Death and Finitude: Toward a Pragmatic Transcendental Anthropology of Human Limits and Mortality (American Philosophy Series) 1498524419, 9781498524414

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Death and Finitude

American Philosophy Series Series Editor: John J. Kaag, University of Lowell Advisory Board: Charlene Haddock Siegfried, Joe Margolis, Marilyn Fischer, Scott Pratt, Douglas Anderson, Erin McKenna, and Mark Johnson The American Philosophy Series at Lexington Books features cutting-edge scholarship in the burgeoning field of American philosophy. Some of the volumes in this series are historically oriented and seek to reframe the American canon’s primary figures: James, Peirce, Dewey, and DuBois, among others. But the intellectual history done in this series also aims to reclaim and discover figures (particularly women and minorities) who worked on the outskirts of the American philosophical tradition. Other volumes in this series address contemporary issues—cultural, political, psychological, educational— using the resources of classical American pragmatism and neo-pragmatism. Still others engage in the most current conceptual debates in philosophy, explaining how American philosophy can still make meaningful interventions in contemporary epistemology, metaphysics, and ethical theory. Titles in the Series Death and Finitude: Toward a Pragmatic Transcendental Anthropology of Human Limits and Mortality, by Sami Pihlström Ethical Habits: A Peircean Perspective, by Aaron Massecar The American Philosopher: Interviews on the Meaning of Life and Truth, by Phillip McReynolds Recovering Integrity: Moral Thought in American Pragmatism, by Stuart Rosenbaum Values, Valuations, and Axiological Norms in Richard Rorty’s Neopragmatism: Studies, Polemics, Interpretations, by Krzysztof Piotr Skowronski

Death and Finitude Toward a Pragmatic Transcendental Anthropology of Human Limits and Mortality Sami Pihlström

LEXINGTON BOOKS Lanham • Boulder • New York • London

Published by Lexington Books An imprint of The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. 4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200, Lanham, Maryland 20706 www.rowman.com Unit A, Whitacre Mews, 26-34 Stannary Street, London SE11 4AB Copyright © 2016 by Lexington Books All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Pihlström, Sami, author. Title: Death and finitude : toward a pragmatic transcendental anthropology of human limits and mortality / Sami Pihlström. Description: Lanham : Lexington Books, 2016. | Series: American philosophy series | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2016031658 (print) | LCCN 2016033540 (ebook) | ISBN 9781498524414 (cloth : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781498524421 (Electronic) Subjects: LCSH: Death. | Mortality. | Transcendentalism. | Pragmatism. | Philosophical anthropology. Classification: LCC BD444 .P55 2016 (print) | LCC BD444 (ebook) | DDC 128/.5--dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016031658 TM The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992.

Printed in the United States of America

Table of Contents

Preface

vii

1 2

Introduction Mortality and Philosophical Anthropology

3 4 5 6 7

The Self as a Limit Death—Mine or the Other’s? Death, Guilt, and (In)equality Controlling Death?: Pragmatist Philosophy of Mortality Conclusion: A Pragmatic Transcendental Anthropology

Bibliography Index About the Author

1 17 55 97 127 153 179 201 211 217

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My attempt to develop a philosophy of death and dying in this study, applying a pragmatist and transcendental philosophical anthropology to the topic of human mortality, is primarily intended for academic philosophers, but the potential readership could include, I hope, not only scholars but also both graduate students and advanced undergraduates, as well as general educated readers. The book ought to be interesting from the point of view of people with quite different philosophical backgrounds. It is intended to be relevant to the concerns of philosophers specializing in, for example, transcendental philosophy, philosophical anthropology, pragmatism, Wittgenstein, and the philosophy of religion. As the book may be said to be an attempt to “philosophize historically,” it is in principle of interest to both systematically and historically oriented philosophers and students. My investigation is, I think, unique in offering the special kind of combination it seeks to articulate: an examination and defense of a pragmatic transcendental anthropology applicable to the concepts of limit, finitude, and mortality. In particular, this book is unique in formulating a very special kind of philosophical anthropology (“transcendental anthropology”), with a very special way of interpreting what is worth maintaining in transcendental philosophy (that is, a pragmatic, and hence naturalized, account of the transcendental), in such a manner that this unusual combination will be shown to be relevant to enhancing our understanding of a human problem we all share—mortality—especially because of the pragmatic transcendental anthropologist’s promising approach to the issues of limits and finitude. Why have I chosen this topic? Because philosophy should, I believe, be humanly relevant. This belief reflects my metaphilosophical pragmatism. There is a sense, I think, in which serious philosophy inevitably reflects on the human condition—and is thus philosophical anthropology, broadly conceived. There can hardly be any more serious problem concerning the human condition than the problem of death. Yet, upon reading mainstream analytic contributions to the philosophy of death—metaphysical as well as ethical, focusing on, say, the definition and criteria of death or various issues in applied ethics related to dying and killing—one may experience a certain kind of frustration. That literature addresses death in general, and it is far from obvious that it is philosophically relevant in the sense of addressing the agony of an individual human being trying to vii

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understand her/his own mortal condition. On the other hand, “Continental” philosophy of death, often starting from Heidegger’s views, may be frustrating in a different sense, as it often fails to be conceptually as clear and argumentatively as rigorous as the analytic literature. Claiming to address my “being-toward-death,” such contributions may also fail to speak to the mortal individual but may end up with endless pseudophilosophical jargon. It is against this background of frustration that I am offering my reflections on death, dying, and mortality from a pragmatist yet transcendental perspective, seeking to accommodate these topics within a broader philosophical anthropology. It is, of course, up to my readers to judge whether I have in any way succeeded in avoiding the pitfalls I try to identify in rival approaches. While some previously published and presented material has been relied on here and there, everything has been rewritten throughout the book; I am presenting my thoughts in the form of a unified monograph, instead of a collection of separate articles. The revisions turning some essays and conference presentations into book chapters have hence been extensive and thoroughgoing: the text has not just been updated but in most cases completely rewritten. Chapter 6 is the only chapter in this volume in which a previously existing (relatively recent) journal article has been used more or less in something resembling its original form. 1 However, in order to appropriately acknowledge the contexts within which my thoughts have developed, I am listing below some relevant conference and workshop paper presentations, as the numerous audiences that have heard early versions of what follows have provided me with invaluable feedback and constructive criticism. Such earlier occasions of presenting materials that found their way into this book have over the years led me to formulate the views I am defending in this volume. Chapter 2 grew out of papers originally presented at an Inter-Nordic Philosophy Symposium in Bergen, Norway (May 2000), and at Comenius University in Bratislava, Slovakia (December 2006). Chapter 3 deals with the concept of the transcendental self, a topic I have explored on a number of earlier occasions, e.g., in a workshop at the University of Copenhagen, Denmark (October 2004) and at a conference at J. W. Goethe University in Frankfurt am Main, Germany (April 2014), as well as in presentations at the philosophy department colloquia at the Universities of Uppsala (October 2013) and Vienna (November 2013), and an invited session on naturalism and philosophical anthropology at the American Philosophical Association Eastern Division Meeting in Baltimore, MD (December 2013). Chapter 4 significantly expands the scope of my early essay, “Death—Mine or the Other’s? On the Possibility of Philosophical Thanatology” (Mortality 6, 2001) (© Taylor & Francis, used with the permission of the publisher), originally presented at a conference on thana-

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tology and suicidology in Stockholm, Sweden, in August, 2000. Chapter 5 uses some material that was originally presented at the symposium Death and Emotions at the Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies, in November, 2011. The chapter also slightly connects with a related paper presented at the symposium Health, Mortality, and Inequality also at the Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies, in June 2014. Chapter 6, an early version of which appears in Mortality 20 (2015) (© Taylor & Francis, used with the permission of the publisher), contains ideas articulated in various papers and guest lectures on pragmatist philosophy of death and mortality, presented, e.g., at the Universities of Frankfurt and Utrecht in February 2012, in yet another conference on death and dying at the Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies in August 2012, at a conference on making sense of dying and death in Salzburg, Austria, in November 2012, and in a workshop on pragmatist philosophy of death and dying at the Max-Weber-Kolleg, University of Erfurt, in April 2013. Chapter 7, a brief concluding chapter, has not been published or presented earlier, though I did discuss the relation between pragmatism and the transcendental self in the context of philosophical thanatology in my talk to the Philosophy Research Seminar at the University of Helsinki in March, 2016. In addition, I would like to thank a number of friends and colleagues whose critical comments at various stages of this project have been particularly valuable: Hanne Appelqvist, Niek Brunsveld, Daniela Chana, Douglas Davies, Andrea Esser, Gabriele Gava, Dirk-Martin Grube, Outi Hakola, Jaana Hallamaa, Sara Heinämaa, Charles Hobbs, Phillip Honenberger, Ana Honnacker, Juha Hänninen, Jarno Hietalahti, Heikki J. Koskinen, Heikki A. Kovalainen, Simo Knuuttila, Martin Kusch, John Lizza, Joseph Margolis, Olli-Pekka Moisio, Ana-Silvia Munte, Virpi Mäkinen, Ilkka Niiniluoto, Anssi Peräkylä, Wayne Proudfoot, Henrik Rydenfelt, Risto Saarinen, Mikko Salmela, Thomas Schmidt, the late Juha Sihvola, Friedrich Stadler, Miira Tuominen, Tero Vaaja, Seppo Vainio, Emil Visnovsky, Niels Weidtmann, Ulf Zackariasson, and above all, Sari Kivistö. I also sincerely acknowledge the support of the three institutions at which I have worked on this project: the Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies, the Faculty of Theology at the University of Helsinki, and the Forum Scientiarum at the University of Tübingen, Germany, where I mostly finished the manuscript during my visiting fellowship from 2015 to 2016. The sabbatical grant from the Finnish Foundations’ Professor Pool (more specifically, the Alfred Kordelin Foundation) enabled me to focus on this project during the academic year 2015–2016. The reviewer who read the manuscript for Lexington Books provided highly valuable comments. I also warmly thank my family—both immediate and extended—for support, especially my two daughters Meeri and Katri, who are occasionally able to make me forget my mortality for a fleeting moment.

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NOTE 1. Some of the same and related themes are discussed in a few earlier articles of mine (also listed in the bibliography): see, e.g., Sami Pihlström, “On the Concept of Philosophical Anthropology,” Journal of Philosophical Research 28 (2003), 259–85; “Death, Rationality, and Irrationality,” in H. J. Koskinen, S. Pihlström, and R. Vilkko (eds.), Science—a Challenge to Philosophy? (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 2006); “Mortality as a Philosophical-Anthropological Issue,” Human Affairs 14 (2007); “Death: Humanistic Perspectives,” in C. D. Bryant and D. L. Peck (eds.), Encyclopedia of Death and the Human Experience (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 2009); “Does Death Make Us Equal?,” Philosophy Today 58 (2014); “Death and Guilt: A Transcendental Account,” in Outi Hakola, Sara Heinämaa, and Sami Pihlström (eds.), Death and Mortality: From Individual to Communal Perspectives (Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies open access series, COLLeGIUM 19, 2015, available online: www.helsinki.fi/collegium); “The Mortal Self: A Pragmatic-Transcendental Anthropology,” in Phillip Honenberger (ed.), Naturalism and Philosophical Anthropology (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave, 2016); “The Subject as Negativity and as a Limit: On the Metaphysics and Ethics of the Transcendental Self, Pragmatically Naturalized,” in Gabriele Gava and Robert Stern (eds.), Pragmatism, Kant, and Transcendental Philosophy (London and New York: Routledge, 2016).

ONE Introduction

Human well-being and the good life are often regarded as key topics of research within the humanities and the social sciences in general, as well as philosophy in particular. Philosophical explorations of “human nature”—that is, philosophical anthropology, as it has been traditionally understood—may be expected to make fundamental contributions to our understanding of these and related issues. Philosophical anthropology (as we will see in more detail in chapter 2) not only investigates factual questions of human nature—asking what human beings are actually like—but also normative ones concerning the good life, the ways in which human lives ought to be led. However, it is clear that the good life cannot be understood at all if we fail to pay attention to the “darker” sides of human existence, including evil, pain, suffering, guilt, and death. Philosophical anthropology, in short, is seriously incomplete without investigations of human death and mortality. 1 As Martin Heidegger famously maintained, our existence is deeply characterized by “being-towarddeath,” Sein-zum-Tode, which is inseparable from our “being-in-theworld” generally, our in-der-Welt-Sein. 2 This book will not offer a study of Heideggerian philosophical anthropology or existential philosophy. However, I do want to extend philosophical anthropology into philosophical thanatology, or what can be called “philosophy of death, dying, and mortality,” but simultaneously I will insist that philosophical thanatology itself remains seriously incomplete if it fails to adopt a distinctively transcendental perspective on human finitude as something that must be explored “from within” that condition itself. The best way to search for such a transcendental perspective is to go through the “transcendental tradition” that was inaugurated in Western philosophy by Immanuel Kant and later continued by phenomenologists like Edmund Husserl and Heidegger, as well as by philosophers of 1

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language like Ludwig Wittgenstein, and these thinkers’ many followers. I have in a series of previous works argued that the pragmatist tradition, initiated in the United States in the late nineteenth century and reinvigorated through the rise of “neopragmatism” in the late twentieth, can in a very interesting way be integrated with transcendental philosophy, to the extent that both classical and contemporary pragmatists are, inescapably, Kantian thinkers in crucial respects. 3 Accordingly, what this book will offer is a pragmatic transcendental anthropology of human mortality. The key pragmatist figure to be drawn upon is William James, whose relations to Kant, phenomenology, and Wittgenstein are philosophically and metaphilosophically fascinating even independently of the topic of mortality. However, unlike many of my earlier publications, this volume is not primarily intended as a contribution to pragmatism scholarship (even James scholarship), even though it culminates in a defense of a pragmatic version of philosophical anthropology, transcendentally construed, thereby both pragmatically “naturalizing” transcendental philosophy and in a way “retranscendentalizing” pragmatism in the context of philosophical thanatology. This will be achieved through a detailed consideration of death and mortality as key aspects of our more general finitude. PROBLEMS OF DEATH, DYING, AND MORTALITY: PHILOSOPHICAL AND METAPHILOSOPHICAL When exploring philosophical thanatology, we should not overlook the fact that human mortality is a strongly interdisciplinary topic requiring continuous creative interaction of a number of academic disciplines (e.g., philosophy, theology, religious studies, history, art and literature, law, social sciences, gender studies, education, psychology, and other fields, with fruitful connections not only among the humanities but also between the humanities and the natural and biomedical sciences). Its interdisciplinary nature is concretized in special problem areas or “grand challenges” such as aging in Western societies, the global climate change, or the significance of embodiment and human bodily vulnerability. However, even though the field is interdisciplinary, the philosophical core of the various approaches to death and mortality should also be investigated. While interdisciplinary inquiries into death and dying are fundamentally important for human flourishing, such inquiries seem to presuppose philosophical reflection on the basic conceptual, metaphysical, and ethical problems underlying these notions. From a philosophical perspective, death, dying, and mortality thus raise a number of conceptual issues that need elucidation and clarification, both systematically and historically. These include at least the following. 4 First, there is the debate concerning the definition and criteria of

Introduction

3

death: what are death, dying, and mortality; what can and should we mean by these concepts and the relevant linguistic expressions; how should we define them; and how can we recognize that a particular phenomenon falls under them? Secondly, philosophers have since antiquity explored the Epicurean controversy: is death and/or mortality necessarily bad (evil) for the one who dies, or can it ever even be bad (evil) in this sense; furthermore, is it in any sense possible to die a “good” death? Thirdly, the existential significance of mortality focuses on our “living toward death” as an ontological feature of human existence (comparable, again, with Heidegger’s notion of Sein-zum-Tode). This topic can be connected with pragmatist examinations of the concern with (im)mortality as a feature of purposively forward-looking human practices. Fourthly, the metaphysics of death includes, for example, the following kind of questions: is it in any sense possible to survive death (materialism vs. dualism); how is death connected with fundamental ontological problems regarding, e.g., persistence, identity and individuation, or modalities? Finally, in addition to these theoretical philosophical problems, there are controversial issues of death and mortality debated in applied ethics: abortion, euthanasia, suicide, killing and dying in war, capital punishment, genocide, terrorism, etc. These special instances of death and dying raise difficult ethical and political problems that need to be addressed in contemporary societies. (The present volume, however, is largely existentially and metaphysically oriented; while dealing with fundamental ethical issues, I will mostly set aside topics of applied ethics.) It is important to realize that issues in philosophical anthropology become urgent when, for example, we set out to examine the basic question concerning the definition and criteria of death. That is, such questions are not neutral with respect to philosophical-anthropological commitments, and therefore it is crucial to examine human mortality from a philosophical-anthropological perspective. Of course there is an at least apparently neutral level at which we may distinguish between concepts such as death, dying, mortality, the moment of death, being dead, and so forth. We may say that death itself is a somewhat vague concept, referring to a phenomenon, a process, or a moment or an event (or perhaps even a state), while the other listed concepts can be made more precise. Dying is a process leading up to death—but even then there is the question concerning the starting point of that process. Does dying begin already in birth, or only after, say, passing a “threshold” after which death can no longer be prevented? Mortality, furthermore, is a state or potentiality of living beings—and only living beings are mortal, or can die; thus we would have to define what it is to be alive in order to be able to explicitly and non-circularly define death-related concepts (which may not be possible or desirable, after all). The moment of death, moreover, is the limit between being alive and being dead—but is this limit infinitesimal or somehow temporally extended? Being dead, in turn, is a state of no longer

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living beings that once (before entering that state) were alive; inanimate beings, of course, cannot be in the state of being dead as they never lived and died. Finally, a distinction between death and deathless annihilation is also needed: for instance, bacteria can divide into two, and when that happens, the original bacteria didn’t survive but didn’t die either, or did it? Now, it seems to me that addressing conceptual questions surrounding these notions and distinctions presupposes that we consider the human meaning or significance of the relevant concepts and phenomena being examined. We can only at a very abstract and general level define these concepts without considering how they are relevant to our lives as human beings. Definitions and criteria are, to be sure, to be distinguished, too. A definition tells us what something (essentially) is, that is, provides necessary and sufficient conditions for something to fall under the defined concept, while a criterion is a practically useful tool in enabling us to identify actual objects and events falling under the relevant concept. 5 Death could, for instance, be defined as the permanent and irreversible cessation or discontinuation of an organism’s life processes, while specific empirically detectable phenomena such as the termination of brain activity could be used as the criteria by means of which we identify death and distinguish dead organisms from living ones. 6 We could claim that defining death is a conceptual and/or ontological question or project, while determining the occurrence of a particular death, based on certain criteria, is an epistemological question or project, and that these questions or projects are distinct from each other—insofar as we find ontology and epistemology strictly separable in the first place. Clearly definitions and criteria must be somehow related, though arguably conceptually separable: a criterion should be useful precisely for determining whether a given concept, defined in a certain way, applies to an actual case. There is hardly any need here to dwell on the question concerning the nature of definitions and criteria, or the possible defeasibility of criteria, or other issues that have been voluminously debated, e.g., in relation to Ludwig Wittgenstein’s later philosophy. What is relevant for us in this context is that the very question concerning definitions and criteria of death inevitably leads us—insofar as we are interested in human death and mortality at all—to consider the similarities and differences between various philosophical approaches and basic commitments that unavoidably become relevant in this area. In particular, a contrast between “humanistic” and “naturalistic” (or, perhaps more appropriately today, “medical”) approaches to defining and understanding death seems to be fundamental. These approaches reflect our basic orientations in philosophical anthropology (to be further explored in chapter 2). Insofar as we take such orientations—and the contrasting approaches they yield—seriously, we must also appreciate the irreducibility of questions of signifi-

Introduction

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cance to questions of (mere) meaning in the sense of a definition. In defining death, we may be primarily interested in the meaning of the concept, but the human, existential, and cultural significance of the relevant phenomena also needs to be examined by philosophy and the various humanities. So, does the biological definition of death as, for example, the “irreversible cessation of organismic functioning” suffice for defining human death, or do we need something else, such as the “irreversible loss of personhood,” or something along those lines? 7 Or something still different, as arguably to be human and to be a person are not the same thing, because there could be nonhuman persons and humans who have lost (full) personhood? It might be plausible to propose a biomedical criterion or standard for determining death while requiring that the humanly relevant definition or concept of death remains broader, including sociocultural dimensions. We need, then, more philosophical work addressing different ways of thinking about humanity and human relevance, and thus about human death. I am not proposing any definition of death of my own in this book. On the one hand, there are already more or less accurate and workable definitions available, and there is no need for any additional proposal; on the other hand, it may be better to leave the concept of death as a partially open-ended, family-resemblance concept in the well-known Wittgensteinian sense, a concept without essential features. The deaths of, say, cells, human persons, species, scientific theories, and cultures are quite different phenomena, after all. If this is even remotely acceptable, then there is certainly no way of simply reducing the concept of death to biological or other natural-scientific concepts. It would be even much more absurd to propose such a reduction to, say, physical concepts (even if one were in some sense committed to the view that the physical world is what there most fundamentally is), because the entire distinction between life and death would be lost at a level that considers only, e.g., subatomic particles and magnetic fields. Similarly, cultural dimensions of death would be completely lost—not redefined but lost—in a purely and reductively biomedical account of death. If I had to subscribe to a specific view on the meaning and definition of death, I would thus begin from a kind of pragmatic pluralism: different definitions are useful for different human purposes (e.g., legal, scientific, medical or clinical, military, theological, and so on), and they categorize the relevant phenomena differently. There is, furthermore, no such thing as a purely philosophical purpose for defining death; the role of philosophy, rather, is to coordinate debates on various possible definitions (and, perhaps, on the related criteria) based on views arising within the various disciplinary perspectives on these matters. I hope my philosophical investigations of death, dying, and mortality in this volume will be understood against this pragmatic and pluralistic background, rather than as

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based on any pursuit of essentialistic definition (on pragmatism more specifically, see chapter 6). Metaphilosophically, however, the crucial question emerging from the present situation in the philosophy of death and dying is whether there in the end is anything that could (or should) appropriately be called “philosophical thanatology” and, if so, what its relation to the other academic approaches to death and mortality could, and should, be: are there fundamental, specifically philosophical problems that would remain to be discussed even after all the empirical (e.g., medical, historical, socialscientific, etc.) “thanatologies” had completed their work? While death and mortality can be approached from a number of academic perspectives, interdisciplinary and disciplinary, it can still be asked what specific role the philosophical perspective might play in inquiries into mortality. What, then, is philosophical thanatology (in addition to, or over and above, special-scientific or empirical thanatologies)? Would, for instance, the kind of philosophical questions concerning human mortality listed above remain open even after all the different empirical or scientific questions had been adequately answered? Or can the phenomena of death and mortality be thoroughly understood scientifically and/or empirically (including the results of the humanities and social sciences), with no fundamental philosophical mysteries remaining? Could, for instance, the metaphysics of personal identity be ultimately resolved in terms of neuroscience? Or could the Epicurean debate over whether death is bad be reduced to psychological and sociological studies of well-being and mental health? The metaphilosophical problem concerning the status of the philosophy of death and mortality resembles the analogous problem concerning the status of philosophical anthropology generally: are there specifically philosophical questions about humanity (human existence, human life, “human nature”) that only philosophical inquiry could adequately answer, i.e., problems that no empirical perspectives as such can ever finally resolve? Philosophical thanatology can obviously be understood as a subfield of such reflections, although (as mentioned earlier) some engagements in philosophical anthropology fail to even mention the problem of mortality. 8 One might expect philosophical anthropologists to be highly sensitive to this problem. In a sense, this metaphilosophical situation raises the general question concerning naturalism familiar from other areas of philosophy, such as epistemology and the philosophy of science. According to naturalism, there is “no first philosophy” (to quote W. V. Quine): 9 there is no privileged philosophical perspective over and above, or more fundamental than, the various scientific and/or empirical perspectives from which, in principle, all genuine questions about the ways the world is can be answered. Yet, the nagging question here is whether humanity is somehow an exception—if not the human mind or consciousness (as in traditional

Introduction

7

philosophy of mind), or human cognitive capacities (as in traditional epistemology), then perhaps human death and mortality? Is naturalism itself problematic or seriously limited: does the persistence of the philosophical problems of mortality demonstrate that naturalism is one-sided and must therefore be rejected as a general conception of the relation between philosophy and the special sciences? Debates on naturalism have frequently, albeit in my view still not sufficiently, examined the “limits of naturalism” from the perspective of transcendental philosophy. Analogous transcendental investigations can be directed at, e.g., consciousness, understanding, communication, and meaning; twentieth-century philosophical traditions, such as phenomenology as well as Wittgenstein’s philosophy of language, have played an important role in these developments of transcendental philosophy. As explained above, this continuously developing Kantian and post-Kantian paradigm of transcendental philosophy provides a very important background framework making possible the kind of explorations of mortality and finitude that this book will pursue. From the transcendental perspective, applied to the issue of naturalism and the metaphilosophical status of philosophical thanatology, it should be examined whether there are fundamental issues concerning human mortality that cannot be thoroughly reductively “naturalized.” Such issues, deepening the basic problems listed above, could include, e.g., the following: First, we should take fundamentally seriously the “first-personal” character of death. One may say, echoing Heideggerian ideas, “I am living toward my death.” This, however, leads to the problem of solipsism, with death being understood not as an event in the world but as “the end of the world.” Here, the world as experientially available to us is firstpersonal in a fundamental sense: the world “for me” will come to an end as my life is over. What needs to be examined is how this solipsistic tendency, or its rich elaborations in the Kantian-Schopenhauerian-Nietzschean tradition of philosophy, is related to one’s need to acknowledge the mortality of the other human being (keeping in mind Emmanuel Levinas’s views on the ethical primacy of the subject’s infinite responsibility to the other)? Could, for instance, a relational theory of the identity of a person settle the asymmetry between first- and third-personal approaches to mortality—an asymmetry that creates significant tensions in the historical development of the philosophical problem of death? Moreover, when phenomenologists following Husserl speak about “transcendental life” as a horizon of objects, what (if anything) could be meant by transcendental death—possibly, death as the end of the (solipsistic) world in Wittgenstein’s sense? Secondly, there are purely conceptual problems concerning, e.g., the meaning of death. While the concept of death can receive, e.g., a medical definition in terms of irreversible cessation of organismic functions (or something along those lines, avoiding any medical details here), is there a

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philosophical core to the pursuit of such definitions? Empirical perspectives can, again, be relevant here, especially regarding the criteria of death. Increased empirical understanding of actual biological events and processes of death and dying may also change our ways of employing these concepts. Thus, naturalism cannot simply be neglected; it must be seriously, and critically, examined even by the “humanistic” transcendental thinker. Thirdly, the relations between death and emotions should be considered. The ways in which grief, guilt, and other interpersonal emotions shape the frameworks of social relations in which philosophical issues of death arise, as well as the cultural expectations in terms of which death and dying are encountered in human societies, both past and present, are fascinating topics of philosophical as well as generally humanistic inquiry. These may be integrated with interdisciplinary notions and problems requiring philosophical “coordination,” such as the ethics and politics of memory, our duty to remember the dead, and the emotions involved in practices of remembering. These and related topics can be examined both directly, with the aim of formulating new philosophical analyses of and arguments for and/or against received views, and indirectly at the metalevel, regarding their status as philosophical problems. Philosophical thanatology can, moreover, be expected to critically reflect on the significance of all these and other problems from the point of view of an individual mortal human being and a community of such beings, also with applications to more concrete social and cultural issues. For example, memory is a philosophical topic concerning our relation to death and the dead (and the past generally) that cannot, arguably, be simply reduced to any topics of the nonphilosophical special sciences. The philosophical discussion of memory must emphasize human finitude and limits—and is, thus, one more piece of philosophical reflection on the human condition. The metaphilosophical thesis the book as a whole will defend is, thus, the irreducibility of genuinely philosophical issues of death and mortality to merely empirical issues. At the same time, the entanglement of pragmatist and transcendental methodologies in investigating these topics, and their mutual entanglement, will be developed and critically evaluated. My thesis of irreducibility will be carefully formulated in terms of an integration of transcendental and pragmatist perspectives. My book hence also examines the very possibility of pragmatist philosophical thanatology. Turning toward the future—conceivable expected experiences and/or results—is a key to the pragmatic method in the task of “making our ideas clear” (to quote the title of Charles S. Peirce’s 1878 essay). 10 Presumably, these expected experiences include experiences of an individual’s most remote and final future possibility, death. When considering the pragmatic meaning of any (philosophical or nonphilosophical) idea or concept(ion), it should also be asked what that idea or

Introduction

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concept(ion), or its possible object, entails regarding our inevitable death—and our practices of living with our mortality. Also the past (i.e., memory) in this sense gains its pragmatic significance from its relation to our open future. However, one should pause to reflect on whether this is an ethically adequate approach: can we sufficiently acknowledge other human beings (especially special groups of the dead, e.g., victims of atrocities), if we conceptualize their past (and deaths) in terms of our future expectations and experiences (particularly our expectation of our own death)? This issue again returns to the first-personal character of human mortality: is death, or mortality, primarily my first-personal concern, or should we reconceive it as, primarily, a feature of other human beings’ lives challenging us to respond ethically? This feature will be highlighted throughout the following chapters. Philosophical investigation of human mortality proceeds, then, from within our mortal condition: human finitude is examined from within our finite lives themselves (just like philosophical anthropology necessarily examines “human nature” of the human condition from within that condition). This starting point can be understood as yielding a reflexive, transcendental investigation. Reflecting on the conditions for the possibility of meaningful life is, thus, a crucial element of this project: mortality itself can be seen as such a condition for meaningfulness (or for meaninglessness experienceable as a genuine lack of meaning), because we can, arguably, only fully appreciate the requirements of ethics and/or morality from within a perspective on the world conscious of its own finitude. An ineliminable aspect of this finitude is the precariousness of the moral perspective itself (or any perspective potentially rendering life meaningful): death and mortality threaten to make that (or any) humanly vital perspective illusory, with nihilistic absurdity as the final result: presumably nothing ultimately matters, insofar as we all—whatever we do, however good we try to be, however well we try to respond to and acknowledge otherness—in the end, die? Mark Johnston has argued in a major recent work 11 that death is in this sense a threat to the “importance of goodness,” as it may seem that, because we all die, morality does not ultimately matter. Yet, this finitude itself and the reflection it (only) enables us to pursue may matter, after all; hence, the specific way in which death is a threat to the moral perspective requires further investigation. Thus, the present investigation will, I hope, contribute to our understanding of the entanglement of mortality and morality in this very basic sense. The meaning and significance of morality as a humanly inescapable perspective on the world needs to be illuminated from the point of view of philosophical thanatology. The metaphysical fact that our lives are finite and highly contingent is ethically a most (or perhaps the most) significant fact about us. An entanglement or (re)integration of pragmatist and transcendental approaches will, again, be crucial here. 12

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Chapter 1

A SUMMARY OF THE ARGUMENT After this sketch of the nature and tasks of philosophical thanatology generally, and the prospects of the kind of transcendental philosophical anthropology of human mortality I seek to defend in this volume, let me offer a somewhat more detailed description of the chapters that will follow. Following this introductory chapter, chapter 2 will examine and critically defend the possibility of philosophical anthropology by first distinguishing (following Heikki Kannisto) between four different basic forms or ideal types of philosophical anthropology: essentialism, naturalism, existentialism, and culturalism. It will be argued that no ahistorical, essentialist assumptions about an unchanging “human nature” are necessary in philosophical anthropology. Even so, the problem of normativity turns out to be crucial to this field of inquiry. In particular, a synthesis of naturalist and culturalist approaches to human nature seems to be vitally needed. This discussion prepares the ground for more specific philosophicalanthropological treatments of mortality, to be taken up in later chapters. Death, of course, is a “universal” human phenomenon belonging to our “human nature” (if anything is); yet, its varied meanings in human life seem to require culturalist (and, of course, naturalist) rather than essentialist explorations. Death and mortality are, I hope to show, prime examples of phenomena calling for a dynamic interplay of all the normative philosophical-anthropological approaches distinguished in the chapter. 13 Toward the end of the chapter the mortality issue is specifically examined on the basis of the fourfold scheme introduced in the beginning of the chapter. Death and mortality will offer a significant case study enabling us to test the philosophical value of the pragmatic transcendental anthropology the book as a whole attempts to defend. Chapter 3 will discuss, at a relatively general and abstract level, both the general concept of a limit 14 and its applications to the mortal self. Among the different kinds of limits and boundaries that could be philosophically articulated in relation to various human practices, enabling us to categorize reality in various ways, there are, e.g., geographical (“natural”) and national (“socially constructed”) boundaries; humanly established social and cultural boundaries between different groups of people; mythical boundaries between the sacred and the profane (offering an example of human categorizations of reality in religion, ritual, and magic); the boundary between fact and value (interestingly softened in some philosophers’, including some pragmatists’, theses about the “fact-value entanglement”); as well as the traditional philosophical boundary between oneself and others, yielding the problem of “other minds.” 15 Furthermore, the more abstractly metaphysical issues of nonexistence, nonbeing, nothingness, and absence need to be taken up in relation to limits. 16 The ways in which our drawing different limits, including the limit between existence

Introduction

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and nonexistence itself, contributes to our categorizing reality—and the ways in which such categorizations can be challenged by crossing and blurring those limits—will be illustrated by preliminarily considering the boundary between life and death, as well as the one between reason and madness (assuming that any categorization should be a rational activity and that fundamental confusions in world categorization amount to deep irrationality). Interestingly, our ability to categorize reality in terms of such boundaries can be challenged not only by philosophical arguments but also by, e.g., horror fiction imaginatively representing agents that do not fit in any conventional conceptual categories—or within the boundaries we usually assume to be there. The topic of transcending limits is thus continuously examined not only philosophically but also artistically. The discussion of limits will also lead to more abstract and general transcendental issues of human world categorization, and the chapter will hence to a large extent focus on the transcendental tradition from Kant to Wittgenstein, with a transition from epistemologically oriented transcendental philosophy to more metaphysical transcendental inquiries into selfhood. An anti-essentialist family-resemblance conception of the notions of transcendental argumentation and transcendental conditions is the background position from which the argument of the chapter unfolds. A pragmatic reconceptualization of transcendental conditions of experience as inhering in normatively structured human practices easily leads to Wittgensteinian considerations. While no detailed interpretation of Wittgenstein will be offered, Wittgenstein is nevertheless a central figure in the book’s overall argument for a pragmatic transcendental anthropology: his later thought provides us with a combination of pragmatic and transcendental methodologies in the service of an “anthropological” project seeking to understand the basic features of human forms of life. This chapter, however, will draw particular attention to the earlier (Tractarian) Wittgensteinian idea of the self (or the metaphysical or transcendental subject) as a “limit” of the world, rather than a thing in the world. Hence, the notion of a limit will here be applied to the task of accounting for the (transcendental) self. Key issues in (meta-)ethics and the philosophy of religion can also be examined from this perspective, again partly with a Wittgensteinian emphasis. Ethics and religion may, if we follow Wittgenstein, “transcend” the bounds of sense, or the limits of meaningful language. This is particularly the case with ethico-religious investigations of human mortality. Chapter 4 continues the discussion of mortality by returning to one of the limits introduced in chapter 3: the boundary between oneself and the other(s). The issue of mortality, here explicitly discussed as a transcendental problem presupposing a transcendental use of “limit concepts,” is also a problem of relating oneself to one’s intersubjective surroundings, to the other human beings living and dying around oneself. The problem of solipsism will be introduced in more detail in this context; the strongly

