Daniel Touey Dept. of Philosophy St. Josephs University 5600 City Ave.

Philadelphia, PA 19131

A Suggestion for The Experience of Death

1. Death as Limit

What is the experience of death? Most of us would say that there cannot be one. Modern philosophical discussion of death is almost wholly committed to the experiential strictures suggested by Epicurus and Wittgenstein:

Accustom yourself to believe that death is nothing to us, for good and evil imply awareness, and death is the privation of all awareness...Death, therefore, the most awful of evils, is nothing to us, seeing that, when we are, death is not come, and, when death is come, we are not. It is nothing, then, either to the living or to the dead, for with the living it is not and the dead exist no longer. (Letter to Menoecus)

Death is not an event in life. Death is not lived through. (Tractatus 6.4311)

Death means the permanent end of all consciousness (so that if there were some continuing consciousness, we would say that death has not occurred). If we take some form of consciousness to be essential to life itself (as opposed to a mere continuation of biological function without it), then Wittgenstein is right and death cannot be lived through, since the capacity to live through anything ceases at death. But how do we take Epicurus claim that death is nothing to us? Did he mean that it was simply nothing, so that it had no reality, or that it was not something that we would ever have to face as individuals, and therefore to us, in terms of the things we need to prepare ourselves to deal with, it can be safely disregarded and viewed as if it were nothing? If it were actually nothing in itself, then it would appear paradoxical to mention it, and talk about it would be empty and illusory, since there was no referent that answered to our words. But, whatever the conceptual difficulties are when we really sit down an reflect on what death is, we do not find it paradoxical to talk of death. Moreover, we cannot do without such talk, and regard an acceptance of the reality of death as a crucial aspect of our commonsense view of reality, for instance in the acceptance of such truths as All living things eventually die. But what, then,

are we talking about when we talk about death? The situation is complicated by our assertion that death cannot be experienced, since something that cannot be experienced cannot, perhaps, be talked about sensibly. Is death, then, even if we reject anything like an afterlife, a metaphysical concept? Yes, I would argue, but only in the most familiar and mundane way. Hume pointed out that our notion of cause was metaphysical because we could find no empirical basis for it--we never see something cause something else, but rather impute a causal role to something in our experience. And despite the lack of empirical backing for it in our experience, we stubbornly continue to assign those roles to things and perhaps need to in order to continue to feel that we live in a comprehensible world. In a similar way, although we have no direct experience of death, we can talk about it, and in fact consider it a real part of our world, because we conceive of it as a limit. We think of death as the limit of life. The kind of limit that we are talking about here is a temporal one, of course, and we tend to use words like ceasing, stopping, or expiring to get at what we mean when a temporal process of any sort comes to an end. But it should be noted right away that a limit in general is never the actual part of the purely descriptive content of any experience, either a spatial or temporal one. Essential to limits of either sort is that they have neither spatial extension nor temporal duration, but are used to mark the finitude of such things as do. It would be impossible for there to be a limit existing by itself, apart from whatever it is that it is a limit of. Any attempt to isolate the limit of something from the thing limited will fail, since a limit is not a part of something at all: One of the consequences of the metaphysical character of limits in general for our question about the experience of death is that, while Epicurus and Wittgenstein may have been thinking of death from ones anticipation of ones own death, the claim that death is not an experience of life extends to the deaths of others. In my experience of myself, every possible experience is an experience of my life, and no possible experience is of my death.

In the different sort of experience in which I experience another, every possible experience of his or her life, while I find, even if I watch someone die, that no experience is ever of this or her death. I can observe someones life activity, and I can observe that they have become a corpse, but there is no experience in between of the event of their death. This conclusion, on the assumption that death is a mere limit, is as simple as noting that a ceasing or stopping is simply not the sort of thing that you can observe. You can note that something has stopped (on the basis of further experience) and therefore know that it has, but you certainly cannot see it stopping. Therefore we can experience someone dying--and can experience our own dying--and we can experience someone having died--which, of course, we cannot do in the case of our own death--but we cannot experience someones death itself. And I would say that in most peoples minds that this is what is meant by the experience of death--the trauma of our empathy with the person in the events leading up to death, and our grief in the aftermath of their having died. The elusiveness of death itself is not the important issue, but rather the pain, fear, and feelings of loss surrounding its before and after. These considerations would then suggest the following answer to our opening question about the experience of death:

--Death is a kind of limit. It is not experiencable but it is a concept that we use to mark the end of the temporally extended process of someones life.

--What we regard normally as experiences of death are actually those we have of ourselves dying, an experience of life, or, with regard to others, of their dying and their having died.

