Death
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When a student interrupted one of Whitehead’s seminars at Harvard, asking, “What has all this to do with death?” most of those present immediately assumed that he was under the influence of Heidegger. The concern with extreme situations had been one of the characteristic features of Kierkegaard’s work, as even the titles of some of his books show: Fear and Trembling (1843), The Concept of Dread (1844), and The Sickness unto Death, which is despair (1849). But Kierkegaard was, and considered himself, a religious writer, and such themes had long been prominent in religious writing. Nietzsche, too, had dealt with some of the most intense experiences, though at least as much with joy as with despair; and when he had written of death, he had celebrated “death freely chosen, death at the right time, brightly and cheerfully accomplished amid children and witnesses” (536 f.). Neither Kierkegaard nor this aspect of Nietzsche’s work was widely noted until Jaspers and Heidegger renewed these concerns after the First World War. In his Psychologie der Weltanschauungen (1919), Jaspers devoted a central section to extreme situations (Grenzsituationen), among which he included guilt and death. Eight years later, Heidegger, in Being and Time, moved death into the center of discussion.
During the Second World War, Sartre included a section on death in his major philosophic work, Being and Nothingness (1943), and criticized Heidegger. Camus devoted his two would-be philosophic books to suicide (The Myth of Sisyphus, 1942) and murder (The Rebel, 1951). Sartre also dealt with men’s attitudes toward their own death in his story, “The Wall,” and in his play, The Victors (Morts sans sépulture); with murder, in The Flies and in Dirty Hands; and with the meaning of death in No Exit. Camus, in The Stranger, dealt both with murder and with a man’s reactions to his own impending death; and his major effort, The Plague, is a study of attitudes toward death, one’s own as well as that of others.
This list is far from exhaustive but sufficient to suggest why the concern with death is so widely associated with existentialism. If now one simply offers one’s own ideas about death, they are likely to be met with the response: why should we accept these rather than those? One might even be taken for an existentialist, because one deals with death. I shall therefore begin by considering briefly, but critically, some of Heidegger’s, Sartre’s, and Camus’s claims.
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Heidegger’s discussion of death bears the uninviting title, “The possible Being-whole of Being-there and Being-toward-death” (Das mögliche Ganzsein des Daseins und das Sein zum Tode). At great length, Heidegger argues to establish this conclusion: “Death does reveal itself as a loss, but rather as a loss experienced by the survivors. The suffering of this loss, however, does not furnish an approach to the loss of Being as such that is ‘suffered’ by the person who died. We do not experience in a genuine sense the dying of the others but are at most always only ‘present’” (239). “The public interpretation of Being-there says, ‘one dies,’ because in this way everybody else as well as oneself can be deceived into thinking: not, to be sure, just I myself; for this One is Nobody…. In this way the One brings about a continual putting at ease about death” (253). A footnote on the following page adds: “L. N. Tolstoy, in his story, The Death of Ivan Ilyitch, has presented the phenomenon of the shattering and the collapse of this ‘one dies.’”
Without doubt Tolstoy’s story was one of the central inspirations of Heidegger’s discussion. The Death of Ivan Ilyitch is a superb book—with an emphatic moral. It is a sustained attack on society in the form of a story about a member of society whose life is utterly empty, futile, pointless—but no more so than the life of all the other members of society who surround him, notably his colleagues and his wife. They all live to no point and tell themselves and each other that “one dies” without ever seriously confronting the certainty that they themselves must die. The only appealing person in the book is a poor muzhik who, realizing that he, too, will have to die one day, patiently and lovingly does all he can to help Ivan. In the final pages of the book, Ivan becomes aware of the futility of his own life and overcomes it, realizing that his malady is not merely a matter of a diseased kidney or appendix but of leaving behind a pointless life to die. He ceases pretending, and “From that moment began that shriek that did not cease for three days”; but during these three days he learns to care for others, feels sorry for his wife, and, for the first time, loves. Now, “In place of death was light! ‘Here is something like!’ he suddenly said aloud. ‘What joy!’” Death had lost its terror.
Heidegger on death is for the most part an unacknowledged commentary on The Death of Ivan Ilyitch. “Even ‘thinking of death’ is publicly considered cowardly fear…. The One does not allow the courage for anxiety of death to rise” Propriety does not permit Ivan to shriek. He must always pretend that he will soon get better. It would be offensive for him to admit that he is dying. But in the end he has the courage to defy propriety and shriek. “The development of such a ‘superior’ indifference alienates Being-there from its own-most, unrelated Being-able-to-be” (254). It is only when he casts aside his self-deceiving indifference that Ivan returns to himself, to his capacity for love, and leaves behind the self-betrayal of his alienated inauthentic life. “Being-toward-death is essentially anxiety” (266)—in Tolstoy’s story, if not elsewhere.