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first-personal nature of the problem of death and mortality will also open an extended discussion of suicide. 17 The crucial question is the one already encountered above, that is, whether death and mortality are fundamentally “my” problems or whether a genuinely social and cultural conception of these matters could be developed. Solipsism, though an extreme position, is highly central in our attempt to understand the profoundly first-personal nature of our mortality. In this chapter, I will also explain why the issue of solipsism itself—along with its applications in philosophical thanatology—must be set (or, when philosophically interesting and relevant, is set) as a transcendental problem instead of a “firstorder” epistemological or metaphysical problem. 18 The first-personal character of death, and even its solipsistic culmination, are crucial to an adequate understanding of the ways in which death and mortality challenge us to reflect on some of the fundamentally important moral emotions. Chapter 5 therefore starts off from the solipsism issue examined in chapter 4 and specifically takes up the concept of guilt in relation to the issues of death and mortality, suggesting that we may distinguish between three different connections between death and guilt, moving from the more ordinary (empirical) to the more metaphysical (transcendental): (i) factual (empirical, ordinary, causal) forms of guilt based on one’s causing death(s) by, e.g., killing (including causing deaths by means of omission, assuming that omissions may be actions); (ii) guilt based on one’s not having done something with or to someone before her/his death, that is, guilt resulting from one’s failure to be sufficiently “available” in another person’s life (to be distinguished from the failure to do something specific, e.g., to save a life—which may, however, ultimately be reducible to case [i]); and (iii) guilt based on one’s life as a whole, on one’s life being “fundamentally wrong,” or misguided and questionable in a profound existential sense. 19 In a way, this chapter applies the considerations of my previous work on the concept of guilt to the special topic of this volume. 20 A critical discussion of the concept of the transcendental subject—something that is reflected on in the earlier chapters as well—will be included, because the crucial question, “whose guilt are we talking about?,” inevitably arises when our considerations move onto the transcendental level. Also, the relation between guilt and some other emotions (e.g., shame) must be briefly discussed; the same threefold distinction between ordinary and transcendental approaches can be applied to other emotions, too. I will finally move from guilt to (essentially nonsolipsistic) equality, though in the end building a bridge between these two notions. The chapter examines the question concerning the equality versus inequality of death from a metaphysical and existential, rather than political or socioeconomic, point of view. I will argue that some philosophical accounts of death that are otherwise opposed to each other (e.g., Epicureanism and the “privation view” made famous by Thomas Nagel) are symmetrical regarding this fundamental issue. The recent at-

Introduction

13

tempt to resolve the threat that death poses to the “importance of goodness” by Mark Johnston is also critically (re-)explored in this context. 21 The horizon of guilt will thereby be opened up again toward the end of the chapter. Chapter 6 considers the possibility of a pragmatist philosophy of death, dying, and mortality. Even though pragmatism will, when we get to chapter 6, have been mentioned several times, its detailed characterization in the context of philosophical thanatology must wait until this chapter. William James’s pragmatist views on death, mortality, and immortality will be critically examined as an example of the need to consider the ethically vital tension between one’s own mortality and that of others; a specific discussion of the problem of death and the “pragmatic method” will be included in the chapter, highlighting the need to critically reconceptualize the transcendental method. Pragmatism, then, is my proposed reaction to the need to integrate transcendental philosophy with its naturalistic alternatives in philosophical anthropology and philosophical thanatology. 22 Moreover, it will be considered whether death and dying could in any sense be (individually or socioculturally) “controlled” by means of the pragmatic—or some other—philosophical method of dealing with these notions. The brief concluding chapter 7 will finally pull the argument together and will point to further reflections on research questions left open by this volume. It will also summarize the preferred position of the book, pragmatic transcendental anthropology of human mortality, by referring to James’s pragmatism. NOTES 1. I try to argue for this general claim also in Sami Pihlström, “The Mortal Self: A Pragmatic-Transcendental Anthropology,” in Phillip Honenberger (ed.), Naturalism and Philosophical Anthropology (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave, 2016). It is astonishing that some works explicitly put forward as contributions to philosophical anthropology, such as P. M. S. Hacker’s otherwise highly interesting Human Nature: The Categorial Framework (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2007), fail to even mention topics like death, guilt, and suffering, let alone analysing them in detail. Hacker focuses on human capacities—on what we are able to do—rather than our limits, incapacities, and finitude; the latter, of course, must be emphasized in any philosophical anthropology examining death and mortality. 2. Famously, this is a key idea in Martin Heidegger, Sein und Zeit (Tübingen, GER: Max Niemeyer, 1961; first published 1927). 3. See, e.g., the following previous works of mine: Naturalizing the Transcendental: A Pragmatic View (Amherst, NY: Prometheus/Humanity Books, 2003); Pragmatic Moral Realism: A Transcendental Defense (Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2005); “The Trail of the Human Serpent Is over Everything”: Jamesian Perspectives on Mind, World, and Language (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 2008); Pragmatist Metaphysics: An Essay on the Ethical Grounds of Ontology (London and New York: Continuum, 2009); and Pragmatic Pluralism and the Problem of God (New York: Fordham University Press, 2013). The Kantian perspective on pragmatism is strongly present also in Sami

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Pihlström (ed.), The Continuum Companion to Pragmatism (London and New York: Continuum, 2011; paperback edition: The Bloomsbury Companion to Pragmatism [London and New York: Bloomsbury, 2015]). Note that while the possibility of “naturalizing” transcendental philosophy has received some attention, even quite recently—see Joel Smith and Peter Sullivan (eds.), Transcendental Philosophy and Naturalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011)—these discussions rarely, if ever, take pragmatism seriously (apart from my own work). 4. For recent introductory textbooks and other relatively general presentations on the philosophy of death and dying, see, e.g., Hans-Dieter Bahr, Den Tod denken (Munich: Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 2002); Christopher Belshaw, Annihilation: The Sense and Significance of Death (Stocksfield, UK: Acumen, 2008); Ben Bradley, Well-Being and Death (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2009); John Martin Fischer, Our Stories: Essays on Life, Death, and Free Will (Oxford & New York: Oxford University Press, 2009); Steven Luper, The Philosophy of Death (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), Héctor Wittmer, Philosophie des Todes (Stuttgart: Reclam, 2009); and Bernard N. Schumacher, Death and Mortality in Contemporary Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010). Some of these will be cited in more detail in what follows, but it would be impossible to take into account all the relevant recent explorations of death and dying. 5. In a comparable philosophical case, a definition of truth would tell us what truth (essentially) is, that is, what it means for a sentence or a statement or a belief or a theory or a proposition (or whatever) to be true, while a criterion of truth would be useful in identifying truths. Correspondence with reality could be regarded as the meaning of truth in the sense of a definition, while properties such as coherence or pragmatic satisfactoriness could be seen as criteria of truth. However, this is too simple according to, at least, pragmatist philosophers, who would insist on the entanglement of meaning and criteria. 6. For example, Steven Luper, in his clear and useful book, The Philosophy of Death (cited above), refers to “the ending of the vital processes by which an organism sustains itself” as the definition of death. 7. For the first definition, see D. DeGrazia, “The Definition of Death,” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (2011); cf. also, for the more humanistic approach, Andrea Esser, “Human Death as a Concept in Practical Philosophy,” in Outi Hakola, Sara Heinämaa, and Sami Pihlström (eds.), Death and Mortality: From Individual to Communal Approaches (COLLeGIUM 19, Helsinki: Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies, 2015). 8. Cf., e.g., Hacker, Human Nature (cited above). 9. See, e.g., W. V. Quine, Word and Object (Cambridge, MA and London: MIT Press, 1960). 10. Peirce’s “How to Make Our Ideas Clear” is available, e.g., in The Essential Peirce, vol. 1, ed. Nathan Houser (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992). 11. Mark Johnston, Surviving Death (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010). 12. Philosophy, however, cannot be the (or even a) foundation of thanatological research; the approach I am recommending in this book is opposed to all kinds of foundationalism and dogmatism. Yet, this does not mean that there would be no role for philosophy to play after all the empirical sciences have had their say on the problems of death and mortality. 13. Of course, it does not matter whether a certain view or approach is called “philosophical anthropology” or not; much that is relevant to this field of philosophy will come under quite different labels, including, simply, “metaphysics” and “ethics.” Those allergic to the phrase, “philosophical anthropology,” may also speak about “philosophical reflection on the human condition,” or something similar. 14. Cf., e.g., the chapter, “Limits,” in D. M. Armstrong, Sketch for a Systematic Metaphysics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010). My analysis of the idea of a limit in this chapter will not be based on Armstrong’s, but his and other contemporary metaphysicians’ theories are certainly relevant to the discussion.

Introduction

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15. There is no shortage of material that could be examined in this chapter: e.g., “applied ontologists’” (e.g., Barry Smith’s and his colleagues’) work on “fiat boundaries”; religious studies scholars’ and folklorists’ work on mythical boundaries maintained in religions and rituals; recent work on the other minds problem, and so forth. I have in earlier works been preoccupied in quite some detail with Hilary Putnam’s views on the fact-value entanglement; see Putnam, The Collapse of the Fact/Value Dichotomy and Other Essays (Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 2002); and Pihlström, Pragmatic Moral Realism (cited above). 16. Here one can draw on the very important work on the metaphysics of nonexistence by, e.g., Armstrong (see his Sketch for a Systematic Metaphysics, cited above), Richard Grossman (whose The Existence of the World [London and New York: Routledge, 1992], contains a chapter on this issue), and Charles Crittenden (see, e.g., his Unreality [Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1991]). 17. Albert Camus famously saw suicide as a fundamental philosophical problem related to the significance of human life (or of anything) in general; thus it is something quite different from a special problem in applied ethics. Far from being “merely” an issue in applied ethics, this issue can, then, be regarded as one of the most fundamental philosophical worries there are, deeply related to concepts and/or topics such as absurdity and nihilism. As we will see, Wittgenstein maintained, in his pre-Tractarian notebooks (1914–1916), that suicide is an “elementary sin”: it is a voluntary destruction of the world-constituting transcendental subject and thereby also a destruction of the world (not just an “event in the world”). I have examined some “solipsistic” aspects of ethics, and of the concept of guilt in particular, in my earlier monograph, Transcendental Guilt: Reflections on Ethical Finitude (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2011). 18. Clearly, my discussions of the problem of solipsism should not be misunderstood: I am definitely not a solipsist, and I am not going to approach the issue of death in terms of solipsism in the sense of endorsing that doctrine. However, there is a “methodological” and (thereby) transcendental element of solipsism in my investigation: we do have to start by considering how our finitude affects our own—that is, my—life and challenges its meaningfulness. Solipsism will arise in a way or another in any transcendental examination of human finitude and its meaning-threatening nature. In the terms of chapter 2, it could be said that the discussion of solipsism in chapter 4 is based on a broadly existentialist approach to philosophical thanatology, even though the examination of transcendental subjectivity throughout chapters 3–5 can be seen to be (implicitly) seeking a critical synthesis of existentialism, culturalism, and naturalism. 19. Cf. Heidegger’s notion of Dasein’s Schuldenwerdenkönnen, developed in Sein und Zeit: the human Dasein is guilty “authentically.” The differentiation between the three (or, possibly, more) concepts of guilt that can be taken into account here must also refer back to Karl Jaspers’s similar distinctions in his famous Die Schuldfrage (Heidelberg: Lambrecht Schneider, 1946). 20. See my Transcendental Guilt (cited above). 21. For Nagel’s views, see Thomas Nagel, “Death,” in his Mortal Questions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), chapter 1. For Johnston’s views, see Johnston, Surviving Death, to be cited in more detail in due course. 22. I have examined James’s views in this respect in my James book, “The Trail of the Human Serpent Is over Everything” (cited above), especially chapter 3.

TWO Mortality and Philosophical Anthropology

This chapter investigates in some more detail the relevance of the concept of philosophical anthropology in contemporary philosophy and applies this investigation to the problem of human death and mortality. 1 The concept of philosophical anthropology has been relatively unpopular in recent philosophy, presumably to a large extent because of some leading twentieth-century and contemporary thinkers’ rejection of any specifically philosophical task of understanding humanity. 2 Yet, philosophical anthropology arguably lies at the center of all philosophical inquiry and is highly relevant to metaphysics, epistemology, philosophy of language, philosophy of science, ethics, social and political philosophy, and other fields. In order to defend this metaphilosophical view, I will, after having outlined a framework for the main types of philosophical conceptions of humanity, present two case studies demonstrating the role played by philosophical anthropology even where the term is not used. We will then more explicitly apply the basic framework to the topic of mortality—the main theme of this book—and eventually reach some more general conclusions regarding the present situation and the future prospects of philosophical anthropology. By the expression, “philosophical anthropology,” I am not referring to any particular school, since the concept may be used to cover any general philosophical reflection on what it is to be a human being. Hence, it need not be restricted to the German philosophical-anthropological movement, influenced by Lebensphilosophie, phenomenology, and existentialism, which is mainly associated with the work of Max Scheler, Helmuth Plessner, and Arnold Gehlen, and flourished, roughly, from the 1920s to the 1960s. 3 The fact that philosophical anthropology is often restricted to 17

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this school may have resulted in its partial eclipse in contemporary (especially analytic) philosophy. Moreover, the philosophical anthropologist need not suppose that humanity can or ought to be investigated in a purely philosophical manner, with no relation to scientific or other empirical perspectives; hence, philosophical anthropology does not presuppose any timeless essence of humanity but only the intelligibility of some distinction between the human and the nonhuman. 4 Philosophy, together with other academic fields, may participate in drawing this distinction, or inquiring into the conceptual background assumptions needed when it is drawn in some particular way. Hence, philosophical anthropology need not be taken to be a “first philosophy” in the sense abandoned by naturalists like W. V. Quine. The issue is how to secure a significant role for philosophy with regard to the problems of humanity without sliding into essentialism and apriorism or, in another extreme, without reducing philosophy to an empirical discipline (viz., mere empirical anthropology instead of philosophical anthropology) and thus in a way eliminating it altogether. 5 Philosophical anthropologists have often argued that it is a mistake to conflate the philosophical question of humanity with empirical questions; 6 on the other hand, it is not unproblematic to assume the availability of a specific philosophical method in the study of human nature—or death. I will return to this problem in due course. 7 Philosophical-anthropological theorists have not usually been satisfied with merely describing human life or with stating in factual language what human beings are like. Rather, they have engaged in a normative evaluation of the human condition. Thus, philosophical anthropologists typically maintain that there is something wrong with human life as we factually lead it. Thus, it is, in a way or another, extremely problematic to be a human being, and something ought to be done to rectify this situation. 8 Obviously, one main reason why human existence may be regarded as problematic is the fact that we all have to die; thus, the normativity of philosophical anthropology and the finitude of mortal human life are inherently linked. It has been suggested that the same fourfold structure underlying philosophical anthropology can be found in most classical and modern theories of humanity, such as Platonism, Confucianism, Christianity, Marxism, Freudianism, existentialism, and sociobiology: these theories present (1) a background metaphysical theory of the world, (2) a basic account of human nature, (3) a diagnosis of what is wrong with human life, and (4) a “prescription,” a suggestion of how to cure the human condition. 9 The normative task of philosophical anthropology distinguishes it from sheer scientific descriptions of human life in terms of contingent facts and regularities. Again, the problem is how exactly philosophy is entitled to intervene in the scientific study of humanity. How

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can philosophical prescriptions for good life (or death) be legitimated— or can they? I cannot hope to solve this problem in this chapter or this book, but I do hope that my reflections will provide some necessary clues for any plausible “solution.” At any rate, I will keep the issue of normativity on my agenda throughout the discussion. We may trust that rational discussion of “human nature” is possible simply on the grounds that such discussion has been actual in the history of human thought. 10 This constitutes a prima facie case for the intelligibility of philosophical anthropology. Such a discussion presupposes that it is possible to distinguish between right and wrong or rational and irrational conceptions of humanity, even though people may endlessly disagree on where exactly to draw the line. The presupposition at work here is the unavoidability of normative evaluation in any human discourse. One of the central problems to be faced by philosophical-anthropological theories is the very possibility of normativity. When applied to death and mortality, philosophical anthropology turns into what is sometimes called philosophical thanatology, the philosophical examination of death, mortality, and (possibly) immortality. When characterized in this way, philosophical thanatology is simply a special field of philosophical anthropology, dealing with certain special issues about human beings. Accordingly, it is also supposed to be a (partly) nonempirical inquiry into normative issues surrounding human mortality. It must be distinguished from merely empirical, factual inquiries seeking answers to straightforwardly factual questions about death, be they natural-scientific ones about the ways in which the human organism may be killed by, say, various diseases, or historical and social-scientific ones about the ways in which the phenomenon of death is or has been understood in different cultures. On the other hand, philosophical thanatology may approach the concept of death from a more general perspective not restricted to human mortality. For example, as was emphasized in the introduction above, the very meaning of the concept of death needs to be discussed, and this meaning may, for instance, be distinguished from the (observable) criteria of death. Our ways of reacting to such conceptual issues will affect our ways of dealing with, say, moral questions about the justification of various death-related decisions and practices, such as euthanasia or abortion. Difficult conceptual problems can be identified—and to some extent clarified by means of philosophical analysis—when thanatological inquiry is directed, for example, at the identity of the subject who undergoes the process of dying and who might perhaps (be thought to) survive bodily death. 11 Another key issue in philosophical thanatology is the long dispute, starting in antiquity, on whether death is or even can be evil for the one who dies. The Epicurean tradition, following Lucretius, says it is not, and cannot be, because after death there is no subject to experience anything’s

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being good or evil any longer. This dispute was revived in modern analytic philosophy of death and dying, especially as a result of Thomas Nagel’s work. 12 Following Nagel, a number of contemporary theorists of death have denied the Epicurean claim, arguing that death, especially premature death, deprives the person of a number of good things life might bring with it. 13 It was Nagel’s 1971 essay on death that launched this entire discussion by defending what is now known as the privation view. I am not at all convinced, however, that the analytic paradigm in philosophical discussions of death is helpful in understanding the phenomenon of mortality in its human complexity. This paradigm is primarily just mentioned here (and will be discussed in the subsequent chapters only at a general level) basically in order to provide a relatively familiar contrast to the kind of reflections on human mortality I will in this book engage in. Nor, however, am I convinced that the treatments of mortality within “Continental” philosophy, given their often impenetrable textual structure, really help the person who is leading a mortal life and is existentially worried about it. The kind of philosophical-anthropological approach I will sketch may, despite—or perhaps rather because of—its relative simplicity, help us at least in distinguishing between the positions (or lines of argument) worth taking seriously. THE BASIC FRAMEWORK Following Heikki Kannisto’s distinctions, we may divide the central types of philosophical anthropology into four basic groups: essentialism, naturalism, existentialism, and culturalism. 14 This fourfold division is not intended to capture all conceivable philosophical anthropologies. Moreover, individual thinkers can (and usually do) hold mixtures of these views. Only seldom have the ideal types been represented in their pure forms. The first type Kannisto considers is essentialism, a philosophical anthropology par excellence. The idea is to uncover a timeless, unchanging, immutable, metaphysical essence of humanity, the essential (both necessary and sufficient) property or properties that make humans humans and separate them from other beings. Classical philosophers like Plato and Aristotle were essentialists in this sense, although their specific conceptions of how the essences are situated in the world or cosmos (i.e., as Platonic transcendent forms or as more mundane, but perhaps equally intractable, Aristotelian universals in rebus) differed from each other. Christian thinkers can also be classified as essentialists, and so can, presumably, the German movement known as Philosophische Anthropologie. What is crucial in essentialist philosophical anthropologies is, again, the role played by normativity: the essence of human beings is normative in

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the sense that it not only tells us what kind of beings we are but also urges us to be as fully humans as we can, to fulfill our essence. Such is, for example, the ancient ideal of humans as rational animals. Individual human beings can be more or less rational; only ideally do they approximate the Platonic (or Aristotelian) essential property of rationality (or Reason), and they can only more or less completely satisfy the description zoon logon echon. Essentialism is usually not considered satisfactory from the point of view of post-Enlightenment thinkers inspired by the raise of the scientific worldview. In Kannisto’s categorization, naturalism, grounded in the victory of the natural-scientific methods and results and their extrapolations in the human sciences, seeks to factualize the normative order set up by essentialism. 15 Human beings do not have any timeless normative essence, since nothing in the world has. Nature is a purely factual, contingent totality. Contemporary naturalists urge that great scientists like Galileo, Isaac Newton, Charles Darwin, and (more recently) Stephen Hawking, Stephen Jay Gould, and others (irrespective of their own specific views of human nature) have shown us that we, like everything else, belong—without remainder—to the natural world. Philosophical anthropology turns into empirical, natural-scientific anthropology: in order to obtain a reliable picture of humanity, we should integrate the results of the relevant scientific disciplines (chemistry, biology, psychology, sociology, history, cultural anthropology, etc.), finally achieving a reductive unified science in which humanity finds its proper, natural (nonnormative, fully factual) place in the natural world. The essentialists’ concern with “human nature” is in naturalistic theories taken literally: “nature” no longer means “essence” but truly and simply nature; humans are a part of nature’s factual structure, natural objects. 16 Another way to “negate” essentialism, different from naturalism, is existentialism, which does not factualize the normative world order the essentialist dreams of but denies that there is any order that is binding for humans. We are radically free to make our decisions in the concrete material and historical circumstances we find ourselves to be “thrown” into. As the famous slogan by Jean-Paul Sartre goes: existence precedes essence. Humans do not have any pre-given, ready-made, God-created essential property which would distinguish them from everything else. What is given is their existence—or, rather, my existence, since existentialism views human life from a first-person point of view—in this world which is in itself meaningless and absurd. 17 Our task is to construct meaning into the world by employing our individual freedom, by making something out of our lives—by committing ourselves intellectually, politically, and morally. Existentialism can be considered a critique of not only essentialism but of naturalism as well. As a movement grounded in a Husserlian phenomenological understanding of subjectivity, it is diametrically opposed to any naturalizing tendency to explain our subjec-

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tive actions in terms of the regularities of the factual world, which is empty of meaning and significance when considered in abstraction from human subjectivity. According to Kannisto and many others, it is difficult (if not impossible) to follow existentialists into a total denial of any limits to what humans can freely make of themselves. Nor is it easy to take a thoroughly naturalist turn and view human life simply on a par with other natural processes in the material world. The fourth option is culturalism. 18 Those who favor this approach continue the essentialists’ project of viewing human life against the background of a normative world order. This order, however, is created by no one else but we ourselves. It is a human construction, a manifestation of our being language-using and goaldirected creatures. Culturalism is a synthesis of the negations of essentialism offered by naturalism and existentialism: there is no ready-made, cosmic, ahistorical, normative structure of essences, as naturalists point out against essentialists; yet, we are not simply pieces of matter in motion in the natural world, either, but free and responsible agents committed to interpreting our lives from an ethically engaged perspective, as existentialists note against both essentialists and naturalists. But existentialists are wrong in claiming that there is no normative order binding for us at all. We (“always already”) belong to a normative order, which we ourselves have made up. We make ourselves, and are continuously remade through the cultural structures we have made. In this sense, we live in a human world in which normative engagement is inescapable, not to be reduced away. Kannisto himself favors culturalism (though he also seems to treat the classical essentialist pursuit with deep respect). Here he joins such influential thinkers as Ernst Cassirer, who regarded humans as symbolusing animals (animal symbolicum) living not only in a physical universe but in a symbolic one as well, 19 and Ludwig Wittgenstein, who found the ground of all meaningful language, communication, and understanding in the natural history of human forms of life. From the Wittgensteinian perspective, we live surrounded by language, in a world thoroughly shaped by language. 20 “Culture is crucial to human nature,” as Stevenson and Haberman laconically note. 21 There is, according to culturalists, no hope in trying to determine the facts constitutive of human nature in a purely naturalistic way, since natural human life is inevitably shaped by cultural factors—by the linguistically transmitted enculturation process that begins immediately after a newborn human baby has come to our world as a “mere animal” and starts its gradual progress toward full personhood. 22 Nevertheless, there is an order we do belong to—a cultural order—which, however, we have ourselves constituted and are continuously reconstituting through our social action and linguistic encounter with our symbolic world. Culturalist theories can also be regarded as attempts to find a middle ground between the extremes of classical exis-

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tentialism (which emphasizes human beings’ radical separation from the natural world) and naturalism (which seeks to reduce human life to its biological or physico-chemical basis)—a tension highly central in modern philosophical anthropology. 23 Culturalism has its obvious Kantian roots. Culturalist philosophical anthropologies are often involved in Kantian-like transcendental reflection on the conditions required for certain human spheres of reality (e.g., morality) to be possible. Kant himself was of course a classical figure of philosophical anthropology—but not only for the reason that he wrote his treatise on Pragmatische Anthropologie. As both Weiler and Kannisto remind us, Kant famously remarked that his three main philosophical questions (“What can I know?,” “What should I do?” “What can I hope for?”) can be combined in one, “What is man?” 24 Herder, Kant’s contemporary, should also be mentioned as one of the founding fathers of culturalism because of his strong emphasis—unusual at his time—on the significance of language in human existence. Human beings are, according to Herder, as much products of language as language is a human product. 25 In addition to Kant, Herder, Cassirer, and Wittgenstein, Charles Taylor provides a splendid example of a culturalist and antinaturalist philosophical anthropology. 26 His argument against naturalism can be summarized in Kannisto’s terms (in fact, Kannisto has produced closely related arguments): as humans, we cannot fully reduce (i.e., naturalize) ourselves into mere objects of scientific description and explanation. 27 Even when engaging in scientific investigation, we inevitably need to orientate in the conceptual space of science by employing an irreducibly normative conceptual network. In a quasi-Kantian sense, the possession of one or another framework of ethical orientation, presupposing what Taylor calls strong normative evaluation, is a necessary condition for the possibility of human life, agency, and personhood. 28 Even if we were able to naturalize all others into material, scientific, lawfully behaving objects, we could hardly do this to ourselves as the subjects of such a project of naturalization (and to go on to claim that the resulting naturalized picture is our reflected, reasoned, argued, or considered view or judgment). 29 No complete conceptual detachment from our prescientific, normatively structured lifeworld (to use Edmund Husserl’s term), which is also the basis of all science, is possible. Thus, culturalists may argue that scientific objectification and naturalization—even if they may partly extend to the area of human life—are grounded in normative distinctions that cannot be completely naturalized. The normativity inherent in our lives cannot be eliminated by scientific means. Qua human beings (and this group includes natural scientists, of course), we are something “more” than natural objects—even though this does not mean that we are anything supernatural. 30 Reductive naturalism, in short, is incapable of accounting for our subjectivity

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(both individual and social), which is part and parcel of our (both scientific and nonscientific) understanding of ourselves as agents. This position unifies such diverse thinkers as Kant, Husserl, Cassirer, Wittgenstein, Taylor, Putnam, and Kannisto. Next, I will try to concretize these suggestions through a couple of more detailed—basically culturalistically oriented—case studies, using Kannisto’s distinctions as my basic interpretive framework. The case studies I will briefly explore do not explicitly take up the topic of mortality. Their results will prove useful, however, when we later (both in this chapter and in the subsequent ones) turn to that topic more closely. WITTGENSTEINIAN PHILOSOPHY AS TRANSCENDENTAL ANTHROPOLOGY Despite their usually sharp opposition to the kind of scientific reductive naturalization described and criticized above, Wittgensteinian philosophers of language would scarcely describe themselves as philosophical anthropologists, either. Yet, it seems that their work can often be interpreted as philosophical reflection on what it is to be a human being in a human world constituted by language. As an example, we may take a look at what Raimond Gaita says about our ethical life and ethical vocabularies in his book Good and Evil (1991). 31 One of the concepts he discusses is remorse, defined as “the suffering recognition and acknowledgment of one’s guilt,” yielding “an awakened sense of the reality of another” and “a recognition of the reality of evil.” 32 That it is possible for a person, after having realized that she or he has done something that ought not to have been done, to say in remorse, “My God, what have I done!” is, according to Gaita, “internal to the kind of seriousness which belongs to the nature of morality and to morality’s deepening engagement with other parts of our lives.” 33 Even though Wittgensteinians usually wish to present their remarks as “grammatical,” as remarks about the ways we use language within our forms of life, 34 they end up saying various things about the nature of morality, and, accordingly, about human life as morally structured. Hence, Gaita’s penetrating reflections on the language games of morality can be interpreted as reflections on a linguistically manifested philosophical anthropology. Gaita’s approach, like Taylor’s, constitutes a culturalist conception of humanity. To presuppose a certain kind of seriousness as an element of moral thinking is, according to Gaita, to be a human being. 35 It is intuitive to think that the very problem of morality has to do with the meaning of life. Gaita says: “Much moral thinking is not thinking what to do and even when it is, it is also an attempt to understand the meaning of what we do, [. . .] to achieve a deepened understanding of the meaning of our actions.” Ethical understanding is usually not learning

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something new or learning about a valid argument whose validity one had not realized previously, but “coming to see sense where we had not seen it before, or coming to see depth where we had not seen it before.” 36 Moral thinking and understanding, thus characterized, should be connected with a grammatical investigation of our morally involved language games, of how we make sense of our lives. Hence, they are intimately linked with philosophical anthropology. The resulting philosophical anthropology is obviously anti-essentialist, as Wittgensteinian thinkers often insist on the heterogeneity of “the human life.” 37 Officially, Gaita opposes moral realism as well as antirealism. He wants to sidestep the issue of whether moral language is truth-valued or not. We should not, in particular, leave it to experts of philosophical logic to decide whether such language is truth-valued. 38 But he also says: “The ‘reality’ of moral value is inseparable from the reality of it as a claim on us, and serious responsiveness to that claim is internal to the recognition of its reality.” What this amounts to is actually an anthropologically (rather than logically or semantically) formulated moral realism. Another realistically interpretable insight is the following: “[T]he character of a proper response to human suffering is conditioned by the ethically conditioned individuality which is internal to our sense of a human being as something more than a member of the species homo sapiens [. . .].” 39 The ethical thinker is committed to the reality of another human being, as irreducible to a biological organism. This position should not be construed supernaturalistically; ethics need not presuppose any otherworldly conception of value. But what needs to be maintained in any account of ethics is the idea that a conception of humanity as something more than the biology of our species emerges out of the very naturalness of our existence. Presumably even scientific reductionists who in their scientific work declare, for example, that there is no free will nor (therefore) moral responsibility, stick to such concepts in their own moral life and in their evaluations of other people, including other reductionists. This conception of morality also requires us to distinguish, conceptually, between human beings and animals: The lives of animals have no meaning, or they have meaning in only an attenuated sense. I mean that as a grammatical remark [. . .]. It is what lies behind the contrast between animals and human beings as it is expressed when we speak of us and them [. . .]. The sense of “meaning” to which I am appealing is sometimes expressed in the contrast between a concern for the meaning of our lives as opposed to a pursuit of happiness. [. . .] The difference between human beings and animals is sometimes expressed by saying that only human beings have souls. 40

The “grammatical” remark Gaita makes here is not merely grammatical but also transcendental. What I mean by this is that it is constitutive of our sense of the ethical. Ethics investigates our having, and our need to

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adopt, an attitude to other humans as an attitude toward souls. This formulation should not, however, be confused with any metaphysical theory of souls. 41 Instead of being a metaphysical concept, the concept of a soul is, for Gaita, a “spiritual” one, applicable to creatures that have an “inner life”—i.e., only to human beings. “An animal can suffer but [unlike a human being] it cannot curse the day that it was born; an animal can be afraid but it cannot be ashamed of its fear and despise itself; an animal can be happy but it cannot be joyous; an animal cannot give of its substance to certain pursuits and be admonished for doing so. [. . .] The problems of life’s meaning cannot arise for an animal and only a being for whom life can be problematic can have a spiritual life, and therefore, have a soul.” 42 Thus, if someone says, e.g., that dolphins use language, we should be suspicious: “unless they care for the truth, and are claimed in response to its demands, unless a dolphin can say to another dolphin ‘come now, do you really mean that?,’ unless a dolphin can be asked to stand behind its words and speak out of the life that it must make its own, then dolphins do not do what we do when we speak to one another.” Animals, moreover, “lack the individuality which is internal to our sense of human preciousness and which is, therefore, internal to our sense of what it is to wrong another.” 43 Analogously, a distinction ought to be drawn between humans and machines. 44 Our attitude to unborn human babies is, then, necessarily (in the sense of something like grammatical necessity) different from our attitude to animals, although some animals may be, biologically and functionally, on a “higher level” than fetuses, newborn babies, or even small children. Gaita argues that our prescientific language game of what it means to be “humanly pregnant,” a language game of love, simply does not apply to the pregnancies of animal mothers. Parents losing a child grieve over the particular, individual child they were not allowed to have. Only human beings can be victims of misfortune, and consequently even children who never grow into normal adults are acknowledged as belonging to us. Moreover, despite the obvious and well-known biological contingency of any particular child having been born (and having the genetically transmitted properties it has), it is “natural” for human parents “to think that the children they have they, in some sense, necessarily have.” 45 We do not simply view such ways of thinking as illusory or antiscientific. There is, then, a mystery in human life and death not to be taken away by scientific descriptions and explanations of these phenomena (but not to be conflated with any pseudoscientific mystification, either). 46 There are no such mysteries in the lives of animals—at least we cannot find any mysteries there. Anyone who is “one of us” is, Gaita tells us, “a fellow in a realm of meanings which condition the way we may matter to one another.” This formulation might be read as a grammatical-anthropological definition of humanity. 47 Some people have refused to regard some humans as be-

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longing to “us” in this sense—slave-owners and Nazis, among others. They have not been able to see all humans as genuine (other) perspectives on the world. It is impossible, according to Gaita, to demonstrate to such a “soul-blind” person that others should be seen as human beings; what would have to be learned by such a person is the possibility of a certain kind of meaning in (another) human life. 48 This impossibility of demonstration should lead us to take seriously the problem of how it is possible for us at all to live within frameworks of culturally binding and actionguiding normativity. Furthermore, seeing another human being as a “soul” is not to treat her or him as an object, that is, not to ascribe certain objectively discernable properties to her or him. Seeing people as souls is not a matter of propositional knowledge. From Wittgenstein’s point of view, Gaita interprets, “having ‘an attitude towards a soul’ is not consequent upon the ascription of particular states of thought to people, but rather a condition of it.” The “mystery” of the “inner life,” of “the life of the soul,” of another human being’s subjectivity, should not be trivialized by treating the other as an object of cognitive inquiry. 49 Yet, even though an objectivist construal of philosophical anthropology is rejected, a reconceptualized sense of philosophical anthropology is here retained: human beings are (seen as) beings involved in networks of meaning. Even if we resist the reduction of philosophical anthropology to the description of our ways of speaking about human beings, we may share Gaita’s conviction that no “independent metaphysical inquiry into the ‘reality’ of good and evil” could undermine our most serious ways of speaking about these matters. We need not agree with his suggestion that the word ontology should be banished in ethics; nor do we need to follow his discussion of ethical “other-worldliness.” But Gaita’s penetrating descriptions of how, for example, evil deeds can “spread through a life,” rendering meaningless the purposes for which those deeds were committed in the first place, can be interpreted in a philosophical-anthropological fashion, as reflections on how evil functions in our human lives—lives structured by the use of ethical notions. 50 The relevance of Gaita’s grammatical considerations for our purposes here can be expressed as follows. Metaphysical interpretations of the human condition—philosophical anthropology—emerge from language use. As Wittgenstein himself thought, grammar expresses the “essence” of a thing. 51 This should not be read as an excursion to transcendent metaphysics, but as a statement of the fact that our human conceptions of the way the world is and of our own place in its scheme of things arise out of our natural ways of using language within our distinctively human forms of life. Language itself, independently of being used, does not make ontological commitments; it is we language users that make commitments to the world’s being in one way rather than another. The use of language in human interaction (language games) is the basis of the emer-

