Hostname: page-component-74656f9884-skzmx Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2026-11-05T11:55:03.462Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

The Banality of Death

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  16 September 2009

Bob Plant
Bob Plant
Affiliation:
University of Aberdeen
Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

Notwithstanding the burgeoning literature on death, philosophers have tended to focus on the significance death has (or ought/ought not to have) for the one who dies. Thus, while the relevance one's own death has for others (and the significance others' deaths have for us) is often mentioned, it is rarely attributed any great importance to the purported real philosophical issues. This is a striking omission, not least because the deaths of others – and the anticipated effects our own death will have on those we leave behind – are normally of great importance outside the confines of academic philosophy. In this paper I want to do three things: (i) argue that philosophers' treatment of death tends to distort the issue (Sections I–III); (ii) outline some of the ways others' deaths figure in how we assess our own mortality (Sections IV–V); and (iii) raise some general questions about the value of ‘theorising’ death (Section VI).

Information

Type
Research Article
Information
Philosophy , Volume 84 , Issue 4 , October 2009 , pp. 571 - 596
Copyright
Copyright © The Royal Institute of Philosophy 2009

Death…makes men precious and pathetic. They are moving because of their phantom condition; every act they execute may be their last… Everything among the mortals has the value of the irretrievable and the perilous. Among the immortals… nothing is preciously precarious.Footnote 1

I. Some banalities of death

There are various senses in which death is ‘banal’ – by which, of course, I do not mean trivial. Most obviously, death is inevitable; each of us will die one day. (As is often said, somewhat melodramatically perhaps, simply to be alive is to be destined for death.Footnote 2) This brute inevitability is so mundane that a casual mention usually suffices in philosophical discussions of mortality. But the mere inevitability of death is just one limited sense in which death is banal. Certainly, each of us will die at some future time and location. But it is also true that one day will prove to be one's ‘last day’; or more accurately, to have been one's last day for those who remain behind. I may sincerely believe that today will be my last day – indeed, I may even have planned it in meticulous detail. But it will only truly be my last day when I have in fact died. (Death can always come sooner or later than anticipated.Footnote 3) In this sense then, one's ‘last day’ is a retrospective designation, and thereby the property of the survivors, not I whose last day it actually was.Footnote 4 The same, of course, applies to one's ‘last words’ – something to which we often attribute great significance.Footnote 5 After all, any specific sequence of words could turn out to be my last (even these I am typing right now). Naturally, I hope the circumstances of my last words will be less ironic than the present context; just as I hope that their content will be more fortuitous than Rousseau's Mme de Vercellis's parting exclamation: ‘a woman who can fart is not dead’.Footnote 6 Still, that any particular utterance I make could turn out to be my last is, I take it, uncontroversial.Footnote 7 A further sense in which death is banal is that it happens all the time. Directly or otherwise, we are surrounded by the deaths of others.Footnote 8 Indeed, given that we are not born with an innate understanding of mortality, we first come to learn about death – and how to use that, and associated, concepts – through others' deaths; notably family, friends, neighbours, pets and fictional characters (human or otherwise).Footnote 9 Ordinarily then, we become aware of the commonality of death long before we have to confront it in its singularity as our own death. It is partly true, as Heidegger and others stress, that one's own mortality has a special significance for each of us.Footnote 10 But even this is not so deeply (or ‘ontologically’) engrained that the deaths of others cannot be equally – if not more – significant for us.Footnote 11 A similarly banal aspect of death is this: When I die I will leave others behind; family, friends, lovers, neighbours and work colleagues, not to mention the multitude of casual acquaintances who populate my daily life. My death will mark my departure from their lives.Footnote 12 What is more, it is others who will have to deal with the tangible posthumous traces of my life. Someone else will be left to mourn, take charge of my corpse, make funeral arrangements, sort through my personal belongings, contact friends and relatives, empty my home and clear my office. (The list is disconcertingly long.Footnote 13) In one sense, as Wittgenstein remarks, ‘Death is not an event in life’Footnote 14 insofar as it brings one's life to an irreversible close.Footnote 15 And yet my death will be a more-or-less traumatic ‘event’ in others' lives (the death of a brother, son, friend, neighbour, colleague), just as others' deaths have been, and continue to be, ‘events’ in mine.Footnote 16

My hope is that these preliminary observations are mundane and uncontroversial. For not only are they the sort of things we learn during childhood, they are also the terms in which most of us fully socialised adults actually think about death. So, for example, when seriously considering my own death, I routinely ask myself whether I will die in hospital, in the street or supermarket in the company of strangers, at home with my family, or alone? If it turns out to be the latter, then who exactly will discover my body? Likewise, I wonder if I will die before my parents and partner, and if so, how they will deal with my passing? Who will take care of my dog? Who will pay any outstanding debts? (Again, the list seems interminable.Footnote 17) These sorts of questions are commonplace. We do not ordinarily wonder if death is best thought of as a ‘harm’. Neither do we devote much, if any, time to considering whether it is rational to fear our own death,Footnote 18 nor the purported a/symmetry between pre-natal and posthumous non-existence.Footnote 19 Likewise, we do not normally wonder whether ‘experience’ as such is a good that death deprives us of,Footnote 20 or what constitutes an ‘authentic’ attitude towards our mortality. These latter questions are the sort of things philosophers worry about. Only when they are not ‘doing philosophy’ do they consider with due seriousness the mundane events surrounding their actual demise, including the deaths of their family, partners, friends, beloved animals, and so on. In itself, of course, this need not count against philosophers' professional activities; after all, they are supposed to question things we routinely take for granted. Nevertheless, their tendency to neglect – or at least downplay – the banal facts of death is prone to distort the purported object of analysis. If one wants to do justice to the ordinary weave of human life in which death (not to mention ageing and illness) actually occurs, then one cannot stay long in the realms of abstraction. To treat death abstractly renders it just one more intellectual puzzle – albeit a puzzle we have little hope of solving.Footnote 21 But death is something that will inevitably happen to all of us fleshy, finite, vulnerable creatures. In the following discussion I therefore want to suggest that the aforementioned banalities of death are worth taking much more seriously, even if doing so ultimately leads us away from the pleasures of theorising. Let us begin by briefly considering some established philosophical approaches to death.

II. Being (almost) dead

Like most philosophers dealing with questions of mortality, Nagel thinks that the significance death has for the one who dies is the ‘primary case’. Indeed, he explicitly avoids discussing the value one's own life (and its inescapable end) ‘may have for others’ (D, 62). Likewise, when considering the possibility of long-term suspended animation, Nagel sidesteps discussion of the numerous ‘inconveniences’ that, once reanimated, ‘[f]amily and friends may have died in the meantime; the language may have changed; the comforts of social, geographical, and cultural familiarity would be lacking’. None of these factors, he therefore maintains, would ‘obliterate the basic advantage of continued, though discontinuous, existence’ (ibid. 62–63). But to describe the intervening deaths of family and friends (amongst other things) as ‘inconveniences’ is, I think, a gross oversimplification. Nagel's disregard for such banal considerations re-emerges, albeit more subtly, in The View from Nowhere:

Like the contingency of our birth, the inevitability of our death is easy to grasp objectively, but hard to grasp from within. Everyone dies; I am someone, so I will die. But it isn't just that TN will be killed in a plane crash or a holdup, have a stroke or a heart attack or lung cancer, the clothes going to the Salvation Army, the books to the library, some bits of the body to the organ bank and the rest to the crematorium. In addition to these mundane objective transitions, my world will come to an end, as yours will when you die.Footnote 22

