text:
Death

From Nietzsche's pronouncement that "God is dead" to Camus' argument that suicide is the fundamental question of philosophy, the concept of death plays an important role in existential phenomenology, reaching from Kierkegaard to Heidegger and Marcel.

This book explores the phenomenology of death and offers a unique way into the phenomenological tradition. Paul Fairfield examines the following key topics:

● the modern denial of death

● Heidegger's important concept of "being-toward-death" and its centrality in phenomenological ideas, such as authenticity and existence

● the philosophical significance of death rituals: what explains the imperative toward ritual around death, and what is its purpose and meaning?

● death in an age of secularism

● the philosophy and ethics of suicide

● death as a mystery rather than a philosophical problem to be solved

● the relationship between hope and death.

_Death: A Philosophical Inquiry_ is essential reading for students of phe-nomenology and existentialism, and will also be of interest to students in related fields such as religion, anthropology and the medical humanities.

**Paul Fairfield** is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Queen's University, Canada.
**Death**

A Philosophical Inquiry

Paul Fairfield

First published 2015
by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN

and by Routledge
711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017

_Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business_

© 2015 Paul Fairfield

The right of Paul Fairfield to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised 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.

_Trademark notice_ : Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe.

_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_

Fairfield, Paul, 1966-

Death: a philosophical inquiry / Paul Fairfield. -- 1 [edition].

pages cm

Includes bibliographical references and index.

1. Death. I. Title.

BD444.F285 2014

128'.5--dc23

2014008315

ISBN13: 978-0-415-83761-3 (hbk)

ISBN13: 978-0-415-83762-0 (pbk)

ISBN13: 978-0-203-78983-4 (ebk)

Typeset in Garamond
by Taylor & Francis Books
For Gwyneth and Evangeline Fairfield
**Contents**

**Introduction: death and existence**

**1** **The denial of death**

Denial and morality

Denial as pathology

Overcoming denial

**2** **Death rituals**

Ritual and meaning

On the advantages and disadvantages of secularization for death

**3** **Voluntary death**

The scientization of suicide

Existential rebellion

The meanings of suicide

**4** **Being-toward-death**

Aspects

Authenticity and inauthenticity

Temporality and anxiety

**5** **Openness to mystery**

Mystery

Familiarity

Humility

Acceptance

Openness

**6** **On speculation and hope**

Knowledge and speculation

Hope

Conclusion: death as educator

_Index_
"Behind every beautiful thing there's been some kind of pain."

Bob Dylan

# Introduction

# Death and existence

The existing individual's fundamental condition is to strive perpetually to know what there is, to judge what is good, and to understand what things mean. One desires knowledge, perhaps even by nature as Aristotle would say, but more than this one fashions interpretations, invents significance, creates artifacts, and decides upon what is important. Beneath the preoccupations of everyday life is an ontological understanding of being and of human being, and an imperative to impose some order on an existence that always threatens to dissolve into nothingness. Human existence is characterized by strivings of a great many kinds—for knowledge and security, power and overcoming, pleasure and happiness, but the pursuit of meaning may be the most fundamental. It is an existence that is organized around meanings that are less found than made and that afford lives with a basic orientation and structure.1

Viktor Frankl spoke in this connection of the "will to meaning" as the primary motivation in human life:

> This meaning is unique and specific in that it must and can be fulfilled by him alone; only then does it achieve a significance which will satisfy his own _will_ to meaning. There are some authors who contend that meanings and values are "nothing but defense mechanisms, reaction formations and sublimations." But as for myself, I would not be willing to live merely for the sake of my "defense mechanisms," nor would I be ready to die merely for the sake of my "reaction formations." Man, however, is able to live and even to die for the sake of his ideals and values!2

This existential psychiatrist repeated an observation frequently articulated by philosophers of existence that human beings are sustained by meanings that are ours to determine. The human being inhabits a lifeworld of relations, practices, and significations that constitute our historical inheritance, while remaining open in an important measure to free decision. Its condition as a being-in-the-world and a being in culture is, in the words of Clifford Geertz, to be "suspended in webs of significance he himself has spun."3 Meaning is no metaphysical given but is an invention characterized in every case by contingency and fragility. It is because meaninglessness remains an ever-present possibility that José Ortega y Gasset spoke of our existence as "a living problem":

> man lives in perpetual danger of being dehumanized. With him, not only is it problematic and contingent whether this or that will happen to him... but at times what happens to man is nothing less than _ceasing to be man_. And this is true not only abstractly and generically but it holds of our own individuality. Each one of us is always in danger of not being the unique and untransferable _self_ which he is.4

Our very existence is a "problem," a question or, as Martin Heidegger expressed it, an "issue." Shall one be oneself or something that is not oneself, the anonymous anyone or some dehumanized entity? Like Nietzsche's tightrope walker, the human being ventures on a rope stretched between animal and overman and suspended over an abyss. Nothingness beckons, yet the will to meaning persists and an imperative, in the words of Albert Camus, "to live and to create in the very midst of the desert."5

The abyss—loss, meaninglessness, dehumanization, and ultimately mortality—conditions our existence, and the vital matter is to see how this is so. The formulations of the point are many: the "death of God" makes possible and necessary a "revaluation of values"; experiencing the absurd is a necessary condition of creative rebellion; the poverty of immanence creates the possibility of transcendence; the anticipation of death is a precondition of authenticity. The philosophers of existence had an eye for this, and a vital part of their legacy is a sense of life that refuses false consolation at the same time that it refuses all pessimism. The human being comports itself by understanding, and the meanings and values that orient it are grounded in no absolute but are inventions in every case.6 Its own artifacts sustain it, even while it so often regards these as transcendent deliverances. These two propositions are inseparable and afford a structure to our existence: the gods have fled and the existing individual is free—to decide what things mean for us and to choose a manner of living, for neither is a metaphysical given. What is given is facticity, finitude, and above all mortality, and while freedom is conditioned and limited at every turn it is not sheer necessity that determines what we are but how we stand to it. How we appropriate a tradition, cope with finitude and loss, and comport ourselves in the face of death are decisions—not Hobbesian preferences made in a vacuum of history but creative responses to the givens of our existence. To be human is not to be hemmed in by necessity but to engage with it and often to struggle against it using all the capacities with which our species is endowed.7 Nietzsche's tightrope walker and Camus' Sisyphus are both telling metaphors in the sense not that the individual is condemned to a pointless fate but that it realizes itself in overcoming and rebelling against what merely is and has been, and stands to its condition in a relation of neither submission nor sovereignty but of unceasing tension. The only redemption in human life, Nietzsche believed, is to "redeem the past and to transform every 'It was' into an 'I wanted it thus!'"8 He was speaking of a life task that faces formidable obstacles and at which one can easily fail.

Among the imperatives of human existence is the invention of meanings which may be broadly shared or specific to one's circumstances but which must be authentically self-chosen if one's life is to be properly one's own. This requires the cultivation of inwardness. Death itself is an affair of inwardness. This " _ownmost_ potentiality-of-being" and certainty of our existence conditions everything about it and affords an invaluable perspective on its possible meaning—if, that is, we have a way of thinking about the matter and an inclination to pursue it.9 So much here calls for thinking: facing up to mortality, redeeming the past, imposing the will to meaning on something that can appear to defy it. How are we to proceed? The ways of the world direct attention toward surfaces and away precisely from our own inner depths and the task of cultivating the kind of inwardness that is a condition of a good life. When Socrates provocatively announced that "life without this sort of examination is not worth living" he was calling human beings back from the preoccupation with outward things and toward another way of being.10 This is not unlike the inward turn for which reflection upon death calls, a call to put aside the distractions of everydayness and to know thyself. Conditions of modern life often lead us to overlook that there are deeper, quieter ways of being alive, that in addition to material gain and respectability there are the tasks of pursuing what is good and being something that is inherently worth being. This requires retreat from the mundane, some venturing of mind that is easily mistaken for escapism or self-indulgence but that is their antithesis. This point finds metaphorical expression in what Ortega y Gasset has called the "great withdrawals into the self" undertaken by so many of the ancient prophets of religion:

> It is no chance that all the great founders of religions preceded their apostolates by famous retreats. Buddha withdraws to the forest; Mahomet withdraws to his tent, and even there he withdraws from his tent by wrapping his head in his cloak; above all, Jesus goes apart into the desert for forty days.11

Such withdrawals make possible a mode of engagement that issues from a more profound region of the self. Effective action has its basis here, in an inwardness that overcomes both the willful insensibility of the world and the existential vacuum brought on by the "death of God."

While the imperative to recall oneself is not limited to any particular experience, it confronts us with special urgency in the encounter with death. It is a demanding task, and one made still more difficult by the nearly pathological fear of solitude that pervades modern culture. The predominating temper of the age is not inclined toward inwardness and solitude but rather frantically in the opposite direction, as if glimpsing the abyss within and resolving not to look upon it. As Rollo May observed,

> Is it not too much to say that modern man, sensing his own inner hollowness, is afraid that if he should not have his regular associates around him, should not have the talisman of his daily program and his routine of work, if he should forget what time it is, that he would feel, though in an inarticulate way, some threat like that which one experiences on the brink of psychosis? When one's customary ways of orienting oneself are threatened, and one is without other selves around one, one is thrown back on inner resources and inner strength, and this is what modern people have neglected to develop. Hence loneliness is a real, not imaginary, threat to many of them.12

We are speaking less of a psychological affliction or moral failing than of an existential phenomenon, an absence of meaning brought on by the collapse of ancient worldviews. If God is dead, nothing holds significance and all is permitted. This idea is seldom articulated explicitly yet its modern prevalence causes solitude to be misinterpreted as a form of escapism for which the antidote is a gregariousness in which nothing quite comes into focus, silence is menacing and loneliness dreaded. It is again the philosophers of existence who brought this to our attention: the collapse of the center, the loss of an absolute standard of values, and the imperative to create significance in a desolate world. If "every age has its collective neurosis," as Frankl noted, it is the "existential vacuum which is the mass neurosis of the present time."13 Nietzsche first brought the phenomenon to our attention: nihilism, in a word, was the diagnosis of this cultural physician, a lost spirit brought on by disconnection from the instincts and the collapse of the Platonic-Christian worldview. It is also, he hoped, a malaise that might precede a revaluation of values, and it is a hope that we may share. May similarly described an emptiness and ennui as pervasive in our times, a condition that he also traced to the collapse of a "center of values" by which lives since ancient times had been fundamentally oriented. Its loss, while a necessary stage in the transition from tutelage to maturity, at the same time creates profound upheaval in our ways of thinking and living. It is a transition fraught with anxiety since the human being must draw upon resources that may be undeveloped. In consequence, many experience a general "feeling of emptiness or vacuity" and a sense of being "powerless to do anything effective about their lives or the world they live in."14

If the center no longer holds, the existing subject faces a decision: to exercise its freedom or surrender to an unkind fate. It either puts its capacities to work in fashioning a worthwhile existence or succumbs to inauthenticity and existential drift. It is a question once again of meaning: if this is not writ large in the heavens then it will have to be invented here and now. The social whole and its institutions will not help us in this. Vaclav Havel observed that the modern world is at a crossroads between a "post-totalitarian" social system dominated by ubiquitous institutions and a social order premised on "the aims of life":

> while life, in its essence, moves towards plurality, diversity, independent self-constitution and self-organization, in short, towards the fulfillment of its own freedom, the post-totalitarian system demands conformity, uniformity, and discipline. While life ever strives to create new and "improbable" structures, the post-totalitarian system contrives to force life into its most probable states.... In everyone there is some longing for humanity's rightful dignity, for moral integrity, for free expression of being and a sense of transcendence over the world of existence. Yet, at the same time, each person is capable of coming to terms with living the lie.15

The lie is the flight into sameness of being, the refusal of all inwardness, and submission where freedom is within our means. The existing individual easily disappears into a function, an object of institutional reckoning, and a consumer of utilities. What Havel called "free expression of being," what Karl Jaspers called Existenz and what Immanuel Kant called dignity, have their basis in an interiority that is outside of utilitarian rationality. When this remains undeveloped, a frantic outer-directedness takes its place. If we can never be still it is because we do not know ourselves, and possibly because we are not ourselves. There is no firm ground within the self, no sense of mystery, transcendence, or of what our existence serves. There is only the everyday business of getting what we want and doing what we must, creating little meaning and much noise. Nihilism is the abyss within, understood not metaphysically but existentially. There is no metaphysical essence of the self, and let us not worry about it. Nor is there a given significance to any human life; let us worry about this, for it falls to us to invent it. Existenz as Jaspers spoke of it—this transcendent mode of subjectivity—is a possibility only, a project that one freely takes up or refuses. Both the project and the refusal come at a price, but the price of the refusal is ultimately higher. How does one face death if one is not oneself, if there is vacuity where inwardness should be?

We have a predicament: the heavens are no longer populated by deities profoundly concerned with the fate of humanity and who if duly appeased hold out the promise of victory over death. They have fled and victory is not at hand. These are dark truths perhaps, but we have had a few centuries to get used to the idea. What is to be done? A demystified universe without and an existential vacuum within demand reflection, a way of thinking about our existence that is post-metaphysical and phenomenological, that has been chastened by scientific and philosophical skepticism, that is less grand of scale than worldviews of old and that is more intellectually honest, perhaps also more modest. If One Big Meaning—of life or of death—defies credulity, we require some existential elucidation of the many small meanings that are the difference between a life that is worth the effort and one that is not. What way of thinking is this? Thinking itself, as Heidegger emphasized, is a way, and "on-the-wayness," in Jaspers' phrase, is its salient characteristic. "Philosophy," Jaspers wrote, "means to be on the way. Its questions are more essential than its answers, and every answer becomes a new question."16 If its most vital questions bear on what things mean for us, philosophy strives after a knowledge that is in some measure elusive and preparatory. Socrates spoke of philosophy as a preparation for death, and we can hold onto this idea so long as it does not become a metaphysical story about souls. Thinking is a preparing and a striving after understanding, and it does not always culminate in a doctrine. Sometimes it resolves matters and at others it opens onto mystery, a kind of expanse in which we are not so much formulating positions as coming to terms with the unknowable.

Nowhere is this more the case than in the confrontation with death. This is not a problem in need of solution but what Gabriel Marcel called a mystery in need of reflection. We stand before this brute fact of our existence with many questions and little knowledge. What is the meaning of this, and what sense can be made of a matter that calls so absolutely for thinking, while being so absolutely elusive? What resources is philosophy capable of providing here? It prepares us for death, Socrates declared; twenty-four centuries later are we then prepared? Perhaps not, or perhaps it is the nature of preparation itself that this also is continually on the way, that we are never truly prepared for anything at all until we are in the midst of it. Preparing, questioning, thinking—these are forever in process, a matter of being poised or attuned in a certain way without having attained some final condition.17 No grand doctrine is to be expected here, no victory, and rather little consolation. If it is comfort we seek, there is no shortage of illusions that will suffice for the purpose. The course of inquiry that follows does not endeavor to provide more than a modicum of consolation, but it will speak of hope and acceptance, the search for and imposition of meaning, and the possibility of facing death honestly. Our questions are existential and our method phenomenological: what is needed, I shall argue, is a way of thinking about human existence that is in equal parts life-affirming and mindful of mortality. This is no simple compatibilism of opposites but a descriptive account of our lived experience, an interpretation of the manner in which an honest contemplation of death makes possible a way of being that is freer, more humble, and more open.

We do not think about death in isolation from its opposite, for the significance of one differs little from the other. Socrates remains the exemplar, a man who died as he lived, his values intact and his integrity preserved against formidable obstacles. His death still speaks to us not because of any doctrine of the soul but because of his way of thinking in a different sense—his comportment in the face of death, his acceptance of mortality, and his resoluteness in holding onto a meaning that had sustained him in life. A life that is empty of significance culminates in a death that is no different. It does not go without saying that our death even belongs to us, or that our life does. As Rainer Maria Rilke expressed it, "The desire to have a death of one's own is becoming more and more rare. In a short time it will be as rare as a life of one's own."18 How is one's death one's own when the modern reality is that we are born and we die in institutions (if we are unlucky we spend a great part of our lives there as well), where the dying are swept up in the machinery in Kafkaesque fashion? We do not die as Socrates did; the obstacles to a meaningful death today are institutional, technological, and very un-Greek, yet the same imperative to impose meaning on the meaningless is with us still. A death that is one's own requires free decision—not vacuous utilitarian preferences but an authentic response to this most ultimate given of our existence. It calls for thinking and for a way of thinking, a way of comporting ourselves in the face of mystery that refuses all denial and falsehood, that is accepting and hopeful, and that is resolved to remain true to the life one has led. A good death is not a happy one but a fitting end to a good life.

Dying is a process and a task—when, that is, time and conditions allow, for there is also the decline into incapacity as well as sudden and unexpected death. There is a sense in which all death is unexpected, but an honest contemplation need not and ought not await the diagnosis of terminal illness. Death may be kept before the mind throughout life, its foreshadowing not evaded but directly perceived. One does not stare at the abyss, but it does profit one to look into it frequently and also cautiously for, as Nietzsche pointed out, "the abyss also looks into you."19 The task of thinking is to prepare—to face death as the person one has been, with one's faculties about one and with some sense of an ending that is more than a physiological fact. Life has the last word. "[T]his flame, which is life," as Nietzsche expressed it, presses invariably forward. It strives toward meaning, transcendence, an affirmation of existence, and ultimately toward more life. It is most itself in reaching beyond itself. To cite the same author once more, "And life itself told me this secret: 'Behold,' it said, 'I am that _which must overcome itself again and again_.'"20

The course of reflection that follows is hardly without precedent in the philosophical tradition. Indeed one finds in this tradition a notable commonality of sentiments on the subject of mortality which has roots in ancient thought and that reaches a kind of high point in existential phenomenology. The inquiry that follows examines philosophical conceptions of death, and one of its tasks is to identify this partial overlapping of sentiments especially as articulated in the writings of the philosophers of existence while also drawing on ideas from a variety of historical figures and some more recent writers. My argument emerges from this larger conversation. Our basic question bears on the meaning of death: not what it is in an objective sense but what bearing it has, or is capable of having, on life. How are we to understand this most elemental and inescapable fact of our existence, and what resources does philosophy provide in creating some intelligibility in the face of what is in the final analysis a mystery? Our task is elusive, and part of its elusiveness is that should we proceed phenomenologically we must contend with the fact that death is not a phenomenon in the sense that it "is not given as an object to the living," as Bernard Schumacher puts it.21 "Death is not an event in life," Wittgenstein also noted; "we do not live to experience death."22 To cite Schumacher again,

> Contemporary philosophers, on the whole, although they are from very different schools of thought, agree in saying that death is "inconceivable," "unthinkable," "enigmatic, indefinable," "inexplicable," "inconceptualiz-able," "a _terra incognita_ , a mysterious and unknown territory"; that it is "undiscoverable," "the enigma," the "most unknown of unknowns," and the "nothingness of knowing."23

Is the phenomenological method therefore unavailable to us? The reason it is not is that while death does not present itself as an object of experience, what Michel de Montaigne called "death's approaches" most certainly do and, more than this, provide our existence with a certain orientation.24 What is experientially evident is death not as an object of experience and knowledge but as a meaningful anticipation. In the words of one phenomenologist,

> Thus, as Heidegger also said, death is the meaning of life—not as an event _in_ life, to be sure, but as the ever-present "coloring" or atmosphere of life. "Death, in the widest sense," he remarked, "is a phenomenon of life." Death is a way to be, which Dasein takes over as soon as it is. "As soon as man comes to life, he is at once old enough to die." Montaigne had already made the same point: "The first day of your birth sets you on a track of dying as well as of living.... The continuous work of your life is to build death. You are in death when you are in life."25

What is to be thought, then, is this "coloring" or "atmosphere" itself, "a way to be" that is at once "in life" and "in death. " We are proceeding phenomenologically in attending to this and in bracketing metaphysical questions that transcend what is experientially evident. What we experience, and what philosophers since ancient times have in various ways brought to our attention, is the ultimate inseparability of life and death as objects of meaning. As Herbert Fingarette summarizes a point so often repeated in the philosophical tradition, "To try to contemplate the meaning of my death is in fact to reveal to myself the meaning of my life."26 Death as meaning, anticipation, and process falls within the experience of human beings and calls for a reflection that is in Søren Kierkegaard's sense "unscientific" and existential rather than objectivistic and metaphysical. Death confronts us as a mystery as well as a certain kind of task; as Jacques Derrida expressed it, "it remains for everyone to take his own death _upon himself_ " as one takes upon oneself a project or a question. This is a reflection that is at once philosophical and personal, universalizable in some respects and in others radically particular. "One" does not die; the existing individual does, alone with their fate. "No one can die for me," as Derrida put it, "if 'for me' means instead of me, in my place."27 What, then, are the dimensions of this task, and how does one comport oneself in the face of mystery?

How are we to think about death, this most elusive and vague of subjects, and at a time when our culture appears not only to be utterly bent on avoiding the task but in a way even incapable of doing so? A worldview that is dominated by science, technology, and instrumental rationality possesses few resources for thinking in any but the most superficial ways about the more ultimate matters of our existence. Learning from the ancients is imperative here, not only for the usual reason—that we do not originate ideas in a vacuum of history—but because it is sometimes necessary to think outside of where we are, to whatever extent this is possible of course. From the perspective of the present, death is essentially a scientific and especially a medical matter, a certain kind of problem that is to be reckoned with or managed but not thought in any sense that transcends the empirical. Contemporary philosophy also regards it as an ethical problem, or as giving rise to issues such as the right to die or to physician-assisted suicide, but in a way that too often presses the phenomena into a theoretical frame that misses the point that is our mortality. Death, as the ancients realized far better than we have, is not a problem and, what is more, it is not bad, or not exactly. In a secular age it is viewed as an object of empirical knowledge and the great nemesis of modern medicine, however for the greater part of human history it is a matter that calls for a different kind or quality of thinking, one that is undoubtedly ethical but not in the resolutely epistemological way that is favored in a good deal of the contemporary philosophical literature. Reflection upon death leads invariably into the vicinity of ethics, into the question of our existence itself and how we are living it. The great teachers of this are largely premodern and, among moderns, those who borrow heavily from the ancients and those whom the ancients regarded as ancient. I shall be discussing in the first three chapters of this book the modern denial of death, the history of death rituals, and the question of suicide not in order to provide an exhaustive theoretical account of any of these matters but in order to prepare the ground for the line of thinking that the final three chapters pursue. There is more to say about the history of death rituals, the ethics of suicide, and the culture of denial than what I attempt here, but these chapters provide an initial orientation to how we may think about death in a way that is not only historically informed but philosophically richer than a scientific-technological worldview makes possible. The final three chapters begin with a discussion of Heidegger's conception of "being-toward-death," what I consider to be the most important philosophical statement on death in the modern literature. The examined life, as the ancients taught and as Heidegger reminded us, involves a certain preparation for death. Indeed our very being is an anticipation of the end, a foreshadowing and a becoming familiar with this most certain of certainties, and not in the manner of any merely empirical fact. Death conditions our existence. Thinking about it must bear on the ways in which this is so. How far these chapters surpass Heidegger, other philosophers of existence, or the tradition itself matters not at all. The aim in thinking is not always to say what is new, and how much of what follows is truly without precedent I cannot say. What I would say is that when the subject is death, if it has truly not been said before—by philosophers, artists, religious thinkers, and other mortals—it is probably not true.

## Notes

1 There is no word in English that properly splits the difference between discovery and invention. Meaning, I shall be arguing, or the pursuit of it goes to the very heart of the species that we are, but whether the meanings that we organize our lives around are found or made is an unanswerable question. I shall be speaking of meanings as inventions, but this is not to suggest that they are invented out of nothing. There is no pure invention in any case, but objective discoveries, something that we merely happen upon, they are not. The meaning of anything—a word, work of art, historical event, death or life itself—is not some entity out there in fully constituted form prior to our discovery of it, but nor is it pure fiction.

2 Viktor Frankl, _Man's Search for Meaning_ (New York: Washington Square Press, 1985), 121.

3 Clifford Geertz, The _Interpretation of Cultures_ (New York: Basic Books, 1973), 5.

4 José Ortega y Gasset, _Man and People_ (New York: W. W. Norton, 1963), 25.

5 Albert Camus, _The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays_ (New York: Vintage Books, 1955), v.

6 Julian Young observes that "attempts to answer the question of the meaning of life" in the Western tradition have tended to work under two assumptions: "life's meaning is taken to be, first, _universal_ , the same for everyone, and, second, _independent of choice_." Both assumptions may be rejected, he notes, without any dire implication. Should we take the view that "there is no such thing as _the_ —universal—meaning of life, that no meaning is written into the metaphysical structure of reality," nonetheless "one might reflect, that doesn't mean that _my_ life can't have meaning. It doesn't mean that I can't _create_ meaning in my life, my own _individual_ meaning." Julian Young, _The Death of God and the Meaning of Life_ (New York: Routledge, 2003), 84–5.

7 "[T]he overcoming and mastery of mere natural necessity," as Herbert Marcuse expressed it, is "the distinction of human existence and endeavor." Herbert Marcuse, "The Ideology of Death," in Herman Feifel, ed., _The Meaning of Death_ (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1959), 65.

8 Friedrich Nietzsche, _Thus Spoke Zarathustra: A Book for Everyone and No One_ , trans. R. J. Hollingdale (New York: Penguin, 2003), 161.

9 Martin Heidegger, _Being and Time_ , trans. J. Stambaugh (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2010), 241.

10 Plato, _Socrates' Defense_ , in _The Collected Dialogues of Plato_ , ed. Edith Hamilton and Huntington Cairns (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987), 38a.

11 Ortega y Gasset, _Man and People_ , 35.

12 Rollo May, _Man's Search for Himself_ (New York: Signet, 1967), 29.

13 Frankl, _Man's Search for Meaning_ , 152.

14 May, _Man's Search for Himself_ , 22.

15 Vaclav Havel, _Living in Truth_ , ed. Jan Vladislav (Boston: Faber and Faber, 1989), 54.

16 Karl Jaspers, _Way to Wisdom_ , trans. R. Manheim (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1976), 12.

17 Victor Hugo articulated the point as follows:

> It was a priest. He was not the usual chaplain to the prison. This was ominous. He seated himself opposite to me, with a quiet smile: then shook his head, and raised his eyes to heaven. That is to say to the vault of my cell. I understood him. "My son," said he, "are you prepared?" I answered, in a low tone: "I am not prepared, but I am ready."
>
> Victor Hugo, _Last Day of a Condemned_ , trans. Eugenia de B. (New York: Howard Fertig, 1977), 108

18 Cited in Pat McNees, ed., _Dying A Book of Comfort_ (New York: Warner Books, 1996), 39.

19 "Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster. And when you look long into an abyss, the abyss also looks into you." Nietzsche, _Beyond Good and Evil_ , trans. W. Kaufmann (New York: Vintage, 1989), sec. 146, p. 89.

20 Nietzsche, _Thus Spoke Zarathustra_ , 68, 138.

21 Bernard N. Schumacher, _Death and Mortality in Contemporary Philosophy_ , trans. M. Miller (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 118.

22 Ludwig Wittgenstein, _Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus_ , trans. D. F. Pears and B. F. McGuiness (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1969), sec. 6.4311.

23 Schumacher, _Death and Mortality in Contemporary Philosophy_ , 120–1.

24 Michel de Montaigne, _The Complete Essays_ , trans. M. A. Screech (New York: Penguin, 2003), 418.

25 Gary B. Madison, _On Suffering: Philosophical Reflections on What It Means To Be Human_ (Hamilton: Les Érables, 2009), 28.

26 Herbert Fingarette, _Death: Philosophical Soundings_ (Chicago: Open Court, 1996), 5. James P. Carse expresses the point as follows: "Death, perceived as discontinuity, is not that which robs life of its meaning, but that which makes life's meaningfulness possible." James P. Carse, _Death and Existence: A Conceptual History of Human Mortality_ (New York: John Wiley and Sons, 1980), 9. Michael Allen Fox provides another example:

> Accordingly, the pursuit of meaning is not an exercise in intellectual construction but rather a response to life's questioning of us. Meaning is personal, individually shaped, contextual, and situational. The sense of meaning undergoes change over time, but generally we build up meaning rather than lose it if our lives are functioning well. Suffering and facing death are occasions for the discovery of meaning, as they are experiences that are unique to each of us.
>
> Michael Allen Fox, _The Remarkable Existentialists_ (Amherst: Humanity Books, 2009), 281–2

27 Jacques Derrida, _The Gift of Death_ , trans. D. Wills (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 44, 41.

# 1 The denial of death

We live in a death-denying society. The salient characteristic of death as it is spoken of today is unreality. Its finality is merely apparent, its permanence temporary, its necessity a contingency when viewed in the right way. It is not an appropriate topic of conversation and is a matter best left for experts, most especially medical professionals, funeral directors, and clergy. They know what to do, what to say and to leave unsaid. Within medical settings the dying themselves are often swept up in the machinery of the institution while the reality of impending death is treated not as a mystery in need of reflection but as a problem in need of solution. When a solution eludes us we fall into silence. What does one say to the dying, except as one of Leo Tolstoy's characters puts it, "We shall all of us die"?1 But what comfort is this? We shall not all die. Death is for others. It happens to strangers, and that it happens to them is quite how it ought to be. For the anonymous anyone, death is a fact of life and entirely unobjectionable. For the loved one, it is an offense, and for oneself it is unthinkable. More than this, it is impossible. It ought not to happen. If it comes to us at all, it is as a thief in the night. "Why me?" is the question. "There are other houses in this neighborhood; why should mine be singled out for such an unkind fate? There must be a mistake. Death is not for me; it is for others. " Even others do not die; they "pass away," as it is said, and escape this mortal coil. They are on a journey of sorts, and it is to a better place they go.

Denial is often spoken of today as a certain kind of psychological or quasi-medical condition, yet at a more fundamental level of analysis it is an existential one. It is no mere pathology of the mind but a way of thinking and of comporting oneself in the face of the unfaceable. It is a self-regarding evasion, rather as if, were we to contemplate our mortality in the full light of day, we might find ourselves susceptible to it. It is not to be wondered at that we should fall into this, for what is the alternative? What way of thinking is even possible here? For medicine, death is a state of the body, and "occurs when there is the (permanent and irreversible) cessation of heart and lung functioning" or brain functioning.2 For metaphysics, it is again a state or condition of some kind, this time of the person rather than the body.3 For practical life, it is a task: of getting our affairs in order, contacting relatives, and keeping busy. For religion, it is a matter of transcendence and entry into the afterlife. Death calls for thinking—for a way of thinking—yet the ways that are presented to us are each in their own way inadequate. Medicine, metaphysics, and practical life are likewise silent about the human significance of death, while religion too often prefers comfort and credulity over intellectual honesty. This most human of phenomena is an existential, urgent, and profoundly personal matter and it calls for a way of thinking that regards it as such, for rigorous phenomenological interpretation and existential elucidation. How should we think about death, what does it mean, and what light does it shed on life and how we are living it? So long as it is comfort that we seek, this line of questioning is not promising. Short of falsehoods, there is little consolation to be had. Whether denial is a refusal to think or itself a way of thinking may be debated, yet it is not surprising that it is our norm, and moralism does not help. We have eminently good reasons for avoiding the matter altogether. It is the most disagreeable of subjects at the same time that it is inescapable and absolutely devoid of solution. What profit is to be had in reflection? If not comfort, then what? Knowledge? Truth? If so, what kind of knowledge and what manner of truth? Is it propositional knowledge that we are seeking—of what becomes of the self after death, of the essence of death, of the afterlife? What truths are to be had here are mostly and perhaps exclusively of the order of the trivial: death is a non-functioning of the organism, we shall all die, and some similar propositions, most of them pedestrian and existentially uninteresting. What they tend to miss is the human significance of death.

I shall be speaking of denial not as pathology but as its veritable antithesis, as the most commonplace and altogether human attitude we have toward death. It is an attitude that we must endeavor to overcome, but the inability or refusal to do so is not fundamentally a medical condition but an existential one. Elisabeth Kübler-Ross pathologized an attitude that is not only ubiquitous in the modern world but also eminently sane, at least from a certain point of view. Tolstoy brought the phenomenon to our attention over a century ago. His dramatic depiction in "The Death of Ivan Ilych" is as incisive a description of denial as any that we have, yet it is not in his interpretation a diagnosis but something altogether different. The instinct of avoidance that here reaches a fever pitch also reigns supreme in practical life, where the imperative once again is to look away and avoid dwelling on so unprofitable a subject. Funeral rituals walk a tightrope, enjoining us at once toward reflection and, still more perhaps, to avoid morbidness and to sever ties with the deceased lest we follow them to the grave. Moralism serves no purpose here, and if Tolstoy himself succumbed to it at times, we must not. Tolstoy enjoined us to face death—to "look at _It_ , look it straight in the face"—as a consequence of his rather strident brand of Christianity.4 We have a duty to support the dying, not to turn away from them out of cowardice and disconnection. So we do, but the hard edge of his critique comes off when we subtract his religious fervor. The collapse of ancient worldviews which Nietzsche spoke of as the "death of God" calls upon us to rethink the nature and the morality of denial. If denial is an ethical failure, it is a minor and eminently human one. What is called for here is not moral sternness but an attitude that is at once more nuanced and more forgiving. Death is not a moral holiday, yet hemming it round tightly with duties or rights can produce a distortion of its own.

## Denial and morality

The phenomenon of death confronts us as nothing else. Be it the death of a loved one or our own approaching end, the sense of death as no longer abstract possibility but present actuality commands attention in a manner unlike any other experience. In an instant the preoccupations of everyday life recede from view and anxiety gives way to numbness and disorientation, leaving our sense of self and reality in suspension. A single obstinate fact stands before us. "[I]t concentrates his mind wonderfully," Samuel Johnson famously noted, "when aman knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight."5 Seneca had made a similar point in rather unforgiving terms. For most human beings, he noted, "death takes them unawares," feeling both stupefied and cheated by "the shortness of life" when the truth as he saw it is that "we are not given a short life but we make it short, and we are not ill-supplied but wastefulofit" until "we are forced at last by death's final constraint to realize that it has passed away before we knew it was passing."6 Montaigne echoed Seneca in remarking upon a phenomenon that is as odd as it is common:

> however decrepit a man may be, he thinks he still has another twenty years to go in the body, so long as he has Methuselah ahead of him. Silly fool, you! Where your life is concerned, who has decided the term? You are relying on doctors' tales; look at facts and experience instead. As things usually go, you have been living for some time now by favour extraordinary. You have already exceeded the usual term of life; to prove it, just count how many more of your acquaintances have died younger than you are compared with those who have reached your age.7

As long as death remains a topic of abstract discussion we are all philosophers. We speak with great detachment of death as an inevitability and a certainty, and we ponder its mystery and the possibility of a life beyond this life. Few topics are more subject to cliché, known to everyone and quotable as the occasion demands. Oddly mingled with this is a sense in which death remains radically unexpected, no matter what the abstract certainties or the prognosis of the physician. Death leaves us, as Sigmund Freud observed, "badly shaken in our expectations," as if somewhere in the hidden recesses of our being we do not altogether believe in death, most especially our own. "[A]t bottom," the same figure wrote, "no one believes in his own death.... [I]n the unconscious every one of us is convinced of his own immortality."8 That death happens, we understand perfectly. For human beings in the abstract it is a daily occurrence and quite as it ought to be. For acquaintances it is a sobering inevitability, while for the ones we love it is altogether unexpected and for oneself it is unthinkable. This universal human phenomenon was described by Tolstoy as follows:

> The syllogism he had learnt from Kiesewetter's Logic: "Caius is a man, men are mortal, therefore Caius is mortal," had always seemed to him correct as applied to Caius, but certainly not as applied to himself. That Caius—man in the abstract—was mortal, was perfectly correct, but he was not Caius, not an abstract man, but a creature quite, quite separate from all others.9

Tolstoy's narrative recounts the final days of a judge whose life had been spent in the pursuit of social position and the kind of pleasures that typically accompany it. His belief in the dignity of his office and his general manner of living never came into question for Ilych until the realization of impending death compelled a reexamination of his life and revealed what had been unthinkable: that he had not lived as he ought. Beneath the propriety and respectability of his life lay a disconnection from the vital process of living. Reflecting on death revealed for the first time the truth of his life, with unbearable suffering as a consequence. The narrative is a cautionary tale, and Ilych is most all of us. Coexisting within each of us are dark realizations, impossible to deny, and comforting reassurances we shall not be without. If a note of falsity characterizes many familiar attitudes toward death, it is no doubt on account of the instinct of avoidance that here reaches a fever pitch. Among the strategies of denial the code of silence is perhaps the most common. Discussion of this most indelicate subject continues to invite general indignation and revulsion, as if declaring it unfit for conversation would somehow lessen its severity or perhaps abolish it altogether. Death must be spoken of, if at all, in hushed tones, not in the presence of children, in specific contexts only, and by appropriate personages. A second strategy, not unlike the first, often accompanies the code of silence. This is, as Freud also observed, "to reduce death from a necessity to a chance event," perhaps even an unnatural occurrence.10 One of the most frequently asked questions in the event of the death of someone close to us is, "Why this individual?"—as if death were a happenstance from which a kinder fate might have spared them.