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gence of any metaphysical and/or philosophical-anthropological positions. The kind of “grammatical” truths about certain concepts applicable to human beings but not to animals or machines (e.g., “Only human beings have a soul,” “Only a human life can be meaningful”) analyzed by Gaita and others are based on the ways we factually speak about ourselves and other human beings, but they lead to normatively loaded philosophical-anthropological commitments to an ontologically relevant picture of human life. Such commitments need not be essentialistic, for the shape the world takes through human language use may change in the course of the development of that language use. It should be obvious that the basic problem we encounter here concerns the (relative) autonomy of normativity. That it is correct to use moral language in certain ways in relation to human (but not animal) life is based on, or emerges from, the fact that we use and have used language in such ways—although it may not be easy to understand how this emergence takes place. Wittgensteinian philosophy of language is, then, a branch of philosophical anthropology, or at least highly relevant to philosophical anthropology. In particular, it shares with the latter the fundamental issue of normativity. The place of anthropology in Wittgenstein’s own work has been investigated in some detail by Jonathan Lear, who even employs the term “transcendental anthropology.” 52 Lear’s account of Wittgenstein’s relation to transcendental inquiry, on the one side, and anthropological inquiry, on the other, may be used to illuminate Gaita’s approach, although there is no explicit discussion of Gaita to be found in his work. According to Lear, transcendental philosophers like Kant and Wittgenstein have tried to investigate our mindedness, the way we are “minded.” The concept of mindedness is defined by saying that “a person is minded in a certain way if he has the perceptions of salience, routes of interest, feelings of naturalness in following a rule, and so on which constitute being part of a certain form of life.” 53 When loosened, Kantian transcendental inquiry may encompass a Wittgensteinian “nonempirical inquiry into rule-following,” but the problem here is whether, and how, one can simultaneously adopt both the transcendental and the anthropological stance, 54 both of which seem to be at work in Wittgenstein’s rulefollowing considerations. This problem is urgent to us, since philosophical anthropology seeks to combine a transcendental, normative task with a (quasi-)empirical and factual description—for example, a grammatical description à la Gaita—of what human life surrounded by language is like. Just like in Wittgenstein’s grammatical investigations, one should in one’s more general philosophical anthropology seek to avoid both the collapse of philosophy into something merely empirical and its becoming a vacuous a priori conceptual investigation. 55 This trick is performed by (Lear’s) Wittgenstein and Lear through the insight that the (empirically) anthropological stance is “only a step along

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a philosophical dialectic” and that the anthropologist is not the “final role” to be taken by the philosopher. The anthropological stance is, in fact, “an artifact of philosophical inquiry,” not genuinely empirical or observational. The final task is to “gain nonobservational [transcendental] insight into that which from a ‘sideways-on’ perspective [anthropologically viewed] is a form of life.” 56 Anthropologically, our form of life might have alternatives, but transcendentally, it won’t, since it is the only one we can understand, the one that constitutes our being minded in the way we are. In this picture, seemingly empirical anthropological remarks about how we humans engage in rule-following within our form(s) of life (for instance, the grammatical facts about our use of moral language that Gaita discusses) eventually yield transcendental, nonempirical truths about how we are, necessarily (though not unchangeably), “minded.” Where the anthropological perspective gives us a form of life (to which we may imagine alternatives), the transcendental perspective provides us with a transcendental subject, “we.” The truths about “us” in this transcendental sense are constitutive of our (or anyone’s) being minded in any way at all, not simply contingent truths of a particular form of life (viz., the one that just happens to be ours), nor universally true of all contingent forms of life. 57 It is in this sense that we may read Gaita’s remark about our seeing others “as souls” as a transcendental condition for—i.e., a necessary condition for the possibility of—our being able to ascribe thoughts, intentions or other subjective states to them. Recognizing them as souls is part of our being minded in the way we (or anyone) are. Gaita (as well as other Wittgensteinians, including Rhees and Phillips) is thus, against his own will, speaking about a transcendental “we.” Several philosophers resist transcendental readings of the later Wittgenstein. 58 One of them is Thomas Wallgren, who sets the transcendental and the grammatical interpretation opposite to each other. 59 We cannot here dwell on the intricacies of Wittgenstein scholarship, but we may note that the distinction between these two interpretive lines vanishes as soon as we see Wittgenstein as a philosophical anthropologist. For example, when Wallgren reminds us that Wittgenstein introduces the notion “what we call ‘obeying a rule,’” rather than the notion “obeying a rule,” leaving us with “our notion of obeying a rule” instead of setting any definite transcendental limits to this notion, 60 we can easily agree with him and add that the introduced notion is an anthropological one, a notion describing us, our (form of) life (which, from Lear’s perspective, is ipso facto transcendental). Pace nontranscendentalists like Wallgren and Emmett, 61 say there is no need to draw any artificial dichotomy between the transcendental and the anthropological (or grammatical). Wittgensteinian “forms of life” are, for us, simultaneously transcendental and grammatical backgrounds for any conceivable meaningfulness. There is no need to suppose that transcendental interpreters are committed to mysterious “transcendental facts” defining our form of life (as Emmett

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puts it); facts constitutive of our form(s) of life are open to a culturalist philosophical-anthropological treatment. 62 Wittgensteinian philosophers like Gaita and Lear have offered a fair picture of the resources of philosophy to end up with genuinely philosophical—that is, not merely (empirically) anthropological—results addressing our need to understand human life. These results are not “metaphysical” in any pejorative sense: they are not far removed from this actual world of natural human existence, in which rule-guided languageuse is one of the irremovable elements of our life. Rather, the philosophical-anthropological results to be gained through a Wittgensteinianinspired attention to language use can be regarded as emergent products of language use itself—though in a way this is just to reformulate the question of the possibility of normativity as something that is tied to its factual basis. By leading a human life with language, by playing the language games rooted in our tradition, we produce the need to understand that empirically discernable life in nonempirical terms, philosophically (transcendentally). The possibility of philosophical anthropology is here seen to be a pivotal problem related to the more general issue of reconciling the transcendental and the empirical (anthropological) perspectives on humanity—one of the key issues of post-Kantian philosophy. What we have found here is a powerful Wittgensteinian case for the possibility of philosophical reflection grounded in, but transcending, the empirical anthropological stance. 63 We should not let Wittgensteinian philosophers’ concern with our use of language conceal their equally serious concern with substantial issues. In short, the way we speak about human life (e.g., about its ethical elements) is such an important part of that life that directing attention to it means ipso facto directing attention to what that life is like in its fundamental aspects. Simply because of their being issues concerning language use, the kind of issues discussed by Gaita and other Wittgensteinians upon closer reflection cease to be “merely terminological.” Such conceptual questions can easily be transformed into philosophical-anthropological ones. 64 We will later in this chapter see how philosophical anthropology directly applies to the philosophy of death and dying. This should be particularly obvious in view of ideas such as Gaita’s: meaning, loss, being or failing to be “one of us,” and seeing another person as a soul—as well as seeing, hence, the loss of a person as a loss of a soul—are all immediately relevant to transcendental philosophical thanatology. However, Wittgensteinian philosophy is not the only paradigm we may find relevant to both philosophical anthropology and philosophical thanatology. There are others, such as pragmatism, which can also be developed into a transcendental direction.

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PRAGMATISM AND PHILOSOPHICAL ANTHROPOLOGY Proceeding to my second case study, I argue that pragmatism attempts to do what Lear thinks ought to be done, i.e., combine transcendental (philosophical) and anthropological (empirical) approaches in the study of humanity. 65 One can also say that pragmatist philosophical anthropology synthesizes culturalism, naturalism, and existentialism. Classical pragmatists like William James and John Dewey insisted not only on humans’ belonging to the natural world but also on their being enculturated in a tradition where certain practical habits, goals, purposes, and interests are always already in place, as well as on their need to make individual choices—employ their freedom, as existentialists put it—in the circumstances provided by their natural and cultural surroundings. 66 This position is naturalistic in treating human life in evolutionary terms, but naturalism is, in pragmatism, subordinated to a prior culturalistic commitment: natural science and naturalism itself (and, in some sense, nature itself, as far as it is intelligible to us) are culturalized, structured from a human, culturally loaded standpoint. 67 This character of pragmatism as an integration of naturalism and culturalism will also be seen to be highly relevant to pragmatist philosophical thanatology (cf. especially chapter 6 below). As in culturalism generally, one of the key notions needed and employed in pragmatism is normativity. Human practices ought to be seen as irreducibly and thoroughly normative. This is, in the pragmatists’ framework, perhaps the most pervasive philosophical-anthropological fact about us. Yet, this normativity is nothing mysterious. One might say that pragmatists like James and Dewey refuse to see any deep problem in the emergence of normativity in the natural world. Rather, they begin with the idea that we live our lives within normatively directed human practices, experiencing and conceptually structuring our world from the standpoint of those (changing) practices. In a Kantian-like transcendental sense, the objective world is a possible object for us (i.e., for a practiceembedded human agent) only in relation to some normative requirements characterizing our practices. On the other hand, our practiceembeddedness is as natural for us as anything can be. Here the term “naturalism” is, obviously, used quite differently from the way it is used in formulations and critiques of reductive naturalism. One of the merits of the pragmatist tradition is the insistence on the compatibility of a moderate, nonreductive, nonscientistic naturalism, which emphasizes the fact that we are naturally evolved beings, rooted in our natural circumstances in the material world, and a transcendental picture of humans as agents “constituting” (though not metaphysically creating) their world within a framework of normative constraints. This is what it means to subordinate naturalism to culturalism. Pragmatism is, arguably, one of the most promising efforts to carry out this task.

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There is no space here to investigate any specific examples of recent pragmatist philosophical anthropologies, which include Joseph Margolis’s pragmatic realism about the self as an emergent, embodied cultural entity and Nicholas Rescher’s value-objectivist theory of personhood. 68 Instead of detailed investigations, a general problem haunting both pragmatism and other culturalist philosophical anthropologies must be taken up. Does pragmatism—or the Wittgensteinian approach examined above—lead to relativism, to an uncritical acceptance of any human form of life or practice that can be described, or any language game that can be played? Criteria of normative evaluation are, after all, internal to practices; so, how can any practice be criticized at all? Isn’t it to already step out of a practice if one sets out to criticize or attack it? There is no immediate response to this critique. Rather, the charge of relativism must be constantly faced by pragmatists and Wittgensteinians, as well as by any culturalistically oriented philosophical anthropologist. But, as D. Z. Phillips perceptively notes in his introduction to a volume of Rush Rhees’s writings, although criticisms of our ways of living can only develop “within ways of living,” “anything goes” only if there is no “concern with how we live.” 69 Philosophical anthropology, in my view, attempts to raise such concern: it is vitally important to reflect on the nature of human life, not through imagined transcendent insights, but by paying careful attention to how we use language and how normative standards of the good life, and criticisms of such standards, develop (or emerge) from that usage. It is equally important to transform our practices toward true dialogue with other, possibly quite different, practices. In short, the problem of relativism must be engaged again and again by maintaining and self-critically developing a “concern with how we live.” This is quite different from the claim to avoid relativism completely. No responsible and open-minded thinker should make such claims. Nor should we say that the relativism issue can be set aside by interpreting Wittgenstein’s notion of a form of life in a singular manner, as referring to the one and the same way of living shared by all humans. 70 The “same” human ways of acting—say, greeting, eating, reasoning, praying, grieving for dead people—may receive various meanings in different cultures or communities. This much any philosophical anthropologist sympathizing with culturalism will have to admit. Cultural relativism threatens to refactualize the normative order of human life that culturalism defends against the naturalistic temptation to factualize human existence; the normative order within which our actions are experienced as meaningful are reduced to culturally local and factual social structures, facts about how people within particular societies or forms of life live and use language. 71 But it should be noted that this threat of refactualization and the resulting reduction of normativity do not specifically depend on a pluralistic interpretation of the notion of a form of life. Even if there were one universal form of life to be distinguished from the

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life-forms of animals (and from those of other actual or possible nonhuman creatures, like aliens or intelligent computers), we might end up with a factualization of the normative distinctions that render our lives (potentially) meaningful to us. This will happen if we take seriously the idea that our norms are based on, or arise out of, the factualities of our (irreducibly sociocultural) life, whether universal and global or culturally relative and local. The disappearance of normativity may thus be a problem in culturalist philosophical anthropologies quite independently of the issue of relativism, even though that issue highlights the difficulty. Indeed, it seems that no philosophical-anthropological theory can avoid the problem of explaining how normativity is possible—as soon as we have lost our faith in essentialistic answers. Not even existentialism succeeds in this task unproblematically, although it emphasizes the individual free subject’s choice of her or his own norms and values, since choices can in the end be interpreted as just more facts of the (cultural) world. Even existentialism might be seen as refactualizing the normative world order within which essentialism originally sought to place human beings, as we are left with existing subjects’ de facto valuations. This situation invites pragmatistic rethinking. What we may have to do in order to live with the irremovable difficulty of accounting for the normativity we experience in our lives is to rethink its status not as opposed to but as a part of nature. The suggestion is to reconceptualize it as something that is there right from the beginning, as a part of our (form of) life that should not and cannot be called into question in the first place— should never have been. That our life (world) is normatively ordered is a part of our “nature” as the kind of beings we are. Pragmatism may help us in this project of rethinking. In John McDowell’s terms, normativity belongs to our “second nature.” 72 Moreover, this suggestion presupposes that we are, as reflective agents, capable of normative evaluation. That is what pragmatists, at least, will have to presuppose roughly in the sense in which Kantian transcendental arguers must presuppose the “given” (e.g., cognitive experience or meaningful language) whose necessary conditions of possibility their arguments set out to establish. Even if the proposed pragmatic rethinking secures normativity in a quasi-transcendental manner, it can hardly remove the disturbing possibility of cultural relativism for good. Our social practices, whose normativity is entirely natural and unproblematic for us, may manifest and depend on different, conflicting, and perhaps even incommensurable normative structures. Here, pragmatists may need help from one of their close intellectual relatives, the culturalistic philosophical anthropology to be found in the later Wittgenstein. Far from encouraging relativism, Wittgensteinian grammatical or anthropological investigation, in its transcendental mode, may actually lead us to understand that we cannot form a coherent conception of someone’s being “other-minded.” According to Lear, our form of measuring, for instance, is simply measuring, consti-

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tuted by our practices and interests. 73 From the point of view of Lear’s Wittgenstein, the transcendental anthropologist, philosophical anthropology investigates our (and from our perspective, anyone’s) being minded in any way at all, or our (and, hence, anyone’s) engaging in the form of life we engage in. This investigation is reflexive, as philosophical anthropology, pursued by human beings, inevitably is. It seeks to understand what our life, from the point of view of that life itself, necessarily (transcendentally) amounts to, yielding, in Lear’s words, nonempirical insights. Such a reflexive investigation adopts what we may call an agent’s point of view. There is no higher standpoint available if we try, with full reflexivity, to understand ourselves. But these nonempirical insights are not nonempirical in the sense in which irresponsible metaphysical or supernaturalist speculations about the trascendent, or the results of logical analysis, are nonempirical. Their transcendental necessity is contextual (or presuppositional), grounded in changing cultural and historical frameworks, and they become empirically expressible as soon as one adopts the (empirical) “anthropological stance” and describes a form of life or a practice from sideways on (rather than transcendentally from within). It is, again, from within human life and its practices that any pragmatic need for nonempirical inquiry arises. The subject of transcendental reflection is not an immaterial metaphysical ego, but it is we ourselves, the same human beings who (from the anthropological perspective) engage in these particular practices as parts of the natural world. In this philosophical-anthropological sense, we may even describe ourselves as “transcendental subjects.” 74 It is at this point that transcendental inquiry and philosophical anthropology meet one another and become inseparable. It is also at this point— having seen how transcendental philosophical anthropology, especially in its culturalist form, investigates what it means to be “us” (“minded” in our way, or, as far as we are concerned, in any way)—that our mortal predicament becomes inescapable in philosophical-anthropological investigations. APPLYING PHILOSOPHICAL ANTHROPOLOGY TO DEATH AND MORTALITY What does the human phenomenon of death look like, if seen from the perspectives of the different ideal types of philosophical anthropology we have distinguished? Is mortality, or perhaps immortality, part of the essence of humanity? Is death a mere natural factuality? Are we essentially individuals living toward our personal deaths? Or is death primarily a cultural phenomenon? How, in particular, does the concept of normativity relate to our need to make sense of our mortal lives? The four basic

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types distinguished in the previous section seem to yield the following general reactions to the issues of death and mortality. 1. Essentialist accounts of human death and mortality (especially Christian and other religious views on humanity) traditionally postulate an immortal soul or spirit, even though not all religiously inspired defenses of immortality are essentialist, as is witnessed by the pragmatists’ Peirce’s and James’s beliefs in immortality, and not all essentialist philosophical anthropologies postulate an individual immortal soul (e.g., Aristotle’s does not). Typically, essentialist theories view human beings as only apparently mortal. Even though the human body will unavoidably cease to exist after death, the true essence of the human being, the immortal soul, will live on. The conceptual basis of this kind of views is something like Cartesian dualism. Alternatively, if the inseparability of body and soul is emphasized, as in more traditional Christianity, it is argued that the entire human being will be resurrected on the “last day” and will be either rewarded or punished, depending on the kind of life s/he led on the earth. Broadly speaking, it is precisely the immaterial and immortal soul—however it is conceived in more detail—the highest “level” of a human being, that is claimed to be in touch with the normative world order central to essentialist theories in general. Whether a human being deserves immortality or resurrection depends, of course, on the quality of her/his earthly life, especially on the way in which s/he has been able to build a connection to the divinely established normative sphere in and through her/his life. 2. Naturalist views usually criticize these immortality “dreams” of the essentialists as, precisely, mere dreams. There really is nothing like the immortal soul (or its various equivalents pictured in different religious traditions). Death must be viewed as a purely natural, worldly fact or phenomenon. As there is nothing to seriously qualify as the subject that survives death, the very idea of survival or immortality must be rejected as unscientific or even incoherent. No sane, scientifically minded person should believe in immortality. Death is the final and irreversible cessation of the process of life. This kind of naturalism, or materialism, is the paradigm of recent analytic philosophical thanatology, defining the context within which it may be examined whether or not, e.g., death is evil for the one who dies. 75 3. Existentialist views are the ones that most emphatically stress human mortality and its significance for understanding human existence in general, famously captured in Heidegger’s notion of Seinzum-Tode and the related pursuit of authenticity which has its roots in earlier proto-existentialists, including Kierkegaard. In the exis-

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tentialist setting, the individual, personal nature of death is very strongly emphasized: I can only live my own life and face my own death; no one can take my place. The full, profound acknowledgment of this basic feature of the human Dasein is the only route to authenticity. If I refuse to acknowledge my mortality, and the deeply individual nature of my mortality, then I am leading the life of Das Man, the anonymous subject whose existence remains inauthentic. Existentialism, especially in its Heideggerian phase (though we must keep in mind that Heidegger himself never approved of this label), also reminds us that it is really only human beings that can die. Only humans are mortals, whereas other living beings, that is, plants and animals, can only perish, or cease to exist; they are not genuinely mortal, and their being is not being toward death. 4. Culturalist views seek to understand death and mortality (and the possible search or hope for immortality or survival, often in a religious context) as sociocultural issues and phenomena, describable and to some extent explainable and understandable from the point of view of empirical anthropological and/or cultural-historical studies on the significance of death, and the related rituals, etc., in various cultures and historical epochs. More philosophically, a culturalist philosophical anthropology may thematize mortality as part of the “normative order” human beings create and (re)structure for themselves, as part of our symbolically articulated self-understanding of human life as mortal life—a self-understanding that is, again, in most cultures at least to some extent religiously manifested and transmitted. Living in the “human world,” we humans live a mortal life. This mortality is part of the cultural normative order we have set for ourselves, part of what it means to be “one of us” (recalling Gaita’s philosophical anthropology discussed above), although it is also part of this same cultural order to investigate the biological facts about death and dying by means of natural-scientific methods, abstracted from specific cultural contexts. The culturalist does not claim that the fact that humans die is somehow culturally dependent (in an obviously implausible factual or empirical sense)—as if there could be an exotic culture whose members were immortal. Rather, the culturalist views human mortality as one of the biologically based phenomena that need to be received and interpreted in all cultures we are able to recognize as human. In this sense, it resembles other deep features of human life, such as birth (natality), parenthood, or sexuality. Again, having described these positions in broad strokes, I must note that the applications of the ideal types of philosophical anthropology identified above—essentialism, naturalism, existentialism, and cultural-

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ism—to issues of human mortality are far from straightforward. As already emphasized, hardly any individual thinker (exclucing the most obvious paradigmatic cases, such as Aristotle) can be said to have represented any one of the ideal types in a pure form. Accordingly, the applications of these types to mortality cannot be represented in a pure form, either, or can only very seldom be. There is enormous variation in the ways in which philosophers philosophize about death and mortality, but it is in my view perfectly plausible to categorize these ways in terms of the fourfold structure I have adopted from Kannisto’s scheme. The four ideal types seem to mirror something that is going on in philosophical thanatology, just as they mirror some of the dialectical moves in philosophical anthropology more generally. SOME CHALLENGES I am now finally able to move to what is presumably the most important part of this chapter. At least the following challenges to our understanding of death and mortality—to any adequate philosophical thanatology— can, I would like to suggest, be discussed on the basis of the application of our fourfold framework. Some of these were already tentatively identified in the introductory chapter, but the framework employed in this chapter now enables us to better systematize our treatment of them as issues of philosophical thanatology understood as part of philosophical anthropology. Again, the metalevel notion of normativity is crucial in many of the challenges I will identify, although I can here describe its relevance only very briefly. (i) The subjective, individual, and personal nature of death and mortality—the primacy of my death in comparison to anyone else’s—is a problem that cannot be set aside in thanatological reflections. Does our philosophical-anthropological reflection help us in dealing with this aspect of death and dying, that is, with the inevitability of occupying a “first person point of view”? Perhaps, if we admit that death indeed has many aspects, manifested in the different philosophical-anthropological perspectives from which it can be viewed, as differentiated in the previous section. The contrast between existentialism and culturalism—and the aspects of mortality each of them emphasizes—is crucial here. It is a key existentialist point that only one’s own death can be authentically faced as an existing subject—to the extent that existentialist treatments of death, not only in classics like Heidegger’s Sein und Zeit, but also in quite different works, including Wittgenstein’s Tractatus, can be said to be “solipsistic” (see chapter 4 below). The question arises whether the existentialist, viewing death and mortality as “my business,” irreducibly mine, can ever adequately acknowledge the mortal “Other”—or what some thinkers regard as the ethical priority of the other’s mortality to my

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own. 76 Because of its solipsistic tendencies, existentialist philosophical thanatology tends to be too narrow and one-sided, recognizing only one crucial aspect of human mortality. On the other hand, solipsism itself is a philosophical problem that surprisingly easily returns even in the ethical attempts to set the “Other” as primary, because it is eventually my duty, and mine first and foremost, to acknowledge otherness, and the Other’s mortality. In any event, if death is simply “my own business,” it will remain unclear whether any normative criteria can be used to decide whether I succeed or fail in authentically facing my death, or in coming to terms with my mortality. (ii) Immortality seems to be an outdated issue, given the overwhelming evidence we have for a (broadly speaking) natural-scientific picture of human life and death. Is there, then, any philosophically justifiable hope to articulate this concept in today’s scientific culture? One of the few options to be taken seriously here is Jamesian pragmatism, which (I would urge) is to be understood as a Kantian-like ethically engaged approach to mor(t)ality and religion, viewing the issue of immortality from the perspective of “practical reason,” in close analogy to the way in which Kant himself regarded the immortality of the soul as one of his “postulates of practical reason.” This is not the place to argue in any detail for a Jamesian investigation of immortality, however. 77 The issue is entangled with issue (i), because James was in his own distinctive way an “existentialist” thinker, too. Furthermore, we may ask whether the idea of immortality ought to be approached from a subjective (existentialist) or a culturalist perspective, given that essentialist accounts of the immortal soul (in traditional Christian style, or in terms of Cartesian dualism) are nonstarters. Perhaps immortality could be understood as a cultural issue, pure and simple? But then, would anything really remain from the subjective individual’s religious hope for immortality? If the hope for and the possibility of immortality (however remote) are simply reduced to facts about how these problems are viewed in different cultures, philosophical anthropology (or thanatology) has again been reduced to its empirical counterpart. Normative questions emerge, again, as soon as it is realized that the problem of immortality is not only the metaphysical problem of whether there is an immortal soul but also the problem of whether a certain kind of life, or (metaphorically speaking) a certain kind of “soul,” could be thought to be “entitled to” the kind of immortality some religions promise. (iii) In addition to these reflections, we may take up a further question (already briefly explored above): does culturalism, in its specific thanatological applications, entail cultural relativism? That is, is there any objective truth, scientific or otherwise, about cultural phenomena, or culturally interpreted natural phenomena, such as death and mortality (or historically developed beliefs about immortality, for that matter)? Cultural relativism, as an apparently natural outcome of culturalist reflections on hu-

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man existence as tied to one or another culturally established normative framework, threatens, as we saw, to “refactualize” the normative order that culturalism itself sought to re-erect on the ruins of essentialism that the naturalist “factualization” of essentialism’s original normative (cosmic) world order left behind. If the cultural normative order that gives structure to the “human world” we live in is simply one or another order contingently established and maintained within a particular culture or society, then it is not a genuinely normative order, after all. Culturalism, as we saw, threatens to collapse into naturalism, if naturalism is understood broadly enough as the replacement of a normative world order by a contingent, factual one. In the case of mortality, what this would mean is the replacement of the genuine, substantial issue of what leading a mortal life (or hoping for immortality) is by the question of how this issue has been articulated in various cultural spheres, communities, or historical societies. Mortality as a personally serious issue would then be lost— with the devastating result, again, of abolishing philosophical anthropology (or philosophical thanatology). Recall that we also observed that the threat of “refactualization” is not restricted to cultural relativism (or even culturalism). A similar outcome haunts basically all philosophical anthropologies, insofar as they may in the end be reduced to the cosmic order ultimately indifferent to human pursuits (essentialism), contingent subjective commitments (existentialism), or natural facts (naturalism). The essentialist’s objective normativity might in the end be something that brutely and inexplicably exists, something that we merely find in the cosmos surrounding us, just as the naturalist’s way of accounting for normativity as an outcome of complex natural processes is inadequate for someone willing to save “genuine,” irreducible normativity. Even the existentialist may, in the end, reduce normativity to individuals’ choices, which are fundamentally inexplicable. In all these cases, normativity may end up being refactualized, or reduced to a set of mere facts, either about the cosmos, about the natural world, or about individual human beings’ decisions. (iv) Both philosophical anthropology and philosophical thanatology may, if their Kantian background is emphasized, be understood as transcendental inquiries reflecting on the necessary conditions for the possibility of certain humanly “given” phenomena (as I am arguing throughout this book). Even “Wittgensteinians” like Gaita (see above) or Peter Winch tend to view death (along with birth and sexuality) as one of the “limiting” concepts or phenomena constitutive of human life as we know it. 78 This can be compared to a transcendental investigation of such concepts as expressing culturally and historically contextualized and transformable, yet contextually necessary, preconditions for human life. It is a serious challenge for philosophical anthropology and philosophical thanatology to examine what such conditionality actually amounts to and, in particular, how its modal status could be made more precise.

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What does it mean to say that mortality is a condition for the very possibility of human life, or of any possible life we could recognize as human? This must, presumably, be something quite different from the mere factual recognition that in the actual world all humans die. On the other hand, it is hardly an analytic or conceptually necessary truth, let alone a logical truth, that all humans die. We can imagine a possible world in which all humans do not die, or even a world in which no one does. From a transcendental perspective, we would, however, hardly recognize such abstract possibilities as relevant in philosophical thanatology. Our task is to understand, transcendentally as I suggested, this mortal life of ours, in this world, yet in a manner somehow “deeper” than a mere factual investigation of the 100 percent mortality rate ascribable to humans in this world. To speak about the latter as a serious candidate for a philosophically interesting examination of the inevitability of human mortality would be a joke rather than a proper suggestion for philosophical research. (A more interesting task is to understand why it would be a joke.) The philosophical anthropologist, and likewise the philosophical thanatologist, is situated somewhere between the scientist investigating factual reality (the actual world and its states of affairs) and the metaphysician speculating about possible worlds. The transcendental approach limits our perspective to this “human world” we contingently inhabit; yet, the results we hope to achieve by means of this approach are not modally neutral. We do make claims about what is possible for us humans, and the philosophical task here is to throw some more light on the modal status of such claims. (v) Mortality, when considered in the context of philosophical anthropology, is an example of a problem requiring not only metaphysical attention (e.g., in terms of possible worlds metaphysics, as just described) and epistemological or semantic attention (e.g., in terms of transcendental philosophy, as suggested), but also ethical attention (as already noted in relation to existentialist views on death and their problems with solipsism and otherness). More radically, we might suggest that mortality is a problem whose metaphysical and ethical aspects are so intimately entangled with each other that they turn out to be inseparable. It is impossible, for us mortals, to inquire into the concept of mortality, and/or its significance in human life, without taking an ethical stance to the question of what it is to lead a decent life as a mortal being amidst other mortals. There is no prior metaphysical question of what death “is” and no prior semantic question of what the corresponding terms mean. (Nor is there a prior empirical or purely factual question about these issues, for that matter.) Thus, the ethical issue of how to face mortality is ipso facto a metaphysical one, thematizing the normative meaning (or even the “essence”) of mortality for us, “existentially” viewed. Furthermore, this account of the profound entanglement of metaphysical and ethical perspectives on death (or, mutatis mutandis, other humanly important phenomena, including

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birth) 79 can itself be formulated ethically: there are moral reasons for the view that ethical and metaphysical treatments of death cannot be separated, and that (more metaphilosophically) metaphysics is not prior to ethics but deeply and pervasively entangled with it. This suggestion is opposed to the orthodoxy of analytic philosophical thanatology, according to which the metaphysics of death ought to be set straight first, in order to turn to ethical questions afterwards. 80 (vi) One might also wonder how different philosophical-anthropological background ideas affect one’s account of such special cases of death as abortion, euthanasia, murder, suicide, capital punishment, and death in war. 81 These more “applied” issues are beyond the scope of this inquiry. One general warning is in order, however. I am certainly not saying that we should “first” develop a philosophical anthropology, and on its basis a general philosophical thanatology, and only then apply it to such cases. On the contrary, our preunderstanding of these cases, as profoundly ethically relevant cases of human death, cases in which our mortality is often dramatically concretized, inevitably contributes to our ability to pose and respond to the metaphysical challenges that then again (circularly) contribute to our understanding of the “cases” themselves. We might, for example, be absolutely convinced that murder is wrong, always and for everyone. With this moral conviction in place, we might go on to examine what we take to be central philosophical-anthropological questions about human mortality. In such an examination, we would not need to “bracket” the specific ethical convictions we started with; on the contrary, we should be encouraged to bring all relevant factors into a holistic evaluation of various factual and normative statements and hypotheses relevant to the phenomena we would be examining. 82 (vii) I will finally venture a general suggestion. My proposal for a (transcendental) philosophical-anthropological-thanatological reconceptualization of these diverse issues about, and surrounding, human mortality offers by far more promising tools for investigating death and mortality in their diversity than standard (either dogmatically analytic or dogmatically “nonanalytic”) conceptualizations that are simply too narrow to deal with these issues in a manner adequate to their human complexity. This is not to say that such narrower conceptualizations would not be important in their own specific contexts. Nor, of course, do I wish to underemphasize the importance of empirical work on these matters, e.g., within cultural anthropology, history, or medical science. 83 What I am saying is that human mortality ought to be understood as a more holistic phenomenon, accommodating features from various fields of philosophical anthropology, emphasized in the different ideal types of philosophical anthropology examined above. We ought to be able to set aside the dream of engaging in philosophy as a science-like activity, solving well-defined problems whose solutions are “out there” in the world, only waiting to be discovered. Philosophy, even philosophical thanatolo-

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gy, can surely be characterized as a rational inquiry, but it is a very special kind of inquiry. Its problems are only gradually constructed through our own ways of living with them, and ways of letting them emerge in the contexts of our lives—contexts that are themselves emergent features of their historical backgrounds and various other contextual factors—and our “solutions” to these problems are also personal attempts to live with them in a responsible way. The relevant context for a philosophical reflection on human mortality is hardly ever an imagined “context without context,” the metaphysician’s transcendent “God’s-Eye View,” from which we ought to determine what death, or any other phenomenon, really is. To pursue philosophical anthropology and philosophical thanatology from within human life itself, as to a large extent defined by its mortality (i.e., the very object of investigation in these fields), is to pursue it in a Kantian transcendental style, as a normatively engaged philosophical self-reflection on the conditions that must already be in place for such a reflection to be itself possible, and on the necessary limits defined by those transcendental conditions. It is only in and through mortal life itself that we can examine this life with the kind of seriousness we attach to it. CONCLUDING REMARKS Even though my method of first identifying some basic types of philosophical conceptions of humanity and then applying them to the human issue of mortality is pretty straightforward, the further philosophical work to be done in this field is certainly not. A lot needs to be settled after this groundwork, with which I have merely been able to scratch the surface. In particular, the highly central concept of normativity needs further elucidation, because philosophical anthropology and philosophical thanatology need to address the ways in which we ought to deal with our existential and mortal condition. In this chapter, I have merely tried to show how this concept is relevant to philosophical anthropology and philosophical thanatology in a number of different ways, manifested in the various challenges we face when attempting to understand, and to come to terms with, our mortality in terms of the framework of basic philosophical-anthropological positions I sketched. By way of conclusion, I simply want to draw attention to the fact that philosophy itself largely arises from the recognition of mortality. After all, Socrates’s speech before his death, as reported to us by Plato in Phaedo, is one of the major sources of Western philosophy in general, though only very few philosophers regard Socrates’s (or Plato’s) “proofs” of the immortality of the soul as sound. It is, given this fact about the very origins of philosophy as we know it, somewhat surprising that philosophical thanatology (just like philosophical anthropology) is on a side

