Person is not a

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forensic, legal, or particularly normative term. Nor is it analytically true that persons are conscious. Consciousness is a criterion of personhood, but does not define it (to utilize Kripke’s valuable distinction between the criterial and the definitional). 7 See Daniel C.Dennett, ‘The Milk of Human Intentionality’, Behavioral and Brain Sciences 3, 1980, pp. 428–30; D.R.Hofstadter and D.C.Dennett, The Mind’s I: Fantasies and Reflections on Mind and Soul, New York, Basic Books, 1981; Daniel C. Dennett, Elbow Room, Cambridge, Mass., Bradford Books, 1984. 8 See Fred Feldman, Confrontations with the Reaper, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1992, chapters 8 and 9.

14 DEATH FETISHISM, MORBID SOLIPSISM 1 My personal thanks to Peter Kraus for hosting a delightful conference, and for the friendship that went along with it. 2 I argued this long ago in ‘Is There Happiness After Death?’ Philosophy 51, 1976. 3 Norman Mailer, The Executioner’s Song, Boston, Little, Brown, 1979. 4 Sydney Carton’s dramatic gesture, at the end of Dickens’s Tale of Two Cities, may have been a ‘far, far better thing than [he had] ever done’, but, for most of us, a good death can come only at the end of a life well-lived. What that is, of course, is beyond the scope of this essay. 5 French ‘mort’, (‘fin’) like their ‘merd’, seems more matter of fact. German ‘Tod’, like so much of German, has the sound of a heavily fallen footstep. 6 I participated in a symposium on evil, some time ago, and watched a very clever analytic philosopher weave a Socratic paradox (‘can one knowingly do wrong?’) into an intricate puzzle about wanting a banana. I’m not kidding. Gone from view was the Holocaust, the horrors of Bosnia and Burma, and the drug cartels. In its place, a technical question about the connection between desires, intentions and (minimal) actions. 7 Except, notably, those nasty questions about consciousness, which play an integral part in philosophical questions about death. 8 Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy, trans. Walter Kaufman, New York, Random House, 1956, §3, p. 43. 9 Paul Edwards (ed.), The Encyclopedia of Philosophy, New York, Macmillan, 1965; Heidegger on Death: A Critical Evaluation, La Salle, Ill., The Monist Monographs, 1979; Reincarnation: A Critical Evaluation, Amherst, N.Y., Prometheus, 1996. 10 James Miller, Michel Foucault, New York, Simon & Schuster, 1993. 11 Albert Camus, The Stranger, trans. Stuart Gilbert, New York, Vintage, 1954, p. 152. 12 Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus, trans. Justin O’Brien, Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1975, p. 62. 13 Notably, The First Man, published posthumously and unpolished, by Camus’s daughter (trans. David Hopgood, New York, Knopf, 1995). 14 One can too easily imagine a crypto-Heideggerian accountant, perpetrating the concept of Dasein (AKA Homo Economicus) as being-towards-taxes, for whom all of life’s practices should be sorted into such existential categories as ‘tax deductible’ and ‘capital gains’. (Unfortunately, that sounds not unlike the lives that many of us good citizens lead already.) 15 It is still called the ‘last will and testament’, but there is rarely much of a testament—a creed, a credo, a covenant with the living, a personal reflection on the meaning of life—to be seen. A will, these days, is not expected to be anything than a legal directive for the distribution of property (including, perhaps, the ‘property’ of one’s own corpse). 16 ‘Letter to Menoeceus’, in Epicurus, Letters, Principle Doctrines and Vatican Sayings, trans. Russell M.Geer, Indianapolis, Bobbs-Merrill, 1981, p. 54 17 ’Wei Boyang and his loyal disciple, together with their dog, revived, became real immortals,

