Death and Philosophy

J.E Malpas, Robert C. Solomon, J.E Malpas, Robert C. Solomon

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2002
• ISBN:
  9781134653973
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

Death and Philosophy considers these questions with different perspectives varying from the existentialist - deriving from Camus, Heidegger or Sartre, to the English speaking analytic tradition of Bernard Williams or Thomas Nagel; to non-wester approaches such as are exemplified in the Tibetan Book of the Dead and in Daoist thought; to perspectives influenced by Lucretious, Epicurus and Nietzsche.
Death and Philosophy will be of great interest to philosphers, or those studying religion and theology, buts its clarity and scope ensures it will be accessible to anyone who has considered what it means to be mortal.

1
DEATH AND PHILOSOPHY
Introduction

Jeff Malpas and Robert C.Solomon

There is an ancient tradition that says that philosophy is essentially concerned with death—whether with understanding it, reconciling oneself to it or preparing oneself for its inevitable arrival. But if that is so then it seems much contemporary philosophizing has failed to fulfil one of its essential functions, since death is a topic that is seldom addressed in contemporary philosophical discussion. There are exceptions, of course. One of the reasons that a philosopher such as Martin Heidegger figures so prominently in this collection is that Heidegger is one of the few philosophers who has indeed had a great deal to say about death. For the most part, however, death appears as a subject for contemporary philosophical discussion only at the margins—say in the context of bioethics where technical definitions of death (for example, ‘brain death’) have become important in the negotiation of several legal and ethical issues. This collection is not, however, about death as it might figure in such ‘technical’ contexts. The concern of all the contributors, whether they are expressing their own thoughts directly or discussing the thoughts of others, is emphatically personal. Their concern is with death—one’s own death—as it figures in human life and in contributing to, or perhaps even detracting from, the meaningfulness of such life.

In this respect, the idea that philosophy is somehow essentially concerned with death need not reflect some peculiar morbidity on the part of the philosopher who advances such a view nor in relation to philosophy in general. Instead, it can be taken to express a view of philosophy as a form of enquiry centrally concerned with the question of what it is to be human and with the nature and meaningfulness of human existence. Certainly death or the experiences and feelings that cluster round the concept of death— experiences, for instance, of loss and sadness, of fear and foreboding, sometimes of release and thankfulness—seem to be at the heart of what it is to live a human life and of what it means to be human. Thus, whether or not we accept the claim—present not only in Heidegger, but captured also in the ancient characterization of human beings as ‘mortals’—that to be human is indeed to be destined to live a life of only limited span, still we can appreciate that, as a matter of empirical fact, human lives are indeed lives in which death plays a central role. The question is: what are we to make of this? How should we understand the relation between death and human life? Is death a source of meaningfulness or does it represent the destruction of meaningfulness? Is the effect of death to render life as nothing but an absurd show—‘A tale/Told by an idiot…/Signifying nothing’¹—or might the absurdity of life in the face of death itself provide a source of meaning?

These are the sorts of questions that take centre stage in the discussions that make up this collection. We might say of such questions that they are ‘existential’ in character. Certainly it is characteristic of many of those writers and philosophers who are often bundled together under the existentialist label (though not all—Sartre is a notable exception) that they have taken the question of death as a central and defining one just in virtue of their preoccupation with human existence. But existentialist approaches are not the only approaches that figure in the following pages. Indeed, the range of approaches is large—including approaches that derive, not only from the work of philosophers such as Heidegger and Camus, but also English-speaking ‘analytic’ philosophers such as Bernard Williams, Derek Parfitt and Thomas Nagel; non-Western approaches such as are exemplified in the Tibetan Book of the Dead and in Daoist thought; and approaches deriving from the writings of figures within the history of Western philosophy such as Lucretius, Epicurus and Nietzsche.

