To Die With Others

Alphonso Lingis

Diacritics, Volume 30, Number 3, Fall 2000, pp. 106-113 (Article)

Published by The Johns Hopkins University PressDOI: 10.1353/dia.2000.0020

For additional information about this article

Access provided by Brown University (19 Mar 2013 15:47 GMT)

http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/dia/summary/v030/30.3lingis.html

106

TO DIE WITH OTHERS

ALPHONSO LINGIS

One dies as one dies�as anyone, everyone dies, as all that lives dies. Do we not knowthat when we lie dying�when, bedridden, hospitalized, removed from our home andworkplace, we no longer exercise our skills, launch initiatives, are depersonalized, andcan do nothing but wait for the end in increasing passivity and prostration? Did we notlearn something of the death that will be our death from every death we witnessed ornoticed about us? And when someone with whom we shared our life dies, do we not feelthat something of ourselves has died too? In several senses of the word, we die withothers.

My Own Death

It is strange then to see that in philosophy one�s own death and the death of others havebeen separated. Socrates makes learning how to die the subject matter of philosophyand makes philosophy the daily practice of dying. He speaks of the relief he will feelwhen the opacity of his body will be broken. His last words�Crito, we owe a cock toAsclepius�say that life is the sickness for which death is the cure. Did not Socrateshere in fact claim to know two things that he did not know�what death is, that is, thatdeath is a relief; and what life is, that is, that life is sickness?

Socrates had seen men die; he had committed himself to defend Athens in war, hehad killed men in battle. He does not speak of how they died, nor of the relief he feltwhen they died.

Socrates died the way he did in order to demonstrate his belief that the soul is of itsown nature immortal. Heidegger, proclaiming the end of the metaphysics launched bythe Platonic Socrates, makes one�s own death again the central topic it had been forSocrates. Heidegger is convinced that death is not an accident that befalls a life that ofits own nature would endure like inanimate things endure. He sets out to show that wedie of our own nature, that our life casts itself with all its forces unto its end.

Death and Nothingness Heidegger also claims to know what death is: that death isnothingness. He identifies it�it is this one thing, nothingness. Yet he also insists thatmy death is utterly my own. From the opening pages of Leo Tolstoy�s The Death of IvanIlych, Heidegger draws the affirmation that witnessing the death of others is not thesource of my sense of my own mortality. At the wake, I have only seen the body ofanother immobilized, tranquilized, but still fully, completely, there. I have not seen an-nihilation. But annihilation is what my death will be for me. This I sense in anxiety, thatsense of being cast adrift, the environment no longer supporting me, sustaining me�and which is a premonition of being cast into nothingness.

Death is ungraspable, unconfrontable; it has no front lines. Is it not too much to saythat I know it is nothingness? Must we not rather say that death is the unknown?

diacritics 30.3: 106�13

diacritics / fall 2000 107

I cannot say, strictly speaking, that I die, since�dying a violent death or not�I am conscious of only part of the event. And a great share of the terror Iexperience at the idea of death derives perhaps from this: bewilderment atremaining suspended in the middle of a seizure whose outcome I can neverknow because of my unconsciousness. This kind of unreality, this absurdity ofdeath, is (without taking into account the physical suffering by which it mightbe accompanied) its radically terrible element, and not, as some may think(�Après moi le déluge!� �Since there�s nothing after death, why are you afraid?��What�s the difference to you, since you won�t be here any more?� etc. . . .),what might make it acceptable. [Leiris 50]

We do not know that death is nothingness�nothingness is not some thing oneknows. But nothingness is what we can long for, out of all the density and suffocatingopacity of pain and suffering.

Nothingness, Futurity, Possibility, Finalities Heidegger brings together the future, thepossible, goals, death, and nothingness. The sense of vulnerability and mortality that isanxiety is a premonition of being cast into nothingness. It anticipates a moment aheadwhen nothing further is possible. This anticipation brings out into relief a field on thisside of the brink of nothingness, where things are still possible. This field is also thefuture.