My contention is that if we really want to think about the significance of one's own (and others') death, then these sorts of ‘mundane objective transitions’ cannot be set aside. Precisely why so many philosophers have neglected the everyday banalities of death is not altogether clear. But it is reasonable to think that this general disregard is due, in part, to the lasting influence of the Epicurean tradition. As is well known, Epicurus attempts to demonstrate why fear of one's own death is irrational and thereby best relinquished. For if all good and bad ‘consists in sense-experience’ (DNU, 42) (a notably contentious claim), and if death constitutes the ‘privation of sense-experience’ (a rather less contentious claim), then we have no good reason to fear our own terminal non-existence. In a nutshell: ‘[W]hen we exist, death is not yet present, and when death is present, then we do not exist’ (ibid. 41);Footnote 23 hence, we should cease worrying about our mortality. Indeed, as Lucretius notes, we cannot even imagine our own death without thereby being ‘present’ as a spectral observer:

When a living man confronts the thought that after death his body will be mauled by birds and beasts of prey, he is filled with self-pity. He does not banish himself from the scene nor distinguish sharply enough between himself and that abandoned carcass… He does not see that in real death there will be no other self alive to mourn his own decease… (NFD, 79)

What philosophers seem to have inherited from this way of viewing mortality, even when they have been overtly critical of the Epicurean ‘nothing-to-fear’ account, is the guiding assumption that the real issue here is the prospect of non-existence for the subject him/herself.Footnote 24 This dual emphasis is made abundantly clear in Nagel's work, in which the permanent vanishing of my unique subjective perspective on the world remains the crucial issue. What is notable about Nagel's discussion of death, however, is his initial response to the question ‘What is the specific object of this [fearful] feeling?’ Before Nagel develops his own analysis of death (and associated themes), he thus provisionally answers this question as follows: ‘In part, it is the idea of the objective world and objective time continuing without me in it…[that] the world will go calmly on without me after I disappear’. Although he refers to this disappearance as ‘the ultimate form of abandonment’, Nagel immediately sets this ‘idea’ aside, for ‘the special feeling’ he is concerned with ‘does not depend only on this’ (VN, 226). Interestingly, in his own musings on the fear of death, Derrida thinks that, more than the prospect of total non-existence, what is

…scarier is the fantasy…that we are going to be present at and in attendance at this non-world, at our own death. We will continue to be dead, that is, absent, while attending the actual world, being deprived of sharing the life of the survivors. This is even more terrible [than the fear of non-existence]: dead without being dead…What is absolutely scary is the idea of being dead while being quasi-dead, while looking at things from above, from outside.Footnote 25

(Somewhat curiously then, Derrida describes his reasons for attending conferences devoted to his work as follows: ‘I would like to see what it looks like as if I were dead, listening to what people are saying, listening and being among them, while not playing the pathetic role of the dead person…[I]t is as if I were dead’ (AID, 215).) What Derrida describes above as the most fearful ‘fantasy’, and what Nagel diagnoses as the ‘ultimate abandonment’, are getting at the same thing: namely, the strange prospect of one simultaneously being dead and witnessing one's own absence. Seeing our own death through the eyes of an imagined other is perhaps the only way we can envisage our inevitable, irreversible demise. But it is not obvious why we should judge this sort of projective imagining as having nothing to teach us about death. Here we might return to Nagel's description above and ask who exactly is being ‘abandoned’ at my death? In our imagined state of being ‘quasi-dead’ we might reasonably respond that here it is I who am – or has been – ‘abandoned’ by the world (including those others who live on after me). In this spectral state, I am, as it were, stuck on the outside, passively left to watch worldly events unfold without being able to take an active part.Footnote 26 This is one way of understanding Nagel's ‘abandonment’ and Derrida's ‘quasi-death’. But there is another, more tangible, sense of ‘abandonment’ worth reminding ourselves of. For at my death it is also I who ‘abandon’ others; notably those intimates who I knew, loved and cared for, and those to whom I had specific responsibilities.Footnote 27 As noted earlier, in my death I leave others behind; those numerous others – strangers, intimates and the multitude in-between – who survive me. This is an extremely mundane fact, though one we are prone to overlook when philosophising.Footnote 28 Keeping these points in mind, let us now briefly turn to Heidegger's analysis of death.

III. My own death

Heidegger seems more attuned than Nagel to what I am calling the ‘banalities’ of death. Not only does he emphasise the significance that one's death is not merely inevitable (it will happen one day), but immanent (in principle possible at any moment Footnote 29), Heidegger acknowledges that we gain some ‘experience of death’ (BT, 281) through witnessing the deaths of others. Likewise, he reminds us that the other's dead body is ‘“more” than a lifeless material Thing’ or ‘just an item of equipment’, and, as such, the dead continue to be ‘an object of “concern” ’ for ‘those who have “remained behind”’(ibid. 282).Footnote 30 Indeed, Heidegger even thinks it worth remarking that ‘the “dying” of Others is something that one experiences daily. Death is an undeniable “fact of experience” ’, and that such instances of others’ deaths are ‘the factical occasion for Dasein's first paying attention to death at all’. Despite all of this, however, he insists that this sort of ‘empirical certainty’ (ibid., 301) is a distraction from the really important issue; namely, one's own death.Footnote 31 Heidegger is so eager to cast death in terms of one's ‘ownmost potentiality-for-Being’ (ibid. 294)Footnote 32 that the significance of many of the aforementioned banalities soon get lost amongst the details of his ‘existential analytic of Dasein’ (ibid. 34). Heidegger is therefore insistent that the ‘dying of Others is not something which we experience in a genuine sense; at most we are always just “there alongside”’. As such, the proper focus of philosophical attention here should be ‘the ontological meaning of the dying of the person who dies, as a possibility-of-Being which belongs to his Being’ (ibid. 282–283).Footnote 33 So, while Heidegger pays lip service to the social, intersubjective dimension of death, what clearly preoccupies him is how this compromises one's own authentic being-towards-death.Footnote 34 The crucial problem for Heidegger is that, subsumed in the anonymous collectivity of the ‘they’ (and their everyday ‘idle talk’), we come to consider death as a sort of ‘mishap’, albeit one that occurs ‘constantly’ (ibid. 296). (‘Someone or other “dies”, be he neighbour or stranger. People who are no acquaintances of ours are “dying” daily and hourly’.) According to Heidegger then, we are prone to think along the following lines: ‘“One of these days one will die too, in the end; but right now it has nothing to do with us”’.Footnote 35 The genuine significance of mortality is here tranquillisedFootnote 36 by our treating death as ‘an indefinite something…which is proximally not yet present-at-hand for oneself, and is therefore no threat’. Certainly we all know that ‘one dies’, but ‘this “one” is the “nobody”…nobody in particular’ (ibid. 297); some anonymous ‘other’ or, to borrow Winch's phrase, a mere ‘instance of humanity’.Footnote 37 In the grip of the ‘they’ then, death is routinely ‘perverted into an event of public occurrence’. More specifically, what troubles Heidegger here is that ‘Death gets passed off as always something “actual” ’– namely, as one event among others that will actually happen at some, albeit unpredictable, time and location. But in this, death's ‘character as a possibility gets concealed…Dasein [thereby] puts itself in the position of losing itself in the “they” ’(ibid., my emphasis).Footnote 38 In other words, ‘they’ do not allow one ‘the courage for anxiety in the face of death’, and as such, one's ‘everyday Being-towards-death’ is most commonly a ‘constant fleeing in the face of death’ (ibid. 298). While even in the attitude towards death prompted by the ‘they’ there is recognition of the inevitable ‘certainty of death’ (ibid. 299), this is a long way from authentic being-towards-death. For such certainty constantly obscures the fact that death ‘is possible at any moment. Along with the certainty of death goes the indefiniteness of its “when” ’(ibid. 302). On Heidegger's account then, focussing on the deaths of others will inevitably distract us from the really important philosophical issues. Indeed, he has no doubt that by concentrating on the significance death has for Dasein itself, he is revealing the fundamental, ‘universal’Footnote 39 features of death – those features which would have to ground any respectable anthropology, ‘biology, psychology, theodicy, or theology of death’ (ibid. 292).Footnote 40