This collection thus includes a variety of different philosophical perspectives on death—in some cases perspectives strongly informed by literary and aesthetic considerations and, in one case, by especially close personal experience. The first essay by Tem Horwitz recounts one case of so-called ‘near death experience’ as undergone by someone with philosophical training and sensitivities. Although in some respects a personal memoir the essay is an especially appropriate starting place for the collection, for whatever else death may be, it is first and foremost something personal. Indeed, whatever our philosophical viewpoint, the personal face of death is something that cannot be avoided. Elias Canetti’s rejection of death, the subject of Reinhard Steiner’s essay, provides an instance of an extreme and very personal reaction to the fact of death. Canetti’s position bears comparison with Dylan Thomas’s exhortation to his dying father ‘Do not go gentle into that good night; rage, rage against the dying of the light’² (though Thomas’s use of the phrase ‘good night’ to refer to death would seem to go against Canetti’s utterly uncompromising rejection of death). Canetti would have us rage against death and sets his face against those—Heidegger amongst them—who seem to want us to somehow ‘accept’ death and make it our own. For Canetti death is not impersonal, but represents the very destruction of personhood, of what is human and what is valuable. Of course the extremity of Canetti’s reaction against death is matched, at the other extreme, by the attitude of those philosophers—notably Lucretius—who have argued that death should be accounted as of little or no consequence. It is this tradition that is the focus for Ivan Soll’s discussion—does such an attitude, asks Soll, amount to anything more than a futile whistling before the darkness comes?

Of course even those philosophers who would have us dismiss the significance of death as an event still emphasize, if sometimes only implicitly, the absolutely central importance of arriving at an appropriate understanding of death for a proper understanding of human life and for the proper living of such a life. In this respect these first three essays all share an affirmation of the possibilities of life that arise precisely out of our attitude towards death. Indeed, for many of the essays in this volume, the significance of death is not to be found in the mere fact of the cessation of existence that is death itself, but rather in the relation between the fact of death and the possibilities for vital and fulfilled human life. Thus Kathy Higgins’s skeleton is much more the merry figure to be seen in the Mexican festival of the dead than the ossified melancholic of Gothic horror or melodrama. Higgins’s essay also introduces a theme that is common to a number of the essays here—the idea of human life as constituted in terms of a narrative or story that, like all good stories, at some point comes to an end. Betty Sue Flowers picks up this idea in one form—as a source of creative possibility in the shaping and directing of a life. According to Flowers death itself brings its own stories with it and the narratives with which we present death to ourselves are narratives that also shape who and what we are or could be. The variety of narratives within which death can be presented is exemplified by the variety of different ways in which death is understood within different cultural settings. Thus Roger Ames provides us with a discussion of Daoist perspectives on death as they arise within the Chinese tradition—perspectives strikingly different from some commonly assumed ‘Western’ attitudes or, at least, from some commonly assumed accounts of those attitudes. Bob Wicks gives us an insight into the understanding of death—and the understanding of enlightenment—within Tibetan Buddhism as exemplified in the Tibetan ‘Book of (or for) the Dead’. Graham Parkes’s essay provides another opportunity to explore and compare different ways of thinking about death as Parkes juxtaposes Montaigne, Nietzsche and Heidegger with Dogen, Shosan, and Nishitani.

The variety of ways in which death is understood and the variety of forms death may take on in different cultural or social contexts need not imply, however, that there is nothing to be said about death from a more purely ‘metaphysical’ perspective. Indeed, the essays of Ames, Parkes and Wicks are as much concerned with understanding death, as with understanding different attitudes towards death. The essays by Kraus and Young focus much more closely on death as such, however, and on the way in which death figures in the work of the philosopher who is often taken, at least in his early work, to exemplify a preoccupation with death, namely, Martin Heidegger. Kraus and Young both examine the role played by death in relation to a number of other central concepts in Heidegger’s thought. Kraus is primarily concerned with the relation between death, nothingness and being, and with the idea that the very possibility of metaphysics might itself be intimately tied to the possibility of death. Young focuses more directly on the relation between death and the Heideggerian notion of ‘authenticity’. In some respects Malpas’s essaycontinues the Heideggerian theme. Yet it does so by calling upon arguments to be found in the work of philosophers other than Heidegger, including those within the so-called ‘analytic’ tradition, in an attempt to clarify why death might be necessary for any properly human life. This is also an idea taken up, without the Heideggerian connection, by Peter Loptson. Combining Kantian and Darwinian ideas, Loptson argues that while death is surely an evil, it is an evil that is probably unavoidable for creatures constituted as we are.

The final essay in the collection, that by Bob Solomon, returns us to some of the themes present in the earlier essays of the collection—to questions of how death should be approached, how it should be represented—and to the matter of the implications for our understanding of ourselves and the sorts of lives we live of our attitudes towards the fact of our dying. As an essay that is itself concerned to undermine a certain form of fetishism about death (a fetishism that may be thought to be expressed in the very idea that death somehow has a pivotal role in giving sense or meaning to life), Solomon’s discussion is not an instance of melancholic brooding on the fact of death nor of its heroic aggrandizement. Instead, as with all the papers collected here, it attempts, in its own way, to place death in the context of life and in so doing to render a view of death that paints it in the only colours available to us—colours that derive from a thoroughly human set of concerns, values and commitments. In this respect, too, Solomon’s essay can be taken to reassert a central theme throughout this collection—that the connection between death and philosophy is a connection established through recognition of the philosophical project as fundamentally concerned with the nature and meaning of what it is to be human.