It is no criticism of Tolstoy to note that not all men are like Ivan Ilyitch. I might suppose that I myself am possibly exceptional in frankly living with the vivid certainty that I must die, were it not for the fact that in a recent World War my whole generation—millions of young men—lived with this thought. Many got married, saying to themselves: I do not have much time left, but I want to live just once, if only for one week or possibly a few months. And Heidegger’s generation (he was born in 1889) had the same experience in the First World War. Tolstoy’s indictment of an un-Christian, un-loving, hypocritical world cannot be read as a fair characterization of humanity. Nor is it true that “Being-toward-death is essentially anxiety,” and that all illustrations to the contrary can be explained as instances of self-deception and the lack of “courage for anxiety of death.”
At this point, one begins to wonder whether, under the impact of the First World War, some other thinker did not possibly consider death a little earlier than Heidegger, without basing himself so largely on a single story. Indeed, in 1915, Freud published two essays under the title, “Timely Thoughts on War and Death.” I shall quote from the first two pages of the second essay, which he called “Our Relation to Death.” Heidegger did not refer to Freud and did not even list Freud’s later discussions of conscience in his footnote bibliography on conscience (272). But while Heidegger’s discussion of conscience is the worse for ignoring Freud’s analyses, Heidegger’s pages upon pages about death are in large part long-winded repetitions of what Freud had said briefly at the outset of his paper:
The war, according to Freud, disturbed
our previous relation to death. This relation was not sincere. If one listened to us, we were, of course, ready to declare that death is the necessary end of all life, that every one of us owed nature his own death and must be prepared to pay this debt—in short, that death is natural, undeniable, and unavoidable. In reality, however, we used to behave as if it were different. We have shown the unmistakable tendency to push death aside, to eliminate it from life. We have tried to keep a deadly silence about death: after all, we even have a proverb to the effect that one thinks about something as one thinks about death. One’s own, of course. After all, one’s own death is beyond imagining, and whenever we try to imagine it we can see that we really survive as spectators. Thus the dictum could be dared in the psychoanalytic school: at bottom, nobody believes in his own death. Or, and this is the same: in his unconscious, every one of us is convinced of his immortality. As for the death of others, a cultured man will carefully avoid speaking of this possibility if the person fated to die can hear him. Only children ignore this rule…. We regularly emphasize the accidental cause of death, the mishap, the disease, the infection, the advanced age, and thus betray our eagerness to demote death from a necessity to a mere accident. Toward the deceased himself we behave in a special way, almost as if we were full of admiration for someone who has accomplished something very difficult. We suspend criticism of him, forgive him any injustice, pronounce the motto, de mortuis nil nisi bene, and consider it justified that in the funeral sermon and on the gravestone the most advantageous things are said about him. Consideration for the dead, who no longer needs it, we place higher than truth—and most of us certainly also higher than consideration for the living.
The simple, unpretentious clarity of these remarks, their un-oracular humanity and humor, and their straight appeal to experience could hardly furnish a more striking contrast to Heidegger’s verbiage. It is said sometimes that Heidegger more than anyone else has provoked discussion of phenomena which, in spite of Kierkegaard and Nietzsche, were ignored by the professors and their students. But in the wake of Heidegger discussion concentrated not on these phenomena but on his terms and weird locutions. Death, anxiety, conscience, and care became part of the jargon tossed about by thousands, along with Being-there, to-hand-ness, thrown-ness, Being-with, and all the rest. But he did not present definite claims for discussion, not to speak of hypotheses.
His remarks about death culminate in the italicized assertion: “The running-ahead reveals to Being-there the lostness into One-self and brings it before the possibility … of being itself—itself, however, in the passionate freedom for death which has rid itself of the illusions of the One, become factual, certain of itself, and full of anxiety” (266). (The words italicized here are printed in bold type in the original.) Unquestionably, the acceptance of the fact that I must die (my running-ahead to my death in thought) may forcibly remind me of the limited amount of time at my disposal, of the waste involved in spending it in awe of the anonymous One, and thus become a powerful incentive to make the most of my own being here and now. But Heidegger’s habit of gluing his thought to words, or of squeezing thoughts out of words, or of piling up such weird locutions that, as he himself insists, not one of his disciples of the days when he wrote, taught, and talked Being and Time seems to have got the point, has not encouraged questions like this one: Is it necessary that the resolute acceptance of my own death must still be accompanied by a feeling of anxiety, as Heidegger insists?
At this point Heidegger relies too heavily on the Christian writers who have influenced him most: above all, in this case Kierkegaard and Tolstoy, and perhaps also Jacob Bohme (Of the Incarnation of Jesus Christ II, 4.1, and Six Theosophic Points I) and Schelling, who claimed in Die Weltalter that anxiety is “the basic feeling of every living creature.” In Heidegger, Schelling’s Grundempfindung becomes Grundbefindlichkeit.
Consider the letter which President Vargas of Brazil wrote to his people before committing suicide. It ends: “I fought against the looting of Brazil. I fought against the looting of the people. I have fought barebreasted. The hatred, infamy, and calumny did not beat down my spirit. I gave you my life. Now I offer my death. Nothing remains. Serenely I take the first step on the road to eternity and I leave life to enter history.”1 Or consider this letter which a Japanese flier trained for a suicide mission, Isao Matsuo, wrote to his parents: “Please congratulate me. I have been given a splendid opportunity to die…. I shall fall like a blossom from a radiant cherry tree…. How I appreciate this chance to die like a man! … Thank you, my parents, for the 23 years during which you have cared for me and inspired me. I hope that my present deed will in some small way repay what you have done for me.”2 Or consider David Hume’s complete lack of anxiety which so annoyed his Christian “friends” who hoped for a deathbed conversion. Or Socrates’ calm in the face of death. Or the Stoic sages who, admiring Socrates, committed tranquil suicide when in their nineties. Or the ancient Romans.