We know as an abstract proposition that death happens, but why must it happen to this person, why now, and more to the point, why to me? The voice of cold reason replies, "Why not to this person? This person it shall be—and you as well." We too, we hear with more than a little indignation, shall cease to exist as the person we now are, and perhaps cease to exist in any form. The terror and unnaturalness of it all compel us to seek reassurance that not all is lost, and that, in any event, it is not as bad as it seems. The quest for reassurance is often one in which intellectual honesty and even the well-being of the dying are quickly sacrificed. The reticence and evasion which Tolstoy described as the harshest cruelty inflicted on the dying involve the refusal to look death in the face by denying its reality, minimizing its significance, or diverting attention. It is an evasion supported by medical institutions, the funeral industry, and the various funereal accoutrements. Everything from the lifelike appearance of the deceased to the names of cemeteries and funeral homes gives the appearance of death as an unreality, a condition closely related to sleep, or perhaps a temporary illness. When silence and evasion fail us, human beings through the ages have turned to religion as a source of comfort, with its offer of consolation and promise of a life to come. The victory over death that religion offers in the form of rebirth or salvation has too often been purchased at a prohibitive price, either of regarding life itself as a means to an end or, in the minds of more literal-minded believers, a kind of metaphysical escapism. For the more scientifically minded, recent discussion of the possibility of indefinite life extension provides a variation on the same theme. Technology, many now hope, will provide a kind of secular counterpart to the promise that religion has long held out of a victory over death, this time not in metaphysical but physical form. Perhaps the human lifespan can be indefinitely lengthened or, if not, the body itself may be preserved in a condition of suspended animation until technology has advanced to the point that it can be thawed out and revivified. The faith in technology that is so widespread in our time is, at times at least, existentially impoverished and nowhere more so than here. The denial of death takes many forms, from the religious to the psychological, practical, medical, and scientific, but beneath the surface manifestation is the same underlying phenomenon.

There is nothing surprising in any of this, nor is it quite the kind of moral problem that Tolstoy believed it to be. There are two attitudes that I would urge us to avoid on the subject of denial: the first is the kind of medicalization that we often find in psychology and the helping professions and the second is moral sternness. Tolstoy had a point: resolutely turning our backs on death is not only an act of cruelty to the dying but symptomatic of a profound disconnection from the human beings around us and from life itself. That many in modern culture have become disconnected from something that is for lack of a better word called life is an observation that Fyodor Dostoevsky was also making in the latter part of the nineteenth century. Dostoevsky expressed this most eloquently through the character of the nameless underground man in _Notes from Underground_ as follows:

> [W]e have all lost touch with life, we all limp, each to a greater or lesser degree. In fact, we have lost touch so badly that we often feel a kind of loathing for genuine "living life," and hence cannot endure being reminded of it. We've reached a point where we virtually regard "living life" as hard labor, almost servitude, and we all agree in private that it's much better "according to books." And why do we sometimes fidget, why do we fuss, what are we asking for? We ourselves don't know, for, after all, it will be worse for us if our silly whims are granted. Just try, just give us, for example, more independence; untie the hands of any one of us, broaden our scope of action, relax the tutelage over us, and we... . Why, I assure you, we shall immediately beg to be placed under tutelage again.11

Nietzsche as well noted the extent to which human beings had become disconnected from the instincts and existentially lost as a consequence both of this and of a larger phenomenon of nihilism. In related ways, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Nietzsche, and other existential thinkers have commented on the manner and extent to which modern humanity has tended to lose its bearings or a sense of the meaning of our existence, with the denial of death as a consequence. It is a condition from which philosophers are also not exempt, as Ortega y Gasset remarked:

> To the shame of philosophers it must be said that they have never seen the radical phenomenon that is our life. They have always turned their backs on it, and it has been the poets and novelists, but above all the 'ordinary man,' who has been aware of it with its modes and situations.12

When a good deal of our existence is lived in a mist of unreflection, meaning can be far to seek. It is what philosophers since Socrates have called the unexamined life, and it is neither to be wondered at nor recommended. It can be described as a form of disconnection—from life, from other human beings or some larger sense of the meaning of our lives—a moral problem, a spiritual sickness of sorts, or perhaps all three, but fundamentally it is a thoughtlessness that is not unique to modern times or to any particular subset of the human species. Whether the examined life has ever constituted the norm in any particular civilization at any time is eminently doubtful, and it is not our norm today. Even those who do cultivate it will often give our subject a wide berth, and for reasons that are well understandable. Serious reflection on the darker aspect of our existence readily deteriorates into depressive wallowing or a pessimism that is little preferable to denial. Thinking about death, honestly and without illusion, is necessary from the point of view of life itself and living what philosophy since ancient times has called not only the examined but the good life. The ultimate importance of our topic is the light that it sheds on how we are living. The denial of death, this most human of failings and perfect commonplace, must be overcome. We may speak of this as a moral imperative, but in doing so let us leave aside all sternness. "The patient is in denial," says the voice of detachment, yet let the one who says this be cautious, for when their time comes they may find themselves in a similar condition.

If unreality is the salient fact about death as we speak of it today, it is due to an unreflection that should not be viewed in too severe a way. Overcoming denial is a project of coming to terms with the human condition in its totality, and it is no small undertaking. It may not be compared with denial in its other forms—of addiction, for instance—for we are speaking not of a problem that permits of any straightforward solution but of our condition itself. We are mortal, and we require a way of thinking about this fact that is free of illusion. We need a way of comporting ourselves, morally and intellectually, in the face of death and of coming to terms with what in our existential condition we cannot change. We need, as Tolstoy wrote, to "look at _It_ ," for doing so is a necessary condition of facing up to our existence itself. Indeed, if there is a single theme that thinkers in this field have dwelled upon with the greatest frequency it is the necessity of overcoming denial. As one contemporary philosopher summarizes this frequently expressed view,

> Death has become taboo. Our relation to death is one of evasion or escape; we escape it through denial of death, or fleeing into forgetfulness, living in what Sartre called a counterfeit immortality—believing this will go on forever—or we escape the fact of death through forms of belief in the afterlife, which has taken on new variants.13

Philippe Ariès has described this as a peculiarly modern phenomenon, the like of which was largely unknown prior to the nineteenth century:

> Death, so omnipresent in the past that it was familiar, would be effaced, would disappear. It would become shameful and forbidden.... At its beginning doubtlessly lies a sentiment already expressed during the second half of the nineteenth century: those surrounding the dying person had a tendency to spare him and to hide from him the gravity of his condition.... But this sentiment [he continues]... very rapidly was covered over by a different sentiment, a new sentiment characteristic of modernity: one must avoid—no longer for the sake of the dying person, but for society's sake, for the sake of those close to the dying person—the disturbance and the overly strong and unbearable emotion caused by the ugliness of dying and by the very presence of death in the midst of a happy life, for it is henceforth given that life is always happy or should always seem to be so.14

Ariès' hypothesis that denial is a peculiarly modern phenomenon may well be questioned—Ernest Becker, for instance, believed it to be a universal occurrence which merely takes different forms in different cultures—however his observation that in our times happiness is held to be something of an entitlement seems plainly true. If the thought of death, many now reason, does not promote happiness, it can only be counterproductive to life's singular purpose. This is another manifestation of what in "At a Graveside" Kierkegaard called "postponement," that "false flatterer" and "hypocritical deceiver" that had become a commonplace by the nineteenth century and the antithesis to which he called "earnestness." "Death is the schoolmaster of earnestness," he wrote, not in the sense that it forces the student into learning, but indirectly: "death says, 'I exist; if anyone wants to learn from me, then let him come to me.' Only in this way does death occupy one in earnestness."15 The only morality where denial is concerned is to think of death and to think it in earnest, free of the illusions with which our tradition provides us. Whether we take our earnestness in the religious direction that Kierkegaard recommended is another matter.

## Denial as pathology

The contemporary alternative to regarding denial in a moral-religious light is the medical model. Especially since the publication of Kübler-Ross' On _Death and Dying_ in 1969, denial has been conceived as an early stage in the dying process which with therapeutic support may be succeeded eventually by acceptance. The advantages of the medical-psychological model are its scientificity and its simplicity. Regarding denial as a somewhat predictable object of scientific knowledge allows us to strip away the unclarity of existential mystery and to simplify: denial is a psychological problem that permits of relatively straightforward solution. The therapist's task is to guide the patient through the five stages of the dying process. These are denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. This rather tidy sequence begins with the patient refusing to acknowledge their condition, preferring to cling to illusions rather than face the truth.

Kübler-Ross described denial as follows:

>... the patient's first reaction may be a temporary state of shock from which he recuperates gradually. When his initial feeling of numbness begins to disappear and he can collect himself again, man's usual response is "No, it cannot be me." Since in our unconscious mind we are all immortal, it is almost inconceivable for us to acknowledge that we too have to face death. Depending very much on how a patient is told, how much time he has to gradually acknowledge the inevitable happening, and how he has prepared throughout life to cope with successful situations, he will gradually drop his denial and use less radical defense mechanisms.

Denial is an extreme and normally temporary device by which the dying patient wards off unacceptable truths. It is rarely maintained throughout the course of the dying process, assuming adequate time, and occurs in some form in virtually all terminally ill patients. One often finds patients in this stage in a mad search for a physician who will offer a more agreeable diagnosis, seeking test after test, and generally refusing to believe the facts that are presented to them. "Denial," she writes, "functions as a buffer after unexpected shocking news, allows the patient to collect himself and, with time, mobilize other... defenses."16

The ordered sequence of experiences that constitutes the dying process, on her account, is comparable to the experiences of those grieving the death of another, and is regarded by Kübler-Ross as so many distinct and universal stages that are passed through in a single order of succession. One does not skip stages, and many do not advance beyond the initial phases of denial and anger. Since Kübler-Ross' investigations, other psychologists have noted similarities in the emotional responses of the terminally ill while sometimes rejecting her assertion that these are altogether discrete stages passed through in a single and predictable order. Edwin Shneidman, for one, describes more subtly

>... a hive of affect, in which there is a constant coming and going. The emotional stages seem to include a constant interplay between disbelief and hope and, against these as background, a waxing and waning of anguish, terror, acquiescence and surrender, rage and envy, disinterest and ennui, pretense, taunting and daring and even yearning for death—all these in the context of bewilderment and pain.17

Shneidman's description surpasses Kübler-Ross' in terms of phenomenological adequacy. The process he describes is notably less tidy and indeed difficult to speak of in terms of stages at all. The notion of a stage suggests a teleologically ordered sequence, as in the educational process grade four is a discrete stage occurring precisely between grades three and five. One does not hop between grades twelve and two and back again, or if one does then we are no longer speaking of distinct grades but a different kind of process. We can speak in similar terms of the process of human growth as comprising stages, with adolescence falling precisely and predictably between childhood and early adulthood. It is not impossible in either process for one to become stalled or to move backwards in the sense of psychological regression, but such cases are normally of limited duration in a process that unfolds in a single direction. Kindergarten constitutes the first stage in the process of formal education, as infancy is the first stage in the maturational process. It is in this sense that denial, for Kübler-Ross, is stage one in a five-step process. If Shneidman's description is accurate, as I believe it is, we must give up the notion of denial as a stage and speak in non-teleological terms of an experience with a meaning, and one that is not necessarily symptomatic of mental disturbance.

Why speak of the denial of death as a medical phenomenon? Other forms of denial are also spoken of in this way. The classic denials of the alcoholic or drug addict are familiar cases in point, as are the countless instances of patients battling mental illness in its numerous forms. It is a common diagnosis—"The patient is in denial"—and it presupposes a few things. It presupposes, first, that the speaker is not suffering from the same condition; second, that the speaker is possessed of the relevant expertise; third, that they know the truth of the patient's condition better than the patient him- or herself; and finally that there is a truth here to be known, that denial is a psychological fact, a symptom, and indeed a condition which is empirically knowable and therapeutically treatable. There is much to say about each of these assumptions, but I shall limit myself to the last of these. When we compare the denial of death to the denial of the addict or the mentally ill we are using the same word to describe disparate phenomena. This is always a dangerous proposition, and I also wish to retain the word but in a non-medical connotation. Denial as I wish to speak of it is neither necessarily nor usually symptomatic of psychological disturbance but is a willful evasion of our condition, and an evasion less comparable to denial in its properly medical-psychological forms than to ordinary forms of obliviousness and unreflection. There are matters that no matter how consequential we believe them to be, the great majority of human beings strongly prefer not to think about, and not because they are suffering from an affliction but for straightforward reasons—mostly because they are unpleasant, arduous, and not obviously conducive to self-interest. What does it profit us, we might ask, to undertake serious reflection when there are other and altogether more pleasant matters with which we might occupy ourselves? This is the attitude not of the afflicted but of ordinary humanity. On the medical model denial must either be healthy or unhealthy, normal or pathological. This is what the classificatory scheme requires, and if it is not one then it is the other. Denial is no more a moral problem, spiritual sickness, or existential condition than drug addiction is. Denial is denial.

If the matter were this straightforward then working through denial should be a relatively uncomplicated matter. It is a problem with a solution, which is for the therapist to lead the patient through the several stages with the help of appropriate therapeutic procedures. Are matters quite so simple? There is very little in human experience that is uncomplicated, and it is unlikely that something as momentous and subterranean as the dying process should conform to as simple a model as what Kübler-Ross described, or to any model. Social scientists are sometimes excessively attached to theoretical models that clarify and simplify the phenomena at the price of distorting them. Crystal clarity is a surface phenomenon, and when we are speaking of the depths of the psyche let us not expect to find matters tidy and well ordered, measurable and knowable with scientific exactitude.18 One observation of Kübler-Ross' is straightforwardly true: denial must be worked through in one fashion or another. The dying patient and those who grieve for them must honestly face this experience and the conflicting emotions that belong to it, or acceptance will remain elusive. To work through an experience of this kind, we must not repress the affects connected with loss but experience them fully. As creatures of passion, we digest profound experiences by expressing freely the emotions that they evoke. If this is something of a commonplace today, a related observation is not. The human being is not only, as psychologists know, a creature of passion but, as philosophers know, a rational being, and we do not cease being this in the face of death. Part of what it means to work through denial is to think it through, to refuse all self-deception and honestly reflect on the mystery of death and what our own may signify. Death bears a meaning that is profound and emotionally charged. It demands not only to be felt but to be thought. This also is grief work, and it is a concentrated form of the task of living itself.

What distinguishes the denial of death from other forms of denial of which psychologists speak is that, except in extreme cases, the former is not a medical phenomenon but an existential one. It is neither a stage nor a symptom of mental disturbance but an existential crisis of the first order. It can involve profound anxiety and suffering, and it is eminently sane. Suffering itself, including its most profound forms, is not usually a symptom but belongs to the human condition and calls forth whatever capacities of mind that we possess. Despite outward similarities, the denial of death is a flawed but unpathological way of coping on the part of many an existing individual with their condition as a totality.

## Overcoming denial

Be it on therapeutic, moral, or existential grounds, all sides agree: the denial of death is an obstacle to reaching a more authentic condition variously described as acceptance, freedom, or some manner of peace. The point is repeated in the literature with great frequency, and is well summarized by Victor Hugo:

> Well, then! Let us have courage with death, take this horrible idea and consider it face to face. Ask what it is, seek to know what it wants, turn it over in our minds, fathom the enigma and look ahead into the tomb.19

"[L]et us deprive death of its strangeness," Montaigne also wrote, for there is no escape either from the thing itself or from the suffering that so often attends it.20 Erich Fromm further noted:

> Physical or mental suffering is part of human existence and to experience them is unavoidable. To spare oneself from grief at all cost can be achieved only at the price of total detachment, which excludes the ability to experience happiness. The opposite of happiness thus is not grief or pain but depression which results from inner sterility and unproductiveness.21

The question remains, how is this done? We are speaking of a singularly difficult task, and at a questionable time for undertaking tasks. Death calls for thinking—about the thing itself and about other matters that perhaps have long been put out of mind. No blueprint exists for the course such thinking must follow, no series of definite stages the dying must endeavor to pass through, no tidy methodology to apply. Would that there were, but our existence is far too complex for this. There are altogether too many variables and contingencies, too much mystery to behold and hidden depths to plumb for any simple therapeutic technique. What, then, is to be done? The answer is provided by the ghost of Jacob Marley, who in Charles Dickens' _A Christmas Carol_ , replies to Scrooge's terrified question, "What do you want with me?," with a single word: "Much!"22

The alternative to evasion is to "look at _It_ ," but to what end, and what exactly is it that we are to see? For Tolstoy, contemplating death affords a perspective from which to understand what our lives have been, and if not for the first time then anew. One's existence is no longer so many possibilities in front of one but the actuality of what has been, and the change in perspective is profound and potentially transformative. If we think of human existence on the model of a narrative, nearing the end changes our perspective on what has been and demands a new quality of reflection. A new kind of retrospection is now not only possible but imperative. What demands to be thought is what one's life has been: who has one been, how has one lived, and has one lived as one ought? What has been the meaning and purpose of one's existence? What does one have to leave behind and to whom does one leave it? These are existential and moral questions, and they call for thinking as never before. It is to be hoped that they are not taken up for the first time now, in the midst of potentially overwhelming emotion, the practical realities of medical appointments, and so on.

Death, if anything, makes a philosopher of the individual in the sense that it calls not for any grand dialectical flights but for an honest reflection on what one's life has been, what it has served, and how others might be expected to understand it. It calls for what is called soul-searching, and if not in a religious sense then a moral-existential one. It is no exercise in self-indulgence or depressive wallowing but a working through of some vital matters given a change in standpoint and while time permits. It calls for a turn in thinking, away from ordinary matters of everyday concern and toward the deeper dimension of one's existence. The confrontation with death is singular in its capacity to alter the perspective and with it the very being of the person, to place aside the trivialities and attend to what matters. Psychologists often speak of the diminishing sociability of dying persons as symptomatic of depression or of the shock that often accompanies the diagnosis of terminal illness. The withdrawal and unconcern for matters of prior interest are sometimes compared with the psychological after-effects of various kinds of disasters, the premise being that such a turn in thinking is indicative of disturbance, and while there is undoubtedly some truth in this it should not lead us to overlook that the turn away is often accompanied by a very unpathological turn within. This turning toward inwardness is not unique to the dying or grieving, yet it takes on a new importance here. It is a quality that can be cultivated at any time of life and is the source of whatever creativity of which we are capable. One turns within not only, and not primarily, as an escape from the world but precisely as a precondition of authentic engagement with it as well as what Marcus Aurelius in the _Meditations_ called a "fountain of good": "Turn within," he urged. "Within is the fountain of good, and it will ever bubble up, if you will ever dig."23 Nietzsche aptly remarked that inwardness or solitude which is not unique to the dying or grieving is constantly "misunderstood by the people as if it were flight from reality" when it is properly regarded as a necessary precondition of creative individuality.24

The most sustained reflection on inwardness in the Western tradition, of course, comes from Kierkegaard, for whom the turn within is essentially an act of religion. For this "town crier of inwardness," the latter is a source not only of the good but of truth itself: "Truth is inwardness; there is no objective truth, but the truth consists in personal appropriation." For Kierkegaard, this is a moral-existential, and specifically a Christian, hypothesis. One's life task is to "become subjective," and to the extent that one does "the uncertainty of death comes more and more to interpenetrate my subjectivity dialectically. It thus becomes more and more important for me to think it in connection with every factor and phase of my life." The " particular existing being" that is the individual does not conceive of death as belonging to an abstract anyone but to oneself, and one conceives of it in the nature of a task—of becoming a certain kind of human being, that is, a Christian.25 One can perceive the merit of this idea without turning it in the particular religious direction that Kierkegaard did. Socrates also regarded the pursuit of wisdom as an inward pursuit, as did Aurelius, Nietzsche, and some other thinkers who were far from sharing Kierkegaard's Christianity. Psychologist Arnold Hutschnecker aptly observed that

> [w]hen a patient is along in a noncritical physical illness, he retreats temporarily from reality into his own inner world. Here he weighs his position, seeking some clarity or decision as to his life and future. In the dying patient, standards and values of self-judgment and self-evaluation are different. He knows there will be no return.26

The religious and the dying are hardly alone in experiencing this inward imperative, although in the latter case the comforting evasions of ordinary life lose some of their power as one realizes that what had been postponed for a later date can no longer be evaded. What demands to be thought is the narrative of one's life as a totality, one's personal past and the ultimate significance that it has had for oneself and others. This change in tense is of the highest existential importance: from what might be—the incessant anticipating of a future which orients us throughout life—to what has been—the sobering reality of how one has lived and who one has been. For some this turning within is virtually unprecedented in their lives while for others it takes on new urgency. It calls us back from all practical necessity and everydayness to the inner recesses of the self where we are alone at last with our mortality and our individuality. There is a sense in which death provides the basis of our personhood in that we die invariably as individuals, departing the world as we entered it. Our death is absolutely our own, an experience that cannot be shared and from which no one can deliver us.27 We sometimes look upon those overwhelmed with grief, be it at the loss of a loved one or one's own imminent death, as having fallen into an abyss from which the rest of us must run, and yet if the experience is authentically faced it can radically alter our understanding of ourselves and the world, enhancing our individuality and taste for life which our everyday existence often leads us to overlook. Those who work with the terminally ill often speak of a pronounced authenticity and sincerity frequently exhibited by the dying, as if they recognize that the time for evasion and forgetfulness of life is now past. Now is the time to remember ourselves and to recall what our life has meant, not in the sense of a meaning writ large in the heavens but a recollection and interpretation of the person one has been through life. It is a telling phrase: remember yourself. Its double meaning is to recollect the person one is and has been and to mind one's conduct in that light. It is a call to resist all untoward influence by recalling how one came to be who one is. The retrospective glance makes it possible to remember in narrative terms how our character assumed its present form, the larger trajectory of action one has followed through the years, and the ethical implications of this. The question is whether one has lived as one ought. Who did one set out to be and who has one become? One lives forwards and understands backwards. This is why death affords a perspective on what one's life has meant—not only because the time for evasion is past but owing to the nature of understanding itself. We arrive at the end of the story and the anticipatory understanding that had sustained us is now replaced with one fully informed by the course of the narrative to its end. Its end is a conclusion and a culmination in the sense that we now comprehend the story as a whole. One's life has become in a sense a _fait accompli_ , one that may be thought in its entirety in terms of a beginning, middle, and end structure.

The turn within is a vital dimension of what is called "grief work," whether we are speaking of one's own death or the death of someone we have loved. There are matters that demand to be thought, and in the midst of often terrible emotion. Grieving is an occasion for reflection not only in the sense that it is possible to gain new perspective on a life that is now at an end but that we are compelled to do so. We must "come to terms" with their death, which means coming to terms with their life and what it has meant. "What is this death for?" is not a different matter than " What has this life been for? What did this person introduce into the world, and what have those who are left behind lost? What was their contribution? What influence did they have, for good or ill? What lessons does their life teach?" The work of grieving is no mere resignation to the inevitable but is a task of "working through," as Freud put it, or digesting emotionally and reflectively all of these matters. Psychologists today well recognize that avoidance strategies invariably fail in their purpose and that simple repression of grief is not only counterproductive psychologically but contrary to the desire so often expressed by the dying and bereaved to discuss and express fully the emotions associated with grieving. Geoffrey Gorer, for one, has noted that,

> there is now a very general recognition that human beings do have sexual urges and that, if these are denied outlet, the result will be suffering, either psychological or physical or both. But there is no analogous secular recognition of the fact that human beings mourn in response to grief, and that, if mourning is denied outlet, the result will be suffering, either psychological or physical or both. At present death and mourning are treated with much the same prudery as sexual impulses were a century ago.... Today it would seem to be believed, quite sincerely, that sensible, rational men and women can keep their mourning under complete control by strength of will or character so that it need be given no public expression, and indulged, if at all, in private.28

Human experience in general requires something very much akin, emotionally and cognitively, to digestion, from the ordinary happenings of everyday life to the momentous experiences of coping with loss and confronting our mortality.29 It requires a willingness to confront experiences directly and to see through the illusions that our culture creates in order to attain a deeper quality of awareness. The work of grieving leads into the very depths of one's being, and while it is a region in which many are not at home, working through this process requires one to descend to the level at which grief has its source. A related task is to resolve any "unfinished business" that remains, a phrase that has a practical connotation as well as a moral one. "Getting our affairs in order" means more than attending to financial matters and includes a larger imperative to integrate loose ends into some coherent arrangement. The projects and personal relationships that are the business of the individual's life are never entirely in order, but as death approaches it becomes increasingly imperative to impose some semblance of order on our disordered existence, to seek or grant forgiveness to those from whom we are estranged, for instance, or to renew old ties. The elimination of matters incomplete, discordant, or unresolved is a task peculiar to no subset of humanity, but the will to undertake it is often especially acute to persons confronting their mortality. One wishes not to die on the wrong note, with all that had sustained us through life in a fractional state and with matters of vital importance remaining unfinished and unsaid.

Death is an undertaking and an educator of sorts. For Ivan Ilych, the confrontation with death was the supreme educator, forcing him into the most honest introspection and reflection on others' lives as well. The narrative's moral now being fully apparent, he was able at last to understand the emptiness of the life he had led and, if anyone were interested, to teach others not to follow his example. The death of another more often is an occasion to learn in a more positive way who one ought to be by reflecting on what the life of the deceased contributed or meant in an ultimate sense. The grieving may resolve to cultivate within themselves some aspect of the person who is now deceased or to take up a project that was dear to them. The death of any human being is an occasion to reflect particularly on their more admirable traits and the lessons that their life imparts. This can go beyond simple acts of self-improvement into the deeper regions of one's character and can involve a restoration of the integrity of the self which the death of someone close may have threatened. The experience of loss can be profoundly destabilizing. Survivors, for instance, often speak of having lost a part of themselves in losing a spouse, a parent or a child, and in a sense that is existentially true. One is no longer the person one was but resolves now to keep the loved one alive within oneself, preserving their memory and cultivating the dimension of character that they represent to one. It is in this sense that the death of another is an undertaking that defies neither action nor freedom. Death indeed befalls us, but it also summons our capacity to invest it with meaning. A meaningful death, as Nietzsche recognized, has an air of consummation to it and serves as a fitting end to a life "which shall be a spur and a promise to the living."30

Death potentially educates in a larger sense as well, and serves as a reminder of the human condition itself about which we may also experience a certain kind of denial. What is often put out of mind in the course of everyday life are more ultimate matters of what is important, what things mean for us, and who we ourselves are or wish to become. The ways of the world invite us to forget this or to look upon it as something of an unpleasantness, a chore of the spirit that may be postponed or evaded entirely. The fact that we are physical bodies with a limited lifespan and an existence that is fraught with contingency is for many a morbid reflection, yet in casting it aside and limiting attention to everyday preoccupations what tends to result is the very forgetfulness of life of which Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, and Nietzsche all warned. The darker realities of our existence need not always be before the mind, but when they are resolutely evaded the sources of whatever meaning and authenticity are possible for us are put out of mind along with them. It is neither morbid nor pessimistic to cultivate a sense of the fragility of life, an explicit realization that while a great part of our lives is spent in the pursuit of security and stability, insecurity and instability remain at the heart of our existence. The extent to which this is put out of mind is the extent to which the confrontation with death leaves the individual shocked and undermined.

It is a familiar reflection: "One must wait until the evening," in the words of George Bernard Shaw, "to see how splendid the day was; one cannot judge life without _death_."31 George Santayana put it this way: "The dark background which death supplies brings out the tender colors of life in all their purity."32 The point can be made in psychological or philosophical-existential terms. As one psychiatrist expresses it,

> the concept of death plays a crucial role in psychotherapy because it plays a crucial role in the life experience of each of us. Death and life are interdependent: though the physicality of death destroys us, the _idea_ of death saves us. Recognition of death contributes a sense of poignancy to life, provides a radical shift of life perspective, and can transport one from a mode of living characterized by diversions, tranquilization, and petty anxieties to a more authentic mode.33

In more philosophical terms, death is a condition of meaning; "far from being a threat to the meaning of our lives, death is a necessary condition of life's _having_ any meaning," as Galen Pletcher puts it. "But death also provides the limitations against which we define ourselves in our projects and in our aspirations, and the limitations that are necessary for the birth of value itself."34 A sense of finitude adds definition to life's meaning while also serving as "an invitation to new life," one that is free of illusions and in many cases of elements of one's personal past.35 Experiences more than occasionally must be placed decisively into an individual's past and exercise a certain power over one when one cannot. We have done with an experience, particularly a painful one, by contemplating it, understanding its significance, feeling our way through it, and deciding what if anything is to be done concerning it. Experiences in general must be digested cognitively and emotionally, and grieving—be it another's death or one's own—is one example of how we do this.36

Let us avoid all moralism: the denial of death which is so pervasive in our times is not to be wondered at or regarded in quite so condemnatory a way as Tolstoy did. It is wholly understandable that death should make cowards of us all. Perhaps the most difficult task in any honest contemplation of death is the apparently simple act of seeing it for what it is. Perceiving this without evasion is a demanding and ultimately inescapable task, and one that is made still more difficult by the falsity that typically surrounds it and that, in the story of Ivan Ilych, "did more than anything else to poison his last days."37 Tolstoy was within his rights in being stern, however let us soften the edges of his critique and remember that if this is a moral failing then it is of the most human and forgivable kind. Facing a singularly unattractive truth in the midst of profound suffering is as difficult as it is rare, yet attempt it we must if we are to come to terms with what is taking place. Accepting the truth, however sobering, makes it possible to live a freer existence. "Insight into necessity," as Herbert Marcuse expressed it, "is the first step toward the dissolution of necessity."38 We must come to terms with our finitude and with that which stands against us in whatever way we are able. So pervasive is the dishonesty about death, from the different forms of denial to the glowing tributes to the deceased that are heard in many a eulogy, that it seems the value we place on truthfulness in other areas of life all but disappears in the face of death. The truth does not always set us free, but shrinking from it never does so. The recognition of what we cannot change, as well as what we cannot know, is the beginning of both wisdom and maturity, and recognition in the face of suffering provides their surest measure.

The alternative to denial is to keep death before the mind and to see its foreshadowing throughout life. Every small ending is an intimation of death and may be perceived as such. As Paul Tillich observed,

> Every end that we experience in nature and mankind says to us in a loud voice, "You also will come to an end!" It may reveal itself in the farewell to a place where we have lived for a long time, the separation from the fellowship of intimate associates, the death of someone near to us. Or it may become apparent to us in the breakdown of a work which gave meaning to us, the ending of a whole period of life, the approach of old age, or even in the melancholy side of nature visible in the autumn.39

Human experience is rife with small endings, each of which foreshadows the final ending if we have the will to attend to it. Small beginnings as well require that something be left behind which may also be grieved, sometimes with an intensity of feeling equal to that which is associated with death. There is foreshadowing where we have a mind to see it. Becoming accustomed to it lessens the fear of death, if indeed anything does.40

## Notes

1 Leo Tolstoy, "The Death of Ivan Ilych," in _Great Short Works of Leo Tolstoy_ , trans. L. and A. Maude (New York: Harper and Row, 1967), 286.

2 John Martin Fischer, "Introduction: Death, Metaphysics, and Morality," in John Martin Fischer, ed., _The Metaphysics of Death_ (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993), 5.

3 Plato's classic definition in the "Phaedo" is "the separate condition of the body by itself when it is released from the soul, and the separate condition by itself of the soul when released from the body." Plato, _Phaedo_ ,in _The Collected Dialogues of Plato_ , eds Edith Hamilton and Huntington Cairns (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987), 64c.

4 Tolstoy, "The Death of Ivan Ilych," 281.

5 J. Boswell, _The Life of Samuel Johnson_ , vol. 2 (London: Everyman's Library, 1949), 123. Victor Hugo's dramatic depiction of the phenomenon in _Last Day of a Condemned_ reads as follows:

> "Condemned to death!" cried the crowd: and as I was led away, the assembly pressed on my steps with avidity, while I walked on, confused and nearly in unconsciousness. A revolution had taken place within me. Until that sentence of death, I had felt myself breathe, palpitate, exist, like other beings. Now I felt clearly that a barrier existed between me and the world. Nothing appeared to me under the same aspect as hitherto. Those large and luminous windows, that fair sunshine, that pure sky, —all was pale and ghastly, the color of a winding sheet. Those men, women and children, who pressed on my path, seemed to me like phantoms.
>
> Hugo, _Last Day of a Condemned_ ,59–60

Ernest Becker advanced a stronger claim that

> the idea of death, the fear of it, haunts the human animal like nothing else; it is a mainspring of human activity—activity designed largely to avoid the fatality of death, to overcome it by denying in some way that it is the final destiny of man.
>
> Ernest Becker, _The Denial of Death_ (New York: The Free Press, 1973), ix

6 Seneca, _On the Shortness of Life_ , trans. C. D. N. Costa (New York: Penguin, 1997), 2, 1–2. He continues along this line as follows:

> So you must not think a man has lived long because he has white hair and wrinkles: he has not lived long, just existed long. For suppose you should think that a man has had a long voyage who had been caught in a raging storm as he left harbour, and carried hither and thither and driven round and round in a circle by the rage of opposing winds? He did not have a long voyage, just a long tossing about.
>
> Ibid., 11

Seneca's criticism raises the question whether in some instances a person has lived long or merely taken a long time to die.

7 Montaigne, _The Complete Essays_ , 93.

8 Sigmund Freud, "Thoughts for the Times on War and Death," in _Civilization, Society and Religion_ , The Pelican Freud Library vol. 12, ed. Albert Dickson, trans. J. Strachey (New York: Penguin, 1985), 78, 77. Freud held this to be universally true of human beings:

> What, we ask, is the attitude of our unconscious towards the problem of death? The answer must be: almost exactly the same as that of primaeval man. In this respect, as in many others, the man of prehistoric times survives unchanged in our unconscious. Our unconscious, then, does not believe in its own death; it behaves as if it were immortal. What we call our "unconscious"—the deepest strata of our minds, made up of instinctual impulses—knows nothing that is negative, and no negation; in it contradictories coincide. For that reason it does not know its own death, for to that we can give only a negative content. Thus there is nothing instinctual in us which responds to a belief in death.
>
> Ibid., 85

Albert Camus as well noted that the fact of death "never quite convinces us" and that "everyone lives as if no one 'knew.'" Camus, _The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays_ , 15.

9 Tolstoy, "The Death of Ivan Ilych," 280.

10 Freud, "Thoughts for the Times on War and Death," 78.

11 Fyodor Dostoevsky, _Notes from Underground_ , trans. M. Ginsburg (New York: Bantam Books, 1981), 152.

12 Ortega y Gasset, _Man and People_ , 55.

13 Simon Critchley, _How to Stop Living and Start Worrying_ (Malden: Polity, 2010), 51–2. Also see Critchley, _The Book of Dead Philosophers_ (London: Granta, 2009). Another representative example of the sentiment is provided by C. W. Wahl:

> We ourselves, at immense expense maintain an entire industry whose sole purpose is to shield us from the crasser realities of its presence. We attempt to preserve and prettify the corpse and endeavor to create the illusion in it of momentary sleep. Moreover, the vast majority of us identify ourselves with religious and philosophical systems of belief which asseverate that death is not death at all, but is rather a fictive experience, a brief transition between one more important existence and another.... We flee from the reality of our eventual deaths with such purpose and persistence and we employ defenses so patently magical and regressive that these would be ludicrously obvious to us if we should employ them to this degree in any other area of human conflict.
>
> C. W. Wahl, "The Fear of Death," in Herman Feifel, ed., _The Meaning of Death_ (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1959), 18

14 Philippe Ariès, _Western Attitudes toward Death: From the Middle Ages to the Present_ , trans. P. M. Ranum (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1974), 85–7.

15 Søren Kierkegaard, "At a Graveside," in _Three Discourses on Imagined Occasions_ , ed. and trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), 79, 75–6.

16 Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, _On Death and Dying_ (New YorkMacmillan, 1969), 42, 39.

17 Edwin Shneidman, _Deaths of Man_ (Baltimore: Penguin, 1974), 7.

18 An observation of William James' is relevant here:

> _Refinement_ is what characterizes our intellectualist philosophies. They exquisitely satisfy that craving for a refined object of contemplation which is so powerful an appetite of the mind. But I ask you in all seriousness to look abroad on this colossal universe of concrete facts, on their awful bewilderments, their surprises and cruelties, on the wildness which they show, and then to tell me whether "refined" is the one inevitable descriptive adjective that springs to your lips.
>
> William James, _Pragmatism_ (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1981), 18

19 Hugo, _Last Day of a Condemned_ , 160.

20 Montaigne, _The Complete Essays_ , 96. Kierkegaard expressed this point as follows:

> suppose death were so treacherous as to come tomorrow! Merely this one uncertainty, when it is to be understood and held fast by an existing individual, and hence enter into every thought, precisely because it is an uncertainty entering into my beginning upon universal history even, so that I make it clear to myself whether if death comes tomorrow, I am beginning upon something that is worth beginning—merely this one uncertainty generates inconceivable difficulties, difficulties that not even the speaker who treats of death is always aware of, in that he thinks that he apprehends the uncertainty of death, while nevertheless forgetting to think it into what he says about it, so that he speaks movingly and with emotion about the uncertainty of death, and yet ends by encouraging his hearers to make a resolution for the whole of life.
>
> Kierkegaard, _Concluding Unscientific Postscript_ , trans. D. F. Swenson and W. Lowrie (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1974), 148–9

A more recent author adds:

> Of course, most of us are not constantly dwelling on the thought that we shall die; there are far too many other things in life that require our attention for _that_. Yet if the idea of our mortality is not generally at the forefront of our minds, it is there in the background as one of the constituents of our specifically human form of self-awareness. If we compare a life to a piece of music, it is a recurrent leitmotif—or, better, a ground-bass—running through the composition. It would only be a slight exaggeration to say that life is built around it.
>
> Geoffrey Scarre, _Death_ (Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press, 2007), 23

21 Erich Fromm, _Man for Himself_ (London: Routledge, 2002), 189–90.

22 Charles Dickens, _A Christmas Carol_ , ed. Richard Kelly (Orchard ParkBroadview, 2003), 51.

23 Marcus Aurelius, _Meditations_ , trans. G. Long (New York: Dover, 1997), 53.

24 Nietzsche, _On the Genealogy of Morals_ , ed. Walter Kaufmann, trans. W. Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale (New York: Vintage, 1969), II sec. 24, p. 96. In a discussion of Heidegger, Michael Fox notes:

> Thinking about death is not fleeing from the world; _refusing_ to think about death, rather, is fleeing from life and from oneself. In this way, Heidegger returns to the wisdom taught long ago by Socrates: Life is a process of learning how to face death properly.
>
> Fox, _The Remarkable Existentialists_ , 163

25 Kierkegaard, _Concluding Unscientific Postscript_ , 71, 149, 195.

26 Arnold A. Hutschnecker, "Personality Factors in Dying Patients," in Herman Feifel, ed., _The Meaning of Death_ (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1959), 238.