Notes

18 19

20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28

29

30

31 32

33 34

176

and went away.’ Shenxian zhuan (a record of eighty-four immortals achieving their immortality compiled by Ge Hung, fourth century, Jin dynasty). Betty Sue Flowers, ‘Death, the bald scenario’, in this volume. One could mention, briefly, not only his philosophical ‘indifference’ to death but also his pronounced atomism, his atheism and his qualified hedonism, not to mention the fact that, from all available evidence, they were both great guys. In David Hume, Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, ed. Norman Kemp Smith, Indianapolis, Bobbs-Merrill, 1962, p. 77 Thomas Nagel, Mortal Questions, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1979, ‘Death’, p. 7. Ibid. Ibid., p. 8. David and Stephanie Lewis, ‘Holes’, in David Lewis, Collected Essays, New York, Oxford University Press, 1983. See Jeff Malpas, ‘Death and the Unity of a Life’, in this volume. See Sartre, No Exit and Three Other Plays, New York, Vintage Books, 1989. It’s a Wonderful Life, Frank Capra, Director, 1946. Jeffrey Masson, When Elephants Weep, New York, Dell, 1995. There is some confusion, however, when it comes to talking about what animals fear or fight for when, for instance, ‘they fight for their lives’. Such behaviour is observable even in some of the ‘lowest’ forms of animal life, and, in a slower time frame, in many plants as well. But it is not at all clear that ‘fighting for one’s life’ is about life at all, which is to say, it is not at all obvious that such behaviour in any way involves the awareness of death as a possibility. So, too, it would seem that the phenomenology of a drowning person is that the person fights for the next breath, not for his or her life. In all living things, there is perhaps this instinctual drive for selfpreservation, but this is not necessarily about death. What is most confused, however, is confusing this instinctual drive for self-preservation with some sort of basic right, as Hobbes notoriously suggests. Whether or not one thinks that there is a right to life, this right is not to be derived from either biology or phenomenology. Too much is made, I fear, of the pain of dying. To be sure, the way many people die today—of protracted diseases such as cancer—is frightening in part—but only in part—because of the pain. But anyone who has ever suffered a serious trauma—a high speed automobile crash or the quick mutilation of the body with a sharp and dangerous implement—knows that the pain is negligible in such instances. Sometimes, as in severe burns, the pain comes considerably later. But in fatal injuries, like being cut with a sword, the pain is not even an issue and to think that it is is to unnecessarily (and evasively) confuse the death issue. So, too, I find the arguments surrounding the ‘cruel and unusual’ techniques of capital punishment as misleading as they are disgusting. The pain of being executed, whether by guillotine, hangman, firing squad, electric chair or lethal injection, is at the very worst a brief interlude. Miller, An Anatomy of Disgust, Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press, 1997, p. 49. See also, Caroline Bynum, The Resurrection of the Body in Western Christianity, New York, Columbia University Press, 1995. Spencer, Faerie Queene I. I. 21. One could argue that Socrates was seriously self-deceived on this point. Reading all or even any of Plato’s dialogues, it is clear that what Socrates loved most was to talk with other people, not think by himself. Spinoza, Ethics, 4th edn, trans. W.H.White and A.H.Sterling, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1930, p. 235. One might object that surely my pain and anxiety are for me and for me alone a concern, apart,

Notes

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that is, from empathetic friends and relatives and the medical staff who must figure out how to deal with it. But, again, I think pain and anxiety management are issues quite separate from death, not in the analytic sense of ‘separateness’ that I have been questioning but in the more obvious sense that these are features of our experience that are unpleasant in any situation, and more so when the prospect is unending rather than terminal. It is because of such callous puritanism as the Clinton administration’s recent ban on pain-saving ‘illicit’ drugs—and many years of similar policies—that dying in pain and anxiety has become as prevalent as it is. Death and dying are not necessarily painful, and the anxiety must be understood, I am arguing, in a much broader frame than ‘being-towards-death’. 35 Again, this is not to deny that one might ‘fight for his or her life’, but that one does not do so, except on reflection, to avoid death. Animals, accordingly, ‘fight for their lives’, but not for ‘self-preservation’. They do, however, fight (to their deaths) for the safety of their offspring or compatriots.

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INDEX Absolute 111 absurdity 2, 113 account, Kantian sense of 136 Achilles 172 action 114–16, 124, 127, 128, 191 aesthetics, closure as basic principle of 40–43 after-death experience 71–78, 185 afterlife 45, 50, 52–53, 54, 61, 158, 159, 173, 174, 183 ageing 39–40, 43–44, 142–43, 150 agency 123, 124, 125, 128, 193 Akira Kurosawa 186 Alexander the Great 160, 170 Allen, Woody 156 Americans 156–57, 163 analytic philosophy 2, 169, 196 anatman (no-self) 90 ancestor worship 60 anima mundi 86 animal, as distinct from human existence 86, 94–95, 120–21, 192–93 animals, and death 134, 171, 196, 197 anti-Cartesianism 114 antiques 44, 194 anticipation 116–17, 119 ‘anticipatory resoluteness’ 108 antinomy, of death 135–51 anxiety (Angst) 88, 92, 93, 95, 96, 99–103, 106–9, 113, 115, 138, 196–97 Appiah, Anthony 46 Aquinas, St Thomas 174 archetypes 78, 80 Aristotle 42, 152, 173, 174, 180 arris 40 ars moriendi 18 art: Aristotle on 42; of dying 18; pointillist 12 artificial intelligence 140 ataraxia 167 attitudes 122, 123, 124–25 atomism 35, 165 Augenblick (‘moment of vision’) 95, 114 authenticity 98–99, 104, 109, 112–19; and death 98–99, 104, 112–19; see inauthenticity 98