Heidegger’s talk about anxiety should be read as a document of the German nineteen-twenties when it suddenly became fashionable to admit one was afraid. In Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front (1929) it was obvious that this new honesty was aimed against militarism and of a piece with Arnold Zweig’s noting that when “the Sergeant Grischa” at the end of Zweig’s great novel (1928) was shot, “his bowels discharged excrement.” But while it took some courage to disregard propriety and to admit that some men, when confronting death, are scared and that some, when shot, fill their pants, it remained for Heidegger to blow up observations of this sort into general truths about Being.
He was not quickly refuted with a list of fatal counter-instances because he put things into such outrageous language that reactions to his prose have in the main belonged to one of four types: either one did not read him at all and ignored him, as the majority of mankind did; or one read him a little, found him extremely difficult, and took it for granted that the fault was one’s own and that, of course, there must be more to his assertions than they seemed to say—especially since he himself says frequently that they are not anthropological but ontological—truths not about man but about Being; or, thirdly, one read him, found him difficult, persevered, spent years studying him,—and what else could one do after years of study of that sort?—became a teacher of philosophy, protecting one’s investment by “explaining” Heidegger to students, warding off objections by some such remark as: “There is much that I, too, don’t understand as yet, but I shall give my life to trying to understand a little more.” The fourth type, now gaining ground among American intellectuals, has not read Heidegger at all but heard about him and his influence and assumes that there must be a great deal to him, Perhaps one has penetrated to the point of recognizing that he alludes to some genuine experiences—such as the sense of our utter loneliness in this world—and this is taken to show that there is more to Heidegger than those admit who shrug him off as writing merely “nonsense.” But not everybody who does not write bare nonsense is original, illuminating, or deep.
It is widely taken for granted that Heidegger is a far more profound thinker than Sartre, and that his philosophy is related to French existentialism as Goethe’s Faust is to Gounod’s. If I had skipped Heidegger, in keeping with the resolve to criticize only men I admire, and begun straightaway with Sartre and Camus, many a reader might have concluded that these Frenchmen are, of course, easy prey, while the one great philosopher in the existentialist camp is Heidegger. This myth is also accepted and spread by the spokesmen for existential psychotherapy, though no evidence is offered to back it up. For the most part, they merely use some of Heidegger’s quaint expressions, without even asking whether the same points could not be made in plain English, or had not actually been made earlier in excellent German by Freud; and they simply ignore Sartre. But Sartre is far from inferior to Heidegger.3
Sartre has offered one crucial criticism of Heidegger in his own discussion of death in Being and Nothingness. Heidegger argues that only the running-ahead to my own death can lead me to my own-most, authentic Being because “Dying is something which nobody can do for another…. Dying shows that death is constituted ontologically by always-mineness and existence.” And more of the same sort (240). As Sartre rightly points out, this in no way distinguishes dying (533 ff.). Nobody can love for me or sleep or breathe for me. Every experience, taken as my experience, is “something which nobody can do for” me. I can live a lot of my life in the mode of inauthenticity in which it makes no decisive difference that it is I who am doing this or that; but in that mode it makes no difference either whether the bullet hits me or someone else, whether I die first or another. If I adopt the attitude that it does matter, that it makes all the difference in the world to me, then I can adopt that attitude toward the experience of my loving this particular woman, toward my writing this particular book, toward my seeing, hearing, feeling, or bearing witness, no less than I can adopt it toward death. As Sartre says: “In short there is no personalizing virtue which is peculiar to my death. Quite the contrary, it becomes my death only if I place myself already in the perspective of subjectivity” (535).
Sartre goes on to criticize Heidegger’s whole conception of “Being-toward-death.” Although we may anticipate that we ourselves must die, we never know when we shall die; but it is the timing of one’s death that makes all the difference when it comes to the meaning of one’s life. “We have, in fact, every chance of dying before we have accomplished our task, or, on the other hand, of outliving it. There is therefore a very slim chance that our death will be presented to us as that of Sophocles was, for example, in the manner of a resolved chord. And if it is only chance which decides the character of our death and therefore of our life, then even the death which most resembles the end of a melody cannot be waited for as such; luck by determining it for me removes from it any character as a harmonious end…. A death like that of Sophocles will therefore resemble a resolved chord but will not be one, just as the group of letters formed by the falling of alphabet blocks will perhaps resemble a word but will not be one. Thus this perpetual appearance of chance at the heart of my projects cannot be apprehended as my possibility but, on the contrary, as the nihilation of all my possibilities, a nihilation which itself is no longer a part of my possibilities” (537). “Suppose that Balzac had died before Les Chouans; he would remain the author of some execrable novels of intrigue. But suddenly the very expectation which this young man was, this expectation of being a great man, loses any kind of meaning; it is neither an obstinate and egotistical blindness nor the true sense of his own value since nothing shall ever decide it…. The final value of this conduct remains forever in suspense; or if you prefer, the ensemble (particular kinds of conduct, expectations, values) falls suddenly into the absurd. Thus death is never that which gives life its meaning; it is, on the contrary, that which on principle removes all meaning from life” (539). “The unique characteristic of a dead life is that it is a life of which the Other makes himself the guardian” (541).