For our sense of the real future is not simply the logically possible�what I repre-sent now by varying the layout of the actual. This representation exists only as a repre-sentation, and exists in the present. Our sense of the real future is also not simply pro-duced by drawing out the implications and possibilities we see in the present; this alsoproduces but a representation in the now. What is really future is actually possible, andthe actually possible is possibly impossible. The anticipation of the really impossible iscombined in the sense of the actually possible and future.

Finally, the anticipation of ending makes possible the fixing of ends. The sense ofmy death is the sense of ending, definitively and irrevocably. It gives me an inwardunderstanding of termination, which combines every sense of goal and every sense ofdestination. The sense of one�s life as a trajectory that casts itself with all its own forcesunto its end makes action possible, where life casts some or all of its forces toward someterm.

The sense of the future, the sense of the possible, the consciousness of goals andthe sense of mortality are thus equivalent. Heidegger also brings together the most thor-oughgoing freedom with the utter inevitability of death. To exist in view of death is tolive in the future and the possible, is to set goals and advance toward them.

But has Heidegger seen correctly the relationship between death, the last moment,and the future? For Heidegger, anxiety, by which I cast myself ahead over the wholerange of the possible unto the brink of definitive and irrevocable impotence, is whatbrings out into relief the extent of a future which is my future. My death is the lastmoment in my time. But it is a not yet present moment in the line of future moments,moments coming toward presence. It is a moment without duration, an instant, an in-stantaneous cut in the line of time extending before me. And the last moment does notreally lie at the end of a line of moments to come; it is imminent in any moment. Thenext moment may be the last moment. The possibility of my death lies with each step ofmy advance into the outlying environment; a falling tile may strike me, my heart mayfail. Then anticipating my death in anxiety does not open before me the field of themoments of time to come; it finds the abyss lurking in any moment.

108

Then the undercurrent of anxiety can freeze initiative at the start instead of engag-ing the anxious one in the possibilities ahead and the resources at hand.

Death and Singularity Heidegger separates utterly the death of others, observed out-side, from my own death, sensed inwardly in anxiety. In addition, it is this sense of myown death that isolates me and posits me for myself as a singular existent. To look at theenvironment about me is to look ahead; to see things is to see possibilities: paths, imple-ments, obstacles, tasks, opportunities. They extend indefinitely, possibilities open foranyone. My death advances toward me as the brink of the abyss, of utter impossibility.It outlines, in the outlying field of all that is possible in general, for anyone, an expanseof what is yet possible for me. It also reveals, under my feet, resources available to me.The acute sense of my mortality thus illuminates for me an expanse of possibilitiespossible for me. At the same time the anxiety that throws me back upon myself makesme feel what is unrealized in me, the potentialities and powers that are in me and haveremained in suspense. Hence the sense of my vulnerability, contingency, mortality isalso the sense of my being, my powers, my singularity.

Heidegger thus traces how the sense of the negative, pushed all the way, convertsinto the most positive, positing experience. It posits my existence in all its singularity.Death, the last limit of impotence, is turned into power, my power. To live one�s life is tolive out one�s life, to discharge one�s forces in the tasks and resources that the environ-ment presents one. And that is the active enactment of dying.

Death . . . is of all things the most dreadful, and to hold fast what is deadrequires the greatest strength. . . . But the life of Spirit is not the life that shrinksfrom death and keeps itself untouched by devastation, but rather the life thatendures it and maintains itself in it. . . . This tarrying with the negative is themagical power that converts it into being. [Hegel 19]

Heidegger sees the anxious one resolutely driving his life with all his forces towardhis death as toward its closure. But at the same time death comes, of itself. In this, deathis not like a future, the brink where the field of possibles ends in the abyss, that we canenvision and advance toward. Death is stalking me, and strikes when it will. Thisexteriority of death undermines the Heideggerian project to appropriate the power ofdeath, to make of it my own ecstasy and power. The death that is coming for me remainsexterior to the death I anticipate.

