Читать книгу The Mystery of Death - Ladislaus Boros - Страница 8

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The Methodological Postulates For an Analysis of Death

1. DEATH AS A METAPHYSICAL PROCESS

Any attemp to clarify the various questions connected with human death brings the philosopher up against a series of methodological difficulties—and this present one is perhaps, for the moment, going to tax the reader’s patience! Let me at once state the most important and fundamental of these difficulties: no man has a direct experience of death. What we go through as we watch at someone’s deathbed is assuredly not death in its inner reality; it is only the outward aspect of death. We cannot expect to receive a decisive, revealing answer from people who have been near death, or have been given up for dead by those about them. The philosopher will get no assistance from those who are professionally concerned with the dying. Though it is true that many of them have gained deep insights into the death-struggle, none ever saw the actual passing-over. This statement requires further explanation.

Death cannot be gone through from outside, reproduced, as it were, in vitro. Each one of us must accept it absolutely alone; we must and can meet death only once. The outsider, for example a doctor, can assist the dying person, can accompany him on the way of his agony, but cannot enter with him into his actual death. The doctor and the philosopher mean different processes when they speak of death. For this reason the philosophical investigation we are undertaking requires us to direct our thinking along radically different lines from those followed by doctors. The doctor observes how in the dying man the flame of life burns slowly lower and lower, growing feebler every moment until it is hardly perceptible. With the help of powerful drugs or other exceptional means the doctor can still revive the sinking flame of life, but the physiological spontaneity of life continues to get weaker and weaker. The essential bodily functions come to a stop. The body begins to decompose, and when that happens, the most elementary co-ordination of the various individual functions is ended. Particular tissues or whole organs can indeed be preserved intact artificially, but life as a whole has become impossible; the person has “died”. But does that mean that he is “dead”? The question points to a distinction between dying and death which is of fundamental importance to our analysis.

Medical science studies those aspects of life that Aristotle calls “physics”: that is, things that are palpable, observable, experimentally demonstrable. But underlying this is the whole complex of what lies beyond, of “metaphysics”. When a philosopher speaks of death he is speaking of a metaphysical process, which he generally describes as the “separation of the soul from the body”.³ Except in cases of instantaneous destruction of the whole organism this separation does not apparently coincide with the cessation of the vital functions. Recent experiments in resuscitation show that life “withdraws” very slowly and can remain for a long time in a body that to all appearances has become “incapable of living”. Intra-arterial and intracardiac injections (adrenalin and atropin) combined with an artificial supply of oxygen and—where necessary—heart-massage, can set some kind of life on its spasmodic course again, even if only for a short time in most cases. There comes a moment, however, when all these efforts fail. This indicates that the “separation of the soul from the body” has possibly already taken place. This metaphysical moment, which it is not possible to determine by simple observation, is what we call “death”. The hypothesis of a final decision is concerned exclusively with the “moment of death” as understood in this sense.

Stated thus, the question of death is one of urgent theological significance. Philosophical reflexions on death in the thirties brought about a great change in theological perspectives.⁴ Until then the interest of theologians (if we leave out of account their discussions of the preliminaries to death, the condition of man before death) was concentrated on an evaluation of the conditions of the soul separated from the body after death. The classic answers are well known: with the separation of the soul from the body man’s pilgrimage comes to a definite end; immediately after the particular judgement the soul passes into one of three—or, if we include limbo, which so many adopt as a theological hypothesis, of four—“places for departed souls”, heaven, hell or purgatory, where it awaits the final resurrection at the end of time. The great turning point in theological reflexion came when death itself began to be examined by the theologians.⁵ What really happens to the whole man at the moment of death?

The final decision which we have assumed as an hypothesis occurs neither before nor after death, but in death. But immediately the objection will be raised: “Surely you cannot assume that anyone really makes the first completely personal act of his life when he is in the state of bodily and spiritual torment we call the throes of death, or, it may be, the state of insensibility no less proper to the process of dying?” From what has been said, it is clear that this objection is like forcing an already open door. Bringing the final decision forward into the agony, into the state before death, would, indeed, betoken great naïveté of thought. It would deprive our arguments of all their power of conviction. On the other hand, the final decision does not take place after death either. Apart from the fact that such an assumption misconceives the metaphysical constitution of the completely personal act, it would also be contrary to the Church’s teaching on the inalterability of the state a man reaches through his death.