Index

185

automobile 163 autonomy 107–9, 116, 118 axiology 136, 148 axiological objectivism 136 ‘bald scenario’ 50–51, 55, 166 bardo (realm of transition after death) 71, 72, 74, 75, 80, 82, 184 Bardo Thödol (Tibetan Book for the Dead) 71–82, 184, 185 Bashō 93 Basquiat, Jean-Michel 161, 162 Becker, Ernest 22, 156 Being 87, 98, 102–11, 115, 134, 189, 190; and nothingness 102–11, 134; as finite 111; of beings 102, 105, 108, 110, 189, 190; meaning of 98; mystery of 106; of Dasein 99, 100, 103, 104; truth of 105; voice of 104 beings: and Being 99–110; ground of 101, 102, 103, 106, 107, 110; Being of 102, 105, 108, 110, 189, 190 being-in-the-world 99, 113, 125 being-towards-death 48, 94, 98–99, 101, 104, 114, 161, 164, 171, 175, 176, 197 ‘being-towards-taxes’ 195 being-with-others 113, 176 belief 122, 124, 192–93 betrayal 27, 28, 29 Bettelheim, Bruno 128 Bildungsroman 114 biotechnology 140 birth 85, 90, 129, 167, 168 body: continuity of 121; ending of see ending of life 130, 133; after death 172–73; identity of 130; living body as ‘focus for involvement’ 124; replacement of components of 147 boredom 107 Borges, Jorge Luís 131, 192 Boswell, James 167 brain-damage 32–34, 35, 133, 148 breath 87–88 Broadway, New York 89 Brooks, Mel 155 Buddha 77, 92 Buddhism 71–97, 158, 165, 185

Index

186

Camus, Albert 14, 22, 113, 156, 163, 170 Canetti, Elias 2, 16–21, 151, 177–78, 194 care 108 Carton, Sydney 195 capital punishment 153, 196 capitalism 53, 163 causal integration 123, 124 causality 27–28, 181 change 37–38, 58–59, 64–65, 68 Chaplin, Charlie 155 character 116, 160 Chekhov, Anton 116 child, death of 45 Chinese: attitudes towards death 57–70, 84, 165–66, 173; cosmology 58–60, 67–68; funerary practices 61 choices 131 Christianity 79, 84, 110, 111, 142, 158, 160, 163, 165–66, 174 clarification: as philosophical task 169 Clinton administration 196 clones 141 closure: as aesthetic principle 40–43, 47; as feature of a life 40–43, 116, 148 clothes 44 Cobain, Kurt 161, 162 ‘codependent arising’ (pratītyasamutpāda) 90, 95, 96 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor 52 comedy, slapstick 155–56 concepts 125 confession 160 conformism 98, 112 Confucian attitude towards death 60 Confucius 18 conscience, call of 113 consciousness 75, 76, 85, 154, 194, 195 content 124–25, 126, 193 copy 141 corpse 33, 35, 144, 148 cosmology 57–60, 67–68, 86 ‘cowboy ethics’ 160 craftsmanship 43, 44 daily life: and nothingness 101, 102 Dante, Alighieri 53, 79 Daodejing (Tao-te Ching) 62, 63–64 Daoism 58, 84, 85, 165, 166 Daoist attitudes towards death 57–70, 84, 165, 166

