Faculty of Environmental Studies Amy Lavender Harris
York University
January 1999
ENVS 6101P Representing Nature
Course Paper
Please do not use this paper without permission and attribution. Comments welcomed. Amy
Lavender Harris may be contacted at alharris@yorku.ca .
Death by Another Name/ Nature Naming Death:
Representing Death as Phenomenological Experience
Yet the so-called “problem of man’s immortality” – which includes
the “problem of man’s survival” – cannot be dismissed with a stroke
of the pen. To begin with, man’s longing for survival and/or immortality
is not a mere whim of his, or, if it is, it is such an obdurate whim
that it has all the appearance of an obsession. (Mora, 1965: 204)
1. Introduction
Death is the second question. Existence is the first only because it is easier. Existence is the sum
of being: cogito ergo sum. Being is thinking; existence is conscious of itself. Death is the
stumbling block, because death is the sum of not being. If all consciousness is being, death is not
conscious. Therefore, we say death is not. What is not? Existence is a thing; perhaps death is also
a thing. At least, we name it as a thing which is not: nothing. Existence is not everything: only
consciousness is existence. Is death everything which is not existence? This is the problem of
exclusive absolutes: you have to add them up to get something. Western culture is nothing if not
meticulously actuarial.
It is a truly curious thing that phenomenologists, among others, place so much emphasis
on death, particularly given the problem of experiencing ‘being dead’, if ‘dead’ is also the
opposite of being. But, ‘dead’ is a thing, and perhaps also a condition. We exclude death from
existence because it appears to fail the test of consciousness: certainly, any consciousness it
might have is not meaningfully conveyed. Scholars (ranging from Heidegger and Freud to
contemporary thanatologists and religious theorists) typically deal with the problem of
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experience by broadening the experience of death beyond that of “being dead”: death is also the
experience of dying, and experience of the deaths of others; it can also be the anticipation,
awareness, and anxiety of one’s own impending death. Thomas Nagel declares simply that the
“subjective character of existence” (what it is like to be something) is absent in things that are
genuinely inanimate: this includes baseballs and the dead (1974; 1981). Warren Shibles obviates
the question by stating that since no communicated experience of “being dead” exists, we cannot
say one way or the other, and accordingly should focus our attention on questions other than
death and being (1974).
Notwithstanding the above, in cultural practice we are very curious about what the
condition of death is like. Myths, stories, beliefs about what happens after life ends abound in
number and variety: tremendous contradictions characterize western beliefs about death, even in
the same times and places. They include that death is the opposite of life; death is an end; death
is a beginning; death is simply change; the dead “pass away” from us; the dead walk among us;
we will all die; we need never die. Death scholarship typically seeks to rationalize these
contradictions by eliminating those most fanciful, or lacking in substantive evidence. This is an
important academic problem, because scholars dealing with death seem almost invariably to
begin and end with western philosophy and/or psychoanalytic theory. The problem with using
these (and their derivatives) is that western philosophy demands proofs; and psychoanalysis
requires experience. Western alternative death scholarship that is dedicated to exploring the ‘near
death’ and ‘after death’ experiences as real phenomena (Kubler-Ross, 1975; Moodie, 1978;
Kastenbaum, 1979; Ring, 1980; Wilson, 1989; Harpur, 1991; Miller, 1997) does not usually
enjoy the same credibility in the thanatology community.
Given the preponderance of speculation on the question of “being dead”, though, it is not
enough to say that death is or is not; and that certain cultural beliefs are or are not logical (or, at
least, can or cannot be traced to psychic childhood trauma). Beliefs about death are, just as death
is (or is not, vis above). An alternative is needed: in commencing works with the observation that
the reader might not live to finish the book, and ending with an analogous statement about the
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profound un-knowable nature of death, even orthodox death scholars suggest the limitations of
their own structured questions, and pay tacit homage to the importance of considering cultural
practices of learning and representing death as belief. In cultural practice, death is much more
than it is or is not (in the realm of fiscal accounting and forensic evidence and hypnotic
regression): death is what it is believed to be, and what it is represented as, and the processes and
conceptions underlying these beliefs and representations are more interesting and revealing than
the possibly unanswerable questions of evidence and experience.
All this, of course, begs the question: “what do we believe death to be?”, and “how do we
represent death?”, ‘we’ being, for the moment, contemporary North Americans. A short answer
is that we don’t know, or at least, we are especially unsure right now. It is important to
emphasize our current unknowing, because it is a central feature of our current representations of
death. This new ‘unknowing’ is emerging paradoxically from nearly a century’s effort to define
death with all the tools of science and law, which itself contrasts sharply with the past, when
what followed death (heaven, hell, or any other of a variety of ‘locations’ and conditions) was
considered far more important than defining death itself. Chief among a variety of reasons for
this current “crisis” of death is the conflict among definitions of death: experience and evidence
(on which we have relied, and of which science, technology and medicine are the main
symptoms) are clashing with broader phenomenological interpretations (which themselves are
struggling with their own rules of what constitutes ontological reality); science is clashing with
nature. As a result, we are struggling to establish new definitional frameworks for death that do
not necessarily rely on science or narrow appreciations of theory, and which are based on what
we represent as more stable frameworks, such as the natural world.
