9

Death and the End of Life

What is strange in finding here on earth the union for which Plotinus yearned? Unity expresses itself here in terms of sun and sea. The heart feels it through a certain taste of flesh which constitutes its bitterness and greatness. I learn that there is no superhuman happiness, no eternity outside the curve of the days. These paltry and essential goods, these relative truths, are the only ones that can move me.

—Albert Camus, “Summer in Algeria”

“Eternity is a terrible thought,” says Rosencrantz in Tom Stoppard’s alternative view on Hamlet, “I mean, where’s it going to end?” And Guildenstern adds a little later, “Death followed by eternity . . . the worst of both worlds. It is a terrible thought.”¹ Death, as they say, is forever, but if the same were true of life—if one could live a life without end—would this be any less terrible? Some philosophers have argued that life in the absence of death would indeed be terrible—it would be a life, according to Bernard Williams, of unendurable boredom.² I think there is something important, and right, about this view. If it is flawed, it is only so, I will argue, insofar as it does not give enough weight to the importance of death in giving shape and significance to life.³ It is not merely that a life without end would be a life of tedium—of endless ennui—but that to have a life, and this is not the same as merely to live, is indeed to be capable of death.⁴

The strong thesis, according to which death and life are indeed necessarily connected, and not in any merely “psychological” fashion, is a central theme in Heidegger’s work, both early and late. It is present in Being and Time, as well as in essays such as “Building Dwelling Thinking.” It has sometimes appeared obscure, however, as to why death should be so important here—why should it be the case, not merely that a life without death would be empty, but that to live a life without death would not even be to have a life? Why could it not be possible to live, and not merely to live, but to have a life, and yet not die? Part of the answer is given in the understanding of death as a limit, and more specifically, as an end—as the end of life, and so as that “toward which” our lives are lived. “End is place,” Heidegger tells us in “The End of Philosophy and the Task of Thinking,”⁵ and the idea of end that appears here applies no less to death in its relation to life than to the understanding of philosophy and its history.⁶ If death is the end of life, then it is also that which establishes the place of life, its topos, and to have a life is for one’s life to be “placed” in just such a way.⁷ The exploration of these issues also has a useful consequence for the understanding of Heidegger’s topological mode of thinking, providing a possible way of integrating some key elements of the early thinking with elements of the later. That is to say, it enables us to see how the focus on the unitary constitution of human life in the early thought—in Being and Time, the unity of Dasein as based in the unity of temporality—might itself be necessarily embedded in the more fundamental unity of place that is the focus of the later thinking.⁸ Much of the discussion will thus follow a line of thinking that draws on elements consistent with Heidegger’s approach in his 1927 work, and that thereby focuses more strongly on temporality than I have elsewhere, but which gradually moves to a broader and more explicitly topological view.

Living and Having a Life

What do I mean by distinguishing mere living from the having of a life? As a characteristic of the living, life is ubiquitous. We find it exemplified in all things that are capable of sustaining themselves in existence, of nourishing themselves, of reproducing themselves. But in the sense that I intend it here, the having of a life is something much more specific—rather than mere continued, self-sustaining existence, the having of a life involves having a sense (even if poorly articulated) of one’s life as indeed one’s own, as something that one lives, as something for which, to a greater or lesser degree, one takes responsibility. In this sense of “having a life,” my cat asleep on the sofa, though undoubtedly alive (as any attempt to displace her will soon make clear), cannot be said to “have” a life. This does not mean that my cat lacks “interests” or desires or has no strong attachments to places and people (for she certainly has all of these) or indeed that she has no “personality” that marks her out from other cats, but that the having of a life is more than this, for it involves having a sense of one’s life as, in some sense, one’s own, as to some extent subject to one’s own self-formation. And this is something of which, notwithstanding her many other accomplishments, my cat is quite incapable.

It is the having of a life in this sense that is one of the things that marks out creatures such as us from other living things. This is not merely a biological difference between us and others, but a difference that is properly ontological—human beings, and any beings sufficiently like us in the relevant respects, are in the world in a way that is very different from other beings, living or unliving.⁹ Indeed, it is perhaps only creatures that can be said to have a life (in the sense I have outlined here) that can also be said to have any sense of the world as such, since to be in the world, and to have a sense of one’s being in the world, must involve both a sense of the world and of one’s life within that world—a sense both of the world as world and one’s life as one’s own. It is, indeed, only through being able to locate oneself within the world that one can order one’s experience so as to be able to have a sense of oneself as the subject of that experience; equally, it is only through having a sense of the order of experience, and so of oneself, that one is able properly to have a sense of the world, and the objects and events within it.¹⁰ In these respects it would seem that to have a life is to have a world and that to have a world is also to have a life.¹¹