Index

187

Darwin, Charles 140 Darwinism 140 Dasein (‘being-there’) 91, 92, 98–109, 111, 112, 115, 171, 188, 189, 195 Davidson, Donald 193 Dawkins, Richard 140 Day of the Dead (Día de Los Muertos) 3, 39 dead: deprived of time 167–68; forgetting of 171; in relation to the living 45–47, 61–62, 77; memories of 45–17, 171 death: acceptance of 16–21, 60–61, 139, 140, 150–51, 158, 165, 178; affirmation of 58; American attitudes towards 156–57; antinomy of 135–51; and authenticity 98–99, 104, 112–19; and being human 1, 156, 171; and disgust 172–73; and experientialism 22–36; and existentialism 2, 187; and finitude 130, 133; and forgetting 63, 171; and indifference 13; and inter-personal relations 45–46, 175; andliberation 71–82, 94, 158, 165; and meaningfulness of life 1–4, 14–15, 48–59, 50–51, 60, 91–92, 94, 111, 120–34; and metaphysics 109–11; and narrative 41–43, 132; and narrative closure 41–42, 148; and nothingness 98, 99, 100, 101, 104, 107, 111, 113; and personhood, 2, 33–34, 36, 37, 120–34, 143–44, 145–51, 150; and philosophy 1, 54, 85, 135, 138, 140, 153–54, 158, 161, 169, 171, 175, 178; and rebirth 71–73, 78–79, 133; and religion, 17, 18–19, 174; and self 10–12, 40, 132, 163, 168, 171, 175; and the world 137–38; as a misfortune 27–38; as an evil 23, 135, 140–41, 148, 150, 151; as catastrophic 22; as consolation 13; as correlated with life 59, 60, 64, 68, 70, 84–85, 86, 87, 90, 91, 96, 97, 120, 170, 174; as end of desires and plans 170, 173; as experience 161, 162, 169; as event 36, 37, 84, 88, 99, 100, 130, 170; as ‘ever-present possibility’ 91, 93, 94, 96, 99; as individuating 176; as ‘nothing’ 26, 30, 32, 151, 155, 161, 165–67, 169, 174; as one’s own 16, 99, 100, 113, 175; as ‘ownmost possibility’ 99, 100; as punishment 152–53; as ritual 160;

Index

188

as ‘timely’ 170; as tragedy 135, 139, 152; as transformation 65–70, 71; being-towards 48, 94, 98–99, 101, 104, 114, 161, 164, 171, 175, 176, 197; Buddhist attitudes towards 71–97, 158, 165; celebration of 162, 164; certainty of 115–16, 117, 138; Chinese attitudes towards 57–70, 84, 165–66, 173; Chinese terms relevant to 62–64; Christian attitudes towards 57–70, 84, 165–66; confrontation with 153; Confucian attitude towards 60; Daoist attitudes towards 57–70, 84, 165, 166; denial of 57, 115–16, 117, 138, 156–160, 164, 165, 174; existential conception of 86, 90, 99, 164, 187; fear of 14, 18, 29, 61, 64–65, 131–32, 150, 165, 169–74, 196; fetishism about 4, 117, 162–64, 174; glorification of 161, 162; ‘good death’ 153, 170, 195; grasp of 129, 130, 134; Greek attitude towards 158; hatred of 19–20; Hindu attitudes towards 158, 165; ‘holiday from’ 156; horror of 19, 172; ‘immanence’ of 88, 90, 96; in battle 160; in old age 14, 44–45, 160; in the Daodejing (Tao-te Ching) 63–64, 84; in the philosophy of Martin Heidegger 1, 3, 4, 16, 22, 48–49, 86–87, 90, 93, 95, 98–119, 134, 153, 161, 163, 171, 175, 186, 187, 194; inthe philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche 86, 87, 88–89, 89–90, 91, 158, 170, 186; in the Tibetan Book for the Dead 71–78; in the Zhuangzi (Chuang Tzu) 64–70, 84; insignificance of 22–32, 126, 131–32, 165; insulation from 154; Japanese attitudes towards 83–97; joking about 155; making death one’s own 161, 163; moment of 75–76, 77, 161; noble death 176; ‘near death’ experience 2, 5–15, 50, 56; of a child 45; of a warrior 160; of a woman 160; of God 57–58; of the body 130; ‘paradoxical’ character of thought about 41–42, 48, 49; phonetics of 153, 156, 195; rejection of 16–21; social significance of 45–46, 166–67, 170–71, 174–76; stories about 50–53, 55;