This paper builds on earlier work I have undertaken on death and problems of experience
and representation. Previously I have examined the phenomenology of death, primarily as
articulated by Heidegger and subsequent writers in a similar vein, and considered how western
culture deals with the dead (by constructing death as other, separate, inevitable, and unknown:
Harris, 1998). In this paper I intend to leave the firm ground I have previously trod, and approach
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the phenomenology of death from a different perspective. I try to broaden the notion of
“experience” in a very preliminary way, by considering two aspects of phenomenological
experience which have not normally been focused on in death scholarship: (1) conceiving of
death experiences as processes rather than fixed moments (or fixed objects): death as change,
with the possibility of representing experiences on both sides of the ‘moment’; and (2) the use of
proxy-experiences to explain what cannot be directly experienced or meaningfully articulated:
death understood as/in Nature. In doing so, I hope to broaden understandings of how
representations of death are formulated and re-formulated in contemporary western culture, and
begin to evaluate the contemporary “crisis” of death in North America, which is predicated on
contested definitions of death, underscored by emerging representations of death as natural
process (in a number of ways) competing with an unravelling association of (static) death with
‘science’ (dependent upon medicine and technology).
2. Changing the Definition: Death as Object/ Death as Process
In addressing experience, phenomenology is fundamentally about process. It is odd, then,
that the substantial body of death literature which assumes, at least in part, a phenomenological
guise considers the moment and condition of death somehow separate from time, process, and
change. This seems very clearly to be related to how death is defined in the west: an absolute
dichotomy of life/death is established, the irrevocable separateness of life and death given
authority by medical science and underscored in law and ethics. In this section, I evaluate
contemporary definitions of death, and consider some problems with the life/death dichotomy. I
then discuss how phenomenology might go about unifying experience before and after the
moment of death. This serves as a prelude to the third section of this paper, in which I move
beyond first person-focused experience, and consider the utility of proxies in representing
experience. At this point, I move beyond a true experiential phenomenology, but address more
directly the concerns of what might be called a phenomenology of representation. In the third
section of this paper, I look at how death is represented in/ as nature. I argue that, where death is
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concerned, in the absence of direct and communicable experience (and in the presumed absence
of the possibility of direct communicable experience), death in nature (beyond the realm of the
human) is represented as if it were human experience.
(a) Defining Death: Establishing a Life/Death Dichotomy:
At some point during the past century, life and death in the west were dissected apart by
scalpel. This cleavage imposed on the practising world a separation long argued in the abstract
by theorists and philosophers, but which previously had not strongly influenced cultural death
beliefs and practices. Conceptions of life and death were governed principally by religious and
poetic concepts of mortality and immortality, which also had dominated how the public
understood scientific and medical research even long after the renaissance. For the first time in
western history, though, science began to eclipse these heretofore parallel approaches to death.
As ‘crypto-religious’ death was absorbed into ‘scientific’ death, the separation of life and death
was soon reinforced by institutionalized medical, legal, and moral convictions. Medical death
necessarily fixates on the individual: the possibility of shared ontological experiences (at a
physical or metaphysical level) is ignored. In addition, ‘scientific’ death seemed also to cleave
humans from nature, with its emphasis on the possession and loss of the unique ‘privilege’ which
defines the living. Subsequently, this dichotomous separation has experienced difficulties,
stemming from the difficulty of pinpointing the exact moment when life ends (a medical and
legal preoccupation), the dilemma of incorporating beliefs about the soul’s possible immortality
(and the immortality of human culture, by extension), the problem of representing death as a
somehow meaningful experience, and the (old) problem of whether humans are distinct from the
‘natural’ world, and whether such a distinction can be maintained following death.