2. A TEMPORAL PROCESS IN A NON-TEMPORAL TRANSITION

Our task is to state as clearly as possible the meaning of the expression: “the moment of death”. Accordingly we shall examine two further objections which attack precisely this point.

Firstly: “For the taking of a decision a certain interval of time is required. But, between ‘before death’ and ‘after death’ there is no intervening space of time. The transition must be thought of as a break that has nothing to do with time. But if death is something instantaneous and indivisible, it affords no possibility for a decision, for a decision is always an act extended over a period of time.”⁶ This argument is verbally very seductive, but logically it is open to question. It must of course be admitted that death as an instantaneous transformation can only occur in a non-temporal transition, and that death is thus not one moment in a temporal succession, but, as it were, a mere line of demarcation between two moments without any temporal extension of its own. But this only means that the last moment before the break and the first after it merge into one another. A line of demarcation without extension of its own does not, in metaphysical terms, bring about a separation within a succession conditioned by time and quantity. The moments of the soul’s “separating” and “being separated” thus coincide. Therefore, the moment of death, the transition itself, is—when looked at from the subsequent condition—the last moment of the preceding condition, and—when viewed from the preceding condition—the first moment of the succeeding condition. So then, although the transition in death must be regarded as something non-temporal, i.e. outside time, the passing and what occurs in the passing are temporal. Because of this, the moment of death offers an opportunity for decision. If the transition in death was not non-temporal, the two moments of before and after could not merge into each other, bringing about a compound and—for that very reason—temporal reality. One suspects that there is another problem at the root of this first counter-argument, and we shall answer this at length when dealing with the next objection, since it gives us the possibility of formulating still more clearly the concept of the “moment of death”.

Secondly: “The hypothesis of a final decision compresses a number of mental acts into one single moment: the act of completely personal decision; preceding this decision in time, an absolutely personal act of perception; conditioning this perception, an awakening of the soul to its spirituality; and so forth. To be able to pose all these acts, the mind requires some length of time, however short. A single moment is not enough.” This objection touches on the problem of temporality. To grasp this in its essentials is one of the hardest tasks in philosophy. Our answer is that the difficulty in question arises from a confusion between the different levels of temporality. The proof can be summarized as follows.

Our experience of time is founded on an observed movement of being. This occurs on different levels, according to the successive stages of being. The first stage in its totality may be called “the sub-personal time-level”. At this level we observe a regular, uniform succession, splitting our world into innumerable flashes of existence, each one of which destroys our world and then re-creates it. Things emerge into being only for a moment and at once disappear into non-being. In other words, the world of our experience arises out of the hidden depths of being as successive moment succeeds to moment.

The second stage in the movement of being is that of our own inner, personal sense of time. At this level the successive moments no longer pass uniformly. Our personal duration takes on different forms: impetuous speed, gradual advance, indolent dawdling. His personal duration is something proper to each individual; it characterizes his mode of existence. Decisions of profound significance compress time and turn it into a kind of thick black line. Superficial decisions, on the other hand, register as mere specks in the course of our existence. We observe the difference in moments of existence when we compare our personal duration with the uniform movement of being on the sub-personal time-level. Strictly speaking the progression of personal reality ought to be measured only by this reality itself. The practical necessities of social life compel us, however, to direct our individual (i.e. intensive) movement of being in accordance with a uniform and sub-personal (i.e. extensive) progression which is independent of us. Furthermore, the sub-personal movement of being is not fundamentally alien to our existence: we are deeply plunged into the sub-personal stream of being and are constantly carried along with it. This is why we are unable to realize our own total content of being, otherwise than in partial acts, in acts dissected into different incomplete functions. Our experience is a double one: on the one side, we have an inkling of what purely spiritual duration could be; on the other, we are unable to free ourselves from the segmented succession of a subpersonal movement of being.

