Death: A Philosophical Inquiry

Paul Fairfield

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781135041243
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

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:

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• 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 phenomenology and existentialism, and will also be of interest to students in related fields such as religion, anthropology and the medical humanities.

1 The denial of death

DOI: 10.4324/9780203789834-1

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 ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Dedication1
• Introduction
• 1 The denial of death
• 2 Death rituals
• 3 Voluntary death
• 4 Being-toward-death
• 5 Openness to mystery
• 6 On speculation and hope
• Index