Prior to the American Civil War (to choose a not entirely arbitrary date, see below),
distinctions between life and death were important primarily insofar as they related to the
separation of the body and soul (a feature of religion, philosophy, science and politics since
before Plato’s time, but of greater preoccupation since Descartes). The death of the physical
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body was of interest as a setting for the transfer of the soul to an existence beyond human life:
the soul’s condition was of far greater importance than that of the body. From the medieval
period through the Victorian age, readiness for divine judgement was articulated as a ‘good’ or
‘bad’ death (Boase, 1972; Dinn, 1992; Jalland, 1996): the moment of death was clearly
secondary to the type of death (and hereafter) experienced. This is not to say that defining the
point of death was not important during these periods; for example, the legitimate fear of burial
alive in the absence of vital monitoring equipment encouraged the invention of ingenious devices
to alert graveside visitors of one’s situation, or to dispatch oneself if so trapped (Jones, 1967;
Quigley, 1996). However, individual death was seen as part of a larger and more profound
process of transcendence (Crouch and Hüppauf, 1985), which manifested important symbolic
meanings for the collective society. Even those who did not accept a conventional
Judeo-Christian vision of the soul’s immortal life allowed for at least a general reabsorption into
the (natural) world, which was also a sort of transcendence: this was a prime feature of the
romantic period’s treatment of idealized pastoral death (N. Harris, 1977; Schuyler, 1986), and
will be important later, in the third section of this paper.
The practical necessity of returning thousands of dead soldiers to their families during
and following the American Civil War prompted a revolution in the treatment of death, and is
credited with helping to establish medical-technological control over it (Bowman, 1959).
Methods of embalming were known but not popularly practised until after the Civil War, when
morticians were successful in convincing the public that embalming was an aesthetic, medical,
and sanitary necessity (ibid.; Farrell, 1980). At the same time, medical advances, paired with
urbanization, industrialization and related events, removed care and treatment from the home:
medicine became institutionalized, and quickly attained the characteristics it exemplifies today,
which can be expressed as the separation of the living from the dead; the “war” against death
waged by the medical profession; and research efforts to identify more precisely the causes,
exact moment, and possible prevention of death. Spiro et al (1996) have written on how
institutions should respond to death; more often, writing on this subject deals with how death is
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actually treated: the dying are separated from other patients; their condition is kept from them;
hospital staff emotionally and sometimes medically distance themselves; dead bodies are
concealed on the trip to the hospital morgue (Sudnow, 1967; Aries, 1980; Palmer, 1993; Moller,
1996; others). “Heroic” efforts are made to prevent death: when a patient dies, it is considered a
defeat (this militaristic language is interpreted by psychoanalysts like Becker, 1973, as being
associated with an innate or learned “terror” of death, and “heroic” impulses directed at denying
death). Research on the abstract causes of death draw controversy and curiosity: scientists debate
whether humans (and other biological forms) have the capacity for immortality; other researchers
identify ‘causes’ of aging (with an aim toward someday circumventing it: these include “wear
and tear”; genetic mutation; free radicals; “error catastrophe”; cellular clocks; waste
accumulation; the immune system; and others (Jones, 1997, 35-36). In modern medical-scientific
discourse, death is opposed to life: science does not concern itself with non-physical aspects of
the body.
The real issue in medical research, arguably as important as delaying and preventing
death, though, is defining what constitutes death. This question has important legal and moral
implications: the living have rights; the dead usually do not. Prior to this century, a person was
considered dead when they did not have a pulse, or did not appear to breathe. These, of course,
were fallible criteria, and people occasionally awakened at their wakes, or after they had already
been buried (see above discussion). There are stories, from more recent dates, of people stirring
while being embalmed (although the injections themselves are lethal, not to mention the removal
of blood and certain organs). In practice, though, a person is dead when their heart cannot be
restarted (technically, heart failure is the ultimate cause of every death). Life support systems,
however, have the ability to keep a body biologically alive indefinitely; this has forced a broader
definition of what constitutes death. Legal precedent in the United States has determined that
‘brain death’ (itself subject to varying criteria, ranging from inactivity in the brain stem to the
loss of all function) may be considered analogous to biological death (Webb, 1997): this has
been encouraged, in part, by the ability to harvest and transplant organs, which need to be as
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‘fresh’ as possible. It is instructive that the legal distinction between ‘alive’ and ‘dead’ is about
rights - of care, ownership, ‘personhood’: when one is dead, one no longer has any but residual
rights; legally and medically, once a person is dead, they have ceased to exist. Death, now, is
defined as the moment when a person ceases not only to be, but ceases to be a person. Writers
including Elisabeth Kübler-Ross (prior to directing her research to after-death experiences)
identified this attitude (which treats the dying as persons un-becoming) as a source of anguish
and terror of death (1969).