Index

189

sudden 162; technical definitions of 1; thinking about 153–56, 164; uncertainty about 171; ‘untimely’ 170 deconstructionists 155 deductive-nomological model of explanation 127 democratic myth 51–53 Democritus 165 demons 72, 73–75, 76, 95 Dennett, Daniel 145 deprivation 32–33, 34, 35, 167–68 Descartes, René 86, 153 desire 23–26, 122, 184, 192–93 destruction 37–38 disclosure, of Being 104, 105, 106 disembodied existence 47, 144 disgust 172–73 dissection 173 Dōgen Kigen 84–85, 87, 92 dreams, 8–9, 78–79, 185 duelling 160 duration 94, 97 dying 18, 36, 161, 196; art of 18; distinct from ‘being dead’ 36; pain of 174, 196–97; process of 5–13, 161, 162 dysfunctional equipment 141 economic growth 54 economic myth 53–54 Edwards, Paul 159 Egyptians 157, 158 elephants 173 Eliot, T.S. 89 elitism 81 embodiment 124, 125 empathy 155 empiricism 35 emptiness 12, 76, 87, 90, 96, 168 energy, psycho-physical 58 enlightenment 71–73, 77, 79, 80, 81–82 entailment 118 Epicurus 16, 26, 27, 150, 161, 162, 165, 166–67, 169, 179, 181 Epicureanism, 29, 32, 166, 167 episodic 36 equipment 189; dysfunctional 141; loss or decay of 140–41 Ereignis (‘appropriation’) 104

Index

190

eroticism 163 error 124 estate planning 164 eternal recurrence 95, 97, 183 eternity 9, 11, 120 ethics 111, 117–18, 136, 160, 174 ethical objectivism 136 ethical thought 47–48 eudaimonism 23, 179, 180 euthanasia 153 events 36–37 execution 153 existence: of Dasein 94, 96, 97, 99, 101, 104, 105, 107, 108, 189; of self 125 existentialism 2, 187 experience 35, 121, 137, 144, 148, 161 experientialism 22–36; principle of motivational or axiological ezperentialism 26 explanation, deductive-nomological model 127 facts 137 Fallen-ness, Biblical account of 185 fantasy 180 fashion 44 fate 168 fear 138, 196; of death 14, 18, 29, 61, 64–65, 138, 150, 169–74, 196 Feldman, Fred 149 fetish 163 fiction 19, 50–55 fictional space 56 finitude 48, 101, 104, 107, 109, 116, 130–31, 132, 148, 150 first-person 126 first person point of view 168–69, 175 focus 116, 118 forgetting, of the dead 63, 171 Foucault, Michel 117, 161, 162 ‘Fountain of Youth’ 143 Frankl, Viktor 179–80 freedom 10, 108–9, 161 free will 161 Freud, Sigmund 78, 79, 80, 88, 146, 163, 169, 180 fundamental ontology 115, 117–18 funerary practices 61, 71, 157, 166, 172 future 50–51, 55, 90, 103, 122, 123, 129, 168 gallows humour 155 gangs 160 Gestalt psychology 42–43, 182 Gilgamesh 157

Index

191

Gilmore, Gary 153 Ginza, Tokyo 89 God 57–58, 110, 111, 160 Godhead 159 gods 72, 73–75, 76, 77, 82, 150, 166, 185 good life 152, 153, 167, 170 Govinda, Lama Anagarika 71, 75, 80–81, 82 Graham, Billy 159 Grateful Dead 157 Greeks 158 Grim Reaper 154 ground: of beings 101, 102, 103, 106, 110; of Dasein 105 Grund (ground, reason) 101 Gulf War 39 Hades 158 Hakuin Ekaku 92 handmade objects 43, 44 Hanson, Karen 44 happiness 23, 28, 42, 62, 152, 180 hatred 184; of death 19–20 Heaven 50, 52, 145, 158, 173, 174 hearing, primordial 104 Hector 172 hedonism 23, 26, 35, 152, 165, 166, 179 Hegel, G.W.F. 110–11, 148, 179 Heidegger, Martin 1, 3–4, 16, 22, 48–49, 86–87, 88, 89, 90, 93, 95, 98–119, 134, 153, 154, 161, 163, 171, 175, 186, 187, 194 Heideggerians 148 Heraclitus 84 heritage 192 hermeneutic distance, principle of 91 heroism 113, 117, 160, 161, 163, 176 Hinduism 158, 165 history 123, 127 Hobbes, Thomas 196 holism 123, 124–25, 165, 193 Hollywood 164, 168 Holy Land 160 home 113 Homer 171, 173 ‘Homer’s children’ 173 Homeric ethics 160 Homo Economicus 195 horizon 121 Horney, Karen 180 Huizi 68 human, as distinct from animal existence 86, 94–95, 120–21, 192–93