27 Madison notes:

> Death "individualizes," as Heidegger said. Death and "aloneness" are the twin, ultimate realities of the human condition, for every individual is condemned to die his or her own death: "We shall die alone. We must thus act as if we were alone" (Blaise Pascal, _Pensées_ , ed. and trans. Roger Ariew [Indianapolis: Hackett, 2005], 151). In this way, the fact of our mortality drives home to us the realization that, however much we may long to be comforted and recognized, we are all, as it were, orphans and lone travelers who have to make our way in an often indifferent and uncaring universe—living our own lives and dying our own deaths.
>
> Madison, _On Suffering_ , 30

28 Geoffrey Gorer, _Death, Grief, and Mourning in Contemporary Britain_ (London: Cresset Press, 1965), 111. Today it is a commonplace among psychologists that

> [e]motionally powerful concerns do not evaporate when the individual chooses to bar them from consciousness. Rather they continue to operate unconsciously and influence behavior in divers ways often unknown to the individual himself.
>
> Robert Kastenbaum, "Time and Death in Adolescence," in Herman Feifel, ed., _The Meaning of Death_ (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1959), 111

29 Nietzsche was especially fond of the digestion metaphor:

> A strong and well-constituted man digests his experiences (his deeds and misdeeds included) as he digests his meals, even when he has to swallow some tough morsels. If he cannot get over an experience and have done with it, this kind of indigestion is as much physiological as is the other—and often in fact merely a consequence of the other.
>
> Nietzsche, _On the Genealogy of Morals_ , III sec. 17, p. 129

30 Nietzsche, _Thus Spoke Zarathustra_ , 97.

31 Cited in McNees, _Dying_ , 12.

32 George Santayana, "For These Once Mine," in _Complete Poems of George Santayana_ , ed. William G. Holzberger (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 1979), 273.

33 Irvin Yalom, _Existential Psychotherapy_ (New York: Basic Books, 1980), 40.

34 Galen K. Pletcher, "Meaning and the Awareness of Death," in Jeffrey Kauffman, ed., _Awareness of Mortality_ (Amityville: Baywood Publishing Company, 1995), 72.

35 Carse, _Death and Existence_ ,9.

36 Paul Tillich gives this idea a religious interpretation in the following passage:

> It has been rightly said that the strength of a person's character is dependent on the quantity of things that he has thrown into the past. In spite of the power his past holds over him, a man can separate himself from it, throw it out of the present into the past in which it is condemned to remain ineffective—at least for a time. It may return and conquer the present and destroy the person, but this is not necessarily so. We are not inescapably victims of our past. We can make the past remain nothing but _past_. The act in which we do this has been called "repentance." Genuine repentance is not the feeling of sorrow about wrong actions, but it is the act of the whole person in which he separates himself from certain elements of his being, discarding them into the past as something that no longer has any power over the present.
>
> Paul Tillich, "The Eternal Now," in Herman Feifel, ed., _The Meaning of Death_ (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1959), 34–5

37 Tolstoy, "The Death of Ivan Ilych," 286.

38 Marcuse, "The Ideology of Death," 66.

39 Tillich, "The Eternal Now," 30.

40 As the eminently quotable Aurelius expressed this point:

> Termination of activity, cessation from movement and opinion, and, in a sense, their death, is no evil. Turn your thoughts now to the consideration of your life, your life as a child, as a youth, your manhood, your old age, for in these also every change was a death. Is this anything to fear? Turn your thoughts now to your life under your grandfather, then to your life under your mother, then to your life under your father; and as you find many other differences and changes and terminations, ask yourself, "is this anything to fear?" In like manner, then, neither are the termination and cessation and change of your whole life a thing to be afraid of.
>
> Aurelius, Meditations,70–1

# 2 Death rituals

To modern ears it is an imperative that sounds strange: die well. The notion of a good death is something of a constant in human history, and while its meaning is variable its importance has been long and well understood. Plato raised the idea to the level of a philosophical principle—a properly human life involves a certain preparation for death—but he did not invent it. While death for early human hunter-gatherers tended to come without warning, a later agricultural way of life made possible a new kind of preparation. As Allan Kellehear has noted,

> Death was gradually moving away from most people as a sudden event and becoming something that we could predict in the next few hours or days. Sedentism, with its attendant infectious diseases, meant that people took some time to die. It gave them and those watching some time together to talk, pray, attempt a last-minute resistance or ritualise its occurrence.1

Death was not merely a biological event but a bearer of meaning which was to be contemplated and prepared for in particular ways. A good death was without violence and undue suffering and was bound up with ethical ideas, customs, and the notion of a transition into another form of existence which made it the preserve of religion. Mortality demanded to be understood, speculated about, and encompassed in a worldview that imposed upon it some semblance of intelligibility and order. A good death was anticipated and absorbed within practices and rituals that made one's dying a social matter. Rituals of death of one kind or another appear about as old as culture itself, and while their original meanings can defy ready interpretation their presence in early human history and prehistory is ubiquitous. The dying needed to be prepared—in particular for the journey into an afterlife in which human beings through the ages have largely believed.

## Ritual and meaning

Interpreting the archeological record on death rituals and the attitudes surrounding them is anything but straightforward. In the Roman period, for instance, not only is the evidence heavily biased toward the elite but, as one historian has pointed out,

> To what extent people actually believed in an afterlife—in Hades or a celestial kingdom—is a tough if not impossible question to answer. It is clear that the creators of the surviving literary visions of heaven and hell were mainly poets and philosophers who did not always believe in what they wrote. These were stories or myths that provided useful allegories for mortal life and insights into universal truths about the human condition.

The notion of death as a migration to another world had its inception in prehistory, yet what is unclear from the evidence is how many in the ancient world and prior accepted the idea as a literal truth and how many regarded it as an allegory or myth. The same author notes that "we have no or few details for the vast majority of the millions of funerals that took place in the Roman period," so heavily is the evidence slanted in favor of the powerful.2 The presence of grave goods, for instance, in itself says little about their meaning. Are they symbolic tokens of respect or intended to be of practical use in the afterlife? What is clear is that despite the obvious diversity of ritual and belief that we observe from the beginning of the Western tradition to modern times, there is also surprising continuity not only between ancient Greek and Roman culture—on this matter as on so many others—but from the ancient world into early modernity. Ariès in particular has argued that one finds "the same general attitude toward death from Homer to Tolstoi," and that while it is not without cultural variation this attitude "is like a bulwark of inertia and continuity" which " has resisted the pressures of evolution for about two thousand years."3 It is an attitude that largely disappeared in the twentieth century.

Ariès terms this attitude "the tame death," and its salient characteristic is familiarity. Until historically recent times death was an ordinary and not unexpected occurrence with which people of all ages were well acquainted and to which they would have also had a keener sense of vulnerability. Denial was hardly possible through millennia in which mortality rates were relatively high and death was not reserved for the elderly but could come to anyone at any time of life. In the Roman era death in the arena was mass entertainment, monuments to the dead were a prominent feature of the urban landscape, and male citizens needed not only to prepare a will but plan their memorial and consider what would become of their reputation after death. Cemeteries in medieval Europe were regular settings for social activities from commerce to musical entertainment while charnel houses served not only as practical storage facilities for exhumed bones but as a kind of theater for public display.

> The spectacle of the dead, whose bones were always being washed up to the surface of the cemeteries, as was the skull in _Hamlet_ , made no more impression upon the living than did the idea of their own death. They were as familiar with the dead as they were familiarized with the idea of their own death.4

If the familiarity with mortality came in many forms through the ages, perhaps the most significant was the sense of one's own imminent death for which the literary evidence is so plentiful. The dying were forewarned in the form of an awareness that was altogether common. The sense of death's approach was nothing supernatural or removed from the ordinary but a matter of common knowledge. "Everything hurts. My death has come, that's how it is" are the plain-spoken words of an elderly coachman in Tolstoy's "Three Deaths," a clear antithesis to the denial that surrounded Ivan Ilych.5 In the usual order of things death did not appear from out of the blue but arrived as something natural and unsurprising. Ariès speaks of an "inner conviction" that was "something very simple, something prevailing throughout the ages, something that persists even today as an anachronism within industrialized societies."6 By modern times this sense would be largely dismissed as superstition, although a more plausible reading of it is that it was a conviction rooted in common experience and a more acute sense of the fragility of life than what we moderns possess.

A related aspect of the familiarity with death was the kind of relation that we witness through the greater part of human history between the living and the dead. Time and again the dead are regarded not as so many expired organisms but as experiencing another form of existence beyond the grave. The belief in an afterlife appears widespread well before historical records began, and inseparable from this belief is the idea of death as a journey into another world of which intimations in life were more than possible and with which it was also possible to establish communication.7 In Roman times, for instance, as Valerie Hope has noted,

> The _Parentalia_ allowed communication between the living and the dead, as did other festivals and personal anniversaries, such as birthdays. The tomb was the focus for these commemorative rituals, suggesting that the dead were regarded as having some sort of continuing existence at, or in close proximity to, their grave. Tombs could be regarded as the homes of the dead and made to appear as houses, with windows, doors, mosaic floors and painted wall décor.8

Interaction also took the form of active remembrance on the part of the living, visiting graves, festivals for the dead, and such everyday activities as simple offerings. The dead needed to be acknowledged as ancestors just as the past more generally was far more of a living presence in Roman culture than for us. Whether one literally believed in an afterlife or not, the memory of the dead was to be preserved and rituals were to be performed not only to honor them but to regulate the manner of interaction between the dead and the living. Ghost stories were popular, and whether believed in or not the idea that we observe time and again was that the dead are among us and must be reckoned with in some socially regulated form. Where the dead were imagined to be or what kind of existence they were thought to have is far from clear, but what is clear is that they were not gone and life and death were not antithetical states. This was not unique to Greco-Roman civilization. As Kellehear notes, "Most civilisations, including those in the Stone Age with evidence of otherworld journeys, did not view life and death in such contradictory, paradoxical terms. Death was not the opposite of life but its continuation"—a theme that is played out in religion, philosophy, literature, and popular belief endlessly in human history.9

By no means were the dead to be excluded from the moral domain. If it is metaphysically strange to speak of them as bearers of rights, it remains that the living had obligations toward them that were not of the order of mere folklore or superstition. One must remember the dead, not only as a matter of convention or social nicety but as an ethical imperative deeply rooted in every culture of which we know. They are to be remembered in the sense of honored (or in some cases damned10), if not as divinities then as ancestors or respected predecessors to whom much is owed. The body of the deceased is to be cared for in the form of a proper burial or cremation, a matter that sometimes called for lavish expenditure as a demonstration of respect or status. Roman tombs, to take an obvious example, could be remarkably elaborate and include gardens, wells, kitchen and dining facilities which would have reflected well on both the deceased and their survivors. It was not only kings and emperors who were thus honored but aristocrats and essentially any who could afford the kind of financial outlay this would have required. Emperors themselves were typically divinized after death by the Roman senate, and not only those who were highly regarded in life. When not declared gods or some sort of minor divinity, the dead through the greater part of history remain proper recipients of honors in the form of respectful disposal and remembrance, prayer, lamentation, grave goods, sacrificial offerings, monuments, and intercession on their behalf. Particularly in medieval Europe, benediction rituals provided for the absolution of the deceased person's sins so that they may enjoy salvation in the afterlife, and included saying prayers, performing masses, sprinkling holy water, and related rites. It remains an ethical obligation of sorts in our own time to hold either a wake or another form of visitation with the dead prior to burial or cremation in order to "pay respect" to the dead and their survivors.

Combined with the gesture of respect, as one repeatedly observes in the ancient world, was the imperative to keep the dead at a distance from the living in order to prevent them from returning. Ancient funeral rituals say a respectful goodbye, not _au revoir_ or not until we ourselves escape this mortal coil. Stories and fears of the dead returning in some ghastly form were commonplace. The dead needed therefore to be placated not only to honor and assist them but to ensure they will not come back to disturb the living. Interaction was to take place at a respectful distance, as shown for instance in the location of ancient cemeteries along roadways outside of the cities. As Ariès has noted,

> the cemeteries of antiquity were always outside the towns, along roads like the Appian Way in Rome. They were either family vaults constructed on private estates or communal cemeteries owned and managed by associations that may have provided the early Christians with the legal model for their communities. In the beginning, the Christians observed the customs of their times and shared the prevailing attitudes toward the dead. At first they were buried in the same necropolises as the pagans, then next to the pagans in separate cemeteries, but always outside the towns.11

Burial within cities was rare and reserved for exceptional personages while even cremation in Roman times was illegal inside the town, partly no doubt due to fire hazard but partly on account of the idea that the dead are a contaminant on the living. Less rare than burial within the city walls was burial in the intermediate zone between the walls and the surrounding suburbs, while the large majority were buried along suburban roads, sometimes in necropolises and sometimes in smaller burial sites interspersed between buildings. This gradually changed in the course of the Middle Ages as the distinction between the city proper and the suburb began to disappear and new settlements appeared around cemeteries located on church lands. This signified a profound change in thinking about the dead, including a weakening of ancient taboos and fears. The church by this time, along with its adjacent cemetery, had assumed a social importance comparable to the Roman forum or the public square of modern times. The medieval church repeatedly had to issue restrictions on the kind of activities that could take place on its burial grounds, suggesting the age-old fear of the dead returning had given way to a kind of easy familiarity. The dead were still to be honored, but at closer proximity, rendering obsolete the lines of monuments along roadsides that led into the cities of the ancient world.

Ariès' notion of the "tame death" is intended to contrast with the contemporary frame of mind in which death is wild, where this essentially means that it is socially unregulated and, inseparable from this, unritualized. "The tame death is the oldest death there is," and its defining characteristics include both the familiarity just noted and an important public dimension.12 There is a sense in which one dies alone, and there is another sense in which one does not. Traditionally, death arrives simply, without terrific drama or shock, in the manner of a guest that was naturally unwelcome but, no less naturally, expected. It was greeted with solemnity, but the crucial matter is that it mobilized families and communities in ways that were directed by custom. There was something to be done—by the dying, by their survivors, clergy, and the larger social group to which they belonged. One may speak here of a certain division of labor, where the dying individual needed to prepare in a way while those surrounding him or her were also charged with tasks that took the form first of preparation and after the fact of recognition of a profoundly important social occurrence. The dying him- or herself would be praised for facing death with courage and composure, most obviously in traditional scenes in which one dies in bed, surrounded by family and bravely bearing one's suffering, but also when death is sudden and violent, as Julius Caesar was classically depicted as repressing outward expression of pain after being repeatedly stabbed. One faced death without terror and with a simple confidence in a scheme of things that transcends the self. Death was a natural event, the will of God or the gods, and was to be accepted with humility. As well, there were practical affairs to attend to, a will to write and property to be dispersed, last wishes to communicate and appropriate leave to be taken. Even while there was a script to be followed, one participated in one's own dying, planned one's funeral or interment, and departed from life on a fitting note. One's death did not merely befall one.

Those surrounding the dying also had a protocol that was well known and deeply rooted in the culture. One was not at a loss; there was a matter that demanded reflection, rituals to be performed, practicalities to be seen to, and a range of things to be done and thought in accordance with custom. The customs themselves are historically variable, of course, and range from donning black clothing and mourning jewelry to drawing blinds, abstaining from certain social activities for a prescribed period of time, visiting, holding a post-funeral family gathering in the home of the deceased, and so on, in the modern period, to such ancient practices as calling out the name of the deceased to confirm that death had occurred, the final kiss, closing the eyes, placing the dead body on the ground, lamentation, feasting, and so on. In Roman times, as Hope remarks,

> The recently bereaved wore the marks of grief: internal suffering was signalled by exterior appearance. The house of a bereaved family, the _familia funesta_ , was marked at the threshold by a branch from a cypress tree, which was consecrated to the spirits of the dead. The bereaved wore dark clothing and might have a disheveled appearance, with hair dirtied and let loose. The bereaved might abstain from food and washing, and they might make dramatic or noisy gestures. In many respects the state of grief was marked by behavior that reversed normal expectations: dark instead of light clothing, dirt rather than cleanliness, emotional display rather than emotional restraint. This inversion of norms and the display of symbols of grief were easily read by onlookers and passers-by, who could then act with appropriate respect. There may also have been an element of superstition involved, since the bereaved were perceived as polluted or ill-omened due to their contact with the dead, thus social interaction with them was to be limited.

Even priests were to reckon with the dead at arm's-length, avoid looking upon them, and carry out their duties without coming into direct contact with them. Laws determined who was to mourn and for how long, a eulogy praising the deceased was customary—for the elite, at any rate—and could be delivered in the forum or at the burial site or pyre. Also at the pyreside the eyes of the dead were ritually opened that they might be visible to the heavens, the body was anointed, and the pyre itself was lit by a close relative. Mourners were available for hire if family members did not suffice for the purpose, and could complement the procession of the body from the home of the deceased to the place of burial or cremation. A proper funeral procession could be lengthy and included not only family and friends but paid mourners and frequently mimes, actors, and musicians in addition to the bier. There was an important element of theater and spectacle involved—again, in the case of the powerful—with sights and sounds that announced with considerable fanfare the procession of an important personage.

> The dead and the bereaved could not be missed. The streets would have cleared at the sound of the musician's trumpets, horns and flutes and the shouts, wails and singing of the hired mourners. All would make way for the decorated bier, the dark-clothed mourners and an entourage of people bearing torches and incense burners.13

Less is known about the processions of common people, but it may be surmised that a similar phenomenon would have occurred on a more modest scale.

In the Middle Ages, of course, the funeral procession and all the other customs and rituals relating to death came under the authority of the church and were conducted with an air of solemnity. Masses were performed, often in large quantity, along with vigils and absolutions, eulogies and final farewells, all according to tradition and presided over by priests. The excessive mourning and lamentation of old was gradually replaced with an imperative of restraint. Christian death was a prelude to salvation and accordingly was an occasion of ritualized pomp and ceremony that honored the requirements of propriety. If professional actors and mimes were no longer in order, orphans and representatives of the poor most certainly were, and no decent funeral was without them. Music was to consist in the singing of Psalms and required no ostentation. Mourners were obligated to express in socially recognized ways a grief that may or may not have been genuine, and were recipients of visits that were their due by a convention known to all. The emotional burden was to be shared and moderated, until the nineteenth century when excess became the fashion. Mourning was now romanticized and fainting, fasting, and unconsolable crying were all in good form.

Perhaps the most salient aspect of a good death, historically speaking, is that the dying individual be remembered for some indefinite period of time—essentially, the longer the better—and by an equally indefinite number of people, the more the better. It was imperative that the dead not be obliterated from memory, a fact of which Greek and Roman civilization provides abundant evidence. The archeological record is rich with tombs, monuments, and inscriptions that continually implore the living to remember whose remains occupy a given site. As one scholar puts it,

> What the Greeks hoped to achieve for the dead was perpetual remembrance, by strangers as well as kin. The dead did not become ancestors (they had no effect on the lives of their descendants and were not reincorporated into society to serve as focal points in the genealogical definition of social relationships): they became _monuments_.14

In life one might hope to achieve a kind of immortality through particular forms of conduct, but in death, as the ancients well knew, one needs a monument. The Roman world was rife with everything from modest inscriptions to statues of the illustrious dead in the forum, building dedications and arches, tombs, heirlooms, and mementos which were a constant feature of the urban and suburban landscape as well as of the private lives of individuals. The past was to be a living past and the dead were to be remembered, honored, and integrated—albeit at arm's-length—within the life of the city. Even the burial sites of slaves in Roman times bore inscriptions identifying their occupants, indicating how deeply rooted were the imperatives to remember and to be remembered. It was an obligation that took both private and public form—to protect from oblivion the memory of the deceased, and a memory that (usually) did them credit. Tombs and inscriptions invited visitors to recall and admire the dead, to honor their achievements and learn from their example.

Funeral inscriptions gradually disappeared in the early part of the Middle Ages when writing and reading in general became restricted to the elite and learned. From approximately the fifth through to the thirteenth centuries, burial places were largely anonymous and silent as the dead were placed in care of the church. Inscriptions began to reappear on the tombs of saints and other esteemed individuals in late medieval times and gradually regained popularity in the centuries that followed. Small plaques bearing the name and occupation of the deceased and sometimes accompanied by a religious scene were a commonplace in churches from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century, by which time inscriptions were regaining the popularity they enjoyed in Roman times when memory meant a kind of immortality different than what Christianity promised and in terms of a social existence of comparable importance. Time and again in history this is what goes to the heart of what a good death is: one that represents a victory of sorts, and if not over the grave itself then over oblivion.

The larger purpose and significance that death rituals have served may be seen in this light. The point, or the points, that they serve are, as is invariably the case with rituals both religious and secular, numerous, complex, and elusive to interpretation, even while their importance is unmistakable. There is a wealth of contemporary literature on ritual theory, and I have no intention of proffering any kind of comprehensive theoretical explanation of everything that counts and has ever counted as death rituals. If the disparate phenomena—be it Western or Eastern, ancient or modern—contain an essence then I do not claim to have glimpsed it. All that can be said, phenomenologically speaking, is that rituals of death and the common sensibilities that they express exhibit a search for meaning that is as old as the species and as imperative as any in this particular form of existence. The human being is a ritualizing animal, and to all appearances has always been so.

Some scholars have suggested that a basic function of rituals in general is to facilitate the crossing of various kinds of boundaries, from the economic to the biological and so on. Thus Richard E. DeMaris maintains that

> In the case of individuals, rites of boundary-crossing mark the various stages of social life, whether one is moving from childhood to adulthood, from single to married life, from adulthood to old age, or from life to death. In the case of human communities, boundary-crossing rites are crucial markers of group identity, for they control who is in and who is out and how one gets in and out. They define a community's character and profile.15

This is a plausible hypothesis, as is the notion that rituals are socially recognized ways of marking various forms of transition from one stage or category of being to another. "Rites of passage," as Barbara Myerhoff writes,

> are a category of rituals that mark the passages of an individual through the life cycle, from one stage to another over time, from one role or social position to another, integrating the human and cultural experiences with biological destiny: birth, reproduction, and death. These ceremonies make the basic distinctions observed in all groups, between young and old, male and female, living and dead.16

Not all rituals can be subsumed under the category of rites of passage or boundary crossings of one kind or another. Often rituals mark the occurrence of a crisis in the life of an individual or community and the search for some form of resolution. The crisis can be existential, moral, or any number of things, and the point of the ritual is to create or restore an order that is culturally constituted. Whether one speaks of a restoration of equilibrium or, more adequately perhaps, a will to meaning, a basic function of ritual (let us not say the only or the essential one) is to assign a particular and socially recognized intelligibility to a given crisis or circumstance that had called an old meaning into question. Ritual is mobilized to create understanding in response to change, to transform persons in light of what things mean for us, to remind us of who we are, and to restore calm in the face of crisis. Rituals do not exist in isolation from a context of sensibilities and a fundamental orientation that define a historical community. They afford a break from the mundane and enjoin all who participate in them to remember ourselves, what we serve, and what we have lost.

Death rituals may be interpreted in this light, whether we are speaking of early humans or the present day. The death of a person ruptures lives and sometimes an entire community; it demands to be grasped in thought, where this signifies not only psychological coping—what the helping professions call grief work—but thinking in a philosophical and existential sense. Traditionally, this is done by means of ritualizing which philosophers have too often dismissed as superstition. There is more to ritual than the enactment of an illusion, yet the point is lost sight of when we focus rather too much on the outward form such rites have taken rather than their underlying significance. Ancient Egyptians practiced the art of mummification to preserve the body from decay; medieval Europeans regarded death as a priestly affair in which the soul of the departed was ushered into its eternal reward by means of masses, prayers, and holy water. The historical record is replete with examples of what one might call superstitious nonsense, and one need not limit one's gaze to the past, yet beneath the nonsense something else can be discerned which it profits us to recall. This is that when a human being dies, lives can be undermined. A wound has been suffered and any number of persons, from the dying person to everyone who cared about them, can find themselves in the grip not only of emotions that can overwhelm but of an existential situation that demands reflection in the most urgent way possible. In time the wound may heal, but the healing is not a function of time alone but of processes of dealing and thinking that tend to be socially regulated. Coping with loss—whether this means overcoming it or merely learning to live with it—tends to follow a pattern which Geoffrey Gorer, in his compelling study of _Death, Grief, and Mourning in Contemporary Britain_ , called "time-limited mourning." The phrase refers to

> a phased pattern of behaviour: a period of intense grief typically characterized by weeping, loss of weight or sleep, and withdrawal from some social activities, followed by a return to physical homeostasis and a fuller social life in one or more stages. Included in this concept are the traditional rituals of mourning, whether established by religious injunction or social custom.17

Suffering may be endured provided conditions are in place that include the sociocultural. Whether we speak of the social reintegration of the grieving individual in the face of crisis, the restoration of a social system, or what have you, the crucial matter is that death has called into question the fundamentals of our existence, perhaps including the will to live itself, and cultural resources of some kind must be mobilized to provide for a new affirmation, if not of the existing social order then of life itself. Lives that have been undone require some way back, and if not into the same power structures and conformities of the kind that social scientists have often overemphasized, then into the web of meanings, understandings, and self-understandings of which their culture is composed. In grief a way needs to be found from what Ariès calls "the calm and monotonous world of everyday reality to the inner world of feelings," and it "is not made spontaneously or without help. The distance between the languages is too great. In order to establish communication it is necessary to have an accepted code of behavior, a ritual that is learned by experience from childhood." The promise of death rituals is that some way back to life will be found; the trauma that has been suffered shall not have the last word but will be rendered both endurable and intelligible in light of socially recognized meanings or what Ariès has termed "codes":

> Once, there were codes for all occasions, codes for revealing to others feelings that were generally unexpressed, codes for courting, for giving birth, for dying, for consoling the bereaved. These codes no longer exist. They disappeared in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries.18

Whether their disappearance is a sign of the onward march of progress or an indication of something more worrisome is the matter to which I now turn.

## On the advantages and disadvantages of secularization for death

Ritual, a growing field of study tells us, is a central aspect of all cultures of which we know, whether we are speaking of death rituals in particular or any number of rites pertaining to social and biological events from birth to marriage, initiation and the emergence into adulthood, and so on. Funeral rites of one kind or another appear to be as old as the human species. Indeed, even Neanderthals buried their dead, often in the fetal position and possibly with grave goods that included stone tools. Grave goods are a regular feature of early hunter-gatherer societies, and whether their significance was intended to be practical, religious, "symbolic" (a convenient designation often given to that which is difficult to designate), or some undifferentiated combination thereof, they represent an effort on the part of the living to find or impose meaning in the midst of suffering and loss. Articles such as tools, food, even shelter, furniture, and fire often suggest a making of provisions to assist the dead in the journey in the afterlife or an effort to appease them, although the bare presence of a grave item is hardly an object of straightforward interpretation. What is relatively clear is that such goods, and the larger attitudes and rituals that are associated with them, were bearers of meaning for the members of a given culture. In the face of death there is meaning—sometimes undoubtedly a meaning that is mythical, superstitious, and impossible for us to believe, but shall we say always?

When we look at the archeological and historical record we are tempted to answer in the affirmative and to proffer an argument roughly along these lines: ours is a post-Enlightenment, scientific, and secular age, and a modern worldview must exclude stories of an afterlife and everything associated with it. Death, on this view, is no longer a religious affair but a biological and medical one and is appropriately spoken of in this terminology, supplemented perhaps in the still empirical language of psychology and a few related disciplines. Secularization, in a word, defines many a contemporary attitude toward death as toward life itself in its various aspects. The judgment that ours is a secular age has found favor among many social theorists for a few decades now, although analyses of its full implications vary significantly. Charles Taylor, for instance, opens his book _A Secular Age_ by asking what it signifies to characterize the present in such terms. "Almost everyone," he writes,

> would agree that in some sense we do [live in a secular age]: I mean the "we" who live in the West, or perhaps North-west, or otherwise put, the North Atlantic world—although secularity extends also partially, and in different ways, beyond this world. And the judgment of secularity seems hard to resist when we compare these societies with anything else in human history: that is, with almost all other contemporary societies (e.g., Islamic countries, India, Africa), on one hand; and with the rest of human history, Atlantic or otherwise, on the other.19

Defining secularization is not straightforward, however Bryan Wilson provided a plausible characterization in speaking of it as "the process whereby religious thinking, practice and institutions lose social significance."20 This is not to say that religion either has disappeared or is in process of disappearing entirely from modern life, but that as a form of consciousness it is placing second to an empirical and technological sensibility, that its institutions are in retreat, and an increasing proportion of social reality is no longer animated in any profound way by religious concerns. Taylor succinctly analyzes secularization as the view that faith in God "is one human possibility among others," and attributes it not only to the liberal-minded but to committed believers no less.21

Whether secularization is a sociological and historical fact is a judgment on which it is too soon to pronounce a definitive verdict for the reason that understanding a given age requires a retrospective glance that in the case of the present is always unavailable. That religion is in its death throes was a popular sentiment for a good part of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, yet an examination of the contemporary world appears to suggest that secularization is true and false in roughly equal proportion—that if we define it weakly, as Taylor does, it is more true than false, and if we define it strongly as the collapse of religious world-views and ways of life, it is more false than true. It may be closest to the truth to say that ours is and is not a secular age, or that modern culture has been rent in two, with a sizeable percentage of the population opting for secular ways of thinking while still formidable religious communities go along as if nothing has happened.

Regardless of the position one takes on the secularization debate of recent decades, a matter on which all sides might agree is that death rituals, if not rituals in general, have fallen on hard times. A secular age, defined in any way one wishes, does not do ritual well. Religious societies do—or, at the very least, they possess very old and deeply rooted cultural resources which enable human beings in some fashion or other to deal with the turmoil that is associated with suffering, loss, grief, and death. These resources, of course, may also be illusions; on this topic I am not inclined to take a stand. What I shall suggest instead is that a culture that is resolutely oriented toward the empirical, technological, and instrumentally rational is at a profound loss in the face of the single most important issue that is faced by human beings: the fact that one is fated to die and that those whom we love share this fate.

Rituals of any kind do not appear in a cultural vacuum but are embedded in every case within a way of life and a conceptual framework that is historically constituted. Cultures that regard death as a transition into another form of existence naturally possess rituals that are thought to ease the transition while also benefiting the living, but what of secular societies—or if not entire societies then particular groupings or persons within them? What I would note here is a special kind of awkwardness that is frequently observed in secular societies, and not only in connection with funeral rituals. Jürgen Habermas provides a compelling illustration of this phenomenon:

> On April 9, 1991, a memorial service for Max Frisch was held in St. Peter's Church in Zürich. It began with Karin Pilliod, Frisch's partner, reading out a brief declaration written by the deceased. It stated, among other things: "We let our nearest speak, and without an 'amen.' I am grateful to the ministers of St. Peter's in Zürich... for their permission to place the coffin in the church during our memorial service. The ashes will be strewn somewhere." Two friends spoke. No priest, no blessing. The mourners were made up of intellectuals, most of whom had little time for church and religion. Frisch himself had drawn up the menu for the meal that followed. At the time the ceremony did not strike me as peculiar. However, its form, place, and progression _were_ peculiar. Clearly, Max Frisch, an agnostic who rejected any profession of faith, had sensed the awkwardness of non-religious burial practices and, by his choice of place, publicly declared that the enlightened modern age had failed to find a suitable replacement for a religious way of coping with the final _rîte de passage_ which brings life to a close.22

Many can relate similar experiences, not perhaps of funeral services that are devoid entirely of significance (for this is overstated) but whose significance is, let us say, not readily apparent and lacking a depth dimension for which the occasion so clearly calls. A human being has died, and we are here to honor their memory and to be with their survivors—and we are brought up short in the most terrible way. We are at a loss; whose role is it to speak, and what should they say? There is something to be said and perhaps done, but by whom and in what way? Is the appropriate setting for this ceremony of sorts a church, funeral home, or graveside? If it is to be a funeral home and no clergy is present, what is the procedure? Evidently it is up to the survivors to decide, but they may be the ones who are most at a loss and in no frame of mind to design a ritual spontaneously. If the deceased has indicated a few wishes then these must surely be carried out, but these typically underdetermine the service itself.

One may say in reply that if there is a sense that something is missing from such occasions it is due to a nostalgia for superstition and irrational nonsense; a priest is never at a loss and can act as a master of ceremonies with the competence of a professional, but along with this comes an institution and a worldview in which one may have little or no confidence. Give up the illusion, and the comfort it provided, and design the whole affair to suit the personality and the wishes of the deceased, one may say. The advantage of a secular death is that it is free of illusion, mythology, and false consolation. The disadvantage, in a word, is that it is also empty. As Nietzsche said of many a modern ideal, it rings hollow when the tuning fork is applied. Of what is it empty, the secularist will ask, but nonsense? The question is as compelling as it is difficult, but let us say this: the central point, or points, of such a service are to remember and to honor the dead and to be with those who have suffered loss, and to be "with" them, to use a little word that is as complicated as any in the language, in a sense that is very different from the everyday. A common sentiment is that we are there to "show support," but the phrase belongs to popular psychology and is shallow. To "pay respect" must be understood not in terms of being in attendance at a ceremony but practicing a certain kind of social comportment and, more important, of inward attunement, one that is given to respectful contemplation of the life that is now at an end and of what it can be understood to have meant. There are many possibilities of interpretation here, and not everyone present need regard the deceased in the same light or pursue the same line of reflection. What is imperative is a will to understand who this person was and a mindfulness of what their life teaches the living. It need not be a terribly solemn or highly scripted affair, with tributes to the dead that are glowing and untruthful; it may provide little in terms of consolation, but it ought not to be inauthentic. The problem, then, for a secular or semi-secular age is its pronounced incapacity to create rituals that invite this kind of attunement and that constitute a fitting break from the course of everyday life. A sensibility for which everything is on the same level, all experiences are on the same register and everything that has being is of the same order, is ill-prepared for a death that is anything other, or anything more, than a biological happening.

Evelyn Waugh gave us a fitting metaphor of secular death in _The Loved One_. It was written as futuristic farce, but as is always the case with good satire it reveals a good part of the truth about us and of modernity's way of thinking about mortality. The narrative centers on a cemetery named Whispering Glades Memorial Park, the vision for which is described by its founder as follows:

> _Behold I dreamed a dream and I saw a New Earth sacred to HAPPINESS. There amid all that Nature and Art could offer to elevate the Soul of Man I saw the Happy Resting Place of Countless Loved Ones. And I saw the Waiting Ones who still stood_ _on the brink of that narrow stream that now separated them from those who had gone before. Young and old, they were happy too. Happy in Beauty, Happy in the certain knowledge that their Loved Ones were very near, in Beauty and Happiness such as the earth cannot give. I heard a voice say: "Do this." And behold I awoke and in the Light and Promise of my DREAM I made WHISPERING GLADES. ENTER STRANGER and BE HAPPY_. And below, in vast cursive facsimile, the signature: _WILBUR KENWORTHY, THE DREAMER_. A modest wooden signboard beside it read: _Prices on inquiry at Administrative Building. Drive straight on_.23

Whispering Glades in many ways is a sign of the times: death is not to be looked upon or spoken of, and indeed it is not death. We do not die. All is well. It is satire, of course, and if we are speaking philosophically our descriptions will need to be a bit more literal. Let us say that while death in modern, secular society is a reality, it is in the first place a medical reality, a kind of failure of the technological-institutional apparatus rather than a properly human phenomenon. It says nothing about our existential condition but is a problem for which there is sometimes a solution and sometimes not. Aside from the matter of how to postpone it, it does not profit us to think about it, and ritualizing it is superstition. There is no need for mourning customs, and grief is a disorder. (Remarkably, the DSM-5 of 2013 has dropped the bereavement exclusion from the DSM-4 catalog of depressive disorders.)

The ancients taught us to die well. This does not translate into a scientific-technological worldview but in the most impoverished way: die without pain. If someone you have loved has died then get over it quickly, and if you cannot then seek psychiatric help. If Evelyn Waugh were alive today, he would write a satire about this. We have replaced a good death with a managed death. Indeed, there is no good death any longer. Death is bad, and is to be combated as the great nemesis of modern medicine. Death does not condition our existence; it is the enemy. Gorer noted that "I am inclined to see a connection between this inability to get over grief and the absence of any ritual either individual or social, lay or religious, to guide them and the people they came in contact with."24 His point is well taken. For as long as death continues to be banished from familiar experience and spoken of, insofar as it is spoken of at all, in a vocabulary of medical science alone, we shall be ill-prepared for its arrival and at a reflective standstill when we are called upon to think and to respond to what has happened. A secular age replaces the priest with the doctor, lawyer, undertaker, and psychiatrist, and not one of these managerial roles is able to tell the dying or the grieving what any of it means. They are service providers, not interpreters of the human condition, and the consequence of our excessive reliance upon them is that death has become quite literally a meaningless event.