It should be clear from the above discussion that there are several difficulties with
attempting to define death as a precise condition happening at a specific instant, with absolute
life on one side and irreversible death on the other (the absolute dichotomy of life/death). These
difficulties, or slippage points, stem in part from disjunctures with other scientific and
non-scientific narratives of death, which continually re-assert themselves despite the efforts to
define death as an absolute. I would like to mention three, which will enter into the discussion
about the phenomenology of death in the following section. The first is more a framing
difficulty: medicine and science, perhaps by necessity (and certainly aided by philosophical and
theoretical models), identify death as the loss or absence of the things which define us as human,
or at least as biologically sentient beings. This conception clashes with resilient narratives of
existence (of some sort, even unknown) following death. Secondly, the dichotomy is based on an
assumption that humans are unique, individual, and separate from nature, which is narrated as
continuous and collective (in other words, the death of an individual person is an end, but the
death of a plant or animal is considered part of a cyclical process). Third, the dichotomy assumes
the inseparability of the body and soul (or ascribes mortality to the soul). Not only does this
collide with a form-matter distinction that dates back to Aristotle, but it also poses additional
questions about what constitutes life and consciousness, and appears to suggest an additional
contradiction to the second problem: whether we are unlike nature while alive and like nature
when dead, and whether this is a contradiction in terms. The life/death dichotomy appears to
raise a persistent question in yet another form: are humans like or unlike nature, and to what
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degree, and to what extent can we consider the natural world analogous to our own experience?
(b) Experience beyond Death: Before and After the Moment
In the preceding section I examined some conditions contributing to the establishment of
a life/death dichotomy in the west. Theorists have long used such a distinction in an abstract
manner, but the influences of science and medicine entrenched the polarity and superimposed it
over other explanations. While separating life and death has simplified moral, medical, and legal
decision-making, it has failed to incorporate narratives beyond the dichotomy, particularly
resilient narratives of continuity and immortality, based variously on the separation of soul and
physical body and observations of the natural world. In this section I discuss phenomenological
approaches to death, and suggest that there has been an untoward reliance on the life/death
dichotomy. I argue that an unnecessarily limited understanding of experience has been applied in
phenomenological approaches to death, and that ‘authenticity’ (as understood in such analyses)
is not always possible nor necessary to satisfy the requirements of experience. It is significant
that phenomenologists’ enquiries into the death experience, beginning formally with Heidegger
(although crediting Husserl for earlier phenomenology writing, and Kierkegaard’s theories of
anxiety and dread), coincide with the establishment of the life/death dichotomy. In
psychoanalysis, too, Freudian, Lacanian, and other analyses of death and death-anticipation have
also relied on an assumed, but not well considered, absolute divide between life and death. These
frameworks also coincided with a growing chasm between the ‘real’ and the abstract, resulting in
poorly matched theories of individual and shared experiences.
Phenomenological approaches to death share a variety of attributes, which I discuss
below. It is my intention to show (at least in a preliminary way, given the limitations of this
paper) that these attributes are not entirely satisfactory in examining the death experience, “being
dead”, or any of the other major enquiries of the approach. A criticism of this effort is that rather
than attempting to correct or broaden phenomenology, I should argue that another approach
entirely is preferable, perhaps a strict Freudian, Lacanian, or Rank-style psychoanalytic study, or
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any of a number of different philosophical approaches on which much has been written. My
response is that the focus of a phenomenological enquiry - experience - can address very well the
chief questions about death floating consistently through religion, ethics, science, and belief. We
are curious about death because we want to know what it is like. It is very hard for us to accept
explanations that do not address this question. Despite millennia of ‘rational’ explanations, a
belief persists that there is something like what it is like to be dead. Phenomenology purports to
address the subjectivity and inter-subjectivity of experience (one’s own and others’), and while
phenomenology does not, as a rule, consider experience that contradicts known facts, it is an
approach that should be sensitive to the vagaries of theory. The bottom line on theories of death
is that we do not know what it is like or not like to be dead: no theory is adequate in that regard.
Yet, there is a compelling body of belief and curiosity based on that same uncertainty, that
ultimately rejects the oversimplicity of the life/death dichotomy (and its mathematical relation to
the obviously problematic “everything = something + nothing” accounting), because of a sense
that there may be yet something deserving of attention on the “nothing” side of existence. It is
my argument that a phenomenology of death should consider the possibility of some kind of
experience in light of these representations, and should not privilege unduly those experiences
that can be articulated or established by the usual rules of evidence. Establishing certainty of
experience after death is not the real question here, and phenomenological studies that focus on
certainty (or, evidence that an experience is ontologically verifiable) are perhaps failing to
discern the subtle nature of some experiences, and demean the value of a phenomenological
approach.
A phenomenology of death is not the same as any other phenomenological enquiry: this
is accepted by those who study it. Yet, it seems odd that this approach is used so often to study a
phenomenon which does not seem to meet many of the basic features of the phenomenological
approach, such as observability; what Husserl called evidenz; and ‘encountering’ (the
correlative of “eidetic” description that precedes causal explanation) (after Embree et al, 1997;
also Farber 1967; Mohanty, 1997; others). To add more layers of contradiction, such writers
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seem almost always to begin with Lucretius’ well-known statement that death is nothing to us,
since while we exist, death is not, and when death comes, we are not (Bryson, 1995: 180): this
statement seems irresolutely to justify the life/death dichotomy which I have already attempted
to set partially aside. Further, an acceptance of Lucretius’ declaration seems to be a statement
that a phenomenology of death is not possible (if death and existence are mutually exclusive),
which is paradoxical given the rather large interest in the phenomenology of death. Some death
writers, such as Feldman (1992) use these statements to disallow a phenomenological study of
death (as itself), but more often they are not considered to contradict the approach, through
various manipulations of the ‘experience’ of death-before-itself.