The Deaths of Others

The Cartesian question: How do I know that what I see down in the street are not hatsand cloaks that cover bodies moved by springs? How do I know that I am not alone?would be answered: because they speak to me, conveying thoughts I can understand.Thus I make contact with other minds. What will be explicated will be a bond with otherminds, not with the life of others.

Heidegger envisions the other as the diagram of a practical operation in a practi-cable field parallel to or contiguous with my practical field. It is by viewing the half-overturned sod as a garden he is making that I view the other�s body no longer as simplya visible pattern but as a mobilized power. To recognize another is to put oneself in hisor her place, to envision a radius of paths, implements, obstacles, and tasks about him asan array that could be spread about oneself. This account of others also does not showhow the others are connected to me in their life and in their death.

diacritics / fall 2000 109

Life That Gives Life Our life gives life to others. While Heidegger integrates death, myown death, into the very nature of my life, Emmanuel Levinas integrates birth, the birthof another life, into the very nature of our life. This relationship between my existenceand another�s existence, the relationship of fecundity, is not a relationship of causalproduction. A willful and deliberate I does not cause another to exist. The infant, onceconceived, grows of himself. His life is our life, but broken off from us, now on its own.In the life of our child, there is my life and that of my spouse commingled, and there isan utterly singular life, on its own.

The possibility of giving life, giving one�s own life to another, is an essential fea-ture of our existence. It is a bond with another more fundamental than that of dialogueor of collaboration.

Nurturing our child, but also others, treating his or another�s wounds, healing himor another�these continue this power to give life. When another�s life is threatened, heturns to us. We are for one another a refuge against death. We can deliver someone overto death by refusing the healing powers of our life.

Life That Kills There is also in us a power to give death. This we see in dismay whenwe give birth to a dead child or to an infant that is not viable, that is doomed to die.

But the power to kill another is also inseparable from our existence. How easy it isto kill! The disproportion of cause and effect is enormous. We can kill a baby by shak-ing him. We can kill a strong adult with a drop of poison, a bullet that is but a few gramsof metal. We can kill someone with any of a hundred ordinary household implements orutensils.

Hatred is obsessive; in hatred our life is interlocked with another�s life. In everyhatred, there is wanting someone to die. Hatred is a bond with another�s life that aims toproduce his death.

Alexandre Kojève insists that in Hegel not only the power to kill others but eventhe will to kill others is essential to one�s own existence as a free conscious being. Hegelthinks that knowing oneself, recognizing oneself, requires a duality between the knowerand the known. Self-consciousness is not immanent adhesion to oneself, but re-cognizingoneself, cognizing one�s re-presentation on an outside mind. Thus in looking at another,I look for recognition of myself, recognition of my own consciousness and freedom.But then I must acknowledge also the consciousness and freedom of the other in whomI seek his, and my own, recognition of myself. But one is really free when one is willingto die for this recognition. It is in entering in a life-and-death struggle with another thatI wrest from him the recognition of my freedom. It requires being willing to risk mybiological life. It requires being willing to kill others. I wield the threat to kill him inorder to enslave him, so that he will continue to recognize my sovereignty.

Hegel assumes that one lives in order to become completely self-conscious. Andthat in every encounter with others, they will be treated as the means to this self-con-sciousness. The notion of complete self-consciousness as the highest state of life is atheological idea, traceable back to Aristotle. But a descriptive phenomenology of hu-man life and behavior shows that self-consciousness is at best a means for acquiringcertain skills. One does not live in order to write one�s autobiography.

Suffering From Leo Tolstoy�s The Death of Ivan Ilych Heidegger has only drawn thecontrast between the tranquilizing and reassuring observation of the death of anotherand the anxiety that gives Ivan a premonition of his annihilation. But the whole centralbody of the tale tells of the pain�the pain that first marks the vulnerability of Ivan, aftera fall in his house, and that relentlessly increases. The experience of pain is an experi-ence of being riveted to oneself, unable to distract oneself by turning to the outside

110

world, unable to retreat behind the pain to observe it and deal with it. To suffer the painis to be unable to turn away from oneself, to look outward, to forget oneself. Sufferingis to be mired in pain, mired in one�s own substance. Pain is passivity and prostration.And pain weighs down and chokes one�s initiatives; it depersonalizes. It fills one�ssubstance and smothers the upsurge of the I.