A secular age faces a formidable problem: death rituals of old no longer hold meaning for us and we have found nothing with which to replace them but for services that ring hollow and create awkwardness where inwardness should be. Is the solution a conservative one: to go back to religion and to reinstate the role of the priest? He at least knows what to say, even as it strikes us as nonsense. He can carry out the time-honored ritual and produce in many a state of consolation which is otherwise difficult to find. My own view here is neither to go the conservative route nor the opposite. Let us not set up a false choice between what we might call for simplicity's sake the medieval view and the secular view but rather try to imagine what a civil death ritual might look like. We have other rituals—civil weddings, for instance—that are secular and presided over by no religious figure but a representative of the state. Is this kind of civil ceremony, or something resembling it, transferable to the funeral ritual, with the funeral director in the role formerly occupied by the priest? Certainly many have taken this view, and it is common for funeral services today to contain as little religion as a civil wedding. Religion today is as optional in funerals as in weddings, as the example of Max Frisch illustrates. The problem again is the awkwardness and, one might say, the vacuity of such services, a sense of absence that is not to be dismissed as nostalgia. Frisch was correct: the present age of secularity has not found a fitting replacement for the burial rites of old.

The principal advantage of secularization for death is its relative freedom from illusion. (I say "relative freedom" for denial is also an illusion, and one that is little preferable to any that religion has to offer.) The principal disadvantage is the existential vacuum with which it leaves us. What, then, is to be done? My answer to this will be incomplete, but let us dwell for a moment on the modern ritual that is the period of silence. It is a ritual that has been practiced for a few centuries by American Quakers and which was popularized in the twentieth century in many nations on occasions such as the anniversary of November 11, 1918. A moment of silence, typically lasting one or two minutes, was intended as an expression of respectful remembrance and its popularization in the course of the last century is due in part to its religious neutrality and consequent appropriateness for secular society. There is something in this ritual that is profoundly compelling. Silence speaks. It speaks louder than actions and much louder than words, and in many contexts is the most fitting response to what we are witnessing. Death is such an occasion. A funeral or memorial service demands, if anything in our experience does, a break from the everyday. The one thing needful is a cessation of the empty chatter, the sameness, casualness, and routine of which so much of life consists, and if not to say the right thing—for no one quite knows what this is—then to say nothing at all, but to contemplate in respectful silence the life of the deceased, to be with them one last time, and to be with their survivors in a sense far removed from the everyday. Silence—this act of which all are thought capable—can express many things, but in this context what it can say more effectively than any words is that here we stand, we mortals, in solidarity with the dead and with each other, in recognition that a human being has lived and died. If there is no religious solemnity and pomp, still there is gravity and a will to find meaning in the face of life's greatest obstacle. Their life counted for something, was about something, and teaches something of which we might be reminded prior to the inevitable return to ordinary life. The life of the deceased may be understood for the first time as a completed totality. "What happens," as Julian Young expresses it, "if one takes 'time out' from the hurried and harried business of everyday living to reflect upon its overall character... is that one grasps the overall script, the 'big picture,' the personal narrative of one's life," whether it be one's own life or that of the dead.25 A new quality of reflection becomes possible, and one that, as Heidegger said of conscience, " _speaks solely and constantly in the mode of silence_."26 Why this period of silence, when it is observed at all, should be limited to one or two minutes might strike us as odd, as if what calls for reflection on such occasions is an uncomplicated matter or simply an unpleasant one, a repulsive dose of thought to be endured before going back to the noise and the rat race.27 We moderns are, or so it seems to me, largely and woefully out of our depth at such times and would much prefer it if some secular counterpart to the priest would preside over a ceremony that the rest of us could simply attend, as we would a baseball game. The period of silence is one ritual only and has an unfortunate tendency to be over before we know it; however the thinking that is behind it may give us a clue to what larger set of rites and customs is suited to an age of secularity.

A second example that warrants mention is the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, DC. Less important perhaps than the design of the three-part memorial is the thinking that is implicit in it and its suitability to a secular age. The largest and most striking part of the memorial, of course, is an elegant black wall inscribed with the names of the dead and missing from a war that aroused such heated political debate at the time and in the years that followed. The names listed contain no mention of rank or unit, and the wall itself is a reflective surface that allows the visitor to see their reflection while reading the names of the dead, the effect of which is to bring the past and present together in a way that is intended to heal the profound psychic wounds that this particular war caused. Here is a place of silent thought, with no authoritative personage presiding, and no set time period for visitors to be present. The memorial itself is a public statement, and what it says (although this, of course, calls for a good deal of interpretation) is that here again we stand in solidarity with the dead, drawing no distinctions of politics or religion or anything that divides human beings from each other. Here is a place not only of moral but of existential equality, for the fate of the deceased is that of the living. Here we remember not in any merely informational sense but in the manner, as Heidegger put it, of a taking care, a "lingering together" with the dead, and an honoring:

> The "deceased," as distinct from the dead body, has been torn away from "those remaining behind" and is the object of "being taken care of" in funeral rites, burial, and the cult of graves. And that is so because the kind of being of the deceased is " still more" than a thing at hand in the surrounding world to be taken care of. In lingering together with him in mourning and commemorating, those remaining behind _are with_ him, in a mode of concern which honors him.... The deceased has abandoned our " _world_ " and left it behind. Nonetheless, it is _in terms of this world_ that those remaining can still _be with him_.28

As Heidegger well knew, "being with" another, be they living or dead, is the most complex of phenomena and, in the case of a being-with that commemorates and honors, requires a mode of concernful engagement that is beyond the mode of the everyday. The memorial itself is located in a space physically removed (somewhat) from the city, again speaking to the idea that here we are at some remove from the realm of everyday concerns, that there is a gravity about this place that demands a different mode of comportment and thought.

What matters in all of this is not whether one erects a statue or a wall, opts for burial or cremation, burns incense or lights a candle, spends lavishly on funerals or practices frugality, but an outer comportment and an inner attunement of respectful remembrance, solidarity, and mindful silence. The notion of a good death need not be given up as an anachronism.

## Notes

1 Allan Kellehear, _A Social History of Dying_ (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 80.

2 Valerie M. Hope, _Roman Death: The Dying and the Dead in Ancient Rome_ (London: Continuum, 2009), 112, 66.

3 Philippe Ariès, _The Hour of Our Death_ , trans. H. Weaver (New York: Vintage, 2008), 28.

4 Ariès, _Western Attitudes toward Death_ , 25.

5 Tolstoy, "Three Deaths," in _The Devil and Other Stories_ , trans. L and A. Maude (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 61.

6 Ariès, _Western Attitudes toward Death_ ,4.

7 As Kellehear notes, "belief in an afterlife seems quite common, at least in the Stone Age, about 30–50,000 years ago." Kellehear, _A Social History of Dying_ , 23. Ariès writes,

> One finds evidence of this belief in the first tombs of the Middle Paleolithic period with burial offerings; and even today, in the midst of an age of scientific disbelief, one meets watered-down versions of the idea of continued existence or obstinate denials of immediate destruction. Ideas of continuation form a foundation that is common to all the ancient religions and to Christianity.
>
> Ariès, _The Hour of Our Death,95_

8 Hope, _Roman Death_ , 101.

9 Kellehear, _A Social History of Dying_ , 59.

10 _Damnatio memoriae_ was a decree by the Roman senate that a traitorous or otherwise dishonored individual—typically a former emperor or other member of the elite—was to be banished from the public memory. On the matter of memory management, the Romans meant business.

11 Ariès, _The Hour of Our Death_ , 30.

12 Ibid., 28.

13 Hope, _Roman Death_ , 122–3, 74.

14 S. C. Humphreys, "Death and Time," in S. C. Humphreys and H. King, eds., _Mortality and Immortality: The Anthropology and Archaeology of Death_ (London: Academic Press, 1981), 270.

15 Richard E. DeMaris, _The New Testament in Its Ritual World_ (London: Routledge, 2008), 12.

16 Barbara Myerhoff, "Rites of Passage: Process and Paradox," in Victor Turner, ed., _Celebration: Studies in Festivity and Ritual_ (Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1982), 109.

17 Gorer, _Death, Grief, and Mourning in Contemporary Britain_ , 72.

18 Ariès, _The Hour of Our Death_ , 579.

19 Charles Taylor, _A Secular Age_ (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2007), 1.

20 Bryan R. Wilson, _Religion in Secular Society_ (New York: Penguin, 1966), 14.

21 Taylor, _A Secular Age_ , 3.

22 Jürgen Habermas, _An Awareness of What Is Missing: Faith and Reason in a Post-secular Age_ , trans. C. Cronin (Cambridge: Polity, 2010), 15.

23 Evelyn Waugh, _The Loved One_ (New York: Penguin, 1984), 34.

24 Gorer, _Death, Grief, and Mourning in Contemporary Britain_ , 83.

25 Young, _The Death of God and the Meaning of Life_ , 87.

26 Heidegger, _Being and Time_ , 263.

27 It was an Australian journalist, Edward George Honey, who first proposed a period of silence on the first anniversary of the armistice that ended World War I. In his letter to a British newspaper he suggested a period of five minutes. King George V opted for two minutes. Monarchs do not justify themselves, so we are left to wonder at the king's line of reasoning here.

28 Heidegger, _Being and Time_ , 229–30.

# 3 Voluntary death

Nero was an unpopular emperor and by 68 AD his days were numbered. Public sentiment was against him, the western provinces were rebelling, the senate declared him a public enemy, and his own armies were defecting. Afraid for his life he took flight and was soon abandoned by his military escort, his friends, and personal bodyguards and was alone but for a few attendants. With his enemies closing in, the last of the Caesars faced a decision. As one recent biographer writes,

> His companions then urged him to escape by suicide from the outrages that were awaiting him. He ordered them to dig a trench that would fit his body and to look out for any fragments of marble for a monument; also to bring water to wash his corpse and wood to burn it. While they carried out these tasks for him, he wept and declared repeatedly (or so we are often told, mistakenly), "What an artist dies in me!"

Nero had fancied himself a poet, musician, actor, and charioteer of the first order, and his artistic endeavors occupied him rather more than running an empire. Historians debate whether there was any method to speak of in the madness of this highly theatrical man, but a failed emperor he undoubtedly was. Violent death was not an uncommon fate for Roman rulers, and the senate's decree stated that Nero was to be punished in the ancestral manner: "he would be led naked through the streets with his neck in a yoke, he would be beaten with rods until he died, and his body would be thrown from the Tarpeian Rock."1 With some assistance from an attendant, Nero, aged thirty, ended his own life with a sword—to the general enthusiasm of the people.

An ignominious end for a born artist, or so it would appear. His suicide, however, raises some questions. Is this man's death properly described as suicide, even forced suicide? Was it voluntary, or perhaps semi-voluntary? What are we to make of this action? Was it pathological, one final desperate act of a madman? What is the meaning of it, and why did he do it? At first glance, the answer to the last question seems clear: it beats the ancestral method, but exactly how so? This man not only fancied himself an artist, he believed it profoundly, and this belief was not without basis or a pure product of madness. We do not, of course, have access to his mental states, but his deliberations on the matter may at least be surmised. His options were essentially two: the ancestral method and suicide. Why would he have opted for the second? Is it as straightforward a matter as that the sword is quicker and less painful than being beaten to death, or is there more to it than this? I suspect there is far more to it. Nero Claudius Caesar Augustus Germanicus had been the ruler of the world's greatest empire for a period of nearly fourteen years—a long time by Roman standards. He was a descendant (after a fashion) of the great Julius Caesar and Augustus, adopted son of Claudius, grandson of the famed Germanicus, and the last of the Julio-Claudian dynasty. It would not do for such a man to die in abject humiliation, and this is precisely what the senate's decree represented. There is honor in death by one's own hand, he would have undoubtedly believed. More than this, there is art, or more art at any rate than what the senate had in store. This desperate poet opted for whatever meaning was possible for him in the circumstances and surely the more poetic death from his point of view. It is not without significance that in his final hours he sent his attendants to prepare a grave, for water to cleanse his body and wood to burn it, and for marble to fashion some makeshift monument. To Nero's way of thinking, there is more poetry in this than in being thrown from a cliff.

To this day this man's reputation remains among the worst in the ancient world. He is often said to have been insane, in which case his suicide, if that is what it was, can presumably be regarded as the last in a long series of pathological acts. A plausible case can be made, however, that he was not mad but merely bad, and perhaps neither so bad nor so unhinged as the tradition of two thousand years has had it.2 Is suicide pathological in every case—in Nero's case, for example? What of other cases of forced or semi-forced suicide? Antony and Cleopatra met a similar end. Having lost the civil war against Augustus (Octavian at the time) in 30 BC, the lovers opted to put an end to their lives rather than surrender. Neither was believed to have been suffering from any psychological affliction. Instead their act has tended to be regarded as forced; facing probable execution, they chose suicide over ultimate defeat at the hands of their enemy. Again, there is honor in this, at least by the standards of the time.

We need to look deeper into cases of this kind, and indeed at any case of voluntary or semi-voluntary death. What is the human significance of this act, and is its meaning one or many? It is surely the most desperate of acts, but as we asked in the case of the denial of death, is it a pathological one, a symptom in every case of mental disturbance? Let us consider briefly one final example, this one from contemporary film. In _The Wrestler_ (2009), Randy "the Ram" Robinson, played by Mickey Rourke, is an ageing professional wrestler with a heart condition and little by way of future prospects. His heyday twenty years in the past, he is now a has-been entertainer down on his luck and rejected by more or less everyone who had meant anything to him but for his long-standing fans and fellow wrestlers. What is this man to do with his life, and what future is open to him? No career beckons, his relationship with his only daughter is estranged, and he is alone, impoverished. Other wrestlers of his age cut a pathetic figure in his eyes and he finds their lot in life intolerable. As the narrative develops, Randy is offered an opportunity to fight one last time in a rematch against his old foe. Against medical advice, he accepts the offer and in spite of experiencing chest pains during the match chooses to climb to the top rope to attempt his signature move, the "Ram Jam." The ending fades to black, his fate unknown. Let us suppose that he died, as seems likely from the course of the narrative. Is his death suicidal? Is it voluntary, a free decision well informed by the medical facts and a product of a sane mind? Or is it a pathological act, a consequence of depression perhaps? The character is undoubtedly melancholy, somewhat lonely and down on his luck, but clinically depressed he is not. His death was the product of a decision. In film, of course, one has partial access at best to a character's mental states, however one gathers that his decision to attempt the life-threatening maneuver turns upon his identity as an athlete and entertainer, loved by his fans and respected by his colleagues. His sport is no mere livelihood but who he is, and it is this that his decision asserts. His death is the fitting end to a particular life and an act of supreme self-affirmation.

These are only a few instances of a death that is in some measure voluntary. Whether any of them is appropriately described as suicide is open to question, however on the face of it they all are. All died at their own hand—with few options open to them, to be sure, but the facts remain: Nero was not assassinated; Antony and Cleopatra were not executed; Randy the Ram did not go quietly. To our knowledge, none of these acts originated in a pathological condition and all bore a meaning to their agents. According to contemporary psychology, suicide—the act and the thought—is a complication of psychiatric conditions, most often mood disorders. Suicidality, as it is called, is a diagnosis and in the main a symptom of depression. It is not a free decision but precisely a symptom, and if not in all cases then virtually all. Most often it is a consequence of an impulse-control disorder. Might it also be a bearer of meaning, an existential decision, or even a rational act? Albert Camus wrote, "There is but one truly serious philosophical problem, and that is suicide. Judging whether life is or is not worth living amounts to answering the fundamental question of philosophy."3 What would bring a philosopher to say this? Is it not a settled matter that suicide is a problem of psychology and psychiatry, and perhaps as a secondary matter sociology? A human being who elects to die or who even seriously contemplates this is suffering from a disorder, and the circumstances in which such deliberation takes place are quite beside the point. Suicide is pathology—the act and the thought—and the medical model applies. How, then, can it also be a question of philosophy, and indeed its most fundamental question? In saying this was Camus resorting to hyperbole? He was, after all, a writer of fiction. Is the statement just cited intended as provocation, as Nietzsche can be read as attempting quite often not only to advance an argument in the usual fashion but to elicit a certain kind of response from the reader? Was Camus trying to inspire something in his readers or is his meaning what it appears to be?

What are we to make of voluntary death, and what is the meaning of it? It can be examined from a number of disciplinary standpoints, but is it essentially a psychiatric-medical phenomenon or something else? Is there a deep truth about it or is it impossibly contingent, beset by too many variables to gain a comprehensive view of the matter? On what we might call the standard view, Nero should have been medicated, and if the Romans had but enjoyed the benefits of modern knowledge he may have received appropriate treatment for his affliction and become a well-adjusted individual. For the better part of two thousand years the standard view was not psychiatric-medical but moral-religious: the problem with this man was that he was evil, one who fiddled while Rome burned, a murderer of his own mother and brother, a monster of vanity, and a persecutor of Christians; his death was divine punishment for a sinful life. Which is it: mentally disturbed, wicked, irrational, some combination of the three, or something else entirely? It is not an easy matter, and let us not assume from the outset that a single theoretical model or way of thinking about this most paradoxical of phenomena need apply.

## The scientization of suicide

Emile Durkheim's _Suicide_ is a classic of sociology and is the obvious starting point in a discussion of the sociology of elective death. What are the social causes of suicide, or if not causes in a strict sense then factors in a social environment that contribute to its occurrence? What explains the difference in suicide rates in different segments of the population and in which groups does its frequency increase or decrease? Essentially suicide for Durkheim and many sociologists and suicidologists who followed him is a product of environmental conditions and is "in itself a collective phenomenon," one properly regarded not as an act of the individual but a phenomenon of the group.4 It therefore naturally lends itself to sociological investigation, using empirical methods of analysis such as statistical comparison, analysis of demographic norms and socio-economic indicators, and the like. Above all, it is the comparison of suicide rates within and between populations that reveals the true causes of this phenomenon, Durkheim and many who have followed him maintain. Durkheim popularized a view of this act as a product of social causes from which the individual is essentially unfree. The social collective, he maintained, maintains such a firm grip on the person that this act, like so many others, is not properly explained from the standpoint of the suicidal human being and the meaning that this act holds for them but from the perspective of societies and the social causes that compel them toward self-destruction.

Among Durkheim's conclusions are the following: "Suicide varies inversely with the degree of integration of religious society. Suicide varies inversely with the degree of integration of domestic society. Suicide varies inversely with the degree of integration of political society." The root cause of increased suicide rates in the modern world is the growing disintegration of each of these elements and a general attenuation of social ties. What he calls "egoistic suicide" in particular is brought on by "excessive individuation" from the group, and its sole remedy "is to restore enough consistency to social groups for them to obtain a firmer grip on the individual, and for him to feel himself bound to them." As he would also write,

> First of all, it can be said that, as collective force is one of the obstacles best calculated to restrain suicide, its weakening involves a development of suicide. When society is strongly integrated, it holds individuals under its control, considers them at its service and thus forbids them to dispose willfully of themselves. Accordingly, it opposes their evading their duties to it through death.5

Here is anti-individualism with a vengeance. The problem with the suicidal individual is not that they are depressed but that they are egoistic and willful. Social engagement in its various forms is what they are missing and must be brought back to through collective force.

Among the primary variables in Durkheim's analysis of suicide is religion. Suicidality increases with religious diversity, or with the "disintegration" of this traditional form of social unity. Studying the relative suicide rates among groups of Catholics and Protestants, he hypothesized that lower rates in the former groups are due to tighter and altogether normal levels of social control over the individual which, he believed, have disintegrated in Protestant populations. Other factors include gender, marital and family status, war and peace, and education levels. Rates of suicide, he noted, are higher among men than women, among the unmarried, the childless, the relatively educated, and in peacetime over war. Underlying all these variables is the matter of relative social unity or integration—one might say homogeneity. As it lessens in modern societies, suicide rates increase as a direct and predictable consequence.

A particular political-philosophical viewpoint underlies Durkheim's analysis. This larger viewpoint had such a bearing on the scientific explanation that it is difficult to determine how much of the explanation remains should we reject that viewpoint. What is especially subject to question is the notion of suicide as a "collective phenomenon." Let us consider this. When we look away from the abstractions and the statistics and in the direction of the individual human being contemplating whether to take their own life, what do we see? Nero is alone with his fate as the enemy approaches, and he is faced with the most tortuous decision of his life. Was his decision a collective one, or the action itself? What about it was collective? Durkheim wished to draw attention away from the particular and toward the abstract, a methodological move that can be cited equally as a case of misplaced concreteness or as what Gabriel Marcel astutely called the spirit of abstraction. The latter occurs when the inquirer becomes so enamored with abstract generalities, methods, principles, or statistics that these come to possess more being than the things themselves. As Marcel expressed it, the spirit of abstraction is a "disease of the intelligence" which is "not separable from this contempt for the concrete conditions of abstract thinking." "As soon as we accord to any category, isolated from all other categories," and from concrete phenomena still more, "an arbitrary primacy, we are victims of the spirit of abstraction."6 Of course, there is nothing inherently problematic about abstractions or statistical inquiry; the problem is when the abstraction becomes more real in the mind of the investigator than the particular. The phenomenological fact of the matter is that suicide is not an abstraction but a decision and an action of the existing subject. Nero was not unfree, moved by causal forces this way or that, and his decision was his own. The collective was not acting through him.

What becomes of the suicidal individual in Durkheim's analysis? Does it exist? Is it a human being with a face and a name, an agent possessed of mystery or freedom, or is it a ghostly entity with a place and function in the social apparatus but no being of its own? It is rather difficult to say. The suicidal individual plays no role in the analysis of the act. They are a pawn in the game, and for Durkheim the game is the thing. If we are to speak concretely, the problem of suicide consists in the lived experience of particular persons, yet this obvious fact goes into eclipse along with the existing individual itself when the general and statistical assume ontological primacy and the spirit of abstraction reigns. It would be absurd to abolish our abstractions and equally absurd to posit a world composed of the same. The collective itself is a category—not something unreal but constituted by particulars without which it is nothing at all. By no means does this spell trouble for quantitative sociological analysis, however it does bid it to climb down from the heavens and recall that the suicidal individual is a being of flesh and bone and that their act, however we are to conceive it, is not "in itself a collective phenomenon." The "in itself" belongs to Kantian metaphysics and does not exist. Characterizing this act as a "collective phenomenon" is the spirit of abstraction at its worst. What we must not do is let the particular disappear into the abstraction but look in two directions: at the general and the particular and back again, but with some accent on the particular. Nero, whatever else one might say about him, was a person.

He was also, according to long-standing belief at least, a crazy person. No psychologist or psychiatrist would put it this way, of course, but they will insist upon regarding suicidality as a medical phenomenon. It is a symptom and a pathology, and if not in every case then in the vast majority. The psychiatrization of suicide, like its treatment in sociology, is problematic only when it loses sight of the existing individual, as rather often it does. The human being who commits, attempts, or contemplates this act is not a classification, and they appear in about as many forms as soldiers or athletes. There are interesting generalities to be made regarding the psychology of athletes, and sports psychology is not humbug, nor is suicidology. The problem is not the discipline but the tendency, not unique to any field, to arrogate to itself a privileged or quasi-authoritative conceptual scheme which presumes to explain all. The totality defies explanation. Like so many human phenomena, suicide may be investigated from the standpoint of sociology, psychology, psychiatry, and a great many other disciplines, not all of them scientific and each of which imposes a classificatory system that selectively reveals and conceals the things themselves. The way an object is disclosed and known depends on the question we are asking about it, the methodology and conceptual framework employed, disciplinary prejudices, and the larger horizon of thought that the inquirer brings to bear. No disciplinary perspective has the final word on this "object," nor is the object itself one. We may use the same word to comprehend the actions of Nero, Antony and Cleopatra, Randy the Ram, the jilted lover, the depressed teenager, the prison inmate, and so on, but employing a single word to cover disparate cases does not entail that the thing itself has an essence or a single deep core of meaning. It may be spoken of as an act of desperation, depression, despair, alienation, immorality, egoism, self-affirmation, rebellion, and some other things, depending on what disciplinary vocabulary we bring to bear, what question we ask, and what is important to us. If morality is what we care about, we may also speak of it as a right or even in some cases as a duty. The political collectivist will speak of it as a collective phenomenon, the utilitarian as an issue of the public welfare, and so on. In this plethora of perspectives none stands above the rest.

## Existential rebellion

Among modern philosophical perspectives, that of Camus is especially notable for its insight into the depth dimension of suicide. Nietzsche had argued that after the death of God the modern world had descended into a nihilistic condition, and it was a diagnosis that many later philosophers of existence shared. Camus preferred to speak in this connection of the absurd: not only modernity but human existence more generally are suffering from a condition of vacuity and lost spirit. In this condition the question of suicide becomes an urgent one: what is the value of life in an absurd condition? If one judges the relative urgency of a question by the actions it entails then the question of suicide is the most urgent of all. "Ihave never seen anyone die for the ontological argument," Camus noted, nor does one die for a great majority of the questions philosophers pose. The issue is a "mortal problem" and his treatment of it in The _Myth of Sisyphus_ "sums itself up for me as a lucid invitation to live and to create in the very midst of the desert."7

If the question is whether life has meaning, the affirmative answer appears to stand without justification, rather as Nietzsche had observed how many ideals of old had by modern times been exposed as idols to which many continue to profess allegiance while lacking any basis for doing so. Since it is a question of meaning and value, the issue is not only a personal matter but a properly philosophical one. "I see many people die because they judge that life is not worth living." Is there a flaw in their reasoning? Suicide, for Camus, is at least in many cases an expression of the conviction that life has become absurd. The act appears to come out of the blue but is rooted in a judgment and an experience:

> Of an apartment-building manager who had killed himself I was told that he had lost his daughter five years before, that he had changed greatly since, and that that experience had "undermined" him. A more exact word cannot be imagined.

The experience of the absurd is of disconnection—between self and others, between one's self-understanding and the reality of one's life, between the fact of death and a way of life in which "everyone lives as if no one 'knew.'" In short, "This divorce between man and his life, the actor and his setting, is properly the feeling of absurdity. "The experience gives rise to a judgment: that there is no point in living under this condition. Suicide is a verdict on life, but does the verdict follow from the idea that existence is without some rationally identifiable meaning? Camus denied the conclusion. Even if, as he believed, human life is absurd, the essential matter is to proceed. No solution is to be had, yet what is required is no act of resignation or evasion but a way of living with this knowledge. Can we live in a world that is devoid of metaphysical significance and indifferent to our fate? No blueprint exists of how to do this, but what is imperative "is not to be cured, but to live with one's ailments."8 One lives with an absurd existence in the sense not merely of adapting or making the best of a lamentable situation but of finding creative ways of living in full awareness of our condition.

This is done through rebellion and consciousness. The realization of the absurd changes us by confronting us with a choice: either to live or die in the face of it. The options are fundamentally two: on one hand resignation and suicide, on the other "awakening" and "revolt." If we cannot overcome the absurdity of the world we can cultivate an awareness of it, and without resignation. This is revolt in its metaphysical connotation: the imperative to understand in the most intellectually honest way the objective meaninglessness of our existence without succumbing to pessimism. Suicide does not follow from the perception of absurdity; on the contrary, what follows is a rebellion that itself imposes value of life. Dostoevsky's underground man serves as a case in point: his freedom, he insisted, lies in demonstrating that he is not a cog in the machine, not part of the apparatus of modern life but a distinct person with a will. His circumstances are abject and his life outwardly pointless, but what is essential is his struggle for self-assertion and refusal to submit to an unkind fate. The same can be said of Sisyphus. This hero of the absurd is condemned to a meaningless fate of rolling an enormous rock up a hill only to see it roll down again in a process that is eternally repeated. What Camus found interesting in this seemingly pointless life is what must go through Sisyphus' mind as he watches the rock roll down the hill for the one thousandth time and begins to walk down after it. Why does he persist in this futility rather than commit suicide? What must he be thinking in order to make it possible to descend the hill yet again? In Camus' words, "One must imagine Sisyphus happy," but how are we to imagine this? His happiness is grounded in awareness; consciousness is the source of whatever meaning and happiness are possible for human beings. Were Sisyphus not aware of his fate he might as well submit to it, but he refuses. His mindfulness is what saves him from the abyss and makes him a heroic figure for Camus. He continues his labor in full awareness of his condition, and this awareness is inseparable from happiness. Indeed, "One does not discover the absurd without being tempted to write a manual of happiness." "[C]rushing truths perish from being acknowledged."9

Human existence at its most fundamental is the "opposition between my consciousness and the darkness in which it struggles."10 Perceiving the absurd is not the end of the story but the beginning; were it the end, resignation would follow, but Camus' aim was to inspire his readers to rebel, to take action and assert their freedom in the midst of whatever circumstances in which they find themselves. Rebellion is a fundamental principle of our existence: to exist is to rebel, and not as an empty gesture of defiance or self-indulgence but in the name of our common human freedom. In a godless universe it falls to us to impose on life whatever meaning it will have, for in itself it bears none. It is no small change in the human condition to regard meaning no longer as a metaphysical given but as a choice and an invention. It means that the person is responsible for their life in a wholly new way. One is an agent and must become who one is, as Nietzsche would say. One does not accomplish this without facing up to the absurd:

> Rebellion is born of the spectacle of irrationality, confronted with an unjust and incomprehensible condition. But its blind impulse is to demand order in the midst of chaos, and unity in the very heart of the ephemeral. It protests, it demands, it insists that the outrage be brought to an end, and that what has up to now been built upon shifting sands should henceforth be founded on rock. Its preoccupation is to transform.

We do not allow absurdity to have the last word, nor go along unthinkingly with the dictates of convention. Rebellion begins with some judicious negation but must turn in a creative direction. It must issue in a decision to do something of importance and that is one's own, and at the same time that one's rebellion is a social undertaking. It is no simple nay-saying and "defies more than it denies."11 Where it is meaningful, negation is a prelude to invention and constitutes a call to some semblance of rational order.

This point is illustrated by Alexei Kirilov in Dostoevsky's _The Possessed_. This young revolutionist determines to commit "logical suicide" on grounds of the non-existence of God and as an assertion of his freedom. "He who wants to have supreme freedom," Kirilov announces,

> must dare to kill himself. He who dares has broken the secret of deception. There's no freedom beyond that: that's all there is; beyond it there's nothing. He who dares to take his life is a god. Anyone can make it so that there will be no God or anything else. But no one has ever done it.12

For Camus, Kirilov is a hero of the absurd in that his suicide constitutes a rebellion against a godless universe and "is his idea."13 It is an assertion of his existential liberty, which in the absence of God is the only meaning that life can hold. If there is no God then Kirilov is God in the sense that he moves into the place formerly occupied by the divinity as determiner of meaning and judge of what is good. "One day," in Kirilov's words,

> there will be freedom, proud men to whom it will make no difference whether they live or not. That'll be the new man. He who conquers pain and fear will be a god himself. And the other God will disappear.14

Having determined that life is devoid of metaphysical significance, all that remains is to prove his own freedom in the act of suicide. His action is a kind of martyrdom in that he wishes to prove that we are all free, and so overcome the deep reluctance so many have to accept this fact about our condition. For the most part, as Dostoevsky astutely observed, human beings do not accept our freedom but live as if under tutelage throughout life and that liberty itself is something we have been sentenced to if it is real at all. Kirilov wishes to prove that his life is in his hands, and his act is therefore one of rebellion rather than resignation. If God is the sole source of meaning in the world, and if there is no God, life is devoid of significance but for the assertion of our freedom. Kirilov's revolt takes unusual form, of course, and for Dostoevsky himself this was hardly a character to be admired, but what matters to Camus is that his suicide is not an act of resignation but is an example of a creative act "in the very midst of the desert."

## The meanings of suicide

So much confusion surrounds the issue of suicide that it is far from clear exactly what kind of issue we are discussing and what the question is. Who commits this act or even contemplates it? What are its causes? What environmental or psychological conditions increase its likelihood, and what is to be done about it, be it therapeutically or at the level of public policy? These are important questions, but underlying them is the question of what this act means. Sociologists and psychologists increasingly recognize that it is not only the mentally ill who commit suicide and that we are speaking of a profoundly personal, existential issue, whether we understand this in Camus' terms or some other. Individuals who choose to end their lives may perceive their circumstances with perfect clarity and the despair they feel may not be pathological but reflect precisely the reality of their situation.

Let us consider what Shneidman has called subintentioned death. This is

> one in which the person plays some partial, covert, subliminal or unconscious role in hastening his own demise. The evidence for such a role might be found in a variety of behavior patterns: poor judgment, imprudence, excessive risk-taking, neglect of self, disregard of a life-extending medical regimen, abuse of alcohol, misuse of drugs—all ways in which an individual can advance the date of his death.15

Shneidman believes this to be a far more common phenomenon than is generally supposed, and that while it is difficult to identify conclusively it likely includes a large percentage of deaths deemed accidental, particularly among those who have recently suffered a grievous loss. Other examples of subintentioned death are easily found. It is well known, for instance, that many widows and widowers die within a relatively short time of their spouse. Is it suicide? Outwardly not, but what is occurring at a deeper level of the psyche? It is at such a time that the contingency of the will to live becomes most visible, however a contingency it has always been. What of the chronic smoker, drug user, or obese person who can see the inevitability of their habit shortening their life but who will not exercise their will? The cases and the variables are many, but what they bring to light is that there are layers of intention which are in regular conflict. The conflict itself does not constitute "disturbance" in the sense that psychology speaks of it but belongs to our condition itself. The human soul is a battleground of strong and conflicting forces; it is disturbed, conflicted, and troubled every day of its existence, and whatever equilibrium it attains is more limited and contingent than we often imagine. It is not especially harmonious or well ordered, and it can be undermined at the best of times, in particular by suffering. In the face of suffering it faces a momentous choice: to continue a life that has become disagreeable or to die. It is not a question that admits of a uniform answer. One intention replies resoundingly in the affirmative while a second is unconvinced.

Subintentioned death provides a clue to a larger phenomenon. Durkheim defined suicide as any death resulting directly or indirectly from an action or inaction of the person which they know will produce this result. On this definition—and others have been offered—it is debatable whether subintentioned death qualifies, although it would appear to if we place some emphasis on indirectness and inaction. Even if it does not, it sheds light on the larger issue of voluntary and semi-voluntary death and reveals something of its complexity.16 We are speaking not of an act of unitary significance but of a set of phenomena that can be investigated from a variety of disciplinary standpoints and that, regarded existentially, exhibits a rather large array of meanings. How do we compare the suicide of Nero to that of the alienated adolescent of today? The short answer is that we do not, for we are speaking of incommensurables. There is no illuminating basis of comparison, nor may both be subsumed without interpretive violence under a single classification. Even trying to define suicide in an adequate way—that includes the full range of what requires inclusion while excluding what should be excluded—is difficult owing to the disparateness of the phenomena. The human significance of this act is not one but many.

There is an existential dimension to this act about which macro, medical, and quantitative approaches remain silent, and it was this to which Camus was drawing our attention. In the end we are left with the individual in the moment of decision, and this most momentous decision in human existence does not admit of a uniform answer. It requires an existential choice, with all the consequences that follow from it—either an end to this life or renewed commitment to a life that is freely chosen. This is a choice that belongs to every human being, but it seldom presents itself as a decision until one is faced with the kind of suffering that is undermining. Consider what is called pre-emptive suicide, where a patient knows they are in the early stages of a condition that is terminal or that will see them eventually deprived of their faculties. It is not a self-evident matter that they must endure an existence no longer as the person they have been. Consider also the parent who has lost a child and who finds their death impossible to bear, or the widow or widower who has lost a spouse of many years and experiences life without them as impossible. Their suffering is profound and unpathological, and the question is not only how but whether to bear it. One expects an affirmative answer, but is the expectation rightful? Whether we are speaking the language of morality or psychology, not one of us is in a position to judge for another how much suffering they ought to endure. This is a decision that belongs to the individual—on the condition that one is of sound mind, of course, but let us neither multiply the conditions nor take suicidality as proof unto itself of instability.

Choosing with conscious will and purpose how one is to live and whether to live at all is a life task for every human being. It is the latter question that suffering can bring into focus, despite the superstitions that have long surrounded this issue. Our personal existence is so deeply connected with particular others that in the event of their loss the idea of suicide may be welcomed as a consolation or, in the unfathomable logic of the unconscious, as a possibility of reunion. "The thought of suicide," as Nietzsche expressed it, "is a powerful comfort: it helps one through many a dreadful night."17 It is not only among the mentally ill that the will to live is a contingency. There are conditions in which one's very existence is experienced as a burden, and the decision one faces bears far less on the moral permissibility of suicide than the existential choice of life or death in the face of suffering. The decision to confront it directly rather than letting it go without saying or evading it as taboo is imperative to the grieving process and to the more basic task of being human. Rollo May noted the beneficial implications that can follow upon the explicit choice of life or death, beginning with "a heightened awareness of life, a heightened sense of possibility." As he noted,

> When one has consciously chosen to live, two other things happen. First, his responsibility for himself takes on a new meaning. He accepts responsibility for his own life not as something with which he has been saddled, a burden forced upon him: but as a something he has chosen, himself. For this person, himself, now exists as a result of a decision he himself has made.... The other thing which happens is that discipline from the outside is changed into _self-discipline_. He accepts discipline not because it is commanded—for who can command someone who has been free to take his own life?—but because he has chosen with greater freedom what he wants to do with his own life, and discipline is necessary for the sake of the values he wishes to achieve.18

It is by our choices that we live, and the most basic of these is whether to take up this task with some resoluteness or to concede it to others. The choice of life or death in the face of suffering is never welcome, and the ways of the world would lead us to believe it is not ours to make—that the matter belongs to an unseen power, medical professionals, common belief, or most anyone but the person. Whether life is worth living is a question resolved not in the abstract but in terms of the one asking the question and the circumstances they face. That the answer is a contingency flies directly in the face of tradition and an ancient taboo that has persisted to this day.

