Death Education and Research

Critical Perspectives

William G Warren

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317773566
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

A critical review of research and reflection in the area of death, with special emphasis on death education. Thought-provoking, often controversial reviews of and reactions to the current general domain of death phenomena--specifically death education--are addressed in this book. The author, skeptical that we can do very much with the phenomenon of death and dying, especially in relation to our efforts at addressing it educationally, explores the philosophical, psychological, socio-cultural, and theoretical aspects and raises critical questions that will challenge proponents of death education. Both advocates and critics of death education in particular, and death research in general, will benefit from this intellectually stimulating volume that sounds a cautionary note, yet offers some positive suggestions for the future of death education. Professionals interested in any aspect of death education will be intrigued by this thorough examination of death education from several perspectives.

PART I

SOME PHILOSOPHICAL CONSIDERATIONS

Chapter 1

Traditional Western Thought and Existentialism

Socrates, in the Apology (Woodhead, 1963), expresses the view that adequately summarizes the attitudes of traditional philosophy to the subject of death:

[D]eath is one or other of two things. It is either complete annihilation, when the dead man has no sensation of anything; or, as we are told a change of life and migration of the soul from one world to another. And if death means complete unconsciousness, like a sleep in which the slumbering man sees not even a dream, then it would be a marvellous gain.… But if on the other hand death is like making a journey to another land, and there is truth in the stories that all the dead dwell there, what greater boon could there be … than this? (pp. 64–5)

For the Greek Stoics death was merely part of the cycle of life, and for their Roman counterparts something to be “met well” — a likelihood strengthened by adoption of the precepts of Stoicism. In over a thousand years of Christian domination of Western thought death was treated more than casually by only a few. Saint Augustine, for example, in his early writing attributed death to sin. Death was to be overcome in the resurrection of the body that follows the truly Christian life (Berleigh, 1963). Martin Luther attributed death to the devil: “were death the work of God, he would not destroy it” (Atkinson, 1962, p. 58). Luther conceived of death as a door through which the righteous man passes and in his letters to the sick, dying and bereaved his counsels are essentially commonsensical (one should avoid sources of infection, not blame oneself, not regard bereavement as God's punishment) and always grounded in scriptural authority (Atkinson, 1962; Lehmann, 1969).

These specific references granted, it might be argued that despite the paucity of expressions of interest Christianity is centrally concerned with death. What is suggested in this last contention is that the whole enterprise of Christianity is directed at how one ought to conduct one's life in order to achieve a victory over that limitation to life as we know it. This may well be the case, and if so discussions of death and Death Education might need to take into significant account Christian and other religious writing; a point taken up in a later chapter. At this point it is sufficient to reassert that essentially the bulk of Christian writing has attempted to order and formulate Christ's teaching, or to correct misinterpretation and challenges to specific (Roman Catholic) interpretation in the Renaissance and Reformation. One looks in vain for a comprehensive, specific discussion in the writing of participants in a development that dominated Western thought from around 500 AD to the reappearance of science and reason in the Seventeenth Century.

As philosophical concerns entered a more secular, scientific phase after about 1650, issues of a social and political sort became paramount. Again, death does not figure significantly in the writings of the major theorists, and this holds true to the present time where since Descartes, philosophy has focused on the problems of knowledge and life, rather than death. As Jacques Choron (1963) notes in his Death and Western Thought, a relatively slim volume considering it reviews some 2500 years of philosophy:

On the whole … as philosophy becomes an independent discipline it evolves and concentrates on its own specifically philosophical problems, and death as a motif of philosophising becomes an exception. Thus, in addition to the differences between philosophies as to the kind of answer to death which they provide, there is another difference to be noted: namely, whether they deal with the problem of death or disregard it completely, (p. 267)

By contrast to the foregoing observations, Existentialism has directly focused on death. Existentialism is, of course, a difficult school of thought to elaborate. Indeed, even as one uses the term as an “ism” in the sense of an articulated, consistent set of propositions, a defense or justification can be demanded because of the variety of writing lumped under this label.