Although Heidegger's analysis of death has been hugely influential in certain philosophical quarters, many of his central claims are not particularly original. Most notably, Heidegger's preoccupation with Dasein's everyday ‘inauthentic’ attitude towards death is beautifully described in Tolstoy's ‘The death of Ivan Ilych’.Footnote 41 There Tolstoy tells us of one of Ivan's colleagues, Peter Ivanovich, who realises after Ivan's death that this ‘might suddenly, at any time, happen to me’.Footnote 42 And yet, despite this startling realisation, Peter is immediately consoled by the ‘customary reflection’ that this death ‘had happened to Ivan Ilych and not to him, and that it should not and could not happen to him’. That is to say, Peter quickly came to view Ivan's death as an ‘accident natural to Ivan Ilych but certainly not to himself’ (DII, 234). (In Heideggerian terminology, Peter here ‘loses’ himself in the tranquilising chatter of the ‘they’.) The same theme emerges elsewhere in Tolstoy's narrative. For prior to his death, Ivan himself has much the same experience of failing to grasp the fact that he was going to die. Of Ivan, Tolstoy thus writes:

The syllogism he had learnt…: ‘Caius is a man, men are mortal, therefore Caius is mortal’, had always seemed to him correct as applied to Caius, but certainly not as applied to himself. That Caius – man in the abstract – was mortal, was perfectly correct, but he was not Caius, not an abstract man, but a creature quite separate from all others… ‘Caius really was mortal, and it was right for him to die; but for me…Ivan Ilych, with all my thoughts and emotions, it's altogether a different matter…’ (ibid. 259)

On this point at least, Heidegger is also prefigured by Kierkegaard, who writes:

If [the ‘when’ of] death is always uncertain, if I am a mortal creature, then it is impossible to understand this uncertainty in terms of a mere generality unless indeed I, too, happen to be merely a human being in general. But this is surely not the case…[T]he fact of my own death is not for me by any means such a something in general, although for others, the fact of my death may indeed be something of that sort. (CUP, 149)Footnote 43

According to Kierkegaard then, taking seriously the ‘certainty’ of death (both its inevitability and its imminence) should make us ask whether our chosen life-projects are even ‘worth beginning’ (ibid. 148). Surely, the prospect of death should ‘transform a man's entire life’, so that he has to ‘think its uncertainty…in every moment’ in order to ‘prepare himself for it’ (ibid. 150–151).Footnote 44 (We are therefore warned that to think about death only occasionally is ‘the same as not thinking about it at all’ (ibid. 149)). These proto-Heideggerian themes are striking. However, it is to Levinas, one of Heidegger's former admirers,Footnote 45 that I want to turn next. For it is here that the focus of philosophical attention is decisively moved away from one's own death.

IV. The deaths of others

In his numerous reflections on human mortality, Levinas maintains that death marks a ‘nonknowledge that translates into experience through my ignorance of the day of my death, an ignorance by virtue of which the “me” writes cheques on an empty account, as if he had eternity before him’.Footnote 46 Indeed, because death is the ‘most unknown of unknowns’ (A&T, 153),Footnote 47 we cannot help but ‘speak of it without ever being sure…what we are talking about’ (ibid. 154). Despite his intellectual debt to Heidegger,Footnote 48 Levinas nevertheless wants to shift attention away from one's own death to ‘the others’ death'Footnote 49 – and not merely the deaths of ‘those “dear to us” ’(ibid. 162).Footnote 50 So highly does Levinas estimate the significance of the other's death that he insists: ‘the Human consists precisely in opening oneself to the death of the other, in being preoccupied with his or her death…[A]round the death of my neighbour…the humanity of man is manifested’ (ibid. 157–158).Footnote 51 Extending this point, he proceeds: ‘I would even say in any approach to a mortal man, the reverberations of that extraordinary unknown [death] can be heard’ (ibid. 161).Footnote 52 For Levinas then, to encounter another human is to encounter a singular, embodied, vulnerable, finite being, whatever social roles s/he may take on.Footnote 53 Our intersubjective encounters are thereby ‘ethical through and through’ (ibid. 162) in virtue of the other's mortality.Footnote 54 (Indeed, between invulnerable, disembodied, immortal beings there could be no ethical relation.Footnote 55) Levinas' preoccupation with the other's death becomes even more tangible in his semi-phenomenological description of ‘the face’.Footnote 56 We need not worry about the details of this here. What is relevant for us is Levinas' insistence that the face of the other is ‘exposed to death’, for the ‘human being in his face is the most naked’ (ibid. 163).Footnote 57 More specifically, the other's face ‘asks me [albeit silently] not to let him die alone’ (EOI, 60).Footnote 58 (‘[M]ortality lies in the Other…in its mortality, the face before me summons me, calls for me, begs for me…The other man's death calls me into question’.Footnote 59) For Levinas then, the ‘whole of ethical conduct’ begins in this recognition of the mortality of the other who faces me.Footnote 60

The suggestion that the other's death ‘calls me into question’ is in-keeping with Levinas' more general claim that the other's vulnerability and mortality places me (whether or not I acknowledge it) in a state of ‘bad conscience’ (A&T, 165). Indeed, this bad conscience pertains, not only to my practical moral insufficiencies, but also to my simply being-here.Footnote 61 The anguished relation I have to my own death is ‘the scandal of an existence dying always too soon’. But Levinas insists that, understood in this egocentric way, the ‘good conscience of being remains intact in that finitude’. What is more important here is that ‘the death of the other…challenges that good conscience’ (ibid. 166). It is not incidental then that Levinas chooses to employ Heideggerian terminology to explain this all-pervasive bad conscience:

The self is the very crisis of the being of beings in the human…because I myself already ask myself if my being is justified, if the Da of my Dasein is not already the usurpation of someone's place. A bad conscience which comes to me from the face of the other who, in his mortality, uproots me from the solid ground where, as a simple individual, I stand and persevere naively – naturally – in my stance. A bad conscience which puts me in question.Footnote 62

In other words, my being ‘affected by the death of the other is…my deference to someone who no longer responds, already a culpability – the culpability of the survivor’ (GDT, 12).Footnote 63 (I will return to this latter point in a moment.)

As we have seen, Levinas makes a decisive shift away from the Heideggerian preoccupation with Dasein's own death toward the other's death. More recent commentators, notably those of a broadly feminist orientation, have similarly objected to Heidegger's preoccupation with one's own death, and indeed his obsession with death per se.Footnote 64 MacAvoy thus thinks that Heidegger's analysis leads to a view of authenticity which remains ‘highly individualistic…and exclusive of Being-with-Others’.Footnote 65 In order to counteract this ‘traditionally masculine’ preoccupation with death, she therefore urges us to consider our finitude from the opposite end; namely, as beings who are born.Footnote 66 Our ‘modern, western’ (HBD, 73) fixation on death, MacAvoy reasonably postulates, is in part due to the way death has been gradually extricated from our ‘firsthand experience’ in everyday life. After all, today ‘an entire industry has been established to deal with the dead, and we no longer really attend to the deaths of others’ (ibid. 72). Moreover, it has been, and indeed continues to be, predominantly women who care for the dying, sick and those most ‘vulnerable’ (ibid. 73), and this needs to be given due attention when theorising about the nature and significance of mortality. Although MacEvoy does not want to dismiss Heidegger's analysis, but rather to supplement it with an account of ‘Being-towards-birth’ (ibid. 76), she nevertheless questions Heidegger's emphasis on death as Dasein's fundamental, ‘ownmost’ mode of being.