It is different at the third stage, to which the soul belongs as it parts from the body and becomes fully awake to its own spirituality. In death the spiritual movement of being is liberated from the alien element of non-personal temporality. The spirit’s succession now becomes entirely interior, that is, determined solely by the succession inherent in its exercise of its own being. This occurs in a total awareness and presence of being, and not in mere flashes that reach us only fragmentarily. Thus the spirit is no longer swept along by an alien succession. It is able to realize fully the whole continuity of its being, all at once, in one and the same act.

We cannot give complete expression to this spiritual process in our own concepts because these are formed on the second timelevel. We speak of “partial realizations”, of “single acts”, each one of which must be actualized and de-actualized individually before a new act can be posed. We speak of the “continuous succession” of different functions, although we know that on the level of spiritual duration self-realization takes place in one single act, that is, in a total awareness and presence of being. Thus, although in death there is but one single act in the completely personal exercise of being, we can grasp the completeness of this single act only by describing it as a concentration of several spiritual acts, as if in death the spirit achieved its self-realization in separate acts, succeeding one another in time. This inexactitude of our language must be constantly borne in mind when we speak of the process of death; otherwise we make unnecessary difficulties for ourselves where, in fact, none exists.

3. DEATH AS A FUNDAMENTAL MODALITY OF LIVING, CONCRETE EXISTENCE

After this preliminary discussion of the concept “moment of death” we ask the crucial question: How can we make any statement at all about this moment? At the very beginning of this methodological introduction we referred to a difficulty that is inherent in the subject: philosophical reflexions on death seem to have no point since we have no direct experience of death. Modern philosophy has gone far towards answering this question. Martin Heidegger, in his book Being and Time, expressed himself very clearly on this point.⁷ According to him, death is a fundamental modality of living, concrete existence. Our existence carries death within itself, and not only—or, at least, not primarily—because we can in reality die at any moment. Any given existence may be defined as a dedication to, an immersion in death, not only because it is on its way to meet death, but more truly essentially because it constantly realizes in itself the “situation” of death. This presence of death is so fundamental to existence that not one of its stirrings can be understood otherwise than in the light of a constitutive ordering towards death. In every act of existence death is present from the beginning. Its own end belongs of right to every existent being as an outstanding debt, a perfectio debita. The expression indicates some thing that is proper to a being, but which it does not yet possess. For example, an unripe fruit develops towards ripeness; it, and no other, brings itself to ripeness, and this characterizes its existence as a fruit. This “not yet” is comprised in its own existence, and attains expression in “ripeness”. True, the presence of death in human existence cannot be grasped from this example without some qualification. It is much more intensive, more truly essential, more pervasive. Heidegger himself supplements the comparison in important respects.⁸

These analyses of Heidegger’s seem to hark back to Augustinian thought. In his portrayal of man Augustine certainly makes of “dedication to death” an intrinsic determining factor of human existence. Man is, in fact, dying as long as he exists. “As doctors, when they examine the state of a patient and recognize that death is at hand, pronounce: ‘He is dying, he will not recover’, so we must say from the moment a man is born: ‘He will not recover’”⁹ Perhaps this remark again could be understood in the sense of a continual “threat” to existence by death, but Augustine’s real thought—and in it he expresses too the essence of Heidegger’s thought—may be seen in a complementary remark: “If each one of us begins to die—that is, to be in death—from the moment when death—that is, the ebb of life—began to work in him, then we must say we are in death from the moment we began to be in this body.”¹⁰

This is an important point to make. Death has been introduced into the structure of living, concrete existence, and a path leading to a philosophy of death has in principle been opened up. For, when the figure of death makes its appearance in living existence, the philosopher is able to lay hold of death itself at the place where the various pointers to death with which existence furnishes him, intersect. To use another image: the philosopher’s task is to discern the presence of death in an existence while it is still alive, and put together the picture of death from the mosaic fragments of so many scattered experiences of death. But how are we to obtain these pointers to death? How can death be discerned in our existence?

