part0025

There are a million ways to die, but existentially speaking, death has only two faces. There is the death we experience, the death of the Other, so emotionally painful and bewildering when it is the death of a significant other, and there is the death we do not experience, our own death, the fear of which nonetheless haunts many a person’s thoughts.

Certainly, some people are haunted almost constantly by their fear of death, and a few are even prepared to talk about it. Samuel Johnson admitted to having a terrible fear of his own death, his own dying, while Thomas de Quincey, in Confessions of an English Opium-Eater , tells how even the brightest, liveliest summer days induced in him the thought of death. ‘The exuberant and riotous prodigality of life naturally forces the mind more powerfully upon the antagonist thought of death, and the wintry sterility of the grave’ (Confessions of an English Opium-Eater , p. 83). Philip Roth’s novel, Everyman, is a disturbingly matter of fact account of an ageing man confronting his irretrievably failing health and the brute truth that he has only oblivion to look forward to. Leo Tolstoy’s preoccupation with death and the meaning of mortality is reflected in his great novel, Anna Karenina , particularly in the thoughts and fears of Levin, a character closely based on Tolstoy himself.

Levin is present at the deathbed of his brother Nikolái. Tolstoy describes Nikolái’s slow, agonising death in chilling, existential detail. It is one of the most moving and disturbing scenes in literature, yet it is simply a brutally honest account of an ordinary, everyday deathbed struggle.

Suffering, steadily increasing, did its part in preparing him for death. There was no position in which he did not suffer, no moment when he was oblivious, no part or limb of his body that did not hurt, that did not torment him. Even this body’s memories, impressions and thoughts now evoked in him the same revulsion as the body itself. The sight of other people, their conversation, his own memories – all this was sheer torment to him. Those around him felt it and unconsciously forbade themselves any free movement, conversation, expression of their wishes. His whole life merged into one feeling of suffering and the wish to be rid of it. (Anna Karenina , p. 503)

Tolstoy’s harrowing account of Nikolái’s dying is particularly terrifying to any reader who sees in it a possible account of her own dying. It is hard to imagine how any reader could avoid thinking: ‘If I do not die quickly in an accident, this is more or less how my own final days and hours will be. I’ll reach a level of physical and mental suffering way beyond any illness or hangover I’ve ever experienced. Only children in their naivety and youthful confusion fear being dead. What I fear is this terrible business of dying. That I must be tasked so harshly to obtain oblivion just when I feel so ill.’ Yet there are many people, it seems, who would see in Tolstoy’s account of Nikolái’s dying only Nikolái’s dying and not their own dying at all.

Amazingly perhaps, some people claim never to think seriously about their own mortality. What are we philosophers and existentialists and generally gloomy souls to make of them? Are they lying, are they incredibly obtuse? If they really never seriously think about their dying then they are certainly lucky, exempt from the average thinking person’s burden of morbidity. Perhaps they are wise. They have quickly learnt to be too busy living to dwell even for a second on their mortality. After all, there is nothing they can do about their mortality other than seek uncertain ways to postpone the inevitable. So why talk about it, think about it, worry about it? Why not indulge in some healthy bad faith and always instantly dismiss the subject as ridiculous and improper whenever it threatens to rear its ugly head?

Nietzsche, a deep thinker who undoubtedly did more than his fair share of pondering death and dying, marvels at how most people are disinclined to think about death. How instead they throw themselves into living as though they were immortal, as though all their little plans and schemes meant something in the grand scheme of things. He sees this thirst for life as a kind of drunkenness, a madness. But it is a healthy madness, a beneficial foolishness that he admires and is pleased to observe, even if he is unable to fully indulge in it himself. As he writes in The Gay Science :

The thought of death . – Living in the midst of this jumble of little lanes, needs and voices gives me a melancholy happiness: how much enjoyment, impatience, and desire, how much thirsty life and drunkenness of life comes to light every moment! And yet silence will soon descend on all these noisy, living, life-thirsty people. How his shadow stands even now behind everyone, as his dark fellow traveller! It is always like the last moment before the departure of an emigrants’ ship: people have more to say to each other than ever, the hour is late, and the ocean and its desolate silence are waiting impatiently behind all of this noise – so covetous and certain of their prey. And all and every one of them suppose that the past was little or nothing while the near future is everything; and that is the reason for all of this haste, this clamour, this shouting out and overreaching each other. Everyone wants to be the first in this future – and yet death and deathly silence alone are certain and common to all in this future. How strange it is that this sole certainty and common element makes almost no impression on people, and that nothing is further from their minds than the feeling that they form a brotherhood of death. It makes me happy that men do not want at all to think the thought of death! (The Gay Science, 278, pp. 224–225)

Even morbid philosophers and novelists busily embrace life more or less as Nietzsche describes, writing about death in as lively a way as possible, as though they believed that by their writing they were making some scrap of difference to their ultimate destiny. How else could they live, how else could anyone live? The stark reality of death cannot change the fact that, as the old saying goes, life is for the living.

