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Jacques Schlanger’s essay stands in a venerable tradition of philosophizing about death. Such contemplation has long served as a spur toward its enactment, a source of material for its reflections, and a corrective to its pretensions. Yet about death, it must be said, such contemplation usually tells us very little. Death resists our attempts to understand it, and certainly to master it. Death overwhelms us. Its inevitability cannot be evaded, and yet the time and exact manner of its coming are things that, for most of us and for most of our lives, we can neither know nor anticipate. Death is and remains a mystery. It is that which is closest to us, and yet also that about which we know the least. Moreover, the very idea of our own death, of that which bounds and defines our lives, is itself something of which we cannot form an adequate idea. To think of one’s own death is already to engage in an impossible act, since in the attempt to contemplate such an event, to look upon “our” death, we nevertheless assume, in the very act of contemplation, our own continued existence. To attempt to think of one’s own death is therefore not to look upon our death at all, but rather to imagine another’s death, and then suppose that it might be our own.
The strangeness of eulogizing one’s own death, then, is partly on account of the fact that this act can be done only from a distance, by standing at a remove from it—so that, in a certain sense, it is not one’s own death that is eulogized at all (just as, in the same sense, one’s own death cannot be an event in one’s own life). As a result, when one approaches death in this way, the impenetrability that attends upon the thought of one’s own death is in part dispensed with, since, in being grasped as an event, death is made akin to other events. It is not, at least in the case of our own death, outside of every event, and as such utterly exceptional. Yet while one might therefore take issue with the starting point of Schlanger’s essay, this is not to diminish its significance. What Schlanger offers us does indeed stand in the tradition of the reflection on death that returns us to a renewed understanding of life. It returns us to a sense of what is most important in our lives, which is not mere life as such, but instead the richness of a life lived in relation to others and to a larger world. In this respect, the acknowledgment of death, and so of the fragile and finite character of life, is one of the keys to the proper grasp of that life, of its nature and worth.
Yet Schlanger’s “eulogy” is also part of a more specific consideration of the manner of our dying, and especially the suffering that often attends upon it. Here he raises difficult questions concerning issues of suicide and euthanasia. Is the argument for either as a humane and reasonable response to the suffering of dying predicated on the idea that we can stand back from our death, even gain some measure of control over it? Furthermore, might not the attempt to gain a degree of mastery over death—over what is surely the most properly unmasterable of all things—be seen as itself a consequence of our contemporary preoccupation with autonomy and individual choice? This preoccupation seems evident both in the desire to curtail life as a means of preempting the suffering of dying (or the decay that comes with old age), as well as in the desperate clinging to or prolongation of life that often occurs in the face of incurable and terminal illness—even though, in doing so, we often diminish the quality of the life so gained.
There can be no doubt that suffering, and death with it, is for the most part an evil, while the diminution of suffering and the avoidance of death is for the most part a good. Yet there are also evils that are incurred in the avoidance of suffering through death and in the prolongation of life in the face of death that are themselves worthy of notice. Those evils may affect not only the one who lives or dies, but also those with whom that life is and has been lived, and the community of which that life is a part. In this respect, our thinking about death cannot consider only death—that is, not just our own death, or the manner of our own dying—but must also be sensitive to the manner of living that it enables. Our thinking about death must take into account the sorts of lives that it manifests and fosters—of both the one who dies, and those who remain as witnesses.
Jeff Malpas
University of Tasmania