2
MY DEATH
Reflections on my journey into non-being

Tem Horwitz

It was perfectly clear to me what was happening. I was dying. Yet at the time of my death in September of 1995 there was no fear, no struggling, no desperation, no confusion and no bewilderment. Yet as I sit here reading my wife’s account of my death I am filled with terror. In the middle of the night, during the Labor Day weekend, I went into anaphylactic shock. Later, it would appear that this was induced by exposure to excessive moulds in the air in our country house, and by drinking beer preserved with sulphites. In my middle years I have become acutely sensitive to both. Our second home sits on high dunes above Lake Michigan on a lot that is a mile deep, heavily wooded and remote. A spectacular and private spot. A mile from a paved road. Ten miles from town.

Waking up in the middle of the night, having great difficulty breathing, I realized that I was in trouble. I woke my wife and told her succinctly, ‘We have to go.’ She understood immediately. She jumped from bed, put on a few clothes, grabbed her backpack, and helped me as we stumbled in total darkness toward the parking lot. I told her to take her car. Her car has a car phone, mine does not.

In the car I fought for my breath, for my life. I withdrew into myself. I knew that I was in the process of dying. I watched it happening. There was no fear; the experience itself was too compelling. During this period of time, which was probably less than ten minutes, all of my attachments to this world dwindled to nothing. Susan’s voice was distant, remote, removed from my experience. I could hear her talking to me and then I could no longer make sense of the words. ‘Hold on.’ ‘Holeone.’ ‘Hoooooooo.’

As I sat there struggling to breathe I watched the dashboard in front of me lose its definition. The lights lost their brightness. Everything turned a dark grey, and then black. My body began to feel very heavy. I could feel the weight in the middle of my back. I let everything settle down into my centre, not struggling with this feeling of heaviness. I responded weakly to Susan, partly because of the physical state that I was in but largely because I was totally absorbed in the process of dying. My head felt huge and heavy like a boulder. I felt my body toppling. I could not tell in which direction I was falling. Falling.

My last breaths were shallow with long exhalations, and finally no inhalationsbut a long final exhalation that felt, from the inside, like a Disney cartoon of a fiery dragon belching fire followed by overpowering sound effects. Roaring. Thunderous. Tolstoy, in ‘The Death of Ivan Ilych’, writes as Ilych is dying ‘all that had then seemed joys now melted before his sight and turned into something trivial…’¹ For me the experience was not of watching the rest of my life become ‘trivial’ but of having my attention totally focused on this experience.

Tolstoy appears to have understood a great deal of what I experienced. Ivan Ilych, as he approaches death, watches as the external world of his home, family, doctors, retainers starts to fade away. There is an indifference to the world, and to his life as he had lived it. It ‘was all dropping away’. So for me, in a much shorter time frame, my life dropped away from me. It was remote and distant. Let me return later to the indifference.

Ivan Ilych’s dying was slow and painful, yet as he gets closer and closer to death Tolstoy writes—‘“And the pain?” he asked himself. “What has become of it? Where are you pain?” “Yes here it is. Well what of it? Let the pain be.”’²

So for me too, there was pain and discomfort—after all I couldn’t breathe—however, it was isolated and detached from my experience of dying. Though I shared with Ivan Ilych his death rattle I did not see the ‘light’ and experience the death of death as Tolstoy writes. Perhaps here Tolstoy was wandering off into the theological, or conjuring up death as he would have liked it to be.

It is ironic, as I sit here writing, that I am going to put my experiences into a chronology. I am about to write about the ‘dissolution of time’, yet I find myself organizing my experiences in time so as to make sense of them for you, and for me in the telling. As I stopped breathing and felt myself retreating further and further into another realm I was conscious of feeling tremendously heavy. My body accumulated a weightiness that was not attached to any sensation of solidity. There was just heaviness and the feeling of being down, down, down. My body was dissolving, leaving me free of any physical constraints. Was this the moment of my death rattle and the moment when I toppled over in the car beside Susan? I do not know.

Though I was not conscious of it at the time, the experience of dying was so engrossing that it left me totally alone. There was no one present at my death—albeit Susan was at my side. This was a solitary journey. No company allowed.