Suicide is no way out, says Sartre. Its meaning depends on the future. “If I ‘misfire,’ shall I not judge later that my suicide was cowardice? Will the outcome not show me that other solutions were possible? … Suicide is an absurdity which causes my life to be submerged in the absurd” (540).
Finally, Sartre asks: “In renouncing Heidegger’s Being-toward-death, have we abandoned forever the possibility of freely giving to our being a meaning for which we are responsible? Quite the contrary.” Sartre repudiates Heidegger’s “strict identification of death and finitude” and says: “human reality would remain finite even if it were immortal, because it makes itself finite by choosing itself as human. To be finite, in fact, is to choose oneself—that is, to make known to oneself what one is by projecting oneself toward one possible to the exclusion of others. The very act of freedom is therefore the assumption and creation of finitude. If I make myself, I make myself finite and hence my life is unique” (545 f.).
Before evaluating these ideas, let us consider Camus.
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Although Camus’s polities were more acceptable to the Nobel committee and are surely more attractive than those of Sartre, and although few writers have ever equalled Camus’s charming pose of decency and honesty and a determination to be lucid, Henri Peyre is surely right when, in a review of Camus’s books and of several books about him, he charges The Myth of Sisyphus and The Rebel with being “not only contradictory, but confused and probably shallow and immature.”4
With the utmost portentousness, Camus begins the first of his two philosophic works, The Myth of Sisyphus: “There is but one truly serious philosophic problem, and that is suicide.” Soon we are told that the world is “absurd.” A little later: “I said that the world is absurd, but I was too hasty. This world in itself is not reasonable, that is all that can be said. But what is absurd is the confrontation of this irrational and the wild longing for clarity whose call echoes in the human heart. The absurd depends as much on man as on the world” (21).
This point could be put more idiomatically and accurately by saying that the hunger to gain clarity about all things is quixotic. But Camus prefers to rhapsodize about absurdity, although he says: “I want to know whether I can live with what I know and with that alone” (40). He speaks of “this absurd logic” (31), evidently meaning the special logic of talk about the absurd, as if such talk had any special logic. Then he speaks of the “absurd mind,” meaning a believer in the absurdity of the world—or rather of the absurdity, or quixotism, of man’s endeavors—as when he says: “To Chestov reason is useless but there is something beyond reason. To an absurd mind [i.e., Camus] reason is useless and there is nothing beyond reason” (35). The word “useless,” too, is used without precision; what is meant is something like “limited” or “not omnipotent.” A little later still: “The absurd … does not lead to God. Perhaps this notion will become clearer if I risk this shocking statement: the absurd is sin without God” (40). Without being shocked, one may note the looseness of the style and thinking: no attempt is made to explain what is meant by “sin,” and Camus is evidently satisfied that his vague statement, even if it does not succeed in shocking us, is at least evocative. But from a writer who quotes Nietzsche as often as Camus does in this book—and in The Rebel, too—one might expect the question to be raised whether, by not including God in our picture of the world, we don’t restore to being its “innocence,” as Nietzsche claimed, and leave sin behind.
As far as Kierkegaard, Jaspers, and Chestov are concerned, Camus is surely right that “The theme of the irrational, as it is conceived by the existentials [sic], is reason becoming confused and escaping by negating itself.” But when he adds, “The absurd is lucid reason noting its limits,” it becomes apparent that all the oracular discussions of absurdity are quite dispensable and that Camus has not added clarification but only confusion to the two sentences from Freud’s The Future of an Illusion, cited in section 92. Like Freud in 1927, fifteen years before The Myth of Sisyphus, Camus spurns the claims of religion and, in Freud’s words, “humbly resigns himself to the insignificant part man plays in the universe.” The same thought permeates the books of Nietzsche.
Nietzsche, however, had gone on to celebrate “Free Death,” both in Zarathustra (183 ff.) and in The Twilight of the Idols: “usually it is death under the most contemptible conditions, an unfree death, death not at the right time, a coward’s death. From love of life, one should desire a different death: free, conscious, without accident, without ambush” (536 f.). Nietzsche’s thought is clear, though he collapsed, but did not die, in his boots, as it were—and his relatives then dragged out his life for another eleven years.
