PROBLEM OF DEATH

Mohammad Noor Nabi

Every man, whether great or small, wealthy or poor, high or low, good or bad, must inevitably move towards that hour when life will cease and the body return to dust from which it came. To the eye, this is the end, the finale, the conclusion. And this is called “death”. Thus man is born, grows, struggles, dreams, plans and builds only to surrender at last to death. But why? This “why” has always remained a central problem of theology, but in philosophy it could not occupy that prominent place which was its due. Credit must go to the existentialist thinkers who, in recent times, have taken up this problem, of death, and tried their best to throw some light, but their approach is not the meta-physical approach; on the contrary, they have approached the problem of death purely as a phenomenon of human existence. In the present paper I propose to discuss the viewpoints put’ for-ward by Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, Heidegger and Sartre.

I

Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900), a German individualist, .accepts the fundamental notion of Schopenhauer that will is the principle of existence, but this will, he conceives, not merely as the will to live, but as the will for power. Life is essentially a striving for a surplus of power, and exuberant instinct is good.[1] This is the basic principle of the philosophy of Neitzsche and on: this principle he presents the conception of “Overman”.

The Overman, in the opinion of Nietzsche, is one who seeks to become, to achieve, what he is to be—the new, the unique, the incomparable, making laws for ourselves and creating our‑selves.[2]

Thus the Overman of Neitzsche has become God-like by murdering God ; that is, he is the person who, not only chooses between good and evil, but who himself establishes new values and affirms the significance of life in so doing.

Nietzsche assigns this duty of “Overman” to the philosophers who have to fill this need for a re-emphasis of self-creation and self-legislation regarding values. These “Overmen,” even in extreme difficulty and critical situation, say “yes” to life. Death, for them, is not the termination of life; on the contrary, it is a consurnmation to life, as “a spur and promise to the survivors, the living”.[3]

Thus death, for Nietzsche, is not a mere happening that be-falls an individual, but a free act, not different in kind from other acts one might choose to do, “the holy No when the time for Yes passed.”[4]

Can we affirm on this principle that suicide is a meaningful alternative for Nietzsche?

Nietzsche will answer it in the affirmative provided it is to die fighting.[5]

Death must be illuminated by a meaning issuing from within the life which is ending.

“That your dying be no blasphemy against man and earth, my friends, that I ask of the honey of your soul.... Thus I want to die myself that you, my friends, may love the earth more for my sake.”[6]

Thus the basic point which we find in the system of Nietzsche about death is the glorification of death by the deeds of the dying person. A man has to perform such creative and courageous deeds that after his death those deeds may serve as stimulus for living persons and thus the dying man may be immortal through the deeds of the living persons.

After Nietzsche we come to Kierkegaard.

II

Man, in the opinion of Soren Kierkegaard (1813-1855), is a synthesis of the infinite and the finite, of the temporal and the eternal, of freedom and necessity, in short he is a synthesis. A synthesis is a relation between two factors.[7] It is not the disrelationship but merely the possibility, or, in the synthesis, is latent the possibility of the disrelationship. And “Despair” is the disrelationship in a relation which relates itself to itself. lf the synthesis were the disrelationship, there would be no such thing as despair, for despair would then be something inherent in human nature as such, that is, it would not be despair; it would be something that befell a man, something he suffered passively, like an illness into which a man falls, or like death which is the lot of all. No, this thing of despairing is inherent in man himself; but if he were not a synthesis, he coutd not despair, if the synthesis were not originally from God’s hand in the right relationship.[8]

This is the basic theme of Kierkegaardian philosophy and,. due to the emphasis on despair, a charge of morbidity has been leveled against him. Thus we find that death, a thing of despairing, is inherent in man. Kierkegaard, not only emphasizes the in herent nature of death, but also the uncertainty of death. Death, according to him, might be “so treacherous as to come tomorrow”. This treacherous nature of death is occasion for realizing that the individual’s resolve for the whole of his life must be made commensurate with that uncertainty that attends the coming of death.[9]

“My death, when it comes, will not be something general; it will not be mere instance of dying. It is the ever-present possibility that demands my utmost concern;—and in the same degree that I become subjective, the uncertainty of death comes more and more to interpenetrate my subjectivity diabetically. It, thus, becomes more and more important for me to think it in connection with every factor and phase of life; for since the uncertainty is there in every moment, it can be overcome only by overcoming it in every moment.”[10]

Thus we find that it is not the thought of the uncertainty of death, but the uncertainty itself of death becomes involved in the subjectivity of the individual in such a way as to become an essential aspect of his existence. In other words, it can be said that Kierkegaard treats death as constitutive of existence itself, in-stead of simply as the ceasing to be of existence.

Here an important question arises as to how the conception of death will transform an individual’s existence in view of that individual’s need to overcome the uncertainty of death at every moment.