Pain and suffering deliver one over to dying. Dying in pain and suffering is reduc-tion to passivity and prostration. It is being cut adrift from one�s future, and from one�spast. One knows that what is coming is death. This death is not one of an array ofpossibilities one reaches out for and takes hold of; it is for the dying one the end of allpossibility, impossibility itself. All the experience and skills one has acquired are pow-erless to deal with it. As the imminence of death looms, it cuts one adrift from one�spast. There is nothing to do but suffer and wait for death. One is held in the suffering, inthe pain, in the present. The present stretches on, without passing, without going any-where.

When, after years of good health, one falls ill and suffers, one finds one now under-stands suffering�the suffering of others, the suffering of all that lives and dies. One�spain opens upon the passivity and prostration of others.

Epistemologists have invented the myth of a pain�and a pleasure�that has butone witness. How do I know, they ask, that anyone else suffers a toothache? How do Iknow that anyone knows of my toothache? Yet there is nothing more evident than thesuffering of others�the pain of an accident victim, of a child who has fallen and bruisedhimself. We doubt this evidence only when we have reasons to doubt it�in a particularcase.

To look upon someone who is in pain is to know what it is. We do not simply seethe pallid surfaces, the contorted hands and fingers; we feel a depth of pain. We do notview the pain behind the surfaces of his skin; we feel it troubling our look, we feel it upagainst ourselves. The sense of sharing the pain of another, the sense of the barriers ofidentity, individuality, and solitude breaking down hold us.

Suffering is a bond with others. One does not suffer without understanding thatothers suffer, understanding how others suffer.

To be a friend is to share the path with someone, to share the labor with him or her. To bea friend is to be there when pleasure can be shared and common. It is also to be therewhen our friend falters and falls. To accompany someone on a part of the path of life isalready to pledge to accompany him or her on the path that leads nowhere, the path ofhis or her dying. To be a friend is to be there and share the pain.

A friend, a lover, a child can be so interwoven with everything we feel, think, anddo that when that friend, lover, or child dies something in us dies. We may well findourselves unable to go on, unable to live.

We are repelled, but also drawn to the pain another suffers. It awakens a will in us tostruggle with that pain. The greater the suffering of the masses Gandhi and Che Guevarasaw, the more strongly they willed to take on that pain. It drove from them all desire forcomfort, for pleasure, for sweet oblivion.

Then we understand that the passivity and prostration and depersonalization ofsuffering that mires me in my own substance do not isolate me. If I suffer as one suffers,as anyone, everyone suffers, it is also true that the others are there, to act, to help, toheal, or to stay with me when no healing is possible.

Compassion is not simply the pitting of our will against the suffering in another. Tobe compassionate is to long to suffer, to suffer with the other. One wants to be afflictedwith this alien pain. One wants to hurt oneself, wound oneself. Among the Papuans ofIrian Jaya a woman chops off a finger when she loses a lover or a child.

diacritics / fall 2000 111

There is also a complacency in compassion. There is an insidious temptation in theanguish with which we abide with the one who suffers�the temptation to know theordeal, the inhuman abysses, the ultimate drama she is undergoing through her, withouthaving to bear the prostration of her pain, without risking what she risks.

Wanting Someone to Live, Wanting Someone to Die We can desperately want some-one, suffering from a grave injury or disease, to live. Because she has not yet livedenough. We want time for her to flourish, knowing that her life is a radiance shed onothers, on us. We can desperately want someone to live because we have not yet shownour love for her enough, not yet loved her enough.

One can doubt the straightforwardness of our wish that the other live: is our wishthat the other live a wish for her or for ourselves? Do we want her to live so that we canshow her we do love her, so that we can love her enough? Is there this guilt that we areseeking to circumvent?