2.The Limits of Death as Limit The conclusion of the previous discussion is that there can be no experience of death, although there is no harm in talking about such an experience as long as we are aware that it is the anticipatory and retrospective experiences surrounding death that we are really talking about. These are, I think, the inevitable results of classifying death as the mere temporal limit of life, and as long as we characterize death as such, there will be no experience of death. However, it may be that such a characterization is mistaken. That is not because of a failure in our analysis of what a limit is, but rather in our presumption of what death is thought to apply to in the first place.. The claim that death is a temporal limit implies that life is a temporal process of some sort. If a life is such a process, or an organized set of processes, then death simply means that it or they have come to an end. But this characterization, though no doubt right, threatens to be partial, because it is not clear that what death applies to is only what are temporally extended processes. What I have in mind, and what casts the sufficiency of death as limit in doubt, is the well-known distinction, so much discussed in the literature on death, between the death of the body or organism, on the one hand, and the death of the self or person (I here make no distinction between them), on the other. The allowance for personhood or selfhood complicates the matter considerably, and forces us, at least, to clarify further what we mean when we say that someone has died. Do we mean the death of a body, the death of a person, or both, and do we believe that the two can be described using the same terms? The characterization of the death of living thing as a temporal limit, as a ceasing or stopping, seems correct only because it seems correct to think of it as consisting in a set of related processes that occur in time. But it is not clear that we should characterize a person or self in that way. If not, then it would not make sense to assign death to a person as its temporal limit. I can only suggest that persons or selves are real, something that no doubt requires a

comprehensive theory of personhood or selfhood ( although I imagine that would only be a more detailed kind of suggestion, in the end, nothing like a proof). But a robust theory of the person is not required here, since all that need be determined of the nature of personhood is just enough to decide whether the notion of temporal limit satisfactorily describes the death of the person, and if not, then what alternative conceptualization might be better. However, an analysis of the person or self, however brief, for the purposes of a sufficient description of the death of a human being, would only be relevant if the personhood or selfhood of the human being was indeed something real. I would, again, merely suggest that they are, given metaphysical allowances similar to those that enable us to speak of limits existing. Just as we believe that deaths really happen (even though, because they are limits of no duration, we can never see them happen), we also believe that persons really exist, even though we cannot say that we have ever observed one, since they are understood to be emergent properties of what we observe, never what we actually do observe. We admit the reality of limits because we acknowledge the physical object or the temporal process as really being limited. I suggest that in a similar way we admit the reality of persons because we interpret the words and bodily actions of human beings in our experience as really being those of particular persons--and incomprehensible otherwise. Persons are real because they are a necessary assumption about what there is in the world, too much of which would remain incomprehensible, arbitrary, and bizarre if there werent any. But it is part of what they are that they can never be part of the describable content of any experience. Certainly one way we could, in some contexts harmlessly, characterize the relation between the person or self and the organism is that the former are manifested through the latter. But is a person ever manifest? That is stretching a metaphor too far, in my opinion.

The person is never clear and at hand. As regards a physical object, it is manifest that it has limits, but those limits themselves are never manifest. Similarly with the bodily acts and words

of a human being, it is manifest that they are those of a person or self, but the latter is never itself manifested. So if persons are part of reality, they are something like logical aspects of it rather than anything apparent in experience. What persons are might be made more clear if we look into the question whether our previous concept of death as limit is sufficient to describe the death of a person. Reflection on the matter immediately suggests that the notion of limit in general, both temporal and spatial, cannot be applied to persons or selves. Spatial limits do not apply, because a person or self does not inhabit physical space and has no extension. That would mean that John, a human being, can board a plane in New York and fly to Spain, so we could say that he travelled across the Atlantic Ocean, but not that his personhood did. This might seem like an odd thing, since a person or self is so intimately tied to the body of the human being, but there are any number of aspects of the particular human being that dont make the trip. If we said that John was intelligent, or beautiful, or American, these things would not travel across the ocean either. Johns intelligence, beauty, and citizenship are all real properties of him, I would claim, but they arent the sort of things that can fly in a plane--unlike his hair, his brain, or his shoes, for that matter. The important thing here is to note that a person is not a substantive thing that somehow stands behind Johns body, invisible but thinglike, but rather a property that we ascribe to him on the basis of what we can observe of him. But if persons do not exist in space could they still exist in time, so that temporal limits could be applied to them? This would seem more likely; although reflection shows that a person cannot be in space, we regard a person as active and doing things, and the things that he does are certainly temporal processes. Does that require that the person himself be in time, if his activities are? We would certainly say about the organism that eats that the temporal process of eating implies that the organism is temporal itself. But the living body is its activities, they are what it consists of, and it does not exist except in and through them. The organism eating is the