Index

192

human beings 140, 143, 144, 171; and human persons 143; as elegant machines 140, 194 human identity 45, 146–47 Hume, David 167, 195 humiliation 152, 153, 172 humour 155–56 identity: after death 45; human 146–47; of a life 131–34; of persons 45, 125, 126, 133, 135, 146, 147; of self 10, 121–24, 129, 133 immortality 13, 14, 15, 19, 20–21, 38, 46–47, 57, 84, 96, 97, 116, 118, 120, 131–32, 134, 135, 142, 145, 147, 165, 173–74, 192, 195 impermanence 84 implication, logical 28 inauthenticity 98, 107, 108, 112–13, 114, 115; see also authenticity 98 indifference 13, 15, 99 information transmission 146, 147 intrinsic value 136 intuition pumps 145 Islam 160, 165, 173, 174 Israeli 152 Jainism 158, 165 Japanese thought 83–97; influence on Heidegger 187 Jaspers, Karl 84 Jesus Christ 45 142, 158 Joan of Arc 160 joy 107 Judaism 165, 173 Jung, C.G. 71, 78–80, 81, 82, 185 Kant, Immanuel 118, 148 Karel, Capek 142 Kaufmann, Walter 187 Keightley, David 60 Kierkegaard, Søren 137, 154 knowledge 100 Koffa, K. 42 Korschelt, Eugen 88 Kraus, Peter xi, 156 Krell, David Farrell 105, 187 Kripke, Saul 194 ‘language-exit’ moves 116

Index

193

‘language-language’ moves 115–16 Laozi (Lao-tzu) 84 leadership 113, 116, 191–92 learning 93 ‘learning death’ 93 liberation 71–82, 94, 158, 165 Lichtung 91 life: and bodily continuity 130; and narrative 3, 41–43, 127–28, 132, 137, 148, 193; as aesthetic object 193; ascorrelated with death 59, 60, 64, 68, 70, 84–85, 86, 87, 90, 91, 96, 97, 120, 170, 174; as one’s own, 120, 121, 123, 126, 128, 130, 131, 144; Chinese view of 60, 64–65, 66, 68, 70, 84; denial of 164, 165; disunity of 123, 126; eternal 46, 158, 166; finite character of 41–43, 48, 116, 129–34, 132, 135, 143, 147, 148; good 152, 153, 167, 170; having of a 121–23, 125–26, 129, 130–31, 134, 148; identity of 131–34; in netherworld 61; Japanese view of 84–85; lived authentically 114–19; lived inauthentically 112–13, 116; meaningfulness of 1–4, 14–15, 47–49, 50–51, 55–56, 60, 70, 91–92, 111, 120–34; medical prolongation of 88; momentary character of 83, 94, 95, 97; projections of 128; unity of 121–34, 135; value of 136–37, 141, 148, 149; waste of 141, 161 life philosophy (Lebensphilosophie) 90 life-story 127, 128 life-style 116 lifeworld 138 limits, recognition of 100, 123 Lincoln, Abraham 34, 36 living see having of a life 120 location 34, 121 Löwith, Karl 117 logic 99–100 Louis XIV 34, 36 love 115 Lucretius 2, 26, 165, 167 MacIntyre, Alasdair 41, 128, 161–62 das Man (‘the One’) 112, 113 machine, human being as 140–41 Makroupulos, Elina 142 Marx, Karl 163

Index

194

meaning: and nothingness 104; in life 1–4, 14–15, 47–49, 50–51, 55–56, 60, 70, 91–92, 111, 120–34 meaningfulness, loss of 99–100, 102, 104, 113, 131 medical school 154 meditation 81, 87 memory 94, 122, 146, 147 memories, of the dead 45–47, 171 metaphysics 109–11 Midas 181 Middle Ages 160, 172 military 160, 168 Mill, John Stuart 166, 179 Miller, Alice, 45 Miller, James 161, 162 Miller, William 172 Mink, Louis 128 Mitford, Jessica 156–57 moment, of vision (Augenblick) 95, 114 Mona Lisa 141 Montaigne, Michel de 83, 85–86, 91, 93, 94, 96, 97, 156, 185–86 Monty Python 47, 155 ‘morbid solipsism’ 175 Mormons 46 Morrison, Jim 164 mortality 1, 21, 22–23, 38, 83, 89, 93, 103, 109, 110, 112–13, 115–16, 118, 129–30, 134, 192 Mother Nature 138 Mother Teresa 55 motivation 24–26 murder 17, 19, 178 music 48 mystery of Being 106 myth: definition of 53; democratic 51–53; economic 53–54; religious 51–52 Nagel, Thomas 27–28, 30, 32–34, 35, 137, 151, 167, 181–82, 194 narrative 45, 47–49, 127–28, 132, 137, 193 ‘natural’ course of things 139, 150 naturalistic fallacy 118 Nature 85, 96; Mother Nature 138 Navajo 40 Nazism, Heidegger’s involvement with 117, 191–92 Neanderthals 157, 166 ‘near death’ experience 2, 5–15, 50, 56 necessary evils 148 negation 100, 101 netherworld 60, 61, 62

