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