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track in contemporary philosophy. According to Miguel de Unamuno, for instance, the human craving for immortality is the basis of all philosophical and religious thought. Philosophy itself can be, and has been, described as a “preparation for death,” and thus as an activity which presupposes mortality, even when theorizing about immortality. 84 This is also true about the kind of pragmatist reflections on immortality that William James provided us with (see also chapter 6). Even if we end up with a philosophical anthropology that renders our instinctive hope for immortality rational, or (more modestly) not entirely implausible, we cannot hide the fact of human mortality from our view. Any humanly relevant philosophical thanatology must come to terms with our mortality, even when defending immortality, and therefore it is worthwhile to inquire into this phenomenon from a wide variety of philosophical-anthropological perspectives. One of the messages of this chapter, then, is that, for us mortals, none of these perspectives can ultimately be disentangled from ethical reflection, and more generally normative reflection. Therefore, we must in the end philosophically acknowledge not only our own mortal life (and within it, possibly, our own immortality) but also that of all the others we recognize as humans. Then, eventually, the issue turns into one about recognition: whom should we recognize as our fellow humans, and on what kind of grounds? Again, it seems, this issue is not decidable in the absence of ethical orientation, which already presupposes orienting toward others as mortals (whether or not one actually believes in their, or one’s own, immortality). Normative questions regarding the grounds for recognizing others as our fellow humans, as persons belonging to a group of “us,” cannot be avoided. Moreover, this notion of “us” (recalling, again, Gaita’s above-analyzed comments) can in the end be only normatively characterized; no mere factual boundary between “us” and “them” can be satisfying here. Accordingly, pace the currently received analytic paradigm in philosophical thanatology, which sets metaphysical issues first and sees ethical issues as subordinate to them, we should now be able to see that philosophical thanatology, as well as philosophical anthropology more generally, provides ample evidence of the inseparable intertwining of ethics and metaphysics. Let me also finally note, by way of conclusion, that my defense of philosophical anthropology in this chapter is close to, and partly indebted to, Richard Schacht’s. 85 Schacht also considers philosophical anthropology a most important part of philosophy, unhappily neglected. Although he draws on authors I have not discussed here—Marx, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Heidegger—he arrives at the kind of anti-essentialist and culturalist view I take to be worth developing, too. He also wishes to combine natural-scientific (e.g., biological or neurophysiological) and cultural or sociohistorical perspectives on humanity, arguing that human life is intrinsically historical, that we do not have antecedently fixed es-

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sential natures but acquire our “natures” in the course of historical development, but that this by no means precludes philosophical-anthropological reflections on the historicity of human existence. 86 This leaves the nature and tasks of philosophical anthropology open: No answer need be presupposed or sought to the question of whether it makes any sense to speak of a human “essence” [. . .]. [I]t is enough to recognize that there are human beings in this world—like and including ourselves—with similarities and differences among themselves and in relation to other things, which are worth investigation. 87

Schacht calls his method a “transcendental mediation,” proposing that philosophical anthropology investigates the results and limitations of the special disciplines inquiring into human life. Moreover, philosophical anthropology may explore, in a Kantian sense (not unlike Lear’s Wittgensteinianism), the conditions for the possibility of various perspectival analyses of the phenomena of human life (and death), endeavoring “to conceptualize the reality to which these phenomena pertain by seeking to articulate a set of structures representing the conditions of their collective as well as individual possibility, and so rendering their existence as features of human life comprehensible.” 88 This is a description of the transcendental task of culturalistic philosophical anthropology (and, a fortiori, thanatology) that I also subscribe to. My discussions in this chapter have hopefully shown that interesting philosophical-anthropological work can be done and has been done outside the movement known as “philosophical anthropology” in older (German) literature. Mine has been a limited and perhaps slightly arbitrary selection of themes I take to be interesting. Relevant material could be found overwhelmingly within virtually all traditions and areas of philosophy, as well as within the foundational discussions of the scientific disciplines. Wherever one looks at in the sciences or in philosophy, one easily sees a need for a comprehensive understanding of what it is to be a human being, i.e., the kind of being who engages in the scientific or philosophical activity at issue. The ethical dimensions of human existence also become immediately relevant, whichever perspective one chooses in one’s study of humanity. We may finally note some similarities between the philosophical anthropologies considered above. Critics of reductive naturalism such as Taylor can be interpreted as transcendental anthropologists roughly in the sense attached to Wittgensteinian grammatical investigations, since they seem to offer transcendental arguments arriving at conditions constitutive of human life. Pragmatists are transcendental anthropologists, too, insofar as they explore normative commitments constitutive of human practices. Wittgensteinians, in turn, can be interpreted as (transcendental or grammatical) pragmatists, because of their emphasis on our practice of using language and on the way in which language use deter-

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mines our ways of seeing other people as morally considerable. For instance, Gaita’s arguments against moral skepticism on the basis of its being an invitation to wickedness is a straightforwardly moral and deeply pragmatic argument, arising out of our ethically engaged practice itself, without pretending to stay on a neutral ground outside morality. All of these general characteristics of the links between the philosophicalanthropological views discussed are, of course, relevant to their applications in philosophical thanatology. A task to be left for further investigations is a detailed comparison between the conceptual resources employed in this chapter. Are there significant overlaps, oppositions, or other relations between Stevenson’s and Haberman’s fourfold structure of the agenda of theories of humanity, Kannisto’s framework of philosophical anthropologies (see above), and the distinction between the transcendental and the empirical employed in Wittgensteinian contexts? For example, it is hard to see how the normative element of the fourfold division (i.e., the idea that there is something wrong in factual human life and that this situation needs to be overcome) could fit the most strongly naturalistic philosophical anthropologies in circulation in contemporary philosophy. 89 Similarly, such reductively naturalistic views lack transcendental elements—but so do classical essentialist theories, situating humans in a metaphysical, cosmic system of norms which can be seen from a “God’s-Eye-View,” an (imagined) “view from nowhere” that more reflexively oriented culturalists and other anti-essentialists reject. 90 Pragmatically developed culturalism may be able to accommodate the fourfold division in its entirety as well as a fruitful combination—or perhaps complementarity—of the transcendental and empirical standpoints. Taylor’s culturalism might also be seen as answering the four questions Stevenson and Haberman include in their list, making use of both empirical and transcendental insights. And all of this is of course relevant whenever philosophical anthropology addresses issues of human mortality. We have seen that, far from being a limited school, philosophical anthropology deserves a wider, more important, and more explicit role both in academic philosophy and in society at large. Presently, its role is marginal and implicit; even philosophers obviously developing and criticizing conceptions of humanity hardly identify their work as philosophical anthropology. 91 Serious philosophical investigation explicitly directed to the understanding of human life and its various (transcendental) conditions might help both philosophers and empirical inquirers in their attempts to construct an adequate conception of that life (and death), a conception both scientifically reliable and culturally, historically and “humanistically” responsible. By sharpening our analytic, critical, argumentative, and interpretive skills, philosophy adds an essential element to the study of human life, an element not to be fully covered by any other field of investigation. 92 Our most general questions aiming at

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an enhanced understanding of humanity, and of human mortality, cannot be left for any special scientific discipline, even though philosophy ought to be “continuous” with the sciences (as any reasonable anti-essentialist should admit). Accordingly, philosophical anthropology can offer a framework taking seriously the undeniable generality of philosophical problems, as well as the tight interconnections between the various perspectives (e.g., metaphysical, epistemological, and ethical) that we may adopt in our investigations. Philosophical anthropology is, then, opposed to the conception of philosophy assumed in much of mainstream analytic work today, that is, the conception of philosophy as a science-like activity solving well-defined, narrowly conceived problems, aiming at novel “results” and “progress.” Without forgetting the link between philosophy and the sciences, we should admit the openness of our philosophical questions, especially the ones that are reflexively related to our self-understanding as mortal and finite beings. Our work on these questions is inevitably a work on ourselves, and it is hard to see how we could make progress in such a work in the way scientific inquiries make progress. We are always back in the beginning, where we have always been, amidst our fragile human existence, entangled in the mortal life we are trying to understand. However, acknowledging this fallibility and uncertainty as part of our human condition does not prevent us from reaching occasional deep insights into this condition out of which our philosophical-anthropological and thanatological problems arise. NOTES 1. For both general and more detailed discussions of philosophical anthropology and the concept of a human being, see H. P. Rickman, “Philosophical Anthropology and the Problem of Meaning,” Philosophical Quarterly 10 (1960), 12–20; H. P. Rickman, “Is Philosophic Anthropology Possible?,” Metaphilosophy 16 (1985), 29–46; R. M. Zaner, “An Approach to Philosophical Anthropology,” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 27 (1966), 55–68; H. O. Pappé, “Philosophical Anthropology,” in Paul Edwards (ed.), The Encyclopedia of Philosophy (New York and London: Macmillan and The Free Press, 1967), vol. 6, pp. 159–66; M. Landmann, Philosophische Anthropologie: Menschliche Selbstdarstellung in Geschichte und Gegenwart, 5th ed. (Berlin and New York: Walter de Gruyter, 1982); W. Jantzen, “Mensch,” in H. J. Sandkühler (ed.), Europäische Enzyklopädie zu Philosophie und Wissenschaften, vol. 3. (Hamburg: Felix Meiner, 1990), pp. 336–58; H. Kuhn, “Menschenbild,” in H. J. Sandkühler (ed.), Europäische Enzyklopädie zu Philosophie und Wissenschaften, vol. 3. (Hamburg: Felix Meiner, 1990) pp. 358–66; Richard Schacht, “Philosophical Anthropology: What, Why and How,” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 50 (suppl. vol.) (1990), 155–76; Schacht, “Philosophical Anthropology,” in Robert Audi (ed.), The Cambridge Dictionary to Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), pp. 580–81; P. M. S. Hacker, Human Nature: The Categorial Framework (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2007), and Phillip Honenberger (ed.), Philosophical Anthropology and Naturalism (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2016). Honenberger’s volume is a major breakthrough in the reinvigoration of philosophical anthropology as a philosophical discipline. For historical introductions to important conceptions of humanity, see Roger Trigg (ed.), Ideas of Human Nature: An Historical

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Introduction (Oxford and Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1988/1996); R. Weiland (ed.), Philosophische Anthropologie der Moderne (Weinheim, GER: Beltz Athenäum, 1995); and L. Stevenson and D. L. Haberman, Ten Theories of Human Nature, 3rd ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998). For my own earlier explorations of philosophical anthropology and its applications to the issue of death, see Sami Pihlström, “On the Concept of Philosophical Anthropology,” Journal of Philosophical Research 28 (2003), 259–85; and Pihlström, “Mortality as a Philosophical-Anthropological Issue,” Human Affairs 14 (2007). 2. J. Derrida, “The Ends of Man,” in K. Baynes, J. Bohman, and T. McCarthy (eds.), After Philosophy: End or Trasformation? (Cambridge, MA and London: MIT Press, 1987), pp. 125–58, is a now classical text attacking the Western tradition of “humanistic” philosophy. 3. Cf. Max Scheler, Philosophische Weltanschauung (Munich: Lehnen, 1954); Rickman, “Philosophical Anthropology and the Problem of Meaning”; Pappé, “Philosophical Anthropology”; Weiland (ed.), Philosophische Anthropologie. 4. H. P. Kainz, The Philosophy of Man: A New Introduction to Some Perennial Issues (University, AL: University of Alabama Press, 1981); Schacht, “Philosophical Anthropology”. 5. Rickman, “Is Philosophic Anthropology Possible?” 6. Zaner, “An Approach to Philosophical Anthropology.” 7. Even though I resist the prejudice that philosophical anthropology is a branch of first philosophy, traditional metaphysical issues, such as the persistence of personal identity through time, are relevant to it. Another metaphysical problem worth mentioning is fictionality: is there any reasonable way of formulating, or criticizing, the idea that the human self is a fictitious entity (see Charles Crittenden, Unreality: The Metaphysics of Fictional Entities [Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1992])? These issues cannot be discussed here. 8. Normativity plays a role on (at least) two different levels. On the one hand, philosophical anthropologists may describe the normative structures inherent in human life; on the other hand, they may attempt to evaluate normatively certain features of human life, stating normative claims about the human condition. The latter is the more problematic sense of normativity, to which we shall return. 9. Stevenson and Haberman, Ten Theories of Human Nature. 10. See Trigg (ed.), Ideas of Human Nature. 11. For this type of discussions, see, e.g., Antony Flew, The Logic of Mortality (Oxford and New York: Blackwell, 1987); Fred Feldman, Confrontations with the Reaper (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992); Feldman, “Death,” in Edward Craig (ed.), Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy (electronic version, London and New York: Routledge, 1998); J. Harris, “Life and Death,” in Craig (ed.), Routledge Encyclopedia; Jay F. Rosenberg, Thinking Clearly about Death, 2nd ed. (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 1998; 1st ed. 1983). 12. See Thomas Nagel, “Death” (1971), in Nagel, Mortal Questions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), chapter 1; and Nagel, The View from Nowhere (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986). 13. See again Feldman, Confrontations with the Reaper, as well as the discussion in John Martin Fischer (ed.), The Metaphysics of Death (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1993); and Jeff Malpas and Robert C. Solomon (eds.), Death and Philosophy (London and New York: Routledge, 1998). 14. Heikki Kannisto, “Filosofisen antropologian mahdollisuudesta” [On the Possibility of Philosophical Anthropology], Ajatus 41 (1984), 217–35. Since Kannisto has published his relevant works in Finnish, it is worthwhile to make his ideas available to the international philosophical community. The conceptual map he draws may crucially help us to understand what is at issue in philosophical anthropology. 15. The term naturalism has several meanings; cf. Geert Keil and Herbert Schnädelbach (eds.), Naturalismus: Philosophische Beiträge (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2000); S. Nannini and Hans-Jörg Sandkühler (eds.), Naturalism in the Cognitive Sciences and the Philosophy of Mind (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 2000). It is custo-

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mary to use it to denote reductive and scientistic ways of thinking, and many critics of naturalism use it in that sense. It is obviously also possible to speak about naturalism in a loose, nonreductive sense. 16. The notion of essence is construed in a strongly normative fashion here. One can say that Aristotelian essentialism is also naturalistic, and one might even see contemporary (reductively) naturalistic accounts as describing the “essence” of human beings. In Kannisto’s framework, which I am using here, the contrast between essentialism and naturalism is, however, essentially a contrast between normative and nonnormative anthropologies. In these terms, Aristotle can hardly be classified as a naturalist; nor can reductive naturalism be considered essentialistic. For a highly useful collection of essays addressing the naturalist challenges to philosophical anthropology today, see again Honenberger (ed.), Naturalism and Philosophical Anthropology. 17. As is well known, this “concrete” existence, which is always primarly mine, is to be investigated (according to most existentialists) by means of a phenomenological method (see Zaner, “An Approach to Philosophical Anthropology”). 18. See also Peter Janich, “Naturalismen in der Kulturfalle,” Dialektik 3/1997, 83–99. 19. See Ernst Cassirer, An Essay on Man: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Human Culture (New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press, 1944/1972). On human beings as symbolizing and thereby self-interpreting and self-constituting creatures concerned with meaning, see also the contributions by Rickman, Landmann, and Schacht cited above. On the notion of culturalism, cf. Herbert Schnädelbach, Philosophie in der modernen Kultur (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2000), chapter 7. 20. Cf. Trigg (ed.), Ideas of Human Nature. The key work by Wittgenstein here is obviously Philosophical Investigations, trans. G. E. M. Anscombe (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1953/1958). 21. Stevenson and Haberman, Ten Theories of Human Nature, p. 230. 22. The idea that we are born as “mere animals” but differ from them by being enculturated in a tradition that constitutes our “second nature” is an important theme in John McDowell’s much-discussed theory of conceptual content (for critical reflections, cf. Sami Pihlström, Naturalizing the Transcendental: A Pragmatic View [Amherst, NY: Prometheus/Humanity Books, 2003]). 23. This tension is discussed in several articles in Weiland (ed.), Philosophische Anthropologie der Moderne. 24. In addition to Kannisto’s “Filosofisen antropologian mahdollisuudesta,” see G. Weiler, “Kant’s Question: What is Man?” Philosophy of the Social Sciences 10 (1980), 1–23. Weiler (p. 3) formulates this question thus: “What is the ultimate nature of man, who understands nature, who is a moral agent and whose make-up is accidentally such that he can ask this question, and thereby bear testimony to his ‘understanding’ of his own position in the world?” According to Weiler, this question was, for Kant, “the ultimate philosophical enterprise,” leading to the “metaphysics of metaphysics” (p. 16)—but neither Kant himself nor we contemporary philosophers can answer the question in metaphysical terms. Weiler’s otherwise clarifying paper can be criticized by noting that he supposes that the kind of ahistorical, essentialist answers he (rightly) thinks we (like Kant) lack are not the only possible answers to Kant’s question. Even so, his suggestion that “the notion of Man” could be interpreted as a Kantian regulative idea (p. 23) remains interesting and is worth contemplating by anti-essentialist philosophical anthropologists. 25. Herder’s relevant writings on the philosophy of language are available in Johann Gottfried Herder, Sprachphilosophische Schriften, ed. E. Heintel (Hamburg: Felix Meiner, 1960/1975). 26. See Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989/1994); Taylor, Philosophical Arguments (Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 1995). 27. A similar argument—to be explored in some more detail in chapter 3 below— can be found in, e.g., Hilary Putnam’s writings on the problems of reductive naturalism. See Putnam, Words and Life, ed. James Conant (Cambridge, MA and London:

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Harvard University Press, 1994). For an analysis of Taylor’s argumentation as a transcendental overtaking, see Pihlström, Naturalizing the Transcendental, chapter 6; for Taylor’s own reflections on the nature of transcendental arguments, see Taylor, Philosophical Arguments, chapter 2. Janich (“Naturalismen in der Kulturfalle,” cited above) also argues against various forms of naturalization on similar grounds: naturalism is self-reflectively inconsistent, since it cannot explain or justify itself within naturalistic constraints, nor can it escape the need to employ normative notions. Naturalism itself is a product of human culture. For related criticisms, see several essays in Keil and Schnädelbach (eds.), Naturalismus, and in Nannini and Sandkühler (eds.), Naturalism. For example, J. Bösenberg (“Comment on D. Parisi’s ‘The Naturalization of Humans,’” in Nannini and Sandkühler, pp. 89–92; here p. 90) points out, against Parisi’s (“The Naturalization of Humans” in the same volume, pp. 75–87) program of naturalization, that the project of naturalization itself would have to be naturalized in a consistent naturalism. There seems to be no denying of the fact that naturalism and naturalization are human, cultural, programs that are hard to fit into the natural-scientific, causal picture of the world they offer us. Full-blown naturalists appear to have problems in their self-understanding (Sandkühler, “Naturalism in the Philosophy of Mind? For a Philosophical Alternative,” ibid., pp. 161–76; here p. 168). The (individual or social) subject of naturalization, the basis upon which the program depends as a legitimate philosophical program, will have to be left out of the picture if naturalization is carried far enough—with self-destructive results. 28. Taylor, Sources of the Self, pp. 27–32. 29. The Taylorian idea that there are no natural-scientific laws applying to humans as members of a natural kind “human beings” may be compatible with the idea that human beings have “individual natures”; see R. de Sousa, “Individual Natures,” Philosophia 26 (1998), 3–21. 30. Arguably, supernaturalism is often a degraded form of naturalism, amounting to a not fully reasoned belief in occult entities seen as vaguely analogous to natural ones and operating in the natural world. Traditional religious forms of supernaturalism are most naturally classifiable as versions of essentialism. Christian conceptions of humanity, for instance, are usually essentialistic—although they may also contain existentialist elements, depending on one’s broader theological assumptions. 31. Raimond Gaita, Good and Evil: An Absolute Conception (Basingstoke, UK: Macmillan, 1991). 32. Ibid., pp. 49, 50, 61. 33. Ibid., p. 5. Cf. also John Kekes’s discussion of “moral horror” and its importance in morality, conceptualized as a tension between the individual and her or his moral tradition, in Kekes, Moral Tradition and Individuality (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1989). For a Gaita-inspired treatment of guilt as a transcendental condition for the possibility of moral seriousness, see Pihlström, Transcendental Guilt: Reflections on Ethical Finitude (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2011). 34. Gaita often makes statements like, “I am here concerned with the grammar of a certain way of speaking of the meaning of a human life” (Good and Evil, p. 129). 35. Such seriousness may often be lacking in academic moral philosophy. Gaita (ibid., pp. 17, 323) refers approvingly to G. E. M. Anscombe’s statement that anyone (e.g., any consequentialist) who thinks that it may, in certain circumstances, be morally permissible to punish someone known to be innocent is a person with a “corrupt mind.” Similarly, Gaita points out that moral skeptics are not incoherent or obviously wrong (this much their arguments do show); they are (or were, if there were any serious moral skeptics) wicked, or invite us to wickedness, since it is not ethically innocent even to seriously entertain the idea that morality might be an illusion (pp. 322, 331, chapter 17 passim). For a recent argument, also influenced by Wittgenstein, reminding us that skeptical and relativist theories of morality are not conceptions of morality at all, see Paul Johnston, The Contradictions of Modern Moral Philosophy: Ethics after Wittgenstein (London and New York: Routledge, 1999). Moreover, the popular idea that ethical inquiry ought to offer us a way of deciding moral dilemmas is re-

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garded as superficial by Gaita (Good and Evil, p. 74; see p. 325). This can also be considered a transcendental claim about what constitutes our concept of the ethical. It is the condition for the possibility of ethical thought that certain painful situations are morally undecidable—or, lacking a better word, tragic. Moral problems are personal in the sense that there can be no “manual of morals” or “Nobel Laureates in Morality” (ibid., p. 105). Nor can we “seek moral advice in the way we seek advice on taxation options” (p. 275). “[W]e cannot,” Gaita says, “give an account of the kind of seriousness [morality] has without reference to its personal character [or] for the kind of difficulty we find in moral deliberation without reference to its personal character” (p. 105). The ethical subject is, in a Kierkegaardian manner, “a human being under the discipline of the ethical requirement to become an individual” (p. 285). A similar conception of morality, obviously inspired by Wittgensteinian considerations, has been defended by Rush Rhees (see his Moral Questions, ed. D. Z. Phillips [Houndmills, UK, and London: Macmillan & New York: The Free Press, 1999]), who also emphasizes that moral decisions are personal, that there is nothing we could learn from ethical theory, and that it is illusory to think that answers to ethical problems lie somewhere “out there” in advance of our personal deliberation, our decision to lead a certain kind of life instead of some other kind of life. D. Z. Phillips, in his Interventions in Ethics (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1992), as well as the Finnish philosopher Lars Hertzberg, also influenced by the Wittgenstein-Rhees-Winch tradition, have expressed similar doubts about the relevance of ethical theories (and their practical applications in “applied ethics”). On the tragic element of moral life, see also Sidney Hook, Pragmatism and the Tragic Sense of Life (New York: Basic Books, 1974). 36. Gaita, Good and Evil, pp. 269, 285. 37. Cf. Phillips, Interventions in Ethics, chapter 18. 38. Gaita, Good and Evil, p. 289, and chapter 16. 39. Ibid., pp. 58, 78. 40. Ibid., p. 119. 41. Ibid., and chapter 10, passim. 42. Ibid., p. 120. Rhees (Moral Questions, chapter 17) espouses a similar view. He points out that we cannot think of animal life having a “course” or a “direction,” that animals are not responsible for their lives, that they never face a difficult choice, that they never show weakness or strength in making choices, that their lives do not progress or decline, that they are never genuinely helpless or not helpless, etc. Only in the context of a human life do such expressions make sense, for only in the human form of life are there standards for evaluating lives on these terms. (No speciesism should be read into these grammatical-cum-philosophical-anthropological remarks. The issue is what it is meaningful for us to say about the similarities and differences between our lives and animals’ lives.) Cf. Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, II, iv; see also Phillips’s (Interventions in Ethics) remarks on our attitude toward others as “souls.” I do not mean to imply that a sharp dichotomy between humans and animals is inevitable if one adopts a Wittgensteinian approach. To the contrary, Simon Glendinning encourages us to take seriously the animality of our existence, opposing (with the help of Wittgenstein and Derrida) the kind of classical humanism whose remnants he finds in Heidegger’s notion of Dasein. Glendinning’s critique of the “metaphysics of the subject” is parallel to various “nontranscendental” readings of Wittgenstein to which we will return shortly. See Glendinning, On Being with Others: Heidegger-Derrida-Wittgenstein (London and New York: Routledge, 1998). I do not believe that a reasonable recognition of our animality as the factual basis of language-use wounds culturalist philosophical anthropologies, though. 43. Gaita, Good and Evil, pp. 284, 120. On the individuality of other human beings, see further ibid., chapter 9. 44. Ibid., p. 283. 45. Ibid., pp. 127, 151, 128, 185.

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46. A similar mystery may be present in one’s acknowledgment of one’s life, considered as a totality, as something meaningful and valuable. Wittgenstein’s views on ethics are relevant here. Cf. ibid., chapter 11. 47. Ibid., p. 153. “We can only love those that others could love too,” i.e., “those whom we see as intelligible objects of our love,” i.e., people who belong to “us” (ibid., p. 163). 48. Ibid., pp. 159, 184, 164–65. 49. Ibid., pp. 170, 173–74 (and chapter 10, passim), 175, 184. Moral understanding, then, is not a matter of coming to know true propositions, but of “wisdom,” whose maturation takes time (ibid., pp. 270–71). Similarly, those who speak with depth and understanding about death do not offer us any new factual knowledge about this phenomenon (ibid., p. 308). They offer us wisdom. 50. Ibid., pp. 192, 237, and chapters 12–13. Gaita seems to recognize the possibility of this interpretation. He says that morality, instead of being “designed for anything,” is “of human origin,” neither naturalistically nor supernaturalistically explainable (ibid., p. 241). His grammatical remarks are directed to those who want to deepen their understanding of what it is to live a human life. We may read other Wittgensteinian philosophers, e.g., Phillips, in a similar manner. 51. Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, I, § 371. 52. See Jonathan Lear, Open Minded: Working out the Logic of the Soul (Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 1998), chapters 11–12. 53. Ibid., p. 249; see also p. 290. 54. When speaking about “anthropology,” Lear obviously has in mind empirical anthropology. 55. Ibid., pp. 253–54, 276. 56. Ibid., pp. 271–73. In Lear’s view, the problem with Wittgenstein’s later philosophy is not that the anthropological and the transcendental standpoints are incoherent (they are not) but that the project is unfinished: one should provide “a critique of the anthropological stance,” “expose its pretense of pure observer,” and thereby recognize its being “an artifact of philosophical inquiry” and “weave it into a richer conception of philosophical consciousness” (ibid., p. 273). What this concretely amounts to is not made explicit. 57. Ibid., pp. 275–76. 58. Cf. Pihlström, Naturalizing the Transcendental, and chapter 3 below. 59. Thomas Wallgren, Transformative Philosophy (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2006). 60. Thomas Wallgren, “‘Grammatical’ and ‘´Weak Transcendental’ Readings of the Later Wittgenstein—Is There a Difference?,” in Uwe Meixner and Paul Simons (eds.), Metaphysics in the Post-Metaphysical Age (Kirchberg am Wechsel: Austrian Ludwig Wittgenstein Society, 1999), pp. 331–35 (here pp. 332, 334). This issue is more comprehensively discussed in Wallgren, Transformative Philosophy. The reference to Wittgenstein is to the Philosophical Investigations, I, §§ 199–202. 61. See K. Emmett, “Forms of Life,” Philosophical Investigations 13 (1990), 213–31. 62. On the notion of a form of life in the later Wittgenstein, and on the issue of whether there can be a plurality of (conflicting) forms of life, see the essays in Wilhelm Lütterfelds and A. Rosen (eds.), Der Konflikt der Lebensformen in Wittgensteins Philosophie der Sprache (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1999). 63. In a related manner, Rickman (“Is Philosophic Anthropology Possible?,” cited above) defends the possibility of philosophical anthropology by means of a transcendental argument: our (empirical) knowledge of human beings, as well as our moral life, presupposes more general assumptions about human life (e.g., something like a “common human nature”); it is the search for, and the explication of, such presuppositions that ought to be seen as the task of philosophical anthropology. 64. Similarly, my discussion of the notion of philosophical anthropology in this book is partly terminological (since it concerns the way we should use that notion), but it is, for that very reason, a substantial one, as philosophical concepts, problems and

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traditions are constituted by our speaking about them. Revising those ways of speaking is never a “merely linguistic” or “merely terminological” enterprise. 65. It should be noted that some self-styled pragmatists, especially Richard Rorty and his followers, oppose the very idea of philosophical anthropology. See my critique of Rorty’s trivialization of the problem of humanity in Sami Pihlström, Pragmatism and Philosophical Anthropology: Understanding Human Life in a Human World (New York: Peter Lang, 1998), chapter 7. 66. Pragmatism can be said to further develop a central Kantian theme, the idea of the primacy of practical reason in human affairs. On Kant’s doctrine of the “two standpoints” (theoretical and practical) and on our need to occupy the latter regarding human action, see Christine Korsgaard, Creating the Kingdom of Ends (Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 1996); cf. also Henry E. Allison, “We Can Act Only under the Idea of Freedom,” Proceedings and Addresses of the American Philosophical Association 71:2 (1997), 39–50. This essentially Kantian idea can be found in several theories of human agency, e.g., in von Wright’s philosophy of human action; cf. Rosaria Egidi (ed.), In Search of a New Humanism: The Philosophy of Georg Henrik von Wright (Dordrecht, GER: Kluwer, 1999). 67. Cf. also Janich, “Naturalismen in der Kulturfalle.” We saw that Wittgensteinian philosophy of language can be interpreted as a culturalistic philosophical anthropology; but this is not to deny that there are naturalistic elements in (the later) Wittgenstein roughly in the same nonreductive sense as in pragmatism. See here David Pears, “‘In the Beginning Was the Deed’: The Private Language Argument,” in Egidi (ed.), In Search for a New Humanism, pp. 65–68; and Massimo Dell’Utri, “Naturalism, World and Truth,” ibid., pp. 69–78. 68. See Joseph Margolis, Culture and Cultural Entities (Dordrecht, GER: Reidel, 1984); Margolis, Historied Thought, Constructed World (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995); Nicholas Rescher, A System of Pragmatic Idealism, 3 vols. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992–1994). 69. D. Z. Phillips, “Introduction” to Rhees, Moral Questions. 70. Cf. Newton Garver, This Complicated Form of Life: Essays on Wittgenstein (La Salle, IL: Open Court, 1994), and the exchange between Garver and Rudolf Haller in Lütterfelds and Rosen (eds.), Der Konflikt der Lebensformen. This is not the right place to determine the correct way to read Wittgenstein. 71. I am again employing Kannisto’s formulation of the problem. 72. See John McDowell, Mind and World, 2nd ed. (Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 1996; 1st ed. 1994). We have here an example of the way in which a philosophical problem can change its status through successive reformulations. It may not be a problem for us any more to explain how normativity is possible (let alone to ascertain whether it is), if we adopt the pragmatist approach. On the other hand, we may simply have come back to square one: is normative thought just a fact of our life, a brute fact about how our practices are structured? 73. Lear, Open Minded, pp. 250–51, 280, 294, 258. The argument is here reminiscent of Donald Davidson’s famous doubts about the possibility of a radically alternative conceptual scheme; see Davidson, “On the Very Idea of a Conceptual Scheme” (1974), in Davidson, Inquiries into Truth and Interpretation (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984). The reference to measuring is naturally to Wittgenstein’s thought experiments imagining tribes whose practices of measuring seem to differ radically from ours. Cf., however, also Emmett, “Forms of Life.” 74. For an insightful critique of the supposition that transcendental investigations of subjectivity (in Kant and Husserl) are committed to dubious metaphysics, see David Carr, The Paradox of Subjectivity: The Self in the Transcendental Tradition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999). This theme will be revisited in chapter 3. 75. See, again, Flew, The Logic of Mortality; Feldman, Confrontations with the Reaper; Fischer, The Metaphysics of Death; Rosenberg, Thinking Clearly about Death; Luper, The Philosophy of Death; and other relevant sources already cited.

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76. Cf. I. Leman-Stefanovic, The Event of Death: A Phenomenological Inquiry (Dordrecht, GER: Martinus Nijhoff, 1987); Emmanuel Levinas, The Levinas Reader, ed. Sean Hand (Oxford: Blackwell, 1989); and Zygmunt Bauman, Mortality, Immortality and Other Life Strategies (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1992). 77. See William James, “Human Immortality: Two Supposed Objections to the Doctrine” (1898), in James, Essays in Religion and Morality, eds. Frederick H. Burkhardt, Fredson Bowers, and Ignas K. Skrupskelis (Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 1982); on James’s views on death, mortality, and immortality, see Sami Pihlström, “The Trail of the Human Serpent Is over Everything”: Jamesian Reflections on Mind, World, and Religion (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 2008), chapter 3. 78. In addition to Gaita’s work cited above, see also Peter Winch, Essays on Ethics and Action (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1972). 79. See Robin May Schott (ed.), Birth, Death, and Femininity (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2010), for several contributions emphasizing the notions of birth and natality along with those of death and mortality. All of these are “limit” phenomena that need a phenomenological and/or transcendental analysis. Schott’s volume generally offers perspectives on “Continental” (especially phenomenological) philosophy of death, including Husserlian and Heideggerian phenomenology as well as Nietzschean views. The bodily nature of death is explored at length. Sara Heinämaa’s chapters, in particular, examine the phenomenology of death in considerable detail. 80. See, again, Feldman, Confrontations with the Reaper; Fischer (ed.), The Metaphysics of Death; and Rosenberg, Thinking Clearly about Death. This general view seems to be assumed also in many of the more recent contributions to analytic philosophy of death, such as Christopher Belshaw, Annihilation: The Sense and Significance of Death (Stocksfield: Acumen, 2009); John Martin Fischer, Our Stories: Essays on Life, Death, and Free Will (Oxford & New York: Oxford University Press, 2009); and Ben Bradley, WellBeing and Death (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2009). For example, Bradley’s book is one of the careful contributions to the analytic metaphysics of death that also functions as the basis for most of the applied ethics about death today. The relation between theories of well-being and the metaphysics of death is specifically discussed. The deprivation theory of the evil of death is defended. This type of discourse is undoubtedly full of insights within the analytic paradigm, but from the point of view of transcendental (and pragmatist) philosophical thanatology adopted here, it’s just a standard representative of that paradigm, hardly original at all. Regarding the entanglement of ethics and metaphysics, a slightly more relevant recent contribution is Samuel Scheffler, Death and the Afterlife, ed. Niko Kolodny (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2013). Scheffler examines, with the help of striking thought experiments, the ways we find the “afterlife” of future people and generations entirely unknown to us crucially significant for the meaningfulness of our activities and lives. It matters to us more than we think that we believe humankind to survive our deaths. This is certainly an observation relevant to our concerns, too, but even here, though, death is not examined transcendentally. On the general entanglement of metaphysics and ethics in pragmatism, see Sami Pihlström, Pragmatist Metaphysics: An Essay on the Ethical Grounds of Ontology (London and New York: Continuum, 2009). 81. See, e.g., Jeff McMahan, Killing in War (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2009). McMahan is one of the leading contemporary theorists of just war, addressing the issue of just versus unjust warfare based on a general theory of the badness of death (based on a privation view). He also contributes to Outi Hakola, Sara Heinämaa, and Sami Pihlström (eds.), Death and Mortality: From Individual to Communal Perspectives (COLLeGIUM 19, Helsinki: Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies, 2015, www.helsinki.fi/ collegium). Another noteworthy recent discussion of death from an “applied” ethical point of view is C. G. Prado, Coping with Choices to Die (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), discussing the ethical questions related to choosing to die due to

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terminal illness, especially regarding the reactions of the dying patient’s family and friends as well as different cultural contextual influences and expectations. 82. This kind of holism could be based on, e.g., Morton White’s holistic pragmatism; see White, A Philosophy of Culture: The Scope of Holistic Pragmatism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002). 83. For a classical sociological study, see Norbert Elias, The Loneliness of the Dying (Oxford: Blackwell, 1982/1985). 84. See Miguel de Unamuno, The Tragic Sense of Life in Men and Nations (1913), trans. A. Kerrigan (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1977). On death as a starting point for philosophy, see also Ann Hartle, Death and the Disinterested Spectator: An Inquiry into the Nature of Philosophy (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1986). 85. See Schacht, “Philosophical Anthropology: What, Why, and How” (cited above). 86. Ibid., pp. 169, 161. On the historicity of philosophical anthropology, see also Per Sundström, “Historicity and the Study of Human Nature or Does Philosophical Anthropology Have a Subject Matter?,” in Carsten Bengt-Pedersen and Niels Thomassen (eds.), Nature and Lifeworld: Theoretical and Practical Metaphysics (Odense: Odense University Press, 1998), pp. 299–311. 87. Schacht, “Philosophical Anthropology,” p. 156. 88. Ibid., pp. 171–72. 89. However, as we saw, normativity is at least potentially a problem for any philosophical-anthropological theory. On the other hand, Stevenson and Haberman (in their Ten Theories of Human Nature) include hard naturalists (e.g., Skinner) in their treatment of philosophical anthropologies in terms of their fourfold division. The idea is, perhaps, that even such naturalists cannot avoid implicitly engaging in normative reflection when they write about human life. They, too, assume that there is something “wrong” in our life and that something ought to be done about it. 90. Such systems are, in Kantian terms, “transcendentally realistic,” failing to make the transcendental (reflexive) turn. 91. In particular, philosophical-anthropological assumptions are at work in the recent “science wars” and debates about the gap between “the two cultures” (the natural-scientific and the humanistic). Crudely scientistic, technocratic presuppositions can be located at the background of not only many scientific fields but also several social practices and policies in modern societies. Such presuppositions invite philosophicalanthropological critique. So does, for example, the increasing fragmentation of the notion of a (morally responsible) human subject in our postmodern culture. 92. Schacht, “Philosophical Anthropology,” p. 158.