Index

195

New Zealand xi, 156 das Nichts (‘the Nothing’) 99, 100, 101–2, 103, 107, 134 Nietzsche, Friedrich 25–26, 30, 41, 57–58, 86, 87, 88–89, 89–90, 91, 94–97, 158, 163, 170, 180– 81, 186, 187, 188 night 87 nihilation 100, 101, 102–3, 104, 105, 106, 108 nihilism 111, 113 Nishitani Keiji 87, 89, 91, 94, 96 non-contradiction, law of 105 not-Being 99, 100, 103, 105, 106 nostalgia 41 nothingness 8, 87, 90, 92, 96, 98, 99, 99–111, 113, 155, 189; and Being 102–7 nullity 99, 101, 107, 108, 109, 113 Nussbaum, Martha 192 objective (and subjective) 180 ontology 101, 102, 111, 115, 117, 121 openness 103, 105, 107 openedness (also ‘openness’), in Heidegger 94, 104–8 original 141 Orphism 83 ‘own-ness’ 126 pain 6, 13, 15, 23, 26, 28, 35, 77, 138, 140, 165, 196–97 pain management 196–97 Palestinian 152 Parfitt, Derek 126, 131 particularity 141 Pascal, Blaise 139 past 9, 11, 90, 122, 123, 129, 168 patina 44 Paz, Octavio 43 permanence, desire for 133–34 Persians 174 persons: and death 2, 33–34, 36, 37, 120–34, 143–44, 145–51, 150; and human beings 143; and narrative 45, 47–49, 51, 137; definition of 194; indefinite existence of 144, 147; identity of 45, 125, 126, 133, 135, 146; unity of 124, 133, 135, 144–6; value of 141, 149, 150 personal existence 144–6 personal identity 45, 125, 126, 133, 135, 137, 143 personality types 72, 77 philosophy: and task of clarification 169; and death 1, 54, 85, 135, 138, 140, 153–54, 158, 161, 169, 171, 175, 178; and democratic myth 54;

Index and ground of beings 101; and nothingness 101; ‘analytic’ 2, 169, 196; ClassicalChinese 58–60; existentialist 2; methodology of 54 Picasso, Pablo 40 pilgrim’s progress 114 Plato 57, 84, 118, 158, 181, 183 play 155 pleasure 23, 24, 25, 26, 165, 166 pointillist art 12 possibility, grasp of 121, 123 posthumous events 29–30, 35, 36, 152 power 26, 180–81 present 10, 11 ‘present-at-hand’ (Vorhandenes) 101, 102, 107, 189 priests 89 process 35, 37 projections, of a life 128 projects 125, 127, 128, 131, 132, 133, 149, 170 prepositional content 126 psychedelic experience 7 psyche 158 psychoanalysis 78–80, 114 psychological projection 73–74, 75, 76, 77 psychological states 136 psychotherapy 71, 78–79, 82 public opinion 112, 113, 116 punishment 152–53, 155 Pythagoras 158 questioning 123 qi (psycho-physical energy) 58, 67, 85 rationality 138, 139 ‘ready-to-hand’ (Zuhandenes) 101, 102, 107, 189 reality: as consciousness 76–77; grasp of 100; nothingness of 99 reason 100; cunning of 138 rebirth 71–73, 78–79, 82, 90, 133, 149 reductionism, about self 126 reincarnation 71–72, 91, 158, 159 relations 34 relational facts 34, 36 relational 36 religion 17, 18–19, 163, 174 religious myth 51–52

