Death and History

Posted by Király István

Death lays the foundations of human history. However, this is only one aspect of death.

Death does not only illuminate the historically articulated human life, so to speak 'externally' — or more precisely, from its end, from an indefinite and aleatory, 'retrospective' point of view, as a foreign and external element — but it continuously interweaves, and what is more, grounds it in its most essential aspects.

To such an extent that history probably exists precisely because there is mortal human life — which is to say, a mortal human being who relates by his life to death, to his being-like-death and mortality — also in a being-like way, and mode of being-like. In other words because there is such a life to which death — its own death — in all respects lends weight, challenge, pressure — grip! — over itself and for itself, and by this a continuous and unavoidable possibility to undertake.

So, the non-human, non-Dasein*-like life which is 'finite', and as such is always born, disappears, passes away, comes into being, extinguishes, changes and evolves ... well, this life actually does not, and cannot have a history — just as the 'inorganic' regions of being have no history in fact, only in a metaphoric sense. Which of course does not mean that this life is not in motion, in change — that it is unrelated with time, or does not 'possess' time with all the processes and 'events', necessary or incidental — in the sense of their happening and references. These of course are also in touch with human history as challenges, meanings and possibilities — which is, when and if there is a questionable meaning or a question referring to meaning. So they have a story, but do not have a history — to the extent that this story of beings devoid of history only becomes — or only can become! — a history of being by history.

In accordance with this reasoning, history exists in fact because there is human death, because there are beings who relate to death — explicitly or implicitly — in and with their being, in and with their mode of being, in a being-like way — for whom death, their own death is not a mere givenness, but — by the way they relate to it — is, in fact, a possibility.

Moreover, it is a possibility which, by its own 'substantive' happening, is dying — precisely by its dying but always beyond it. It is a possibility which derives — and constitutes and structures, articulates, permeates, colours — all of their other modes and possibilities of being. In other words, it opens them up really and truly, structures them open in — and precisely because of — its finitude. And by this, it also lends to these possibilities a well-defined importance, open towards, and from, this finitude, which also leads in fact to the articulation of these modes of being.

If the various modes and regions of human existence — as well as their birth and changes in time — can prove that their very existence, meaning and change is utterly unthinkable and 'absurd' without death, or that death plays a direct or indirect role in their coming into being or changes, then it is also proved that death grounds, originates, and constitutes history in the … essential, ontological sense.


*Dasein is a German word which literally means 'being there' or 'presence'.

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Király V. István is an Associate Professor in the Hungarian Department of Philosophy of the Babes-Bolyai University, Cluj, Romania. This post is an extract selected by the Editors, and slightly adjusted for the purposes of the blog,  from his new book, Death and History.

Kikaku leads the way

Posted by Alex Stein*

Image by senunez

Sometimes people ask me how I came to be a writer of aphorisms. To that, I reply:

I came to the aphorism by way of haiku and I came to haiku by ways still vague to me. I was 25, living in Seattle, and in thrall to the prose of Jack Kerouac. I spent my days and evenings filling notebook after notebook with stream of consciousness twaddle. Perhaps, I would have continued at this until I was good and dead. There was really no reason not to. I enjoyed the activity. Notebooks were cheap. The hours flew by.

Then something odd: in the middle of the twaddle, I wrote a little poem. 

Dandelion, roar!
Simple thing,
speak your simple mind.

I looked at the poem, and here is the curious thing: the poem looked back at me. Not long after that I wrote:

Hold light,
butterfly;
for a short life:
Praise
!

The more I looked at these poems, the more they looked back at me. “What?” I asked. “What do you want?” “Divine us,” they replied. “How?” I asked. “Divine us,” they repeated.

In a bookstore in downtown Seattle, I found a haiku anthology. In it, I read Kikaku’s:

Above the boat,
bellies
of wild geese.

Over the next few years, I must have read that poem a thousand times. Then, one day, I wrote in the margin:

Perhaps our world is the spirit world of some other world. Perhaps our birdsongs are heard but faintly in some other world, and only by certain ears. Perhaps a poem is like an airlock that carries the breath of one world into the lungs of the next.

I read Kikaku’s:

  Evening bridge,
  a thousand hands
  cool on the rail.

 I wrote:

Kikaku’s bridge spans both the construct of space and the abstract of time; so, all those hands, “cool on the rail,” are also the hands of the dead in their various phases of crossing-over.

 Kikaku! That was the unlikely name of the piper who led me on.”

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*Alex Stein is (with James Lough) the co-editor of, and a contributor to, Short Flights: Thirty-two Modern Writers Share Aphorisms of Insight, Inspiration and Wit, the first EVER anthology of contemporary writers of aphorism. Other aphorists in Short Flights include Charles Simic, Stephen Dobyns, Irena Karafilly, and Yahia Lababidi.

Meaning is More

Cueva de las Manos, Argentina

Posted by Thomas Scarborough

The title of one of Thomas Nagel's popular books reads at first sight like a question to be answered: 'What Does It All Mean?' But the word 'All' has undertones of something more perverse. I wrote to Professor Nagel that, as one turns the pages, the meaning of the title seems to turn into to a cry of despair. Yes, he replied, I had recognised the double entendre.

For many people, a lack of meaning is no slight problem. Some experience it as a living death, while others would rather die than surrender their meaning. At the same time, there has been a curious retreat of meaning in our day. It now lies beyond the interest of many people – even, sometimes, beyond the interest of dictionaries of philosophy. Historically, however, it has been an important philosophical question.