But there is also love in wanting someone to die.When someone we love who has been suffering dies, we feel a sense of relief. We

feel a loosening of tension, a repose. Death appears as a deliverance from dying�fromthe suffering of dying.

The other�s suffering is trouble for us�hours spent in hospital visits, in somberinterviews with doctors, in looking after the sick person�s affairs. The other so bound tohis suffering seems to bind us: we feel a somber obligation that excludes insouciance.

We cannot view the sufferer�s contorted hands, his grimaces, hear his sighs andmoans, without these inducing contortions, grimaces, sighs, and moans in us, and withthem, inducing a sense of the pain. His pain, that pain that rivets the suffering one tohimself, to the limits of his own existence, reverberates in us.

To comfort someone, to comfort oneself�it is the most spontaneous of our initia-tives. When we find ourselves helpless to comfort others in their distress, we comfortourselves by believing that the death that comes to them as the last extremity of suffer-ing and prostration is a deliverance.

We feel a sense of relief that this agony of another, which has been an ordeal for us,is over. Is the sense of relief a recognition that we are freed from the suffering and dyingof another, that his death returns us to the lures and lightheartedness of life?

We want to think that the death that finally came to the sufferer is a relief to himtoo. Perhaps we can accept our own sense of relief only by thinking that the other feelsrelief too.

There is no doubt that the other can look forward to his death as to the end of thepain and the suffering. But the death he awaits will not be the relief and renewal heknew when someone whose suffering he watched died. Death is not for him release, butthe last limit of suffering and prostration. Our sense of release is his entombment. Ourrelief is burdened by a sense of our having escaped, having fled.

Dignity Dignity is not a word we use much. We do talk about people who behave withdignity in certain situations, with the composure and assurance that formal and ceremo-nial occasions�state dinners, funerals�require. They know the codes. We also speakof people who behave with dignity in crises, when their competence is being impugned.The engineer behaves with dignity, when he listens carefully and respectfully to all thecriticisms being made of his work, knowing that he can answer them. The minister ofthe environment behaves with dignity, when he resigns his cabinet post as the govern-ment grants the mining companies rights to national parklands. The nurse behaves withdignity, when she listens attentively to the patient, or the doctor, telling her how shescrewed up. It is especially during the ordeal of dying that we speak of dignity, and

112

honor it. Someone who suffers a long agony without illusions, with lucidity, withoutunrealistic demands on the medical staff, without rancorously searching for blame inthe past, dies with dignity.

The dying one is dying, he is not reaching for dignity, dignity is not his goal. He doesnot have a goal: he is going nowhere. He is going without going on. Dying takes time;he is held in the endurance of time. It is not that he extends a field of time�like theperson engaged in living, who foresees what is ahead, foresees objectives and foreseesthe paths and implements and obstacles on this side of those objectives. The dying oneforesees nothing. The state of death, of the extinction of his life and of the environmenthis life lights up about him, is not something he confronts. It has no faces and no sur-faces and no place. It cannot be located in the succession of moments of time. The lastmoment is ahead, not yet there, but it is imminent; the next moment may be the lastmoment. He is enduring a time without a future, a time from which the resources of thepast are irrelevant and disconnect. His lucid recognition of that is lived as patience.Patience is not just passivity; it is suffering, but it is suffering without grappling forrelease and without recrimination against the past which can no longer offer its forcesand resources. Because he knows his time to die has come, because he knows he isdying and awaits what cannot be foreseen or confronted�because he somehow finds,in patience, the strength for this lucidity�he makes no unrealistic demands on the medicalstaff and does not rancorously search for blame in others or in his own past. And it is justthat that strikes us as his dignity. But that was not an objective; it is a side effect.

Is it not the awesomeness of such an achievement, when all his resources are fail-ing, in the midst of relentless pain, that makes us project the dignity we witness thereback over the whole life of such a person? We are unable to witness such a dying with-out envy, without an intense longing to be able to die that way, when our time comes. Itmotivates us to wish to live with dignity.