The general position of the existentialists with regard to death, with regard to life for that matter, is that to be authentic a person should be clearly aware of the hard, inescapable, existential truth of her mortality; aware that her life is a finite project . This awareness should spur her relentlessly towards positive, decisive, courageous action rather than sink her into a paralysing fear of death that amounts to a fear of life and a failure to live it to the full.

My exploration of authenticity in Chapter 10 ended with a promise to return in this final chapter to Heidegger’s notion of authentic-being-towards-death . Like the other existentialists, Heidegger holds that the project of authenticity involves a person affirming the inescapable, existential truths of the human condition. However, whereas the accounts of authenticity offered by Sartre, de Beauvoir, Camus and others emphasise the affirmation of freedom, Heidegger’s account of authenticity, as put forward in his major work, Being and Time , emphasises the affirmation of mortality. Authenticity for Heidegger is primarily authentic being-towards-death.

As previously explained, Heidegger refers to a person’s presence in the world as Dasein . Dasein literally mean being-there and refers to a person’s unique spatial and temporal situatedness in the world. Heidegger insists that ‘Death is Dasein’s ownmost possibility’ (Being and Time , p. 307). For Heidegger, the constant possibility of death in the present, the inevitability of death in the future, is central to the very being of Dasein.

A person’s present is what it is by virtue of its finitude, a finitude arising directly from the promise of death that perpetually haunts the present. Authentic being-towards-death involves a person fully acknowledging her finitude and the inevitability of her death in the way she lives her life. By recognising that she herself must die, rather than merely considering death to be something that happens to other people, something that happened, for example, to an unfortunate character in a Tolstoy novel, a person ceases to view herself as simply another Other and realises that she exists as the wholly unique possibility of her own death. Heidegger says, ‘The non-relational character of death, as understood in anticipation, individualises Dasein down to itself’ (Being and Time , p. 308).

Only by realising that she is the utterly unique possibility of her own death does she cease to treat herself as though she is a copy of the next person and of all people. For Heidegger, this is the real meaning of authenticity. The authentic person, like the authentic work of art, is the genuine article, not a reproduction or a replica. Though her life may resemble the lives of many others, she is, nonetheless, unique, and what makes her unique above all else is that only she can and will die her death.

A bodyguard throws himself in the line of fire and takes the fatal bullet meant for the president. The bodyguard has ‘died for the president’ but he has not thereby died the president’s death. Only the president can die the president’s death at some point in the future. ‘No one can take the Other’s dying away from him … Dying is something that every Dasein itself must take upon itself at the time. By its very essence, death is in every case mine, in so far as it “is” at all’ (Being and Time , p. 284).

In Heidegger’s view, it is only when a person fully realises that she must die and acts in accordance with this realisation that she truly begins to exist and live in her own right. In taking responsibility for her own death she takes responsibility for her own life and the way in which she chooses to live it. For Heidegger, to truly realise and affirm mortality is to overcome bad faith. This view concurs with the claim made directly or indirectly by all existentialists that authenticity involves living without regret.

If the positive affirmation of freedom demands that a person affirm her entire life without regret, then it follows that she must also affirm her mortality. This does not mean she must take pleasure in the prospect of death – ‘The thought of suicide is a powerful solace: by means of it one gets through many a bad night’ (Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil , 157, p. 103) – but it does mean she must acknowledge that her life is finite and the implications of this for the way she lives her life.

Nietzsche formed the idea of the ideal Ubermensch (overman). An overman creates himself, he is the source of his own values. He has achieved authenticity and true greatness of spirit by overcoming himself and all his regrets. A key characteristic of Nietzsche’s overman is his recognition and acceptance of his own mortality. The overman is a person who, though fully aware of his mortality, is not petrified with fear at the thought of it. He does not allow his fear of death to prevent him from taking certain risks and living his life to the full.

Simone de Beauvoir, who took many risks in her life, particularly during the German occupation of France, argues that this attitude towards death is an essential characteristic of the adventurous person who values the affirmation of his or her freedom above timid self-preservation. ‘Even his death is not an evil since he is a man only in so far as he is mortal: he must assume it as the natural limit of his life, as the risk implied by every step’ (The Ethics of Ambiguity , p. 82).

Although Heidegger’s thoughts on affirming mortality concur with de Beauvoir and Sartre’s thoughts on affirming freedom, the fact remains that Sartre objects to the concept of being-towards-death that lies at the heart of Heidegger’s theory of authenticity. This is worth exploring as it reveals further insights into the phenomenon of death.