Camus writes against suicide: “Suicide, like the leap, is acceptance at its extreme. Everything is over and man returns to his essential history…. In its way, suicide settles the absurd. It engulfs the absurd in the same death…. It is essential to die unreconciled and not of one’s own free will. Suicide is a repudiation.” Camus wants “defiance” (54 f.). Now suicide is “acceptance,” now it is “repudiation.” Surely, sometimes it is one and sometimes the other, and occasionally both—acceptance of defeat and repudiation of hope. Nietzsche’s “free death” was meant as an affirmation of sorts, an acceptance of one’s own life and of all the world with it, a festive realization of fulfilment, coupled with the thought that this life, as lived up to this point and now consummated, was so acceptable that it did not stand in need of any further deeds or days but could be gladly relived over and over in the course of an eternal recurrence of the same events at gigantic intervals.
No less than in his later work, The Rebel, in which “the rebel” replaces the editorial we, exhortations are presented in the form of literally false generalizations. “The rebel does x” means “I do x and wish you would.” In The Myth of Sisyphus, Camus hides similarly behind “an absurd mind” and “an absurd logic.”
The first part of Camus’s Myth of Sisyphus is ambiguously and appropriately entitled “An Absurd Reasoning.” Portentousness thickens toward the end. “The absurd enlightens me on this point: there is no future” (58). “Knowing whether or not one can live without appeal is all that interests me” (60). “Now, the conditions of modern life impose on the majority of men the same quantity of experiences and consequently the same profound experience. To be sure, there must also be taken into consideration the individual’s spontaneous contribution, the ‘given’ element in him. But I cannot judge of that, and let me repeat that my rule here is to get along with the immediate evidence” (61). In sum: men don’t, of course, have the same quantity of experiences, and least of all the same profound experiences, but in the name of simple honesty we must pretend they do.
This paraphrase may seem excessively unsympathetic; but consider what Camus himself says on the next page: “Here we have to be over-simple. To two men living the same number of years, the world always provides the same sum of experiences. It is up to us to be conscious of them. Being aware of one’s life, one’s revolt, one’s freedom, and to the maximum, is living, and to the maximum.5 Where lucidity dominates, the scale of values becomes useless. Let’s be even more simple.”
Why in heaven’s name must we be so “over-simple” and then “even more simple?” Two men who live the same number of years do not always have the same number of experiences, with the sole difference that one is more aware of them, while the other is partly blind. Life is not like a film that rolls by while we either watch or sleep. Some suffer sicknesses, have visions, love, despair, work, and experience failures and successes; others toil in the unbroken twilight of mute misery, their minds uneducated, chained to deadening routine. Moreover, a man can avoid or involve himself in experiences; he can seek security or elect to live dangerously, to use Nietzsche’s phrase. Finally Camus writes as if experiences were like drops that fall into the bucket of the mind at a steady rate—say, one a second—and as if the sequence made no difference at all; as if seeing Lear at the age of one, ten, or thirty were the same.
Let us resume our quotation where we broke off: “Let us say that the sole obstacle, the sole deficiency to be made good, is constituted by premature death. Thus it is that no depth, no emotion, no passion, and no sacrifice could render equal in the eyes of the absurd man (even if he wished it so) a conscious life of forty years and a lucidity spread over sixty years. Madness and death are his irreparables…. There will never be any substitute for twenty years of life and experience…. The present and the succession of presents before a constantly conscious soul is the ideal of the absurd man.”
Camus is welcome to his absurd man, who is indeed absurd, wishing to imbibe, collect, and hoard experiences, any experiences, as long as they add up to some huge quantity—the more the better. If only Camus did not deceive himself so utterly about the quality of his own thinking—as when he concludes the second essay of the book by counting himself among those “who think clearly and have ceased to hope.” Of course, Camus’s novels are far superior to the arguments discussed here. He was a fine writer and a profoundly humane man, but not a philosopher. Why, then, discuss his attempts at philosophy at all? For at least three reasons.
First, his was a kindred effort; our agreements far outweigh our differences; so it seems right to relate my own attempts at answers to his. Then, he illustrates the shortcomings of that now popular philosophy which is at the opposite pole from analytic or linguistic philosophy. The so-called existentialists have not only advanced few problems toward a solution; they have often impeded fruitful discussion of important and fascinating problems by the eccentricity of their prose. Finally, this analysis of Camus should help to set the stage for some of my ideas.
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Camus’s confusions bring to mind a poem by Hölderlin: “Nur einen Sommer …” Heidegger has devoted essay after essay to this poet and eventually collected the lot in a book, but has not written about this poem, which is both clearer and better than the ones Heidegger likes—to read his own thoughts into.
A single summer grant me, great powers, and
A single autumn for fully ripened song
That, sated with the sweetness of my
Playing, my heart may more willingly die.
The soul that, living, did not attain its divine
Right cannot repose in the netherworld.
But once what I am bent on, what is
Holy, my poetry, is accomplished,
Be welcome then, stillness of the shadows’ world!
I shall be satisfied though my lyre will not
Accompany me down there. Once I
Lived like the gods, and more is not needed.
Of the “absurd man” Camus says, as we have seen: “Madness and death are his irreparables.” Hölderlin did become mad soon after writing this poem, but the point of the poem is surely that still he should not have preferred to be Edgar Guest or even Methuselah. Not only is there a “substitute for twenty years of life,” there is something more desirable by far: “Once I lived like the gods, and more is not needed.”
