I became aware that I was losing contact with myself. At each descent a new person was disclosed within me of whose name I was no longer sure and who no longer obeyed me. [!] And when I had to stop my exploration because the path faded from beneath my steps, I found a bottomless abyss at my feet, and out of it came—arising I know not where from—the current which I dare call my life.
Introduction
“You know what they say: ‘It takes nine months to create a man, and only a single day to destroy him.’ We both of us have known the truth of this as well as anyone could ever know it…. Listen, May: it does not take nine months to make a man, it takes fifty years—fifty years of sacrifice, of determination, of—so many things! And when that man has been achieved, when there is no childishness left in him, nor any adolescence, when he is truly, utterly, a man—the only thing he is good for is to die.”
This bitter remark, taken from the last page of André Malraux’s Man’s Estate,1* was intended by the author of the novel to be an expression of the futility of life. For, if human death has no meaning, then the whole of life is nothing but emptiness. If, on the other hand, there is in death a fullness of being which life does not possess, then life itself must be subjected to a thoroughgoing reinterpretation and revaluation. It is a strange thing that the search for some content in life and some continuity in human existence should have to start off as an enquiry into the meaning of death!
It is not easy for us to do this nowadays. The violent, primitive process of death is becoming so obscured by our general forgetfulness of the meaning of all natural processes that we are no longer disturbed by it. There are few happenings to which we have grown so blind as we are to death. But to be forgetful of death is to be forgetful of life, whereas thinking of one’s death is an act in which life begins once more to appear as a source of light. A man who knows death, also knows life. The converse is true, too: the man who is forgetful of death, is forgetful of life also.
When considered from a biological and medical point of view, death is apprehended in that aspect of its being that is accessible to experimental science, that is, as a dissolution, an occurrence to be endured, a deprivation of consciousness, a destruction. Metaphysical anthropology, on the other hand, asks the question whether this complete removal from self which we undergo in death does not conceal a much more fundamental process which could be described, not in terms of a dissolution and an endurance of suffering, but rather in terms of the progressive achievement of selfhood, of actively initiating the self to life. As an approach to a consideration of this metaphysical problem, let me give, in outline, a picture of death as I see it—a picture the accuracy of which I propose to establish in the course of the following investigation. But first of all a brief sketch, without going into more precise detail.
In death the individual existence takes its place on the confines of all being, suddenly awake, in full knowledge and liberty. The hidden dynamism of existence by which a man has lived until then—though without his ever having been able to exploit it in its fullest measure—is now brought to completion, freely and consciously. Man’s deepest being comes rushing towards him. With it comes all at once and all together the universe he has always borne hidden within himself, the universe with which he was already most intimately united, and which, in one way or other, was always being produced from within him. Humanity too, everywhere driven by a like force, a humanity that bears within itself, all unsuspecting, a splendour he could never have imagined, also comes rushing towards him. Being flows towards him like a boundless stream of things, meanings, persons and happenings, ready to convey him right into the Godhead. Yes; God himself stretches out his hand for him; God who, in every stirring of his existence, had been in him as his deepest mystery, from the stuff of which he had always been forming himself; God who had ever been driving him on towards an eternal destiny. There now man stands, free to accept or reject this splendour. In a last, final decision he either allows this flood of realities to flow past him, while he stands there eternally turned to stone, like a rock past which the life-giving stream flows on, noble enough in himself no doubt, but abandoned and eternally alone; or he allows himself to be carried along by this flood, becomes part of it and flows on into eternal fulfilment.
This is the meaning of the hypothesis which we shall try to justify in two successive essays, the first philosophical, the second theological. It may be stated thus: Death gives man the opportunity of posing his first completely personal act; death is, therefore, by reason of its very being, the moment above all others for the awakening of consciousness, for freedom, for the encounter with God, for the final decision about his eternal destiny. This way of viewing the subject transforms the expression of futility we quoted at the beginning into an exhortation to confidence. In the course of the following discussion this idea will—rather in the form of a dissertation (for which we ask the reader’s indulgence)—be described as the “hypothesis of a final decision”.
In its original form—the structure of which has for the most part been retained—the following essay was written in quite a short time and composed currente calamo without a break.2 Since I want to avoid anything that might disturb the unity of treatment of this problem as a whole, I have thought it advisable to clear the ground by discussing at the outset all the methodological points necessary for the understanding of the whole work.
* The notes will be found grouped at the end of the work.
I
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