In a similar vein, Secomb complains that philosophers' accounts of death have routinely failed to do justice to the sheer ‘range of human experience of death and relations to death’ (PDF, 111). In particular, she identifies Heidegger's description of ‘Dasein's authentic dying’ as overlooking the ‘functioning of shared experience and community in the construction of the relation to death’; an account that again relies upon a ‘predominantly masculine experience of death’.Footnote 67 Women, Secomb thus argues, tend to experience death intersubjectively ‘through being-with dying and dead others’. As such, ‘death comes to us when the other – a friend, lover, an unknown person, or a whole community – dies’ (ibid. 112).Footnote 68 She proceeds:

Our ‘ownmost’ experience of dying is founded on a prior experience of the other's death…this experience of the other's dying and death, and the experience of loss and grief that this evokes, mediates the relation to ‘my’ own death…I experience ‘my’ death through a process of dwelling-with-death. (ibid. 114)Footnote 69

MacAvoy and Secomb are, I think, right to highlight the historical and cultural contingencies that shape, not only our thinking about death more generally,Footnote 70 but specifically the prioritisation of one's own death and what that means for oneself. The way Levinas shifts attention to the others' mortality is, however, rather more extreme. After all, he repeatedly insists that in one's everyday ‘relation with the death of the other’ – that is, through merely encountering concrete, finite others – one discovers that ‘the death of the other has priority over yours’ (A&T, 164 my emphasis).Footnote 71 As noted earlier, the other's death clearly can have priority over one's own; one may, for example, prefer one's own death to that of one's child or lover. But Levinas' claim is much stronger than that. (Although there are ways of making his point more plausible, I will not discuss them here.Footnote 72) Still, whatever its specific shortcomings, Levinas' general position, like MacAvoy's and Secomb's, provides a valuable counterweight to philosophers' routine assumption that one's own death is the ‘primary case’ (D, 62) or real philosophical issue.

V. What we leave behind

In Philosophical Explanations Nozick draws attention to the mundane fact that ‘when you are no longer around…then all that will be left of you is your effects, leavings, traces’. Specifically what interests him here are the ‘traces’ one wants, intends or plans to leave behind. This seems reasonable enough. After all, we frequently consider it ‘important to continue to be around somehow’ after our demise. (The motivating thought here, Nozick suggests, is something like: ‘[I]t shouldn't ever be as if you had never existed at all’.Footnote 73) The ‘traces’ we explicitly want, or at least hope, to leave for posterity are clearly important to most of us. As Scarre remarks of one's prospective posthumous fate: ‘[T]hough death – being dead – is no sort of unpalatable experience, it marks our irreversible loss of the world. But as if that were not bad enough, it is also the world's loss of us’. As such, there is nothing ‘irrational about caring how the world shall be when we are gone’.Footnote 74 Still, we need not think of all of this merely, or even primarily, in terms of our posthumous reputation. Neither need we assume that such concerns are in essence a poor secular substitute for traditional religious hopes of immortality; that is, of ‘living on’ in what one leaves behind.Footnote 75 What often matters more to us here and now is how, after our death, our friends and family will cope, how our children will flourish or fail, whether our partner will find love elsewhere (and so on). In other words, so much of what we care about now has enough ‘posthumous scope’ (PR, 214)Footnote 76 for us to be concerned about our own death, and to be so concerned through what our own death will likely mean for those who survive us. (As I will explain shortly, such concern is inadequately characterised as fear.) Mindful of Nozick's talk of ‘traces’ then, those who raise children usually want the world to be a better, safer place for their offspring after their own demise.Footnote 77 But alongside the traces we want to leave behind (the sort of things we can now work towards establishing), lie all of those traces we simply do leave behind at death. So, for example, I do not want to leave behind a house full of my belongings for others to sift through. Neither do I want to leave behind a body that has to be discovered, stripped, examined, dressed appropriately, buried, incinerated or grieved over.Footnote 78 But doubtless I will leave these – and many other – things behind for the survivors to deal with.Footnote 79

Keeping these (again, very mundane) points in mind, let us recall that when Levinas discusses the other's death he refers explicitly to the ‘bad conscience’ (A&T, 165) and ‘culpability of the survivor’ (GDT, 12). Here Levinas is referring to one's own ‘bad conscience’ for surviving the other; that is, the bad conscience of the survivor.Footnote 80 But this is only part of the sense in which ‘bad conscience’ can meaningfully function here; there can also be bad conscience for the prospective survivor. That is to say, I may now experience ‘bad conscience’ for my own (future, inevitable, yet unpredictable) death and the implications that will likely have for those who will survive me. Taking this point seriously, we can begin to make sense of the notion of ‘fear of death’ in a way that is not reducible to my fear of mere ‘non-existence’. For at least part of what I ‘fear’ about my own death is what my own death will bequeath the other; that is, the various burdens (emotional, psychological, economic) for others that my death will leave in its wake.Footnote 81 It is difficult to express this thought without sounding unduly melodramatic. Still, there is a sense in which I am now sorry for this posthumous debris; I am, as it were, prospectively apologetic about the fact that at my death all my worldly belongings, my body (and so on) will not immediately disappear from view and memory.Footnote 82 (Of course, this inevitably conflicts with my also wanting to be remembered and thought of fondly, especially by those I care about.Footnote 83) My death will most likely be a burden on those I leave behind – especially on my family, friends and other intimates. Understood in this way then, ‘fear’ of one's own death becomes rather less paradoxical than it might initially seem. For it is not my future non-existence in itself that is the primary issue here, but rather what this pending absence will mean for others. This very concrete prospect I can reasonably be anxious about right now.

This then is one way we might re-cast the seemingly paradoxical notion of ‘fear of death’; namely, in terms of fearing what significance one's own death will have for others. But it seems to me that ‘fear’ is not the main or most obvious response toward the prospect of one's own death. Setting aside the fear I may have of others' deaths,Footnote 84 and the fear I may have of experiencing a painful or humiliating dying, if truth be told, I am more saddened by the prospect of my own death than I am fearful of it.Footnote 85 Here I experience what I can best describe as self-mourning. Now, this might initially appear to be just as paradoxical as the ‘fear of non-existence’ diagnosed by Epicurus, but I do not think it is. Such sadness or self-mourning naturally accompanies what Derrida describes as the ‘fantasy’ of being ‘quasi-dead’ (AID, 216) and what Nagel describes as ‘abandonment’ (VN, 226); that is, one's spectral imaginings of one's absence (discussed earlier). Solomon makes a similar point:

When I think of my death, I cannot help but think of what others will see in me, how others will see me, how others will think of and remember me. When I imagine myself at my own funeral…it is the eyes of others I am imagining, not my own, whether or not ‘my perspective’ is, logically and irreducibly, mine and mine alone. When I imagine my body on a slab, or bloodied in the street, or frozen from terminal pain, it is others I imagine thus seeing me, not I. When I worry about how I will die, bravely or badly, it is for others that I am concerned. (DFM, 175)Footnote 86

I would be saddened to oversleep and miss New Year's celebrations with my family and friends – even though there will be other New Year celebrations in the future.Footnote 87 Indeed, the very possibility of this occurring can cause me prospective sadness right now – if I choose to dwell on it. Here I want to suggest that the sadness I currently feel about the prospect of my death is an extension (albeit it a radical one) of this very ordinary sort of anxiety; namely, I will miss seeing my children grow, accompanying my lover into old-age, witness my friends pursue various projects and plans (and so on). The prospect of dying saddens me precisely because I know that no matter how final death is for me, those I leave behind will continue their lives without me.Footnote 88 Of course, I want them to continue without me; I do not want those I care about to spend the rest of their lives weeping over my absence. Still, that their lives will unfold in unpredictable ways without my assistance, delight and love (and also my worry, unwanted interference, and occasional admonition) causes me sadness now. There is nothing very mysterious or metaphysically puzzling about this.