(i) A Conventional Phenomenological Approach to Death
In Being and Time (1927; 1996 translated edition referenced herein), Heidegger
commences with the understanding that an opposition of ‘being’ and ‘death’ is necessary to the
study of either. Das Sein (‘being-there’) is the essential condition for any authentic experience.
He asserts that ‘care’ (the potentiality-of-being coexistent with the need to accomplish further, or
“a constant unfinished quality” [219]) is a stipulation of da-sein, and that if nothing remains to
accomplish, da-sein, as such, is no longer possible: “eliminating what is outstanding in its being
is equivalent to annihilating its being” (220). These statements establish the two fundamental
tenets of Heidegger’s phenomenology of death: (1) death is seen as a limit (the fulfilment and
simultaneous elimination of da-sein) ; and (2) driven by ‘care’, we are thus
“beings-toward-death”. These statements are not at odds with Freud or Lacan’s theories of the
“death drive” (Ragland, 1995), nor do they conflict with a common assertion that humans are the
only creatures with foreknowledge of our own death.
Heidegger used the concept of the limits of da-sein to approach (and limit) existence
itself: being-toward-death reveals the “authentic temporal roots of man [humanity] as essentially
finite” (Leman-Stefanovic, 1987: xii). Of course, setting a limit to da-sein presents difficulties to
a phenomenology of death: Heidegger’s efforts to get around this are summed up by
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Leman-Stefanovic thusly; that “some kind of phenomenological inference or “extrapolation”
may provide a “unique and privileged revelation of what it is like to be dead” (ibid.: 3); and that
“insofar as I am aware that death will necessarily be present for me at some indeterminate time
as a factical event”, death will be meaningful to me (4). However, Heidegger firmly places these
understandings on the da-sein side of the limit: he very clearly is not suggesting the existence of
an authentic first-person experience of “being dead”. He also warns against incorporating the
experience of the deaths of others, noting that we must guard against “any ontic re-presentation
and unauthentic objectification of the factical event of the death of the Other” (7). Heidegger
argues, in a vaguely Freudian sense, that being-toward-death inheres in da-sen; our existence is
oriented toward the limit/ achievement of not-being. However, he doesn’t clearly set out (and
Freud, and subsequent theorists of an innate ‘death drive’ also fail in this regard) how our
knowledge of death comes about, if not from the experiences of the deaths of others, except in
the most abstract terms. Other writers who assert that our knowledge of death comes from the
deaths of others (Kaufmann, 1959; Mora, 1965; Shibles, 1974; Bowker, 1991; others) seem to
have less difficulty integrating the experiences of others into a phenomenology of
being-toward-death: obviously, a particular sort of ‘nature-nurture’ debate exists in discussions
of how we achieve an awareness of our own death (this is well documented in Becker, 1973,
who, incidentally, argues in favour of an innate heroic urge against death). Given the above, a
phenomenology of death, in the Heideggerian tradition, must concern itself with
being-toward-death (but not being dead), and must adhere to strict rules about how the
experiences of others are used.
(ii) Some Problems and an Alternative Phenomenological Approach
It is important at this point to state again the primary purpose of this paper: to consider
how phenomenology can enlighten persistent representations of the condition of death. In this
section I present several tenets of a phenomenological approach to death in a slightly new way,
in order to demonstrate (1) that death is better conceived as change rather than a limit (offering
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possibilities for phenomenological consideration beyond the life/death dichotomy; and (2) to
‘make room’ for indirect experiences (represented as analogous to first-person experiences - a
modification of others’ experiences) in a phenomenological enquiry. The ‘tenets’ I consider
include: completion (the fulfilment of ‘care’ that Heidegger considers); the ontological basis for
being-toward; uncertainty as a formulating aspect of subjectivity; the shared character of
experience; and the dynamic nature of experience.
I have indicated earlier that phenomenological approaches to death generally begin with
an explicit or implied acceptance of Lucretius’ comment that existence and death are mutually
exclusive and mutually obliterating. This is a main basis for the life/death dichotomy discussed
above, which has been perhaps somewhat naively accepted in the phenomenology of death.