THREE The Self as a Limit

This chapter continues to examine the nature of philosophical thanatology and its fundamental questions concerning what it means for human beings to be mortal by focusing more deeply on the issues of selfhood and subjectivity from the double perspective of pragmatism and transcendental philosophy, seeking to critically respond to what can be seen as the key challenge of integrating naturalism and antireductionism in attempts to understand the human self and its (that is, our) relation to the world. This is, arguably, a challenge equally for the philosophy of mind and for the metaphysics of culture, and even for general metaphysics, as well as many related fields of philosophical inquiry. As such, it is a reconciliatory challenge largely defining the tasks of philosophical anthropology (both historically and today)—or, if we for any reason prefer to avoid that label, the tasks of the philosophy of the human condition. 1 It is also, like all issues in philosophical anthropology, a challenge fundamental to human self-understanding. In a way or another, we need to reconcile our view of ourselves as natural creatures accounted for by science with our view of ourselves as cultural creatures engaging in normative practices. We are thus still struggling with the basic Kantian task of regarding human beings as both subjects to the laws of nature and free agents acting for reasons. This tension has wide implications for our understanding of death and mortality. 2 It is this challenge to our self-understanding that motivates a transcendental inquiry: human reason and/or subjectivity must turn—reflexively—toward an examination of its/their own capacities, conditions, and limits. What, however, does the transcendental self have to do with philosophical anthropology? The transcendental self, after all, is not to be identified with the person, or the human being, at least if we take seriously what Ludwig Wittgenstein says about the metaphysical subject in the 55

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Tractatus (to which we will return shortly), or if we take seriously what Kant himself says about, say, the transcendental apperception. Nevertheless, it can be regarded as an aspect of the human being, reminding us that we must take a “double aspect” perspective on our own humanity. We pragmatically need the notion of the transcendental self in order to understand ourselves as human beings. Or this, at least, is part of the argument to be developed in this chapter. It is, then, crucially important to articulate the notion of the transcendental self in a plausible way that does not require us to buy the entire Kantian package of transcendental idealism. 3 Transcendental philosophy and the notion of the transcendental self will in this chapter be approached from a pragmatist point of view. 4 The kind of pragmatist transcendental philosophy that I favor gives up the essentialistic, aprioristic, and ahistorical features of the Kantian tradition without giving up what may be seen as the core of transcendental inquiry itself, that is, the focusing of philosophical attention on the necessary conditions for the possibility of certain humanly given experiential actualities. I will try to show that a useful concept of the transcendental self, along with a naturalized version of transcendental idealism, can be maintained within such a pragmatically revised form of transcendental philosophy. This will be extremely important for a transcendental anthropology of human mortality. Our discussion of the self should, however, begin from some wellknown nontranscendental ideas, because it is in terms of such notions that the mainstream philosophical discussion of the self develops today. I will therefore first very briefly outline the prospects of nonreductive naturalism based on some recent discussions of the mind. Such views of the self—or such philosophical anthropologies—need to be considered, as the pragmatist is likely to embrace them in some form. After having found the standard programs of nonreductive naturalism wanting, I will identify their key problems in the failure to account for the dynamic and “world-involving” nature of subjectivity, on the one hand, and in their metaphysically realistic presuppositions, on the other hand. I will argue that what we need instead of these approaches to the self is a conception of transcendental subjectivity that is naturalized enough in the sense of accommodating the ways in which the self is “involved” in its world, articulated in terms of the notion of transcendental constitution. Furthermore, the transcendental account of subjectivity needs to be supplemented by a treatment of such ontological and conceptual issues as nothingness and limits, keeping in mind the Wittgensteinian view that the subject is a “limit” of the world, as well as the issue of personal identity. These sections will take us back to the question of how pragmatism, in particular, is able to account for such an ontology of the self. The answer for this question will be sought from the pragmatically pluralistic doctrine of several equally acceptable perspectives, connected with the treatment of the notion of recognition from a pragmatist point of view. How all

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this is actually based on a pragmatically updated version of Kantianbased transcendental idealism also needs to be explained. The ethical dimensions of the pragmatically naturalized conception of transcendental subjectivity will then be explored through a discussion of “de-selfing”—a notion that is immediately relevant to the topic of death. Toward the end of the chapter, I will move on to discuss some challenges to the transcendental world categorization taking place through activities of the transcendental self, linking this discussion with issues such as limits, rationality, and irrationality. 5 NONREDUCTIVE NATURALISM: EMERGENCE, SUPERVENIENCE, AND PANPSYCHISM One of the traditional ways of understanding the relation between mind and matter nonreductively, yet nondualistically, is by employing the concepts of supervenience and/or emergence. The idea is that mental or psychical properties supervene on, or emerge from, their material or physical base properties. Here, of course, we cannot discuss these proposals in any detail; as we know, there is a great number of increasingly sophisticated specifications of these notions available in current literature. For example, the various difficulties surrounding the famous Davidsonian program of “anomalous monism,” based on the idea of supervenience yet denying lawlike connections between the mental and the physical, have been debated voluminously. While the relation between emergence and supervenience remains somewhat unclear, it may be argued that emergentism is in many ways more plausible than more straightforward reductive physicalisms and materialisms, according to which mental properties are “nothing but” material or physical (e.g., neurophysiological) properties. One problem with emergentism is, however, that the very emergence of mentality, experientiality, or subjectivity itself may seem to be a mysterious leap. How can emergence be explained? Is it just a brute fact of nature, of emergent evolution? Or can emergence itself be somehow reduced to fundamental physical and causal processes? The air of mystery is not dispelled by appeals to downward causation. Emergent (e.g., mental) properties seem to have to be causally efficient in order to make any difference to the system of nature. Otherwise they are just metaphysically superfluous and epiphenomenal. However, it is not easy to understand how downward causation supervenes on fundamental physical causation (which, according to most emergentists, is in some sense metaphysically fundamental), or if it does, what, if anything, it really adds to the reductively naturalistic world picture. On the other hand, “mere” supervenience is also unsatisfactory, because it is compatible with nonnaturalist theories of the mind, including even dualism.

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In a way—to put the problem in a nutshell—emergence theories seem to want to eat the cake and have it too. The mind is taken to be both dependent on physical nature but at the same time something over and above it. This is of course a key problem with many other compromise attempts as well. Some philosophers, including Jaegwon Kim, have thus expressed severe doubts about the very coherence and motivation of nonreductive physicalism or naturalism in general. 6 It might be noted here that the relations between pragmatism and emergentism have not been discussed as thoroughly as they should, even though John Dewey’s version of pragmatic naturalism, in particular, could be seen as an emergentist position in a loose sense. 7 Among recent neopragmatists, Hilary Putnam may be the one whose views come closest to an emergentist philosophy of mind and subjectivity. He has, after all, been one of the leading critics of reductive accounts of the mind for decades—and having himself been among the architects of functionalism in the philosophy of mind, he has since the late 1980s rejected this position as well. However, in one of his incarnations (it’s difficult to determine whether this was his final view), he points out that emergence is a “bad metaphor,” 8 especially because its advocates tend to construe the mind as a mysterious entity whose existence calls for a (scientific-like) explanation. He argues that we should, rather, view the mind pragmatically as a world-involving set of capacities (see below). Instead of maintaining the largely Cartesian framework within which mentality and subjectivity remain mysterious, we should, according to Putnam, dissolve this mystery—partly in a Wittgensteinian manner. From Putnam’s point of view, it may seem, then, that emergentist philosophers of mind just keep up the mystery of the self by talking about the somewhat magic leap of emergent novelty. On the other hand, if the pragmatist philosopher of mind/self, in a Deweyan and/or Meadian fashion, regards mental properties as “naturally emerging,” it may be argued that no mysterious emergentist assumptions are needed. 9 The problem need not be thoroughly dissolved in a Wittgensteinian way, even if both dualistic and reductively naturalistic and scientistic approaches to it are abandoned. Even so, however, both supervenience- and emergence-based theories treat the mind, or the self, as a special kind of entity with special properties requiring theoretical explanation. The issues are typically phrased in terms of the metaphysical and explanatory relations between the different “levels” of properties. From a pragmatist (and transcendental) point of view, this is part of the problem rather than a solution. Hoping to avoid mysterious leaps, some philosophers—who nevertheless do not want to return to the even more mysterious ideas associated with dualism—suggest that, instead of emerging from nonmental, nonexperiential, and nonpsychical brute facts, mentality, experience, and psychical properties have in a sense been there all along. According to

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this panpsychist view, matter has rudimentary “proto-mental” or “protopsychical” properties. 10 Panpsychism, a view with an impressive history going back to antiquity, 11 has only relatively recently reemerged as a truly serious option in general metaphysics and the philosophy of mind, and while many may find it difficult to reconcile with the general scientific worldview of materialism or physicalism, it does have its strong supporters. It is, indeed, hard to deny that it enjoys some plausibility in comparison to some other attempted solutions. As Thomas Nagel famously argued in his essay, “Panpsychism,” 12 panpsychism seems to follow from premises that are all more plausible than their denials (including, among others, nonemergence), though perhaps less plausible than the denial of panpsychism. Accordingly, panpsychism, though certainly a nonstandard alternative, is increasingly drawn attention to in the philosophy of mind today. 13 It would be a significant pragmatist contribution to critically analyze in detail the usually relatively strongly realistic background assumptions at work in the emergence versus panpsychism opposition. The main novelty of pragmatist philosophy of subjectivity might be, indeed, that this dialogue should not be based upon prior metaphysically realist presuppositions, according to which there either just is, or is not, emergent subjectivity (e.g., qualia, or related “mysterious” entities) “out there” in the world independently of us, conceived “absolutely,” or from an imagined “God’s-Eye View.” Rather, a pragmatic perspective on subjectivity should take seriously the idea that the world, insofar as it is an object of human conceptualizing, theorizing, and understanding (even including its mental, subjective, and perspectival aspects), is to some extent a “human construction,” structured and categorized by us into what it is or can ever be for us—as will be elaborated below. Subjectivity itself, then, would also be something that we ourselves (in a Kantian-like way) “impose on” or “contribute to” the world we live in. Whether this idea could ultimately be cashed out either emergentistically or panpsychistically is another matter deserving further discussion. One major problem with panpsychism is that it is inevitably rather hard to understand what proto-mentality would actually be like. This may be as hard or harder as it is to understand what mysterious emergent leaps are. Panpsychism remains an interesting—perhaps increasingly interesting—research program in the field, but we have to be conscious of the general problem that whereas emergence cannot properly explain how subjectivity, culture, or experience rises out of mere nature, panpsychism cannot properly explain how “mere” nature could possibly be (even if only rudimentarily) experiential.

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THE SELF AS WORLD-INVOLVING Both emergentism and panpsychism are, then, problematic as general philosophical theories of the mind and the self, albeit in quite different ways—indeed, in ways that are mirror images of each other. Instead of these equally problematic attempts to explain the nature of the self as a special thing or entity—or, quoting the title of the famous book by C. D. Broad, to explain “the mind and its place in nature” 14 —the self or subject(ivity) should, from a pragmatist point of view, be dynamically understood as a capacity, perspective, or standpoint, rather than a thing, structure, state, or even a process or a set of properties. Thus, we should replace the talk about the emergence of psychical properties—or their nonemergence, that is, their having been there all the way from the beginning—with talk about our human capacities and practice-laden perspectives that are both fully natural and uniquely cultural. This would also be compatible with the kind of synthesis of naturalism and culturalism that is, as was suggested in the previous chapter, something toward which pragmatist philosophical anthropology should aim. Moreover, the self, thus understood, is (instead of having an identifiable “place” in nature) deeply “world-involving”—not a “view from nowhere” but perspectivally embedded in the natural and social world. The emergence versus panpsychism controversy leads us astray in the sense of postulating psychical properties in a static manner, overlooking the irreducibly dynamic ways in which such properties are rooted in our perspectival being-in-the-world (if a Heideggerian expression is appropriate in this context). A pragmatist view of the self, or subjectivity, takes this kind of embodied and practice-embedded world-involvingness very seriously. Pragmatic subjectivity heavily depends on our human (habits of) action, and hence on the notion of agency. This conviction seems to be shared by those pragmatists who are fruitfully (re)interpretable as emergentists (including Dewey) and those who would rather abandon the entire issue of emergence (including Putnam). The emergence of subjectivity is not the emergence of peculiar immaterial entities, properties, or states (e.g., qualia understood as some kind of internal mental objects), but the emergence of certain capacities and habitualities, of ways of “being in the world.” This, along with the pragmatists’ general naturalism, is a further step toward a total rejection of Cartesian assumptions that pragmatists have attacked since Charles Peirce’s anti-Cartesian articles in the late 1860s. 15 For pragmatists, the mind is “in the world,” instead of being “in the head” of subjects or minded beings; subjectivity is inevitably connected with intersubjectivity, when it is understood in terms of subjects’ worldly (social) actions. Pragmatism, then, can never remain merely a philosophy of mind; rather, it inevitably amounts to a much more comprehensive orientation in philosophical anthropology, seeking to understand not just

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the mind (mentality, subjectivity) but the entire human being in her/his worldly (including social) surroundings, that is, in James’s words, “the whole man in us.” As such a general philosophical project, pragmatism must not only investigate the nature of the mind and its contents—as analytic philosophy of mind primarily does—but the ways in which “minded” creatures like us live in the world, amidst their different projects and habitualities. After all, the concept of a habit, or habitual action, has been central to the pragmatist tradition since its beginning. This is why we need to approach the issues of the self, or subjectivity, in a reflexive transcendental fashion. This is also why the recent analytic debates in the philosophy of mind have only limited relevance to pragmatist explorations of the mind and subjectivity—and to the kind of reflection on a pragmatically reinterpreted transcendental subjectivity I am pursuing in this chapter. Nor do, say, standard phenomenological investigations fare much better in this regard, however. Phenomenologists usually seek to examine mental and experiential phenomena from an allegedly “presuppositionless” standpoint, focusing on the way the world appears to us in experience and bracketing all naturalistic presuppositions (such as the very existence of a material world). One reason why we need to insist on both the natural emergence and the habitual embeddedness of subjectivity in pragmatism is the need to avoid any remnants of “first philosophy,” even when we are working within and further developing the paradigm of transcendental philosophy. Despite some highly interesting developments in phenomenology that seem to bring it in many ways close to pragmatism, it seems to me that the “worldly”—natural and practical—embeddedness of embodied subjectivity has generally not been sufficiently emphasized in typical phenomenological studies of experience. 16 The same may, after all, be true about James’s radical empiricism, which, as an apparently first-philosophical metaphysical theory of the general structure of reality, may in the end be hard to reconcile with his pragmatism. TRANSCENDENTAL CONSTITUTION The notion of transcendental constitution (comparable to the notion of Gegenstandkonstitution sometimes used in phenomenology) must, in some version, be employed in transcendental philosophy, however naturalized. The transcendental philosopher must maintain that there is a sense in which all possible objects of experience, cognition, and representation are constitutively dependent on us. Transcendental constitution must be distinguished from (mere) “construction,” however: transcendental philosophy, though committed to some form of transcendental idealism (to be specified below), is not a form of naive social constructionism, although it does claim that the (empirical, cognizable, knowable, represent-

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able) world is a kind of construction based on the activity of the transcendental self—conceived, in a Wittgensteinian-inspired way yet to be explained, as a limit of the world, not as an object in the world that would then, circularly, construct the world it exists in. The transcendental self is needed, precisely, to avoid this circularity: if the world is “constructed,” or at least categorized, it is natural to ask who or what constructs the constructor(s), or categorizes the categorizer(s). Given its reflexive structure, the transcendental self can be invoked in dealing with this kind of questions. Naturalized transcendental philosophy (of the self) ought to defend pragmatic realism about the empirical world (including the empirical self), instead of defending either metaphysical realism or social constructionism. Just like the phenomenological notion of Gegenstandkonstitution, the pragmatist conceptions of world-structuring and world-involvingness taking place through human practices would be thoroughly misunderstood if these ideas were taken to be committed to the claim that we humans “construct” or “create” reality in a factual, causal, or empirical sense; clearly, much of reality is independent of us, and we should be pragmatic realists about it. This naïve view is still attributed to the pragmatists by some of their critics. However, there is a clearly identifiable (Jamesian-Deweyan) sense in which reality does constitutively depend on us. The objects of our thought and inquiry are inevitably the result of selective interests, of what is regarded as important for us, of what we find significant in the world surrounding us, a world in which we must continuously act and (re-)orientate. Our being world-involving and our being world-structuring beings are entangled here. The relevant kind of selective interests and valuational activities—arising out of our human agency and habits of action, which themselves are crucial to any pragmatist philosophy of subjectivity, as suggested above—then to a crucial extent determine what the world, for us, is like. This is rather obviously analogous to the way in which the human cognitive faculty, with its forms of intuition and pure concepts of the understanding (that is, the categories) at a transcendental level constitutes the empirical world in Kant’s First Critique. 17 We can also avoid the talk about construction and constitution entirely by saying that certain forms of intelligibility are necessarily involved in any attempt (linguistic, conceptual, categorizing) to deal with the world. But this, I think, is basically a terminological issue—though I do not want to deny the importance of such issues. The notion of transcendental constitution is practically speaking equivalent to the idea that certain forms of intelligibility are involved, or necessarily invoked, in our dealings with reality. But why (it may still be asked) do we need a transcendental philosophy of the self in the first place, even if we reject metaphysical realism, as recommended above? Why cannot the self be simply naturalized, and

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why cannot the relevant notion of constitution itself remain something purely natural? The following brief transcendental argument should be seen as a way of introducing the notion of the transcendental self into these discussions. 18 First, we may start from the observation that “naturalization” itself is a normative process based on scientific inquiry. Secondly, someone has to engage in this process of inquiry, and be committed to the norms governing and constituting it, in order for anything like naturalization to be possible. Thirdly, this engagement and/or commitment itself cannot be naturalized into a mere causal process taking place in nature independent of human contributions, because it would then lose its normative character. Fourthly, therefore, naturalization itself— especially the naturalist’s commitment to it—cannot be (reductively) naturalized. (To imagine it could is, as we may say, to fall into the “blind spot” of reductive naturalism.) 19 It hence follows, fifthly, that the transcendental perspective on the self and its activities, including its activities of naturalization, is not only legitimate but necessary. The transcendental subjectivity reached through a transcendental argument of this type must, however, be carefully reconceptualized in terms of natural (possibly, emergently real) human normative practices taking place in the world, which again is constituted, transcendentally, starting from the world-involving perspectives occupied by the self itself. There is, admittedly, a circular structure here, indicating, however, reflexivity instead of any vicious circularity or question-begging. Transcendental subjectivity is not any kind of other-worldly (transcendent) ghost; it is our own subjectivity in this very world we live in, a world that is given to us as an object of cognition, that is, our own subjectivity viewed as the source of world-constitution rather than simply as one object among others in the (constituted) world. In short, we must, therefore, be able to view ourselves, somewhat paradoxically, as both subjects and objects. 20 Pragmatism, linked with transcendental philosophy, may offer us philosophical resources to defend this “double-aspect” view of ourselves in a nonreductively naturalized framework. And again, in order to adequately account for the “we” here, we need the reflexive structure of the transcendental self. However, the main worry here is that insofar as transcendental philosophy is pragmatically naturalized along these lines, transcendental constitution arguably turns into some form of social construction all over again: the transcendental self-constituting the world and its objects is now reinterpreted as, for example, a social practice or a form of life (at least if our rearticulation of the transcendental self is based on pragmatism or the later Wittgenstein). Is this a reductio ad absurdum of the notion of the naturalized transcendental self? Does transcendental constitution collapse to, say, “worldmaking” in Nelson Goodman’s sense? 21 What is needed, I must reemphasize, is a nonreductive naturalization of transcendental philosophy and the relevant notions of the transcendental

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self and its constitutional activity. Such an account should make transcendental world constitution “naturalistically acceptable” while maintaining its genuinely and irreducibly transcendental character. This is the key challenge we need to deal with. I am suggesting that this challenge can (perhaps only) be successfully met when transcendental philosophy is naturalized through pragmatism (or, possibly, through a critical synthesis of pragmatism and phenomenology). 22 Naturalized transcendental philosophy (of the self) should embrace pragmatic realism about the (empirical) self, that is, neither metaphysical realism (joined with either reductive or nonreductive naturalism) nor social constructionism but a critical middle ground between these approaches. However, it might seem that the challenge I have identified is very difficult or perhaps impossible to be adequately met. This can be phrased in terms of a dilemma. Either you (reductively) naturalize the self (or the subject) into a “mere object” in the world (in nature) and thus cannot explain—as the above-sketched transcendental argument seeks to show—who, and in terms of which normative criteria, engages in this naturalization (and how it is possible for anyone, whoever s/he is, to do so); 23 or you postulate a transcendental self that cannot be understood in terms of scientifically or naturalistically acceptable ontological categories at all. In the latter case you are left wondering what on earth—what kind of a thing—the transcendental self in the end is. What kind of an entity could possibly engage in the relevant constitutive activity? Transcendental postulations in general might not seem to be naturalistically acceptable at all—not because they would involve the transcendent (which they do not) but because the methodology of transcendental philosophy is aprioristic and ahistorical. The brief transcendental argument outlined above may simply fail to be convincing from a (mainstream) naturalistic point of view because any transcendental argument looks suspicious. A possible way out starts from a reconsideration of the very idea of “postulating” a transcendental self, a reconsideration that puts into question the need to ontologically postulate any thing or entity here at all. What I am suggesting is a pragmatist articulation of the self as world-involving activity connected with a Wittgensteinian view of the self as a “limit,” yielding a rearticulation of naturalization itself as a process of the self’s “disappearing” into the world. This is, as will become apparent, also an attempt to reconsider what naturalization is or means. Moreover, as will also become visible as my argument unfolds, this is an essential link between the pragmatist view of subjectivity and a transcendental conception of mortality.

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TRANSCENDENTAL PRAGMATISM: GIVING UP METAPHYSICAL REALISM A further point worth emphasizing is that even when we are defending pragmatic realism in general metaphysics, our pragmatist metaphysics of the self (our philosophical anthropology) and of culture must be based on a (once again naturalized) version of transcendental idealism, reinterpreted as transcendental pragmatism. All ontological or metaphysical postulations and commitments depend on human purposive practices—and thus on human culture in a broad sense. Joseph Margolis has expressed this point by suggesting that the world is “languaged,” while our language is “worlded,” world-involving. 24 This “symbiotic” language–world entanglement leads to a kind of circularity that, however, can be regarded as self-strengthening rather than vicious. Similarly, we may say that metaphysics is ethically loaded, while ethics needs to be involved in metaphysics (cf. below). A transcendental philosophy of the self fruitfully integrates these perspectives, when pragmatically developed. A successful rehabilitation of metaphysics within pragmatism—in relation to selfhood and subjectivity, or more generally—can eventually only take place if we are prepared to reconnect metaphysics with ethics, which is what philosophical anthropology generally does (cf. chapter 2). Ultimately, our metaphysical perspectives on subjectivity, when subjected to pragmatic evaluation in terms of the “pragmatic method” (especially in its Jamesian form), will have to be grounded in ethical considerations. This, I believe, is how we should read James’s reflections on “some metaphysical problems pragmatically considered” in the third lecture of Pragmatism. It is, in the end, the ethical significance of various metaphysical conceptions of subjectivity that will determine their pragmatic “cash value.” Far from claiming that there is no cash value at all in metaphysical reflection, transcendental pragmatism seeks to relocate that value ethically. In the metaphysics of the self, relations, particularly the relations of recognition (and failure of recognition) in which one stands to others, are both metaphysically and ethically constitutive, as will be suggested toward the end of this chapter. It seems to me clear that metaphysical realism—in its different forms 25—can be identified as a common problematic background assumption, the proton pseudos, of the received views on the self, naturalism, and related matters (such as supervenience-based theories, as well as emergentism and panpsychism). However, this is arguably the case even with the more promising pragmatic realisms about the mind as a set of natural world-involving capacities. Even if we admit that, pragmatically, our subjectivity is a dynamic, perspectival, world-involving set of capabilities of practical engagement, instead of being a thing, a precategorized ontological structure, or a set of properties, we may still fundamentally operate in terms of metaphysical realism, albeit with a somewhat trans-

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formed basic categorization of the ontological structure of the world. There may still be no room for the concept of transcendental constitution (as preliminarily articulated above) within such a position. This kind of metaphysical realism is the picture that, according to the kind of pragmatism defended here, holds us captive and should be reconsidered. 26 Here I cannot at all argue against the mainstream naturalisms briefly discussed above, either their reductive or nonreductive versions. For the purposes of this chapter, I will take it as given (partly on the basis of the discussion of the basic types of philosophical anthropology provided in chapter 2 above) that reductive naturalism is a nonstarter in serious attempts to understand human subjectivity; what now needs to be pointed out is that various nonreductive naturalisms are, in their standard forms, inadequate as well, failing to deal with the transcendental self at all. Instead of these attempts to explain the nature of the self as a special kind of thing or entity—or to explain “the mind and its place in nature”—the self and/or subject(ivity) should, as argued above, be from a pragmatist point of view dynamically understood as a “world-involving” capacity, perspective, or standpoint. It does not itself have any definite “place” in nature. There is the danger that we still succumb to the “mind and its place in nature” temptation and its metaphysically realistic presuppositions even if we postulate a processual ontology, conceiving of the self as a process rather than a thing. Even as a process, it still has a place in nature—in the spacetime, at least. This assumption needs to be criticized from a properly transcendental perspective. While pragmatism in my view quite naturally leads to a transcendental way of posing the question about the self, and while pragmatism and transcendental philosophy generally are equally critical of metaphysical realism, pragmatism by itself does not, then, go far enough in this criticism if it remains nontranscendental, as it often does. Yet, the need to overcome the above-discussed mainstream naturalistic options and their shared commitment to metaphysical realism may be the key route through which we are led to employ the notion of the transcendental self in the first place. The need for this notion arises from the dissatisfaction with the metaphysically realistic ways of understanding the self and the world as fundamentally separate and distinguishable, to the extent that it becomes a mystery how the self can be there—emergent or not—at all. There are different versions of meeting this need. Consider, for instance, Kant’s familiar argument that we cannot account for cognitive experience, or even its possibility, if we take such fundamental features of experienceable objects as their spatiotemporality or causal relations as properties of those objects as mind-independent “things in themselves.” To see how experience and its objects are possible for us, we must, according to Kant, view them as transcendentally dependent on the activities of our subjectivity, more specifically on the transcendental structures of our cognitive capacity, such as the categories. Analogously, Husserlian

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phenomenology argues that the mere natural attitude is insufficient to ground and articulate human experience and consciousness in their world-directedness, i.e., intentionality. The transcendental ego—even if it is in the end (in some sense) naturalized and embodied—is needed to account for, precisely, the very possibility of the world-involvingness and “aboutness” of our experience. And the same is true, though typically without any mention of the transcendental self, of pragmatist conceptions of the self and subjectivity. We cannot really understand our subjectivity and experience as “worldinvolving” (in the sense sketched above) unless we cease to think of the world as absolutely independent of us and of the self as a mere natural object in the world. World-involvingness arguably entails constitutive activity: a subject cannot really be “involved” in a world that is completely independent of it (otherwise it is not a matter of being involved at all but only of being a part of—that is, being an object rather than a subject). This could be regarded as a pragmatic argument for the relevance of the notion of the transcendental self, which is ipso facto an argument against metaphysical realism. Finally, Wittgenstein offers us his versions of this argument by urging, in his early work, that the solipsistic subject is needed for relations of linguistic representation between propositions and states of affairs to be possible, and by replacing this picture, in his later work, by the idea that it is the sociopragmatic form of life (rather than a solipsistic individual subject) upon whose constitutive and meaning-bestowing activity the world is dependent on. 27 These are all different but deeply related ways of rejecting metaphysical realism and the picture of the self and subjectivity—”the mind and its place in nature” picture, as we may call it—that seems to be entailed by such realism. I will try to explain in the following in more detail what it means to reject metaphysical realism (albeit not realism as such) in philosophy of the self and subjectivity—or philosophy of the human condition generally—and how this rejection can be based on, and may be employed in the further articulation of, a healthy synthesis of pragmatism and transcendental philosophy. This will also amount to an investigation of what kind of transcendental philosophy (and, hence, what kind of naturalism) is available to us today in our postanalytic and neopragmatist situation. Eventually, the rejection of metaphysical realism will obviously turn out to be fundamental for a pragmatist and transcendental philosophical thanatology, too. NATURALIZED TRANSCENDENTAL SUBJECTIVITY What we need in the kind of dialectical situation very briefly described in the previous sections is, instead of metaphysical realism, an adequately

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“naturalized” account of transcendental subjectivity—that is, a pragmatically naturalist view of the self that does not sacrifice the insights of transcendental philosophy. What this means is that pragmatism as well as pragmatic naturalism and realism about the self and subjectivity should not merely examine the self—or the human being, or human mortality—as a part of nature, based on a prior metaphysically realistic naturalistic commitment, according to which the self is basically just one peculiar object among other natural objects, but the way in which the self constitutes nature (for us). While the naturalized picture of subjectivity typically associated with pragmatism may seem to be opposed to any form of transcendental subjectivity, such as the transcendental ego invoked by classical transcendental thinkers like Kant and Husserl, there is an important transcendental strain in pragmatist philosophy of subjectivity (and intersubjectivity) itself. According to James, in particular, “we” organize or structure the reality we are able to experience; 28 this world-structuring “we,” we may argue, plays a (quasi-)transcendental role, although in many respects pragmatism departs from Kantian transcendental philosophy. There is, then, in addition to clear and undeniable differences, a lot of common ground between the Kantian transcendental tradition and the pragmatist tradition, to the extent that the latter may even be regarded as a relatively late twist in the former. The pragmatist perspective on subjectivity, as outlined above, may be seen as a way of articulating, and responding to, what has been called the “paradox of subjectivity”—our problematic status as both world-constituting beings and beings existing in a fully natural world, that is, as selves whose subjective experiences and world-constituting structures of subjectivity emerge (if we still want to use that concept) within that same world—that the transcendental tradition has always taken seriously. 29 A challenge for pragmatists in this regard is to make naturalism and transcendental inquiry better compatible with each other as philosophical methods. Such a reconciliation might be achieved by arguing that the world-engaging, dynamic, practice-embedded subjectivity the pragmatists emphasize itself “constitutes” reality, including its objectivity and mind independence at an empirical and factual level, in a way analogous to the constitution of reality and its objects in transcendental philosophy. The empirical self as a part of the thus constituted natural world is hence also, paradoxically, constituted by the transcendental self that is in a sense identical with the empirical self it constitutes (or is, ontologically, nothing over and above it, no addition in being—as there is only one self). In order to make sense of all this, a “transcendental turn” is needed in our philosophy of the self and subjectivity, and in our philosophical anthropology. But this turn is not a rival to the “pragmatic turn” but is actually motivated by it. Instead of asking the question (based on metaphysical realism) of how we should think of the self and/or subject(ivity),

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given a naturalist or physicalist worldview (i.e., the “mind and its place in nature” question), we should ask a Kantian-inspired transcendental question: what must the self and/or subject(ivity) and the world be like in order for us to be able to experience, as well as linguistically and conceptually categorize, the world in the way we do, especially to experience and categorize it as a realm of (potential) human action? What does it mean to pursue this kind of questions transcendentally? As is well known, transcendental philosophy generally investigates the conditions for the possibility of humanly ineliminable actualities, such as cognitive experience and linguistic meaning. In various versions and reformulations, this has been the main task of this philosophical paradigm since Kant through Husserl, Wittgenstein, and other modern classics up to the present day. The key challenge for us here is to show how this kind of philosophy itself can, in this specific area, be nonreductively naturalized through pragmatism (or perhaps, more modestly, suggest one possible way of doing this). We have to keep in mind—as transcendental philosophers themselves have recognized—that transcendental inquiries into the self themselves also need naturalism, or what phenomenologists call the “natural attitude.” The kind of nonreductive naturalization I am proposing, a project taking seriously the transcendental turn—the transformation of the naturalistic question about the self into a transcendental question, yet without giving up naturalism—should be supplemented by an examination of nothingness, as well as of related concepts such as limit and identity. In an important sense, the subject (the self), transcendentally conceived, is “nothing.” It is like a limit or an empty space rather than an identifiable thing within certain limits of its own, or occupying a definite area in space(-time) or in nature. This account of nothingness will turn out to be highly important in the project of nonreductive naturalization. Indeed, the idea of the transcendental self as “nothing” seems to me to be the only plausible way of accounting for the properly transcendental role of the world-constituting self while maintaining (nonreductive) pragmatic naturalism. 30 Precisely because the transcendental self is itself “nothing,” no addition to the being of the empirical self, the pragmatically naturalized view of the self as embodied (and mortal) is not threatened by the transcendental approach. Moreover, this picture of the self—this philosophical anthropology—enables us to view the self’s mortality in a very special way. Let us explore these ideas in some more detail, finding a profound philosophical expression for them in Wittgenstein.