The part of me that has always stood aside as an observer of myself, as well as of the world, was left alone—free of distractions—to observe the process of death. This part of myself is quite familiar to ‘me’—excuse me, to whom? As a child I spent a great deal of time hovering between life and death. I was severely asthmatic, and at that time the treatment for asthma was extremely limited. The treatment consisted of medication designed to relax my lungs, cut with speed to keep me up there and a downer to ensure that I didn’t go too far. This is when I came to know intimately this part of myself and to become comfortable in this detached state. I remember many hours spent staring through lace curtains at the sky and at the branches and the leaves of an old, majestic maple tree outside my window.

In later years when I began to take psychedelic mushrooms I was at once at home, having returned to a very familiar world—a world in which my consciousness was detached from my body and was free to roam about. As a young, healthy adult experimenting with drugs I had much more mobility, companionship and stimulation. I recall tripping with friends recently returned from spending three years in New Guinea, the first outsiders to live with a previously unvisited tribe. They had spent their time learning the language and studying with the local shamans and participating in the tribal rituals and ceremonies. As we stared at the shaman’s shield—a triangular shield, perhaps 3 feet tall with black and pale red triangles painted on it—we each had the experience of having part of ourselves drawn through the negative spaces in the shield into another world. There was an elasticity to our consciousness, we went through the shield and were pulled back into the room by conversation, music, movements. It was too scary for any of us simply to leave and possibly not return through that shield. Nevertheless it was too exciting and magical not to be drawn back into it. This consciousness or spirit or whatever we want to call it was the same observer who was present at my death.

Digressing a little more, as a graduate student in the late Sixties at Columbia, in New York, I recall joking with some very bad Puerto Rican gang members in New York on 110th Street who had a knife at my throat and who wanted my money. I again experienced a splitting off of my consciousness from my body. I can still feel the sharp, cold point of the knife in my throat—it was a winter evening with light snow falling— while I joked around with them and explained why I wasn’t going to give them my money and why in fact they shouldn’t even want to take my money. After an eternity or a minute or a few seconds one of them removed the blade of the knife from below my jaw…The guy raised his head up in a sign of recognition, a sudden and complete relaxing of the tensions that had built up. Laughter. They turned and continued strolling down 110th Street. I continued on my way in the opposite direction. I was yanked back into time and my consciousness and body were in their everyday relationship, one to the other.

More of this consciousness later. Let me keep up with my chronology.

Sounds. There was only one sound component of this experience. At what I take to have been one of the stages of my biological death there was a tremendous roar that came from out of nowhere. It felt like I was hearing my body from the inside, listening to the roar of my heart and my vital organs. There was no beat, like the beat of the heart, just a tremendous all encompassing roar. The sound of water rushing through a gorge. I felt the fury and the rage and the potency of death, not my awareness of death, but the thing itself.

At this point the heaviness changed to a feeling of immersion in a liquid far heavier than water, a blue-black solvent that seemed to dissolve the substantiality of the material world so there was no longer solidity, stability or substantiality. This medium, this solvent, dissolved the very adhesive that heldmy world together. This was the universal solvent. All of the connections in the physical world disappeared.

Here I was in this great nothingness—no longer black or void or silent or heavy— nothing, nothing, nothing. The part of me that was experiencing this state was again too curious to be fearful or confused. There was nothing terrifying about this geography. I supposed that this is what death is—a realm without space, without time, without definition, without stimulation. In this realm there was no longer a sense of self, ego, consciousness, body. There was no longer the same observer to observe for there was no distinction between the me and the it, the place or non-place, the me or the not-me.

Sorry. Still no feeling of bliss, of great peace, or of love. Emotionless. It was what it was.

No boundaries, no beginning, ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• The Contributors
• Preface
• 1: Death and Philosophy Introduction
• 2: My Death Reflections on My Journey into Non-being
• 3: Against Death the Case of Elias Canetti
• 4: On The Purported Insignificance of Death Whistling Before the Dark?
• 5: Death and the Skeleton
• 6: Death, the Bald Scenario
• 7: Death as Transformation In Classical Daoism
• 8: Death and Enlightenment the Therapeutic Psychology of theTibetan Book of theDead
• 9: Death and Detachment Montaigne, Zen, Heidegger and the Rest
• 10: Death and Metaphysics Heidegger On Nothingness and the Meaning of Being
• 11: Death and Authenticity
• 12: Death and the Unity of A Life
• 13: the Antinomy of Death
• 14: Death Fetishism, Morbid Solipsism
• Notes
• References