VI. Our mundane mortality

There are various ways in which one can be concerned about death. I can be concerned about what my death means for me, and what my death means for others. Likewise, I can be concerned about what an other's death means for them, and what their death means for me. For the most part, philosophers have been preoccupied with the first of these. But what my death means for me alone is not obviously the most pressing issue. Indeed, in one sense my anxieties about my own death are very unremarkable. After all, as even Camus recognises, the body naturally ‘shrinks from annihilation’Footnote 89 – though, of course, the determined suicide can override such basic drives.Footnote 90 Those of us with a particular philosophical education may want to try and explain this by reference to the ‘positive’ (D, 62) goodness of experience as such.Footnote 91 But this, one might reasonably suspect, is little more than philosophical veneer adorning a mundane natural fact. Likewise, it is far from clear why ‘say[ing] we have a natural dislike of oblivion…is simply to reframe what needs to be explained’ (PR, 210). Nobody seriously thinks that our propensity for hunger (even our craving specific foods) requires philosophical ‘explanation’. Why then should we think that our natural adversity to death (amongst other things) requires such theoretical bolstering?Footnote 92 There is something right about Marcuse's allegation that Heidegger perverts the mundane ‘biological fact’ of death by granting it the status of ‘an ontological essence’ (DU, 138).Footnote 93 But it would be unfair to reserve this sort of criticism for Heidegger, for he is far from alone in underestimating the banalities of our mortality.Footnote 94 In particular, trivialising (or simply ignoring) the significance our own death has for others – not to mention the import others' deaths have for each of us – seems to be an occupational hazard of philosophers of various methodological persuasions. As I suggested earlier, even the much-discussed paradoxes of ‘non-existence’ cannot plausibly be isolated from its intersubjective significance. Treating my death as an essentially monadic prospect (or even Heideggerian ‘possibility’) simply feeds a philosophical fiction. Solomon is therefore right to insist that ‘philosophers should argue that it makes a difference to me whether I live or die not because of the phenomenology of experience but because of the particular phenomenology of social experience’. As he goes on to remind us: ‘What I really care about are the people I leave behind…Death is what individuates us only in so far as it targets the vulnerability of intimate and significant relationships’ (DFM, 175–176).Footnote 95 The significance my prospective death has for me is not, as Nagel claims (and many others assume), the ‘primary case’ (D, 62). For what my death means to me is highly dependent on what my death will mean to those others I will leave behind. Just as my ongoing assessment of my own life is mediated by my relationships with others (notably, but not exclusively, with intimates), so too is my attitude towards my own death mediated by others.Footnote 96 To describe this as ‘inauthentically’ losing oneself in the ‘they’ is deeply misleading; it is rather an eminently human response to having personal relationships and a shared history with unique, singular others. Hermits and sociopaths aside, the past, present and future of our ordinary lives are inevitably intertwined. Given that we are all finite, vulnerable beings, our mortality is part of this wider narrative.

Whatever we might think about Heidegger's analysis of death, his approach is just one manifestation of philosophy's broader self-conception. For philosophers generally tend not to care much for the contingencies or ‘merely empirical’ dimension of our lives; instead, they want to say something of fundamental significance. (Even when, like Nagel, the ‘subjective’ perspective is given considerable attention, it is the general features of such a perspective that ultimately count.Footnote 97) But the banalities of death I have here been emphasising are poorly understood as ‘merely empirical’ phenomena. My ordinary concerns about who will discover my body (assuming I die alone), how family and friends will deal with my death, and who will sort through my belongings, are not ‘merely empirical’ issues. Of course, in one sense these are ‘empirical’ considerations. But it is little more than a philosophical prejudice to think that such facts do not get to the heart of the matter; that focussing on these would be to miss the real ‘conceptual issues’.Footnote 98 It seems to me that without taking such banalities seriously philosophers will continue to treat death as an intellectual conundrum; a puzzle that bears little relation to the concrete realities of our mortality and the persistent concerns we (including off-duty philosophers) naturally have about it. Death is mundane, and should we feel the need to theorise about it, we should do so more mundanely.Footnote 99

References

1 Borges, Jorges Luis, Labyrinths: Selected Stories and Other Writings (London: Penguin, 1970), 146Google Scholar.

2 See Heidegger, Martin, Being and Time (Oxford: Blackwell, 1999), 289, 298, 303 (hereafter abbreviated BT)Google Scholar; Lingis, Alphonso, The Imperative (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1998)Google Scholar, ch 16 (hereafter abbreviated IMP). I will assume that death is final; questions about immortality (and other forms of posthumous survival) are not the concern of this paper.

3 See Derrida, Jacques and Stiegler, Bernard, Echographies of Television (Cambridge, UK: Polity, 2002), 106 (hereafter abbreviated ECH)Google Scholar; Pascal, Blaise, Pensées (London: Penguin, 1995), §587 (hereafter abbreviated PEN)Google Scholar; de Montaigne, Michel, The Complete Essays (London: Penguin, 1991), 684 (hereafter abbreviated CE)Google Scholar; Levinas, Emmanuel, Alterity & Transcendence (London: Athlone, 1999), 155 (hereafter abbreviated A&T)Google Scholar.

4 On one's last moments see Seneca, Ad Lucilium Epistulae Morales, Vol 1 (London: William Heinemann), 189 (hereafter abbreviated EP).

5 On the purported special epistemic and moral status of ‘last words’ see Kastenbaum, Robert, ‘Last words’, The Monist 76 (1993)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Frequently neglected here are the last words spoken to the dying by the living – most often, of course, these occur unwittingly and before any deathbed scene.

6 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, The Confessions (London: Penguin, 1953), 86Google Scholar. See also Derrida, Jacques, Without Alibi (Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 2002), 95Google Scholar.

7 On photography and death see Barthes, Roland, Camera Lucida (London: Vintage, 2000), 9, 14–15, 32, 82, 84, 96–97Google Scholar; ECH, 39, 51, 97, 115ff, 132.

8 See IMP, 154. We are surrounded by the dead in other less obvious ways. As Sartre notes, we the living ‘decide the fate of the dead’ – those who precede us, who form the cultural-historical background each of us inherits, and so on (see Sartre, Jean-Paul, Being and Nothingness: An Essay on Phenomenological Ontology (London and New York: Routledge, 1993), 542–543 (hereafter abbreviated B&N)Google Scholar).

9 ‘A person's own death does become real to him after the death of both parents. Until then, there was someone else who was “supposed to” die before him; now that no one stands between him and death, it becomes his “turn”’(Nozick, Robert, The Examined Life: Philosophical Meditations (New York, London, et al.: Touchstone, 1989), 20; see also 22Google Scholar). Bauman describes the death of a loved one as ‘a death experience “once removed” ’, just as the ‘breakdown of a relationship cutting an interhuman bond also carries a stamp of “finality” ’(Bauman, Zygmunt, Liquid Fear (Cambridge, UK: Polity, 2006), 44 (hereafter abbreviated LIQ)Google Scholar).

10 Montaigne ridicules this in CE, 685.

11 See Solomon, Robert, ‘Death fetishism, morbid solipsism’, in Malpas, J. and Solomon, R.C. (eds.), Death and Philosophy (London and New York: Routledge, 1998), 152 (hereafter abbreviated DFM)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Note Cockburn's discussion of grief for the death of a loved one (Cockburn, David, Other Human Beings (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1990), 155–157 (hereafter abbreviated OHB)CrossRefGoogle Scholar).

12 See A&T, 154; Mothersill, Mary, ‘Death’, in Hanfling, O. (ed.), Life and Meaning: A Reader (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996), 86 (hereafter abbreviated DE)Google Scholar.