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THE SELF AS A LIMIT OF THE WORLD Insofar as the idea of the self as “nothing” is taken seriously, the transcendental self or subject(ivity) can, following Wittgenstein, be understood as a limit of the world, instead of being regarded as a thing in the world; clearly, the limit itself is, ontologically, “nothing,” i.e., “no thing.” This is a major theme in Wittgenstein’s Tractatus, whose peculiar treatment of the “metaphysical subject” (he does not talk about the “transcendental self”) around § 5.6 contains the famous statement that the subject, in the sense in which it is of interest to philosophy, is not the empirical (psychological or physiological) subject but the metaphysical subject, which is then argued to be the “limit” rather than an object: the “philosophische Ich” is not a human being but “die Grenze—nicht ein Teil der Welt.” 31 However, it can be suggested that even the late-Wittgensteinian sociopragmatic reinterpretation of the transcendental self as a “transcendental ‘we’” 32 does not require total rejection of the early-Wittgensteinian (Tractarian) account of the transcendental subject as a “limit” of the world that is not a thing in the world. Rather, this late-Wittgensteinian view (which I am certainly not claiming is or was exactly Wittgenstein’s own—or that it wasn’t, for that matter) can preserve the “limit” idea, critically transformed. The form of life of the “transcendental we,” any more than the metaphysical subject of the Tractatus, is not a “thing” in the world it transcendentally constitutes. What is crucial is the transformation of the Kantian-Wittgensteinian individual transcendental self into something like a social and pragmatic (“first-personal plural”) transcendental subject. Arguably, this transition happens in pragmatism as well— and for this reason pragmatism and the later Wittgenstein’s ideas are analogous in a deeper (Kantian) way than has often been acknowledged. However, we should not move too fast. Let us return to the Tractatus for a moment, in order to see how Wittgenstein’s early solipsism may in fact show us a way of naturalizing the transcendental self, as surprising as this may sound. This is so because the subject (in the puzzling remarks following Tractatus § 5.6) ceases to be a mysterious object (a “thing”) that needs to be fitted into nature—and hence the “mind and its place in nature” question ceases to trouble us as a philosophical question, as distinguished from a straightforwardly empirical or scientific question— when the subject of solipsism “shrinks to a point without extension” and thus disappears into (not from) the world (though not into the status of any object in the world), as solipsism coincides with “pure realism.” 33 Through the “disappearing” of the solipsistic subject and the coinciding of solipsism and realism, what remains is reality. But this reality, or world, is still “coordinated” with the self (“es bleibt die ihm koordinierte Realität”). Thus, reality will still depend, in terms of “coordination,” on the vanishing subject that is nothing.

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Solipsism and realism, or even naturalism, need not conflict, any more than idealism and realism in Kant do, when the situation is transcendentally analyzed. The analogy of the shrinking solipsistic subject in the later Wittgenstein is the “disappearing ‘we’” carefully examined by Jonathan Lear, in particular (cf. chapter 2 above). This is the “transcendental form of life,” if we may use such an expression. In both versions of transcendental idealism or solipsism (with a “we”), nature and its objects—the world as a totality of objects or states of affairs—are left as they are, and the transcendental self is left as nothing at all, at least nothing over and above those objects. Therefore, there is a sense in which this is a kind of naturalization. The challenge is to incorporate the world-constitutive character (or what I called “constitutional activity”) of the subject into this picture—and it is right here, I am suggesting, that we need pragmatism. So how can constitutivity be naturalized without turning it into (mere) social construction? This is, again, the basic challenge we are dealing with. Only pragmatism, it seems to me, promises to render naturalism and transcendental idealism genuinely compatible. 34 Another dimension of our subjectivity that should be accounted for when we face this challenge is personal identity, which, arguably, similarly presupposes limits, negativity (or at least negation), and a kind of nothingness. This is because in order to be some particular individual, you have to be distinct from others (whether your identity is conceived as traditionally substantial or relational in the sense of, for example, William James); that is, you cannot be something/someone else. 35 Note also—as a more explicit excursus to the philosophy of death and dying—that this also entails that you cannot live forever; otherwise you could do, and be, anything or, indeed, everything, and so could and indeed would everyone else who lived forever. In the end there would be no negations and distinctions, nor any real personal identities, any longer; true individuality would be swiped off as effectively as it is swiped off in death. Hence, you—or I—as a specific individual could not be immortal in this sense, even if human beings in general somehow miraculously could. Therefore, finitude, hence limits and negativity, are transcendentally necessary not just for our contingent individual identities but for the very possibility of having an identity at all. Our being the selves we are presupposes our not being something else, and our not being unlimited in either space or time. These necessary negativities can be seen as dimensions of the transcendental self—or, better, as transcendental features of our own mortal selfhood. PRAGMATIC PLURALISM AND RECOGNITION This formulation—the distinction between the features of the transcendental self and the transcendental features of “our own” selfhood—leads

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us back to the paradox of subjectivity (to use Carr’s formulation): we are both something (empirically identifiable, individual yet also relational psycho-social selves) and “nothing”—that is, transcendental limits of some kind. Why should we think that pragmatism—of all philosophies— can plausibly accommodate this conception of the transcendental self qua limit and nothingness, and the related conceptions of personal identity and freedom? The answer is that, arguably, only a pragmatic pluralism can, at a metalevel, deal with this pragmatic need to shift perspective, or to take multiple perspectives, on our subjectivity. Pragmatist philosophy of self and subjectivity can account for the paradox (only) by rejecting metaphysical realism and embracing a pragmatic pluralism of perspectives or standpoints, none of which postulates any such things as the entities or processes that the world is fundamentally made of. 36 Hence, my intermediary conclusion at this point is that pragmatic pluralism of perspectives is itself a transcendental precondition of the conception of perspectival transcendental subjectivity developed within a pragmatic naturalism that regards the self as a world-involving activity (rather than a “thing”). Accordingly, the pluralism of perspectives can deal with the paradox of subjectivity, that is, the fact that we are both (transcendentally) subjects and (empirically, naturalistically) objects, and that it is “natural” for us to consider ourselves from both perspectives. The argument in favor of this pluralism is transcendental, because it is argued that only pragmatic pluralism can, in the end, make sense of this double character of human subjectivity, which is itself something whose actuality we cannot coherently question. But our problems are not yet thereby eliminated. Who takes these different perspectives, or changes perspective between the transcendental and the empirical? We ourselves, perhaps? Does the perspectivalness of the identity of the self (and of its many perspectives themselves) thus go all the way down—and does this lead to an infinite regress? I am not going to solve this problem here, and certainly at this point pragmatic pluralisms such as William James’s are not very helpful. Perhaps we just have to bite the bullet and admit that there is a certain kind of perspectivalness “all the way down”—that is, that our perspectives on the world and on our own subjectivity are not among the fundamental things there are in the world, just because nothing is. 37 Be that as it may, these reflections also directly apply to the freedom versus determinism issue briefly touched above: the self is both (morally) free and (causally) determined, as Kant already argued, depending on the perspective we adopt. This suggestion leads to a kind of pragmatic compatibilism, which should be regarded as a corollary of pragmatic pluralism about perspectives. This compatibilism is, furthermore, one aspect of the integration of naturalism and culturalism in philosophical anthropology. 38 It also goes well together with a Deweyan rejection of any principled, essentialist dichotomy between culture and nature—and thus

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with the kind of pragmatic integration of culturalist and naturalist philosophical anthropologies proposed in chapter 2. No matter how exactly the concept of freedom is construed here, my account of the self as a limit, as well as the paradox of subjectivity and the pragmatically pluralistic way of dealing with it are all ethically relevant. The ethical significance of the naturalization of the transcendental self lies in the idea that, as the self itself is “nothing” (no object or thing), any ethically relevant “content” to this “empty space” must be provided from the outside—that is, from other selves. Ethics, hence, provides the “positive” story supplementing the “negative” ontological account of the self as nothing, or as a mere limit. The perspectival and pluralistic conception of naturalized transcendental subjectivity I have been developing should therefore be compared to the idea of the self/subjectivity (personal identity) as being constituted by or through relations of recognition among a community of selves: human identity is social, relational, and recognition-dependent (contra, e.g., Cartesian and post-Cartesian theories, both dualist and naturalist or materialist, postulating fully autonomous and/or metaphysically self-sufficient individuals). 39 This is a way of pragmatically relationalizing and, hence, anthropologizing and nonreductively naturalizing the transcendental self. Such a self must be understood as being deeply and irreducibly accommodated in a human form of life. Furthermore, this transcendentally recognition-dependent nature of subjectivity—that is, the transcendental constitution of the self itself through relations of recognition—leads us to a more general ethics-metaphysics entanglement: the metaphysically constitutive relations of (mutual) recognition between selves and/or persons that are necessary for their being the selves they are, and even selves at all (and are, thus, transcendental conditions of selfhood) are irreducibly ethical relations, or at least grounded in ethical relations. There is, in brief, no pure metaphysics of personal identity in the absence of ethical issues of identity. (This, of course, is only a special case of the wider inseparability of ethics and metaphysics based on the idea that any metaphysical postulation presupposes a value-laden human perspective.) Relations of recognition can be said to play a constitutive role in more general pragmatist metaphysics of culture. Such metaphysics, however, must be ethically informed and even ethically grounded, precisely because it is based on irreducibly ethically relevant relations of recognition. It must differ from metaphysically realistic approaches to the metaphysics of culture (or social ontology), in which the nature of cultural entities is examined on the basis of a metaphysical scheme purportedly describing the world from a “God’s-Eye View.” Both reductionist (naturalist) and antireductionist (e.g., Platonist, Popperian) metaphysics of culture typically turn out to presuppose such metaphysically realist background

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assumptions, just as, e.g., emergentism and panpsychism in the philosophy of mind do. 40 Furthermore, relations of recognition, ethical and metaphysical, also play a crucial role in the continuous reflexive (transcendental) (re-)identification and self-constitution of the (late-Wittgensteinian) “plural” transcendental self (the “transcendental we”), which is “nothing” all by itself, because it is being constantly constituted and reconstituted through reflexive engagement and inquiry. Indeed, the acknowledgment—”recognition”—of the other subject, another experiential point of view independent of ourselves, is a decisive test case, a criterion for any adequate pragmatist metaphysics of subjectivity. This will be a genuinely metaphysical endeavor grounded in ethics. Our pragmatist philosophy of subjectivity and selfhood cannot first settle the metaphysical question of what subjectivity is, or whether there is any, in order to turn to ethical issues afterward, but must approach this topic ethically from the very beginning. There is no nonethical, or morally neutral, way of understanding, at a purely theoretical level, our practical world-embeddedness and the transcendental (albeit naturalizable) world-constitutivity, or activity of Gegenstandkonstitution, that is itself reflexively embedded in that world-embeddedness. Thus, the special case of (transcendental) subjectivity, pragmatically investigated and rearticulated, enables us to draw a general metaphilosophical moral about the need to reconsider the relations between ethics and metaphysics. This supplements the view, already tentatively developed in the previous chapter dealing with philosophical anthropology, that ethics and metaphysics just cannot be separated. For a pragmatist, it is not the case—either here or elsewhere—that metaphysical issues are to be solved first and ethical ones only thereafter; on the contrary, the two are intimately entangled all the way from the beginning, as there is no way to examine metaphysically the way the world is absolutely, and any investigation of the world as structured from the perspectives of our selective (subjective) interests will inevitably be colored by ethical considerations. This is itself a transcendental result achieved through an analysis of the way in which our self (subjectivity) is world-embedded and -involving. 41 Moreover, all this is directly relevant to the need to develop an ethics of what I have elsewhere called a “transcendentally guilty” self taking seriously the constitutive role of (actual or potential) guilt as a necessary condition for the possibility of a moral perspective on the world. 42 A further ethical articulation of the “nothingness” of the transcendental self could be the “de-selfing” or “exhaustion” of the self that writers in the mystical traditions have often invoked. What is ethically crucial, according to such thinkers, is not our active self-assertion but the “emptying”—and thus a certain kind of passivity—of the self. There are similar tendencies in Wittgenstein: the self, which (as we saw) is not an object but

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a limit, disappears into the world, as solipsism coincides with realism, as suggested at Tractatus § 5.64. 43 When developing the ethics of the transcendental self, or, possibly, a more detailed account of guilt as a transcendental feature of the moral subject, we might wish to strive for a “de-selfing” account in contrast to emphasizing positive self-assertion. Here, in an important sense, lies the power of what might be called “negative thinking” in this area—thinking in terms of absences, negativities, nothingness, and limits instead of positively characterized existence or capacities. Yet, there is a tension here: any act of de-selfing, self-surrender, emptying of the self, etc., is always already an act of the self, presupposing—transcendentally—the self reflexively surrendering itself to something external to itself. 44 The transcendental argument for the irreducibility of the transcendental self we briefly examined in relation to naturalization above cuts both ways: whether the self engages in naturalization or self-surrendering, it must in some sense be there in order to be able to engage in this, or any, process, even if it “is” itself “nothing.” 45 Moreover, just like perspectivalness (according to the pragmatic pluralism of perspectives sketched above) presupposes selves adopting perspectives, while being themselves only perspectivally constituted, the activities of passive de-selfing paradoxically require the active self. 46 And so it goes, all the way down? Well, philosophy is more about questions than answers. WORLD CATEGORIZATION, THE HORRIBLE, AND LIMITS At this point, I will make a digression from the transcendental examination of world categorizing subjectivity into a somewhat different kind of investigation of the way in which the world is categorized by us—and by “us” we may here mean the transcendental self—and of how such categorizations may be challenged. I will now study the limits of human world categorizations by drawing attention to a very specific perspective from which received categorizations can be challenged, namely, horror fiction depicting category-breaching agents and objects, such as monsters. A philosophical study of such (real or imagined) nonhuman creatures 47 may considerably enrich our picture of human nature—our philosophical anthropology—and our conception of human subjectivity (even transcendental subjectivity), especially with respect to its mortality and finitude, precisely because such a study may lead us to rethink the ways in which we employ the categories we do employ in making sense of the world we live in, and to consider how this sense-making is constrained by certain (transcendental albeit historically mutable) limits. 48 Why and how all this is relevant to our concerns in this chapter and this book will emerge in due course.

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Let us begin by exploring the relation between horror and irrationality through an examination of some conceptual and metaphysical issues surrounding the notion of death. It is, after all, death, in particular our own mortality, that is presumably the source of the darkest horror there can be in human life; death is something we find especially hard to think rationally about, something the contemplation of which can, indeed, drive us into madness. It hardly helps to know that science can deal with death, too. The sense in which death can be scientifically studied—or, more generally, rationally discussed—may not be the sense of death as something mysterious that evokes horror in us. Moreover, the concept of “the undead,” invoked in Gothic fiction both in its seriously artistic and in its more popular forms, can be used to illuminate this horror. 49 This concept, which will be my central example in what follows, is connected in interesting ways with the Christian concept of resurrection, although these concepts are by no means the same. The more specific example to be used in highlighting the aesthetic and epistemological role of this category-breaching category is Bram Stoker’s novel Dracula (1897). I will distinguish between different forms of horror and briefly examine the concepts of the natural and the supernatural, in close relation to the concept(s) of (ir)rationality. Finally, I will offer some reflections on the nature of the experience of being horrified by something deeply different or unnatural. It turns out that our concepts of the natural and the unnatural (or supernatural), just like our concepts of the rational and the irrational, must be relativized to the natural world we take ourselves to be living in; it is just this world, as well as its describability and/or comprehensibility, that is challenged by the conceptual framework of the undead. Thus, my investigation in the rest of this chapter, while partly about Gothic fiction as a threat to scientific (or, perhaps, scientistic) attempts to get rid of mystery and unintelligibility in our relations to the world, is not confined to, or even primarily part of, aesthetics or philosophy of art. My key results concern, rather, the notion of the natural, and hence this discussion follows the one concerning naturalism and culturalism as philosophical anthropologies, as well as the one on the naturalization of the transcendental self. Indeed, the kind of horror and irrationality we find associated with the concept of (human) death may be considered a serious challenge to any rational, including scientific, ways of categorizing reality—a challenge to its characteristic attempt to provide a “full coverage,” a complete, adequate, or even “absolute” picture of reality. Human nature, including our human capacity to describe and categorize reality, is more complex than this, and this is something that our mortality, as thematized by Gothic art among many other perspectives, may help us realize. We should now explicate the concept of the undead in order to throw some light on the connections between the concepts of death, the undead, horror, and madness or irrationality. Some analytic philosophers dealing

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with the metaphysics of death and dying have argued that there are severe conceptual difficulties involved in the very notion of surviving one’s own death, in particular, in the idea of immaterial soul-like existence, and that it is, therefore, deeply irrational to believe in disembodied spiritual existence or, for that matter, in any kind of life after death. Their arguments, which I am not going to deal with in any detail here (cf., however, chapter 4 below), contain important insights that may, however, be problematized precisely by invoking the challenging concept of the “undead.” The undead are, by definition, corporeal and thus material beings; yet, they have died and have “come back,” finding no “rest” in death. Vampires and other monsters, whom presumably no reasonable scientifically educated person in the twenty-first century believes to actually exist, are of course paradigmatic examples of such beings, but similar or closely related conceptual issues concern, in principle, the Christian belief in resurrection. According to the Christian view, or one well-known and widespread version of it, resurrected humans (including Christ as resurrected, even after his ascension to Heaven) are material beings who have died but live again; both the soul and the body will have an eternal life. Yet, unlike the undead, the resurrected will not “come back” to the Earth (though Christ supposedly did that, for a while, and is believed by Christians to do that once again on the Last Day) but will rather eventually go into a transcendent Heaven, or possibly Hell. On the other hand, the undead do not exactly “come back,” either; that is, they do not come back to their normal lives as earthly creatures but to something quite different. A living dead, a living corpse, such as Count Dracula, the famous vampire, is a perverted version of a resurrected human person—or indeed of Christ as resurrected. The Christian background is, obviously, ineliminable from Gothic fiction operating with the concept of the undead—which is one reason for realizing that serious Gothic fiction (literature, film, etc.) is very different from the shallower horror fiction one may consume by watching popular horror movies. Sophisticated Gothic works of art are typically characterized by complex philosophical and psychological problems, particularly by epistemological uncertainty resulting from the mixing of conceptual categories—something that we will reflect on in the following. Therefore, they are also characterized by issues in philosophical anthropology (and philosophical thanatology). In the paradigmatic cases, the undead, characterized in something like the above terms, are, or have been, humans (though some examples might be drawn from popular fiction in which this is not true). Thus, their being undead (or perversely resurrected) is a mark of their utmost inhumanity. Given the important analogy (though by no means identity) between the undead and human beings after resurrection, it is evident that the relevance of the philosophical issues related to the notion of the undead is

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wider than one might initially think. In any event, it is clear that no simple anti-Cartesian argument against the possibility of un- or disembodied postmortal existence is efficient against views in which the category of the undead figures centrally. The undead could be as inseparable mixtures of “soul” and “body” as we are, although their “life of the soul” would undoubtedly be very different from ours. In some cases, especially the case of zombies, they would not be “minded” at all. A crucial issue is whether the undead are so much as possible entities. If they are, this result should affect our metaphysical views on death and the mind. We should bear in mind that resurrected humans are not immortal souls, because they are, after all, corporeal; nor is the category of the undead the same as the category of ghosts. The latter are usually thought to be immaterial, though in some cases vaguely materialized. Ghosts might actually be seen as occupying an intermediary category between immaterial soul-like entities, e.g., Cartesian substantial souls that might continue to exist after the destruction of the body, and the fully corporeal undead; ghosts have also, in a way, “come back” to, or have never entirely “gone away” from, this world. In a sense, if we find materiality necessary for agency and if we maintain that ghosts are immaterial agents, it may even seem that ghosts are (metaphysically) impossible in a sense different from the mere non-actuality of the “undead.” 50 What does this have to do with the limits of human subjectivity and selfhood? Now, obviously, we twenty-first century educated Western people, within the scientifically advanced culture we live in, think that it is thoroughly irrational to believe in the existence of the undead. Science has rightly taught us that there are no such things, or any supernatural things in general. If we “see a ghost,” we will immediately start looking for some natural explanation for such an experience. 51 More importantly from our present point of view, however, the very conceptual framework of the undead—a framework that can be used for the purpose of evoking horror in a work of art, for instance—challenges some of our cherised assumptions of rationality. If the undead are even possible entities, we may have to rethink our ways of categorizing reality. I can think of no convincing argument against their possibility, although I am strongly (quite unshakably) convinced that such things do not actually exist. At least, I do think that the undead are (even relatively easily) imaginable entities, though I may be mistaken here—I would be the first to admit that, for all I know, my intuitions about what is imaginable and what is not are fallible. We may in any event further examine whether, and how, we should revise our standard view of, say, science as rational description and explanation of reality when challenged by the sheer possibility of there being things not dreamt of in our science. Such an examination, motivated by the concept of the undead, should be based on more specific

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insights into the kind of horror we may imaginatively experience upon meeting such creatures. THE AESTHETICS (AND METAPHYSICS) OF THE HORRIBLE These thoughts lead us to the aesthetics of the horrible, in which the notions of irrationality, madness, and categorization play a significant role. The metaphysical and conceptual issues briefly dealt with above have applications in the field of aesthetics. As is well known, the undead—vampires, zombies, and other horrible monsters—busily wander around in the world of popular fiction, though in some cases the boundary between “high” and “popular” art is vague; just think about, for instance, Stoker’s Dracula (1897) and Francis Ford Coppola’s movie (1992) based upon it. While the importance of fictional characters, including vampires, for our understanding of evil has been rightly emphasized by scholars, it should also be noted that nonfictional evil—whose many forms we encounter simply by opening the television and watching the latest news—may be a challenge to our categories of understanding, something that makes us think about concepts such as “madness” or “insanity.” My emphasis on fiction here by no means precludes our need to cope with these nonfictional challenges as well. 52 According to an influential epistemologically focused view on the aesthetic significance of horror, the horribility of such fictional figures as vampires is based on the breaking down of our ordinary categories of intelligibility. 53 There are, however, different varieties of such a breakdown and thus of horror. First, we may speak of the naturally horrible or terrifying (e.g., a tiger, an earthquake, a car accident)—i.e., something actually existing and potentially harmful, which may destroy one’s life but does not challenge our ordinary categories of intelligibility and which is, therefore, rationally and, in principle, scientifically explainable as a natural object, event, or process in the world. Secondly, in contrast, there is the supernaturally horrible or terrifying (e.g., a vampire, a ghost, a zombie)—i.e., something that does not actually exist but is, for all we know, logically or conceptually, or even metaphysically, possible and, as such, is a challenge to our standard ways of categorizing reality in terms of, e.g., the concepts of life and death. 54 Finally, there is the distinct category of the totally unintelligible or unconceptualizable and therefore horrible (e.g., a situation in which time or temporality, or other Kantian-like preconditions of meaningfully arranged experience, break down completely, as in some of H. P. Lovecraft’s horror stories)—i.e., something totally irrational, “mad,” impossible, or noncategorizable, at least for us, as the kind of world-experiencing and -conceptualizing beings we in fact are. In terms of this threefold classification, the humanly natural and almost universal fear or horror of death does not constitute a category of its

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own; rather, the horror of death can be and usually is involved in all of the three forms of the horrible. I do not mean to provide any exact definition of “horror,” or of related notions such as fear, but I find it natural to speak about horror in cases in which one is threatened by death, the loss of one’s life. In horror, no rational discussion or calculation is possible. Horror may be a “natural” feeling or state in some given situation, even in a situation in which something supernatural—really or imaginatively—happens; it would, however, be odd to describe it as “rational,” even though it may be rational for us to be afraid of various kinds of things. Moreover, the mixing of the categories of life and death in the concept of the undead is more serious than, say, the mixing of the categories of the human and the machine, or of the human and the animal, although these may be extremely terrifying, too, and may even be partly involved in the notion of the undead. It seems that we can incorporate in our scientific worldview new concepts referring to entities that are thought to be some sort of mixtures between the human and the machine, for example. To some extent, the mixing of the categories of life and death may also be scientifically acceptable—consider, say, viruses, which are thought to be neither fully living nor “dead,” or the debates over the most plausible criteria of death, e.g., in terms of total termination of brain activity (cf. chapter 1). But in a more profound sense, life and death cannot be mixed, e.g., in the sense of claiming that a certain person—the whole person, rather than some of her/his cells or some parts of her/his brain—is both dead and alive. Such claims do not, at the present moment, at least, belong to our rational classifications of things, either in science or in ordinary life. To claim they do would be to be committed to utter madness, to step out of the language game(s) in which words like “life,” “to live,” “death,” and “to die” have their meaningful use. Let us take a look at the case of the vampire, Dracula in particular, in some more detail. 55 Note, first, that Dracula may in fact not be the best possible example of an “undead” figure, as defined above, because, at least according to the introductory story of Coppola’s 1992 movie (a story not to be found in Stoker’s novel), Dracula, unlike other vampires, never died but became an immortal “living corpse” after having cursed God. Yet, I use Dracula as my main example here, because this vampire is obviously one of the best known among all demonic characters in Gothic literature. Dracula, as depicted in Stoker’s novel, is physically threatening, dangerous, fearsome, but also dirty, disgusting; one feels both fear or horror and disgust when confronting him. As the narrator of the novel tells us: “His face was not a good face; it was hard, and cruel, and sensual, and his big white teeth, that looked all the whiter because his lips were so red, were pointed like an animal’s.” 56 Moreover, the disgust is not just physical but also, more deeply, conceptual. Dracula is “in between” the ordinary classes of things, breaks the normal “forms” of things. As Noel Carroll’s theory well explains, horror as an artistic way of expression can

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be compared to postmodernist ideas about the inconsistency and unstability of our conceptual and classificatory frameworks. If this is so, then an undead figure like Dracula is a most philosophical construction. As a being that breaks the dead versus alive classification, in particular, he is an epistemically threatening being, something that simply does not fit our scientific or everyday categories. He threatens us with his “polymorphic” and in this sense non-categorizable way of being: he lies not only between death and life but also between the past and the present, East and West, barbary and civilization, irrationality and rationality, the uncanny and the homely. 57 The threat he poses is therefore not only physical but also, perhaps primarily, epistemic and conceptual. Or, one might say that the threat is physical from the point of view of the characters within the novel but epistemic-conceptual—or even transcendental, pertaining to categorizability—from our point of view, for us readers, who do not, or at least need not, believe that Dracula is real. 58 On the basis of this reading of Stoker’s novel, we may say that the key philosophical issue of the horrible lies in concepts such as uncanniness, otherness, unknowability, incomprehensibility, indescribability, and epistemic fragility—in the confrontation with something that we cannot see as anything else but evil, filthy, or deeply irrational (in a word, inhuman). The ways of understanding and conceptualizing reality that are built into our ordinary practices and habits of thought, whether scientific or commonsensical, are violated when we face such an imagined reality. This is a philosophical-anthropological observation, because our own humanity may, through such a violation, break down. Of course, in some cases we may be even more upset and horrified when something definitely human—a real person, such as Adolf Hitler—turns out to be monstrous, worse than any of the evil fictional characters we could think of. Such an experience may even be strengthened if we experience a partly fictional work of art based on the life of such a person, or on the historically real monstrosities that really took place, because fictional and nonfictional evils may be—again challengingly—mixed up in such an artwork. In its celebration of the unknowable, the indescribable, and the uncanny, Gothic fiction can, as has often been noted, be characterized by features such as excess and transgression. Furthermore, Lovecraft’s horror stories—or, mutatis mutandis, Franz Kafka’s often fantastic novels and short stories—are usually somewhat realistic until something inexplainable (such as Gregor Samsa’s metamorphosis to an insect) takes place, something which indicates that the world we thought to be familiar and safe is not at all like that. Reality is transformed into something thoroughly incomprehensible and mad. Our sense of reality and its categories is fundamentally distracted. In particular, our trust in the scientific worldview collapses (not outside the artwork, of course, but within the projected world of such stories). This is also a central theme in Dracula:

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something as premodern as vampires can exist in the modern, scientifically and technologically advanced England of the late nineteenth century. As soon as something like this must be admitted by the characters in the story, their categorization of the world breaks into pieces. 59 It may be noted that even in the case of the naturally horrible, some moderate version of the breaking down of conceptual categories and thus of “getting lost” in the world may be involved. For example, many people are afraid of flying; it may be thought that the very idea of human beings as flying is a conceptual confusion—humans just don’t fly, do they? However, as airplanes are part of our familiar everyday life, we have become used to this kind of “mixing up” of categories; even many of those who do fear flying usually think that, while their fear may be naturally explainable in terms of psychology, with reference to, say, the loss of control involved in the passenger cabin, there is “really” nothing to be afraid of in normal passenger air traffic, at least compared to other much more risky forms of traffic. In any case, the one who fears flying—just like the one who is afraid of vampires or other undead—is presumably above all afraid of dying. The horror of death is the context within which all different forms of horror can be distinguished. Heidegger may have got something essentially right in arguing that we humans are living toward death in the sense that the expectation and inevitability of death transcendentally color our entire existence (cf. chapter 4 below). In this sense, the horror of death has no specific object and is thus to be distinguished from “normal” (nontranscendental) kinds of fear; whatever the immediate object encountered or imagined (a tiger, an airline crash, a vampire, an unconceptualizable “something”), the “mood” of the horror is provided by the expected, imagined, or acknowledged, but in any case inevitable, loss of one’s life. The fear of death is, then, a transcendental fear, and qua transcendental, it is not just fear but horror, an expression of being horrified at the possibility—or, indeed, inevitability—of losing the world, in all of its various categorizations and categorizabilities. REFLEXIVE REFLECTIONS These reflections are, thus, intimately related to the familiar Heideggerian view that our existence is irreducibly temporal (even though I am not following Heidegger in any specific sense here). Temporality as a condition of intelligibility (in Kantian terms, as a form of pure intuition) is hence highly central in the philosophy of the horrible, insofar as the latter—as in the case of the undead—is conceptualized in terms of the breaking down of our usual conceptual categories. Now, the concepts of the natural and the supernatural are of course crucial here, and they obviously require further scrutiny. What is natural—and what defines our

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notion of the naturally horrible—is relative to our world (the world categorially constituted by the transcendental self, as suggested earlier in this chapter); the relevant notion of relativity, moreover, can be construed with reference to the set of possible worlds in which the natural laws of the actual world (or of “sufficiently similar” ones) hold. The undead are un- or supernatural for us, in our world, because they do not obey the natural laws governing all known living and dying organisms; the aesthetic effect of such entities is to a great extent based on their being partly natural (corporeal, acting) and partly supernatural—and thus “in between,” mixing up conceptual categories, as we have seen. This is also why relations of recognition (also discussed earlier in this chapter) are difficult or even impossible in the case of monsters. We may be unable to recognize, or acknowledge, say, the suffering of a creature such as a vampire, and by in a way inviting us to do so Gothic fiction may be ethically engaging. The typology of different forms of horror must, then, be relativized to the world we actually live in and whose objects, events, and processes our science reliably explains and predicts. For different (possible but not actual—for us) creatures, the challenging of their conceptual categories might result in forms of horror quite different from ours. Aesthetically, a most interesting challenge would be to apply, reflexively, these concepts to themselves. How could someone whose very existence breaks down our conceptual categories her- or himself experience a similar breakdown? That is, what would it be like for, say, a vampire to experience something truly horrible and/or unintelligible? Can we imagine anything like that? Similarly, can we really imagine what it would be like for a person we consider mad, or deeply mentally disturbed, to arrive at a worldview very different from the one s/he actually has, e.g., a more “normal” or “cured” one, something that we take ourselves to have? These questions may lack clear answers. The undead, such as Count Dracula, are, we may assume, capable of feeling horrified; that is also part of their aesthetic effect upon us. However, we must again be careful here: for example, zombies, lacking mental life altogether, can hardly experience such feelings, and even the “emotional life” of a vampire may be so inhuman that it might be difficult for us to ascribe our notions of fear and horror to such an entity. Yet, a vampire can, presumably, be afraid of, e.g., a crucifix, can’t he or she? He or she might even be afraid of something that we can hardly understand or even imagine. On the other hand, an undead creature could hardly fear, or be horrified at, death itself in the way we can. Let us return to Dracula. His dirtiness and irrationality, the fact that he cannot be accommodated by either scientific or commonsensical classifications, is not restricted to his evil and violent character. There is a deeper paradox lying in this figure. We might be led to think that Dracula, like many other monsters, is such an inhuman figure that we cannot

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adopt toward him the kind of attitude we adopt toward other human beings. Our attitude to him, presumably, cannot be a Wittgensteinian “attitude towards a soul”—or can it? It seems that the profound way in which Dracula challenges our conceptual categories lies in his being also a suffering creature whom we must pity, someone for whom getting rid of the nightmare of eternal life would even amount to a kind of ironic Christian atonement. 60 Before the crucial battle in Dracula, Mina Harker tells the others to feel pity for Dracula, too: “That poor soul who has wrought all this misery is the saddest case of all. [. . .] You must be pitiful to him, too, though it may not hold your hands from his destruction.” 61 As Dracula is in the end destroyed, he finds peace and his sufferings are over. From the point of view this Christlike figure and the motive of atonement, Dracula’s ambiguity is highlighted. He breaks our categories, once again, by being, somewhat metonymically, both Satan and Christ. On the one hand, he is evil through and through, almost an Antichrist, the one who produces unspeakable suffering and misery; on the other hand, he suffers himself, and through his suffering, he also releases and “saves” his victims, including Mina Harker. 62 The closing of Dracula is not unambiguous, either, however. Van Helsing’s final words, “We want no proofs; we ask none to believe us!,” 63 can also be read ironically. A “happy ending” would be too easy a resolution. The fundamentally problematic nature of human life, the fact that surprising, un- or supernatural events and the distractions of reality they produce cannot be a priori rejected, is again highlighted toward the end of the novel. The possibility of evil and the fundamental inexplainability, incomprehensibility, or intractability of this possibility remain ineliminable features of our human world. The inexplainability of reality itself, the fact that the world—both in its good and evil aspects—is an irresolvable mystery for us humans, can be seen as a key theme of Dracula. This is a feature of the world itself, the world as we humans know and experience it, that Stoker’s work describes—and it seems to be a feature of our world not adequately accounted for by science. “There are always mysteries in life,” Van Helsing says and asks his friends: “Do you know all the mysteries of life and death?” And he immediately continues: “Do you not think that there are things which you cannot understand; and yet which are; that some people see things that others cannot? But there are things old and new which must not be contemplate [sic] by men’s eyes, because they know—or think they know—some things which other men have told them. Ah, it is the fault of our science that it wants to explain all; and if it explain not, then it says there is nothing to explain.” 64 Van Helsing, a scientist and “metaphysician” himself, thus abandons the pursuit of a “total” or “absolute” scientific conception of the world. This need not be interpreted as the thesis of the novel itself, but Dracula might be seen as a novel attempting to open our eyes, a text whose author—or, rather, implied author, as narratologists like to put it—tries

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to maintain something from the original human openness to the mystical realms of being. Without the religious context of the book, nothing like this could be achieved. On a metalevel, Dracula can be read not only as a piece of Gothic fiction raising feelings of horror in us by its symbolic descriptions of our conflicting ways of being in the world, but also as a thesis about the very nature of human ways of describing and categorizing the world. It can be read as claiming that our categories are never fully stabilized, never metaphysically secured—that they are, indeed, ineliminably human ones, even when they are established by the transcendental self. They are not, pace metaphysical realists, Nature’s or the World’s “own” categories, which (as it were) could open up for us reality as it is in itself. On the contrary, our engagements with the world we live in constantly transform the categories within which we find such engagements possible. Our own way of being human may thereby also be transformed. Our categorizations of the world and of ourselves are, then, never immutable or eternal; they must dynamically change in the course of the changes of our lives themselves. This is why transcendental philosophy, and philosophical anthropology, must turn pragmatic. Insofar as Stoker’s novel (and, possibly, many other Gothic works of fiction) can be read as a reminder of this way in which the categorization of reality is tied to our limited and changing perspectives, it is not merely a novel dealing with our epistemological uncertainty and the limits of human knowledge, that is, about the possibility that something quite unexpected may happen, but also a literary treatment of the metaepistemological transcendental issue of categorization itself. Let us draw some more general conclusions based on our case study of Dracula. It may, as the example of Dracula testifies, be impossible for us to truly understand the imagined “inner life” of (for us) merely possible creatures, such as the undead, even if those creatures are in some sense imaginable from our point of view, because the very classification of things into “natural” and “unnatural” that we rely on and use in classifying the undead themselves as unnatural would be quite different from their point of view, were such a point of view ever actualized. 65 Mina Harker’s request to feel pity for Dracula might then itself be ironic: for all she knows, she might be mistaken in her assumption that there is something (anything) to be understood in Dracula. If Dracula, as the category-breaching being he is, is truly, deeply, different, in some sense completely an “other” from the human point of view, then there might be nothing “in” him that we could ever understand or, a fortiori, pity. Perhaps he is, once again, in between categories, this time between the categories of the comprehensible and the incomprehensible; and it might be entirely incomprehensible for us how anyone or anything could lie between those categories.