It is beyond the scope of present interests to go too far into what Existentialism is. Shearson (1975) has addressed the difficulty of characterizing this position, arguing that unless some common characteristics can be stated then there is no legitimacy in using the term as an “ism.” Shearson locates two central themes to which all writers traditionally identified with Existentialism are oriented. These themes are an ontological one and an epistemological one. The first deals with the nature of human existence, or being, in its most fundamental level. The second deals with encounter between individuals, encounter from which develops the significant knowledge of the world, especially knowledge of others and how those others see the world. In very general terms, however, whether viewed as a special kind of philosophy, a way of doing philosophy, a mere reaction to life's crises and man's inhumanity to man, or a historical movement (a movement perhaps at an end with Sartre's death if not before?), Existentialism has been usefully summarized by Van Cleve Morris (1961) as a view of the human condition that flows from the confrontation of the paradox between two central principles:

i.	the fact that we ourselves, as individuals, are the most important elements and the central features of each of our own worlds, and to ourselves we assign absolute value and worth; and,
ii.	we count for absolutely nothing in the universe; our death is relatively unnoticed; the “scheme of things,” nature, or the cosmos make no stand on whether, how, or how long we live, nor whether, when, and how we die.

It might be said that Existentialism attempts to deal with the foregoing paradox between our absolute worth and our ultimate worthlessness. Existentialism postulates the essential freedom, and hence responsibility of the individual. It alerts us to the difference between confronting the paradox and living an authentic life, as opposed to avoiding it and living an inauthentic life immersed in the commodities and trivial cares of everyday existence. It stresses the need to examine the human condition not from a perspective of assumed objectivity nor that of a detached spectator, but from the perspective of a passionate concern for the realities of life, particularly including the reality of the inevitability of death.

Now, whatever the limitations of the present characterization of Existentialism, implicit in all of that characterization, and explicit in individual thinkers identified as Existentialist, is the significance of death. Indeed, for one writer identified with the literary side of Existentialism, Albert Camus (1942/1979), the question of suicide—genuine suicide — is the only truly serious philosophical question. More generally among Existentialists there is agreement that a person ought to consciously develop and keep to the forefront of consciousness, an awareness of death; of one's own personal, individual death. And there is agreement that without the consciousness of death, life is lived in a shallow, nonintense, even cowardly, fashion.

Beyond these general comments, Martin Heidegger (1927/1978) makes the most of the fact and significance of death in his Being and Time and Jean-Paul Sartre (1943/1956) in commenting on Heidegger's ideas, generates quite a different position, even though both writers are traditionally regarded as within the Existentialist tradition. This allows the identification of two opposing camps within Existentialism on the more specific significance of death: Heidegger being representative of the one, and Sartre the other (Olson, 1972). It must be acknowledged, however, that whatever one might say about Heidegger, at least, one must remain tentative. Only a small section of his works are available in English, and Heidegger is not the easiest thinker to understand, let alone to summarize. Nonetheless, by concentrating on this question of death in Heidegger and Sartre an important perspective for our present interests is illuminated, even if discussion is expository rather than critical; though Sartre does provide a critique of Heidegger.

Heidegger agrees with the general notion that consciousness of death reveals the triviality of everyday concerns, cares, and commodities, and adds two stronger ideas. The first is that this consciousness of death is the significant factor in creating individuality; the second is that this consciousness has the effect of providing a totality or wholeness to an individual's life.

In the first idea Heidegger draws attention to the fact that death is an event no one can undergo for me, no one can be my agent. Death thus reveals my aloneness, my uniqueness, my individuality. Consequently, people who cannot accept their individuality, those Heidegger calls the “they,” conspire to avoid the personal significance of death for themselves, and for me, by making death matter-of-fact, just another everyday event of no personal significance. As Heidegger says:

Death is encountered as a well-known event occurring within-the-world. As such it remains in the inconspicuousness characteristic of what is encountered in an everyday fashion.

The “they” has already stowed-away an interpretation for this event. It talks of it in a “fugitive” manner, either expressly or else in a way which is mostly inhibited, as if to say, “One of these days one will die too, in the end; but right now it has nothing to do with us” … Dying, which is essentially mine in such a way that no one can be my representative, is perverted into an event of public occurrence which the “they” encounters, (p. 297)

In addition to extracting me from the inauthentic group, and from the trivial everyday cares with which the group tries to delude me, standing before the nothingness of death allows me to grasp the nature of my Being as a whole, or “totally.” This might be contrasted to my usual experiences in which I catch merely fleeting glimpses of bits of myself in particular states and moods, or in relation to things in the world which I acquire, use, manipulate, treasure, and so forth. Heidegger again:

Being-in-the-World has always dispersed itself or even split itself up into definite ways of Being-in. The multiplicity of these is indicated by the following examples: having to do with something, producing something, attending to something and looking after it, making use of something, giving something up and letting it go, understanding, accomplishing, evincing, interrogating, considering, discussing, determining. … All these ways of being-in have concern as their kind of Being. (p. 83)

For Heidegger “Being-towards-Death” alone allows the authentic life that is characterized as “Being-a-Whole”; in contrast to merely “Being-in-the-World” where utility dominates and one never has time to, or otherwise never does, grasp one's wholeness: what it is to Be as distinct from not-Be. Thus concern in the above quotation has the sense of “concerning ourselves” with particular activities we perform or things we procure, use, identify with.