Kierkegaard answers this question by putting forward the conception of subjectivity. He says that to the extent that the individual gives himself over to reflection on the possibility of death, he is developing himself in his subjectivity. The thought of death is, accordingly, a thought that is a deed. Because it is the active interpretation of the individual about himself by reflection concerning his own existence that brings forth his development, so that he really thinks what he thinks through making a reality of it.[11]

But this does not mean that death can be achieved by taking a dose of sulphuric acid. That would be an objective consideration regarding death, not a subjective one; and Kierkegaard’s concerns are emphatically confined to the subjective one.

Thus we find a glaring difference between the position of Nietzsche and Kierkegaard. Nietzsche is a great optimist, while Kierkegaard is a pessimist.

in the system of Nietzsche, death brings immortality to a dying man by his actions copied by living men ; while in that of Kierkegaard, death is a thing of despairing which brings an end to his existence.

After Kierkegaard we survey the existential approach to death by Heidegger (b. 1889), a well-known German philosopher.

III

Heidegger’s analysis of death, in his book Sein and Zeit, Being and Time in English, reveals in thought the truth that has been presented by Dostoevski in his novel Memoirs from the House of the Dead which he wrote after his return from imprisonment in Siberia and by Tolstoy in a story “The Death of Ivan Ilyich”. Both Dostoevski and Tolstoy have tried to show the existential view of death from the facts of their own experience.

Here is the experience of Dostoevski in the words of Myshkin “This man had once been led out with the others to the scaffold and a sentence of death was read over him. Twenty minutes later a replience was read to them, and they were condemned to another punishment instead. Yet the interval between these two sentences, twenty minutes, he passed in the fullest conviction that he would die in a few minutes… The priest went to each in turns with a cross. He had only five minutes more to live. He told me that those five minutes seemed to him an in-finite time, a vast wealth. . . . But he said that nothing was so dreadful at that time as the continual thought, what if I were not to die ; what if I could go back to life… What eternity I would turn every minute as an age ; I would not waste .one…”[12]

In a like manner Tolstoy, in his story “The Death of Ivan Ilyich,” narrates :

“Ivan Ilyich is a thoroughly ordinary and average bourgeois. He falls from a ladder, but the accident seems slight and he thinks nothing of the pain in his side. The pain stays, however, and grows; he begins to go from doctor to doctor, but no diagnosis seems to serve. Then the horrifying thought dawns upon him hat he may be going to die. The reality of death is not in the physical structure, the organs that medical science examines it is a reality within Ivan Ilyich’s own existence…

“The reality of death is precisely that it sunders Ivan Ilyich from all other human beings, returns him to the absolute solitude of his own individual self, and destroys the fabric of society and family in which he had lost himself. But awful and inexorable as the presence of death is, it gives to the dying man the one revelation of truth in his life, even though the content of this revelation is chiefly the pointlessness of the way he has lived”.[13]

Both the above quotations explain the authentic meaning of death and this authentic meaning of death forms the basis of Heidegger’s existential approach to death.

The authentic meaning of death, “I am to die,” is not, in the opinion of Heidegger, “as an external and public fact within the world, but as an internal possibility of my own Being. Nor is it a possibility like a point at the end of a road, which I will in time reach. The point is that I may die at any moment, and therefore death is my possibility now. It is also the most extreme and abso­lute of my possibilities. Extreme, because it is the possibility of not being and hence cuts off all other possibilities ; absolute, be-cause man can surmount all other heart-breaks, even the deaths of those he loves, but his own death puts an end to him. Hence death is the most personal and intimate of possibilities since it is what I must suffer for myself; nobody else can die for me.”[14]

Touched by this interior angel of death, I cease to be the impersonal and social one among many, as Ivan llyich was, and I am free to become myself. Thus death becomes a liberating force. It frees us from servitude to the petty cares that threaten to engulf our daily life and thereby opens us to the essential projects by which we can make our lives—personally and significantly our own. Heidegger calls this the condition of “freedom to-ward death” or “resoluteness”.

This resoluteness discloses the radical finitude of our existence. We are finite because our being is penetrated by non-Being. Though logically it seems paradoxical, we ourselves, as existing beings, comprehend it all too well when we are plunged into the mood of anxiety, when the void of non-Being opens up within our own Being.