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The deepest horror of all might indeed lie in our fear of becoming incomprehensible or unintelligible—to others, to ourselves, or both. We may fear that the challenge to our conceptual categories and classifications launched by the aesthetic use of the concept of the undead, for instance, irrecoverably problematizes the very natural versus supernatural categorization we have relied on and agreed on with our fellow humans. Or, obviously, we might be afraid of becoming severely mentally ill. In these cases, as varied as they may be, our world would clash into pieces, lose its rational integrity. We might even, as a philosophical thought experiment, imagine, or rather, desperately try to imagine, a world in which a “transcendental chaos” would be a rule: a world, that is, in which the objects and events of our environment would not possess a sufficient, to us recognizable degree of stability and variety, so as to render self-conscious human cognitive experience of determinate objects and events so much as possible. 66 If we are afraid of transcendental chaos, thus defined, or are afraid of madness or utter irrationality interpreted as a transcendental chaos in this sense, we are afraid of losing the integrity of experience itself—or, even worse, of losing self-consciousness and subjectivity, which, of course, we do lose in death. All of these cases are, unsurprisingly, entangled with our horror of death, although mere horror of death as such is too simple a concept to cover these different conceivable situations (or, better, conceivable inconceivabilities). CONCLUDING REMARKS Generally speaking, we should notice the occasionally ingeniously selfconscious reflexivity characteristic of Gothic works of art, comparable to the reflexivity at work in transcendental examinations of human selfhood. When describing this human—and inhuman—world, e.g., extreme evil, Gothic art often describes the very difficulties involved in the project of describing the world at all—and the impossibility of describing it as it is “in itself.” Admittedly, I have not shown, merely by considering horror fiction and the possibility of the undead, that (say) science, or the philosophical interpretation of science known as scientific realism, would really be in trouble in the project of representing and categorizing the world. But I have argued that world categorization is a more complex matter than we might initially think—a reflexively complex one, that is, involving a transcendental reflection on what our subjectivity or selfhood ultimately comes down to. We should also note that Gothic works of art may even question their own ability to describe or represent anything, including the difficulty of describing or representing anything. Reflexively, they thus question not only the absoluteness of the scientific perspective on reality but also their own status as works of art. It is commonplace to note that the problematization of the project of narrating about or linguistical-

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ly describing the world is a crucial feature of particularly twentieth-century Gothic; it may, however, be more interesting to note that this conception of the horrible can be connected with the ways in which the notions of irrationality and madness are used in our accounts of our own difficulties with describing the world we live in, and ourselves. We may, simply, feel like living in an irrational world, a world that can only be described as “crazy” or “mad”—and in that sense indescribable. The dialectics of description, or representation, runs deep. 67 The artistic functions of the category of the undead are largely based on the conceptual strangeness, uncanniness, of this category and on the resulting epistemological problematizing of our normal human abilities to categorize—scientifically or otherwise—a meaningfully structured reality. The undead—or even the possibility of imagining them—are, as we have seen, a challenge to our conceptual capacities, to our “rational” being in the world, even if we are convinced that there actually are no such things. They thus challenge, like death itself does, our very ability to occupy a subjective perspective on the world, a world-categorizing perspective—and thus they challenge our sense of self in general, at a transcendental level. Realizing this may lead us to appreciate the philosophical value of Gothic fiction, but also the value of thought experiments such as Westphal’s “transcendental chaos” in which the very possibility of cognitive experience of objects and events would break down. I have, in other words, tried to point out the philosophical relevance of art (in particular, horror fiction, but in principle other forms of art as well) in our ongoing reflections on what it is to describe a world that we occasionally experience as undescribable or even inexperienceable. I have, that is, tried to show that our understanding of ourselves may be enriched by attempts to imagine “mad,” category-breaking entities and situations apparently very different from what human life looks like in the light of science and common sense. This chapter has obviously only taken some careful steps toward a pragmatically naturalized rearticulation of the transcendental self and its world-categorizing capacities, and their limits, in its ethical and metaphysical (and aesthetic) dimensions. My main purpose has been to sketch a conceptual and theoretical space within which it is possible to further examine the notion of the transcendental self in a pragmatist, yet genuinely and irreducibly transcendental, manner, and to suggest aesthetic ways of reflexively reflecting on the world-categorizing character of human selfhood. 68 One of my key conclusions is that the ethical and metaphysical dimensions of the notion of the transcendental self that have been explored are inextricably related to the concepts of limits and nothingness, whose metaphysical articulations must be understood as deeply entangled with the ethics of human finitude. Hence, this has, in a way, been an exercise in what might be called “negative thinking”: it is in terms of absence, loss, nothingness, loss of

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categorizability, and (more humanly) death and mortality, rather than in terms of positive ontology or positively characterized human capacities, that we ought to think about our selfhood and our subjective perspectives on the world. Similarly, it is in terms of guilt and failure that we should understand our moral relations to other people, including relations of recognition and failed recognition. In particular, the pragmatic method in philosophy can and must draw attention to such negativities, which “make a difference” in our conceptual world categorization much more concretely, and often more shockingly, than positive ontological or ethical concepts do. Death is, arguably, the fundamental negativity. In the next chapter, I will more explicitly turn to the concept of death, having now (in this chapter and the previous one) offered an outline of my general approach to philosophical anthropology and (pragmatic) transcendental philosophy of the self, an approach that will be utilized in the following chapters. While this chapter may seem to have taken a rather long detour via the transcendental self and the aesthetics of horror, it has, I hope, served the main purposes of this book by showing how a transcendental approach to the relation between the self and the world differs from the more mainstream naturalized approaches. My discussion has focused on the notion of limits, invoked in transcendental philosophy as centrally as in imagined beings violating received rational categorizations (and hence limits), such as vampires. This extended account of what it means to be “limited”—limited in space and time, as well as limited in terms of various actual and possible categorizations of reality—is a vital background for the examination of death itself as a human limit, and condition, to follow. NOTES 1. For a metaphilosophical discussion of the idea of philosophical anthropology, see chapter 2 above. This chapter immediately continues some of the explorations of the previous chapter. For an earlier argument of mine along the same lines, see Sami Pihlström, “Subjectivity as Negativity and as Limit: On the Metaphysics and Ethics of the Transcendental Self, Pragmatically Naturalized,” in Gabriele Gava and Robert Stern (eds.), Kant, Pragmatism, and Transcendental Philosophy (London and New York: Routledge, 2016). 2. In this extremely general sense, I suppose it is fair to characterize the overall approach of this entire book to the issues of death and mortality as “Kantian.” 3. I will be using the concept of the transcendental self in a broadly Kantian sense, as will be apparent throughout the chapter, but it should be kept in mind that for Kant philosophical questions (i.e., the famous trio, “what can I know?,” “what ought I to do?,” “what may I hope?”) are ultimately questions about what a human being is. Note that this chapter is primarily written to an audience that, while perhaps already to some extent sympathetic to both pragmatism and transcendental philosophy, still needs to be convinced about the need to employ the concept of the transcendental self. The book as a whole can be regarded as a more comprehensive (though partly only implicit) argument for the integration of pragmatism and transcendental philosophy.

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4. For some previous attempts at a specifically pragmatist articulation of transcendental philosophy (or a retranscendentalized version of pragmatism), see, e.g., Sami Pihlström, Naturalizing the Transcendental: A Pragmatist View (Amherst, NY: Prometheus/Humanity Books, 2003); and Pihlström, “Rearticulating the Transcendental,” Inquiry 48 (2004), 297–314. As will become clear, there are many ways in which my project of pragmatizing transcendental philosophy differs from the better known project of this kind advanced by such major philosophers as Karl-Otto Apel and Jürgen Habermas. 5. Thus, this chapter is not an historical inquiry but, rather, a metaphilosophical attempt (partly continuing the metaphilosophical reflections of the previous chapter) to sketch a way in which two apparently different philosophical frameworks can, or should, approach the notion of the transcendental self. The approach to the possible integration of transcendental philosophy and pragmatism here is indebted to my earlier work on the topic, including Pihlström, Naturalizing the Transcendental (cited above); and Sami Pihlström, Pragmatist Metaphysics: An Essay on the Ethical Grounds of Ontology (London and New York: Continuum, 2009). In the early sections of this chapter, I also borrow some formulations from Sami Pihlström, “Pragmatism and Naturalized Transcendental Subjectivity,” Contemporary Pragmatism 6 (2009), 1–13. 6. See Jaegwon Kim, Mind in a Physical World (Cambridge, MA and London: MIT Press, 1998). On emergence more generally, see Achim Stephan, Emergenz: Von der Unvorhersagbarkeit zur Selbstorganisation (Dresden and München: Dresden University Press, 1999). See also Charbel Nino El-Hani and Sami Pihlström, “Emergence Theories and Pragmatic Realism,” Essays in Philosophy 2 (2002), www.humboldt.edu/~essays, available online. 7. See, e.g., John Dewey, Experience and Nature (Chicago: Open Court, 1986; 1st ed. 1925, 2nd ed. 1929). 8. Hilary Putnam, The Threefold Cord (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999). 9. See again El-Hani and Pihlström, “Emergence Theories and Pragmatic Realism,” for more details. 10. For some recent literature on panpsychism, see, e.g., David Skrbina, Panpsychism in the West (Cambridge, MA and London: MIT Press, 2005). For a discussion of panpsychism in relation to William James’s pragmatism, see Sami Pihlström, “The Trail of the Human Serpent Is over Everything”: Jamesian Perspectives on Mind, World, and Religion (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 2008), chapter 7. 11. See again Skrbina, Panpsychism in the West. 12. This essay is available in Thomas Nagel, Mortal Questions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979). 13. Another major contemporary philosopher who expresses considerable sympathy to panpsychism is David J. Chalmers; see especially Chalmers, The Conscious Mind: In Search of a Fundamental Theory (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), pp. 293–301. As I have examined panpsychism in some detail elsewhere (see note 10 above), I will skip more detailed examinations here. 14. See C. D. Broad, The Mind and Its Place in Nature (London: Kegan Paul, 1925). 15. These famous essays can be found in vol. 1 of Charles S. Peirce, The Essential Peirce, eds. Nathan Houser et al. (the Peirce Edition Project) (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992–1998). 16. This situation is, however, changing, largely thanks to phenomenologists such as Dan Zahavi and Sara Heinämaa. See, e.g., Dan Zahavi (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Contemporary Phenomenology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), especially Heinämaa’s essay on embodiment. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, of course, is an exception among classical phenomenologists, given his strong emphasis on embodied subjectivity. 17. For an interesting recent debate on whether pragmatism and/or the rejection of metaphysical realism commits us to an implausibly “constructivist” picture of the mind-dependence of reality, see the exchange between Devitt and Putnam in M. Baghramian (ed.), Reading Putnam, (London and New York: Routledge, 2013) (i.e., Michael

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Devitt, “Hilary and Me: Tracking down Putnam on the Realism Issue”; and Hilary Putnam, “Comments on Michael Devitt,” pp. 101–20 and 121–26, respectively). From a Kantian point of view, the problem with this controversy is that the properly transcendental character of the notion of constitutive dependence is not acknowledged (even by Putnam, whose position is otherwise much closer to mine than Devitt’s). 18. Versions of this argument could (though not in exactly these words) be found in philosophers like Hilary Putnam and Charles Taylor. See, e.g., Putnam, Words and Life, ed. James Conant (Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 1994); and Taylor, Philosophical Arguments (Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 1995). 19. I have explored this in some more detail in Sami Pihlström, “Emergent Truth and a Blind Spot—an Argument against Physicalism,” Facta Philosophica 8 (2006), 79–101. Cf. also the argument pursued in chapter 2 above: the reductive naturalist cannot fully naturalize her- or himself into a mere natural-scientific object. 20. See David Carr, The Paradox of Subjectivity: The Self in the Transcendental Tradition (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1999). Carr’s work focuses on Kant and Husserl, but the transcendental pragmatist can easily agree with his main argument. 21. See Nelson Goodman, Ways of Worldmaking (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1978). 22. I have repeatedly discussed this particularly promising synthesis of phenomenology and pragmatism with Sara Heinämaa. 23. See, for instance, Carr’s in my view compelling critique of Daniel Dennett’s notion of the “intentional stance” in Carr, The Paradox of Subjectivity, chapter 4 (cited above). 24. See, e.g., Joseph Margolis, “The Passing of Peirce’s Realism,” Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society 29 (1993), 293–330 (at 323); Margolis, “Comparing Dummett’s and Putnam’s Realisms,” The Philosophical Quarterly 44 (1994), 519–27 (at 523). This point is more comprehensively developed, e.g., in Margolis, Historied Thought, Constructed World (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995); and Margolis, Pragmatism Ascendent (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2012). 25. I am not going to properly define “metaphysical realism” here. It is, roughly, the view that the world, including the fundamental metaphysical nature of minds or selves, is ontologically independent of the mind(s) inquiring into the world, including in particular our language-use, concepts, theories, etc. For more careful recent formulations, see, for example, Hilary Putnam’s and his many critics’ reflections on Putnam’s various twists and turns in the debate on internal and metaphysical realism in Baghramian (ed.), Reading Putnam. (One of Putnam’s classical formulations is available in Putnam, Reason, Truth and History [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981], chapter 3.) 26. It should be noted that there are significantly stronger forms of realism to be found within the pragmatist tradition itself than the relatively moderate realism (subordinated to something like transcendental idealism and/or transcendental pragmatism) that I am prepared to maintain here. Philosophers inspired by Peirce’s defense of “extreme scholastic realism” and “real generals” would presumably argue that my realism is too weak. This is a large issue that cannot be pursued here. See, e.g., Douglas R. Anderson and Carl R. Hausman, Conversations on Peirce: Reals and Ideals (New York: Fordham University Press, 2012); cf. my exploration of Peircean realism of generality (with plenty of references to secondary literature) in Sami Pihlström, Pragmatist Metaphysics: An Essay on the Ethical Grounds of Ontology (London and New York: Continuum, 2009), chapter 6. 27. The purpose of these brief historical remarks is not to make interpretive claims about the classical figures or lines of thought mentioned. In particular, I do not want to take any stand on how Wittgenstein ought to be read. I am indebted to Bernard Williams’s famous account of Wittgenstein (early and late) as a transcendental idealist, though—and I will get back to this theme in due course. See Williams, “Wittgenstein and Idealism,” in Williams, Moral Luck (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,

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1981). Cf. also Jonathan Lear’s transcendental reading cited in chapter 2. For a recent critical comment on Williams, from a broadly “New Wittgensteinian” perspective, see Stephen Mulhall, “‘Hopelessly Strange’: Bernard Williams’ Portrait of Wittgenstein as a Transcendental Idealist,” European Journal of Philosophy 17 (2008), 386–404. 28. See especially William James, Pragmatism: A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking (1907), eds. Frederick H. Burkhardt, Fredson Bowers, and Ignas K. Skrupskelis (Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 1975), Lecture VII. For a transcendental reinterpretation of James’s “we,” see Pihlström, “The Trail of the Human Serpent Is over Everything,” chapter 5. 29. See again Carr, The Paradox of Subjectivity (cited above). 30. Human freedom is also, arguably, a kind of nothingness—at least according to Jean-Paul Sartre’s existentialist philosophy of freedom: as radically free, we are not, at least not yet, committed—or destined—to doing something (anything) in particular, to filling the empty space of the self with some (any) specific content; yet, we are not free to avoid doing something: the necessity of future choice is always there to haunt our experience of freedom. A key reference here is, of course, Jean-Paul Sartre’s L’Être et le Néant (1943), English translation by Hazel E. Barnes: Being and Nothingness (London: Routledge, 1958). However, in addition to existentialism, analytic philosophers have also, at least since Meinong and Russell, busily examined problems of nonbeing and unreality, including even the concept of a hole as a metaphysical example of the relevance of nonbeing. This vast discussion is obviously beyond the scope of the present inquiry. I am referring to the issue of freedom only in passing, but given the contextualization of the general problem of the transcendental self in the “self-understanding” challenge identified above, freedom is obviously also a central topic to be addressed in more comprehensive transcendental philosophical anthropology focusing on that challenge. Freedom, of course, is also a major theme in William James’s “The Will to Believe,” available as chapter 1 of James, The Will to Believe and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy (1897), eds. Frederick H. Burkhardt, Fredson Bowers, and Ignas K. Skrupskelis (Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 1979). 31. Wittgenstein, Tractatus, § 5.641. Henry E. Allison, in his Kant’s Transcendental Idealism: An Interpretation and Defense (New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press, 1983), argues for a very interesting and important comparison between Kant’s transcendental subject of apperception and Wittgenstein’s metaphysical subject in this regard (see pp. 290–93); moreover, it is interesting to note that this comparison, as far as I can see, does not as such occur in the “Revised and Enlarged Edition” of Allison’s book (Yale University Press, 2004) at all. In the earlier edition, Allison observes that, “following Wittgenstein’s suggestion, we can say that just as the eye cannot see itself because it is not part of its own visible field, so the subject of apperception cannot think itself as object because it is not itself part of its ‘conceptual field.’ Finally, since the subject of apperception cannot think itself (or be thought) as an object at all, it cannot think itself (or be thought) as a noumenal object” (pp. 292–93). In addition to Kant, Husserl, and other major classics of transcendental philosophy, also less central figures like Solomon Maimon (cf. his Essay on Transcendental Philosophy [1790], trans. and eds. Alistair Welchman, Henry Somers-Hall, Merten Reglitz, and Nick Midgley [London: Continuum, 2010], offering an ontological—not only epistemological— version of Kantian critical philosophy) should be seen as relevant to more detailed historical explorations of the origins and development of this idea. 32. See, in addition to Bernard Williams’s above-cited influential paper, “Wittgenstein and Idealism,” especially Jonathan Lear, Open Minded: Working Out the Logic of the Soul (Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 1998), especially the essay, “The Disappearing ‘We’” (cited in chapter 2 above). I am not trying to determine here whether we should understand Wittgenstein’s accounts of the “we” (in the Investigations or elsewhere) as critical transformations or, rather, deconstructions of Kant’s transcendental subject. Cf. here also Constantine Sandis, “Understanding the Lion for Real,” in António Marques and Nuno Venturinha (eds.), Knowledge, Language and Mind: Wittgenstein’s Thought in Progress (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2012), pp. 138–61; as

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well as P. M. S. Hacker, “Kant’s Transcendental Deduction—a Wittgensteinian Critique,” ibid., pp. 11–35. 33. I am of course referring to the famous passage of the Tractatus (§ 5.64): “Hier sieht man, dass der Solipsismus, streng durchgeführt, mit dem reinen Realismus zusammenfällt. Das Ich des Solipsismus schrumpft zum ausdehnungslosen Punkt zusammen, und es bleibt die ihm koordinierte Realität.” 34. To put this in slightly different terms, we might say that while nonreductive naturalisms such as emergentism maintain that the human self emerges from the natural (nonhuman) world, the Wittgensteinian transcendental philosopher of subjectivity points out that there is no emergence in this sense, because the self is “nothing” (no thing emerges). There is, rather, a kind of abyss between the nonhuman merely natural world and the humanly constituted world; the human world of transcendental subjectivity is a different world altogether. However, again, this abyss is itself metaphysically “nothing,” because the self, as transcendental, is “nothing.” Emergence (or, analogously, other favorite notions of nonreductive naturalism) only applies to the empirical psychological self, not to the transcendental self. To speak about the emergence of the transcendental self would be to commit a category mistake. 35. For an insightful analysis of the topic of relational identity in James, see José Medina, “James on Truth and Solidarity: The Epistemology of Diversity and the Politics of Specificity,” in John J. Stuhr (ed.), 100 Years of Pragmatism: William James’s Revolutionary Philosophy (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010), pp. 124–43. While the idea of relational identity is connected with James’s radical empiricism and the doctrine of the reality of relations, the realism versus nominalism issue, ethically understood, is another key issue here—and it is at this point that a Jamesian analysis of relational identities should be compared to what Charles Peirce had to say on “what men have in common.” For comparison, see Peirce’s critiques of nominalism (e.g., in the 1871 “Berkeley Review,” in vol. 1 of The Essential Peirce). The standard opposition between Peircean realism and Jamesian nominalism is seriously misleading. See also Pihlström, Pragmatist Metaphysics, chapter 6. 36. The rejection of metaphysical realism is thus a crucial element of pragmatic pluralism. I am not saying that the form of pragmatic pluralism I have in mind here is directly entailed by the rejection of metaphysical realism, though. 37. This view is further developed in Sami Pihlström, “The Problem of Realism, from a Pragmatist Point of View,” in Roberto Frega (ed.), Pragmatist Epistemologies (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2011). 38. Historical discussions of Jamesian and Deweyan pragmatism as maintaining this Kantian insight would be necessary to defend these views (but are impossible here). Furthermore, we may, I think, safely ignore the question of whether physical nature is deterministic or indeterministic (based on, e.g., quantum physics). Our inquiry is not about physical nature but about how we should view our own agency and selfhood (that is, “human nature”). 39. This is not the right place to examine theories of recognition in any detail. For the contemporary discussion (largely indebted to Hegel), see Axel Honneth, Kampf um Anerkennung (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1992; rev. ed. 2003). 40. On the other hand, a Peircean realism about generals need not amount to metaphysical realism in this sense. Cultural entities (e.g., money, art) can be understood as “real generals” in the sense of Peirce’s “extreme scholastic realism.” Compare this also to the tension between Peircean synechism and emergence, as discussed, e.g., in Sami Pihlström, “Toward a Pragmatic Metaphysics of the Fact-Value Entanglement: Emergence or Continuity?,” Journal of Philosophical Research 35 (2010), 323–52. 41. For example, as a both ethically and metaphysically compelling investigation of “limit” phenomena and their transcendental significance one could mention the discussion of the Muselmänner who in some sense are situated at the limits of the human and the nonhuman, of life and death, and of human death and mere perishing, in Holocaust literature such as Primo Levi’s If This Is a Man, intriguingly analyzed in Giorgio Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive, trans. Daniel

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Heller-Roazen (New York: Zone Books, 2002), especially chapter 2. In a sense this is, again, a naturalization of the ethics of the transcendental self, following from an empirical account of a concrete historical event, i.e., Auschwitz. The notion of the Muselmann, as characterized by Levi and Agamben, is itself a kind of Grenzbegriff comparable to the transcendental self. This is intimately related to the problem of the witness (of historical horrors such as Auschwitz) and the very possibility of witnessing. Agamben writes (pp. 120–21): At first it appears that it is the human, the survivor, who bears witness to the inhuman, the Muselmann. But if the survivor bears witness for the Muselmann [. . .] then [. . .] it is in some way the Muselmann who bears witness. But this means that the one who truly bears witness in the human is the inhuman [. . .]. Or, rather, that there is no one who claims the title of ‘witness’ by right. To speak, to bear witness, is thus to enter into a vertiginous movement in which something sinks to the bottom, wholly desubjectified and silenced [. . .]. This can also be expressed by saying that the subject of testimony is the one who bears witness to a desubjectification. But this expression holds only if it is not forgotten that ‘to bear witness to a desubjectification’ can only mean there is no subject of testimony [. . .]. I am offering this example here not in order to directly contribute to the tormenting discussion of the possibility of testimony but in order to highlight the potentially enormous ethical relevance of the transcendental conception of the self as “nothing.” 42. Cf. chapter 5 below. See Sami Pihlström, Transcendental Guilt: Reflections on Ethical Finitude (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2011). Even the notion of ethical solipsism comes into the picture here because at the deepest metaphysical level guilt could be regarded as a notion only applying to the first person (echoing Dostoyevsky’s suggestion that everyone is guilty for the crimes of all humanity, but I am more guilty than anyone else). The free and morally responsible subject as “nothingness” is always potentially “filled” with guilt: precisely because it is not necessarily anything in particular (and is, in this sense, “nothing” and a limit), it could always be guilty. This is the perspective from which an ethical attitude to the world limited by one’s transcendental subjectivity can emerge. The ethical “content” filling the emptiness of the self is provided from the outside, from our relations to others—as already suggested above. Transcendental guilt could, furthermore, also be connected with Heideggerian analyses of conscience as transcendental. See several relevant essays in Steven Galt Crowell and Jeff Malpas (eds.), Transcendental Heidegger (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2007). Their volume is useful in other ways as well, because it generally draws attention to the way in which transcendental philosophy can be ontological (in the Heideggerian sense but also in a way that can be extended to other ways of understanding ontology). 43. One might compare this to Simone Weil, and to the mysticism of James’s Varieties. See William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature (1902), eds. Frederick H. Burkhardt, Fredson Bowers, and Ignas K. Skrupskelis (Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 1985). In Jamesian pragmatism, this creates a tension between active (“Promethean”) pragmatist self-assertion and world-making, on the one hand, and passive mysticist acquiescence, on the other. Cf. Richard Gale’s critical reflections on James’s “two selves,” the Promethean and the mystic, in Gale, The Divided Self of William James (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999). For some criticisms of Gale (and other recent interpreters), see Pihlström, “The Trail of the Human Serpent Is over Everything” (cited above). 44. Again, there are interesting potential comparisons, including Fichte (the “I” posits, setzt, the “not-I”) and Levinas (it is me to whom otherness is set as an infinite ethical responsibility), not to be considered any further here (but see chapter 4 for a discussion of Levinas regarding this issue). 45. In addition, one might ask why the self would have to (and how it even could) engage in any “de-selfing” if it already is nothing. The short answer is that the process

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of de-selfing would be a philosophical reflection that would make the self conscious of its being “nothing.” (In that sense, this chapter could be read as an extended reflection of that kind.) 46. Agamben also asks, “what does it mean to be subject to desubjectification? How can a subject give an account of its own ruin?” (Remnants of Auschwitz, p. 142.) He notes that the “I” is a “purely discursive reality that refers neither to a concept nor to a real individual (ibid., p. 121). These reflections are analogous to my question of how a self can so much as engage in de-selfing. I am tempted to answer that we need the transcendental self at this point—as an infinitely reflexive structure. (Is this a kind of immortality, because of the infinity of the task of de-selfing? This may be the only kind of infinity that a radically finite and mortal subject is capable of.) 47. See Stephen Asma, On Monsters (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010). 48. See, for a somewhat more comprehensive discussion, Sami Pihlström, “Death, Rationality, and Irrationality,” in Heikki J. Koskinen, Sami Pihlström, and Risto Vilkko (eds.), Science—a Challenge to Philosophy? (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 2006). 49. Cf. the anthology, K. Silem Mohammad and Richard Greene (eds.), The Undead and Philosophy: Chicken Soup for the Soulless (Cambridge, MA and Oxford: Blackwell, 2006). 50. See Sami Pihlström, “Ghosts,” in Clifford D. Bryant and Dennis L. Peck (eds.), Encyclopedia of Death and the Human Experience (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 2009), pp. 517–20. 51. It must be admitted, to be sure, that many people whom we take to be relatively “rational” in their daily lives do believe in extraordinary things. According to even relatively recent statistics, a significant number of, say, Americans actually believe in the existence of angels, demons, or even ghosts. Let us leave this matter aside, however, because the main issue here is not the irrationality of believing in ghosts, or in the undead in general, or in some other supernatural beings—these are beliefs that I find obviously irrational and in no need of further discussion. 52. See Sami Pihlström, Taking Evil Seriously (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave, 2014), for my views on evil. 53. See Noel Carroll, “The Nature of Horror,” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 46 (1987), 51–59; Carroll, Philosophy of Horror or Paradoxes of the Heart (London and New York: Routledge, 1990). Let me note that I am only using Carroll’s theory as a point of departure for my own reflections, i.e., I am not subscribing to his views on the genre of horror in general. 54. That is to say, the undead are “in between” these two categories, which are usually thought to be mutually exclusive—though, as we saw, vampires and ghosts can be said to be “in between” them in somewhat different ways. 55. Drawing some help from Carroll, Philosophy of Horror; see also P. A. Roth, Bram Stoker (London: Twayne, 1982); Toni Reed, Demon-Lovers and Their Victims in British Fiction (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1988); and F. Botting, Gothic (London and New York: Routledge, 1996), chapter 7. 56. Bram Stoker, Dracula (New York: Permabooks, 1897/1957), p. 170. 57. Cf. Botting, Gothic, p. 150. 58. One of the central symbols in Dracula, blood, is also similarly conceptually confusing and ambiguous: it is the symbol of both death and life, and Dracula’s pathological taste for blood keeps him “alive” as an “undead,” as a living corpse. Without blood, he would have to return to the normal state of dead people, nonexistence. Sucking blood and “living” through it is perhaps the most unnatural thing about him. Dracula is, then, dirty or filthy in a mythical, archetypal way. As is well known, the New Testament teaches us that the blood of Christ saves the humankind, liberating us from the grip of sin and death; again, this “saving” is depicted in an ironic way in Dracula. In Dracula’s case, blood—the object of his unholy appetite and the condition of the continuation of his “life” as an undead monster—is as ambiguous and conceptually challenging as Dracula himself.

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59. Small wonder, then, that the motive of getting lost has also been popular in horror fiction: showing how our lives are epistemically fragile, such fiction shows that we may easily get lost in our daily lives and lose sight of how to get along with the conceptual categories we habitually employ. A popular movie from the late 1990s, The Blair Witch Project (1999), brings this out quite explicitly by developing the age-old motive of getting lost in the woods: as the protagonists get lost, they become increasingly challenged, physically as well as conceptually and epistemically, by the evidence about witchcraft they originally took to be mere make-believe. Yet, unlike the characters in Dracula, they are surrounded by a threat that never becomes fully visible; the evil that haunts them remains unknown to the very end. 60. See also Roth, Bram Stoker, pp. 96, 126. 61. Stoker, Dracula, p. 306. 62. As Botting (Gothic, pp. 150–51) points out, Coppola’s movie, Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1992), makes it particularly clear that the vampire is no longer an “absolute Other”; on Botting’s interpretation, Coppola moves Stokerian horror into the 1990s, an age which longs for love, tolerance, and understanding—even for a vampire and for otherness in general. Thus, the movie is “emptied” from its Gothic elements and signifies the “end of Gothic” (ibid.). 63. Stoker, Dracula, p. 376. 64. Ibid., p. 189. 65. We may find an analogy here: it has been recently argued by Rupert Read that there is no such thing as “understanding” severe schizophrenia or other grave mental illnesses, because there is no sense, content, or claim “in” there, in the life or words of a person suffering from such an illness. See Read, “Wittgenstein and Faulkner’s Benjy,” in J. Gibson and W. Huemer (eds.), The Literary Wittgenstein (London and New York: Routledge, 2004). If this is correct, we only experience an illusion in “understanding” what such a person thinks or does, just as we experience an illusion of understanding the words of a metaphysical philosopher. Read’s argument is based on his “neo-Wittgensteinian,” “resolute” conception of nonsense, according to which there is no profound, somehow meaningful nonsense that “gestures at” something that cannot literally be said, be put to words. Cf. the essays in Alice Crary and Rupert Read (eds.), The New Wittgenstein (London and New York: Routledge, 2000). 66. This has been a major theme in Kenneth Westphal’s writings on Kant and realism, e.g., Kenneth R. Westphal, Hegel’s Epistemology: An Introduction to the “Phenomenology of Spirit” (Indianapolis: Hackett, 2003); and Westphal, Kant’s Transcendental Proof of Realism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004). 67. Probing the limits of conceivability, experienceability, and conceptualizability in this manner may even lead us to appreciate the condition that Leszek Kolakowski labels “metaphysical horror”; see Kolakowski, Metaphysical Horror, ed. A. Kolakowska (Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin, 1988/2001). 68. It might also be valuable to examine whether the mutual relations of pragmatism, naturalism, and transcendental philosophy could be understood in terms of the holistic mutual adjustment highlighted in Morton White’s holistic pragmatism. This would, indeed, open up a conceptual space in which all three could work together in an attempt to deepen our understanding of the self. This would not be White’s own view, though. Cf. Morton White, A Philosophy of Culture: The Scope of Holistic Pragmatism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002).

FOUR Death—Mine or the Other’s?