This is overlooked by Sartre, too. Rightly, he recognizes that death can cut off a man before he had a chance to give his life a meaning, that death may be—but he falsely thinks it always is—“the nihilation of all my possibilities.” Not only in childhood but long after that one may retain the feeling that one is in this sense still at the mercy of death. “But once what I am bent on, what is holy, my poetry, is accomplished,” once I have succeeded in achieving—in the face of death, in a race with death—a project that is truly mine and not something that anybody else might have done as well, if not better, then the picture changes: I have won the race and in a sense have triumphed over death. Death and madness come too late.
We see the poet’s later madness in the light of his own poem. Nor does it greatly matter that Nietzsche, like Hölderlin, vegetated for a few more years before death took him: his work was done. To be sure, others make themselves the guardians of the dead life and interpret it according to their lights; but we have no defense if they begin to do the same while we are still alive. Nor can we say that this is the price of finitude, of finite works no less than finite lives. Men say that God is infinite but can hardly deny that theologians and believers make themselves the guardians of the infinite and offer their interpretations, if not behind his back then in his face.
A common fault of Heidegger, Sartre, and Camus is that they overgeneralize instead of taking into account different attitudes toward death. The later part of The Myth of Sisyphus represents a somewhat arbitrary and portentous attempt at a study of types: three ways are open to “The Absurd Man”—to become a Don Juan, an actor, or a conqueror. Surely, one learns more from Malraux’s novel, La Condition Humaine (Man’s Fate), which, offers almost a catalogue of different ways of meeting death. Nor did either these men or Tolstoy initiate the concern with death.
Heinrich von Kleist (1777–1811) was a Prussian officer more than a century before World War I. His Prinz Friedrich von Homburg is one of the most celebrated German plays; and here Kleist had the courage to bring to life on the stage the Prince’s dread after he, a general who has disobeyed orders, is sentenced to death. Then Kleist went on to depict his hero’s conquest of anxiety, to the point where in the final scene he is ready to be shot without the slightest remnant of anxiety. Indeed, he welcomes death, is blindfolded, and—one thinks of Dostoevsky and of Sartre’s story, “The Wall”—pardoned. Kleist himself committed suicide.
Georg Büchner (1813–37), best known as the author of Woyzek, dealt with death in an even more strikingly modern way in another play, Danton’s Death. But these playwrights do not claim to offer any general theory of death, any more than Shakespeare did. I tried to show in the first chapter of From Shakespeare to Existentialism how many supposedly existentialist themes are encountered, and important, in Shakespeare. Surely, he also offers an imposing variety of deaths and suicides.
Among the points understood by Shakespeare but neglected by the existentialists are these. Much dread of death is due to Christian teaching, and pre-Christian Roman attitudes were often very different. So, we might add, was the Buddha’s: after his enlightenment experience he transcended all anxiety, and the stories of his death represent an outright antithesis to the Gospels’ account of Jesus’ dreadful death.
Vitality influences one’s reaction to impending death: a soldier in a duel does not die like patients in their beds. And attitudes toward death may be changed, too, by the confidence that there is absolutely nothing one will miss—either because the world will end for all when we die or because life “is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing,” and it is well to be rid of “tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow.”
Finally, not one of the existentialists has grasped the most crucial distinction that makes all the difference in facing death. Nietzsche stated it in The Gay Science: “For one thing is needful: that a human being attain his satisfaction with himself—whether it be by this or by that poetry and art; only then is a human being at all tolerable to behold. Whoever is dissatisfied with himself is always ready to revenge himself therefor; we others will be his victims, if only by always having to stand his ugly sight. For the sight of the ugly makes men bad and gloomy” (98 f.). Or, as Hölderin says: “The soul that, living, did not attain its divine right cannot repose in the netherworld.” But he that has made something of his life can face death without anxiety: “Once I lived like the gods, and more is not needed.”
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Our attitude toward death is influenced by hope as much as it is by fear. If fear is the mother of cowardice, hope is the father.
Men accept indignities without end, and a life not worth living, in the hope that their miseries will end and that eventually life may be worth living again. They renounce love, courage and honesty, pride and humanity, hoping. Hope is as great an enemy of courage as is fear.
The early Romans and Spartans faced death not only fearlessly but also void of mean hopes. There was nothing for the surviving coward to hope.
In the Israel of Moses and the prophets, religion did not hold out hope for individuals. There was hope for the people as long as men and women lived and died with courage and without hope for themselves.
Paul made of hope one of the three great virtues. Doing this, he did not betray Jesus, whose glad tidings had been a message of hope for the individual. Neither of them abetted cowardice or fear of death as such; for their hope was not of this world. Men who accepted the faith of Paul died fearlessly, hopefully, and joyously when the Romans made martyrs of them.
Indeed, “the desire for martyrdom became at times a form of absolute madness, a kind of epidemic of suicide, and the leading minds of the Church found it necessary to exert all their authority to prevent their followers thrusting themselves into the hands of the persecutors. Tertullian mentions how, in a little Asiatic town, the entire population once flocked to the proconsul, declaring themselves to be Christians, and imploring him to execute the decree of the emperor and grant them the privilege of martyrdom…. ‘These wretches,’ said Lucian, speaking of the Christians, ‘persuade themselves that they are going to be altogether immortal, and to live for ever, wherefore they despise death, and many of their own accord give themselves up to be slain.’