In the West, Christianity has long had it that suicide is the moral equivalent of murder. The life of the person being in a sense not one's own but a gift of the Creator, it is the Creator alone who may bring that life to an end. The Christian view superseded older attitudes of Greek and Roman culture which had often adopted a more tolerant stance on the matter.19 The Stoics in particular regarded death by one's own hand as an act of moral freedom and as eminently human, indeed noble in certain circumstances.20 Yet it is the Christian view that came to dominate thought on the matter until modern times, a view that in the medieval period enjoined such religious penalties as the refusal of burial rites, the trial of the deceased person before a homicide court, confiscation of their assets, and degradation of the body. The modern period saw this view partially amended, beginning with its decriminalization in parts of Europe in the eighteenth century as well as its gradual transformation from a religious, moral, and legal matter to a medical one. If suicide at the present time is no longer a moral evil—or not in quite the way it had been in the Middle Ages—it is now a pathology to which the appropriate stance is not condemnation but explanation, intervention, and prevention.

There have been notable exceptions to the traditional view, of course, including not only the Stoics but David Hume, Arthur Schopenhauer, and Nietzsche. As Hume expressed it in the eighteenth century,

> has not every one of consequence the free disposal of his own life? And may he not lawfully employ that power with which nature has endowed him? In order to destroy the evidence of this conclusion, we must show a reason why this particular case is excepted. Is it because human life is of such great importance, that it is a presumption for human prudence to dispose of it?... A hair, a fly, an insect, is able to destroy this mighty being whose life is of such importance. Is it an absurdity to suppose that human prudence may lawfully dispose of what depends on such insignificant causes? It would be no crime in me to divert the Nile or Danube from its course, were I able to effect such purposes. Where then is the crime of turning a few ounces of blood from their natural channel? Do you imagine that I repine at Providence, or curse my creation, because I go out of life, and put a period to a being which, were it to continue, would render me miserable? Far be such sentiments from me.21

Nietzsche as well spoke of "the difficult art of—going at the right time." "Many die too late and some die too early. Still the doctrine sounds strange: 'Die at the right time.'"22 For both figures, suicide needed to be demystified and treated as a free decision. When it is our very being that is at stake—who we are, what it means to be, what the significance of our life has been and whether our continued existence would continue to hold meaning for us—this is not a matter to be relinquished to others. It is the nature of existential choice to be radically particular, non-generalizable, and passionate; it engages not the rational faculty alone but the whole being of the individual. Above all it is a free decision—one for which there are no absolute requirements or objective criteria. One decides, and on a basis that one also decides. There are choices that belong to the existing individual, not in the sense that it is arational or a matter on which others may not have a vital interest but that the salient fact about the decision is who makes it rather than what others think about it or the abstract content of the reasoning.

Whatever else suicide is—an act of despair, desperation, madness, or freedom—it is not a violation of morality. This much may be stated categorically. It remains largely presupposed in common-sense morality that there is something fundamentally unethical about suicide, yet without the assumption that one's life is not one's own this view does not stand. Most of humanity holds the conviction that life possesses infinite value, so much so that to question it even under grievous circumstances invites something akin to indignation. Surely one knows that human life bears an importance that is beyond price, and anyone who would question this must either be joking, disturbed, or immoral. Yet immoral is precisely what it is not. The absolute commitment most have toward life is not a consequence of moral obligation, and the words "You must value life" have likely never persuaded a soul who had been in doubt about the matter. One values life not out of duty but as a spontaneous affirmation arising from a joyous experience of living, of growing and learning, loving and being loved, overcoming difficulties and expending energy toward a constructive purpose. We affirm our existence when life itself works through us, as it were, and issues freely in physical action and sensation, emotional connection and creative expression. Yet no sooner do many experience the value of life than they transform it into a duty, judging that all others must do the same and that they are positively indecent if they do not. A life that is experienced as joyful and infinitely worthwhile is something that some are virtually born into, while others must struggle for it every day of their lives. The second group is more likely than the first to perceive the contingency of the value that life holds. Those who have never perceived this in an immediate way are easily tempted to believe that those who do are morally deficient, but this is far from the truth. Having struggled to make their life something of value, and having glimpsed the alternative, they are well placed to judge both the value and the meaning of their existence and to remark upon the purported obligation to continue it under any circumstances. In this group one finds few absolutists.

Human existence is many things: a journey, a struggle, a tightrope walk, a set of possibilities, yet a duty it is not. It is a free decision, and when one resolves to end it one is committing no transgression. Others may take the view that the suicidal individual has everything to live for, yet it remains that no decision is more rightfully one's own and that unless one shares their view it is beside the point. Regarded from the outside, suicide can appear as an act of selfishness or madness, however it is the standpoint of the individual in the moment of decision that has primacy. Questions of morality, psychology, and sociology enter in when suicide is an object of knowledge, but ultimately we are speaking of a decision and a question of existential meaning for which there is no single answer. There are cases where suicide may indeed be described as an act of insanity or desperation, as a failure to realize a potential or to cope with a misfortune it was within a person's power to overcome, but there are others that are an act of freedom or release from pointless suffering, of protest or honor. For the soldier embarked on a suicide mission, it is an act of bravery and sacrifice. For the terminally ill patient facing unendurable suffering it is a release. In Japanese history it is (or has been represented as) a means of vindication in the face of shame. For a Buddhist monk during the Vietnam War, it was an act of political protest. For the grief-stricken it is a notional reunion with a deceased person without whom one does not care to live. For the ageing person facing certain decline into incapacity it is an act of self-respect. In short, it is an act with too many meanings and variables to encapsulate in a tidy philosophical or scientific package. Its meaning is in every case contingent, circumstantial, and profoundly personal.

The reply of the absolutist is that human life is invariably sacrosanct and accordingly is not a choice. Indeed, the only point in thinking about the matter is to congratulate ourselves on the path we have followed but not chosen. Even if one grants the premise, the conclusion does not follow. Why suppose that the more important a given matter is the less it is subject to free decision? Life suffers no loss in being an object of choice. On the contrary, the conscious decision to continue living in the face of misfortune may invest a life with a value and purpose that it previously lacked. Much the same holds for all our more profound commitments. We do not always choose these in the distanced fashion of consumers, to be sure. Certain of our commitments belong to our facticity, but even here our affirmations require reaffirmation and reinterpretation in ways that call upon our freedom. To reaffirm a commitment is neither to behold a fact nor merely to recall a previous decision but to make a choice where more than one option exists. Still the absolutist persists: sane people do not commit suicide, full stop. Those who do are not exercising their freedom but succumbing to causes over which they have little or no control. Absolutism in this form is not moral but scientific, and its classic proponents include Durkheim and Freud. The latter introduced the theory of a death instinct (Thanatos) to account not only for suicide but for a range of phenomena relating to war and death. This instinct wars eternally with Eros, the instinct of life, and both are universally present in the unconscious. "It is as though," Freud wrote,

> the life of the organism moved with a vacillating rhythm. One group of instincts rushes forward so as to reach the final aim of life as swiftly as possible; but when a particular stage in the advance has been reached, the other group jerks back to a certain point to make a fresh start and so prolong the journey.

He came to believe that

> If we are to take it as a truth that knows no exception that everything living dies for _internal_ reasons—becomes inorganic once again—then we shall be compelled to say that " _the aim of all life is death_ " and, looking backwards, that " _inanimate things existed before living ones_."

The death drive remains largely concealed in human psychology, but whether it is turned upon oneself or directed outward it conflicts directly with "the sexual or life instincts" in a dualistic conception of the drives.23 This hypothesis found few defenders, and while it will not be defended here either the notion of a fundamental tension within the self has a good deal of plausibility. Much of human experience involves precisely a "vacillating rhythm" or dialectic of some kind, if not between instincts of life and death then between conflicting imperatives toward expansive vitality and contractive lethargy, awareness and unawareness, sociability and unsociability, and a thousand lesser polarities. If life itself impels us toward motion, something else impels us otherwise. Let us not call it an instinct or affix to it a metaphysical category. If we were to express this in the psychoanalytic vocabulary of instinctive drives then perhaps we could posit a lethargy instinct rather than a death instinct, however the language of instincts adds little to our understanding of the human situation. I would sooner speak of imperatives than reified instincts, imperatives impelling us now in one direction and now in another. Lethargy has a momentum of its own, one that surpasses the purely physiological need for rest to incorporate much of our way of living and thinking. Suicide may be one of the ways the human being resolves such tensions. In the case of the mentally competent adult, voluntary death is not a product of causal forces but a way of coming to meaningful terms with one's existential condition. Like any choice, it may be wise or ill conceived, but it is an act in which life is taken decisively into one's hands.

General statements on an issue as complex and subterranean as this one are difficult to justify and the burden lies with those who would reduce suicide to an object of knowledge or an effect of particular causes. What if the cause of suicide in a given instance is existential distress, an absence of meaning in one's life or in the only kind of life that remains for one facing unendurable suffering or incapacity? What kind of cause is this? Indeed it is not a cause but an occasion for decision. The choice rests on a judgment of how worthwhile a life is under a given set of circumstances. We do not understand suicide by dwelling in the region of generalities and statistics, moral certainties and scientific quantifiables. The point is to understand the meaning of the act from the standpoint of the actually existing subject, and this meaning is not one but many.

Were the idea not so entrenched, it might well strike us as odd that suicide should possess a unitary meaning in light of which it is to be proscribed in all circumstances. All variants of this idea presuppose that death is not only an evil but that it is unconditionally so—a perfectly ordinary belief, but what is its philosophical basis? Unless the life of the individual remains the moral property of the gods, there does not appear to be any reason for the view that voluntary death is a transgression, and apart from ancient stories about hellfire there is no basis for the view that death itself is bad. It is instinct alone that drives us to this view; Eros, _elan vital_ , the will to live, the will to power, call it what you will, but the objective badness of death has not been demonstrated and nor is it a self-evident proposition. One may call it instinctively evident, but this is no basis for a categorical prohibition. Let us speak directly: death is not bad, and certainly not unqualifiedly. There are circumstances in which dying is to be preferred, and what matters is not that we die but when and (especially) how. As Montaigne remarked:

> the majority of ancient opinions agree on the following: that it is time to die when living entails more ill than good, and that preserving our life to our anguish or prejudice is to infringe the very laws of Nature—as these old precepts put it: "Either a quiet life or a happy death. It is good to die for those who find life a burden. Better not to live than to live in wretchedness."24

There is wisdom in these precepts. More recently, Thomas Nagel has suggested that while regarding death as an evil is a "natural view"—"the allegation that it is good simply to be alive"—it remains that if this is so "it cannot be because of [death's] positive features, but only because of what it deprives us of."25 What makes death an evil—when it is so—is not the thing itself but that it separates us, radically and finally, from the goods of life. It does not, however, deprive us in a genuine sense since there is no longer a subject of experience. Moreover, being deprived of the goods of life is not a condition that is unique to death and may occur well prior to the cessation of biological life.

It is incoherent to speak of death as bad and yet an inevitability not only of the human condition but of nature itself. The fact of its absolute inevitability forces an alteration of perspective, from regarding it as a state that is objectively bad to a process and an undertaking of sorts. The point is to die well—at the right time, in the right way, and with the right attitude of mind. Inevitability, as the Stoics in particular knew, entails serene acceptance of what we cannot change. If dying cannot be eluded then the question, as Steven Luper has expressed it, is "when, and how, _should_ we die?" It is, as the same author argues, a question that permits more than one answer:

> It can be entirely reasonable to fight to the end against diseases or injuries that ultimately prove to be fatal. Since our very lives are at stake, seeking aggressive medical treatment, including drug therapy for the control of pain, is often the best choice. However, it is not always the best choice. For some of us, it will be best to decline treatment, and let ourselves die.26

It was Nietzsche's view as well that death is a process not unlike the process of life, or living, itself. Indeed it was his "deepest conviction," as Carse notes, "that life is not a state or a condition, but a dynamic process which he called 'becoming.'"27 In Nietzsche's words, "life itself is _essentially_ appropriation, injury, overpowering of what is alien and weaker; suppression, hardness, imposition of one's own forms, incorporation and at least, at its mildest—exploitation."28 Nietzsche's conviction that life is an imposition of form, meaning, and value on an existence for which none of these is given applies with equal appropriateness to death. One may also cite Carl Jung in this connection:

> We grant goal and purpose to the ascent of life, why not to the descent? The birth of a human being is pregnant with meaning, why not death? For twenty years and more the growing man is being prepared for the complete unfolding of his individual nature, why should not the older man prepare himself twenty years and more for his death?29

If we are to believe Socrates then all of life is, or ought to be, a preparation for death. The being that is life is a becoming and a preparing, one that is "pregnant with meaning," and the same can be said of death.

The one thing needful in the confrontation with death is not to avoid it but to make it in some manner one's own. "Man is not free," Marcuse correctly noted, "as long as death has not really become 'his own,' that is, as long as it has not been brought under his autonomy."30 Death and autonomy are an unusual coupling yet a vital one if our death is to hold meaning. Dying well is the goal. In some circumstances suicide, this "most private and impenetrable of human acts," is one way of imposing meaning on what can appear to defy it.31

## Notes

1 Edward Champlin, _Nero_ (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2003), 5.

2 See especially Champlin, _Nero_ , and Miriam T. Griffin, _Nero: The End of a Dynasty_ (New York: Routledge, 1984).

3 Camus, _The Myth of Sisyphus_ , 3.

4 Emile Durkheim, _Suicide_ (New York: Free Press, 1951), 145.

5 Ibid., 208, 217, 373, 209.

6 Gabriel Marcel, _Man against Mass Society_ , trans. G. S. Fraser (South Bend: St. Augustine's Press, 2008), 121, 116.

7 Camus, _The Myth of Sisyphus_ , 3, v.

8 Ibid., 4, 15, 6, 38.

9 Ibid., 123, 122.

10 Ibid., 45.

11 Camus, _The Rebel: An Essay on Man in Revolt_ , trans. A. Bower (New York: Vintage, 1956), 10, 25.

12 Fyodor Dostoevsky, _The Possessed_ , trans. A. H. MacAndrew (New York: New American Library, 1980), 112.

13 Camus, _The Myth of Sisyphus_ , 105.

14 Dostoevsky, _The Possessed_ , 111.

15 Shneidman, _Deaths of Man_ , 87.

16 Steven Luper points out that

> theorists sometimes provide tendentious analyses of these terms [suicide and euthanasia]. This is especially true of "suicide." Many analysts think that nothing should be called 'suicide' unless it is wrong, and this shapes the definitions they defend.... For example, they will not count as suicides the deaths of those who sacrifice themselves for others, since such sacrifices are admirable.

His proposed definition of suicide is

> an act performed by someone who expects, correctly, that it will be fatal, and who does it in order to die. It is still suicide if she does something fatal in response to circumstances that greatly limit her choices; if her only options are to drink poison or die of thirst while trapped deep in a cave, drinking the poison is something she does under her own volition. If a maniac threatens to slaughter her family unless she kills herself, the latter will also be an act she performs under her own volition, and will count as suicide. Socrates had to choose between obeying the government that ordered him to kill himself and going into exile. The choice he made was suicide.
>
> Steven Luper, _The Philosophy of Death_ (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 172, 174

Richard Brandt's definition is also an improvement over common usage:

> "Suicide" is conveniently defined, for our purposes, as doing something that results in one's death, from the intention either of ending one's life or to bring about some other state of affairs (such as relief from pain) that one thinks it certain or highly probable can be achieved only by means of death or that will produce death.
>
> Richard B. Brandt, "The Morality and Rationality of Suicide," in Samantha Brennan and Robert J. Stainton, eds., _Philosophy and Death_ (Buffalo: Broadview, 2010), 312

Brandt's definition would apparently include subintentioned death.

17 Nietzsche, _Beyond Good and Evil_ , sec. 157, p. 91.

18 Rollo May, _Man's Search for Himself_ , 148–9.

19 An important exception to this is Plato, who in the _Phaedo_ identified the moral grounds of the suicide taboo in religious terms:

> "The allegory which the mystics tell us—that we men are put in a sort of guard post, from which one must not release oneself or run away—seems to me to be a high doctrine with difficult implications. All the same, Cebes, I believe that this much is true, that the gods are our keepers, and we men are one of their possessions. Don't you think so?" Yes, I do, said Cebes. "Then take your own case. If one of your possessions were to destroy itself without intimation from you that you wanted it to die, wouldn't you be angry with it and punish it, if you had any means of doing so?" Certainly. "So if you look at it in this way I suppose it is not unreasonable to say that we must not put an end to ourselves until God sends some compulsion like the one which we are facing now."
>
> Plato, _Phaedo_ , 62b2–c7

20 As Seneca expressed it,

> Nowhere should we indulge the soul more than in dying. Let it go as it lists: if it craves the sword or the noose or some potion that constricts the veins, on with it, let it break the chain of its slavery. A man's life should satisfy other people as well, his death only himself, and whatever sort he likes is best. There is no sense in thinking: ' _X_ will say that I lacked fortitude, _Y_ that I was too impulsive, _Z_ that another kind of death would have shown higher spirit.' Think rather: 'What people say is irrelevant to the proposal in hand.' Your sole object is to wrench free of Fortune with the greatest expedition; there will always be people to disapprove of what you have done.
>
> Lucius Annaeus Seneca, _The Stoic Philosophy of Seneca: Essays and Letters_ , trans. M. Hadas (New York: Norton, 1968), 204

21 David Hume, "On Suicide," in _Of the Standard of Taste and Other Essays_ , ed. John W. Lenz (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1982), 155–6.

22 Nietzsche, _Thus Spoke Zarathustra_ , 98, 97.

23 Freud, _Beyond the Pleasure Principle_ , ed. and trans. James Strachey (New York: Norton, 1989), 49, 45–6, 53. "The upshot of our inquiry so far," he concluded, "has been the drawing of a sharp distinction between the 'ego-instincts' and the sexual instincts, and the view that the former exercise pressure towards death and the latter towards a prolongation of life." Ibid., 52.

24 Montaigne, _The Complete Essays_ , 245.

25 Thomas Nagel, "Some Recent Responses," in Samantha Brennan and Robert J. Stainton, eds., _Philosophy and Death_ (Buffalo: Broadview, 2010), 178.

26 Luper, _The Philosophy of Death_ , 171.

27 Carse, _Death and Existence_ , 404.

28 Nietzsche, _Beyond Good and Evil_ , sec. 259, p. 203.

29 Carl Jung, "The Soul and Death," in Herman Feifel, ed., _The Meaning of Death_ (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1959), 7.

30 Marcuse, "The Ideology of Death," 74.

31 Richard Cobb, _Death in Paris, 1795–1801_ (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978), 10.

# 4 Being-toward-death

Death conditions our existence. According to Martin Heidegger, it "is a phenomenon of life" and belongs to its very structure. What could this mean? For Heidegger, this is an ontological matter; our being "always already _is_ its end" or is "a _being toward the end_ ," an anticipation of the "possibility of impossibility."1 Philosophical inquiry into death is a "way," to use one of that thinker's favorite expressions—one that leads far less to any position taken than in a direction of uncertainty and often back to where we began. "Ways, not works" was this philosopher's motto. Hans-Georg Gadamer explained the point as follows: "Ways [ _Wege_ ] are there to be walked upon, such that one can leave them behind and progress forward; they are not something static on which you can rest or to which you can refer." A way of thinking in this sense—about death or about anything—"ultimately lead[s] nowhere" but is rather a "showing and bringing something to show itself." If little propositional knowledge is to be had here, something happens to us along the way, and this is the decisive matter. As Gadamer further remarked,

> Today the majority think of things differently. They no longer want to go along; rather, they want to know in advance where they are going—or they are of the opinion that they have a better idea of where one should go.2

When the matter to be thought is death, we would do well to follow Heidegger's recommendation and, avoiding all haste, endeavor to draw near to our subject and engage in some phenomenological description. What is our lived experience of mortality, and in what ways does it condition our existence?

My theme in this chapter is Heidegger's reflections in _Being and Time_ on what he termed "being-toward-death." It is a reflection that he placed under the rubric of ontology and "existential analysis" rather than a "metaphysics of death." It is the way in which "the 'end' enters into the average everydayness of Dasein," or the living and acting human being, that is his focus.3 To "draw death into Dasein" is the central point.4 Regarding death existentially-ontologically means that it is conceived not as an objective occurrence but as it shows itself to us, which is as a possibility and undertaking of a kind. It calls upon one to adopt a stance toward it that is distinct from some manner of scientific or metaphysical knowledge. If being-toward-death is, as Heidegger maintained, "the fundamental constitution of Dasein," it must be clarified in what sense this is so. Mortality "is a possibility of being that Dasein always has to take upon itself," while death itself "is the possibility of the absolute impossibility of Dasein." This is how dying or the thought of it is experienced, not as any merely biological event but an anticipation that lends meaning and structure to our existence. Coming to terms with this is a precondition of one's death and, more important, one's life becoming genuinely one's own. Facing it squarely, without the falsifying evasion and denial of " _the they-self_ ," is a necessary precondition of a kind of existential integrity about which I shall have more to say in what follows.5

## Aspects

Being-toward-death, as Heidegger spoke of it, comprises four aspects, the first of which is certainty. This is a certainty that belongs to us in a way that no other certainty does: "Death is something that stands imminently before human beings; it is something that life itself knows," and knows not in the manner of a truism but in the most urgent manner possible.6 One's existence and everything that pertains to it are approaching their end. It is not a certainty that comes to one from without, in the manner of an empirical discovery, but is something that one already knows—that one's condition is one of absolute vulnerability in the face of death. As Piotr Hoffman remarks, " _this_ is the one truth that I cannot doubt, though I may try to conceal it and cover it up."7 One comports oneself as if one does not know, but one knows. The difficult matter here is not knowing the truth but maintaining oneself there, where this is no mere act of assenting to a proposition but an altogether different kind of certainty, one that is not of the order of empirical evidence or formal demonstration. Second, death is indeterminate. One does not know the timing or circumstances of one's end, only that it is imminent. "As long as Dasein is, a not-yet belongs to it, which it will be—what is constantly outstanding." The _that_ is certain; all else is not—the what, the when, the how, and the wherefore. We live under "a constant threat" to our existence that arises from our very mode of existing. "Being-toward-the-end must hold itself in this very threat, and can so little phase it out that it rather has to cultivate the indefiniteness of the certainty."8 The third characteristic is that death is insuperable. It belongs to one not as an object of experience but as an anticipation of what is imminent. One lives forward, toward a future of determinate possibilities, the most salient of which is the end itself. Our very being, then, or way of experiencing ourselves and our world is a being toward an end that is not to be bypassed or outrun. If these three characteristics—certainty, indeterminateness, and insuperability—have the appearance of banality, their non-banality becomes evident when we regard them not as so many formal propositions but as existential conditions before which every human being stands and in the face of which it must find some way of comporting itself.

It is the fourth aspect of being-toward-death that is perhaps the most important. Death, on Heidegger's account, is non-relational. As Simon Critchley puts it, "it's not about a relational experience to the other's death; it's about _my_ relationship to _my_ death."9 One does not experience another's dying—from the inside, as it were—but looks upon it from without. Death individualizes in the sense that no one can spare me from my fate or die my death for me; one dies one's own death, alone. "In dying," in Heidegger's words, "it becomes evident that death is ontologically constituted by mineness," and that "[ _n_ ] _o one can take the other's dying away from him_."10 No one, of course, can have anyone's experiences for them, but what distinguishes one's dying from one's joy and suffering or the full range of other experiences is that one can avoid or at least imagine a life without any of the latter. Someone else can represent or replace one in any experience of ordinary life, but "no one unburdens me of my death."11 Even if another dies in my place in the sense of sacrificing their life for mine, it remains that they are not dying my death but their own.

Martin Luther had said much the same:

> The summons of death comes to us all, and no one can die for another. Everyone must fight his own battle with death by himself, alone. We can shout in another's ears, but everyone must himself be prepared for death, for I will not be with you then, nor you with me.12

This is an expression not of solipsism but of a truth that is profoundly personal: one's death—potentially also one's life—is one's own; another cannot take one's place. The anticipation of one's personal end

> lets Dasein understand that it has to take over solely from itself the potentiality-of-being in which it is concerned absolutely about its ownmost being. Death does not just "belong" in an undifferentiated way to one's own Dasein, but it _lays claim_ on it as something _individual_. The nonrelational character of death, understood in anticipation, individualizes Dasein down to itself.13

My death, or my dying, is something that I must take upon myself in the manner of a task. The same can be said of my living, and as one commentator has noted,

> it is precisely Heidegger's point that the non-relational nature of death highlights an aspect of Dasein's comportment to any and all of its existential possibilities;... the fact that no one can die our death for us merely recalls us to the fact that our life is ours alone to live.14

Mineness characterizes our existence in general, and again in the fashion of a task and a decision.

These four ideas—that our dying is certain, indeterminate, insuperable, and non-relational—led Heidegger to speak of death as the possibility of the impossibility of existing at all. What could it mean to understand the end as simultaneously certain and possible, and what manner of possibility is this? For Heidegger, possibility defines far more than the present actuality our mode of existing in general. "I live," as Michael Watts expresses it, "amid a continual overhang of unfinished business: my not-yet-realized possibilities.... Each choice I make has the potential to reshape and redefine my identity and the meaning of my existence."15 This remains the case every day of one's life such that one neither gains a complete view of it nor altogether is what one is but is continually on the way to realizing or failing to realize some definite possibility. Our being is a becoming or "being ahead of itself," and

> "As long as it is," up until its end, it is related to its potentiality-of-being. Even when it, still existing, has nothing further "ahead of it," and has "settled its accounts," its being is still determined by "being ahead of itself." Hopelessness, for example, does not tear Dasein away from its possibilities, but is only one of its own modes of _being toward_ these _possibilities_.... This structural factor of care tells us unambiguously that something is always still _outstanding_ in Dasein which has not yet become "real" as a potentiality-of-its-being. A _constant unfinished quality_ thus lies in the essence of the basic constitution of Dasein.16

Our way of being is to seize upon particular possibilities of what we might become, and when these are at an end so too is our existence. In this sense it is too early to have a totalized perspective on one's existence. In life it is always too early; in death it is too late. Death, then, is forever ahead of us as a potentiality or possibility, even while it is simultaneously a certainty.

More than this, it is one's "ownmost" possibility. It belongs to one in the most fundamental way since it conditions all one's other possibilities. "I am this 'I can die at any moment. '... _I myself am this constant and utmost possibility of myself_ , namely, to be no more."17 To say that care defines the human being's basic state means that things matter, and must matter, to us precisely because of their and our own finitude. What one cares about is here for a limited time, and this includes one's existence itself. Were it otherwise, were we to have it for all time or live forever, it would be far from obvious why any of it should then matter to us. We care about what can be taken from us at any moment. Care, then, both characterizes the fundamental condition of human beings and is inseparable from mortality and finitude. To speak of death as our ownmost possibility means not only that it is altogether unavoidable but that it conditions and limits all our undertakings. One's possibilities, of course, are many: to become this or that, to succeed or to fail in this or that venture. Hanging above them all is "the most extreme possibility" which is "the possible impossibility of its existence."18 What is most essentially and unavoidably one's own is no metaphysical actuality but the potentiality of no longer being at all. Death is no merely biological event that belongs to the future but is an existential structure that conditions our way of being in general. As Hubert Dreyfus states, "The event of death when it comes must manifest what Dasein _has been all along_."19

## Authenticity and inauthenticity

What human existence is and has been all along is a set of historically conditioned possibilities, and everything in that existence depends on how we stand toward them. How we do this for the most part consists in what Heidegger famously termed inauthenticity. This notion is not to be regarded in a moralistic way but as a description of our everyday and altogether normal way of comporting ourselves in the face of possibilities not limited to mortality. In the usual course of life one is entangled utterly in practicalities and norms of which one is not the author and which one did not expressly choose. One's orientation is toward meeting needs, getting things done, and abiding by standards belonging to a public realm which Heidegger termed "the they." It is they—the anonymous anyone—who determines for the most part how one lives and what one believes. One does not decide but has decided for one, while imperatives of doing what is done and caring about what is cared about ensure that nothing quite comes into focus as a matter calling for a decision. The mineness of my existence becomes lost in what "they" do and how "they" live, where " they" are no one in particular. The passive voice is needed to describe this manner of living, and it is a manner not limited to the abject or conformist but that characterizes us all in our everyday comportment or a sizeable share of it. Heidegger spoke of this as a forgetting and a falling, a kind of insidious drift away from myself that accompanies all going along with the ways of the world. In the words of one commentator,

> we become so mired down in ordinary chores that we forget that we are called upon to take a coherent stand in a world where things are genuinely at stake. This self-forgetfulness, paradoxically, tends to aggravate our own self-preoccupation and self-absorption. Constantly concerned with checking its performance against public criteria, Dasein becomes "entangled in itself," sinking into "the most exaggerated 'self-dissection,'" into an "extravagant grubbing about in one's own soul which can be in the highest degree counterfeit."20

Time itself is experienced here as an endless series of now-points without any larger temporal frame or narrative significance. Experience is fragmented into means and ends, strategies and outcomes determined by public standards the author of which is precisely no one. Social expectations, the demands of the moment, and sheer expediency rule while the individual loses itself or never comes into its own. It is not altogether itself; it is adrift, alienated, and bored. For the inauthentic way of life, all our undertakings are of the order of distractions, means toward ends we have fallen into without choosing and that do not ultimately matter.

How does the inauthentic individual approach death? Heidegger's answer is that they do not. They cover it up, deny it in the sense spoken of in Chapter 1, and speak in general terms of a future actuality—one day, long from now—which calls for no present action and changes nothing. Insofar as it is spoken of at all, it is limited to "the idle talk of the they: one also dies sometime, but for the time being not yet." Not at any moment but sometime, not now, and not I myself but "one." "Nobody doubts that one dies. But this 'not doubting' need not already imply _that_ kind of being-certain that corresponds to the way death—in the sense of the eminent possibility characterized above—enters into Dasein." Nothing has entered into me and nothing has happened to me when I entertain the proposition, however certain, that in some remote future some event will befall "one." The power of this certainty is downgraded, and indeed it may not happen to me at all but to a hypothetical self of the future. "For the most part," Heidegger believed, "everyday Dasein covers over its ownmost, nonrelational, and insuperable possibility of being" and in this sense "is in 'untruth.'" In inauthenticity, the certainty of dying is merely empirical, not existential: "One _knows_ about the certainty of death, and yet 'is' not really certain about it."21 A kind of counterfeit immortality comes about through the power of non-reflection. Death is for others; quite possibly it will leave me alone. This way of thinking or not thinking, he emphasized, is not limited to those who live unexamined lives but belongs to us all in the course of our everyday existence. Death belongs to the future, and if we admit that it may occur at any time it is in the manner of a formal possibility only. There is nothing to be done in the case of possibilities in this sense. We may grant, for instance, the formal possibility of someone's arrival, but unless we view it as a genuine, that is, an imminent possibility, we do nothing to prepare, take no action, and are changed not at all.

The human being understands itself in terms of its possibilities, and the most basic of these, Heidegger maintained, is "its possibility to be itself or not to be itself."22 The mineness of my existence is nothing given but the consequence of a transformation that is less psychological or ethical than ontological. The transformation from an inauthentic to an authentic way of life begins with a certain kind of guilt—not in the usual moral connotation of the word but again in an ontological sense. Guilt is revealed to us as a somewhat ambiguous appeal or a call. "Strictly speaking," Ingrid Leman-Stefanovic writes,

> the call has no specific content; "the call 'says' _nothing_ which might be talked about, gives no information about events." But the strange indefiniteness of both the caller and the impossibility of identifying more definitely what this caller is, are not just nothing; they are distinctive in a _positive_ way, for the call reaches the they-self of concernful Being-with-Others, "passing over" the "they" and thereby pushing it into insignificance.23

The call brings or recalls one to oneself, not in the form of a reproach directed at one from without but as a summoning within oneself. The identity of the caller is indefinite— Heidegger termed it conscience—and "yet the self is unequivocally and unmistakably reached." " _Dasein calls itself in conscience_ ," but what is doing the calling is far less important than our manner of listening.24 The existing individual here is alone with itself, no witnesses are present, and one is silently brought back to oneself and away from one's lostness in the they-self. Here the point is not to assuage guilt but to take it upon oneself or make it one's own. Guilt in this sense belongs to our existential situation; there are no amends to be made or problems to be solved but a condition that calls for a different kind of responsibility. If there is no wrong to be corrected and nothing to be done, still one is called upon to undergo a transformation less (perhaps not at all) in the content of one's daily undertakings than in their form. The decisive matter is an owning up to the totality of one's condition as a being thrown into a network of possibilities and social involvements and to seize upon these in a new and resolute way.

The authentic individual's salient characteristic, then, is a kind of resoluteness that is not to be confused with simple voluntarism. One does not become the master of one's fate or chooser of everything but gains a certain lucidity and comportment toward one's facticity. The call of conscience summons one not to take action in the usual sense but to become open to what Heidegger termed "the clearing of being." Our fundamental choice here, as Dreyfus puts it,

> is whether to keep silent so as to hear the call or to try to drown it out by plunging into the noise of the everyday rat-race. This choice, as Dasein's letting itself be called, is receptive rather than willful.

To say that the authentic individual chooses itself means not that it attains sovereignty over itself or its corner of the world but the veritable opposite: it is receptive, silent, and in a sense powerless. The center of our being is no metaphysical essence or will to power but a nullity that must be faced. It is not, existentially speaking, about the self; it is about the situation before one, in which one is called in an immediate way to take action. The action itself is no optimizing of utilities but is fundamentally a response to what is encountered in the situation and what it requires of us. What is called for is openness, not mastery, and openness not to some absolute meaning of our existence but to the many unique meanings that give that existence a kind of constancy. To cite Dreyfus once more, " According to Heidegger's nonintentionalistic account, authentic Dasein sees what needs to be done by finding itself pushed into doing it"—and pushed not by any public demands of normality or respectability but by the situation before us.25

This view contrasts both with the caricature of the existential voluntarist who, after glancing into the dark side, goes from one peak experience to the next while asserting its personal freedom as well as with romantic notions of getting in touch with some inner core while separating oneself from the herd. The authentic or resolute individual as Heidegger spoke of it does not leap out of its lifeworld or choose itself in a vacuum but, on the contrary, belongs in a fundamental, ontological sense to a particular historical community and strives for some manner of freedom within it. All choosing occurs within a social context that is largely ruled by the they, particularly as it concerns the affairs of everyday life. The possibilities among which one chooses are defined by our cultural heritage, and in the usual course of events one cannot but fall into inauthenticity for the sake of getting by and getting things done. Authenticity is not a permanent state, Heidegger insisted, but a way of being that one may rise to in certain moments. One makes these possibilities one's own and no longer regards them as so many givens of our existence. In the process it becomes possible for the individual to participate in earnest in whatever social context in which they find themselves rather than simply going along with how things are done. It is a richer and deeper kind of involvement in social life of which Heidegger was speaking, not transcending it or retreating into an ontological counterpart of the state of nature. The accent on mineness—one's own possibilities, decisions, and way of life—is to be understood not in an intentionalist sense but again in terms of openness, receptivity, and finitude.

This is especially apparent in Heidegger's interpretation of authentic being-toward-death. Here one's personal mortality is owned up to, in the form not of a distant eventuality but of a certain and imminent possibility. While it is always to come at some indefinite date, it may also come at any moment, and an honest contemplation of this makes possible a transformation from one mode of existence to another. One is, or becomes, oneself in the same process that has one come to regard death as a living possibility rather than a merely formal bit of knowledge. This contemplation changes everything in the sense that facing this certainty conditions and limits all of one's other possibilities and compels one to care about one's existence in a new way. One's life matters precisely because it will end, while some clarity of perspective is introduced regarding the decisions with which that life is continually occupied. All of one's undertakings and commitments become invested with meaning because they too are of limited duration and may be chosen in a manner that is more clearsighted than hitherto. The clear perception of the end entails a deeper understanding of life in its totality and of one's own responsibility for that life.26 "Authentic Dasein," as one commentator expresses it,

> is not fearful of death, nor does it worry about the actual event of death; instead, it suffers from an anxiety that brings it face to face with the inevitability of its own death. In the light of this awareness it realizes and accepts that its possibilities are limited by death and bases its choices in life on this understanding.27

A clear perspective on one's life as a temporal whole enhances the resolute individual's capacity and inclination to fashion decisions in light of available possibilities and to discern what the situation calls upon one to do. A temporal comportment that is not locked into the present but that sees clearly both one's personal end and past allows one to resolve upon present action with caring and dedication in a way that brings about a kind of constancy or continuity in the human being one becomes. For Heidegger, the only true constancy of the person lies not in the possession of any deep core of being or identity but in an attitude of steady yet unwillful commitment that can endure through the entire course of a life.