Heidegger assumes that consciousness ceases with death; the absence of any verifiable conveyed
experience is taken as evidence of this. Shibles (1974) is particularly vocal in arguing the fallacy
of this assumption: the absence of any direct experiential knowledge on what follows death
means that we cannot say what death is like; the failure of the dead to convey any experience of
death does not mean that they have necessarily ceased to exist (the above raises an issue in
phenomenology beyond the scope of this paper which deserves further attention: whether
individuals may be said to exist at all independently of a social context, and whether something
not conveyed may exist). Given the above, death cannot truly be considered a limit: from the
outside, we can suggest that it may be different from life, but is not necessarily an absolute.
Heidegger’s concept of ‘care’ adds an additional complication. Da-sein (being there) is always
incomplete; ‘existence’ is constantly striving toward the fulfilment of itself, but ceases to exist if
it is completed (1996: 220). In addition to the seeming paradox, experientially this is difficult to
accept: if death is completion (loosely), then the dying (or living) must have some consciousness
of moving toward fulfilment. Ontologically, there may be a sense of movement and change, but
being is not usually self-consciously arrayed toward the completion of death. In other words,
death-as-completion (=non-being) is an inadequate proof of death-as-limit. Huertas-Jourdas
(1978) offers as an alternative his “Law of Partial Actualization” which allows an abstraction
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from direct experience: experience is made up of both the ‘real’ (as ontologically experienced)
and the ‘ideal’, as the “haunting” aspect lived as “represented” by the real but as not being really
there (123); neither has precedence in constructing awareness, although only one may be
actualized at any one time. He describes this as the “passage of the ideal into actual presentation”
(123).
The point of death-as-limit is that it obviates the possibility of ‘authentic’ experience
after death. I have shown above that adequate grounds do not exist to describe death as a limit;
indeed, we cannot knowledgeably assert with conviction anything about death: we can only
consider what is possible, and does not contradict what we do know. Lund (1985) argues that
disembodied experience is possible, even if it is not conveyed to the living: he describes this
possible existence as somewhat analogous to dreams and other thoughts we have that are not
necessarily related to our corporeal existence. Lund’s assertions might be used to re-articulate
Huertas-Jourdas’ ‘Law of Partial Actualization’ as the passage of the actual into ideal
presentation: certainly this is a central feature of representation (Lund addresses this as well,
noting as others have that the ‘real’ is never presented to us as it actually is). I should mention
here as well Heidegger’s concept of ‘transcendence’ as part of a triad consisting also of
individuation and temporality: Leman-Stefanovic describes this formation as “holding open .. the
horizon within which the Being of the essent is perceptible in advance” (21-22). Is
foreknowledge a feature of being-toward (-death)? On what basis is this foreknowledge
established? Neither Leman-Stefanovic nor Heidegger clarify, except in the abstract.
What I have been alluding to is death-as-change, which is a less-dogmatic conception of
death which avoids contradiction, begins to address persistent myths of continuity; and possibly
allows a phenomenological approach to death itself. ‘Change’ suggests a more incremental
approach than the life/death dichotomy; it does not become trapped in the justification of
opposites, but it also does not deny that life and death are likely very different. Death-as-change
seems to more genuinely reflect the concerns of a phenomenological approach to death, in that it
does not posit the same sort of absolute end to experience that Heidegger’s approach does
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(raising question such as whether dreams may be considered experiences, not unlike those Locke
addressed in his Essay Concerning Humane Understanding [1690]). We experience life as a
series of changes, not all which are immediately (or ever) comprehensible to us; it seems
therefore more logical to consider death as a process, different from, but not entirely distinct
from life. Finally, death-as-change is sensitive to beliefs about continued existence after death:
phenomenology is obligated to consider these beliefs, and at least their potential reliability, given
that they are more plausible, rationally, than death-as-limit is. Like Lund, Mora gives equal
consideration to myths and beliefs of continuity after death: he contemplates the following view
(formulated by Fechner), which seeks to co-join spiritual belief with empirical ‘proofs’:
[that] sensation is not the foundation of psychic activity; it is often
a screen that comes between consciousness and reality. If we pierce
this screen we come up with a vision of reality which is not dependent
upon sensation. From the new point of view thus gained, what is
called “death” is only the cessation of sensory perception but not, or
not necessarily, that of psychical-spiritual activity. (232)
Again, this assertion cannot be established with current knowledge, but it satisfies, at least in
part, the possibility that underlies beliefs that there may be experience beyond death.