196

Index

197

religious practice 61–62, 67 representation 137, 140 resoluteness 108, 113, 114, 116 responsibility 123 Ricoeur, Paul 128, 132 Rilke, Rainer Maria 16, 87, 178 Rimbaud, Arthur 161 Romeo and Juliet 115 Rosenkrantz and Guildenstern 120 Rosenstein, Leon 44 samsara, 85 Sartre, Jean-Paul 13, 22, 114–15, 118, 130–31, 161, 169, 175, 179, 191 scenarios 55 Scheherazade 132, 194 Schopenhauer, Arthur 40, 41, 137 science 53, 54, 101, 102, 189, 190 scientific attitude 52, 100 secret 81, 185 Seinsvergessenheit 190 self: and death 10–12, 40, 132, 163, 168, 171, 173, 175; and first-person 126; and narrative 127–28, 132; and nothingness 109, 113; and reductionism 126; and stories 41–42, 47–49, 51, 55–56; authentic 116; identical with person 194; identity 10, 121–24, 125, 126, 129, 133–34, 135; inauthentic 112; nature of 74, 92, 121–25; sense of 10–11, 40, 122, 123, 125, 129, 137, 146, 159; unity of 135, 148 self-awareness 122, 123, 125 self-conception (and self-conceptualization) 122, 124, 126, 127 self-concern 132 self-consciousness 179 self-direction 122, 124 selfishness 175 self-knowledge 126 self-liberation 73 self-presentation 126 self-preservation 196, 197 self-realisation 22, 179–80 self-recognition 123, 126 self-reflection 123, 124 Sellars, Wilfrid 115 sexuality 78, 79, 80 si (death) 62, 93 skeleton 3, 39

Index

198

skull 69, 89 Silenus 175, 181 Simmel, Georg 90 S-M practices 162 sociology 157 Socrates 31, 83, 158, 181, 166, 173–74, 196 solidarity, in death 46, 89 solipsism 137, 175 Solon 42, 152, 173 Sontag, Susan 161 Sōtō School, of Zen Buddhism 84 Soviet Union 54 soul 38, 57, 72, 83, 84, 86, 97, 158, 159, 165–66, 173–74 Spenser, Edmund 172 Spinoza, Baruch de 174 spiritual development 79 Starobinski, Jean 91, 186, 187 Steinberg, Leo 40 Stevens, Wallace 50, 51 Stewart, Jimmy 169 Stoicism 85, 166 Stoppard, Tom 120 stories 3, 40–42, 51–56, 127–28, 132, 137 storytelling 128 style 116, 192 subject, idea of 122 subjective (and objective) 180 subjectivity 122, 130 suffering 73, 78, 82, 158, 165 sufficient reason 136 suicide 153, 163, 172 survival 19, 45, 147, 159 suspension of disbelief 52 Suzuki Shōsan 85, 88, 93 tea ceremony, Japanese 40, 44 teleology 139 Teller, Paul 182–83 temporality 9–10, 11, 45, 47–48, 90–91, 103, 122, 123, 129 theology 110 Tibetan Book for the Dead (Bardo Thödol) 71–82, 154, 184, 185 time 6, 9–12, 90, 122, 123, 129, 167–68; deprivation of 167–68; dissolution of 6, 9–12 Thales 86 Thomas, Dylan 2, 41 thought experiments 145 Three Stooges 155 thrownness 99, 113, 192 Tolstoy, Leo 6, 22, 170 torture 153

Index

199

totality 99, 100, 101, 107 transcendence 100, 101, 102, 103, 106, 107, 108, 109–10, 111 transcendental 148 transcendental unity of apperception 145, 148 transformation 65–70 Trungpa, Chögyam 185 truth 54, 124 TWA 800 162 Unabomber 55 Unamuno, Miguel 194 understanding, and narrative 127–28 unified personal existence 144–45, 148, 149 unity: of a life 121–34, 135; of persons 124, 133, 135, 144–46; of self 135, 148 utilitarianism, 179 Vaihinger, Hans 138 Valhalla 145 value 23, 24, 26, 132, 136, 149, 194; intrinsic (or objective) 136, 194; subjective 136 vanity 11, 172, 173 victim 162 Vietnam 157 violence 161 Vorhandenes (‘ready-to-hand’) 101, 189 wandering Jew 142 wang (to depart, to perish) 62–63 wang (to forget) 63 warrior ethics 160 Waugh, Evelyn 157 Wei Boyang 195 White, Hayden 41, 128 will (‘last will and testament’) 195 will to power 22, 27 Williams, Bernard 120 Wittgenstein, Ludwig 137 women’s equality 160 world: as representation 137, 140; conceptions of 57–60; -for-me 137–38; grasp of 121, 123, 125, 128, 134; ordering of 131 wrinkles 39–40

Index ‘Yellow Springs’ 60 Yunmei, Kang 61, 66 Zarathustra 91, 115 zero-sum game 32 Zen Buddhism 84–85, 89, 91–92, 93, 94, 96 Zhuangzi (Chuang Tzu) 61, 67–70, 154, 165, 169 Zhuangzi (Ckuang Tzu) 59, 62, 184 Zuhandenes (‘ready-to-hand’) 101, 189

200