## Temporality and anxiety

Underlying Heidegger's conception of being-toward-death is an ontology of temporality according to which the present moment is experienced as arising from the past and as having an orientation to the future. Phenomenologically speaking, the present is not an isolated now-point any more than the past is over and done with. "In its factical being," that is, in terms of the conditions, possibilities, and limits within which it acts, "Dasein always is how and 'what' it already was. Whether explicitly or not, it _is_ its past." It is a socially shared as well as a personal past in the sense that the past provides an occasion and a context for present experience and conveys an understanding of its meaning. A present undertaking may be conceived as a continuation, a departure, or in some respect a response to what has gone before. It is not merely what it is but, insofar as it is understood, how it has come to pass. It is a living past that weighs upon the present; not everything, to be sure, is remembered or recovered from the past, but what is lives on by setting a stage for what is now happening. This is expressed in Heidegger's concept of thrownness: the human being finds itself cast into a lifeworld and in the midst of relations and concerns that provide it with a fundamental orientation. It is neither frozen in time—an eternal present—nor separate and apart from its world but a being-in-the-world, a being-with-others, and a profoundly temporal and historical being. Its lifeworld affords it with possibilities of what it may become and which reflect what others have done, what roles they have played, and so on. The past lives, then, not only in that it "pushes itself along 'behind'" present experience or "has an effect on it," but the human being "grows into a customary interpretation of itself and grows up on that interpretation."28

More important from the standpoint of mortality is the future, which is also to be understood in its living character. We continually act and choose in a sense of projecting forward on the basis of possibilities recovered from the past. One is, for Heidegger, what one does or what one is continually in process of becoming in time, not a determinate or stable entity of some kind. Just as the past weighs upon the present, so too does the future in the sense that the meaning of one's present undertaking is inseparable from what one is endeavoring to accomplish at a later time. One is continually projecting a future for oneself and in this sense is one's future no less than one's past. "Dasein," in his words, " _is always already its not-yet_ as long as it is." Its mode of existence being more processual than thing-like, the human being always exhibits an unfinished quality, a "constant being-ahead-of-itself" that can be likened to the ripening that is "the specific being of the fruit." The fruit is continually in process of reaching its fulfillment in a ripeness that is its end. The disanalogy here is that the end that is dying is not a fulfillment in this sense but something in front of us that defines present experience and the possibilities that belong to it. Futurity is intrinsic to the present or to our way of comporting ourselves within it in the sense that our future is not a distant or external happening but is constitutive of our way of being in the here and now. We anticipate and expect it in such a way that "the possible is drawn into the real, arising from it and returning to it." To anticipate one's end is not a matter of wallowing in nothingness but of freeing oneself from the they. Heidegger summarized the point this way:

> _anticipation reveals to Dasein its lostness in the they-self, and brings it face to face with the possibility to be itself, primarily unsupported by concern that takes care, but to be itself in passionate, anxious freedom toward death, which is free of the illusions of the they, factical, and certain of itself_.29

The existential significance of death is nothing in the event itself but the potentially transformative effect that the anticipation or expectation has on present life. One realizes the contingency and temporariness of life and everything that occupies one within it as well as the imperative to realize whatever freedom and authenticity are possible for us. In becoming free for death, one becomes free for present life and liberated, in some measure at least, from the they. As Watts writes,

> Death confirms and reveals the sobering truth that the essence and meaning of human life is grounded in time; all the possibilities of my life are defined by, dependent on and only make sense in the light of my eventual death.30

Our death is not yet a human death as long as it is a merely biological event of the kind that befalls any living organism. Heidegger called this "perishing." The human being "does not simply perish." It dies, in the sense not merely of "the ending of what is alive" but, ontologically speaking, of "the _way of being_ in which Dasein _is toward_ its death."31 The fundamental issue is not what death is, conceived scientifically or metaphysically, but how we stand toward it, which always means toward our personal mortality. Authentic dying happens not only at life's termination but throughout it, in the form of an ever-present possibility and certainty that is not denied out of fear but faced and integrated into an authentic way of life which formulates current plans in light of this, its most ultimate, possibility. Both the past and the future weigh upon the present and in this sense are both phenomena of life. Stephen Mulhall notes, "Being-towards-death is essentially a matter of Being-towards-life; it is a matter of relating (or failing to relate) to one's life as utterly, primordially mortal."32 Relating to mortality, again, is no wallowing in despair but precisely a learning to care about and to appreciate one's present existence. Care and death are "equiprimordial" in that care underlies our experience in general while a cultivated sense of finitude makes all our caring decidedly more pervasive and emphatic. The present moment and the human being itself are not merely what they are; one is an "issue" to oneself, constantly in process of realizing or failing to realize some potentiality of what one might be, and things matter for one because among the possibilities of that existence is the possibility of impossibility.

One will die, therefore everything matters. This is not a logical argument, yet upon it everything in human existence depends. That which one cares about is fated to end, and contingency and fragility belong to everything in that existence. The important matter is not to comprehend this as an intellectual proposition but what happens to us in this comprehension. We are called upon to take responsibility not only in an ethical sense but existentially and ontologically. We are responsible for life in its wholeness, not merely for particular moments or actions within it but for the accumulated totality. One's life is not to be conceded to the norms and expectations of the anonymous anyone but lived as one's own, which for Heidegger means with resoluteness. One's life is not cosmically special, destined to last forever, or hooked up to the absolute. One's being here is an accident, everything that is might have been otherwise, and that which one loves is also here temporarily. These may be dark truths, but understanding them in an explicit way—being seized by them—is the difference between a life that is authentically one's own and one that is no one's and nothing in particular. They may also be familiar truths—Heidegger was not the first to point out the fact of human finitude—however, to cite Mulhall once more,

> no representation of ourselves is harder to achieve or enact than this one; nothing is more challenging than to live in such a way that one does not treat what is in reality merely possible or actual or conditionally necessary as if it were absolutely necessary—a matter of fate or destiny beyond any question or alteration. Authentic Being-towards-death is thus a matter of stripping out false necessities, of becoming properly attuned to the real modalities of human existence.33

To say that death is a way of being, that is, of living, means that the authentic individual "opens itself to a constant _threat_ " that is its end and " must hold itself in this very threat." Knowing about a threat is a very different matter than maintaining oneself in this knowledge. How one does this, Heidegger asserted, is in the experience of anxiety. Indeed, "[b]eing-toward-death is essentially anxiety"—not fear, which always has a particular object, but an unease that intends nothing specific but the possibility of impossibility in general.34 Understanding is always accompanied by an attunement or mood, and the mood that accompanies any genuine contemplation of mortality is anxiety. Recalling one of Heidegger's seminars from the 1920s, Gadamer noted:

> One day in a seminar on Schelling, he read this sentence to us: "The _Angst_ of life itself drives human beings out of the center." Then he said, "Tell me a single sentence from Hegel that compares to this sentence in profundity!" 35

The existing individual is not the measure of what is, and if it thinks otherwise there is one remedy to its delusion only. Anxiety is no mere affect but brings every human being with the inclination to look upon it face to face with its condition which is far removed from the center. Anxiety reveals the utter lack of security at the heart of that condition, the absence of solid ground and the sheer unpredictability of everything that matters to us. The center of our being is a nullity, the potentiality of not being at all.

Therefore I become resolute. This is the transformation that Heidegger described, from inauthentic drifting along with whatever is valued and expected of us to a comportment that is altogether more profound, humbler, and more open. One's actions stem no longer from convention or calculation alone but from commitments that are authentically chosen and which impose upon them a larger configuration of habits and projects. Some constancy of the self comes into being, and herein lies the value of anxiety. It is a mood from which in the usual course of things we flee because of its formidable power to undermine what we care about and the self itself. The experience in which the ground beneath us trembles is singularly unpleasant, making the importance that Heidegger placed upon it far from intuitive. Its value lies in what it reveals, the utter strangeness of a world that had seemed familiar and the inhospitality of that world. Normal interpretations that serve us by creating illusions of comfortable at-home-ness in a cold universe need precisely to be undermined, and for the purpose of living not only an examined but a free existence. We are not free so long as the responsibility of our lives is conceded to others and the only resoluteness we show is in refusing to look upon what is unpleasant. The strangeness of our existence is that it has not always been and will not always be, that it is stretched between two limited points in time, and that there is no point in wishing it otherwise. We are not at home in such a world, and so must assume the task of making it livable precisely by making it our own. Anxiety therefore individualizes. Insofar, that is, as the human being is capable of genuinely standing out from the mass and becoming an individual—which never means that it ceases to be a being-in-the-world and a being-with-others—it is the anticipation of death and the accompanying mood of dread that make this possible.

Heidegger was no solipsist, and if he was an individualist in any sense it is not in an ethical-political but an existential-ontological connotation of the word. The conception of being-toward-death that he described in _Being and Time_ as well as the larger accent in that text on the human being would be modified after the gradual "turn" in his thought beginning in the 1930s away from Dasein and toward being, yet after the turn or before it, he was no Hobbesian individualist—indeed he was about as far from this as it is possible to get—nor did newer existentialist forms of individualism (Jean-Paul Sartre's in particular) that claimed Heidegger as an influence sit well with him. His point was neither to reject collectivism for individualism nor the reverse but to understand in a more profound way what it is, what it means, to be human and, beyond this, what it means to be in general. At the heart of this is a letting-be which is directly contrasted with the will to mastery that he attributed to modern science-technology as well as to the individualist ideal of being captain of one's ship. The kind of individualization of which he spoke he articulated as follows:

> In anxiety, Dasein finds itself _faced_ with the nothingness of the possible impossibility of its existence. Anxiety is anxious _about_ the potentiality-of-being of the being thus determined, and thus discloses the most extreme possibility. Because the anticipation of Dasein absolutely individualizes and lets it, in this individualizing of itself, become certain of the wholeness of its potentiality-of-being, the fundamental attunement of anxiety belongs to this self-understanding of Dasein in terms of its ground.36

The ground, the very mode of being, of the individual is nothing as solid as we imagine. The basis of one's life is fully beyond one's control and is a kind of nullity, a mere being possible which itself is a function of one's heritage. One's freedom itself is not a fact but a possibility which the they-self overlooks; it becomes a fact only through its exercise. The human being itself is not an entity with a determinate essence but a set of historically contingent potentialities that is approaching its end.

Existential anxiety is not an emotion but an attunement or mood which reveals to us aspects of the human situation that our day-to-day existence overlooks or denies. Its upshot is that one must change one's life—not because one is called upon by a divinity but because one is mortal. One is called upon by oneself, to live a different kind of life and to alter if not an outward course of action then its basis and meaning. As the influence of the they-self recedes, the possibility arises of resolutely affirming a purpose for one's life that is one's own. Our sense of self is defined no longer by unchosen values but by conscious decisions fashioned in light of our temporality and finitude. As Charles Guignon writes, "Facing death, one is pulled back from the dispersal, distraction, and forgetfulness of every-dayness. The result is the ability to live with a clear-sighted grasp of the temporal continuity and future-directedness of one's own life-happening."37 Anxiety reveals the temporal basis of life and, precisely on this basis, the imperatives of freedom and responsibility. One undertakes commitments in light of a finite time horizon that defines one's personal existence as a whole. It is this alone that gives integrity and narrative coherence to a life. It is this mood that makes it possible to distinguish what is important from what is trivial. The sense of what matters rests upon the sense of an end.

Ontologically speaking, then, one is one's temporality in the sense not that one lives in the future or the past but that one is both. In Heidegger's words,

> I myself am my future by way of this anticipatory forerunning. I am not in the future, but rather am the future of myself. Becoming guilty is nothing but carrying the _past_ within myself; to become guilty means _to be my past_.... Human Dasein thus comes properly into the _present_ , into action. In being resolved Dasein is its future, in being guilty it is its past, and in acting it comes into the present. _Dasein is_ nothing other than _to be time itself_. Time is not something that occurs out there in the world, but is rather what I myself am.38

An authentic life is then lived with an explicitly temporal orientation toward its future and out of its past and in this sense "is" both; that is, its way of comporting itself in the present resembles nothing so much as an episode in a narrative which in every case is defined by its before and after. The future weighs upon the present as the past does. The metaphor of weight is apposite here. Nietzsche had spoken of the eternal return as a weight that lies upon our actions, and indeed as "the greatest weight"—a matter to which I shall return. Death conditions our existence; the anticipation of it as our ownmost possibility weighs upon, conditions, and structures everything in the present, and in the manner not of a burden but a weightiness and a responsibility of a kind that is lacking in the everyday pursuit of normalcy and respectability. The weight of the present need not be a weighing down or a depressive wallowing of the kind that we so often see but something more free-spirited, resolute, and open to what possibilities still await us. The present is devoid of meaning when nothing lies upon it and nothing is at stake within it. Whatever significance it assumes must be taken up with conscious purpose and in light of something that holds self-chosen value. We carry the past with us and the future likewise; indeed we are both insofar as present experience has a point beyond doing what is expected of us.

Blaise Pascal famously argued that insofar as greatness is a quality that can be attributed to human beings it is our thinking that makes it so, and specifically an awareness of our existential condition:

> Man is but a reed, the most feeble thing in nature; but he is a thinking reed. The entire universe need not arm itself to crush him. A vapour, a drop of water suffices to kill him. But, if the universe were to crush him, man would still be more noble than that which killed him, because he knows that he dies and the advantage which the universe has over him; the universe knows nothing of this. All our dignity consists, then, in thought.

Pascal concluded, "Let us endeavour, then, to think well; this is the principle of morality."39 It is a sentiment that Heidegger fully shared. To think well is to think in the right way about the right matters, which include the condition of mortal humanity and the meaning of that condition. My task in the following chapters is to pursue this matter a while longer. Heidegger's phenomenology of being-toward-death is the most noteworthy statement on mortality that is to be found in modern philosophy. The way that he pursued may be traversed again along with a few of its tributaries. The point in this is not merely to say what is new—to discover some hitherto unglimpsed truths about death—but, as Heidegger himself pointed out, to say what is old but in the right manner and in response to questions that bring the phenomena into the open.40 Is there more to be said about how we "draw death into Dasein," make it our own, and impose some meaning on what can appear to defy it? Reflection upon such matters may well be preparatory in either Socrates sense or Heidegger s, but it need not and perhaps ought not culminate in a doctrine. Philosophical preparation for death is an opening onto mystery, a resolute standing before the unknown and unknowable and maintaining oneself there without the false certainties with which tradition is replete. The ground of our existence contains no certainty and no security. If the philosophers of existence, and Heidegger in particular, brought this to our attention, it remains to take a few additional steps down this path.

## Notes

1 Heidegger, _Being and Time_ , 237, 236, 241.

2 Hans-Georg Gadamer, _Heidegger's Ways_ , trans. J. W. Stanley (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1994), 135, 117, 62, 119.

3 Heidegger, _Being and Time_ , 238, 239.

4 Heidegger, _Contributions to Philosophy (From Enowning)_ , trans P. Emad and K. Maly (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999), 200.

5 Heidegger, _Being and Time_ , 240, 241, 255.

6 Heidegger, "Wilhelm Dilthey's Research and the Current Struggle for a Historical Worldview," in _Becoming Heidegger: On the Trail of His Early Occasional Writings, 1910–1927_ , eds Theodore Kisiel and Thomas Sheehan (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2007), 263.

7 Piotr Hoffman, "Death, Time, History: Division II of _Being and Time_ ," in Charles B. Guignon, ed., _The Cambridge Companion to Heidegger_ , 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 225.

8 Heidegger, _Being and Time_ , 253–4, 233, 254.

9 Critchley, _How to Stop Living and Start Worrying_ , 38.

10 Heidegger, _Being and Time_ , 231.

11 Schumacher, _Death and Mortality in Contemporary Philosophy_ , 71.

12 Martin Luther, _Invocavit Sermons_ , in _Luther's Works_ , American Edition, vol. 51, eds J. Pelikan and H. T. Lehman (St. Louis and Philadelphia: Concordia Publishing House and Fortress Press, 1986), 70.

13 Heidegger, _Being and Time_ , 252.

14 Stephen Mulhall, _Heidegger and Being and Time_ , 2nd ed. (London: Routledge, 2005), 126.

15 Michael Watts, _The Philosophy of Heidegger_ (Durham: Acumen, 2011), 105.

16 Heidegger, _Being and Time_ , 227.

17 Heidegger, _History of the Concept of Time: Prolegomena_ , trans. T. Kisiel (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985), 313.

18 Heidegger, _Being and Time_ , 254.

19 Hubert L. Dreyfus, _Being-in-the-World: A Commentary on Heidegger's Being and Time, Division 1_ (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1991), 311.

20 Charles B. Guignon, "Authenticity, Moral Values, and Psychotherapy," in Charles B. Guignon, ed., _The Cambridge Companion to Heidegger_ , 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 280.

21 Heidegger, _Being and Time_ , 245, 246, 247.

22 Ibid., 11.

23 Ingrid Leman-Stefanovic, _The Event of Death: A Phenomenological Enquiry_ (Dordrecht: Martinus Nijhoff, 1987), 72.

24 Heidegger, _Being and Time_ , 264.

25 Dreyfus further writes,

> Resoluteness, _Entschlossenheit_ in German, is an illuminating but potentially misleading pun. _Entschlossenheit_ normally means determination or resolve, but... understanding resoluteness as lucid, total choice leads to the despair of the ethical. Heard as _Ent-schlossenheit_ , with a hyphen, however, as Heidegger sometimes writes it and always intends it, the term means unclosedness, i.e., "openness." As Heidegger explains in a 1953 lecture: "The essence of resoluteness ( _Ent-schlossenheit_ ) lies in the opening ( _Ent-borgenheit_ ) of human Dasein into the clearing of being, and not at all in a storing up of energy for 'action.'... Its relation to being is one of letting-be. The idea that all willing should be grounded in letting-be offends the understanding." Heidegger also felt he had to warn explicitly against any intentionalistic understanding of resoluteness as deliberate action: "The resoluteness intended in _Being and Time_ is not the deliberate action of a subject, but the opening up of [Dasein], out of its captivity in that which is, to the openness of being."
>
> Dreyfus, _Being-in-the-World_ , 318, 320

26 Nietzsche had already noted that, as Young puts it,

> in our post-death-of-God age, it is up to each of us to construct our own, "heroic" selves. To do this we must learn the art of "simplifying" our view of ourselves: the art, that is, of viewing our life as if from its end—grasping ourselves as a completed totality, as "something past and whole."
>
> Young, _The Death of God and the Meaning of Life_ , 87

27 Watts, _Philosophy of Heidegger_ , 109.

28 Heidegger, _Being and Time_ , 19.

29 Ibid., 235, 251, 255.

30 Watts, _Philosophy of Heidegger_ , 110.

31 Heidegger, _Being and Time_ , 238.

32 Mulhall, _Heidegger and Being and Time_ , 129.

33 Ibid., 129.

34 Heidegger, _Being and Time_ , 254.

35 Gadamer, _Heidegger's Ways_ , 116.

36 Heidegger, _Being and Time_ , 254.

37 Guignon, "Authenticity, Moral Values, and Psychotherapy," 282.

38 Heidegger, "Wilhelm Dilthey's Research and the Current Struggle for a Historical Worldview," 266.

39 Blaise Pascal, _Pensées_ , trans. W. F. Trotter (London: Everyman's Library, 1931), sec. 347, p. 97.

40 Whether the answer is "novel" is of no importance and remains extrinsic. What is positive about the answer must lie in the fact that it is _old_ enough to enable us to learn to comprehend the possibilities prepared by the "ancients."

Heidegger, _Being and_ Time, 19

# 5 Openness to mystery

We require a way of thinking about death, one that does not constitute demonstrable knowledge so much as run alongside it. As far as propositional knowledge is concerned, remarkably little of this is to be had on the subject despite three odd millennia of learned inquiry. In the modern period death is increasingly spoken of as an object of scientific discourse and across a variety of disciplines, from biology and medicine to psychology, anthropology, sociology, and some others. It has never ceased being a topic of religious and philosophical speculation, where questions theological, metaphysical, and ethical tend to predominate. Here as well the aim has been to regard death as an object of knowledge, and while undoubtedly there is knowledge to be had on the matter the salient fact about such knowledge is its limits, that is, from the point of view that ultimately concerns us as existing individuals: the existential significance of death. Death as a state of the organism, medical problem, metaphysical essence, ethical issue, or sociological phenomenon sheds little light on its human significance. What is called for is what, following Heidegger, may be called a way of thinking rather than knowledge in any strict sense of the word, a way of making sense of death and comporting ourselves in the face of it without making claims to knowledge that are either unjustifiable or beside the point. Not everything in human experience is an object of knowledge, nor do we need to know or have beliefs about everything. What we do need is a way of thinking about death, a sense of it that runs alongside knowledge and that does not lose sight of its limits.

What is it to make sense of death, if it is not exactly to know the truth about it? What is a sense of death, and what is one lacking who is without this sense? The concept of a sense is apposite here. To have a sense of something is to have at once a feeling for it, an understanding of what it means, an appreciation of its importance, and perhaps also knowledge—depending on what exactly we mean by this word. It is to have cultivated certain habits of concernful engagement—of attention and action—to be at home in a certain sphere, and to comport oneself in a way that others can look to as an example. To have a developed musical sense is not only to possess the relevant knowledge but more essentially to be at home in music—to have an esthetic appreciation and a love of it, to be capable of perceiving shades of meaning, of listening and discerning, understanding subtleties, catching its spirit, and responding in the sense of following where it leads. One is transported by music and transformed by it. Knowing the truth about it is a separate matter; rather often it is beside the point. Likewise, a sense of language surpasses a knowledge of grammar, syntax, and so on and amounts to a feeling both of familiarity and deep appreciation for what is sayable in the language and also its limits. One knows how meaning is created in language, what word or phrase to reach for in what context and for what reason. Although language is not a tool, the person with a developed sense of a given language knows how to express meaning within it, how to make oneself heard, and how to reach an understanding with others. What, then, is the sense of death? Again it is a habit and mode of concernful engagement, but of what kind? Its salient features, I wish to argue, are familiarity, humility, acceptance, hope, and openness to mystery.

A sense of death is a vital dimension of a sense of life. One's basic sense of life is deeply rooted, remarkably resistant to change, and reflects, or indeed is, one's temperament. For the most part, as William James observed, temperament rules the life of the mind. One can be reasoned out of one's optimism or pessimism about life with about as much prospect as one can be reasoned out of one's musical taste. Let us not say that one's sense of life is entirely immune to reflection but that it is a recalcitrant student and tends to remain with us for better or worse throughout life and in essentially unaltered form. It remains, however, that living what philosophy calls the examined life requires that we examine this as well— indeed this above all in view of its consequences for our existence as a whole. A point of entry is the sense of death: what kind of sense is this? Who possesses it and who does not, and what difference does its presence or absence make to how we live? There is an amusing scene in the film _Barfly_ (1987) in which the main character, an alcoholic poet named Henry and played by Mickey Rourke, is stopped at a red light behind a young amorous couple and says to a second character, "What they need is a little taste of death," following which he accelerates, pushing the car ahead into the intersection and oncoming traffic. There is nothing so educative as a taste of death, yet what does it teach? That we are mortal, one will say, but surely we already knew this, at least as so much propositional knowledge. It teaches in an existential sense: it makes the ground beneath us tremble, delivers us from our everydayness, and teaches that we must change ourselves. The amorous couple in this scene is exhibiting the habitual self-regard and unreflection of youth—and not only youth. One imagines that their existence lacks originality and any larger significance than the pleasures of the moment. What is more, they lack a sense of mystery. It is this from which a sense of death is ultimately inseparable.

## Mystery

Death is the mystery of mysteries, not in the sense that no knowledge is possible here but in the way that Marcel distinguished a mystery from a problem. Marcel's distinction sheds an important light on our theme. At the most fundamental level of analysis, death is not a problem—of metaphysics or epistemology, medicine or ethics—in need of solution but a mystery in need of a certain kind of reflection. Crucially for Marcel, it is a matter for which we cannot distinguish the question from the questioner. Death belongs to our way of being; it constitutes us and has an ontological and existential importance that a problem does not. We do not approach it as an object outside of us—still less as a matter that permits of solution—but as a mystery that is inseparable from our being. The kind and quality of reflection that is called for is what Marcel called existential elucidation and phenomenological interpretation.

We do not think about death, so to speak, from the inside. It is never an object of perception, some actuality before us but an anticipated possibility only. What would it be like to experience death as an actuality? What child has not tried to imagine what being dead must be like? One imagines being in the grave, the insufferable stillness, darkness, a sensation of imprisonment perhaps. But now we must subtract consciousness and precisely oneself from the equation. What is that like? Of course it is an impossible question, for in all our flights of thinking and imagining we necessarily take ourselves with us; there is no thought without a thinker, as Descartes liked to say. Death, as actuality, is unimaginable. One then imagines attending one's own funeral, gazing upon one's open casket from the audience, but here again one is an outsider. The inside we do not see, or not until we are there and perhaps not even then. In desperation one turns to stories of near-death experiences, but once again to be near to something is not to be inside it. Death is a mystery in this sense, however this is a child's conception of mystery. There is another.

The important distinction Marcel drew between a mystery and a problem turns upon the nature of the relation between the matter that we are questioning and the questioner him- or herself. A problem is something that one stands to as subject to object; it is the obstacle in one's path, a set of objective conditions to which one stands at arm's-length. It does not enter into our being and may be solved or not solved without in any meaningful way transforming us. In the encounter with mystery the subject-object split disappears and the matter into which we inquire is inseparable from the being that we are. Love is a mystery in this sense of the word, as is death and life itself. To characterize it as such does not mean that it defies knowledge utterly but that to question it is to question ourselves. A mystery is not an object before us, to which we stand in some distanced relation and upon which we pronounce our self-regarding calculations, but is a part of our existence. In Marcel's words,

> A problem is something met with which bars my passage. It is before me in its entirety. A mystery, on the other hand, is something in which I find myself caught up, and whose essence is therefore not to be before me in its entirety. It is as though in this province the distinction between _in_ me and _before me_ loses its meaning.1

It is a common tendency, Marcel maintained, to attempt to transform a mystery into a problem and so to degrade it. There is nothing sacred in a life comprised of so many problems in need of solution, nor is a social reality that is devoid of mystery and organized around a complex of utilitarian problems one that is properly habitable by human beings. Something inhuman characterizes such a world: a certain lack of depth, of meaning and community. A problem may have considerable complexity, but what it lacks is the depth dimension that the notion of mystery properly captures. To partake of a mystery is to "find myself committed, and, I would add, not partially committed, not committed in regard to some determinate and specialized aspect of myself, but committed as a whole man." It is to "abolish that frontier between what lies in the self and what lies before the self."2 A life that is organized exclusively around solving problems and satisfying needs is existentially lost, adept as it may be at getting what one wants. To live well is not to get what one wants, still less to die well.

In an age of science we are ill at ease with mystery—not the mystery of what scientific investigation has yet to discover but the full-fledged mystery of the unknowable and insoluble. When science and technology rule our ways of thinking about things in general, including human existence, mystery is abolished and with it any capacity to think about death. When we are speaking of the ultimate mystery of our existence, rather often the answer to our questions is silence—and the silence not of "the one who knows" but of the one who does not and shall not. Death is a mystery that is universal at the same time that it is profoundly personal. For it is not only death in general that is unknown but precisely one's own death, this most urgent of questions, where the desire for knowledge is as absolute as its unattainablility. In the encounter with mystery what is called for is openness along with a certain restraint, a refusal of all rashness and of taking positions where no position is any more defensible than any other. Miguel de Unamuno put it superbly well:

> In the most secret chamber of the spirit of him who believes himself convinced that death puts an end to his personal consciousness, his memory, for ever, and all unknown to him perhaps, there lurks a shadow, a vague shadow, a shadow of shadow, of uncertainty, and while he says within himself, "Well, let us live this life that passes away, for there is no other!" the silence of this secret chamber speaks to him and murmurs, "Who knows!..." He may not think he hears it, but he hears it nevertheless. And likewise in some secret place of the soul of the believer who most firmly holds the belief in a future life, there is a muffled voice, a voice of uncertainty, which whispers in the ear of his spirit, "Who knows!"3

We do not know, and we shall not know. Why do these words sit so badly with us today? Do we really imagine that some day we shall solve the mystery of being, that in just a few more generations of scientific thought some grand unified theory or theory of everything will leave no question unanswered? Would we wish to live in such a world? If there were a "solution" once and for all to the "problem" of suffering, or history, or love, would we really wish to know it, or on the contrary would it not make for the most soulless existence human beings have ever known, one where all mysteries are flattened out into so many bland problems? Death is and will remain a mystery in the way that our existence itself is. Human life contains problems and any number of them, but a problem itself it is not. It is an occasion for thought, an undertaking or project of sorts, perhaps a journey, but it is not a problem, and much the same can be said of death. Death is surrounded by no end of problems—how to postpone it, how to plan for it, and so on—but it is no more a problem than love is. It is a dimension of ourselves and of our way of being, more how we are than what we are.

To pursue and to love wisdom is not to possess it in the fashion of a known proposition. As Jeffrey Kauffman has put it, "There is no _knowledge_ of death. Being awakened to mortality is not an epistemic mode of consciousness. Knowledge about death is, in this basic sense, illusory and an impediment to awareness of mortality." We are speaking of a way of thinking that is outside of epistemology. "Confronted with death," the same author writes, "we are opened to the extreme limit of the possible: the unlimited."4 The unlimited is not encapsulated in any tidy package of knowable truths, but calls for an altogether different mode of thought. Kierkegaard stated that on the subject of death "I have sought for guidance in books—and I have found none."5 The reason is that we are speaking not of an object of knowledge but of an imperative to reflect beyond the reach of epistemology. This is a mode of thought that is oriented far less toward truth than meaning. To cite Kauffman once again, "Death makes us meaning-makers," inventors of significance where no knowledge is to be had.6 In an age dominated by scientific and technical rationality, meaninglessness, in the face of death and of life itself, is as that great physician of the soul Carl Jung remarked, "a soul-sickness whose full extent and full import our age has not as yet begun to comprehend."7 When science and modes of thought modeled upon it exhaust the sphere of possibilities, the result is that we have nothing of consequence to say in the face of mystery. A " _technical world_ ," as Marcel knew,

> _can only end in despair_. For, by the very nature of such a world, it can offer us no possibility of help where techniques are useless—as primarily, and above all, they are useless, of course, in the presence of death. How, from the point of view of such a world, could death appear as anything else than the flinging on the scrap heap of a being that has ceased to be of service—and that no longer _is_ anything, the moment it is no longer of _any use_?8

Our reflection is a preparation, and one is never altogether prepared.9

## Familiarity

The antidote to the evasion of death, as Tolstoy wrote, is to look at it, to become familiar with this most strange of phenomena. Indeed he belabored the point:

> And what was worst of all was that _It_ drew his attention to itself not in order to make him take some action but only that he should look at _It_ , look it straight in the face: look at it and without doing anything, suffer inexpressibly. And to save himself from this condition Ivan Ilych looked for consolations—new screens—and new screens were found and for a while seemed to save him, but then they immediately fell to pieces or rather became transparent, as if _It_ penetrated them and nothing could veil _It_.... "It really is so! I lost my life over that curtain as I might have done when storming a fort. Is that possible? How terrible and how stupid. It can't be true! It can't, but it is." He would go to his study, lie down, and again be alone with _It_ : face to face with _It_. And nothing could be done with _It_ except to look at it and shudder.10

The strength of the antidote reflects the determination of the disease. Ilych and those around him evade the obvious with a resoluteness that is absolute. Death is unthinkable, impossible to behold, and terrifying, most especially one's own. If we contemplate it at all, it is only when no alternative is open to us.

It is noteworthy that the lone character in Tolstoy's story to be comfortable with the subject was a peasant. Gerasim was a servant and decidedly rural man, closer to nature and better acquainted with the cycle of birth and death than his more sophisticated urban counterparts. It is Gerasim's company that Ilych increasingly seeks as he alone is able to sit with Ilych without lying. "'We shall all of us die'" are his plainspoken words,

> "so why should I grudge a little trouble?"—expressing the fact that he did not think his work burdensome, because he was doing it for a dying man and hoped someone would do the same for him when his time came.11

This is a plain sentiment, yet unusual to behold in the flesh. Tolstoy had an enormous respect for the Russian peasantry, not out of cultured condescension but because of their rootedness in nature, their connectedness to each other, and their uncomplicated spirituality. A familiarity with death is bound up with rurality. Denial, one might say, is a phenomenon of the modern city, where it is more than possible to grow up unmindful of natural processes of a great many kinds, and the cycle of life and death in particular. How does one come to think about and reconcile oneself with a phenomenon with which one has so little direct acquaintance, that has been kept at a distance that is artificial and socially sanctioned? Knowledge will not help us; imagination may.

It is a common sentiment to ask what you would do if this were the last day of your life. The purpose behind it is to change how we are living. "Act as if..." is the point, but the sentiment itself could use some work. Nietzsche attempted this imaginative task with his notion of the eternal return: "What if," he famously wrote,

> some day or night a demon were to steal after you into your loneliest loneliness and say to you: "This life as you now live it and have lived it, you will have to live once more and innumerable times more; and there will be nothing new in it, but every pain and every joy and every thought and sigh and everything unutterably small or great in your life will have to return to you, all in the same succession and sequence—even this spider and this moonlight between the trees, and even this moment and I myself. The eternal hourglass of existence is turned upside down again and again, and you with it, speck of dust!" Would you not throw yourself down and gnash your teeth and curse the demon who spoke thus? Or have you once experienced a tremendous moment when you would have answered him: "You are a god and never have I heard anything more divine." If this thought gained possession of you, it would change you as you are or perhaps crush you. The question in each and every thing, "Do you desire this once more and innumerable times more?" would lie upon your actions as the greatest weight. Or how well disposed would you have to become to yourself and to life _to crave nothing more fervently_ than this ultimate eternal confirmation and seal?12

This single thought, Nietzsche hoped, might add meaning to our every decision and action, focusing the mind in a way that transforms us. The eternal return is not a metaphysical doctrine but an experiment in thought, and it works by delivering us from everyday unreflection. The point is the "what if?" and the response this evokes in us.

Dostoevsky offered a similar reflection in _The Idiot_. Prince Myshkin relates a story out of Dostoevsky's own life in which a man is sentenced to be executed for a political crime, only to be given a reduced sentence minutes before facing a firing squad.

> Nevertheless, in the interval between the two decrees, twenty minutes or at least a quarter of an hour, he had lived absolutely convinced that in a few minutes he would die.... [H]e said that nothing was more awful than the incessant thought, "What if I was not to die! What if life was given back to me! What an eternity! And it all would be mine! I would turn each minute into a century. I would miss nothing. I would reckon each passing minute and waste nothing!" He said that this thought finally filled him with such rage that he wanted to be shot as soon as possible.13

What if our own life were suddenly returned to us, from having been thought to be over? "Act as if" is the point once again, not to live for the moment in a trivial sense but to appreciate what one has. Imagining loss not only "concentrates his mind wonderfully" but cautions one against the taken-for-grantedness into which one falls with the greatest ease and by a seemingly inevitable process. What if a loved one died and were now returned to us? Would Lazarus' family not appreciate him more, and perhaps love him better, after his return from death? One imagines after a period of tremendous celebration his family eventually returning to the lives they knew. In all likelihood they would take up their usual projects, but not unthinkingly. No theological doctrine emerges from this little thought experiment. It is only an exercise, but it serves a purpose. This is to become aware of how contingent and fragile human and all life is, how everything that we care about can be taken away in a moment and will be one day—and one draws the appropriate conclusion. Habitual imagining serves this purpose and lies upon our actions, as Nietzsche put it, as the greatest weight.

Simply getting used to the idea of mortality transforms us. So much of what we do is regulated by habit that a bit of daily imagining can change our way of being in profound ways, add a bit of depth to the personality, and make one altogether more interesting. There is no one so uninteresting as the person who has never known suffering, who gives not a moment's thought to their mortality and their limits, and who cannot fathom anything more weighty than their own pleasures.14 The perfect egoist is a perfect bore. What they need is to suffer, and to suffer habitually, to "look at it and... suffer," as Tolstoy said. Suffering educates, as does becoming at home in the thought of our death. What it teaches is nothing less than the truth of the human condition. Any experience that is worthy of the name changes us. Habitual meditation on death—not depressive wallowing but brief flickerings of imagination—changes our way of being-in-the-world and can make a personality deeper, more open, and more life-affirming.15

The idea of keeping death before the imagination was well expressed in the sixteenth century by Montaigne as follows:

> let us deprive death of its strangeness; let us frequent it, let us get used to it; let us have nothing more often in mind than death. At every instant let us evoke it in our imagination under all its aspects. Whenever a horse stumbles, a tile falls or a pin pricks however slightly, let us at once chew over this thought: "Supposing that was death itself?" With that, let us brace ourselves and make an effort. In the midst of joy and feasting let our refrain be one which recalls our human condition. Let us never be carried away by pleasure so strongly that we fail to recall occasionally how many are the ways in which that joy of ours is subject to death or how many are the fashions in which death threatens to snatch it away.... We do not know where death awaits us: so let us await it everywhere. To practise death is to practise freedom. A man who has learned how to die has unlearned how to be a slave.