4. THE WORKINGS OF THE DEATH-PROCESS REVEALED BY THE TRANSCENDENTAL METHOD

If death really is a fundamental modality of living, concrete existence, then, in any given existence, it must always and everywhere be present; but what is always and everywhere present is not perceived. We take as little notice of it as we do of the beating of our heart, or of the air we breathe. It is like an atmosphere enveloping the landscape of our existence, and we have become so accustomed to it that our eyes no longer see it. What is closest to us is often farthest away. That is why we are never consciously and explicitly aware of death as a basic cause of the movements that occur in our mental activity. Death is the unreflexive, uncoordinated factor in our existence, one of those primitive metaphysical data that precede immediate experience. Human existence is lived out on different levels. It builds up from within, from an inner nucleus which ever eludes our grasp. It is, however, possible for philosophy to isolate and lay bare this thing in us which is constantly rising to the surface but is never actually grasped. This can be done by the transcendental method, that is to say, by an investigation of the acts of consciousness in order to find out just what implications they convey.¹¹ In other words, the transcendental method is the way that discloses how, in our acts, there is always being effected at the same time an accompanying process of penetration into the sphere of what gives birth to them, something welling up out of the depths of our human being.

Some historical examples will show us how this method has been used. Plato directed his efforts to revealing the absolute contained in every experience. He had recognized intuitively that there is in us a primitive knowledge which is not obtained from experience, but precedes and conditions experience. He called these primitive data “ideas”. Therefore, in working out his theory of ideas, Plato was actually using a philosophy based on the transcendental method. St Augustine dealt with the same basic problem. In every act of concrete existence he decried something transcendent that constantly eludes the grasp of our thought. He called this “the realm of eternal truths”, and held that man unconsciously gains possession of it in every act of knowing, and that its presence, though realized only in an unconscious manner, floods the spirit with “light”. His theory of “eternal truths” and “illumination”, and hence his transcendental method, influenced both early and later Scholasticism. There is no doubt that the method is present in St Thomas Aquinas and that it played a decisive part in his teaching about the apriority of our knowledge. In the later developments of Scholasticism it was more and more concealed by a preponderance of Aristotelianism until it disappeared almost completely. Kant discovered it afresh and used it in his Critique of Pure Reason to re-establish the connexion between our empirical knowledge and its a priori foundations. In German idealist philosophy, in Fichte, Schelling and Hegel, the transcendental method attained a perfection which, until then, had not been thought possible. Vast areas of the activity of human consciousness were studied with its help, so as to reveal the a priori data which are contained in them, providing them with both a foundation and norms. In twentieth-century philosophy the transcendental method has been recognized as the appropriate instrument and process of metaphysical thought. Husserl’s “reductions” and Heidegger’s “expositions” bear witness to the effectiveness of this method. With Maréchal it provided a new foundation for metaphysics—in the immediate, it is true, for epistemology alone—and it has made a decisive contribution to the development of a completely new atmosphere in Scholastic thought. Perhaps the most important representative of the transcendental method is Blondel. His system is a veritable ordnance survey of the regions of the human person right up to their extreme limits, and a bringing to light (i.e. conscious perception) of what in its deepest reality the person had always been and willed. He has described his method as follows: “The method we must use … may be called a method of ‘implication’ and ‘explicitation’. These expressions simply mean that, instead of running away, as it were, from the data of reality and from concrete thoughts, we have to bring to light what they envelop, what they, in the etymological meaning of the word, suppose; what makes them possible and gives them their consistency.” “Implication means the discovery of what is, indeed, present but not adverted to, not yet expressly recognized or formulated.”¹²

All these achievements of thought, as varied, even as contrary to one another as they may be, are related in one respect: the basis for all of them is the conviction that man, although he is in the world and, therefore, primarily not in his right place, at ease with himself, yet goes out to encounter the world from a spiritual depth that reaches further than any leadline can plumb. Into every act of his encounter with the world there enters, imperceptibly, an element from out of the unfathomable. In the view we are examining, man’s fundamental metaphysical constitution lies in the fact that, while he draws his life from an incomparable abundance of spiritual wealth, he is yet condemned ever to deal with a superficial and fragmentary world. From this original experience, from the perception of the fact that man is, in each of his acts, more than the single act itself, grew the transcendental method. We shall have to make use of it if we wish to get beyond the merely superficial interrelations of our conscious activities and discover, at their roots, the fact of our dedication to death, which is their condition and reason. Discovering this dedication to death we shall also grasp the essential nature of man’s death.