Thus, in having a sense of one’s life or a sense of the world, one does not merely have a grasp, separately and discretely, of the various elements that are part of the world and that also go to make up a life. My cat has a grasp of aspects or features of the world much as I do—although we have very different reactions to its presence, and may even “understand” its presence in very different ways, we are both, for instance, aware of the wattlebird that drinks from the pool outside the window where I work—but my cat cannot properly be said, on the account I have given here, to have a life or to have a sense of the world. The having of a life or a world involves more than just a capacity to grasp and react to aspects of the world. Instead, it is a matter of having some sense of the whole within which those aspects are placed. In this respect, the sight of the bird drinking is, in my own case, located within a larger horizon that encompasses myself and other persons as well as other events and objects—a horizon that, like the horizon of the visual field, bounds and so unifies that which lies within it, while also stretching out to the manifold possibilities that lie beyond those bounds.¹² Since the having of a life and of world consists precisely in having an understanding of this larger horizon of possibility—of the limits and range of possibilities—then, insofar as my cat lacks any sense of such a horizon, she does not properly have a life or a sense of the world. Moreover, this does not, it should be noted, entail any “lack” or “deficit” on the part of my cat. We have a tendency to think of other creatures and entities, as well as ourselves, as if we stood apart from our defining capacities and potentialities. But we are not first beings, thought in some abstract way, who are then associated with some capacities or other. Our mode of being is itself intimately tied to the capacities and potentialities that belong to us. There is thus no possibility of making sense of a lack or deficit in that mode of being, since for a creature or entity to be the being that it is just is for it to be the way that is proper to it.¹³

Unity and the Idea of a Life

Just as the world consists in more than a mere concatenation of features, but has a unity integral to it, so a life is not simply a collection of events or experiences, and nor is its continuity a matter only of the physical continuity of a single body. Events may be unified by being part of a single temporal or causal sequence, and yet those events need not be part of the same life; a body may continue in existence—for instance, in the case of a body kept alive in the absence of significant brain activity—even though the life associated with that body has ceased to be. The unity of a life is something over and above mere causal, temporal, or even bodily continuity. It must be a unity internal to the life—a unity worked out from within it and intrinsic to it¹⁴—a unity that is paradigmatically expressed through the capacity of the creature whose life it is to have a sense of that life as its own. A life is consequently something that can be understood as a whole, as having a certain shape, and as being in some important sense self-directed. In this latter sense a life is undoubtedly something on which one can “work”—as one can work on the way one’s life is oriented, on the way it exemplifies certain ideals or traits of character, on the sorts of possibilities that it enacts—and in working on one’s life one also, of course, shapes and molds one’s own identity.

The very idea of a life, then, carries with it a sense of self-awareness, self-conception, and self-direction—perhaps something of this is suggested in the injunction, typically directed at someone who seems to have no sense of what is important or who lacks any meaningful or ordered way of living, to “get a life!”—and so the having of a life is also a matter of the having of a sense of self-identity. It is indeed through one’s ability to recognize one’s life as one’s own that one is able to shape and direct that life, and so establish it as a having a unity that is integral to it. Insofar as the having of a life and of a sense of the world are also tied together, so the unity of a life and of the self is a unity necessarily worked out in terms of a particular locatedness and orientation within the spatial and temporal frame of the world. Properly understood, it is a topological unity that is at issue, and so it is a unity that cannot be understood in terms of the temporal or the spatial alone. Nevertheless, the unity of a life is often thought in terms that give primary emphasis to the temporal aspect that appears here (a tendency of thought that is not accidental), and so to the way in which the unity at issue is one that must be established and maintained with respect to the unity of past and present actuality, together with future possibility. This is certainly the direction in which Heidegger moves in Being and Time.¹⁵

If one is to focus on temporality, then the temporal unity at issue will be a unity that operates both over time and at a time.¹⁶ Thus, the set of actions and attitudes that constitute a life must be a coherent and integrated set (a coherence and integration partly expressed in the unity and integration of the body), even if that coherence and integration is imperfect (as, in a certain sense, it must be, given that it is a unity that necessarily encompasses multiplicity), and having a sense of the unity of one’s life must be a matter of having a sense of the way in which one’s past actions and attitudes are connected to and consistent with one’s present and future actions and attitudes.¹⁷ Memory and recollection, along with purposiveness and imagination, are necessary elements in this unity, since it is through both one’s sense of the past and one’s projections and anticipations of the future that one’s life is integrated and unified over as well as at a time.¹⁸

The capacity to understand oneself as existing “over time” is necessary not merely in order to have a conception of the unity of one’s life, and of the unity of the actions and attitudes that are the constituent elements of that life, but also for the very existence of such a life and for the existence of those elements. A sense of time and possibility is essential to the capacity for complex, integrated action and to the having of those attitudes on which action of this sort is grounded—that is, complex forms of belief, desire, intention, and so forth. To be capable of belief, for instance, is to be capable of having an attitude that one can recognize as related to other attitudes one holds, an attitude that may be based on past experience, may influence present actions, and may also be open to modification in the light of future events. Indeed, the very concept of attitudes such as belief or desire is closely connected with the idea of an enduring subject to whom those attitudes belong and who is capable both of being acted upon and acting in ways largely determined or mediated by those attitudes; it is also connected with the idea of the world as that which both constrains us and yet also offers new possibilities.¹⁹

The skein of connections here is tangled: to have a life is to have sense of that life as one’s own and a sense of the world in which that life is lived; and these notions in turn mutually imply a sense of oneself as existing in and through time, and so as having a life grounded in past and present actuality and projected into a future of possibility. To this tangled skein we may add two more threads. The first concerns responsibility and self-direction. To have a life is to have a sense of one’s life as one’s own, and part of the having of a life in this sense is that one’s life is something for which one takes responsibility. But since one can hardly take proper responsibility for that over which one has no control, so one component in the having of a life would seem to be just the ability (always constrained by circumstance) to shape and direct that life.

Here, once more, we are forced to recognize the close interdependence that obtains between the capacity for self-reflection and self-recognition, the capacity for coherent action, and the having of a sense of temporality, possibility, and history. Moreover, since the having of a sense of a life—indeed, the very living of a life—involves some understanding of both past and present actuality and future possibility, so one can say that to have a life is knowingly, on the basis of the already determined actuality of the life, to hold oneself open to the possibilities of that life and to be aware of the possibilities that it presents—including the limits to those possibilities. To have a life is precisely to have a sense of the bounds of that life, of what is part of it and what is not, of what is possible within it and what is not. And since this understanding of possibility and of limit may be put in terms of a capacity to question, so one might say that to have a life is to be capable of putting that life in question—a conclusion that can be seen to express much the same point that Heidegger makes, in Being and Time, by his characterization of Dasein as instantiated in the human as that mode of being whose own being is an issue for it.²⁰ What is brought to light here is the very close connection between the capacity for questioning and the capacity for recognition of oneself. Only insofar as we have a sense of ourselves can we put ourselves or our world into question. Moreover, only insofar as we can put ourselves into question can we be said to have a sense of ourselves. In the work of Donald Davidson, the way questioning enters in is evident in his characterization of belief as “taking up the slack” between “objective truth” and what is held true.²¹ In this respect, the idea of belief opens up a domain not of indubitable certainty, but precisely of questionability.

In having a life, one has a sense of one’s self-identity, and to have this is to have a sense of one’s life as consisting in more than the bare causal or logical connectedness of the elements that make up that life or the simple acquaintance with those elements. It is precisely to have an understanding of one’s various actions and attitudes as unified parts of a single, temporally (and spatially) extended, rationally connected, and (though I have not made much of this point) causally integrated structure. Since the unity that is at stake here is indeed a complex unity, it is also a unity that is able to tolerate a certain degree of disunity. Every life is but imperfectly integrated, and the connections that go to make up a life, any life, always display an element of fragmentation. Even the best of us act foolishly, contrary to our interests, in ways that seem to us irrational or mistaken; we do not always well understand our own desires and motives; we forget, we disappoint ourselves, we feel regret. Conceivably a life could become so fragmented that it would cease even to be a life (and indeed such a possibility will be important later in this discussion). For the most part, however, our lives retain an ordering and unity, even in the face of the always imperfect coordination of those lives. Such unity is exhibited in and maintained by means of our own sense of self—by means of our own capacity for self-conceptualization, self-reflection, and self-direction.

The unity of a life is thus neither pregiven (it does not exist prior to the actual articulation of that life) nor does it consist in the unity of some simple self (it does not consist in anything independent of or apart from such articulation), even though it can be expressed through the idea of the self or person whose life it is. The unity of a life is precisely something to be articulated or worked out through the actual living of that life and the complex ordering in time and space of the actions and attitudes that make it up. As a direct consequence of this, the unity of any particular life is inseparable from the unity of a particular structure of activity. It is because one’s actions and attitudes constitute an integrated whole, even though that imperfection is always, necessarily, imperfect, that those actions and attitudes can count as part of a single life.

Although the integration at issue here is not that of mere causal or logical continuity, and necessarily encompasses more than just the behavioral and attitudinal alone, it is nevertheless an integration that is especially evident in, and articulated through, the complex causal and rational interconnection of actions and attitudes: one’s attitudes need to be causally related to one’s actions and to other attitudes, and also generally consistent with one another and with one’s actions. Such integration is most clearly evident in the integrated, organized operation of a living body. Indeed, it is through the way in which we operate as embodied agents that we can be said to be the sorts of creatures that believe, desire, hope, fear, and the rest, since it is the active body that is the primary focus for our involvement with things and other persons—in truth it is the proper “locus” for such involvement—and it is primarily through practical involvement with things in the world that attitudes are themselves constituted.

Attitudes, whether of belief, desire, hope, or fear, are identified through relations to specific contents—one fears that interest rates will rise, one hopes that the weather will be fine, one believes that Fred is an honest man, one desires that one’s friends should come to dinner. And those contents are themselves dependent, first, on the interconnection of attitudes themselves—so that the belief that Fred is an honest man depends on other beliefs about what it is to be honest, about who Fred is, and on other beliefs following on from these—and, second, on the interconnection of attitudes in general with the world. Although one may be mistaken in believing that Fred is honest, one cannot believe that Fred is honest if one is mistaken about Fred’s identity and about what it is to be an honest man—or, at least, the more error that creeps in here, the less clear it will be just what one does believe. The point is that one cannot divorce questions of the content of attitudes from questions about the relation between those attitudes and their objects—most importantly, one cannot separate questions about the contents of beliefs from questions about the truth of those beliefs. And not only must our attitudes in general stand in the right relation to those worldly things and happenings that are their objects, but in the case of the vast majority of the contents of those attitudes, those contents are constituted in terms that are quite specific to our particular activities and surroundings. Thus one understands concepts of identity and honesty, of weather and dinner, friendship and finance only insofar as one can apply those concepts to one’s own concrete experience and insofar as those concepts can be employed in a coherent fashion in organizing and directing one’s own thinking and acting. The understanding of concepts, therefore, and with it the possibility of content, is thus closely tied to the capacity to interact with things and other persons in the world and so to the possibility of organized, embodied agency—an understanding that might be characterized in contemporary philosophical parlance as both “holist” and “externalist.”²²

The conclusion to which this line of reasoning inevitably tends is that the very having of a life is dependent on one’s existence as an active, embodied creature. Our self-identity is consequently bound up, as is the possibility of contentful experience, with our organized activity in the world—we might say that our self-identity is bound up with the worldly projects and activities in which we are engaged. Such projects and activities are orderings “of” the world,²³ but they also function to establish a certain ordering that constitutes an identity of self. One should understand a life as given its identity, then, not in virtue of the person whose life it is—for to be a person is indeed, in the sense I am using here, just to have a life—but through its being a particular ordering of the world, a particular way of being-in-the-world, of which the being whose life it is has can be said to have a sense. A life is not something independent of such ordering, but constituted through it. So my own identity and existence is established through my active involvement with the objects and events around me rather than being something given prior to and independently of those objects and events.²⁴ The active involvement at issue here—what I referred to above as a “structure of activity”—cannot itself be separated off from the larger worldly structure that gives shape to as well as enables that structure and the activity in which it consists. It is thus that we can understand lives, and selves, not as already constituted entities that then shape the world in which they find themselves, but, to adapt a phrase from Lawrence Durrell, as themselves “functions of place,”²⁵ or of the complex working out of place—a working out that operates through the embedded interaction of bodies and environments. Moreover, the idea of a life as a certain unity of activities or projects can now be seen as not so much a unity given through a projection that is itself unified by the one who projects, as instead, a unity of activity or projection that is given through a certain interconnectedness and unity of place.²⁶

The unity of my life, and of myself as a person, is the unity, always incomplete, of an ongoing and interconnected set of activities and projects as worked out in relation to an encompassing environment or locale—it is also a unity that is recognized as such by the one whose life it is. Of course, insofar as one’s self-identity is indeed tied to one’s active, embodied involvement in the world, and so to a certain sort of projective activity, so the idea of a life as involving recognition of future possibility can itself be seen as tied to the idea of a life as a matter of self-aware, projective activity. The capacity to form a conception of oneself and to have a sense of one’s life as one’s own is thus not a capacity to grasp something independent of or distinct from the particular connection of objects and events that go to make up a particular life—it is indeed just the capacity to recognize those objects and events as being connected in a certain way, namely, as part of that life that is one’s own and so as part of the projects that make up that life, and to act in a way that, for the most part, preserves that integrity.²⁷

Insofar as the unity of a life is such that it can be represented within that life (through the concept of self) and that representation can itself function in the maintenance and formation of a life’s unity (as the concept of self is part of that by means of which one’s life is unified), so it seems proper to say that the unity of a life, for a creature that can properly be said to have a life, is indeed a unity intrinsic to that life—it is part of the very nature of the sort of life it is that it be capable of forming a concept of itself as a whole. A creature that has a life in the sense I have used it here is also a creature that has a conception of itself, that can refer to itself using the first-person (and that can also refer to others in a way distinct from this), that can take itself as an object of its own reflections, and whose life can therefore be said to belong to it alone. Such a creature can be said to have a capacity for self-knowledge that is itself closely tied to the creature’s having of a life. The idea of the “ownness” of a life—whether put in terms of my life as “mine” or as “belonging to me”—is therefore closely tied to the idea of unity. Precisely because the unity of a life is not a perfect unity, but one that must include within it a degree of disunity, so the unity of a life can only be understood through the idea of the person whose life it is and through that person’s own capacity to understand that life as their own. This is not, however, to make the identity of a life dependent on some prior notion of “person” nor to appeal to the sense of “ownness” as the criterion of identity for lives. Rather, it is to point to the way in which the unity of a life is tied to the capacity for a certain sort of self-recognition and self-conceptualization within that life.

Since the unity of a life is not merely a matter of the unity given by certain connections (causal or otherwise) among the elements of a life, but is a unity that consists in the self-presentation of the life as a whole—in the creature whose life it is having a sense of that life as indeed its own—reductionist accounts of the self, of which Derek Parfit’s may be taken to be exemplary,²⁸ and that treat the self as able to be reduced to a mere concatenation of psychological states, cannot be adequate as accounts of the unity of a life. Such accounts cannot, for instance, explain the way in which the unity of a life can be preserved in a manner consistent with the often imperfect integration of the elements of that life—and they do not even attempt to offer such an explanation. This might be taken to be a simple consequence of the fact that these accounts have little regard for the concept of a life as such, at least as developed here, but such disregard itself suggests a failure to understand the way in which that concept, and the unity that it implies, is intimately connected with the very possibility of the having of contentful attitudes and of organized activity. Reductionist accounts of this sort also sever the connection between the notion of a life and of self or person and the use of the first person. Just as the having of a life and the having of a sense of one’s life are connected, so too is the notion of a life or of the self closely connected with the use of sentences containing “I,” “me,” and “mine.” In the use of such first-personal language we refer to and also elaborate on a form of self-identity that is not captured in any mere continuity of body, of causal or temporal connection, or of propositional content. Such a focus on continuity alone fails to capture the connected sense in which the having of a life, and presumably the existence of a self, is tied to the capacity to recognize one’s life as one’s own, and so to the capacity for self-recognition and self-conceptualization. On reductionist accounts there is thus no real sense in which my life is my own, and although this enables such as Parfit to argue for the possibility of a mode of continuation beyond death, it is only by having abandoned the very idea of a life or a self of which death is the ending.

Life and the Unity of Narrative

The organization and unity of a life is essentially a matter of the organization and unity of the activities that make up that life and the integration of those activities as part of a larger set of activities that may be understood as the life itself. One way in which such unity is expressed, but through which it may also be constituted, is in the unity and integrity of a particular life-story. Indeed the sort of unity that is at issue in the unity of a life is not the unity of some self distinct from a set of experiences and involvements, but is just the unity of an integrated form of active engagement in the world (what we might well think of as a “project”), and that may also be said to consist in a form of self-conceptualization paradigmatically expressed in the form of narrative. In this latter respect the unity of a life can also be understood in terms of the unity of a narrative, and this is so both with respect to those smaller projects in which we are always engaged and with respect to the project of a life as a whole within which those various projects are integrated and of which they form parts.²⁹

Narrative clearly exemplifies the sort of complex unity over time that seems appropriate to the understanding of the unity of a life—for a story to be a story is precisely for it to combine different events and characters in a way that is not a mere relating of causal connectedness, but is a combining of those elements so as to allow them to be seen and to be understood in quite specific ways. Yet not only does the story exhibit its own unity, through its telling it also unifies the events and actions on which it focuses and so exhibits those events and actions as themselves having a certain unity of their own. Through narrative, then, we come to understand not only the nature of a character or of some event, but we also come to see how the character or the event is exhibited, develops, and is articulated through a manifold of particular happenings, relationships, and actions. In fact, one might claim more generally that, when it comes to an understanding of human lives and the human significance of events, it is through narrative that such understanding is primarily to be achieved, for only through narrative can an appropriately rich interconnection of elements over time be achieved.³⁰

The idea that narrative may have an important role in the understanding of the unity of a human life can be seen to lie behind the view of many of those historians who have objected to the simple application of deductive-nomological models to historical explanation. Perhaps the idea that notions of rationality have an ineliminable role in explanations of human action, so that those explanations cannot be reduced to purely causal accounts, can also be seen to suggest a similarly ineliminable role for narrative in such explanations—to cite a reason for an action, it might be said, is also to place that action within a particular narrative space and to indicate a particular kind of story that can be told about the actor. But it is not just that narrative is an important tool in the understanding of human life from “the outside.” Our own understanding of ourselves would seem to be bound up with our ability to tell stories about who we are and what we have done, and to construct narrative accounts of our lives. Indeed, it may be that only through such stories can we bring order into our lives to begin with. Thus, Bruno Bettelheim, for instance, has emphasized the role of the fairy story in enabling young children to give meaning to the world into which they are growing,³¹ while Paul Ricoeur, Alasdair MacIntyre, and others have pointed to the way in which narratives and narrative figures provide the means by which we bring order to our lives and by which we can assign value and significance to events—in MacIntyre’s case, they provide the cultural schemata by which we make sense of the world.³² Thus while Louis Mink and Hayden White tell us that stories are not lived and lives are not told,³³ the truth, perhaps, is that only a life about which stories are told is a life that is lived.

To live a life is also, we might say, to be involved in telling and retelling the story of that life. Of course, since none of us can know the real ending to our lives, and for the most part we have only the haziest memories, if any, of our beginnings, the stories that we tell provide ways to unify our lives on the basis of a particular position within those lives. So the stories we tell ourselves are projections of our lives rather than necessarily factual accounts of that in which those lives consist. In this respect we can see how the capacity for storytelling is actually quite closely connected with the capacity for agency, since the coordination and purposiveness necessary for action, as well as the appropriation of a past context that provides the grounding for such action, is dependent on just the ability to understand the way in which actions fit within larger narratives. It is through narrative, then, that we are able to project our lives from the past and present into the future, and in so doing we are also able explore and map out possibilities for action.

In narrative, one is able not only to project one’s life forward, but to understand one’s life as an ongoing project and so as constituted with respect to certain central aims and values. Indeed, given the necessarily temporal dimension to the project and projection of a life, and the complexity of the connections that go to make up a life, it would seem that only a narrative structure would be sufficient to capture the sort of unity at stake. Understanding a life as a project or as a narrative can thus be seen to be closely related ideas—projects can be seen to have a structure exemplified through narrative, and one may view the project of a whole life as just the formation of a life that carries a certain sort of narrative integrity. In this respect, the having of a life is not only a matter of having a sense of one’s life as one’s own, but is also a matter of one’s own making of that life, both of which converge in the capacity to understand that life within some narrative frame. To have a life, one might say, is to be a creature that makes itself through its ability to tell stories about itself (as well as through the other actions and activities to which those stories relate), and to shape its life through those stories.

Mortality and Finitude

For there to be a life, there must be a capacity to have some sense of the life as a whole—such is indeed implied in the idea that to have a life is to have a sense of that life as one’s own. This means having a sense of a whole that extends over a certain time and space—having a sense of the past background to current actions and events, having a sense of the extension of those actions and events into the future, and, although I have not said much about this, having a sense of the located character of those same actions and events (even if the understanding is primarily manifest in action itself). Having a sense of one’s life as a whole is thus also having a sense of the perspectival and situated character of one’s life—of the topos that belongs to that life. For creatures that are finite, having a grasp of their lives as a whole in this way must ultimately mean having some sense, no matter how rudimentary, of the way in which their lives encompass a concrete history from their birth to that end of possibilities that is their death. But what of creatures that have no such end in view—because either they do not die or because, for whatever reason, they cannot grasp their own deaths? What of the possibility of a life that was lived without the idea of its own ending? Can one properly have a life that is understood to stretch endlessly into the future in this way?

At this point, some clarification is required. There is a difference, or so it would seem, between having a sense of one’s mortality and the fact of such mortality. After all, one’s understanding of the facts of one’s life may be mistaken, and it might be that one conceives of one’s life as having a finite span, and yet one’s life never actually comes to an end. The questions that I put in the preceding paragraph took no account of the difference that is indicated here between knowing of the possibility of one’s death and the fact that one can die, and the discussion that follows will also tend to ignore this difference. In doing so, it might appear that an important distinction is being left to one side. Maybe to have a life it is necessary that one have a sense of that life as having a limit in death, and yet it is not necessary that such a limit actually be reached—not necessary for there to be a life that it should indeed come to an end.

In fact, as may already be evident, and as I hope will become clearer in the course of the discussion below, any creature that can have a sense of its life as a whole will be a creature that dies, since the death at issue here is not some arbitrary event that exists independently of the life whose ending it is or independently of the having a sense of that life or its finitude. To have a sense of one’s life is also to have a sense of that life as finite, and so already to take the fact of mortality into the structure of one’s life, and for there to be a life such that one can have a sense of that life is also for that very life to be finite, to be a life that will end. These two—the sense of one’s own mortality and the fact of that mortality—are bound closely together.³⁴ It is this argument, or the details that underpin it, that must now be followed in a little more detail.

For a creature to be said to have a life it must, I have claimed, have a sense of that life as its own. The question before us now can thus be put as the question of whether a creature that does not die or that has no sense of its own death—of its mortality—can be said to have a sense of its own life. We might also ask whether such a creature could be said to properly have a sense of itself. Ordinarily this question might seem peculiar, even arbitrary—why suppose that one’s mortality or one’s grasp of one’s mortality would have anything at all to do with one’s grasp of oneself or one’s self-identity? Surely, it seems, whether one dies and whether one has any conception of one’s own death is a purely contingent matter, unrelated to whether one can be said to have a life or to have a grasp of that life.

Although he raises the matter in a rather different form, Sartre makes a rather similar point in arguing against any attempt to tie finitude to mortality. “Since death is always beyond my subjectivity,” he writes, “there is no place for it in my subjectivity,”³⁵ arguing that:

Ordinarily the belief seems to be that it is death that constitutes our finitude and which reveals it to us. From this combination it results that death takes on the shape of an ontological necessity and that finitude, on the other hand, borrows from death its contingent character. . . . But if we consider the matter a little more closely, we detect their error: death is a contingent fact which belongs to facticity; finitude is an ontological structure of the for-itself which determines freedom and exists only in and through the free project of the end which makes my being known to me. In other words human reality would remain finite even if it were immortal, because it makes itself finite by choosing itself as human.³⁶

Death, according to Sartre, is thus a contingent matter, whereas both our finitude and our having of a life are not. Whether we are finite creatures, and whether we are creatures that can be said to have a life, is therefore not dependent, according to Sartre, on whether we are capable of death.

An immediate problem with this account, however, is that “death” may refer to either of two logically distinct events: the ending of the integrated functioning of the body or the ending of a life.³⁷ Sartre does not himself distinguish between these two events, and ordinarily, of course, the events coincide, but they need not do so. Indeed the fact that we can conceive of the possibility of increased human longevity through the replacement of bodily parts and, in the case of some science fiction possibilities, of a whole body (although the latter raises many more questions) suggests that we do not need to identify the ending of the body with the ending of a life. This is not to say that the identity of a life is in no way dependent on the identity of the body. But one can grant that a particular life is lived always in relation to a particular body (insofar as that body is a part of the set of objects and events with respect to which a particular life is constituted)³⁸ without having to admit that the span of a particular life through time is logically indistinguishable from the span of a particular body’s continued existence through time. The question as to whether a creature can be said to have a life if it is not capable of dying, or if it lacks any grasp of the possibility of its own death, is thus not a question about whether a creature must have a body that can die if that creature is to have a life (although an answer to this question can certainly be inferred). Rather, the question is whether a life that has no end is indeed a life, or whether a creature can have a sense of its own life in the absence of any sense of the ending of that life.

Once the question at issue is put in these terms, we can begin to see that the connection between the having of a life and the capacity for death need not be so arbitrary or contingent after all, for if the having of a life is the obtaining of a certain unity among the elements of that life (among a set of experiences, behaviors, and attitudes), then it seems reasonable to ask whether such a unity can obtain over an unending span of time. And here we come to another consideration to which the sort of account offered by Sartre apparently pays scant attention: if a life is constituted as an ongoing set or activities or projects, and if such a life, and the activities in which it consists, are constituted through the ordering of objects and events in the world, then it is hard to see how there could be the right sort of unity or integrity to a life that was understood as spanning an unending period of time and as consisting in what would presumably be an unending series of activities and projects. The immortals described in one of the stories of Jorge Luis Borges are indeed creatures in whose infinitely extended lives everything is possible and consequently nothing is significant. As Borges puts it, “No one is someone; a single immortal man is all men. Like Cornelius Agrippa, I am god, hero, philosopher, demon, and world—which is a long-winded way of saying that I am not.”³⁹

How could one conceive of a life without end as constituting a unity—that is, as constituting a single life? Not only might there be quite radical discontinuities between a portion of this “life” lived over one period and a portion lived over another, but it is hard to see how, from within that life, any activity or project could possess significance in giving identity to that life as such. Our lives are largely constituted by the activities in which we engage and so are constituted in terms of the particular orderings of the world that we establish. But for a life without end there need be no limit on the orderings that are possible within that life and no sense in which that life need depend on any finite number of choices. Given an endless span of time, the possibilities that a particular life might encompass are themselves endless. In that case it seems that the Sartrean claim that death, as the ending of the span of a life, bears no essential relation to finitude would seem to be simply false. Finitude is the finitude of my activities and projects, and this does not mean simply that those projects are finite in the scope of what they encompass, but that they cannot be projected endlessly. The same is true for the “project” that is my own life. Insofar as I can grasp it as my own, and insofar as this is necessary for me to have a life, such a life cannot be projected forever.

It is precisely because we cannot play through an endless series of choices, an infinite series of possibilities, that the choices we do make become so important to us (and so are part of what is most properly our own): those choices establish the character and identity of our lives; they allow certain things to show up as valuable; they establish a certain ordering of and orientation within the world. It is perhaps for this reason that the idea of immortality can seem to entail an emptying out of life, even a form of boredom. A life without end would be a life in which the framework within which value and significance was established or within which it was able to appear was absent. This seems to be one of the inconsistencies in any sort of reductionist approach to the self and so another problem for such an account. Parfit, for instance, argues that death should hold no fear for us, since what is important for identity is just the continuation of certain attitudes and values and these may continue independently of the existence of any particular embodied creature.⁴⁰ But by removing any sense of self-identity Parfit also removes any sense in which things can matter just insofar as doing so removes the sense in which they can matter to me or to any other individual. And as content is itself constituted through the unitary activity that makes for a life, so value can only appear within the context of such an integrated, organized unity of activity. But the possibility of such a unity requires a recognition of a unity and identity that is more than just a matter of the persistence of certain attitudes or values. As Paul Ricoeur asks, “really, how can we ask ourselves about what matters if we could not ask to whom the thing mattered or not? Does not the questioning about what matters or not depend upon self-concern, which indeed seems to be constitutive of selfhood?”⁴¹

One way of understanding the nature of a life is through the idea of a certain unity of projects. Such a view seems to present problems, however, for any account that takes the temporal finitude of a life to be merely contingent and allows the possibility of a life without end. If we look to conceive of the unity of a life through the idea of the unity of narrative, then similar problems arise: Does a story that lacks an ending, a narrative that goes on forever, really constitute a story? Does it constitute a single story? One can certainly conceive of stories that go on, perhaps, forever. But such stories are surely understood better as sequences of stories, sequences that may be unified in only an attenuated sense that is given warrant, perhaps, by the presence of some connecting thread (perhaps some loose continuity of content or theme), rather than as a single story. Maybe an unending narrative should be understood as not one story, but an infinite sequence of stories in which there is always, rather like the tales of Scheherazade, another story to come.⁴² Maybe a “life” without end should be similarly understood as not a single life, but an infinite sequence of lives. Of course, in such an unending sequence, not only might we be left with a multiplicity of finite lives rather than a single infinite life, but the sense in which we have even a single sequence might itself be quite tenuous—perhaps the only unifying principle would be that the various lives are part of a single causal chain, and this hardly seems to make for a unity in any appropriately significant sense.

The existence of a life is a matter of the existence of certain sorts of connections between objects and events—to live a life is to impart a certain ordering to the things in the world. In this respect one cannot divorce a life from the objects and events in the world with respect to which that life is constituted. If a life has its character in a particular way of being in the world—in standing in a particular relation to objects, events, and places and to other persons, other lives—then one cannot separate the life from the relations that constitute it. Thus, the character of a life, and so the life itself, cannot be grasped independently of a grasp of the relations that are constitutive of that life; independently of the concrete particularities of the life that is lived; independently of the particular involvements and commitments in which that life consists. This means that we have to conceive of lives as encompassing more than just the self as narrowly conceived (or perhaps, we have to conceive of the self as encompassing more than just some set of internalized “experiences”). A life must be understood as given in a certain “being-in-the-world,” to use Heidegger’s phrase, that encompasses self, others, things, events, locales, and environments—a being-in-the-world that should itself be understood in terms of a certain complex, multiple, and active placedness.⁴³

This is not to say that the relations that are part of a life (or the persons, things, events, and locales that are implicated in those relations) cannot change without the life of which they are a part also being destroyed, but that there must always be a certain continuity in those relations and some sort of integration between them. Too catastrophic a breakdown in the integration of a life or between elements of a life—say, a breakdown that occurs in such a way that it separates what might otherwise have been a single life into two quite separate wholes—may itself constitute the ending of one life and the start of a new. This why the body alone cannot be wholly determinative of a life—the body may remain and yet the life be extinguished—even though body and life are in so many respects almost the same.⁴⁴

We often talk of beginning a new life, of breaking with the past, of becoming a new person (even of being “born again”), when we mean to indicate the way in which our lives, though still the same lives, have undergone some radical or important change. But such turns of phrase can also apply to cases where we really do mean that there has been a change in the seeming identity of the life that is being lived—in relation, for instance, to catastrophic breakdowns or changes in personality or character. Thus someone who undergoes a severe trauma of the sort associated with some form of neurophysiological damage may well be said literally to cease to be the person they were previously. It is hard to comprehend the phenomenology that might be involved in such a breakdown, but it may well be appropriate in such cases, and reactions from relatives and friends may bear this out, to regard such a breakdown as no less the ending of a life than the death of the body. And this may be so even if the person concerned remains a functional human being, simply because the involvements, commitments, and attitudes that previously made up that person’s life have been completely altered.

If the ending of a life is essentially a matter of the breakdown in the integrity of the life—a breakdown in the ongoing projects, in the involvements, commitments, and attitudes, that make up that life—then a life may indeed end without the ending of the body with which that life is associated. And similarly, the idea of a life that never comes to an end may be better expressed in terms of the idea of a project that never breaks down or whose breakdown can never be envisaged, rather than in terms of the death of some particular body. Yet future possibilities always carry the possibility of ceasing to be because they carry with them the possible destruction of what we are (and we are not just this set of bodily parts or even this set of dispositions), because they carry with them the possible destruction of those objects and events, those projects, with respect to which our identity is established. Thus, insofar as my worldly surroundings and activities are contingent, so my continuity and identity is always uncertain, always fragile, always determined within a finite frame.

That our self-identity is indeed connected with the identity of that which surrounds us—in which we find our place—is indicated by the way in which the desire for a continuation of our projects, and of ourselves—for immortality—can be manifest in a desire to make the world around us as permanent and unchanging as possible. But this desire, common though it may be, represents a failure to understand the nature of our projects themselves and of our involvement in the world. An unchanging world would be a world that made no demands on us, in which we would no longer have any significant involvement, and in which there would be no life to live. It would also, perhaps, be a world in which we could no longer find anything that would require our attention and our care, since it is surely only that which has a certain fragility, and that which therefore must be cared for, that can be worthy of such attention. If there was nothing in such a world to care for, would there be anything to care about—would it even be a world in which there could be anything of worth? On this basis, to wish for a world of unchanging stability and permanence, and for the immortality that such a world might be thought to bring, is actually to wish, paradoxical though it may seem, for a certain kind of “death.” The possibility of the kind of ending that comes with the fragility of our projects, the essential changeability of our world (and of the locales within it), and the mortality of our existence is thus intrinsic to the possibility both of our own self-identity and to the having of a life.⁴⁵

The End of Life—the Nothing

The having of a life requires a sense of that life as a whole. To have a sense of one’s life requires understanding it through the ongoing unity and integrity of the elements, including the projects and activities, that make up that life. But the very identity of those elements, and of the life as a whole, cannot be separated from the particular entities, events, and locales with which those elements, and that life, are involved. A life that continued endlessly would be a life that was capable of continuous mutation, and yet such a life would not be a single life at all. At most it could be a succession of lives—the realization of something like the “dispersal” (Zerstreuung) that threatens Dasein and which Heidegger considers in Being and Time.⁴⁶ Not only would this sort of life lack any sense of genuine of temporal unity (and would also, as a consequence, lack any genuine spatial, or more properly, topological, unity⁴⁷), but it would not be a life about the shape of which one could care—in fact, such a life would have no shape. In that case we can say that immortality (and this includes the sort of quasi immortality that reductionism offers) means a dissolution of identity, a dissolution of self, and this hardly seems like immortality at all.

To suppose that one could have a life that did not end is actually to suppose a mode of living that would not be a life at all. The ending of a life is part of what constitutes a life, and the sense of one’s life as having an end is part of the structure of one’s life that itself reflects the very character of that life—it is thus not a sense of one’s life that can be other than true to the reality of that life. To have a life, to have a world, to have a sense of value and significance, is also to have a sense of one’s own fragility and mortality, and to be fragile and mortal—to have a sense of being given over to death and to be capable of death. As Heidegger comments:

The mortals are human beings. They are called mortals because they can die. To die means to be capable of death. Only man dies. The animal perishes. It has death neither ahead of it nor behind it. Death is the shrine of Nothing, that is, of that which in every respect is never something that merely exists, but which nevertheless presences, even as the mystery of Being itself. As the shrine of Nothing, death harbours within itself the presencing of Being. As the shrine of Nothing, death is the shelter of Being. We now call mortals mortal—not because their earthly life comes to an end, but because they are capable of death as death. Mortals are who they are, as mortals, present in the shelter of Being. They are the presencing relation to Being as Being.⁴⁸

To be capable of death is simply to find oneself placed in the world, and to be placed in the world is to be capable of death. The sense of “being placed” that is at issue here is not merely of being able to be located in relation to other things and other places (as one might do using a GPS or a map), but rather in the sense of standing within that open realm in which self, other selves, and things first come to presence. The very possibility of such an opening is essentially dependent upon that opening being bounded in a way that presupposes an end no less than a beginning that is already encompassed in the idea of the placed character of that opening. Such placedness is evident in the embodied character of human being, in its historicality, its fragility, and in its essential mortality. Such placedness is itself grounded in nothing that lies beyond or outside of it. It finds its meaning and significance within the very same relations as appear within it and by which it is constituted.⁴⁹ The shrine of nothing is thus also the shrine of home and hearth, of the threshold, of the bounded, of place.