“Believing, with St. Ignatius, that they were ‘the wheat of God,’ they panted for the day when they should be ‘ground by the teeth of wild beasts into the pure bread of Christ!’” (Lecky, I, 415 ff.).
As the otherworldliness of Jesus and Paul gave way to a renewed interest in this world, as Christianity became the state religion, hope reverted from the other world to this. The temporary bond of hope and courage was broken. The age of the martyrs was over. Now Christianity became the great teacher of fear of death, and dread of purgatory and damnation became fused with hope for a few more years in this world.
The Greeks had considered hope the final evil in Pandora’s box. They also gave us an image of perfect nobility: a human being lovingly doing her duty to another human being despite all threats, and going to her death with pride and courage, not deterred by any hope—Antigone.
Hopelessness is despair. Yet life without hope is worth living. As Sartre’s Orestes says: “Life begins on the other side of despair.” But is hope perhaps resumed on the other side? It need not be. In honesty, what is there to hope for? Small hopes remain but do not truly matter. I may hope that the sunset will be clear, that the night will be cool and still, that my work will turn out well, and yet know that nine hopes out of ten are not even remembered a year later. How many are recalled a century hence? A billion years hence?
The cloud-capp’d towers, the gorgeous palaces,
The solemn temples, the great globe itself,
Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve;
And, like this insubstantial pageant faded,
Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff
As dreams are made on, and our little life
Is rounded with a sleep.
(Tempest, IV, i)
It is possible that this is wrong. There may be surprises in store for us, however improbable it seems and however little evidence suggests it. But I do not hope for that. Let people who do not know what to do with themselves in this life, but fritter away their time reading magazines and watching television, hope for eternal life. If one lives intensely, the time comes when sleep seems bliss. If one loves intensely, the time comes when death seems bliss.
Those who loved with all their heart and mind and might have always thought of death, and those who knew the endless nights of harrowing concern for others have longed for it.
The life I want is a life I could not endure in eternity. It is a life of love and intensity, suffering and creation, that makes life worthwhile and death welcome. There is no other life I should prefer. Neither should I like not to die.
If I ask myself who in history I might like to have been, I find that all the men I most admire were by most standards deeply unhappy. They knew despair. But their lives were worthwhile—I only wish mine equaled theirs in this respect—and I have no doubt that they were glad to die.
As one deserves a good night’s sleep, one also deserves to die. Why should I hope to wake again? To do what I have not done in the time I’ve had? All of us have so much more time than we use well. How many hours in a life are spent in a way of which one might be proud, looking back?
For most of us death does not come soon enough. Lives are spoiled and made rotten by the sense that death is distant and irrelevant. One lives better when one expects to die, say, at forty, when one says to oneself long before one is twenty: whatever I may be able to accomplish, I should be able to do by then; and what I have not done by then, I am not likely to do ever. One cannot count on living until one is forty—or thirty—but it makes for a better life if one has a rendezvous with death.
Not only love can be deepened and made more intense and impassioned by the expectation of impending death; all of life is enriched by it. Why deceive myself to the last moment, and hungrily devour sights, sounds, and smells only when it is almost too late? In our treatment of others, too, it is well to remember that they will die: it makes for greater humanity.
There is nothing morbid about thinking and speaking of death. Those who disparage honesty do not know its joys. The apostles of hope do not know the liberation of emergence from hope.
It may seem that a man without hope is inhuman. How can one appeal to him if he does not share our hopes? He has pulled up his stakes in the future—and the future is the common ground of humanity. Such rhetoric may sound persuasive, but Antigone gives it the lie. Nobility holds to a purpose when hope is gone. Purpose and hope are as little identical as humility and meekness, or honesty and sincerity. Hope seeks redemption in time to come and depends on the future. A purposive act may be its own reward and redeem the agent, regardless of what the future may bring. Antigone is not at the mercy of any future. Humanity, love, and courage survive hope.
Occasionally, to be sure, they may not persist in despair; but that does not prove that they depend on hope. Much more often, humanity has been sacrificed to some hope; love has been betrayed for some hope; and courage has been destroyed by some hope.
Humbition, love, courage, and honesty can make life meaningful, and small hopes can embellish it. For a few decades one may be able to love and create enough to make suffering worthwhile. If that becomes impossible:
I will despair, and be at enmity
With cozening hope: he is a flatterer,
A parasite, a keeper-back of death,
Who gently would dissolve the bands of life,
Which false hope lingers in extremity.
(Richard II, II, ii)
We do not all have the same breaking point; each man has to discover his. When Freud heard of Franz Rosenzweig’s unusual exertions to work to the end (described in § 20, above), he said, “What else could he do?” But a man unable to emulate Rosenzweig or Freud need not resign himself to becoming a vegetable. It is better to die with courage than to live as a coward.