Anxiety is not fear, being afraid of this or that definite object, but the uncanny feeling of being afraid of nothing at all. It is precisely Nothingness that makes itself present and felt as the object of our dread. Because Nothingness is a presence within our own Being, always there, in the inner quaking that goes on beneath the calm surface of our preoccupation with things. Anxiety before Nothingness has many modalities and guises but always it is as inseparable from ourselves as our own breathing because anxiety is our existence itself in its radical insecurity. In anxiety we both are and are not, at one and the same time, and this is our dread. Thus our finitude is such that the positive and nega­tive interpenetrate our whole existence. We are finite because we live and move within a finite understanding of Being.[15]

Thus we find that death shares one of the fundamental characters of existence—Femeinigkeit. “No one can die for an‑other. He may give his life for another, but that does not in the slightest deliver the other from his own death.”[16]

Heidegger presents the analogy of the ripeness of a fruit to understand death. As the ripeness of the fruit is not something added to the fruit in its immaturity but it means “the fruit itself in a specific way of being. In like manner though death is the end of man as being-in-the world, the end is not something added on, so to speak; it belongs itself to the being of man”.[17]

But this analogy breaks down at that point, for, whereas ripeness is the fulfillment of the fruit, the end may come for man when he is still immature or it may delay until he is broken down and exhausted with his fulfillment long past. But here again one positive result emerges. Death belongs to my possible ways of being—though in a unique kind of way, since it is the possibility of ceasing to be.

Heidegger clarifies the understanding of death as an existential phenomenon by referring it to his interpretation of the being of man as care. Care has a threefold structure: (i) possibility, (ii) facility, and (iii) fallenness. Death belongs to man’s possibility—it is, indeed, his most intimate and isolated possibility, always his own.

This possibility of death is not accidental or occasional. It belongs to man’s facticity. He is always already thrown into the possibility of death, as existing. His being, whether he is always conscious of it or not, is a “being-into-death” (Seinzum-Tode).

Certainty and indefiniteness are the two characteristics of this possibility. It is certain because we are sure of it that it will be actualized and it is indefinite because as possibility it is already present. I am already thrown into it, and we never know when it will be realized. “Man is always old enough to die.”

Fallenness is related to the flight from death. Man, in his. everyday, inauthentic existence, avoids the thought of death and conceals from himself its real significance.’[18] Thus we find that for Kierkegaard the fact that an individual will die provides an-other occasion for living in his thoughts the possibility of his death—for his becoming subjective. But for Heidegger, death appears as a liberating goal, a super-possibility of the person, as it were.

Secondly, death is treacherous in nature for Kierkegaard, but for Heidegger it is sure as an indefinite.

Thirdly, death is a despairing thing for Kierkeggard, but for Heidegger it provides the authentic existence to the individual.

Now from Heidegger we pass on to Jean-Paul Sartre (1905-1980).

IV

Jean-Paul Sartre, a French novelist and thinker, admires the Heideggerian conception of the meaning and role of death. But he basically disagrees with the standpoint of Heidegger where he says that death is the sovereign possibility of man. “Death,” says Sartre, “is not my possibility at all, it is a can be, which is out-side my possibilities.” Death is accidental in its occurrence and, therefore, absurd. It does not give any meaning to life as both Tolstoy and Heidegger, each in his own way, maintained, but, on the contrary, it may leave that meaning in doubt and suspense. “My project towards a death is comprehensible (as suicide, martyr, hero), but not the project towards my death as the indeterminate possibility of no longer realizing presence in the world, for this project would be the destruction of all projects. Thus death cannot be my peculiar possibility; it cannot even be one of my possibilities. On the positive side, my death is the triumph of the point of view of others over the point of view which I am. My whole life then simply is, and is no longer its own suspense, can no longer be changed by the mere consciousness which it has of itself,”[19]

Like Nietzsche, Sartre makes a bold assertion that death is no annihilation. The fate of the dead is always in the hands of the living. Death is the lapse of the subjectivity of man out of the world. “I leave behind meanings and traces,” says Sartre, “which are my meanings and traces and which are modified at the hands of others: I exist solely in my dimension of exteriority. Therefore, to mediate on my life considering it from the standpoint of death would to be mediate on my subjectivity taking the point of view of another upon it, and that is impossible.[20] Indirectly, however, there is a future to my death, a future that is not for me but for others. On the occasion of my death, my entire life is past. But the past is not a non-being; it is, on the contrary, in the mode of the in-itself. In and by itself the in-itself is without meaning, but the in-itself that is my past may have meaning bestowed upon it by other human beings who are, therefore, cast in the role of the guardians of my life.”[21]

Death, Sartre asserts, belongs in its origin to my facticity. Death is a pure fact, like birth. I am not free in order to die (Heidegger), but a free being who dies.

Sartre, like Heidegger, neither takes death as the source of human freedom. Finitude, for Sartre, is not a function of mortality but of freedom. In my freedom I project certain possibilities to the exclusion of others; I am myself finite by this excluding aspect of the choice by which I determine my being.

Neither does death serve to limit my freedom, although it is an external limit of my subjectivity. Death would be such a limit were it, as conceived by Heidegger, an unavoidable possibility, a possibility which I could not refuse to choose.

And Sartre concludes that death is a situation which a human being must eventually confront.

Thus the importance of death is lost in the cobweb of Sartrian thought.

NOTES