In dealing with the human condition, then, Heidegger first draws attention to the way in which people become lost in particular things of use in the world, and live inauthentically. They never grasp the wholeness of a life or the question, “Why is there Being rather than nothing?” (It is the question, not the answer, Heidegger wants people to grasp.) They never achieve consciousness of the separateness and uniqueness that is individuality, their own unique individuality. He indicates that one may achieve the authentic life, by realizing both one's individuality and the sense of wholeness. The answer involves “staying-with” the anxiety or dread that follows the awareness of the inevitability of one's own personal death.

Sartre (1943/1956) takes up Heidegger's thoughts on death in his own Being and Nothingness. He does not accept that consciousness of death confers the status of individuality and suggests Heidegger's argument is both circular and gratuitous. Equally, he does not accept that by facing the inevitability of our own death we gain some sense of the totality or wholeness of our lives; in fact, and here Sartre echoes Freud, consciousness of our own personal death is not possible.

In relation to the question of individuality, Sartre objects to Heidegger's contention that “no one can die for me.” He suggests that on the level of “actor,” (the person carrying out the act), this is obvious and we might also say, with as little significance, that “no one can love for me” or perform any other single action that I might do. On the other hand, at the level of the result my action creates, anybody could do what I do: if I die for my country, so too could anyone else; if someone is inspired by my death, then any other person's death could inspire equally as well or serve as an example. Worse than this, Heidegger's line of argument is fallacious, according to Sartre, in that Heidegger has granted to the experience of death the quality of individuality, and at the same time this experience is the one that is supposed to confer individuality by alerting one to the relative triviality of everyday existence and the uniqueness of the person.

In addition, Sartre finds Heidegger's other contention, that consciousness of death provides a wholeness or “totality” to a life, unsound. The reason is simply that no one can conceive of one's own death, one's own “nothingness.” Any attempt to stand outside my life finds me somehow still there in it as observer. Sartre does accept that one can expect death, but this is a mere fact of life; one cannot wait for death in the sense of understanding or conceptualizing the end of one's understanding and conceptualizing.

Sartre goes on to point out that death is nevertheless a very significant aspect of a person's facticity, one's existence in the world. By accepting the fact of death, the reality that there is a situation in life that acts as a built-in limit to the individual's choosing (a central concept in Sartre), one is freed from the so-called constraint of death. It is a matter, for Sartre, of recognizing death as a contingent fact of life, a limit to one's subjectivity, but not itself a “project” about which one can decide or choose. Suicide, in this analysis, is not a project to be chosen but rather a means to an end, that end being some other project. Equally, execution relates to someone else's project, and does not involve my own choosing. Accidental death, the most significant in Sartre's analysis, comes from outside me, it is not one of or part of my projects, my freely chosen actions or activities. Death as fact is a background reality to choosing. This choosing confers authenticity and individuality and is more likely or more probable when death is accepted or viewed as a fact of life. Expectation of death in the sense of knowing that it will occur alerts one to the triviality of everyday concerns that divert attention from the fact and need for choosing.

In contrast to Sartre's “recognition of the fact of death in order that…” Heidegger's position is that recognition of personal mortality confers individuality and totality directly. Recognition of death, personal death, for Heidegger is a qualitative notion involving cognitive and other processes that Sartre suggests are not possible. Indeed, Freud (1917/1971) made a similar observation:

It is indeed impossible to imagine our own death; and whenever we attempt to do so we can perceive that we are in fact still present as spectators. Hence the psycho...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• About the Author
• Dedication
• Preface
• Introduction
• Some Philosophical Considerations
• Traditional Western Thought and Existentialism
• Rights and Values
• Postscript Non-Western Thought
• Concluding Remarks
• Some Psychological Considerations
• Bereavement
• Conceptualizing and Assessing Death Attitudes and Cognitions
• Lifespan Differences in Death Orientations
• The Empirical Study of Death Education
• The Personal Construction of Death and Death Education
• Concluding Remarks
• Socul and Ideological Aspects
• Survey Data and Accountability
• Religion and Death Education
• Educational Radicalism
• Concluding Remarks
• Praxis
• Curriculum
• Philosophy, Education, Death and Life
• Concluding Remarks
• Conclusion
• Subject Index
• Author Index