But while we speak of dignity in others�it is even one of the things we are most im-pelled to call attention to and honor when we witness it�we are most reticent to speakof dignity in our own case. Is that not because to invoke dignity for oneself, to say, �Ihave dignity,� is to seek to designate a quality that will be in force in our continuing life,whereas dignity is something we first observed in someone who was dying? What wedesignated there as dignity appeared to us to be the most improbable, inexplicable,awesome trait that emerged in the throes of physical collapse, pain, the impotence ofmental skills, the process of definitive and irreversible defeat. The intense longing thatarises in us to be able to die that way surges in us like a hope fraught with the sense of allthe laxities, facilities, cowardices, escapisms, illusions, and fantasies with which ourlives are interwoven. If the spectacle of someone dying with dignity is what motivatesus to wish to live with dignity, whether we in fact do live with dignity will be knownonly when the time comes for us to die.

If to invoke dignity for oneself is to forfeit it, if dignity cannot be an objective, if itis essentially a side effect of that thing we have to do, to die, to lucidly see that we havefallen into a time which has no objectives, no future, then dignity can only be a sideeffect of undertakings that we engage in that do have objectives. One cannot producedignity intentionally or willfully; it can only appear as a side effect of doing other thingswell, aiming at outside objectives. Our dignity can appear as a side effect of caring forthe suffering, accompanying the dying.

The Unintelligibility of Killing There is, in hatred and in killing, a syncope of theunderstanding. We cannot understand what we are doing. Hatred cannot but sense the

diacritics / fall 2000 113

disproportion between hatred and its effect. This person I hate is but an intermittentpresence in my environment which contains thousands of other individuals. In killinghim I only wanted to annihilate this one item from my environment. But I annihilatedthe whole environment for him.

Is it not this disproportion that makes hatred have no proper measure? Thus hatredof one deed done by a terrorist, commando, or bombing mission can unleash a hatreddirected against a whole nation. They killed my wife and children�let us kill them all!This especially happens when the killer cannot be identified�cannot be envisioned inhis singularity, as is proper to hatred. A hatred directed indiscriminately at faceless en-emies can, by virtue of this very distance and anonymity, be the most rabid and the mosteffective. How much easier it is to drop napalm on villages from high in the sky than toshoot an enemy whose face we see! But hatred is not assuaged by being dissipatedagainst desingularized, faceless enemies.

It is assuredly paradoxical that number�that pure element of intelligibility, that cre-ation of our intellect�effaces for us the significance of the death of others. Englishpolicy deliberately starved a million men, women, and children in Ireland. Pol Pot killedone (or two) million of his own Cambodians. Stalin�s decision to export grain killed tenmillion peasants, and another ten million Soviet citizens died in the purges and gulags.Mao�s Great Leap Forward policy in China killed thirty million people in three years,mostly by hunger. In 1994 Rwandan Hutus killed eight hundred thousand Tutsis in onehundred days. In 1894 bubonic plague killed thirteen million people in Asia [Dillard 58-59]. Our minds cannot represent ten million singular individuals. Even ten thousandindividuals dead in a flood in our home state are difficult to represent. But on anothercontinent, ten thousand miles from here, they are even more blurred.

To Give One�s Life The deaths of those close to us�parent, lover, child, friend�linkup. The death of each one illuminates the deaths of those who died before, makes clearertheir suffering, and give us a progressively molded sense of what death is.

A parent would kill or die for his or her child. Someone in love would kill or die forhis or her lover. Our closest friends are those we would kill or die for. Is then the close-ness of someone to us measured by the fact that we would give our own life for his orhers, or take someone�s life that he or she live?

But it also happens that one kills or dies for a stranger. One throws oneself in theway of a bullet or strikes the attacker that a child in the street be saved. One throwsoneself in the icy river to save a stranger.

WORKS CITEDDillard, Annie. For the Time Being. New York: Knopf, 1999.Hegel, G. W. F. Phenomenology of Spirit. Trans. A. V. Miller. Oxford UP, 1977.Leiris, Michel. Manhood. Trans. Richard Howard. San Francisco: North Point, 1984.