That one may face death well or badly, that one learns to die, and learns it via imagination rather than knowledge, are ideas that sound strange to us today. So long as death is thought of as a problem rather than a mystery, Montaigne'sreflections will remain strange and somewhat beside the point. The point of a problem is to solve it, not to prepare for the insoluble in the right way, for there is no right way. A mystery, by contrast, must be engaged with, held before the mind as something that is my own, that is not to be evaded but only postponed. Our mode of engagement is defined by the "what if." What if, as I am driving my car on this routine day, I were to lose my life in a collision? What if this were the end, here and now? Is this reflection merely self-indulgent and morbid? It appears so again only when death is conceived as a problem. It serves no educative purpose to imagine being unable to solve a mathematical problem; becoming educated in mathematics can only mean learning to find solutions and overcoming whatever barriers to this exist. Learning to die in Montaigne's sense is categorically unlike this. It is learning to reconcile ourselves with the human condition and with what we cannot change. At times Montaigne may have overshot the mark: "one of virtue's main gifts is a contempt for death, which is the means of furnishing our life with easy tranquillity, of giving us a pure and friendly taste for it."16 Aurelius at times did the same: "Let it make no difference to you," he wrote, "whether you are cold or warm, if you are doing your duty; and whether you are drowsy or satisfied with sleep; and whether ill-spoken of or praised; and whether dying or doing something else." As well: "It is a vulgar but still a useful help toward contempt of death to pass in review those who have tenaciously stuck to life. What more have they gained than those who have died early?"17 Contempt for death—a simple lack of feeling—is not the goal, but keeping the matter in perspective and creating meaning in the face of suffering. Familiarity here does not breed contempt, and "easy tranquillity" there is not. The point in any philosophical meditation on death is to cope with it, not to win a victory or to convince ourselves that it is nothing.

There is, as Montaigne knew, a freedom and a wisdom that come with the realization that we can live without illusion, that we can look death in the face and not be crushed by it. "[A]ll the wisdom and argument in the world," he wrote, "eventually come down to one conclusion; which is to teach us not to be afraid of dying."18 The dread of death we may never overcome—indeed this is not an aim worth seeking—but we may overcome death's power to terrify by overcoming its foreignness. The object of everyday familiarity does not terrify but becomes a part of our being. It becomes my death, a part of a narrative that is my own (unfortunately it is also the last part). "Death," as it is said, "is a part of life." The statement is meant to provide comfort, and so long as this is the aim it is a pale comfort indeed. If it is comfort that we seek, this is best found in illusion. But if freedom is our aim, overcoming what Montaigne called servility and what we might also call terror, then making death an object of our everyday acquaintance can serve us well and make possible a more robust affirmation of life. We do not say yes to life, or to anything, by hedging it with a thousand qualifications but by affirming the totality. As Carse writes,

> in all great systems of thought the agency of death is alien and hostile, but it is _also_ an invitation to new life. What first appears as the willful destroyer of meaning in human existence comes to be seen as the very point of access to a more durable meaning, one that can embrace all forms of meaninglessness possible.19

A free existence requires cultivating an awareness of the tragic and the sorrowful; if we cannot look tragedy in the face our existence has a certain falsity about it. By the same logic that we cannot create meaning without recognizing the inherent meaninglessness of things, nor invent values for ourselves without realizing that no values are truly objective or given, we do not honestly affirm life without facing up to its darker aspect.

Perhaps no one is more familiar with death and the dying than members of the clergy. It is precisely this familiarity that affords them the admirable quality of being able to keep their wits about them and sit with the dying when others can manage only with a terrible awkwardness. It is the familiarity of the professional, one who is charged with doing something even when there is nothing to be done. There are rituals to be performed and words to be spoken, but there is no problem to be solved, only a mystery to be sat with quietly and in peace. In the case of the cleric this is a familiarity that is buttressed with theological doctrines which may or may not speak to us, but what is admirable is not the doctrinal commitment but the familiarity and peace of mind that accompany it. A peace of mind that is supported by doctrine easily shades into illusion, but there is nothing illusory about the existential freedom and calm that come with a habitual acquaintance with death.

The structures that support our existence are not absolutes but the opposite of this: thin threads of imaginative invention suspended over an abyss. Death is the abyss. Nothing about our existence is absolute but for the abyss itself. This is not a formula for gloom but a lesson in humility.

## Humility

There is an old belief that humility is the virtue of the common, not of the achiever. "I am humbled," says the latter, when great honors are bestowed upon them, but one sometimes senses a false note in these words or that humility, at any rate, is not a dominant feature of their personality. Humility is for the ordinary. Aristotle declined to regard it as a virtue at all; what is virtuous, he taught, is the pride that makes great achievement possible and which is its proper reward. Humility is abject, adeficiency of pride, and a close associate of humiliation. Baruch Spinoza spoke of it as "not a virtue but a passive emotion";it "is the pain arising from a man's contemplation of his own weakness" and "does not arise from reason."20 Historically, those who have regarded humility as a virtue have tended to do so under the influence of religion. I wish to make a case for humility, not on religious grounds and not as the virtue of some subset of the human population but as a disposition properly cultivated by all and nowhere more so than in the encounter with death. We do not face death as achievers—great, moderate, or under- —but as individuals who leave our achievements and everything else that merely belongs to us behind. One takes oneself alone, and we are equal at last. No ancient king or aristocrat ever succeeded in facing death otherwise than as an existing individual equal to every man, woman, and child on the earth.

Humility begins with a meditation on the condition of our existence as well as our knowledge. We are mortal, our knowledge limited and hedged about with contingency, uncertainty, and ignorance. Everything human is of limited extent and characterized by fragility, despite a few millennia of monumental efforts to persuade ourselves otherwise. Recall the ancient ceremony of the Roman triumph, in which an emperor or general of high rank would be paraded with great fanfare through the streets of Rome in recognition of victory in war, surrounded by crowds of enthusiastic spectators. Not an occasion for humility, one would think, except for the curious figure of the slave who invariably trailed behind the triumphant one whispering in his ear that he is mortal. This role of the slave was carefully preserved through the centuries in which triumphs were celebrated, yet for what reason? The Romans, like the Greeks, dreaded _hubris_ above all, a Greek word signifying an unbridled arrogance that was displeasing to the gods. "You are mortal, and no god," the slave—personification of humility—reminds us. We no longer celebrate triumphs, although they have their modern counterparts. The slave, however, does not. If it is no one's role today to remind us of our mortality and our finitude, we either put it out of mind or take this role upon ourselves. This is the meaning of humility and the reason why it is more than good form to be humbled when others recognize our accomplishments. Even the greatest achievers, and perhaps especially them, realize just how short of the mark they fall, that no matter how impressed others may be with their accomplishments, they were actually aiming higher.

This, as the ancients realized far better than we do, is the human condition: that we are mortal, fragile, conflicted, and beset by imperfection even in our finest moments. Whether we are speaking of our knowledge, our lifespan, or the effectiveness of our actions in the world, everywhere we encounter limits. This idea came alive for the Greeks in tragedy while a more familiar and fascinating illustration in contemporary culture is provided by the phenomenon of celebrity downfall. In this familiar narrative, some celebrated public figure is revealed as having a fantastic skeleton in the closet, some fatal flaw that causes them to be knocked, with terrific force, off the pedestal they had occupied, to the great indignation and entertainment of all. The pattern repeats itself with titillating and profitable regularity, and while it is difficult to take the matter seriously there is something in this that calls for thinking. Media organizations have neither the motivations nor the intelligence of Greek tragedians, yet in all the nonsense that issues forth from them this phenomenon does serve as an unintentional reminder of the condition of us all. "There but by the grace of God go I," one might think while reading of the latest celebrity to fall to their doom. "Alas, they are flawed, and so am I"—a sobering truth of which we were aware all along, however nothing serves as well as a narrative of downfall to bring the point home to us. There are truths that are held in the mind as so many cerebral propositions but that are not known in a more authentic sense. This is part of the value of narrative, that it makes abstract truths come alive when this is needed, as it is in the case of knowledge of our existential condition. The decline-and-fall narrative is an education in humility.

There are occasions that call for this virtue specifically. Achievement is one of them, death another. Humility is not a belief in one's personal insignificance but an awareness of what stands against the self, one's finitude and falling short of the ideal, and a way of comporting oneself in that light. Accolades are an occasion to remind oneself that one might have done better and that no level of success elevates one above the rank of human being. Anticipating one's death is an occasion to recall the existential condition of us all, that our projects will remain incomplete and our aspirations perhaps half-realized, that our affairs never were altogether in order and cannot be made so now. It is an occasion to reflect on what endures after our death, whether we take this idea in a religious direction or not. "My time is past, but my children live on, my community or commitments"—it need not be a religious idea. There is "something greater" than the self, as religion reminds us. What that something is is a secondary matter, and the possibilities here are many. What is essential is that one does not face death as the center of existence.

There is something untimely about this line of argument. The trend in recent decades has been, especially for those charged with raising the young, to speak of self-esteem as the paramount virtue, humility being a kind of deficiency—this time not of Aristotelian pride but of a trait that resembles it only in outward ways. Humility once again is beside the point; it is abject, or it is for the religious. We may take this view, but the consequence is that as self-esteem or what passes for it moves into the center something else is quietly relegated to the margins. Does one face death with self-esteem? What would this even mean? Neither we ourselves nor our happiness occupies the center of what is, and we do not face death as the occupant of the center. We face it as existing individuals, the center of not much of anything. There are conditions that stand against us, and we lose sight of this at our peril. We are not gods; there are things larger than ourselves and more important, things that precede and survive us. We need not take this idea in a religious direction, nor is it only for the abject. Pride in Aristotle's sense is indeed a virtue, indeed the "crown of the virtues," but to say this in no way diminishes humility.21 Unlike _hubris_ , authentic pride still knows that it is mortal, fragile, and off-center, that no matter one's accomplishments one does not lord it over life. The object of our desire is never fully attained, our aspirations never fully realized. The approach of death makes this especially obvious, as our capacities diminish and we realize that our projects are destined to remain unfinished, yet to the humble this has been long and well known.

The culmination of the Roman triumph was no hymn to the self but a scene of the celebrated individual ascending the steps of the Temple of Jupiter on the Capitol and offering a sacrifice. Historians tell us that during one of his triumphs the great Julius Caesar himself proffered the innovation of climbing the steps on his knees before offering a sacrifice.22 This was no show of false modesty but an act of profound meaning and piety. No matter what conquests he had won, he remained a servant of the gods. It is not only the abject who are servants.

## Acceptance

Kübler-Ross famously spoke of the acceptance of death as the fifth and final stage of the dying process, the preceding four in this rather tidy sequence being denial, anger, bargaining, and depression. The scientifically minded often decidedly prefer it when the objects they study are not only empirically observable and measurable but predictable and well-ordered, yet of all the adjectives that apply to the more subterranean dimension of human experience, predictable and well-ordered are not among them. The human psyche, as artists and thinkers have been saying for a couple of millennia now, is about as far from tidy and predictable as anything on earth. Before elaborating on this, however, let us reckon with Kübler-Ross' conception of acceptance. What is it to accept death, and does it indeed constitute a discrete stage in an empirically identifiable and somewhat predictable dying process? Does acceptance take a single form and is there one road to it?

On her account, the dying individual, with help from the psychologist (naturally), gradually is able to process what is happening to them and the mental struggle in time ceases. Denial and anger are at an end, bargaining and depression subside, and a new and less conflicted stage sets in. In her words,

> Acceptance should not be mistaken for a happy stage. It is almost void of feelings. It is as if the pain had gone, the struggle is over, and there comes a time for "the final rest before the long journey" as one patient phrased it.... While the dying patient has found some peace and acceptance, his circle of interest diminishes. He wishes to be left alone or at least not stirred up by news and problems of the outside world. Visitors are often not desired and if they come, the patient is no longer in a talkative mood. He often requests limitation on the number of people and prefers short visits. . Our communications then become more nonverbal than verbal. The patient may just make a gesture of the hand to invite us to sit down for a while. He may just hold our hand and ask us to sit in silence. Such moments of silence may be the most meaningful communications for people who are not uncomfortable in the presence of a dying person.23

Under the therapist's supervision, the terminally ill patient is able to work through the first four stages to this final one. This requires time and does not occur in cases of relatively sudden or unexpected death. The patient is tired and weak, sleeps much, prefers quiet, and no longer struggles to hold on to life. Those who fight to the end do not reach this stage, sometimes viewing it as cowardly or passive when what is called for is resoluteness. The therapist then must help such patients work through what is happening to them while also being careful not to lead them to give up the fight too soon.

The difficulty with Kübler-Ross' account of acceptance is not the empirical description itself but the theoretical framework in which it appears. In this teleological account acceptance is the single goal of a process that takes a single form. The therapist's role is to assist the patient in reaching this particular end-state. Are matters quite so straightforward? Theories of such topics that place their ducks rather too carefully in a row invite skepticism, especially when the object of our theorizing belongs to the deeper waters of our existence. Tidiness, order, and predictability belong to the surface of human affairs, not the depths, and acceptance is a phenomenon of the depths. The existing individual does not always play by the rules, and if it has any taste for freedom at all it is not predictable. The great teacher of this is not Kübler-Ross but Dostoevsky, most directly perhaps in his _Notes from Underground_ , the nameless protagonist of which will go to extremes to demonstrate his freedom to the "gentlemen" who are his addressees. If the scientific gentlemen predict that he will or ought to do _X_ —that it is his human nature or in his rational self-interest— he will show them that he will do _Y_ , to spite them if nothing else. He is not a scientifically constituted object of prediction or therapeutic management but a self-respecting individual. Such an individual does not do what he is told. He is free, and this means that he decides, if necessary at his own expense.

We need a new conception of acceptance. There is no freedom and no mystery in acceptance as an empirically knowable object or a stage in a teleological and altogether too predictable model. Nor is acceptance what it often appears to mean in common parlance: an attitude of submission, passivity, a simple matter of going quietly. There is no longer a fight, it is true, but in the realization that one is about to lose, whether it be on a small scale of everyday life or the largest one of facing imminent death, there is freedom still. Acceptance in the sense of resignation is an option; one accepts defeat passively and submits to an unkind fate. Self-respect is another; one has not been defeated, and one will comport oneself as the person one has been to the end. One has lost one's life, but one has not lost oneself. Acceptance in this second sense is a state of being, a decision, and an existential achievement—which normally does not require the services of a therapist. It is an attitude of humility in the face of what we cannot change.

The great model here is Socrates. Here is a man who faced death in heroic fashion, which does not mean that he "went out fighting," for he did not. He accepted his fate—a death sentence that was also, of course, a travesty of justice, but that is a separate matter. Existentially, as the saying has it, "he died as he lived." This is a bit of a cliché, but it is also one of the highest compliments that one can pay to a human being. To die as one has lived is an achievement of the first order, and this is what Socrates accomplished, both for himself and for us. For himself, he held his composure and his dignity, kept his wits about him and remained true to his convictions and to himself. In the face of an unjust verdict and sentence of death he refused his friends' offer to bribe the guards and flee, preferring to face execution if the citizens of Athens deemed it just. For us, he held himself as a model of how to die without losing yourself. The task of acceptance is to remain yourself in the face of death, even when it is brought on by human action and injustice of a terrible sort. For Socrates it was a kind of moral project to teach those witness to his death how not to surrender what one cares about no matter what is taking place around one. Where others lose their wits he taught restraint and serenity.

How did Socrates accomplish this? He accepted death without abject passivity yet also without the services of a medical professional and evidently without first undergoing Kübler-Ross' sequence of stages. Acceptance for him was not a stage but a way of being and of holding himself in a way that others could look to as a model. He did this by an act of will, and undoubtedly in the face of terrible emotion. Abandoning the fight for him was a decision and a moral choice, a lesson for the people of Athens and for us no less. After twenty-four centuries, students of our discipline still look to this man as an exemplar, somewhat less on account of his doctrines than on account of how he comported himself in the face of death. Socrates as philosopher and teacher was the great model, of how to comport oneself not only in the realm of ideas but in the face of death. He taught us the inseparability of death and philosophy. As he expressed it:

> Ordinary people seem not to realize that those who really apply themselves in the right way to philosophy are directly and of their own accord preparing themselves for dying and death. If this is true, and they have actually been looking forward to death all their lives, it would of course be absurd to be troubled when the thing comes for which they have so long been preparing and looking forward.

Philosophers prepare for death, indeed "make dying their profession," insofar as they anticipate the release of the soul from the body, a separation that makes it possible for the soul to behold reality in its true dimension, without the distorting influence of the body and the senses.24 Since, Socrates claimed, the soul not only survives the death of the body but is able in death to gain pure knowledge of being, a properly philosophical attitude toward death is to welcome it as a liberation as well as to accept it as an inevitability. This attitude toward death Socrates himself demonstrated, facing his own demise with an acceptance and resolve that transformed his death into a symbol of the philosophical life.

Socrates' way of thinking about death was at once existential and metaphysical. The latter can be dispensed with (indeed it is questionable whether Socrates himself accepted such arguments) along with any conception of "looking forward" that suggests joyful anticipation. There is no joy here, and the doctrine of the immortality of the soul is more than questionable. If Socrates' death still speaks to us, it is owing not to his metaphysical speculations but to his comportment. What does Socrates still have to teach us, and what kind of exemplar is it who died on such a grand scale, with large ideas at stake and for an audience of all history? We die on a small scale, in a hospital room surrounded by machines and a whirlwind of medical professionals. There are no disciples present, no one to record our final words for posterity, only a handful of loved ones, and this if we are lucky. What is it about Socrates' death that still inspires us, we who belong to a different time and who will certainly not die in circumstances comparable to his? The answer is that Socrates taught us the art of acceptance, how to maintain ourselves and be who we are no matter the circumstances. The fight is over, Socrates is not the victor, but he remains himself in the sight of his friends and in his own eyes, practicing the same philosophical conversation at the end that occupied him throughout life. The end of the narrative is a fitting conclusion and a culmination.

Philosophy and death are ultimately inseparable, Socrates taught, and so as well are life and death. To affirm our existence means to say yes to the whole, to joy and suffering, success and failure, beginning and end. There is meaning in all of this, a search for and an invention of significance that drives the whole and remains with us until the end. We find or impose meaning where we can, and learn to live with the remainder. To cite Montaigne once more:

> We must learn to suffer whatever we cannot avoid. Our life is composed, like the harmony of the world, of discords as well as of different tones, sweet and harsh, sharp and flat, soft and loud. If a musician liked only some of them, what could he sing? He has got to know how to use all of them and blend them together. So too must we with good and ill, which are of one substance with our life. Without such blending our being cannot be: one category is no less necessary than the other. To assay kicking against natural necessity is to reproduce the mad deed of Ctesiphon who, to a kicking-match, challenged his mule.25

Life and death form an experiential unity, and one loves or despises the totality.

The art of acceptance is the antithesis to denial. Philosophers have been making this point since ancient times and the contemporary literature continues to rehearse it. "Acceptance," as Madison writes,

> is not the same thing as resignation: To make oneself capable of overcoming the servile mentality of victimhood by actively affirming life and being _grateful_ for it is to come to terms with suffering in a way that goes beyond mere resignation or uncaring indifference and that is in fact the basis for a noble life.... The heroic person, [William] James said, can stand his ground and "meet [the Universe] and keep faith in it in the presence of those same features which lay his weaker brethren low."26

Nietzsche had said much the same. There is freedom and nobility in overcoming that which can crush the human spirit, and precisely in gratitude for a life that is not without misfortune. Here is a man who knew misfortune, yet was still capable of writing: "One should part from life as Odysseus parted from Nausicaa—blessing it rather than in love with it. "27 As well: "For one thing is needful: that a human being should _attain_ satisfaction with himself, whether it be by means of this or that poetry and art; only then is a human being at all tolerable to behold."28 Aurelius was also no stranger to misfortune, but understood well the nature and importance of acceptance:

> And if all men refuse to believe that he lives a simple, modest, and contented life, he is neither angry with any of them, nor does he deviate from the way that leads to the end of life, to which a man ought to come pure, tranquil, ready to depart, and without any compulsion, perfectly reconciled to his lot.29

## Openness

A sense of death, a way of thinking about it that is at once meaningful and intellectually honest, includes an openness to the unknown and unknowable. Death is a mystery. It is a wall through which no light penetrates. The kind and quality of reflection that is called for is what Heidegger spoke of as openness to the mystery. It is a kind of mysticism that makes no claims to knowledge but stands before the unknown with a comportment of acceptance and humility. We do not know, we do not need to know, what death is "from the inside," we whose condition is always to be on the outside of this phenomenon. Death remains a mystery in much the way our existence itself is—not a problem in need of solution, not a subject of tidy theorizing, but a mystery in Marcel's sense. Marcel himself was also a Christian, for whom the apprehension of mystery includes a certain kind of belief. The sense of mystery too quickly transforms into belief—in an afterlife, in the immortality of the soul, or some such metaphysical position. Openness to the mystery does not require a taking of positions. It requires a thinking that is beyond knowledge and a familiarity with what in the end can never be known. Familiarity and mystery are an odd coupling perhaps, but preserving the tension between them is vital. Becoming familiar with any mystery does not mean transforming it into a problem or creating objective distance between the questioner and the questioned. No distance is possible here; as habituated to the idea of death as we may become, a mystery remains what it is.

The temptation to believe can be great. James thought it a forced choice—to believe in a creator and an afterlife or not to believe—but it is not so.30 Our problem today is that we have too many beliefs, beliefs to which we have a will but lack a right. We do not always require belief, neither in an intellectual proposition nor a creed. A way of thinking can and sometimes ought to be doctrinally neutral, not asserting what is the case but something altogether less epistemological. Musicians also think; a musician has a sense of their instrument, a chosen technique and habits of a particular kind, and a characteristic style of expression. They know what their instrument is capable of and what its limits are, how it can be made to speak and how it can fall flat. Their thinking is a way—of doing things, of handling and listening to the instrument and expressing meaning through it—not a position. So do cabinetmakers, woodcarvers, and gardeners. In each case thinking is a way, and one that has little to do with propositional knowledge. Information and justification are involved, of course, but in a secondary capacity. Thinking itself here is more art than demonstration, more showing than arguing. It is not only philosophers who think.

Thinking about death involves cultivating a sense of mortality and a willingness to place oneself in the open and to maintain oneself there. To reflect upon a mystery is not to prove a case but to face up to our condition, with humility and acceptance. The larger trajectory of such thought is not toward ascertaining a metaphysical truth but a meditation on life and the way we are living it. It is a short step from mortality and the kind of meditation for which it calls to ethics, as Aurelius expressed in a few words: "Death hangs over you. While you live, while it is within your power, be good." Encountering our finitude reminds us of wrongs that need to be set right and of what we owe to other human beings—our indebtedness to those who raised and loved us, those who educated and formed us—and that one day we shall disappear from the only world we know and be remembered for better or ill by those who remain. How will we be remembered? This is an ethical question, as the same figure also observed:

> How have you behaved hitherto to the gods, your parents, brethren, children, teachers, to those who looked after your infancy, to your friends, kinfolks, to your slaves? Consider if you have hitherto behaved to all in such a way that this may be said of you: Never has he wronged a man in deed or word.31

A recent author writes that the death of someone we have loved can be seen "as the possibility, albeit sorrowful, for the survivor to be pushed out into deep waters, to allow his equilibrium to be upset, and to call himself into question."32 A deeper openness to mystery is inseparable from an openness to human beings whose existential condition mirrors our own. Learning how to comport ourselves in the face of death is no different than learning how to live, and as Seneca passionately reminded us, it takes a lifetime to learn either:

> Living is the least important activity of the preoccupied man; yet there is nothing which is harder to learn. There are many instructors in the other arts to be found everywhere. . But learning how to live takes a whole life, and, which may surprise you more, it takes a whole life to learn how to die.33

Learning to die—also to live—is a preparation and an ethical project that is never brought to completion.

## Notes

1 Marcel, _Being and Having_ , trans. K. Farrer (Westminster: Dacre Press, 1949), 100.

2 Marcel, _Man against Mass Society_ , 67.

3 Miguel de Unamuno, _The Tragic Sense of Life_ , trans. J. E. Crawford Flitch (London: Collins, 1962), 126.

4 Jeffrey Kauffman, "Blinkings: A Thanatocentric Theory of Consciousness," in Jeffrey Kauffman, ed., _Awareness of Mortality_ (Amityville: Baywood Publishing Company, 1995), 78, 79.

5 Kierkegaard, _Concluding Unscientific Postscript_ , 152.

6 Kauffman, "Blinkings," 79.

7 Jung, "The Soul and Death," 15.

8 Marcel, _Man against Mass Society_ , 71.

9 Another great physician of the soul put it this way:

> To tolerate life remains, after all, the first duty of all living beings. Illusion becomes valueless if it makes this harder for us. We recall the old saying: _Si vis pacem, para bellum_. If you want to preserve peace, arm for war. It would be in keeping with the times to alter it: _Si vis vitam, para mortem_. If you want to endure life, prepare yourself for death.
>
> Freud, "Thoughts for the Times on War and Death," 89

10 Tolstoy, "The Death of Ivan Ilych," 130–1.

11 Ibid., 135.

12 Nietzsche, _The Gay Science_ , trans. W. Kaufmann (New YorkVintage, 1974), sec. 341, pp. 273–4.

13 Dostoevsky, _The Idiot_ , trans. H. and O. Carlisle (New York: Signet, 1980), 80–1. As Kierkegaard expressed it,

> Death itself produces a scarcity of time for the dying. Who has not heard how one day, sometimes one hour, was jacked up in price when the dying one bargained with death! Who has not heard how one day, sometimes one hour, gained infinite worth because death made time dear! Death is able to do this, but with the thought of death the earnest person is able to create a scarcity so that the year and the day receive infinite worth—and when it is a time of scarcity the merchant profits by using time.
>
> Kierkegaard, "At a Graveside," 84

14 'The people that are interesting,' Bruce Springsteen has remarked, "are the people that have something eating at them, and they're not exactly sure what that thing is." Bruce Springsteen, _Devils and Dust_ , Bonus DVD (Columbia Records, 2005).

15 Familiarity with death, like every good, can also be taken too far, as Todd May has noted:

> Constant reflection on death is no better a strategy than ignoring it. This is because constant reflection on death is usually an attempt to cure it or control it. But death cannot be cured or controlled. Staring up at a curtain will not prevent it from falling. To be perpetually thinking about death in an attempt to ward off its danger is to be like obsessive-compulsive people who cannot stop washing their hands. They feel continuously threatened by dirt or impurity, so they hope that with enough cleansing they will keep them at bay. But germs, and death, will always be with us. There is no ritual that eliminates them or even ensures that we may have any space between us and them.
>
> Todd May, _Death_ (Durham: Acumen, 2009), 80

May's observation here is important. Periodic reflection is not to be confused with constant dwelling.

16 Montaigne, _The Complete Essays_ , 96, 91.

17 Aurelius, _Meditations_ , 37, 27. The latter passage continues:

> Certainly they lie in their tombs somewhere at last.... Although the interval is small between birth and death; and consider with how much trouble, and in company with what sort of people and in what a feeble body, this interval is laboriously passed. Do not then consider life a thing of any value. For look to the immensity of time behind you and to the time that is ahead of you, another boundless space. In this infinity, then, what is the difference between him who lives three days and him who lives three generations?

18 Montaigne, _The Complete Essays_ , 89.

19 Carse, _Death and Existence_ ,9.

20 Baruch Spinoza, _The Ethics and Selected Letters_ , trans. S. Shirley (New York: Hackett, 1982), 184–5.

21 "Pride, then, seems to be a sort of crown of the virtues; for it makes them greater, and it is not found without them." Aristotle, _Nicomachean Ethics_ ,in _The Basic Works of Aristotle_ , trans. W. D. Ross, ed. Richard McKeon (New YorkRandom House, 1941), 1124a1–2.

22 See, for instance, Adrian Goldsworthy's account of this in _Caesar: Life of a Colossus_ (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2006), 469.

23 Kübler-Ross, _On Death and Dying_ , 113.

24 Plato, _Phaedo_ , 64a, 67e.

25 Montaigne, _The Complete Essays_ , 1237.

26 Madison, _On Suffering_ , 110–11.

27 Nietzsche, _Beyond Good and Evil_ , sec. 96, p. 83.

28 Nietzsche, _The Gay Science_ , sec. 290, p. 233.

29 Aurelius, _Meditations_ , 18. Yet another acquaintance of suffering was Dostoevsky, who wrote:

> a mysterious process gradually transforms an old grief into a quiet happiness; seething youth is replaced by gentle and serene old age. Every day I bless the rising sun and my heart sings to it as it did before; but now I love the sunset even more, and its long, slanting rays bring back to me quiet, touching, tender memories, dear faces, and images from my long and blessed life.
>
> Dostoevsky, _The Brothers Karamazov_ , trans. A. H. MacAndrew (New York: Bantam Books, 1981), 351

30 For James,

> religion is a _forced_ option, so far as that good goes. We cannot escape the issue by remaining sceptical and waiting for more light, because, although we do avoid error in that way _if religion be untrue_ , we lose the good, _if it be true_ , just as certainly as if we positively chose to disbelieve.
>
> James, _The Will to Believe_ (New York: Dover, 1956), 26

31 Aurelius, _Meditations_ , 22, 35.

32 Schumacher, _Death and Mortality in Contemporary Philosophy_ , 111.

33 Seneca, _On the Shortness of Life_ ,9–10.

# 6 On speculation and hope

The temptation to speculate is great at times, and nowhere more so than on the question of death. Is there a life beyond this life, some manner of personal survival that we can believe in or at least hope for without surrendering our reason? Is there a right to imagine we shall be rejoined with the loved ones who have meant so much to us in life and whose death we find so hard to endure? At the end of The _Brothers Karamazov_ a group of children asks Alyosha Karamazov whether they will one day meet again the friend whose funeral they have just attended: "Karamazov, can it be true, as our religion claims, that we shall all rise from the dead, come back to life, and meet again, Ilyusha too?" To this Alyosha replies: "We shall certainly rise and we shall certainly all meet again and tell each other happily and joyfully everything that has happened to us."1 It is a moving scene, and there are times when the sentiment, "we shall meet again, in an existence beyond death," moves us to the depths of our being. This is the obstinacy of hope. It is the instinct of life working through us that compels us to anticipate with infinite longing that which we cannot know. Infinite longing for the absolutely unattainable—this is the condition of the existing individual who asks what awaits us beyond death. It is more than tempting to follow Alyosha and believe, with certainty no less, but is it intellectually responsible to do so? Hope remains even when there is no belief. To say we have hope does not entangle us in the epistemological problem that belief does or assent to an intellectual position, but to many this is unsatisfying. Is hope ever a reasonable position, and is it a position? What is it to hope, and for what may we hope? Do we have a right to it, and to belief still more? Where there is no knowledge there is always the possibility of speculation, but do we have a right to this? Shall we speculate or shall we not? Speculation does not exactly enjoy a favorable reputation in philosophy, suggesting as it does empty guesswork and wishful thinking. Any speculation is as good as any other, we often hear, and it is irrational to engage in it, including when it is an emotionally urgent matter.

To speculate or not to speculate—there are arguments to be made on both sides. I wish in this final chapter to consider both arguments, trying in each case to make the argument as strong as possible before asking how much force they carry.

## Knowledge and speculation

Let us begin with a familiar argument, one so often expressed in philosophy as to constitute the dominant position on the matter. The argument has been formulated in numerous ways through the ages, but it can be summarized as follows. It is intellectually irresponsible to speculate in all circumstances, no matter the emotions involved and perhaps especially when powerful emotions enter in, because ideas form a basis for how we live. Emotions tempt us to adopt beliefs that we cannot possibly justify, or not in any philosophically rigorous way. Intellectual honesty, or reason itself, requires us to limit our assent to beliefs that we can demonstrate by means of logical argument or, a little less formally, good reasons.

The problem with speculation is that it is not knowledge but a pale substitute for it, little better than the flipping of a coin. Serious thought is knowledge, and the object of knowledge is truth—statements that correspond to the way the world is. We are not interested in what may be, but what is. What may be is for poets, prophets, and children, not thinkers in a higher sense of the word. Reason can establish no hold here, and there is no scope for intelligent argument about matters that are often of far-reaching importance. Whether we take Kierkegaard's "leap to faith" or opt not to, whether we accept or decline Pascal's wager, is important from the point of view not only of where we stand in an intellectual sense but of how we live and who we are. We organize our lives around ideas and use them as a basis for action. Matters of such consequence cannot turn on guesswork, and when they do there is an abdication of responsibility and even a betrayal of our nature as rational beings. We are beings, as Aristotle famously said, who desire to know, not to believe arbitrarily or on the basis of merely psychological need. Philosophers especially should assert only what they can show in the sense of demonstrating with arguments of which any rational being can see the force. Any who are persuaded by speculations are undisciplined in their thinking and prepared to surrender their faculties in exchange for a false sense of certainty or a bit of consolation. We must believe only what we have sufficient reason to believe, not what produces a state of psychological satisfaction.

Philosophy from its ancient inception has helped humankind overcome superstition and dubious conjecture of a great many kinds. Ancient Greek stories of the gods at last it subjected to rational scrutiny, along with baseless moral and political claims, and so moved the conversation forward in a crucial respect. In the modern period Enlightenment thought emancipated us once again from centuries of medieval superstition. "But is it true?" is its characteristic question; "how do we know and how can this be demonstrated?" Surely this represented progress over adopting beliefs that have no basis in sound argument. Modern philosophy and science in their own ways both represent a decisive step forward in thought precisely because of their refusal to indulge in conjecture and to practice restraint where less disciplined minds opted for whatever beliefs produced a certain state of feeling. Where ideas are concerned what matters is what is true and what can be proven, not how ideas sit with us, and speculation, being incapable of rational adjudication, can only return us to a condition in which beliefs are adopted on merely psychological grounds, which is to say no grounds. Where there is no rational argument, there is no right to believe.

Let us now hear the argument on the other side. Real knowledge is never more than the tip of the iceberg of what we surmise, imagine, suspect, gather, and believe. We are beings that by nature desire to know, but we are also beings that desire, perhaps also by nature, some other things. We desire to live in a world of meaning, to understand not only what is but what may be, and to make ourselves at home in such a world. We cannot live on knowledge alone, for this affords too slim a basis for life. We require literature and music, social involvements and a sense of purpose, work and leisure, recognition and self-respect. We require, in short, an existence that is not only knowable but significant, purposeful, and comprehensible. Our very way of being is a search for understanding, for ways of coping that hold meaning for us, and where coping does not mean getting by on beliefs that are false but gratifying, but becoming at home in a world of unlimited complexity and mystery. Human life itself is a mystery—not a tidy problem of utilitarian accounting or scientific management, and not an object of knowledge. We do not know what is a properly human life; indeed the properly human life does not exist. There are good lives and bad, nobler and baser ways of conducting ourselves, but unless we wish to assert that the human being has a deep metaphysical essence that makes it the kind of entity that it is then we are left with mystery and an existence that is a perilous walk on a tightrope suspended over an abyss.

A way of life that is restricted to knowing the truth of what is or what can be conclusively demonstrated is an impossible and inhuman existence. We desire and indeed require not only to know but to live, and to live well. A good life requires knowledge, and a great deal of it, but where knowledge is not an idol it is an ingredient in the good life, not the whole of it. Knowledge, whatever it is, does not by itself afford a basis for life, properly human or otherwise, nor is it a compartment distinct and separate from the rest of what minds do. It is more like a way of doing things, a possible and reasonable way of speaking but not a total way of life or a stable actuality. We ourselves are not a stable actuality but a possibility or set of these—possibilities that open onto no little complexity and mystery. So too is our awareness characterized by possibility, contingency, uncertainty, and doubt. Try as we might to make fast the life of the mind by tying it to the secure post of reason, the post itself is not as secure as philosophers have often imagined. It is no absolute, but a way of finding our way about the world. At the most fundamental level of analysis, thinking is coping—solving problems where we can, posing questions, reflecting on mystery, disclosing meaning, listening and showing, creating artifacts, imposing value, entertaining wonder, and imagining what is around the corner. Most of this does not involve linking a proposition to an absolute, nor might it one day if only we remain true to our rational nature. The ideas that we organize our lives around are not so many _P_ s and _Q_ s on a logician's blackboard, crystal clear in definition, neatly arranged and strung together by means of rules that fall from the sky. The life of the mind is not like this, nor might it become so if only we hold the will in check and believe what our reason clearly and distinctly perceives.

We are not only knowers but human beings, bodies with capacities for thought which philosophers have long found incongruous with our condition in nature as organisms of flesh and bone. Mind and body are one, however we wish to formulate this philosophically. So are knowledge and action. The way of life of this particular species is defined by thinking, and in a sense that is broader and richer than knowing. The object of thinking is our condition broadly conceived: what is true, what is good, what is important, what things mean, who we are, and what may be. All of this is the business of human life, and if we are to live as rational beings we must have something intelligent to say about each of these matters. Try as we might to limit ourselves to saying only what we know, we do not succeed and nor is this a goal worth seeking. Were we to succeed in this we would cut a ridiculous figure, some entity that belongs in science fiction rather than the kind of being that we are. Let us have caution and rigor in our thinking, when this is called for, but let us also have boldness and imagination when this is called for, as in some cases it is. Knowing when the former suits, and when the latter, belongs to the art of thinking. Now we worship at the temple of Apollo, now of Dionysus; it depends on the occasion, on the object of thought and what the question is. Therefore we speculate, and have a right to speculate on matters that bear vitally on what concerns us as existing individuals, what is urgent and impossible to put out of mind. We are not robots, and we shall not adopt an epistemology that is suited to one. We can have an ethics of belief without epistemological orthodoxy, and we can do our best to bring our speculations within this ethics of sorts. Thought is not an all-or-nothing affair of certainty or evasion. Speculation may be engaged in with good conscience when we have no alternative but a shrug of the shoulders.