13 See DFM, 168, 172. There are many ways in which one can respect the dead, and these are highly culturally-historically malleable. Wittgenstein thus writes: ‘Recall that after Schubert's death his brother cut some of Schubert's scores into small pieces and gave such pieces, consisting of a few bars, to his favourite pupils. This act, as a sign of piety, is just as understandable to us as the different one of keeping the scores untouched, accessible to no one. And if Schubert's brother had burned the scores, that too would be understandable as a sign of piety’ (Wittgenstein, Ludwig, ‘Remarks on Frazer's Golden Bough’, in Luckhardt, C.G. (ed.), Wittgenstein: Sources and Perspectives (Bristol: Thoemmes Press, 1996), 66 (hereafter abbreviated RFGB)Google Scholar). This point can be extended further, for there is nothing inherently peculiar about eating the flesh of the dead out of respect – no matter how distasteful we might find such a practice. After all, it is not that difficult to see how literally consuming an other – literally ‘taking the other into oneself’ – could be performed out of deep love and devotion to their memory. As Winch rightly insists, to understand such practices, it is important to situate them in their broader cultural context (see Winch, Peter, ‘Understanding a Primitive Society’, American Philosophical Quarterly 1:4 (October 1964), 310 (hereafter abbreviated UPS)Google Scholar); though this does not in itself commit one to some form of cultural relativism.

14 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (London and New York: Routledge, 1995), 6.4311Google Scholar. See also A&T, 155; IMP, 153. Note also Winch's remarks on the intimate relation between our conception of life and death (UPS, 322–323).

15 See also Schopenhauer, Arthur, The World as Will and Idea: Abridged in One Volume (London: Dent/Everyman, 2000), 211Google Scholar.

16 See DFM, 170; Kant, Immanuel, Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 59Google Scholar (hereafter abbreviated APP). According to Sartre, death is the ‘triumph of the point of view of the Other over the point of view which I am toward myself’ (B&N, 540). While alive, I have control over my life's meaning and value. My facticity, the life-projects I choose, and my interpretation of both (indeed, the latter is part of the ‘project of the self’ (ibid. 541)) are in my ‘own hands’ (ibid. 543). But with the advent of my death, it is the other who becomes ‘the guardian’ of the value and meaning of my life. In death I thus ‘lose…[my] personal existence’ (ibid. 541–542) to what others will make of it; whether they offer a positive ‘reconstruction’, let my life fall into ‘oblivion’ and become ‘forgotten’ (ibid. 541), subsume me ‘into a mass’ or ‘collective existence’ (ibid. 542), and so on. For Sartre then, the ‘very existence of death alienates us wholly in our own life to the advantage of the Other. To be dead is to be prey for the living. This means therefore that the one who tries to grasp the meaning of his future death must discover himself as the future prey of others’ (ibid. 543). Needless to say, Sartre's portrayal of ‘the Other’ as threatening here is in keeping with his broader, and rather bleak, account of intersubjectivity. On a more cathartic note, see Aurelius' remarks about others wanting ‘to be rid of us’ (Aurelius, Marcus, Meditations (London: Penguin, 2006), 103–104 (hereafter abbreviated MED)Google Scholar).

17 See DFM, 170–171.

18 See Epicurus, , ‘Death is nothing to us’, in Helm, P. (ed.), Faith and Reason: Oxford Readers (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999) (hereafter abbreviated DNU)Google Scholar; Lucretius, , ‘We have nothing to fear in death’, in Hanfling, O. (ed.), Life and Meaning: A Reader (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996) (hereafter abbreviated NFD)Google Scholar. Bauman thinks that the prototypical fear is fear of death; indeed: ‘Dangers are conceived as “threats” and derive their frightening power from the meta-danger of death’ (LIQ, 52; see also Rorty, Amélie Oksenberg, ‘Fearing Death’, Philosophy 58, 224 (April 1983), 181 (hereafter abbreviated FD)CrossRefGoogle Scholar).

19 Nagel argues against this alleged symmetry in Nagel, Thomas, ‘Death’, in Fischer, J.M. (ed.), The Metaphysics of Death (Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 1993), 67–68 (hereafter abbreviated D)Google Scholar.

20 On the latter see ibid., 62.

21 Solomon makes a similar point in DFM, 154, 155, 169.

22 Nagel, Thomas, The View from Nowhere (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), 225 (hereafter abbreviated VN)Google Scholar; see also LIQ, 42–43. Solomon refers to the dead body (and our anxieties about what will happen to it upon death) in DFM, 173.

23 See also MED, 14.

24 What Heidegger calls ‘Being-come-to-an-end’ (BT, 282) and ‘Being-no-longer-in-the-world’ (ibid. 284).

25 Derrida, Jacques, ‘As If I Were Dead: An Interview with Jacques Derrida’, in Brannigan, J., Robbins, R. and Wolfreys, J. (eds.), Applying: To Derrida (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1996), 216 (hereafter abbreviated AID)Google Scholar. See also APP, 60.

26 See Solomon's remarks in DFM, 175.

27 Interestingly, Wittgenstein suggests that belief in immortality can be understood, not as a quasi-empirical hypothesis regarding one's posthumous survival, but rather in terms of the feeling that one has ethical responsibilities to specific others that even death could not obliterate (see Wittgenstein, Ludwig, ‘Lectures on Religious Belief’, from Barrett, C. (ed.), Lectures and Conversations on Aesthetics, Psychology and Religious Belief (Oxford: Blackwell, 1994), 70Google Scholar).

28 Somewhat dismissively, Solomon refers to ‘the obvious comment that death affects the survivors as well as the deceased’ (DFM, 166).

29 See BT, 302; LIQ, 51; Derrida, Jacques, ‘I have a taste for the secret’, in Derrida, J. and Ferraris, M., A Taste for the Secret (Oxford: Polity, 2001), 23Google Scholar. As we will see shortly, in this Heidegger is not entirely original (see Kierkegaard, Søren, Concluding Unscientific Postscript (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1968), 148–151 (hereafter abbreviated CUP)Google Scholar; Derrida, Jacques, Aporias (Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 1993), 4Google Scholar).

30 On related themes see Gaita, Raimond, The Philosopher's Dog (London and New York: Routledge, 2003), 85ff (hereafter abbreviated PD)Google Scholar. Cockburn remarks: ‘[T]here is a significant continuity between the live and dead human being. For the extended, tangible being does not lose its history through death, and our understanding of what we are confronted with when we are confronted with a corpse is…crucially conditioned by our acknowledgement of its history’ (OHB, 187–188).

31 See Pascal's remarks in PEN, §170.

32 According to Levinas, death is not the ‘possibility of impossibility’ (as Heidegger maintains), for this, he thinks, implies ‘a human power’. Rather, death is better described as ‘“an impossibility of possibility” ’ (A&T, 155). See also Derrida, Jacques (with Maurice Blanchot), The Instant of my Death/Demeure: Fiction and Testimony (Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 2000), 65 (hereafter abbreviated DEM)Google Scholar.

33 And similarly: ‘No one can take the Other's dying away from him’, for ‘[b]y its very essence, death is in every case mine’ (BT, 284).

34 See Harries, Karsten, ‘Death and Utopia: Towards a Critique of the Ethics of Satisfaction’, in Sallis, J. (ed.), Radical Phenomenology: Essays in Honour of Martin Heidegger (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1978), 138, 141ff, 145, 148–149 (hereafter abbreviated DU)Google Scholar. As Harries rightly notes, Heidegger's use of the term ‘authenticity’ has a normative dimension (see ibid. 147).

35 See also BT, 302; IMP, 155.

36 See BT, 298.

37 Winch, Peter, Trying to Make Sense (Oxford: Blackwell, 1987), 174Google Scholar.

38 In a similar vein, Derrida stresses his own interest in death as a possibility, not merely an inevitability (see Derrida, Jacques, (various remarks in) Glendinning, S. (ed.), Arguing with Derrida (Oxford: Blackwell, 2001), 102ffGoogle Scholar).

39 See BT, 295.

40 Heidegger insists that his ‘existential Interpretation of death takes precedence over any biology and ontology of life’, just as it provides the necessary ‘foundation for any investigation of death which is biographical or historiological, ethnological or psychological’ (ibid. 291). Likewise, anthropological studies of how death is perceived and dealt with in different cultures presuppose an ‘existential analytic’ of Dasein and ‘corresponding conception of death’ (ibid. 292).