Returning to the phenomenological method, the problem remains of how one may go
about accessing the possible ontological reality of experience after death. Arguing that death is
better conceived as change, or a process, may be accepted into phenomenology (Heidegger’s
insistence on death-as-limit was after all, a book-end to his considerations of existence, and does
not necessarily rewrite the larger field of phenomenology), but altering how experience is
understood and interpreted might make claims that the approach remains phenomenological
seem rather misguided. In an initial effort to make a case that a broader interpretation of
experience is amenable, and indeed necessary, to the phenomenology of death, I return to the
articulation of experience. I noted earlier that basic features of phenomenology include
observability, evidenz, and ‘encountering’(among others); the first two features are very much
concerned with the ability to meaningfully convey (or articulate) an experience. It is my
15
argument that the privileging of that which is articulable is a shortcoming of Heideggerian
phenomenology, and that further study of phenomenology as originally devised by Husserl will
reveal that pre-articulated experience is what phenomenology is trying to get at, which the third
feature I have listed above suggests (unfortunately such study is beyond the limits of this present
work, as it was Heidegger who devised the phenomenology of death, and there is a considerable
separation between the two writers). The phenomenology of death is different from other
phenomenological enquiries: the subject is one which cannot be approached through
conventional ontological representations.
I stated earlier that it was my intention to argue that where death is concerned, in the
absence of direct and communicable experience (and in the presumed absence of the possibility
of direct communicable experience), death beyond the realm of the human is represented as if it
were human experience. I have discussed, briefly, the question of how it is we come to have an
awareness of our own (future) death; both Heidegger and Shibles make use of Tolstoy’s “The
Death of Ivan Illych” for different purposes, but both demonstrate the role of others in
influencing our own understandings of death. It is important to note that these are understandings
of death ‘before the fact’, and do not elucidate ‘being dead’ (or, in other words, they refer to the
death of the other, and only help us consider the concept of mortality). Yet, our experiences of
the deaths of others form an important part of our representations of death: this is clear from the
literature that takes its assumptions from our observations of the deaths of others: they stop
‘being’ responsive and lose their biologically ‘human’ form. To us, they appear to end. But this
is only part of the story. What of the deaths of non-human elements of our environment. Here I
speak of plants and animals (which are not considered widely to have any consciousness of their
own deaths), who die but are not considered to end. In the next section I attempt to show just
how substantial an effect these ‘others’ have had on our own representations of death, but at the
moment, I want to reconsider the persistent representations of some sort of continuity after death
of what makes us unique as individuals. These representations exist independently of
philosophical or religious arguments, and are not convinced nor dissuaded by them; they exist at
16
the level of what Mora calls ‘instinctive’ proofs. It seems that perhaps observations of what
happens in nature are translated, at a metaphorical or mythical level, as though they were our
own experience (or destiny). What we are presented with, then, is a phenomenology based on
what is possibly, at root, an ‘inauthentic’ experience of being-toward, but which is impossible to
separate from our own ontological reality.
3. ‘Experiencing’ Death: Using Nature as a Proxy
Anthropologists examining non-western or ‘primitive’ societies often mention their
explanations of death. One that stands out as somewhat representative is a fable attributed to the
Malagash people of Madagascar, which explains death as the result of a decision made by the
first people: offered the opportunity of continual death and rebirth, like the moon, or death like a
tree, which lives on through its seeds, they chose immortality through their children (Palmer,
1993). This myth resonates because it takes knowledge of human mortality and genealogy and
constructs an explanation based on observable processes in the natural world. Explanations of
this sort persist because they do not contradict specific knowledge that may be acquired
subsequently. For example, we can observe empirically that the moon reappearing throughout
the month is the same moon each time, although it is ‘dead’ to us after it has waned. We also
know, through the wonders of medical science, that parents reproduce themselves, and that some
genetic material is reborn, or continues, in our children. This sort of continuity is comforting to
us, whether we base it on tradition or myths of science.
Having addressed in the context of a rational enquiry some problems and potential
explanations of death in the earlier sections of this paper, in this section I attempt to demonstrate
how a phenomenology of ‘being-dead’ is made possible by accepting that observances of the
natural world are represented as if they were our own experiences, and that these representations
form an important part of our ontological reality. In doing so, I consider the basis for myths/
beliefs about death; and representations of nature as infinite and continuous; and their
connections to this reality. The persistence of representations of existence following death
17
necessitates an evaluation of their source, given that they can neither be verified nor dismissed
by normal empirical or rational methods; an alternative approach is required that accommodates
their subjective character. A phenomenological enquiry (even an unorthodox one) helps get at
their relation to individual human understandings of death.
The allegories of the moon and trees mentioned above are suggestive of some
characteristics of nature we hold as essential: nature changes, but continues always; it is never
‘fulfilled’ (in the Heideggerian sense): it is always becoming. These characteristics of nature
form the basis of our myths and beliefs of immortality and continuity. Human death is linked
with the seasons (e.g., “To everything there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the
heaven: a time to be born and a time to die”, Ecclesiastes). Autumn (the fall) is associated with
death; birth with springtime; and summer with youth. In a treatise on death and animal-myths,
Herzog alludes to the life- (and potentially death-) giving powers of the natural world: “dead life
transforms itself into food, and food is transformed back into life ... life itself means
transformation” (1983: 16). Henderson traces numerous other myths of death and regeneration to
their natural sources: he notes that the cycles of nature never fail in these myths; the dead are
invariably restored to life. Henderson lists the most common natural subjects of
death-resurrection myths: the phases of the moon; the agricultural or seasonal cycle; particular
insects (such as the scarab) which lead a ‘ritually’ cyclic existence; sacred and ordinary trees; the
sun; and the nurturing woman-earth (1963: 99-100).