Sartre certainly agrees with Heidegger that embracing life’s finitude is a prompt to authentic action. He agrees with Heidegger that a person who embraces her finitude is motivated to commit courageously to a course of action rather than hold back in cowardly and ultimately futile self-preservation. He agrees also that embracing finitude inspires a person to reject mediocrity, what Heidegger calls everydayness , in favour of being all that she can be. Sartre, however, disagrees with Heidegger that death is a person’s ownmost possibility – the possibility that is most her own. Indeed, Sartre argues that death is not one of a person’s possibilities at all. As the absolute limit of all of a person’s possibilities it is not itself a possibility.

Sartre insists that a person does not die her own death because her own death is not an event she can experience. From her own point of view, she does not undergo death. How could she, when death is the utter annihilation of the point of view that she is? In a very real sense, death only happens to other people. Only the death of other people is an event in my life, just as my death can only be an event in the lives of those who outlive me. Reflecting on a serious cycling accident that nearly killed her, Simone de Beauvoir writes:

I had had a close brush with death. Considering the terror which death had always aroused in me, to have come so very near to it was, for me, a highly significant event. ‘I might never have wakened again,’ I told myself, and suddenly the business of dying seemed out of all proportion … in the most literal and precise sense, death is nothing . A person never is dead; there is no longer a ‘person’ to sustain the concept of ‘death’. I felt I had finally exorcised my fears on this score. (The Prime of Life , p. 497)

Sartre and de Beauvoir are surely quite right that one’s own death is not an event in one’s own life and that it is therefore irrational to fear death. However, as has already been suggested, it is not actually death that most people fear but the physical and mental agony of dying. Admittedly, even a terminally ill person does not know for sure at any moment that she is just about to die because she may yet make a temporary recovery. But surely, she must know when she has entered into the final stages of her terminal illness. There must come a point when she accepts that there is no longer any hope of a genuine recovery, of a return to relative health or reasonable quality of life, that it is, as we say, only a matter of time.

Tolstoy’s Nikolái hoped to make a recovery from what was generally understood to be a terminal illness even when that illness was far advanced. But at the stage of extremity described in the passage above, even he knew that the game was up, that he was now dying, that there was no way back, that give or take a day or two he would be dead. De Beauvoir, then, is surely saying two things: she had exorcised her fear of death because death is nothing, and she had exorcised her fear of the kind of dying that follows an instantaneous and unexpected loss of consciousness. Surely, she cannot be saying that she had exorcised her fear of dying in the manner of poor Nikolái: slowly, painfully and fully conscious.

In Sartre’s view, a person who is genuinely aware of her mortality and lives her life accordingly is not thereby subject to a sense of being-towards-death like a condemned prisoner awaiting execution. Sartre even argues that a person who views her death as being nearer today than it was yesterday is mistaken. She will, of course, live for a certain number of days, but she is mistaken if she thinks that with each day that passes she is using up a sort of quota. She is mistaken because she does not have a quota. She could die now or tomorrow or years from now. It is inevitable that she will die eventually, but the time of her death is not predetermined.

This seems a fair argument so long as we are not talking about a person in extremis . Surely, Nikolái knows, in the sense described above, that his death will come very soon. But of course, as Sartre would insist, he cannot sense death approaching like a storm and does not know the precise moment when he will expire.

Sartre’s main point is that when a person is dead, others will give the total of her years, but this total was not fixed in advance while she was alive and her life was not a process of fulfilling it. Only a condemned person has a quota of days, but even a condemned person can be reprieved unexpectedly or killed by flu before reaching the guillotine. The point is that the closeness of death changes with circumstances. If a person was in a high fever yesterday, she was closer to death yesterday than she is today now that she has recovered.

So, a person does not experience her mortality, her finitude, as such. A person does not experience herself as progressing towards an encounter with the nothingness and annihilation of death; as a being-towards-death. Even a person in extremis , though she knows the end is near, does not know the exact distance to the finishing line or exactly when she will get there. And in getting there, she will not get there, for she will have ceased to be.

It sometimes seemed to me that if I succeeded in being there at the exact instant of my death, if I coincided with it, then I would compel it to be : this would be one way of preserving it. But no, I thought, death will never lie within my grasp; never will I be able to concentrate all the horror with which it fills me into one final, all-embracing spasm of anguish. There is no help for it, the small squeamish fear will remain, the persistent night thoughts, the banal image of a black ruled line terminating the series of measured spaces that stand for years – and after it nothing but a blank page. I shall never apprehend death; all I will ever know is this illusive foretaste, mingled with the flavour of my living days. (The Prime of Life , p. 604)