Of course, there are deaths that one views with horror: slow, painful deaths; deaths that destroy us by degrees; deaths that, instead of taking us in our prime, demean us first. But, fearing such deaths, I do not fear death, but what precedes it: pointless suffering, disability, and helplessness. Death in a crash might be exhilarating; death in sleep, peace; death by poison, dignified.
When Hannibal, who had humiliated the Romans like no man before him, could not escape from their vengeance and had nothing to look forward to but being led in triumph through the streets of Rome, and then imprisonment, and finally a miserable death, why should he not have taken poison as he did? Suicide can be cowardice; it need not be. In Antony and Cleopatra, Shakespeare contrasts suicides: Antony botches his, while Cleopatra’s death has enviable dignity and beauty.
The Greeks have often been held up as models of humanity. There are few respects in which their humanity compares more favorably with that of most modem nations than the way in which death sentences were carried out. They did not grab men unawares in the middle of the night to drag them to the guillotine and chop their heads off, as the French did until recently; they did not hang them, British fashion; burn them, Christian fashion; or strap them, the American way, into an electric chair or a gas chamber—depriving a human being of his dignity and humanity as far as possible: Socrates was given hemlock and could raise the cup to his own lips and die a man.
Is it possible that the fear of death and the prohibition of suicide have been as deliberately imposed on men as laws against incest—not owing to any innate horror, but because lying, like incest, is so easy? Culture depends on men’s attempting to do what is difficult. We are naturally endowed with aspirations but also with a tendency toward sloth; and when ambition meets obstacles we are always tempted to take the easy way out.
Even if there is a natural instinct of self-preservation and an innate aversion to death, culture depends both on reinforcing this aversion and on teaching men to overcome it under certain circumstances. Culture requires that men should not seek death too easily, but also that they should sometimes consider it the lesser evil. A life worth living depends on an ambivalence toward death.
My own death is no tragedy. But may I deny that the death of others is unjust, unfair, and irremediably tragic? We like to blame death rather than those who died, if we loved them; hence we deceive ourselves as they might have deceived themselves. We do not say, “How many months did they waste!” but, “If only they had had a few more weeks!” Not, “How sad that they did not do more!” but, “How unfair that they died so soon!” Still, not every death allows for this response. There are deaths that reproach us, deaths that are enviable.
Often we mourn the death of others because it leaves us lonely. But we do not hate sleep because we are sometimes lonely when others have gone to sleep and we lie awake. Death, like sleep, can mean separation; it usually does. We rarely have the honesty to remember how alone we are. The death of those we loved reminds us of what dishonesty had concealed from us: our profound solitude and our impending death. In the quest for honesty, death is a cruel but excellent teacher.
Our attitudes toward death are profoundly influenced by religion. From the Old Testament we have learned to think of every single human being as crucially important. Buddhism and other Oriental religions spread a very different view. To men brought up on the idea of the transmigration of souls, the teaching of Darwin could not have come as a shock: they assumed all along that a generation or two ago I, or any man, might well have been an animal, and that after death I might become one again. To men who had read in their scriptures of millions of myriads of ten million cycles, of thousands of worlds and vast numbers of Buddhas who had appeared in these worlds in different ages, the Copernican revolution would not have involved any blow to man’s pride. That there are about a hundred million galaxies within range of our telescopes, and that our own galaxy alone contains hundreds of thousands of planets which may well support life and beings like ourselves seems strange to those brought up on the Bible, but not necessarily strange to Oriental believers.
For those not familiar with the sacred books of the East, the contrast may come to life as they compare Renaissance and Chinese paintings: here the human figures dominate the picture, and the landscape serves as a background: there the landscape is the picture, and the human beings in it have to be sought out. Here man seems all-important; there his cosmic insignificance is beautifully represented.
Modern science suggests that in important respects the Oriental religions were probably closer to the facts than the Old Testament or the New. It does not follow that we ought to accept the Buddha’s counsel of resignation and detachment, falling out of love with the world. Nor need we emulate Lao-tze’s wonderful whimsey and his wise mockery of reason, culture, and human effort. There are many possibilities: I say with Shakespeare, “All the world’s a stage.” Man seems to play a very insignificant part in the universe, and my part is negligible. The question confronting me is not, except perhaps in idle moments, what part might be more amusing, but what I wish to make of my part. And what I want to do and would advise others to do is to make the most of it: put into it all you have got, and live, and, if possible, die with some measure of nobility.
1 New York Herald Tribune, August 25, 1953.
2 Inoguchi, 200. The whole last chapter, “Last Letters Home,” 196–208, is supremely relevant.
3 Cf. my Existentialism from Dostoevsky to Sartre, Chapter I; for a detailed critique of the later Heidegger, From Shakespeare to Existentialism, Chapters 17–18; and for a fuller treatment of Being and Time, my essay “Existentialism and Death” in The Meaning of Death, ed. Herman Feifel. I have made liberal use of that essay in the present chapter, but omitted entirely the first section, which deals with Being and Time.
4 What Peyre says is, to be precise, that Philip Thody, in Albert Camus, “is forced to confess when he comes to those two volumes that they are not only…”
5 This sentence is not so bad in the original, and might be rendered: “The more fully one is aware of one’s life, … the more fully one lives.”