What is meaning? There are many kinds of meaning: existential meaning, psychological meaning, linguistic meaning, semiotic meaning, and various meanings besides. There is, too, a classic book on the subject: The Meaning of Meaning. The professor of philosophy Gilbert Harman notes that, in the theory of language, meaning can mean three things: the place which an expression has in the language, the thought which it communicates, and that for which it is used.

One may say much the same about the meaning of life. One's meaning is about finding one's place in the universe, bringing one's own self to full expression, and achieving one's goals and purpose. All three, in fact, are aspects of one and the same: I experience meaning when I know and feel my place in the big, wide whole – in the context of everything. Aristotle noted, 'Happiness is the meaning and the purpose of life – the whole aim and end of human existence.' We may note his emphasis on 'the whole'. The meaning of life is not partial. Rather, it encompasses everything.

What, then, is 'the whole' of it? It has been the tragic tale of countless people, that they held a meaning which was later exposed as being only partial – in fact, was found to hold no real meaning at all. They found their meaning in a cause which was destroyed, in a relationship which ended, even in things which later proved to be ruinous.

Some philosophers suggest that there may be no real problem with that. The professor of philosophy Thomas Nagel writes, 'Perhaps the trick is to keep your eyes on what's in front of you.' The fleeting meanings of the moment are all that we need – we just shouldn't think on it too hard. This may seem to have some appeal, except for two reasons: we sense that meaning is not something we should ever lose – it ought to be timeless, absolute, not a victim of the vagaries of life. But more than this, if meaning is partial or fleeting, we may bring others into bondage to our own petty meanings (of which more in a moment).

MEANING IS MORE

Meaning may be found in many things: in a lover, a family, an ambition, a culture. Various ideas, too, may play a focal role in our lives: economics, social evolution, science, or politics. And this gives us a clue as to what we do when we find a meaning. We find it within the systems we create. Consider for a moment that this universe is, in the words of the Buddhist expositor Lama Govinda, an inseparable net of endless, mutually conditioned relations'. It is, in a sense, beyond all systems – so our systems of meaning may be understood to be 'regions of relations' within this infinite expanse.

But now, a problem arises. If we step outside of our 'regions of relations', our meanings will evaporate. There is no meaning outside the system. All is well while I measure my meaning, say, by the well-being of the roses in my garden. Yet if I step outside of this, to ask what life is about beyond it, I find no answer. Until, that is, I find a new and a bigger answer.

It is a fundamental feature of meaning, then, that it always requires something more. It always requires something which lies outside of my given system of meaning. Every closed system can be imagined to be larger. The entrepreneur Adam Toren gives us this timely reminder about meaning: 'It is bigger than this!'

Seen like this, we may call our quest for meaning an infinite progression. It must be more, and more, and more. And as the horizons of our systems of meaning expand, so we come to realise that, ultimately, meaning must be unbounded. Ultimately, meaning is found in the 'infinite expanse' – without those constructions which confine it and reduce it to mere 'regions of relations'. Ultimate meaning only reveals itself to me where systems of meaning are destroyed. Meaning is found, in an important sense, only where the quest for meaning is abandoned – or perhaps one should say, fulfilled.

This, presumably, is why the 'larger' meanings of our world have such an allure: they incorporate our smaller meanings, which fail to answer our search for 'more'. Larger meanings are systems which lie outside of the confines of our own muddling purposes. This is why a Napoleon, or a Hitler, or a Stalin can exist. They offer a meaning which is more.

Or a God. However, God may be understood not only as the guarantor of my own system of meaning – 'God told me to do it,' or 'I was obeying God' – but God may be seen as the purpose beyond all purposes, before whom all contrived meanings dissolve. The theologian Paul Tillich wrote, 'God is being-itself, not a being.' God is not entangled with our own small designs.

THE LOSS OF MEANING

Destiny, culture, ideology are schemes of meaning so large that one can barely imagine anything larger, that might lie outside of them or beyond them. Not even famine or war or genocide may defeat such systems, so large may they become. This presents us with a sobering thought on the 'more' of meaning. If our meaning is not to be found in the whole of the infinite expanse of relations, or in something which transcends our meaning, our meaning may well lead to disaster.

There are other dangers which lie in a loss of a larger meaning. More than anything, my own loss of meaning may reduce the meaning of others. One is able to view others only in terms of the meaning – the 'regions of relations' – which one has traced for oneself in this world. This means that everything, and everyone, must be understood in terms of my own meaning.

When a woman becomes a student of sociology, she may comment at a cocktail party, 'Sociology explains all that.' When a businessman owns a nature reserve (and remains a businessman at heart), he will run his nature reserve as a business. If an economist becomes a president (and remains an economist at heart), he will treat the nation as an economy. One president said that untimely deaths were bad for the economy.* The earth quakes, wrote King Solomon, when a slave becomes king – presumably because the slave sees the world in terms of the master-slave relationship, and cannot see its meaning beyond such terms.

The flight of 'meaning' today, from our social and philosophical debate, has much to do with the fragmentation of our society. As we have developed a complex social diversity, so we have lost touch both with our world as a whole, and with one another's worlds. Increasingly, we have needed to focus on smaller meanings. And all too often, when these smaller meanings dissolve, we seek to preserve them and protect them. And if they should represent my total system which I cannot see beyond, I may choose any means to keep them: petty fraud, white lies, implied threats, even worlds of fancy in my mind which do not exist. But the world is bigger and more beautiful than that. In the words of Graham Ward, professor of divinity at Oxford:

The system is a self-contained whole within which everything is made meaningful.

*President Thabo Mbeki, who was trained as an economist.