5. STARTING-POINT FOR THE PHILOSOPHICAL ANALYSIS OF DEATH

Death is present in the whole structure of existence; therefore, any spontaneous activity of existence we may like to choose can be taken as the start of a philosophical analysis of death. There is, however, one act of existence which would seem to be peculiarly suited to this purpose, and that is the experience which philosophers since Plato have pointed out as the basic act of the philosopher, namely “wonder”. This is an experience it is difficult to define. In it our existence is transplanted from its everyday experience and snatched away to the exalted realm of being. It can assume different forms. Buddha felt deeply the suffering of the world, and this set him off on a train of wondering reflexion. We are told of this young prince that he got up one day and “went forth into homelessness”. His action is a symbol of the initial philosophical shock.

Augustine learnt of the death of a friend in a way which placed him with shattering suddenness before the ultimate questions of existence. “In the years when I first began teaching in my native town, I found, thanks to our common interest in learning, a true friend of the same age as myself and, like me, in the full vigour of youth. He had grown up with me from childhood; we had both gone to the same school, and played the same games. This friendship was very close indeed, ripened in the warmth of a like mutual affection.” One day, however, death carried off this friend, and the emptiness left by his loss, opened up for Augustine the road to philosophy. “My heart grew dark for grief and pain, and everything I saw turned into an image of death. Even my native town became a torment, my parents’ house an unbearable agony. Everywhere my eyes sought him out, nowhere did they find him, and all things seemed hateful to me, for they were not my friend. I became for myself a great riddle.”¹³

It was by a mystical experience of which he informs us in his Mémorial that Pascal was summoned to the ultimate loneliness of wonderment, a solitary struggle, the violence of which is attested by those fragments of thought we call the Pensées. The ways and possibilities of making the ascent to philosophical wonderment are varied in the extreme. Once in a lifetime each of us reaches a point where solitude begins to grow and the daily world of experience vanishes into an uncanny remoteness. This is when the process leading to philosophical maturity begins, and it requires a good measure of mental courage if one is going to shoulder this transformation of the hitherto familiar world into one that is remote and uncanny, and to see precisely in this transformation the invitation made us by being.

What is the structure of this basic act of philosophy? Socrates’ dialectic gives us a first indication. It shows us that there is, in philosophical wonderment, a twofold form of experience: Socrates evokes “wonder” in his partner by continually revealing that the apparently known is, in fact, unknown, only to go on from there and demonstrate that the unknown is, in reality, something long since known. This twofold element in the initial philosophical experience remains as a constant in all subsequent reflexion. Accordingly, philosophizing appears to be the mere re-enactment in all its dimensions of the basic act of philosophy. In every philosophical act of knowing the mind is catapulted out of its familiar world to the “unfamiliar” horizon of being. In the same moment, however, the knowing subject is directed back to the things of sense, but these meanwhile have become “unfamiliar”, precisely because of the return of thought from its adventure with being. The tension between the being drawn away (i.e. the ecstasis of thought towards the infinite—which is what wisdom really is) and the being thrown back (i.e. the conversion to the contingent, which is the essence of foolishness) lies at the root of all philosophical experience. Accordingly, Plato is right when he says that, as a philosopher, one stands “midway between the sage and the fool”.¹⁴ Moreover, the famous two-way movement of the mind in Thomist thought (the abstractio and the conversio ad phantasma) is nothing but the translation into a metaphysical terminology of the tension between being caught up out of oneself (ecstasis) and being thrown back upon oneself of which we are conscious in the experiencing of philosophical wonder. We shall now attempt to open up the basic philosophical reaction of wonder by turning the keys leading to four forms of experience. In this way, we shall be laying the foundations for our analysis of death.