The connection of these myths with our contemporary representations and understandings
of death must be considered, particularly given that our present urban culture is removed from
direct experience with nature in the forms one would expect to have such an impact. Herzog (a
Jungian scholar) examines these myths as archetypes underpinning our psychological makeup;
Henderson concurs: “analytical psychology has shown that what is true of myths in the collective
sense is also true in the individual sense. A single person may step out of his culture pattern at
any time, producing dreams or acts which bring again to life myths which might have been
thought to be dead or outgrown” (15). Other writers, on the psychology of death (Cappon, 1983;
18
Kastenbaum, 1992) indicate that our first experiences of death are often based in the natural
world (as banal as leaves falling from a tree; or witnessing a dead animal), which may be related
to broader understandings of cycles. Whether we remember these incidents as adults, they have
become indistinguishable from our understanding.
The point of the above illustrations is that our experiences always refer to an already
existing framing mechanism, which provides a context for our understanding of them. Thus, our
ontic reality is never ‘purely’ authentic or in-the-moment. This provides an additional insight
into Huertas-Jourdas’ description of the “haunting” aspect of the ideal, represented by the real
but never being quite in it (123): all experiences are ‘partially actualized’ by a combination of
their “real” and “ideal” parts. In this way, a phenomenology of death may arguably incorporate
non-direct (partially authentic?) experiences, as long as they inhere in the experience itself.
Certainly, it is impossible to entirely separate an experience from the layers of its innate meaning
or significance, even before we consciously attempt to impose meaning on it. This is, in part,
what makes a phenomenological interpretation of death (becoming or being) somewhat unique:
such a fundamental part of our understandings of death (as an abstract or personal concept) is
necessarily derived from pre-existing, and proxy, interpretations and experiences, because of the
apparent impossibility of meaningfully conveying an experience of being dead. Representations
of “being dead” recur in our culture; they are an important component in a phenomenological
enquiry, which is enlightened by an understanding of how we represent proxy experiences when
direct experiences are impossible.
4. Conclusion
In this paper it has been my intention to explore the concept of death beyond assumptions
of ‘mere’ physical mortality and the terminality of experience, upon which most conventional
death scholarship is based. I am not trying to demonstrate the existence of some sort of
immortality, because there does not appear to be adequate proof that this is the case. However,
myths and representations of continued existence are a persistent (although not necessarily
19
universal) feature of human belief, which cannot be easily explained away in biological nor
psychological terms, and this justifies some sort of consideration. I have considered the
development and limitations of a western twentieth century life/death dichotomy, which I argue
has influenced theoretical approaches to death, in particular phenomenological enquiries (which
have been a recurring approach in death scholarship). I show that an acceptance of the life/death
dichotomy should , by definition, rule out a phenomenological approach, but note that it has not
dissuaded such scholars. I indicate that a phenomenological approach is potentially well situated
to consider the possibility of some kind of experience after death in light of recurrent
representations of the same, and therefore attempt to broaden the phenomenology of death
beyond the most orthodox rules of phenomenology by first revising the distinctions between life
and death from opposition to change, and secondly arguing that a phenomenology of death must
be open to considering the subjective character of this change, and its affect on ontological
experience. I suggest that in the absence of easily accessible knowledge of such experience,
phenomenology should consider proxy-experiences, in cases, such as death, where they are
represented in such a way that they are indistinguishable from direct experience. I argue that
processes of death and regeneration/ continuity in the natural world are analogous in this manner
to human experience, and therefore should be considered in a ([n] admittedly unorthodox)
phenomenological enquiry. Broadening a phenomenology of death to include proxy experiences
that are represented as indistinguishable from direct experiences permits the study of persistent
myths of continuity (personal or otherwise) which are otherwise rationally inaccessible in
conventional scholarly approaches.
Obviously, questions remain about the utility of the approach I have suggested. Bound by
the length of this paper, I have offered a fairly general set of ‘proofs’ for my position, including
alternatives to the life/death dichotomy, and the degree to which death-in-nature is actually
represented as truly analogous to direct human experience. I have also not really established
whether my proposed approach may be reconciled in practice with conventional phenomenology.
Notwithstanding these present inadequacies, I hope this preliminary interpretation does offer at
20
least a glimpse of a solution to the dilemma of representation/ persistent myth vs. ontological
evidence, where the experience of ‘being dead’ is concerned.
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