41 Heidegger briefly refers to Tolstoy's ‘The death of Ivan Ilych’ in ibid., 495 n xii.

42 Tolstoy, Leo, ‘The death of Ivan Ilych’, in The Raid and Other Stories (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982), 233 (hereafter abbreviated DII)Google Scholar.

43 See also CUP, 151. Solomon emphasises much the same thing in DFM, 158–159.

44 Seneca similarly notes: ‘There is no fixed count of our years. You do not know where death awaits you; so be ready for it everywhere’ (EP, 191). And likewise, Epictetus, variously writes: ‘Let death and exile and every other thing which appears dreadful be daily before your eyes; but most of all death…’ (Discourses of Epictetus with the Encheiridion and Fragments (London: Bell and Sons, 1912), 387 (hereafter abbreviated DOE))Google Scholar; ‘Do you not know that both disease and death must surprise us while we are doing something? the husbandman while he is tilling the ground, the sailor while he is on his voyage? what would you be doing when death surprises you…?’ (ibid. 209).

45 Levinas never forgave either Heidegger's involvement with National Socialism, or his silence on this matter after the war.

46 Levinas, Emmanuel, God, Death, and Time (Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 2000), 21 (hereafter abbreviated GDT)Google Scholar.

47 See also A&T, 155–156; LIQ, 29–30.

48 See E&I, ch 2.

49 Levinas, Emmanuel, ‘Ethics of the infinite’, in Kearney, R., Dialogues with Contemporary Continental Thinkers: The Phenomenological Heritage (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1984), 62 (hereafter EOI)Google Scholar. See also A&T, 157, 167; Mortley, Raoul, French Philosophers in Conversation: Levinas, Schneider, Serres, Irigaray, Le Doeuff, Derrida (London and New York: Routledge, 1991), 15 (hereafter abbreviated FPC)Google Scholar.

50 See also A&T, 167. Cockburn discusses the deaths of strangers in OHB, 183–184.

51 See also A&T, 161.

52 See also Derrida's remarks on his friendship with Paul de Man in Derrida, Jacques, Memoires for Paul de Man (New York: Columbia University Press, 1989), 29Google Scholar.

53 See Levinas, Emmanuel, Ethics and Infinity: Conversations with Philippe Nemo (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1992), 86 (hereafter abbreviated E&I)Google Scholar; Robbins, J. (ed.), Is it Righteous to Be? Interviews with Emmanuel Levinas (Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 2001), 135, 204 (hereafter abbreviated IRB)Google Scholar. According to Cockburn, others' ‘irreplaceability’ is poorly understood as their possessing a collection of ‘psychological characteristics’ (OHB, 158), but is rather inextricably connected to their having ‘a particular history’ (ibid. 155; see also 156–157, 183, 187); a history nobody else could possibly have without being that person.

54 See Derrida, Jacques, The Gift of Death (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 46 (hereafter abbreviated GOD)Google Scholar.

55 According to Levinas, the finite, vulnerable body is the ‘condition of giving’ (GDT, 188; see also Levinas, Emmanuel, Otherwise than Being Or Beyond Essence (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1994), 77Google Scholar). Levinas, albeit tacitly, retains Heidegger's emphasis on death as possible at-any-moment insofar as the former's concern with the death of the other is not restricted to the actually dying other (though, of course, we are all in a sense always already dying). That is, for Levinas, the other's inherent fragility includes their being vulnerable to death at any moment, not merely their being vulnerable to death one day.

56 For more detail on this, see Plant, Bob, Wittgenstein and Levinas: Ethical and Religious Thought (London and New York: Routledge, 2005), 131ff (hereafter abbreviated W&L)Google Scholar.

57 See also E&I, 86.

58 See also Levinas, Emmanuel, Outside the Subject (London: Athlone, 1993), 44 (hereafter abbreviated OS)Google Scholar.

59 Levinas, Emmanuel, Hand, S. (ed.), The Levinas Reader (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996), 83Google Scholar; see also 86; E&I, 89, 96; IRB, 48. Levinas insists that ‘access to the face is straightaway ethical’ (E&I, 85; see also 87, 97). Note also Barthes' remarks on ‘waiting’ (specifically for one's lover) as a ‘minor mourning’ for the other who is ‘as if dead’ (Barthes, Roland, A Lover's Discourse: Fragments (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1990), 37–38Google Scholar).

60 See A&T, 164. Levinas' attitude toward non-human animals is rather negative (see Levinas, Emmanuel, ‘The Paradox of Morality: An Interview with Emmanuel Levinas’, in Bernasconi, R. and Wood, D. (eds.), The Provocation of Levinas: Rethinking the Other (London and New York: Routledge, 1988) (hereafter abbreviated POM)Google Scholar; Bob Plant, ‘Welcoming dogs: Levinas and “the animal” question’, forthcoming in Philosophy & Social Criticism (USA)).

61 For more detail on this recurrent theme in Levinas' work, see W&L, ch 6.

62 Levinas, Emmanuel, Entre Nous: Thinking-of-the-Other (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), 148Google Scholar; see also OS, 48; FPC, 19; POM, 172; Levinas, Emmanuel, Of God who comes to mind (Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 1998), 169, 171, 175Google Scholar.

63 See also GDT, 17; A&T, 162; GOD, 51, 68–69, 70–71, 85–86. Echoing Levinas, Derrida similarly thinks that ‘We are all survivors who have been granted a temporary reprieve’ (Derrida, Jacques, Learning to Live Finally: The Last Interview (Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 24 (hereafter abbreviated LLF)CrossRefGoogle Scholar). Indeed, he confesses that this ‘question of survival’ has ‘always haunted’ him in ‘every instant’ of his life ‘in a concrete and unrelenting fashion’ (LLF, 25–26). After all, ‘life is living on, life is survival’ (ibid., 26; see also 51–52; DEM, 45; Derrida, Jacques, Anidjar, G. (ed.), Acts of Religion (New York and London: Routledge, 2002), 383Google Scholar; Derrida, Jacques, ‘To Forgive: The Unforgivable and the Imprescriptible’, in Caputo, J.D., Dooley, M. and Scanlon, M.J. (eds.), Questioning God (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2001), 49Google Scholar; Derrida, Jacques, Adieu: To Emmanuel Levinas (Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 1999), 6Google Scholar).

64 Solomon dubs Heidegger the ‘patriarch of death fetishism in philosophy’ (DFM, 163).

65 MacEvoy, Leslie, ‘The Heideggerian Bias Toward Death’, Metaphilosophy 27,1–2 (January/April, 1996), 64 (hereafter abbreviated HBD)Google Scholar. According to Secomb, that I cannot die the other's death can be broadened, for I cannot ‘experience the other's experiences’ either. As such, ‘being-with-others in their dying is not unique in this regard’ (Secomb, Linnell, ‘Philosophical deaths and feminine finitude’, Mortality 4, 2 (1999), 114 (hereafter abbreviated PDF)CrossRefGoogle Scholar).

66 See HBD, 64, 73ff.

67 See also PDF, 123. In this regard, Secomb claims, Heidegger's analysis is ‘partial and incomplete’ (ibid. 114).

68 See also ibid. 113.

69 See also ibid. 121–122. More caustically, Solomon describes Heidegger's account of being-towards-death as ‘morbid solipsism, a denial of the obvious in favour of an obscure and mock-heroic philosophical theory’ (DFM, 175).

70 See DFM, 175. This is not to say that death (amongst other things) is conceived of in radically different ways across different cultures. As Winch (following Wittgenstein (see RFGB, 66–67)) puts it, the ‘very conception of human life involves certain…“limiting notions” ’– notably those surrounding ‘birth, death [and]…sexual relations’ (UPS, 322; see also 324; Winch, Peter, ‘Nature and Convention’, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 20 (1960), 238–239Google Scholar). The horizon of possibilities for how human beings conceptualise and deal with these natural phenomena may not be radically open, but neither is it rigidly circumscribed. It seems to me that, regarding issues of mortality, philosophers could learn a lot from other academic disciplines (anthropology, sociology, psychology, and so on), not to mention those actually working with and caring for the dying.

71 See also EOI, 60.

72 One way of making this point more plausible (though somewhat less Levinasian) is to follow Cockburn's distinction between first- and third-person perspectives on suffering and death. He suggests that there is an important ‘asymmetry’ (OHB, 167) between others' deaths and one's own death. My concern (anxiety, fear, horror) about my own death does not depend upon who I happen to be, but it is highly relevant to my concern about others' deaths whose death it is. In this sense, my relation to my own death is morally ‘thin’ (ibid. 193). It would therefore be misleading to say that my death matters more to me than the death of my lover or child. (Cockburn places great emphasis on those intimates with whom one shares a personal history (see ibid. 155–157).) In other words: ‘What is for me an overwhelmingly significant fact – the fact that it is Jane [for example, my lover] who is dying – is barely registered in the internal standpoint [regarding my own death]’ (ibid. 168; see also 194–195). My concern about Jane is ‘concern about a particular person…an individual with a history’ (ibid. 183; see also 187), but the concern I have about my own death (and suffering) is more akin to a ‘violent reflex’ (ibid. 193; see also 194). As such, we should not think that focussing on the latter – as philosophers are prone to do – is going to help clarify the real significance of death (see ibid. 168). Following this broadly Wittgensteinian approach, we might therefore say that Levinas is not entirely off-beam, but that the other's death is not simply more important than mine; rather, the significance of each is different. In short, the former is, to use Cockburn's terms, morally ‘rich’ (ibid. 193).

73 Nozick, Robert, Philosophical Explanations (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1981), 582Google Scholar.

74 Scarre, Geoffrey, ‘On caring about one's posthumous reputation’, American Philosophical Quarterly 38 (2001), 209 (hereafter abbreviated PR)Google Scholar. See also Margalit, Avishai, The Ethics of Memory (Cambridge, Mass. and London: Harvard University Press, 2002), 91ffGoogle Scholar.

75 This sort of ‘living on’ seems rather paltry, for presumably what one wants from immortality is self-continuity; that it is I who continue to exist, not merely (for example) the memory of my former life in the thoughts of others.

76 See also PD, 92; DFM, 173.

77 This does not mean that only those with offspring can have such posthumous wishes; one may similarly want the future to be ‘better’ for friends, relatives, work colleagues, one's favourite charity or beloved football team.

78 In Sartre's Nausea, Rôquentin makes a similar point: ‘[E]ven my death would have been In the way. In the way, my corpse, my blood on these stones, between these plants, at the back of this smiling garden. And the decomposed flesh would have been In the way in the earth which would receive my bones, at last, cleaned, stripped, peeled, proper and clean as teeth, it would have been In the way’ (Jean-Paul Sartre, ‘Mysticism of the Absurd’ (extract from Nausea), in Westphal, J. and Levensen, C. (eds.), Life and Death (Indianapolis/Cambridge: Hackett, 1993), 61Google Scholar).

79 Of publishing (and ‘writing’ in the narrow sense) Derrida remarks: ‘The trace I leave signifies to me at once my death…and the hope that this trace survives me’ – though this is not, he insists, ‘a striving for immortality’, but rather something ‘structural’ (LLF, 32). In short: ‘I live my death in writing’ (ibid. 33).

80 As I have argued elsewhere, this emphasis is best understood by reading Levinas as a post-Holocaust thinker (see W&L, 128ff).

81 Mothersill makes a related point in DE, 90.

82 Indeed, one need not have led a particularly murky life in order to feel anxiety – and even prospective embarrassment or shame – at the thought of others (perhaps especially other intimates) sorting through one's personal belongings. Love letters, diaries (and so on) are normally kept private. But at death such private items soon become public – albeit to a restricted audience.

83 It also conflicts with my not wanting to prevent others from their need to grieve, engage in funeral rites (and so on).

84 For example, when an other is dying we might well ‘fear that we shall not be able to endure…[her] suffering’ (IMP, 160). We may similarly fear not being available to care for an other when death comes to them (see ibid. 161).

85 Craig recalls feeling ‘unbearable sadness’ (Craig, William Lane, ‘The Absurdity of Life without God’, in Klemke, E.D. (ed.), The Meaning of Life (2nd Edition), (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 41Google Scholar) when first learning that one day he would die.

86 Regarding ‘fear of death’ Rorty remarks: ‘Some fear that the world will go on without their being there to experience it…The drama will continue without their participation, and perhaps none the worse for that’. Interestingly, she continues: ‘What turns such sorrow into fear is the thought that all our efforts to live well…were all in vain…that our lives were idle and pointless, our enterprises arbitrary’ (FD, 177 my emphasis).

87 I am not suggesting that ‘fear’ plays no role here, merely that other emotional responses are at least equally appropriate.

88 See DFM, 174.

89 Camus, Albert, The Myth of Sisyphus (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1971), 72Google Scholar.

90 See OHB, 193; Hanfling, Oswald, The Quest for Meaning (Oxford and Cambridge, USA: Blackwell, 1995), 32–33Google Scholar.

91 It is a curious notion that experience as such, regardless of its specific content, could be ‘good’, ‘bad’ or anything else.

92 Rorty plausibly argues that ‘fear of death’ can, at least in part, be cashed out in terms of its natural (‘pre-rational’ (FD, 180)) ‘functionality’ (ibid. 179); that is, fear of death is ‘more efficient than an indefinite number of particular fears’, such as ‘fear of exposure in very low temperatures, fear of dehydration, fear of this and fear of that’ (ibid. 181). She goes on to suggest that the ‘metaphysical fear of death – angst at one's non-being’ (ibid. 185) is a ‘by-product’ of functional fear (ibid. 186). In a nutshell then, fear of death is ‘a natural fact, a consequence of being constituted in a certain way’ (ibid. 188).

93 See also DU, 150ff.

94 Mothersill refers to the ‘academicism’ of ‘Philosophical writing on the topic of death’ (DE, 87; see also 88–89). More caustically, she criticises Nagel: ‘Pronounced in a vacuum, “Not only do I not want to die, but it would be a bad thing if I were to die” is rather pretentious’ (ibid. 91).

95 In a similar vein, Solomon writes: ‘[W]e are, first and foremost, phenomenologically and ontologically as well as biologically, social animals. One's own death is always, except in the most lonely of cases, a disruption (one hopes, not too minor) of a network of relationships. And even in those lonely cases, one's death is, in one's own thinking, a disruption of past or possible relationships, or, at the outer reaches of pathos, a lament that one is, quite unnaturally, dying all alone’ (DFM, 175). I agree with Solomon that what is important about death is not the mere ‘dread of the unknown’ or the ‘confrontation with nothingness’ (ibid. 174), but rather the ‘social dimension of death’ (ibid. 175). However, I see no reason to follow him in judging even the latter as manifesting an unflattering degree of ‘self-interest’ (ibid. 176).

96 Despite his numerous remarks to the contrary, Solomon sometimes suggests that questions about one's own death are ‘quite distinct’ from questions ‘concerning the death of others’ (ibid. 155). I think this is far from obvious.

97 As Nagel insists in his discussion of the absurd, he is not interested in the way feelings of absurdity arise in ordinary situations (the sorts of experiences Camus famously describes), but the deeper ‘philosophical sense of absurdity’; namely, the way ‘pretension and reality inevitably clash for us all’ (Nagel, Thomas, ‘The Absurd’, in Mortal Questions (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1979), 13 my emphasisGoogle Scholar).

98 The customary philosophical distinction between merely ‘empirical’ and genuinely ‘conceptual’ (properly philosophical) questions seems to me very shaky indeed.

99 Thanks to Gerry Hough for his comments on an earlier draft of this paper.