organism active in a particular way. The relation of person to a set of its activities does not bear the same relation. I am not claiming that the activities of a person, as opposed to those of the organism, do not take place in time; rather it is that the person does not actually engage in any activities, but is an emergent property of the body that does. What is that property? It cannot be personhood itself. That is, personhood cannot itself be a property of the individual action or speech act. Rather, the property is something like said or done by a person or in any particular case said or done by a particular someone (John, Jane, etc.). This or something like it is a property necessary to ascribe to an act to make it comprehensible as an act of that person. The circularity here is obvious, since an act is merely presumed to be an act of a particular person, and nothing in the act tells us that it is. There is no evidence in our experience that an act is that of a particular person, or any person at all. But this should not trouble us when it comes to the reality of persons, or at least we should be no more troubled by it than with regard to the reality of physical objects. We similarly lack evidence that the various presentations of the same object in our experience are in fact those of the same object. Yet we have no doubt that we live in a world of physical objects that endure in time and present themselves in various ways, and undergo changes in themselves, yet remain the selfsame objects. The person is part of a property that we ascribe without any immediate evidence. It is necessary in order to make sense of the words and bodily actions of a human being. It has no temporal duration but is part of a property of things (bodily actions, words) that do. It is then pretty easy to see that temporal limits cannot be applied to persons because, as a property, or aspect of one, rather than a thing, they do not unfold in time. On the level of the person, death is not a limit, since it is not coherent to say that a person unfolds as a temporal process. Limit, then, does not coherently describe the death of a person. In the next section I will argue that the better description of the death of a person is absence. The failure of the of

the concept of the temporal limit to accurately describe the death of the person, and the resort to the phenomenon of absence instead, has immediate consequences for our opening question (What is the experience of death?), since a ceasing or stopping cannot be perceived but an absence can.

3. Death as Absence In choosing to characterize death as the absence of persons I risk being misunderstood because I also believe that persons are always absent, that in fact it would be a very strange thing for them ever to be present. Nevertheless I think that absence, a specific experience of absence, is the best way to characterize the death of the person. What I have to suggest

as characteristic of the death of a person is the absence of the departed that is evoked by the impossibility of communication. That specificity is required, because in any number of ways we still deal with the personhood of the dead, not only in memory, but through their words which remain--their writings, audio of their speech--and through images and film or video of their actions. If we are supplied with enough of these artifacts of the dead, then it must be admitted that their person is still available to us, at least as much as a living person who is at a distance from us, or is otherwise someone that we cant or simply dont visit. The same is true for our dealings with the personhood of famous living people whom we never actually meet. There is nothing paradoxical then in saying that the person can outlive the body. We have access to the person beyond death insofar as we still need to make an ascription of personhood in order to make sense of our memories of the dead human being, as well as whatever writings or recordings of speech and actions are available to us after their death. We may then question whether the person really is dead. And this is in fact a very good question, for it may be that a person, as opposed to a body, is not the kind of thing that can die.

The difference between a living person and a dead one cannot consist in the former being real and the latter not. The reality of the person is assumed each time we invoke it to make sense of his bodily actions and written or spoken words. Since those latter continue to be available to us after the death of the person, in the form of memories and written and audiovisual records, and we continue to invoke his personhood in order to make sense of them, we have no reason to claim that the living person was any more present to us than the dead one is. Both are absent. Neither could ever be present. Yet things do not need to be present to be real. So the mere absence of the dead does not differentiate them from the living. Yet we are quite able to tell the difference between living and dead persons. Death, I suggest, is experienced as the absence of the person, insofar as that person is permanently unavailable for communication. This experience is possible only when the temporally extended processes of life have reached their limit; therefore one cannot experience ones own death, although others can. We notice that a body has died, we know that it is dead, when we decide that it can no longer engage in the activities that make up life. Death is then assigned retroactively as the limit of the life of that body. The death is then never part of the experience of any possible observer. The case is different with the death of a person. We notice that a person has died when we note that they cannot be queried (not temporarily but permanently, not because of practical impediments, but in principle). This unavailability is in fact what the death of the person consists in (rather than some limit having been reached). It is not only a possible experience, but one that is capable of repetition. It might be objected that the kind of experience I have proposed for the experience of death is actually the experience of someone being dead, rather than the death of someone. think that this point has more than a little merit. But the objection would seem to stand on a I

claim that I fail to make the distinction between an event and the situation that results from that event. However, the first thing that falls upon reflection on the nature of death is its status as an event at all. We could find no event called death that was distinguishable from an event in life, which is the whole reason for calling death a limit. This casts considerable doubt on the coherence of the distinction between death and being dead. This claim, that the experience of death consists in the realization of the permanent unavailability of the person for communication, is not formulated to respond to any sentiment we may have about the dead, but is presented soley as the best conceptual guess about what the death of a person actually is. However, should this idea of what death is hold up, there are some obvious consequences for the issues of the status of the dead and the human experience of grief.