The first point at which we make the experience of philosophical wonder is, no doubt, the shock with which we realize the uncertainty and mysteriousness of existence. At the beginning of thought we always find an experience of this subjective uncertainty, dubiousness and indecision. Suddenly we are struck by some occurrence, perhaps something quite ordinary; a strange feeling of uncertainty comes over us and we feel all at once that we have lost our bearings in a world of insecure objects. This brings upon us a feeling of distress that, at times, can be so excessive that we cannot bear to be alone for one single moment. We know ourselves to be lost, and feel our own personal existence to be a mere plaything of inscrutable events, a solitary, aimless and isolated thing. Perhaps we can go on living in society, but we take part in events as if they did not properly concern us. Things have lost their name, almost even their form; it is as though they had no permanent individuality. In this abstraction of ours we make the fundamental discovery of an inner quality which seems to envelop all the actions, deeds and experiences we have mentioned. We are incapable of overtaking, of coming alongside our own deeds, of fully entering into our own acts, of stamping upon them our personality; we are incapable of being fully persons. Our own self constantly eludes us, and, it would seem, without our contributing in any way to this strange effect. The initial stirrings of existence never proceed really from ourselves; we simply follow them, as if impelled by something alien to ourselves.

Furthermore, to take up the point of the mysteriousness of existence: it is precisely in this impossibility of our ever catching up, an impossibility that forms the basis of our powerlessness both with ourselves and with the world, that we discover that our situation is worth questioning from the point of view of philosophy. In us there lives an unknown, in face of which we feel powerless; it is, therefore, something superior to us and seems to make our actions a priori of no account. As such, then, this unknown appears to us to be what we have always been aiming at in all our questionings. When, in our philosophical wonder, the fundamental powerlessness of existence is all at once removed from the periphery of consciousness into the centre of reflexion, our own existence is seen to be both bound up with impermanence and yet for ever breaking out of its provisional limitations; that is, it is shown to be something very questionable indeed: a disconcerting vacuum empty of meaning, and challenging us to a search for meaning. This is the beginning of philosophical reflexion.

There is a second point in our experience of philosophical wonder—a feeling of uncertainty in the realm of the familiar. The moment we feel insecure in our habitual system of relations with the world, we lose our grip on our mastery of the world as we had hitherto practised it. In the framework of the basic philosophical experience, there occurs the specific one Kierkegaard so impressively describes in his Stages on Life’s Way—one’s existence, on the level on which it has hitherto moved, comes up against a limit and perceives that on this level of existence life can progress no further. Courage must be found for a leap to a higher level, and this means that the whole system of relations with the world is involved in a crisis affecting all bed-rock principles. A new world is opened up to our existence, a world whose ways are untrodden, its promises untried and its hopes still uncertain. The leap itself, however, can no longer be put off, for the call of this new life becomes ever more pressing; so a man goes out from his old habitat and tries to find a footing in the unknown. The uncertainty experienced in philosophical wonder lies at a deeper level than the ordinary, everyday threats made to our existence, deeper than our ordinary experiences of failure. This need to make a leap into the dark reveals to us that there has been some obscure kind of loss, of existential loss. It is precisely in the urgency of this inescapable surrender of ourselves that we realize that the uncertainty of which we have now become aware has always been, without our knowing it, a component in all our actions, in the general tone of our existence, in our attitudes and our premonitions of the future. It (this uncertainty) has always been rising up from within us in varying emotional forms, assuming shapes, putting on masks or playing parts in our waking experiences, and still more, in our dreams. Whatever the different manifestations, one thing they all had in common—a feeling that we do not belong “here”, that “somewhere” we have lost something, something very significant. What, we do not know and never have known. That is why we feel so much uncertainty about making the new leap in our existence, because we have always been so uncertain in our world, uncertain despite our superficial air of security in a self-made and forcibly maintained world-structure of practical utility. But, precisely in this uncertainty, we gain anew the knowledge that there is a sure guarantee. Even as we tried, amid the temporary expedients of our daily life, to build up for ourselves a safe situation out of small assurances, and palpable certainties, we were longing, all unconsciously, for a guarantee that would dominate them all. This quest for certainty is an unconscious return, a groping after something that lies far beyond the concrete forms of our search. We constantly strive to push our way across the mysterious boundary which runs through things, persons and events. We live in a constant expectation of infinite encounter and ineffable security.