Let this stand as the case for speculation. Very well then, shall we speculate or shall we not? The reader will have gathered my sympathies for the latter argument, but the former also has obvious and considerable force. Banishing speculation from the field of thought, or "serious" thought as some like to say, seems to me not so much rational as myopic, a recipe for blandness if not exactly error. Let us remember Alyosha Karamazov's words: "We shall certainly rise and we shall certainly all meet again... ." A philosopher convinced by the first line of argument might respond as follows: "He really ought to have said, 'It is far from certain, and to the best of our knowledge we shall not rise and we shall not meet again. You may, however, propose this as a hypothesis.'" On this view, if there is insufficient justification for the proposition, "There is a life beyond this life," then we are left with a second-rate kind of claim: "Maybe there is." Let us consider a few other claims that involve the little word "is": "Alyosha Karamazov is"; "Man is a wolf"; "Human life is suffering"; "I am the truth." In the case of metaphorical predication, "is" means "is like," or "is as if"; it is not the literal "is." "Man is not a wolf, but he resembles one." Try saying this to a poet. Their reply will be, "no, man is a wolf; the literalist does not have an exclusive right to this word." Let us now say to the storyteller, "Alyosha Karamazov is not; he is a literary character only, an imaginative fiction comparable to a unicorn or the Easter Bunny. We can imagine him, even speak of him, but he is not." Let us now say to the religious believer, "human life is not suffering; human life is human life and suffering is suffering. There is a case to be made that life involves suffering, but it is no such thing. Nor is any human being the truth; they may know it, possess a share of it, but they are not it." Again the believer replies: "the word 'is' is not the moral property of literalist philosophers. Literally, yes, human life is not suffering, but to translate this idea into the proposition, 'Human life involves suffering,' degrades it. The religious 'is' is not the literal 'is,' nor is the metaphorical or the narrative 'is.' We are speaking of separate discourses, distinct language games perhaps or different ways of speaking. There is not one way of speaking about what is."

What are we to make of this sentence: "There is a life beyond this life"? Is this the literal "is," the religious, metaphorical, narrative, or some other? For many believers, it is the literal "is," however I would prefer to speak of it as the speculative "is," crucially distinct from the others while also intersecting with them on occasion. From the standpoint of the literalist this will always look like guesswork, just as from that perspective the poet lies in declaring that man is a wolf and the religionist errs in speaking of life as suffering. Literalists are turf warriors, and they fall into a kind of thoughtlessness. This is not the familiar thoughtlessness of being careless or too loose in our thinking, reckless in asserting as true what we cannot prove, but being unimaginative. The literal-minded are not mistaken so much as myopic, always insisting on viewing the world through a single lens and sticking to a single line of questioning no matter what we are speaking of or what is at stake. Intellectual myopia commits no fallacy and is never exactly in the wrong. The problem with it is that it has a way of missing the point, and especially when the stakes are highest. "Human life is not suffering; it involves it." "Man is like a wolf, but he is not one." These sentences fall flat. The speaker has missed something, and the reply is not to instruct but to sigh. A musician knows when an instrument is speaking and when it is falling flat, and so too must the thinker.

"There is a life beyond this life": who says this, and what is their meaning? The speaker is not a scientist speaking qua scientist or a logician undertaking a proof but an existing individual confronting their mortality. Their meaning is not, "I know this proposition to be the case, to correspond to the facts of the world," but something else. They are not (or ought not to be) proposing or asserting anything at all but engaging in a different kind of discourse. Their meaning and their point resist translation into the literal, and like any bad translation it always falls flat: "Let's hypothesize that there is an afterlife," or some such. Again we sigh. "They have failed to get it," the speaker says, as one fails to get a joke. What have they failed to get? They have failed to see that not everything is a proposition, and not every use of the word "is" is literal, or even "figurative." Novelists do not speak figuratively; they speak full stop. So do musicians speak and think. They do it without propositions, without methodology and literality, but they do it all the same, and in a way that seems strange only to literalists. The speaker's meaning in the case of the statement above is not to put forward a metaphysical hypothesis but something else, and something that defies ready translation into philosophical prose.

When Nietzsche spoke of the eternal return in section 341 of The _Gay Science_ , in the first and most important formulation of this idea, he employed the phrase "what if." Many have interpreted this idea as a metaphysical hypothesis, rather oddly considering Nietzsche's complete disdain for metaphysics. The point of this idea is not to propose what is the case—indeed it is exceedingly improbable that Nietzsche could have believed this—but to transform us, to change how we are living and to lie on our actions as "the greatest weight." The eternal return partakes of the transformative power of Christian immortality without the nihilism and slavishness that he attributed to that religion. It is not a doctrine but a test of character and a challenge to our way of life. It is literal nonsense and it is loaded with meaning. It is an example of speculation at its finest. Believing in it would be strange, about as strange as believing that Jesus is the truth in a literal sense of "is."

James believed that every thinker faces a basic choice between desiring truth and desiring to avoid error. James and the speculator both opt for the first, the "intellectualist" philosopher whom he criticized the second.2 Descartes is the paradigmatic example of the latter. Is the Cartesian meditator prepared for death? Do they have a way of thinking about it that we might wish to make our own? Have they made dying their profession, as Socrates would say, or are they a philosopher of the blackboard, solemnly arranging their _P_ s and _Q_ s while life passes them by? When avoiding error is our cardinal virtue we remain in a sense beyond reproach even while our thinking is one-dimensional. More worldly thinkers take a risk and are sometimes to be faulted for doing so, but in the end they tend to understand more and to see more deeply into human affairs. Were I facing my own imminent end I would sooner converse with a thinker of the first kind than the second, perhaps a storyteller or a cleric, and it would matter little which religion the latter represents. What matters is whether their conceptual vocabulary includes hope and wonder, whether they have the boldness to take a chance and to contemplate the mystery without keeping too anxious an eye on the blackboard. A little Cartesian anxiety can be good; too much is debilitating and leaves us at a reflective standstill when it behooves us to think.

We may still learn from the ancients. Death calls for thinking, and while a good part of our thinking begins as a quest for metaphysical knowledge its constant tendency is to end up in the vicinity of speculation and, quite often, ethics. The conclusion reached again and again is, do not fear death; rather, love and be grateful for life. Live so as to prepare for death, even while we are never truly prepared. "[T]rue philosophers," we can still believe, "make dying their profession"; "to them of all men death is the least alarming." Let us remember that the man who spoke these words was about to drink hemlock for crimes of which he was not guilty. He was not solving an intellectual puzzle but speculating with an eye to teaching his friends how they may live better. His arguments—the metaphysical ones—are not compelling perhaps, but the example that he set is. When death is our theme, rational argument, seeking truth about the world, approaches a limit and has a tendency to remain unconvincing. Socrates urged that we not fear death on grounds of the immortality of the soul. Recall, for instance, the argument in the _Phaedo_ that opposites come from opposites: "between each pair of opposites there are two processes of generation, one from the first to the second, and another from the second to the first."3 If this be true, he reasoned, and if life and death are opposites, then death comes about from life and life from death. Suppose we find no fault in the reasoning; are we therefore convinced? How about Epicurus' argument in his "Letter to Menoeceus" that death is nothing to fear since it is not an object of experience:

> Accustom thyself to believe that death is nothing to us, for good and evil imply sentience, and death is the privation of all sentience.... Death, therefore, the most awful of evils, is nothing to us, seeing that, when we are, death is not come, and when death is come, we are not. It is nothing, then, either to the living or to the dead, for with the living it is not and the dead exist no longer.4

Are we persuaded by this, or by Aurelius when he argues, quite reasonably, that "nothing is evil that is according to nature" and recommends

> waiting for death with a cheerful mind, as being nothing else than a dissolution of the elements of which every living being is compounded. But if there is no harm to the elements themselves in each continually changing into another, why should a man have any apprehension about the change and dissolution of all the elements?

A rational mind could (and did) maintain this, and no fallacy is committed in the reflection from the same thinker: "In everything that you do, pause and ask yourself if death is a dreadful thing because it deprives you of this."5 Plausible arguments all, yet even when we grant their validity, arguments of this kind have a limited power to convince, or convince for long. Sooner or later the fear returns, and this too is reasonable. Knowledge is never more than the tip of the iceberg of the kind of being that we are. The human being and everything that pertains to it is finite, and this includes knowledge itself.

If necessity is the mother of invention then speculation is the father. Without it thought travels in the same tracks forever. The speculative mind is venturesome, not especially disciplined, and above all free. There are occasions when it is clearly out of order, however when we are not solving a problem but encountering a mystery, not investigating so much as reflecting, where there is no method to follow but the "what if or the" "perhaps," and when there is an urgency to the matter that makes it intolerable that we should have nothing to say when our very being is at stake, then we may speculate without philosophy giving us a bad conscience. Now we worship at the temple of Dionysus; it is not the only temple in town, but when one is in the neighborhood it is best to offer a sacrifice.

## Hope

For what may we hope? The question calls for speculation. That it is not only a suitable question for philosophy but one ofits most essential was proposed, let us recall, not by some soft-minded prophet but by the venerable Kant himself. This notion is not divorced from reason, although whether it may be brought "within the limits of reason alone" is doubtful. Thinking encompasses _mythos_ and _logos_ alike, the Dionysian and the Apollonian, and hope may be conceived not as outside of reason and knowledge but as running alongside them, neither accountable to the latter in a sense connoting authority nor vice versa. There is always hope; it remains a possibility and an imperative no matter what experience throws our way, but there are conditions in which it makes sense and conditions in which it does not. What, then, is hope, for what may we hope, and when does our hoping make sense?

A necessary condition of hope is possibility. Without it, hope is nonsensical and empty. A farmer hopes for rain in the midst of a drought, and this makes sense in a way that hoping for the impossible does not. A second condition is the unavailability of knowledge. The scientist who hopes their hypothesis to be true while declining to test it is being senseless. Hope occupies the space between impossibility and knowability, and it is a space in which a good part of our existence is played out. It is affiliated with speculation and wonder, faith and mystery, and has a questionable relation to belief. Must hope involve taking a position in the sense of assenting to a belief? Indeed it does not. Hope and belief are separate matters, and in some instances the latter is a corruption of the former.

Nothing is more pointless than asserting as a literal truth that the soul survives the death of the body and enjoys some kind of life in the hereafter. Proposing this as a doctrine is as foolish as proposing that man is a wolf in the literal sense of "is." Propositional knowledge requires justification or a basis in argument. There is a sense in which a good metaphor can also be justified, and a good narrative, but in a different respect. Insofar as hope has a basis, it is afforded by bare possibility. The farmer hopes for rain; does he therefore believe? This is a separate matter, and the answer may well be negative. Farmers do not hope because they have grounds but because this is what farmers do. There is necessity here, even when there is no belief. "I hope it rains": has the speaker advanced a claim that may be true or false? The statement can make sense or fail to, but it cannot be true or false, except as a mere report on the state of their feelings. Let us not, then, go in search of grounds for belief in a life after death, understood in a literal sense.

There are times when literality is an obstacle to thought, and this is decidedly the case on the question of immortality. May we hope that something of ourselves will persist after death? In thinking through this question one must decide whether it is oneself or that which one has cared about in life that matters most. If Saint Peter offered admittance either to the self itself or to what one loves, but not both, which would one choose? For what does one hope, and hope most fervently? If the latter then there is indeed hope that our family and community, our ideas and undertakings, perhaps certain prized possessions, and so on, will remain after our death. The affairs that we do our best to get in order, that which has been the business of our lives, persists after our death or may persist. This modest hope is what our conception of immortality might have been had human beings never invented stories of heaven and hell or the reincarnation of the soul. Stories of this kind created an expectation of a life beyond death in a literal sense, the persistence of one's eternal soul. Those who believe or have believed in such stories may find talk of metaphorical immortality deeply unsatisfying. We may then opt for the former: it is personal immortality in a metaphysical sense that defines our hope. Our loved ones will have their own appointed hour with Saint Peter; at the moment it is my turn.

We may hope, to begin with, that what we have cared about and loved will survive us. For many this is immortality enough. Let us speak directly: what has one's life been for? Has its meaning been defined subjectively or in terms of something that lies beyond the self? Both, one may say, however Saint Peter has asked us to choose, and with humility. The choice is now obvious, but what of the self itself? May we hope that something of the person one has been will persist beyond the death of the body? One's memory survives, or so one may hope, and for many again this is immortality enough. One does not wish to fade into nothingness but to be remembered by those one cares about, and remembered well. This last matter is decidedly contingent and depends entirely upon how we have lived. There are those who are forgotten even before they die, or if they are remembered at all it is as an appalling human being. If one has lived a disgraceful life, one can expect to be forgotten and hope for little more. Hope, it now appears, is an ethical question far more than a metaphysical one. It compels us once again to think about what matters most ultimately, which is not what happens to us when we die but how we are living. It is senseless to hope for superior rebirth or to enter into heaven when one has not lived as one ought. The best one can hope for in this case is to serve as an object lesson in how not to live. Most, however, do not live such lives. For what may they hope?

If we insist upon taking this question metaphysically, it is best not to answer it, for there is no answer that can withstand scrutiny. We do not know, we shall never know, whether there is in a literal sense a life beyond this life. There is hope, full stop. Pascal argued that while there is no convincing evidence of an afterlife or of the existence of the biblical God it is best to believe anyway. His famous wager was that while there is no prospect of either proposition being proven true it is best to believe in the event that God exists. If the biblical story be true, he reasoned, we are better off believing and leading our lives accordingly since we stand to gain an eternal reward for doing so. If it be false, we have lost relatively little. Either way, we must take a chance. As he wrote, "Let us weigh the gain and the loss in wagering that God is. Let us estimate these two chances. If you gain, you gain all; if you lose, you lose nothing. Wager, then, without hesitation that He is."6 It is unlikely that many have been converted to a Christian worldview by Pascal's wager, yet it is not uncommon to hold that just in case there is an afterlife, we had better live as if there is. While this view is seldom formulated explicitly, it is often held implicitly by those who prefer not to spend too much time contemplating such matters. It is sometimes held as well by moderate skeptics of religion, who prefer to hedge their skepticism in case they turn out to be mistaken. Pascal's effort to bring hope within the orbit of reason is commendable in its way, but ultimately it is unsuccessful. There are no rational beliefs to be had here. The only sensible position is neither to accept Pascal's wager nor to refuse it; one walks away from the table. This is not the same as saying one is out, for one was never in.

The corruption of hope is belief. When we speak of belief we are in the temple of Apollo, and what is sacrificed there is not hope but empty conviction. Neither believer nor unbeliever, one neither takes Kierkegaard's leap nor refuses it. Let us not call it agnosticism. The only ism to which I would profess allegiance here is mysticism, and if taking up this word makes me beholden to a tradition or a doctrine then I would refuse this as well. It is absurd to believe when there is no possibility of justification. One of the tragic realities of human existence is that we often encounter the limits of what is knowable precisely where the desire for knowledge is most urgent. In the encounter with death there is nothing we desire more than some definite conviction about what happens to the human being after death, but the fact remains that we are brought up against a wall before which the only intellectually responsible position is the non-position of the "who knows?" Intuitions we have aplenty, and not one of them is a basis for belief. If there is no topic on which we are quicker to abandon our wits than the afterlife, what we need are not fresh efforts to know the unknowable but a measure of intellectual honesty. Prior to our death we shall not know whether there is a life beyond death, nor should we expect investigation into the experiences of the dying or near-dead to discover anything of metaphysical importance (psychological importance perhaps). In the present age of science we are not only uncomfortable with mystery but on the verge of forgetting that we cannot and need not know everything, nor must we hold opinions on all subjects. On this subject there is no belief that has any greater claim to our allegiance than another.

Immortality is a moral, not a metaphysical, question, and its point is to encourage reflection on how we are living, just as the point of the eternal return is not to introduce a doctrine but to lie on our actions as the greatest weight. The point of a good metaphor is not that it is true in a literal sense but that it is telling; the point of a narrative is not that it really happened but what it shows and how it transforms us; and the point of the hope for immortality is not that we shall overcome death in a metaphysical sense but that we shall not be defeated by it in a moral sense. Hope is visceral, not cerebral. It opens onto mystery without taking a position. The language of hope is not the "what is" but the "may be" and the "what if." It does not work with assertions but possibilities, and when it does not lose its head it believes nothing at all.

What we may hope for in a moral sense is that if we have lived as we ought then that which we have loved will persist beyond our personal death. The proviso is a large one, and upon it everything turns. Hope turns on decision, not dogma—the decisions we have made through life and the actions that proceeded from them. One's time is past, but that which one has cared about, pursued, and worked upon continues, with the same proviso. We may also hope to be remembered, for a time at least and by those who have mattered most to us. This is a kind of personal survival as well. It is a common expression that when someone we have loved dies a part of ourselves dies with them, and metaphorically at least this is true. As Augustine well noted, our identity as persons is profoundly linked with particular others:

> How well the poet put it when he called his friend the half of his soul! I felt that our two souls had been as one, living in two bodies, and life to me was fearful because I did not want to live with only half a soul. Perhaps this, too, is why I shrank from death, for fear that one whom I had loved so well might then be wholly dead.7

By the same token, if we are as connected as this with particular persons in our lives then a part of ourselves does survive in the continuation of family and friends as well as larger processes of life. Beyond this, as it is said, there is always hope, and we may hold onto this in good conscience so long as we do not surrender our reason. Living in the face of death means living in the face of mystery and accepting the mystery for what it is. If in the encounter with mystery there is neither certainty nor even reasonable belief, there remains the imperative of hope. The voice of hope is the voice of life itself, an absolute affirmation of life in the face of death. It is the obstinate refusal to allow death the final say, a protest of one's whole being against annihilation. The basic movement of life is toward more life, toward unceasing expansion and the anticipation of a future. It is a movement toward exuberance and self-affirmation, one that compels us to hope even as wisdom disciplines that hope. As Madison expresses it,

> Along with anxiety and struggle, hope is one of the "conditions without which" humans could not be truly human.... As Hans-Georg Gadamer asserted in an interview on the occasion of his 102nd birthday (and 1 month before his death): "People cannot live without hope; that is the one thesis I would defend without any restriction.". True hope is without presumption. It is without illusions and without naive eschatological expectations that eschew the present for the sake of some supposedly glorious future to come. It is devoid of metaphysical conceits, and poses no demands.8

Literal belief in the afterlife has been on the wane for a couple of centuries now, and whether for the better or the worse it is among the most momentous changes in the history of thought. George Orwell noted in the middle of the twentieth century:

> Even among professing Christians it is probably decaying: other people, as a rule, don't even entertain the possibility that it might be true.... I do not want the belief in life after death to return, and in any case it is not likely to return. What I do point out is that its disappearance has left a big hole, and that we ought to take notice of that fact.9

The hole is part of a larger phenomenon that Nietzsche spoke of as the "death of God," and it has caused a monumental shift in our thinking. When this thought takes hold it can appear to follow that if no divinity and no conception of the hereafter occupies the center of our worldview then the individual does. If there is no God then Kirilov is God. In arguing that these ancient beliefs are well lost, Orwell and Nietzsche both had a point. The trouble is that there is a second and countervailing point, and this is that Kirilov could not live with his belief. One does not approach death as the occupant of the center. In the final analysis one is the center of nothing at all, and the world goes on its way after the demise of each human being. What matters is that something of importance, something other and larger than the ego, persists after its death. It is this thought that, if it does not overcome altogether the fear of death, allows us at the very least to cope with it. Bertrand Russell made the point this way:

> The best way to overcome [the fear of death]—so at least it seems to me—is to make your interests gradually wider and more impersonal, until bit by bit the walls of the ego recede, and your life becomes increasingly merged in the universal life. An individual human existence should be like a river—small at first, narrowly contained within its banks, and rushing passionately past boulders and over waterfalls. Gradually the river grows wider, the banks recede, the waters flow more quietly, and in the end, without any visible break, they become merged in the sea, and painlessly lose their individual being. The man who, in old age, can see his life in this way, will not suffer from the fear of death, since the things he cares for will continue.10

The fear likely remains, but it may be hoped that it will not turn into despair.11

Russell's metaphor of the sea ought not to be transformed into a doctrine, and if we need give it a name let us call it simply life. Time and again, this is what philosophical reflection on death leads us back to: life and how we are living it. Are we able to accept what our life has been, to make peace with both the past and the present, and to uphold the conviction that through even the worst of it there was a discernible meaning? As Tillich put it, "Can we banish elements of our past so that they lose their power over the present?"12 In the case of someone who has lived a regular span of life, this is not always easy, nor is it at all easy to repeat with conviction these lines from a song: "Some days were dark; I wish that I could live it all again."13 Even the apparently simple act of existing in the present is far from easy. A sizeable portion of life tends to remain short on significance, shrouded in illusion, and petty, and it is the contemplation of mortality that reminds us of the limited duration and the fragility of life. To cite Madison once more:

> The specter of irremediable loss hovers continually over everything in our lives.#x2026; It is only when we realize how thin the threads are that bind us together with those we love that we are in a position to truly cherish and value them. Or as Seneca expressed the matter: "We ought to love all our dear ones,... but always in a realization that we have received no promise that they will be ours forever, no, not even for a length of time. #x2026; The heart... must not forget that those we love will leave, indeed are already leaving."14

A good part of Seneca's project, particularly in _On the Shortness of Life_ , was precisely to remind us that "there is nothing that the passage of time does not demolish and remove," but that in spite of this, "Life is long enough, and a sufficiently generous amount has been given to us for the highest achievements if it were all well invested."15 Life appears short not because it is but because so much of it is wasted. A good part of Nietzsche's project as well was to return us to life—this life, the earth, the instincts, and the present, rather than live for a future that may not be or in a past that is best forgotten. Much of the point of the eternal return was precisely to overcome resentment and to inspire a new commitment to life and to the part of it that matters most: the present. His Zarathustra taught us to "Lead, as I do, the flown-away virtue back to earth—yes, back to body and life: that it may give the earth its meaning, a human meaning!"16

Are the stories that religion tells true? A definite maybe and a certain "who knows?" If anything at all can be asserted here it is that the truth of the ancient legends is more existential than metaphysical, more moral than cosmological. On the question of death and the afterlife we must think morally and existentially, but above all phenomenologically. When the things themselves are beyond our grasp, there is no knowledge, but there is hope. The answer does not satisfy perhaps, but philosophy does not always console.

## Conclusion: death as educator

Death, according to long-standing tradition, is an educator. It is now time to say exactly how this is so. How and what does it educate, and what is one lacking who is without this form of education? The course of argument to this point began from the premise that human beings are creatures of meaning, suspended, as Geertz maintained, in webs of significance we ourselves have spun.17 The will to meaning, to understand the world in which we find ourselves and to self-understanding, drives the human being through life more profoundly than any pleasure principle or will to happiness. One has an understanding—if only a dim one—of what one's life is for, what it serves and what it is about not in any simple way but in the way that a narrative, as complex as one likes, exhibits certain underlying themes and some semblance of being-in-motion. The narrative, including the biography, unfolds in a particular direction, and while its ending may not be happy what matters is that it be fitting and that it be faced with honesty, humility, and also wonder at the mystery of our existence. Outwardly, every biography has the same ending, but in a deeper sense human beings face death in very different ways, with different ways of thinking and comporting themselves. This way of thinking matters profoundly: what does one's death mean and what has one's life meant? The two questions are one, and it falls to every human being to answer it for themselves. One does not undertake to answer it in distanced fashion, as one sets about to solve a mathematical problem or deliberate about a consumer choice. One answers it with constant reference to a sense of life. The conclusion to which our larger line of argument leads is that insofar as anything truly educates the sense of life, it is a cultivated sense of death that does so, or that may do so. Death, of course, is not the only teacher. Life also teaches, the ordinary course of experience insofar as it becomes an object of reflection. So does love, and suffering. Success and failure are also educators in a way, as are history and art, but in every case what they have to teach is not always well learned. The kind of learning that is transformative has little to do with information or calculations of utility and sometimes requires the application of terrific force to the existing individual's hinder part. When the ground beneath us trembles, our wits are about us and our sense of life is educable at last.

Let us speak of a sense of life as an affectively charged understanding of the significance of human existence and a judgment of its value, most especially one's own. It is a habitual mode of concernful engagement with life which is deeply rooted in, or that is, one's temperament. It rules one's existence, including the life of the mind, in the sense that one trusts one's sense of life as a kind of absolute. Nietzsche correctly noted that "most of the conscious thinking of a philosopher is secretly guided and forced into certain channels by his instincts" and that philosophy itself is always "the personal confession of its author."18 Thinking is the confession of our temperament or sense of life and, as James observed, it is something in which the thinker has perfect confidence. The philosopher "trusts his temperament" as Socrates trusted his daimon, not because he was able to produce a rational proof of its reliability but as a psychological article of faith. Even the skeptic does not question their sense of life, and the tough- and tender-minded alike are, as James also remarked, convinced that those of the opposite temperament are "out of key with the world's character" and "not in it."19 How does the pessimist fathom the optimist, or the Apollonian the Dionysian? For the most part they do not, but look upon each other as if members of a different species. While not utterly immune to reflection, one's sense of life is remarkably resistant to change and largely remains with us through life in unaltered form. Consider this short and incomplete inventory: Apollonian, Dionysian, optimistic, pessimistic, heroic, slavish, romantic, religious, utilitarian. Simplifying to an extreme, the sense of life may be spoken of as an existential affirmation or negation, or a particular way of affirming or denying life as a totality. Whether it is a verdict rooted in experience, culture, psychology, physiology, or what have you, it is a fundamental yeah- or nay-saying to the life that is given to us, and often one that is hedged with qualifications: yes to happiness, no to suffering; yes to the next life, no to this one; yes to the intellect, no to the instincts, and so on. There is no use in moralism here: "you ought to adopt a different sense of life," which always means the speaker's, is a singularly empty assertion. We are not in the land of morality or reason here but trust.

There is no converting the human being with a slavish to a heroic sense of life, the optimist into a pessimist, or the utilitarian into a romantic in the way that we might hope to produce an anti-realist out of a realist; however, is that in which one trusts utterly impervious to education in some form? Perhaps not. Whatever one's sense of life, a cultivated sense of death is educative—potentially at least, and where nothing else serves quite as well to trim the excesses that every sense of life exhibits. For the unbridled optimist death teaches what the ancient Greeks well understood and what we moderns have largely forgotten: beware all _hubris_ , for we are mortals and not gods. What the naive optimist must learn is humility, that not one of us is the master of our fate, and what better teacher is there than the encounter with mortality? The flaw in the pessimist's sense of life is what Nietzsche termed _ressentiment_ , an abject wallowing in negativity and envy of our imagined betters. The sense of death urges against glorifying in self-pity and to affirm life while there is time. If the optimist must be brought down a notch, to a more measured view of things, the pessimist requires motivation; a wake-up call is one of the less violent metaphors, although the violent ones are more to the point. The Apollonian and Dionysian are similarly inclined toward excess—a renunciation of the instincts in the former case and consequent disconnection from life, while the latter tends to renounce the examined life for wine. Neither is to be recommended, or not for more than a few hours at a time. The slavish sense of life, like the pessimist, must learn resoluteness while the heroic require periodic reminding that they belong to the human race. The utilitarian needs to get an imagination while the romantic and religious need to keep theirs in check. Whatever form it takes, the sense of life provides a fundamental orientation that tends toward excess and to conceal half the world. Gazing into the abyss—let us not say staring, but a regular and cautious glance—is the supreme reminder of human finitude and of the contingency and frailty of everything that holds meaning for us. "There but by the grace of God go I" teaches above all the art of gratitude. The goddess Fortuna does not eliminate decision as a force in human life but forms a counterweight to all our planning and choosing.

A lesson that is well taught is not always well learned, but insofar as the sense of life can be educated at all, death is the educator of educators in that a cultivated sense of this can get through with a force and clarity that nothing else can. One who is highly teachable—which is to say open—can learn from anything, but not every student can be so described. As students go, the sense of life may be recalcitrant but it is not incorrigible. Being grounded in the instincts, the sense of life tends both to resist change and to lack measure. What death teaches above all is the art of measure: not to get carried away in optimism or pessimism, to remember in the former case that however self-satisfied we may become as an individual or a culture, still there are things that stand against us, while in the latter case we are not hostages of fortune. An honest contemplation of death trims excess if anything will and teaches appreciation (for what one loves is fleeting), humility (for one is no god), acceptance (for the will is not always sovereign), resoluteness (but one had better exercise it while one can), and also hope (for who knows what is to become of us).

The predicament remains: meaning is no longer writ large in the heavens and the victory over death is not at hand. The human being faces a demystified universe without and an existential vacuum within, both of which call for thought. Philosophy can still constitute a preparation for death in the sense of fashioning a way of thinking that is life-affirming and mindful of the mystery that is our mortality. The task of thinking is to refuse all denial, to impose meaning where none is given, and to face death while being true to the life one has lived and the person one has been. It is to prepare for a death that is one's own and to comport oneself with an acceptance that can look like resignation but that is its opposite. A human death is more than a physiological fact. As endings go, it is perfectly final, but as Gadamer expressed it, it is among the distinguishing characteristics of the human being

> to think beyond his own life in the world, to think about death. This is why the burial of the dead is perhaps the fundamental phenomenon of becoming human. Burial does not refer to a rapid hiding of the dead, a swift clearing away of the shocking impression made by one suddenly stuck fast in a leaden and lasting sleep. On the contrary, by a remarkable expenditure of human labor and sacrifice there is sought an abiding with the dead, indeed a holding fast of the dead among the living. We stand amazed before the wealth of mourning gifts that continually flows up toward us from the graves of every ancient culture. Gifts of mourning are a way of cherishing human existence. They do not let death have the last word.20

## Notes

1 Dostoevsky, _The Brothers Karamazov_ , 936.

2 Believe truth! Shun error!—these, we see, are two materially different laws; and by choosing between them we may end by coloring differently our whole intellectual life. We may regard the chase for truth as paramount, and the avoidance of error as secondary; or we may, on the other hand, treat the avoidance of error as more imperative, and let truth take its chance.... For my own part, I have also a horror of being duped; but I can believe that worse things than being duped may happen to a man in this world.... Our errors are surely not such awfully solemn things. In a world where we are so certain to incur them in spite of all our caution, a certain lightness of heart seems healthier than this excessive nervousness on their behalf.

James, _The Will to Believe_ , 18–19

3 Plato, _Phaedo_ , 67e, 71b.

4 Diogenes Laertius, _Lives of Eminent Philosophers_ , vol. 2 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1925), 651.

5 Aurelius, _Meditations_ , 12,82.

6 Pascal, _Pensées_ , sec. 233, p. 67.

7 Augustine, _The Confessions_ , trans. C. Pine (New York: Penguin, 2003), 77–8.

8 Madison, _On Suffering_ , 374, 376.

9 George Orwell, "As I Please," _Tribune_ , April 14, 1944.

10 Bertrand Russell, _New Hopes for a Changing World_ (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1952), 205.

11 "He who pretends to face death without fright lies. Every man fears death; that is the great law of sensible beings, without which every mortal species would soon be destroyed." Jean-Jacques Rousseau, _Julie, or The New Eloise_ , trans. P. Stewart and J. Vaché (Hanover: University Press of New England, 1997), 128.

12 The same author noted:

> A pathetic struggle with their past is going on almost without interruption in many men and women in our time. No medical healing can solve _this_ conflict, because no medical healing can change the past. Only a blessing which lies above the conflict of blessing and curse can heal; it is the blessing which changes what seems to be unchangeable—the past. It cannot change the facts: what has happened has happened and remains so in all eternity! But the _meaning_ of the facts can be changed by the eternal, and the name of this change is the experience of "forgiveness."
>
> Tillich, "The Eternal Now," 34, 36.

13 Rush, "Headlong Flight," in _Clockwork Angels_ (Anthem Entertainment, 2012).

14 Madison, _On Suffering_ , 35.

15 Seneca, _On the Shortness of Life_ , 25, 1.

16 Nietzsche, _Thus Spoke Zarathustra_ , 102.

17 Geertz, _The Interpretation of Cultures_ ,5.

18 Nietzsche, _Beyond Good and Evil_ , sec. 3, p. 11; sec. 6, p. 13.

19 James, _Pragmatism_ , 11.

20 Gadamer, _Reason in the Age of Science_ , trans. F. G. Lawrence (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1989), 75.
**Index**

acceptance, , , , , –,

Antony and Cleopatra, –

anxiety, , , –,

Ariès, Philippe, –, , , , , –54n7

Aristotle, , , , 115n21,

Augustine,

Aurelius, Marcus, , 34n40, –, –, 115n17,

authenticity, , , , , , –,

Becker, Ernest, , 30n5

being-toward-death, –

belief, , –, , ,

Brandt, Richard, 75n16

Caesar, Julius, ,

Camus, Albert, , 31n8, –, , , ,

care, –,

Carse, James, 11n26, ,

Champlin, Edward,

clergy, , , , , , ,

consolation, , , , , , ,

Critchley, Simon, , 31n13,

death: as conditioning existence, , , , , , , ; cultural aspects, , , , , , ; definition, –; as educator, , , , , , –; good, , , , , , ; victory over, , , , , ,

decision, , , , , , , , , –, , , , ,

DeMaris, Richard,

denial, , , –, , , , , ,

depression, , , ,

Derrida, Jacques,

Descartes, René,

Dickens, Charles,

Dostoevsky, Fyodor, , , –, , , 116n29, , ,

Dreyfus, Hubert, , –, 93n25

Durkheim, Emile, –, ,

Epicurus, –

ethics, –, –, , , , , , , ,

existentialism, , , , , , ,

familiarity, , , , , , , –,

Fingarette, Herbert,

finitude, , , , , , , ,

Fox, Michael, 11n26, 33n24

fragility, , , , , , –,

Frankl, Victor, ,

freedom, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Freud, Sigmund, , 31n8, , 76n23, 114n9

Fromm, Erich,

Gadamer, Hans-Georg, , , ,

Geertz, Clifford, ,

Gorer, Geoffrey, , ,

gratitude, , ,

grief, –, , –, , , 116n29

Guignon, Charles,

Habermas, Jürgen,

Havel, Vaclav, –

Heidegger, Martin, , , , , 33n27, , , –, 94n40, ,

Hoffman, Piotr,

hope, , , , –

Hope, Valerie, , ,

Hugo, Victor, 11n17, , 30n5

Hume, David,

humility, , , , –, , , ,

Humphreys, S. C.,

Hutschnecker, Arnold,

imagination, –,

immortality, , , , –, , , , , , –, –

inwardness, , , , ,

James, William, 32n18, , , , 116n30, , , 134n2

Jaspers, Karl, ,

Johnson, Samuel,

Jung, Carl, ,

Kant, Immanuel, ,

Kastenbaum, Robert, 33n28

Kauffman, Jeffrey,

Kellehear, Allan, , , –54n7

Kierkegaard, Søren, , , , 32n20, , 115n13, ,

knowledge, , , , , , , , , , , , , , –, –,

Kübler-Ross, Elisabeth, , –, –

Leman-Stefanovic, Ingrid,

life, , , , , –, , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Luper, Steven, , 75n16

Luther, Martin,

Madison, Gary B., , 33n27, , –

Marcel, Gabriel, , , , , ,

Marcuse, Herbert, 11n7, ,

May, Rollo, , –

May, Todd, 115n15

meaning, –, 10n1, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , –, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

medical model, , , , , –, , , , , ,

mineness, , –, , ,

Montaigne, Michel de, , , , , –,

Mulhall, Stephen, ,

Myerhoff, Barbara, –

mystery, –, , , , , , , –, –, ,

mysticism, ,

Nagel, Thomas,

narrative, , , , ,

necessity, ,

Nero, –, ,

Nietzsche, Friedrich, –, , , 11n19, , , , , 33n29, , , , , –, –, , 93n26, –, , , –

nothingness, , ,

openness, , , , –,

Ortega y Gasset, José, , ,

Orwell, George,

Pascal, Blaise, 33n27, –, , ,

past, , , 33n36, , –, ,

phenomenology, , , , , , , , ,

Plato, 30n3, , 75n19

Pletcher, Galen,

preparation, , , , , , , , , , , ,

rebellion, , –

religion, , , –, , , , , , , , , 116n30, , ,

remembrance, , , , , , , , , 54n10, ,

Rilke, Rainer Maria,

rituals, , , –

Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 135n11

Russell, Bertrand, –

Santayana, George,

Scarre, Geoffrey, 32n20

Schopenhauer, Arthur,

Schumacher, Bernard, ,

science, , , , , ,

secularization, , –

Seneca, , 31n6, 75n20, ,

sense, –, –, –

sense of life, , , –

service, , , ,

Shaw, George Bernard,

Shneidman, Edwin, –, –

silence, , , –, 54n27,

Socrates, , , , , , –, ,

speculation, , –

Spinoza, Baruch,

suffering, , , –, , –, 116n29,

suicide, , –

Taylor, Charles,

technology, , , , , , ,

thinking, –, , , , , , , , –, , –, ,

Tillich, Paul, , 33n36, , 135n12

Tolstoy, Leo, –, –, , –, , , ,

truth, , , , , , , ,

Unamuno, Miguel de, –

understanding, , , , , , , , ,

Wahl, C. W., 31n13

Watts, Michael, , ,

Waugh, Evelyn,

Wilson, Bryan,

Wittgenstein, Ludwig,

Yalom, Irvin, –

Young, Julian, 10n6, , 93n26

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaBook