Confronting Death

1. Confronting Death The concept “death” makes the absent present, paradoxically inviting us to confront what is un-confrontable. No one can die for us. Yet we can also never survive, and thus be present for, our own death. When our death has arrived, we have departed. Instead, we confront the inevitability of our approaching death and grapple with the events of the deaths of those around us. Public intellectual Cornel West has argued that philosophy as a pursuit is only possible when our infinite desire confronts the reality of its finitude in death. We will explore a number of ways in which philosophizing has emerged from and responded to death. We will consider various definitions of death, the role of fear in dying, and whether death is a primarily individual or social phenomenon. This presentation will consist primarily in the group discussion of a selection of quotes from philosophers of death across the history of philosophy. Katherine Davies, Ph.D.

2. What is a human being? • Plato • A thinking being, i.e. a being who can have a conversation with itself • Two famous definitions from Aristotle • the Rational Animal • the Political Animal • Hegel • a natural being that can act against nature • Nietzsche • the Interesting Animal • Butler • A being who lives two lives, one biological and another defined by relations to others

3. What about Death? • Several pre-Socratic thinkers, the epic poet Homer and the tragedian Sophocles in particular, defined human beings not in reference to our capacity to reason or our relatedness to others, but rather in reference to our relation to death. • For both these thinkers, human beings are stranded between animals (who are going to die but don’t know it) and the gods (who aren’t going to die and know it). • Human beings are thus first and foremost mortals.

4. Heidegger on how to determine the Human Older Man: “…Whenever we previously spoke about the essence of the human-and that means about the occidental determination of the essence of the human-each time you focused only on the characterization of the human as the living being that thinks. To be sure, this definition was already common in the ancient Greek world. But in the most ancient Greek world, the human was thought otherwise-namely, as ὁ θνητός, as the mortal in distinction to the immortals, the gods. This characterization of the human seems to me to be incomparably deeper than the one first mentioned, which is gained by means of holding in view the human by himself, isolated and detached from the great relationships in which he properly stands.” -Martin Heidegger, “Evening Conversation” 143-4

5. Robert Pogue Harrison on Mortality and the Human Being “humans bury not simply to achieve closure and effect a separation from the dead but also and above all to humanize the ground on which they build their worlds and found their histories. And since I will be referring to the human rather often in these pages, let me put forward a premise here to the effect that humanity is not a species (Homo sapiens is a species); it is a way of being mortal and relating to the dead. To be human means above all to bury.” (The Dominion of the Dead, xi)

6. Cornel West on Philosophy as Possible only as a Reaction to Death https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vf1d2qSeVVE

7. “There is but one truly serious philosophical problem, and that is suicide. Judging whether life is or is not worth living amounts to answering the fundamental question of philosophy.” -Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus

8. What is Death? When does death happen? To whom does death happen?

9. “And is this what it means to have died: for the body to have become separate, once it’s freed from the soul and is itself all by itself, and for the soul to be separate, once she’s freed from the body and is herself all by herself? Death couldn’t be anything other than this—could it?” “those who practice philosophy in the right way are in training for dying and they fear death least of all men.” -Plato, Phaedo

10. “Death does not concern you, dead or alive; alive, because you are: dead, because you are no more” “We do not know where death awaits us: so let us wait for it everywhere. To practice death is to practice freedom. A man who has learned how to die has unlearned how to be a slave.” “Your life’s continual task is to build your death. You are in death while you are in life: when you are no more in life you are after death. Or if you prefer it thus: after life you are dead, but during life you are dying: and death touches the dying more harshly than the dead, in a more lively fashion and more essentially.” -Michel de Montaigne, To philosophize is to learn how to die

11. Augustine describing the funeral of his mother, Monica: “we did not think it right that a funeral such as hers should be celebrated with tears and groans and lamentations. These are ways in which people grieve for an utter wretchedness in death or a kind of total extinction. But she did not die in misery, nor was she altogether dead.” -Augustine, The Confessions

12. “death is the possibility of the impossibility of existence in general” “death reveals itself as one’s ownmost, nonrelational, and insuperable possibility. As such it is an eminent imminence.” -Martin Heidegger, Being and Time “Death is itself like something that waits in us.” -Martin Heidegger, ”Evening Conversation”

13. Upon learning of the death of Ivan Ilyich, a colleague and friend: “‘You see, he’s dead, and I’m not,’ each of them thought or felt.” -Leo Tolstoy, The Death of Ivan Ilyich

14. “It is often said that those who object to death have made the mistake of trying to imagine what it is like to be dead. It is alleged that the failure to realize that this task is logically impossible (for the banal reason that there is nothing to imagine) leads to the conviction that death is a mysterious and therefore terrifying prospective state. But this diagnosis is evidentially false, for it is just as impossible to imagine being totally unconscious as to imagine being dead.” -Thomas Nagel, Death

15. “the ancient city was built on the foundations of the ancient house, and the ancient house was build in turn upon the ancestor’s grave…the house was literally and figuratively erected upon their tombs, forming a sort of mausoleum around them.” -Numa Denis Fustel de Coulanges, The Ancient City

16. “I died in Auschwitz, but no one knows it.” -Charlotte Delbo, Auschwitz and After “The study of trauma also replaces the traditional philosophical puzzle about whether the soul can survive the death of the body with the question of whether the self can reconstitute itself after obliteration at the hands of another.” -Susan Brison, Outliving Oneself

17. Social death is the status of being a living being radically deprived of all rights that are supposed to be accorded to any and all living human beings. For example, one of the institutions that slavery annihilated for African-Americans was kinship. The slave-master invariably owned slave families, operating as a patriarch who could rape and coerce the women of the family and effeminize the men; women within slave families were unable to exercise their role in protecting and governing women and children. Slaves are treated as dying within life. -Orlando Patterson, Slavery and Social Death

18. “The desire to kill someone, or killing someone, for not conforming to the gender norm by which a person is ‘supposed’ to live suggests that life itself requires a set of sheltering norms, and that to be outside it, to live outside it, is to court death. The person who threatens violence proceeds from the anxious and rigid belief that a sense of world and a sense of self will be radically undermined if such a being, uncategorizable, is permitted to live within the social world.” -Judith Butler, Undoing Gender

19. Atul Gawande on confronting death as a medical provider and why it is important to have (philosophical) conversations about death at all: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VRkr09ZMI3w