We have in the previous chapters tentatively concluded that death is at the center of philosophical anthropology. We have also started an extended transcendental analysis on the way in which our human condition is colored by the horizon of mortality, focusing on the idea of the transcendental self as a “limit” of the world. Now it is time to move from relatively general discussions of philosophical anthropology and the transcendental philosophy of subjectivity toward a more explicit philosophical treatment of the issue of mortality. 1 Our mortality and our awareness of being mortal constitute, arguably, a crucial background of many (or perhaps all) perennial philosophical problems. When philosophizing, a human being tries to understand the world and her/his place in its scheme of things; the phenomenon of death can hardly be absent from such a project of understanding. 2 Indeed, thanatologists who approach death from medical, psychological, historical or sociological perspectives admit that the problem of death is, ultimately, a philosophical one. Many academic philosophers fail to take the study of death and mortality seriously, however. Even though most classics of Western (and non-Western) philosophy—from Plato and Epicur to Schopenhauer and Nietzsche—have had very interesting things to say about death, mortality, and immortality, the topic is perhaps not as widely discussed among academic philosophers nowadays as one might expect. This may have something to do with the more general “denial of death” in our modern, scientifically advanced culture. 3 As has often been remarked, death has been “medicalized,” pushed to the margins of our existence as healthy, technologically advanced, powerfully living modern citizens and consumers. Death, the end of any conceivable practical human action, is a threat to the very idea of instrumental means-ends rationality that possesses such a glorified status in our high-tech civiliza97

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tion and to the related idea of controlling individual and social lives (see further chapter 6 below). In this situation, scientifically minded analytic philosophers, in particular, may feel that we cannot really say anything specifically philosophical about death, as soon as we have (rightly) given up, e.g., traditional metaphysical attempts to prove the immortality of the soul. According to these philosophers, the phenomenon of death can be adequately described, insofar as it can be described at all, scientifically, without metaphysical presuppositions; the task of the philosopher is primarily conceptual clarification that may help both scientific and everyday ways of thinking about the matter. There are, admittedly, some leading analytic philosophers who have written extensively on thanatology, such as Thomas Nagel and Jay F. Rosenberg. 4 The latter, in particular, focuses on the conceptual analysis of various traditional questions related to death and (im)mortality, such as the identity of the subject who might be thought to survive bodily death. I am not convinced that this kind of philosophical thanatology is really interesting, if we are willing to understand what mortality means for us in our lives. Analytic philosophical thanatologists may engage in endless disputes over, say, the criteria of death or the justification of euthanasia. 5 I do not want to claim, of course, that there would be no value in such disputes or that the problems they address would be unimportant; on the contrary, determining the criteria of death may be crucially important in biomedical ethics and in ethically responsible practical decision making. 6 Nevertheless, the “transcendental” thanatological approach adopted in this book is quite different. 7 While the purpose of this chapter is not to claim that scientific accounts of the phenomenon of death are insignificant or that analytic philosophers should not engage in their clarificatory attempts to think clearly about death, I shall try to find some deeper meaning in death by philosophical means—or, rather, to suggest some directions in which such meaning might be sought. Furthermore, I am of course not at all implying that there could not be nonphilosophical (e.g., religious or artistic) ways to find meaning in death (cf. also chapter 3 above). Philosophical thanatology can, at any rate, investigate the significance of mortality relatively independently of religious or other weltanschaulichen assumptions. The philosophical thanatologist is free to admit that in many cases nonphilosophical accounts of mortality—e.g., in terms of tragedy— may be more illuminating than philosophical ones, just like the philosophical anthropologist more generally can welcome nonphilosophical perspectives as relevant to her/his examination of human nature. Thanatology, moreover, provides a case study of the relation (and, possibly, cooperation) between philosophy and other disciplines, especially medicine, psychology, history, sociology, theology, and comparative religion. It is the task of these fields to conceptualize the phenome-

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non of death in their various ways; when such conceptualizations are carried out, it remains for the philosophers to ask whether we have arrived at a unified, coherent and workable notion of death. There may be no clear, well-defined role for the philosopher to play in these discussions, but s/he can always intervene by asking questions about the background assumptions of the different ideas regarding death and mortality at work in the various corners of the interdisciplinary field known as thanatology. An analogous role remains for philosophy in other interdisciplinary research programs, too. More generally, in our attempts to understand human life in its different aspects—in medical, psychological, historical, sociological, theological, and other perspectives on our humanity—there seems to be room for philosophical background issues, something that we have in this book called philosophical anthropology. Insofar as death is a crucial part of human life, philosophical thanatology can, as I have suggested, be classified as a subdiscipline of philosophical anthropology, or the philosophical study of human life. To inquire into the nature of death and mortality is to inquire into what it means to be a human being. 8 Indeed, from a Heideggerian perspective, only mortals— only humans—can die; other living creatures perish or are destroyed, but they are not living toward their deaths in any philosophically pregnant sense. 9 I have already tried to show that philosophical thanatology is at its most interesting when it is explored as a form of transcendental philosophy, as a transcendental undertaking (cf. chapter 3 above). What this means is that the concept of death should be analyzed as a transcendental concept: death, or mortality, is a necessary condition for the possibility of the meaningfulness or authenticity (or meaninglessness or inauthenticity) of human life. This theme can be found in various authors, among them philosophers highly influential in the twentieth century, e.g., Ludwig Wittgenstein and Martin Heidegger. 10 It is in this transcendental setting, however, that the problem of solipsism becomes urgent, as we will see. THE FIRST-PERSON POINT OF VIEW Transcendental philosophical thanatology approaches, or at least ought to approach, death from a first-person perspective, focusing on my death rather than death in general. As no one can immediately experience another person’s death, everyone dies fundamentally alone. The philosophical significance of death lies in its being the subject’s final encounter with their (or, rather, my) world. If this is correct, death can hardly be adequately captured in a purely objective “third-person” (e.g., medical or social) description; nor are, say, applied ethicists’ concerns with abortion, euthanasia, or suicide particularly relevant from the perspective of the absolutely individual phenomenon of death studied by the transcenden-

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tal thanatologist. If we adopt this characterization of philosophical thanatology as our starting point, the analytic work on the criteria of death may also seem rather peripheral to our concerns. The worry we will have to face later in this chapter is that the transcendental, subject-centered view expresses a solipsistic attitude to death. Solipsism, sometimes defined as the (prima facie unacceptable and even absurd) thesis that the world is “my world,” claims that the existence of everything outside me depends on my existence or is internal to my thought and experience. A solipsistic conception death is visible in Wittgenstein’s remarks on death as something that is “not an event,” not an experience of life, i.e., not a process or event that takes place in the empirical world but rather the end of the world (transcendentally speaking), as well as in Heidegger’s well-known notion of “being-towarddeath.” 11 Solipsistic philosophy of death can, of course, be resisted, as we shall see. Emmanuel Levinas and Zygmunt Bauman, among others, have suggested that the truly ethical and, therefore, philosophically primary attitude to death is the one focusing not on my death but on the death of the other person. 12 Even here, as will be observed, the problem of solipsism returns, since, according to Levinas and Bauman, I am infinitely responsible for the other’s mortality and may, in some extreme situation, be morally required to sacrifice my life for the other. This responsibility is asymmetrical: I always have “one responsibility more” than the other. Hence, it will be argued below that even apparently nonsolipsistic approaches to philosophical thanatology cannot easily liberate us from the transcendental problem of solipsism, even if my relation to the mortality of another human being is more fundamental than my own mortality. Anyone seeking to understand, philosophically, the phenomenon of death must seriously deal with the issue of solipsism. This results from the transcendental interpretation of the problem of death. One may speculate that most theories of the “transcendental self” or “transcendental subject”—from Kant, Schopenhauer and Husserl to Wittgenstein and (possibly) Heidegger—have been attempts to live with the mortality of the human self, i.e., with my own mortality (cf. chapter 3 above). If, however, the transcendental approach leads to solipsism, it is questionable whether it can help us in being mortal. More generally, philosophical accounts of death can perhaps be pragmatically evaluated in terms of their capacity to enable us to organize our lives more meaningfully. 13 According to this principle, if a philosophical thanatology is to have real value, it should be somehow relevant to our often agonizing experience of being mortal. Such a pragmatic power might at least be one source of value for philosophical thanatology (and, for that matter, for philosophical theorizing in general). It will be left for the reader to decide whether the philosophical discussion offered in the present chapter (or the whole book) is relevant in such a pragmatic sense. The first-person approach does not guarantee that something significant

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will be said about death. On the contrary, we should constantly be aware of the danger, perceptively identified by Robert Solomon, that the talk about “one’s own death” may in the end have nothing to do with me at all. 14 One might study thanatology in order to avoid genuine confrontation with one’s own personal mortality, after all. I hope this is not the case with the present inquiry, though—but this, I guess, is my problem rather than my readers’. DEATH AS A TRANSCENDENTAL CONCEPT As has been repeatedly noted above, the tradition of transcendental philosophy, since Kant’s seminal formulation of transcendental idealism, has investigated the way in which certain given actualities of human life, such as empirical cognition of objects or meaningful use of language, are “conditioned” by something without which they would not be possible. Transcendental conditions can be defined as the necessary conditions for the possibility of such given phenomena. For instance, Kant himself argued that we could not have empirical knowledge of the objective world, unless the objects of our cognition were organized spatiotemporally and according to the categories of understanding (causality, among others). These organizing principles, or transcendental conditions, are in Kant’s idealistic system based on the activity of the transcendental subject of cognition. They cannot be found ready-made in the world in itself. Thus, we can only cognize the empirical world as something that we ourselves constitute, structure, or shape. Accordingly, the previous chapter was partly devoted to the world-categorizing character of transcendental subjectivity. It would not be uninteresting or irrelevant to discuss Kant’s views on subjectivity here in more detail, but at this point his transcendental philosophy can only constitute the background for the more specifically thanatological considerations we need to take up. I am tempted to say not only that transcendental reflection can be applied to the subject matter of death but also that death provides a model of what transcendental conditions governing the actualities of human life may look like. These conditions are in a sense “limits” to any humanly conceivable world or experience. From the transcendental point of view, there is no going outside, or beyond, those limits. This is not to say that the soul (if we may use that word at all) is not immortal; nor is it to say that it is. What the transcendental philosophical thanatologist asserts is that mortality belongs to the “human condition”: from any humanly conceivable point of view—from a point of view which inevitably lies within the limits set by birth and death—we can at most see the limit and gradually proceed toward it, never project ourselves beyond it without making extravagant metaphys-

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ical assumptions about immortality that do not belong to properly transcendental reflection. In the Critique of Pure Reason (1781/1787), in the chapter on the “Paralogisms,” Kant famously attempted to destroy all metaphysical arguments that had been taken to prove the simplicity and immortality of the soul. 15 Yet, he employed the idea of immortality as a “postulate of practical reason” in his moral philosophy. In contemporary metaphysics, the disputes over mortality and immortality are in my view relatively boring. I take Kant to have been so obviously right in his critique of immortality proofs that I consider arguments against immortality given by philosophers like Rosenberg largely waste of time. 16 Rosenberg is a typical analytic philosopher in the sense that despite his impressive analytic skills— with which he, among other things, convincingly argues that there are no clear identification criteria for immortal, immaterial souls—he does not reach the transcendental level of his questions at all. While he does make some brief comments on death “in the first person” and on the “aloneness” of death, he irrelevantly conflates the discussion of “life toward death” with the Cartesian epistemological issue concerning privileged knowledge of “inner objects.” 17 Yet, it is important to understand what kind of limits the transcendental philosophical thanatologist is talking about. When exploring death as a transcendental concept, philosophical thanatology cannot just define it as an object of investigation to be studied “from both sides of the limit.” The metaphor of a limit must be taken seriously, as we already saw in chapter 3 above. There is no point of view available for the philosophical thanatologist beyond the limit, simply because the thanatologist her- or himself is a mortal human being. In other words, there is no transcendent point of view available, no “God’s-Eye-View” to the mortality that each one of us must presuppose, with transcendental necessity, as framing our lives. The Kantian distinction between the transcendental and the transcendent is obviously crucial here. Roughly, what is transcendental provides the conditions (and thereby limits) to what can be experienced; the transcendent, in contrast, lies outside those limits. It is, thus, only by making assumptions that belong to the realm of transcendence that we could meaningfully claim something philosophical about, say, the immortality of the soul. This is not something that the philosophical thanatologist can do, if she or he wishes to engage in a transcendental project. Transcendental philosophy is always conducted, reflexively, “from within” the limits it draws. The general issues regarding the coherence of such a project are as old as Kant’s thought, and they need not concern us here, even though the notion of transcendental subjectivity, for instance, would deserve a lengthier exploration. Hence, mortality must be philosophically conceptualized from a perspective lying within mortal life itself, from the point of view of one’s attempt to understand one’s own mortal existence. Within that existence,

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there is no way to transcend the limit set to us by death. This is something that has also been emphasized in the phenomenological movement, which is (from a thanatological point of view and more generally) one of the most significant twists in the transcendental tradition. For a Heideggerian phenomenologist, in particular, it is clear that philosophical thanatology ought to be pursued in a “this-worldly” fashion, based on the structures of the subject’s experiential life world. A phenomenological analysis cannot be based on any speculations about otherworldly matters but must remain an investigation of the ontological conditions of our experience. 18 This is not to say that the topic of immortality cannot be phenomenologically or philosophically studied at all; yet, this topic must be approached by means of a reflection on our search of meaning and significance in our lives, on this side of the limit. 19 Accordingly, death is not simply a contingent limitation of human possibilities. That we all die, including those of us craving for immortality and concerned with the prospect of immortality as a source of the meaningfulness of life, is of course a contingent fact, but in its transcendental usage the notion of death does not simply express such a fact. Our mortality is transcendental precisely in the sense of grounding any conceivable contingent limitations and any possibility of overcoming any such contingent limitation. It is a limit that frames all contingent boundaries that we may overcome or fail to overcome in our lives. This transcendental claim must be carefully distinguished from any (transcendent) metaphysical or quasiscientific ideas about the factual inevitability of death or the possibility of survival. These observations are closely related to Heidegger’s phenomenological thematizations of the essentially worldly and temporal existence of human Dasein (cf. also the next section below). As Stephen Mulhall explains, we should see Heidegger as describing precisely the limits of human life in the sense of the “human condition,” i.e., the conditionedness inevitably belonging to human existence, instead of seeing him as describing limitations that we somehow in principle could (though in fact cannot) overcome. 20 Mulhall does not use the term transcendental, and Heidegger is famous for his critique of the transcendental tradition, but we may nonetheless read his views on death through transcendental spectacles. The kind of limits or conditions he describes—mortality being presumably the most important of them—may be interpreted as transcendental limits and conditions of human life. As Mulhall says: “For Dasein to acknowledge its mortality—to anticipate death—is for it to acknowledge one of the most fundamental limits or conditions of its existence.” 21 Clearly, we are here dealing with a transcendental limit or condition that makes our life possible as a life (as a totality for which we can be, or fail to be, autonomously responsible), not with a limitation we could even in principle escape. And when another commentator states that death, for Heidegger, is “an intrinsic existential structure that is con-

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stitutive of our very existence,” rather than simply something that will happen in some remote future we need not worry about now, it becomes even clearer that a transcendental notion has been introduced. 22 Death is, then, a kind of transcendental frame for the totality of life, but the temporal dimension that plays such an important role in Heidegger’s picture makes this analogy partly defective, too. Mulhall explains why: “Death for Dasein is not a limit in the way that a frame is the limit of a picture or a kerbstone the limit of a road. The picture ends at the frame, but it is not annihilated by it in the way that death annihilates Dasein [. . .].” 23 Still, it is a kind of frame in the sense that it frames the area which is conceivable and possible for us mortals. Philosophical thanatology, transcendentally developed, tries to conceptualize the realm of the humanly possible by framing human life by means of the notion of death. In this sense it is easily classifiable as a form of philosophical anthropology, as has, indeed, been suggested throughout this inquiry. DEATH AND SOLIPSISM When viewed transcendentally, what is at stake in the phenomenon of death is the first-person perspective—my own death, rather than death as a general, abstract concept applicable to living organisms. This philosophically substantial concept of death is not the scientific (or social) one applicable to the objects of what Kant called the empirical world; it is the one applicable to the subject for whom the world is an object of experience and upon whom, thus, the very objectivity of that experienceable world (transcendentally speaking) depends, i.e., me. Alternatively, if we follow the currently popular way of describing human life and identity in narrativist terms, 24 we may again emphasize the importance of the firstperson point of view to death: in narrative accounts of human life and its meaning (or lack of meaning), death as the end point of my life serves as a necessary condition for the possibility of that question of meaningfulness. We can easily see here that one’s attitude to death depends on one’s more general philosophical views. In particular, if I am a realist and, unlike Kant and his followers, believe in a cognizable, mind-independent, objective, external world, my death may seem to be merely one rather insignificant natural event in the world—albeit an event whose inevitability may make my life seem absurd from the subjective point of view, precisely because it is so insignificant from the objective point of view. This kind of realism seems to be assumed in the debate over whether death is, or even can be, a bad thing for the one who dies. This classical debate goes back to the Epicurean materialistic and hedonistic conception of the good life. In Book III of The Nature of the Universe, the Epicurean poet Lucretius argued that as death is not experienced by the one who

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dies, it is nothing to be afraid of: “death is nothing to us and no concern of ours,” since “when we shall be no more,” there will be nothing that could “stir our senses” and thus harm us. 25 Assuming the same basic realism about the material world and, accordingly, a third-person point of view, Nagel famously questions the Epicurean conclusion: although the one who dies does not suffer any harmful experiences, since there clearly is no longer anyone whose experiences they would be, he or she suffers the harm of being deprived of all the good things that her or his life might have brought along with it. As seen from the objective, third-person perspective, mortality thus threatens to make our lives absurd and insignificant. In the long run we will all be dead, as everybody knows, and we will thus be deprived of everything that might have made our lives valuable. 26 Such a pessimistic attitude to death has even led some thinkers to refrain from acknowledging death as a natural element of life. Thus, Elias Canetti refused to respect or even to “accept” death, and Miguel de Unamuno regarded the irrational hope for immortality as the main source of human thought and culture. 27 It seems to me that the third-person approach to the question of the evil of death is almost entirely irrelevant to the first-person question of whether I should fear my death, or whether my death will (or can) be good or bad for me. Even though Unamuno in particular addresses the craving for immortality and the “tragic sense of life” from the point of view of an individual human being, he seems to be speaking on behalf of all humans. We will later return to the more optimistic (but not unproblematic) idea that death, far from being (necessarily) a great evil, is in fact something that makes life meaningful. But such an idea might require abandoning realism about the natural world. On the other hand, if I am an extreme antirealist or idealist, e.g., a solipsist, claiming that the world is “my world,” then my death is in a sense the end of the world, either with a bang or a whimper. Here, unlike in the realistic picture, the transcendental subject lies at the center of the world, as the source of its meaningfulness. When this subject is removed, the world will also be gone. None of these alternatives—realism and transcendental solipsism—sounds entirely promising. Solipsism may make one’s life seem even more absurd than it seems when viewed realistically. But the Kantian route, the route of transcendental reflection on mortality from within the limits it sets to my life, may easily lead to solipsistic commitments. 28 Let us, finally, discuss some more specific examples. The natural place to begin is Wittgenstein’s Tractatus, where we find the oft-quoted remarks: 6.43: Wenn das gute oder böse Wollen die Welt ändert, so kann es nur die Grenzen der Welt ändern, nicht die Tatsachen; nicht das, was durch die Sprache ausgedrückt werden kann.

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Chapter 4 Kurz, die Welt muß dann dadurch überhaupt eine andere werden. Sie muß sozusagen als Ganzes abnehmen oder zunehmen. Die Welt des Glücklichen ist eine andere als die des Unglücklichen. 6.431: Wie auch beim Tod die Welt sich nicht ändert, sondern aufhört. 6.4311: Der Tod ist kein Ereignis des Lebens. Den Tod erlebt man nicht. Wenn man unter Ewigkeit nicht unendliche Zeitdauer, sondern Unzeitlichkeit versteht, dann lebt der ewig, der in der Gegenwart lebt. Unser Leben ist ebenso endlos, wie unser Gesichtsfeld grenzenlos ist.

This passage introduces an extremely rich context of Wittgenstein’s views on language, the world, and the subject—views whose details need not concern us here. What is important is the transcendental first-person perspective he adopts: the world is my world, or identical to (my) life; hence, what solipsism tries to say is quite correct, although it cannot be meaningfully expressed according to Wittgenstein’s picture theory of language. 29 From this transcendental-subjectivist or transcendental-solipsist perspective, death is the end of the world, not an experienceable event in the world. 30 It is, just like the subject itself (cf. chapter 3 above), a limit of my world, a limit that (transcendentally) makes the world possible as a world. Richard Brockhaus distinguishes between two notions of death at work in Wittgenstein’s Tractatus: (1) the empirical, biological, death as a natural event in the world and (2) the death of the metaphysical subject, i.e., its disappearance, the end of the world. This distinction bears on Wittgenstein’s conception of value, ethics, and happiness. Since all the objects there are in the world are “eternal” within the framework of experience whose form is given by the metaphysical subject, the disappearance of that subject must be seen as a kind of miracle. So, its existence is also a miracle. The world as “my world” has a unity: there is an ethical monism connected with the Tractarian ontological pluralism of states of affairs. On Brockhaus’s reading, “my world can wax and wane tutti, but only insofar as this waxing and waning is centered on, or due to, some change in the inner limit, the metaphysical subject.” 31 We may accept Brockhaus’s interpretation, but there may still be no immediate need to accept the view here taken to be Wittgenstein’s. A philosopher sympathetic to realism or naturalism instead of solipsism will argue at this point that the Tractarian distinction between two kinds of death is superfluous and amounts to little more than metaphysical sophistry. The philosophically significant thing is the natural death of real flesh-and-blood human beings (as well as nonhuman organisms) in this fearful world. Natural death, its inevitability in our own lives as well as in the lives of others, is the source of ethics. 32 Presumably, no ethical account of death (or life) can be constructed on the basis of a solipsistic worldview. Ernest Gellner’s reading of Wittgenstein is in many ways

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superficial, but he succeeds in formulating what might be taken to be the crucial ethical point against Wittgenstein’s conception of death: If death is not an event in life, then at any rate it would seem that the death of others would be a part of life. But the Tractatus appears to be an autistic work in which there simply are no others. . . . If there are no others, then indeed, death cannot be a part of life. For the author of the Tractatus, evidently this was so. 33

A comparison between Wittgenstein and Levinas should be taken seriously at this point, as Levinas (although he certainly cannot be described as a “realist” in any normal philosophical sense) might be seen as leading us out of the Wittgensteinian solipsistic predicament. Wittgenstein’s conception of ethical value may be interpreted as “totalizing” (and solipsistic), since it regards the world (which is mine) as valuable as a whole, as a totality of my life, viewed under the aspect of eternity, or sub specie aeternitatis. Levinas’s approach, on the contrary, seeks to avoid all kinds of totalizing ethics, locating the ethical in my concrete face-to-face relation to the mortal and vulnerable Other. 34 But the contrast may be merely apparent. In a way, the later Wittgenstein, with his emphasis on the “attitude towards a soul” in our relations to other human beings (cf. chapter 2 above), comes quite close to Levinas’s face-to-face conception of the ethical relation, whereas Levinas, I will argue, cannot easily get rid of the problem framework of solipsism, since in his view the infinite, preontological and pretotalizing responsibility for the Other is inevitably mine and nobody else’s. Who, here, is this “me,” individuated not as an empirical object in the world but as the center of ethical responsibility? A more nuanced distinction should now be drawn between (apparently) solipsistic and nonsolipsistic philosophies of death. A comparison not only between Levinas and Wittgenstein but also between Levinas and Heidegger is relevant in this connection. As for the Wittgenstein of the Tractatus death is a solipsistic phenomenon, for Heidegger, too, it is, in a Wittgensteinian way, something that is primarily mine—just like human existence or Dasein itself is. Dasein’s inevitable “mineness” is discussed in many places in Sein und Zeit where Heidegger distinguishes between authenticity and inauthenticity. 35 From the Heideggerian perspective, being-toward-death, Sein-zum-Tode, is Dasein’s ultimate mode of being, the existential project that only can make my life truly authentic. 36 When reflecting on death, I must, inevitably, focus on my own death, on death as the culmination of my essentially subjective, authentic or inauthentic, existence, as the last (pseudo-)event of my being-in-the-world, as my (Dasein’s) ultimate possibility of no longer being in the world. Death, for me, is a possibility that colors each moment of my life, painfully demonstrating the fact that being itself is an issue for me (which, of course, is the main theme of Sein und Zeit more generally), that I am responsible for my own life as a totality (as Wittgenstein also maintained in his own, very

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different way), and that only by realizing this can I lead an authentic life. 37 Wittgenstein’s solipsistic picture of death is characterized by an aspiration to timelessness, to the eternity of the “now,” 38 and Heidegger’s by an affirmation of the historicity of human existence, but despite these differences the first-person perspective appears to be fundamentally the same. Despite Heidegger’s critiques of Edmund Husserl’s more Cartesian, methodologically solipsistic approach in phenomenology, he does not seem to have been able to entirely avoid a basically similar “egological” approach, at least when he writes about death and Dasein’s mineness in Sein und Zeit. One of Dasein’s modes of being is, according to Heidegger, Mitsein, being-with-others, but even as such a social subject Dasein is fundamentally alone in its way toward its own death. 39 As Mulhall also reminds us, death is, for Heidegger, “ineliminably mine,” Dasein’s “ownmost possibility” which “most intensifies the mineness of existence.” 40 My being-toward-death cannot be any genuine being-with-others, because the others’ deaths are something quite different from my own. From the point of view of a phenomenological investigation of the structures of my life world, my being-with-others is also something that belongs to the totality of my experiences. SOLIPSISM RETURNS Contrary to both Heidegger and Wittgenstein, Levinas attempts to formulate a truly nonsolipsistic philosophy of death by focusing on the Other’s death instead of mine. From his perspective, death must be conceived primarily as the death of another person, if this concept is to have any ethical significance, another person whose ethical demand is prior to any self-contained subjectivity of the Dasein living (or being) toward (her or his own) death: [I]n its expression, in its mortality, the face before me summons me, calls for me, begs for me, as if the invisible death that must be faced by the Other, pure otherness, separated, in some way, from any whole, were my business. It is as if that invisible death, ignored by the Other, whom already it concerns by the nakedness of its face, were already “regarding” me prior to confronting me, and becoming the death that stares me in the face. The other man’s death calls me into question, as if, by my possible future indifference, I had become the accomplice of the death to which the other, who cannot see it, is exposed; and as if, even before vowing myself to him, I had to answer for this death of the other, and to accompany the Other in his mortal solitude. The Other becomes my neighbour precisely through the way the face summons me, calls for me, begs for me, and in so doing recalls my responsibility, and calls me into question. 41

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Here, in this contrast between solipsistic and nonsolipsistic pictures of death and mortality, we have arrived at the heart of the problem to which this chapter is devoted. At this point, it seems to me that the problem of solipsism returns—not only in the case of Levinas but in the case of some other emphatically nonsolipsistic thanatologists as well. 42 Death, as something that is essentially mine, is from my point of view something infinite, the end; now, the same ought to be true about the death of the Other in the Levinasian framework. Levinas describes, in an admirable but extremely puzzling manner, how I am responsible for the Other’s death and how this responsibility for the Other, being infinite, is unshareable. It is me who occupies someone else’s place “with the Da of my Dasein”; therefore, “I am inescapably responsible and consequently the unique and chosen one,” “non-interchangeable,” in the face of the Other. 43 It is, in other words, the ego itself, me, that is “wrenched from its primordiality” through an encounter with another ego. 44 The Other’s mortality, the turning away from death as a solitary project characterized by mineness in a Heideggerian-Wittgensteinian style, paradoxically leads to my being chosen as the single person ethically responsible for the death of anyone else. It is from this pre-original responsibility, from my need to respond to my right to be, to take someone else’s place, that language itself—as a response to my being called into question—arises. 45 Attempting to go beyond Heidegger, Levinas ends up by singling out me, the ethical subject, as the unique and chosen one. He is, then, in a sense, an ethical solipsist, after all, in his thanatological reflections. This is not a metaphysical form of solipsism according to which the world is my world, but it is an ethical transformation of the solipsistic attitude, locating all conceivable moral values in my relation to those who are Others to me. Further textual evidence for this interpretation is not difficult to find: “The word I means here I am, answering for everything and for everyone,” Levinas says, adding that I, as a “self,” am a “sub-jectum,” “under the weight of the universe, responsible for everything.” “The non-interchangeable par excellence, the I, the unique one, substitutes itself for others,” and this substitution is my own in a profound sense, since I am “integrally or absolutely ego” and no one can substitute her-/himself for me, although I substitute myself for all. “I am unique and chosen”; “it is I, and no one else, who am hostage for the others.” “I support the universe.” 46 Thus, it is always, inevitably, me, a mortal human being, who must ethically focus on the Other’s death, bearing responsibility, substituting myself for her/him. 47 I am responsible even for the Other’s responsibility: “To be oneself, otherwise than being, to be dis-interested, is to bear the wretchedness and bankruptcy of the other, and even the responsibility that the other can have for me. To be oneself, the state of being a hostage, is always to have one degree of responsibility more, the responsibility for the responsibility of the other.” And further: “I always have,

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myself, one responsibility more than anyone else, since I am responsible, in addition, for his [the other’s] responsibility. And if he is responsible for my responsibility, I remain responsible for the responsibility he has for my responsibility.” 48 It should be concluded that even though Levinas stands in a great philosophical tradition which has attempted to move away from Cartesian methodological solipsism—a tradition extending from Kant’s and Husserl’s egological accounts of transcendental subjectivity to Heidegger’s critique of the Cartesian elements of Husserl’s phenomenology—he cannot avoid some of the basic commitments of that tradition, commitments that other critics of solipsism (e.g., Heidegger) have not been able to avoid, either. In his discussions of my responsibility for the Other, Levinas is, at least methodologically, an ethical solipsist. He turns toward my original responsibility just like Descartes in his cogito argument turned toward the ego’s (my) subjective experiences and the problem of their being in touch with the way the external world is. 49 We might say that Levinas’s ethical solipsism is also transcendental in the sense that the solipsistic assumption about my being the primary locus of responsibility is made at a higher level than the mundane, empirical one at which other human beings are concretely encountered. It could be suggested that we can see the Other as ethically primary also by focusing on the influence of our own deaths on those surviving us, that is, by focusing on the loss those survivors will suffer when we are gone. But this would hardly make the return of solipsism any less threatening. It would, again, be me who would have to take the others into account—by turning attention to the way those others would be affected by my having disappeared from their lives. Moreover, while it is probably true that most people are more worried about how their death will affect their loved ones, especially their children, than about what will happen to them after death, this fact is too empirical to have much significance in the transcendental problem of solipsistic death. Furthermore, “my world” can, in the Levinasian account, be claimed to be primary to the Other’s world at least in the sense that I have to be responsible for the Other who is, necessarily, “a stranger in my world,” someone for whom I must “make room” in my world or whom I must welcome “into my home,” someone who “finds no other support besides me in my world.” 50 I am afraid of “occupying in the Da of my Dasein someone else’s place,” and this fear comes to me “from the face of the other,” 51 from the Other’s mortality. If this is possible, isn’t my Dasein again the primary core of reality, something that could have been, but is not, the Dasein of an Other and now is, disturbingly, irreplaceably mine? Levinas also asserts: “The I is the very crisis of the being of a being [. . .] in the human [. . .], because, being myself, I already ask myself whether my being is justified, whether the Da of my Dasein is not already the usurpation of someone’s place.” 52 Paradoxically, in deciding, ethically, to sup-

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port the Other and not to kill her or him, I make, again transcendentally speaking, a solipsistic decision. The subject, me, is in a primary position simply by existing, by being alive (and mortal) and not (yet) dead, because the very existence the subject enjoys, even when being impressed by the ethical challenge, could have been someone else’s. This makes one’s mortal existence amongst other mortals problematic, calling for an infinite responsibility which can never be truly met in one’s practical actions. In a word, the finitude grounded in our mortality is the source of the infinity of our ethical duty. Let us briefly take up another thanatology close to Levinas. In his sociological investigation of death, Zygmunt Bauman joins Levinas in requiring ultimate ethical responsibility for the Other. In particular, this means that a genuinely moral principle can never legitimate the death of another and must always require that my responsibility for the Other may extend to my duty to die for her/him, to offer my life as a gift (without necessarily wanting to do it, and especially without thinking that I am heroically sacrificing my life for some good cause, general value or ideology). 53 Now, solipsism comes back, just like in Levinas, for it is again, equally irreplaceably, me whose infinite moral responsibility it is to die for the Other. There is no sense in requiring anyone else to take such responsibility. An ethical attitude to otherness is, for both Levinas and Bauman, asymmetrical. What duties others might have is ethically insignificant, for ethics, these thinkers seem to be saying, is my business and no one else’s. I am not drawing this conclusion in order to attack either Levinas or Bauman. Rather, I wish to emphasize that it is one of the metaphilosophically interesting features of the solipsism issue that it may help us understand our mortality, especially the relation between our being both mortal and morally concerned about others’ mortality, and thus help us to philosophize about death. I am tempted to conclude that no philosophical thanatologist can leave the problem of solipsism aside. 54 I am not saying that the solipsistic strand is inevitable in any thanatological investigation; I am just saying that stronger efforts than mere appeals to otherness will be needed, if one wishes to abandon it. AGAINST TRANSCENDENTAL PHILOSOPHIES OF DEATH? Perhaps the only way in which a philosophical thanatologist can overcome the issue of solipsism is by overcoming the transcendental approach itself. Most (particularly analytic) philosophers of death and dying are, as we have seen, nontranscendental philosophers, but they hardly find the transcendental approach worthy of being critically commented, let alone examined in its solipsistic dimensions in any detail. The intentional or unintentional misunderstanding of the notion of the

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transcendental subject has, indeed, resulted in a lot of confusion in discussions of death and subjectivity. Let us, as an example drawn from contemporary debates, take a look at how J. J. Valberg’s theory of death and the self has been criticized by Mark Johnston. The relatively recent books by these two philosophers are both major contributions to the philosophy of death and dying, both of them much more original and illuminating than most of the standard treatments of these topics. 55 Valberg crucially employs the notion of a personal horizon in his examination of death. It is, he tells us, “only by being ‘at the center’ of the personal horizon, of the horizon that is ‘mine,’ that something (a human being) is a ‘subject.’” 56 This horizon, however, is, like the Wittgensteinian subject, “nothing in itself”; hence, it is not among the many horizons there are but “the horizon,” 57 and this is the (Wittgensteinian) “truth in solipsism.” The nothingness at issue here is a fundamental element of the transcendentality of the horizon, or of the transcendental subject. If the horizon were “something” in particular, a thing in the world, it would no longer be transcendental (though this is not exactly the way in which Valberg expresses his point). It would not play the constitutive role in making the world possible (and thus no transcendental role at all) if it were itself an object or a place in the world. Things get complicated when Valberg starts to speak about other horizons and about all of them claiming “preeminence” for themselves. 58 “In regarding you as a metaphysical equal, I recognize your horizon as outside my horizon,” he says. 59 But this is precisely what is problematic, and the problematic character of such metaphysical equality becomes manifest when we consider death. Death “in the metaphysical sense” is the “cessation of the crucial subject matter, of my horizon,” of “that from within which the world appears.” 60 In a Wittgensteinian vein, Valberg argues that “the fact that I will die (in the metaphysical sense) leaves the totality I call ‘the world’ untouched,” because “the fact of death concerns not the ceasing to be of anything in that totality, but the ceasing to be of THIS, the horizon of the totality.” 61 This is also related to the “mineness” of my death emphasized by Heidegger. 62 It is right here, then, that solipsism is brought into this picture. My horizon is, as noted above, “the horizon,” and is is this metaphysical (transcendental) fact that actually makes it “mine.” 63 Therefore, the word “my” in these phrases cannot refer “possessively” to the human being that I happen to be. 64 In a sense, then, Valberg—much more explicitly than Wittgenstein—endorses solipsism, albeit in a deliberately paradoxical form saying that “we” (all) know it to be true: In this way, we are all solipsists. What makes my horizon “mine” is that it is the horizon. [. . .] Solipsism is a solution to our problem. [. . .] I think we already know it to be true [. . .] but we have to become open to

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what we know. We have, in other words, to discover philosophically this truth that we already know, the truth of solipsism. 65

It is death, in particular, that “puts us in touch with the truth of solipsism, our own solipsism, in a way that nothing else does.” 66 Here Valberg considers Wittgenstein’s Tractatus, observing that Tractarian solipsism is concerned, precisely, with the “horizon or limit of the world.” 67 He interprets the relevant sections of the Tractatus by saying that this horizon or limit—that is, the “self of solipsism”—”is nothing in itself and thus adds nothing to the world” in the sense that there is no increase in reality whatsoever due to its being internal to that self; hence, the self of solipsism “adds nothing to the world, just as death takes away nothing from the world,” even though what it does take away is precisely the self of solipsism, the horizon, the limit. 68 In Valberg’s terms, death will eliminate all presence; there will be NOTHING. “The world will remain, but there will be NOTHING”—and this cannot be just relativized into there being just “NOTHING for me,” because “what death means to us” is not any such relativized nothingness but absolute nothingness. 69 We do not, at death, just lose the world (on the contrary, the world will continue to exist without us, and that is also horrifying), but we lose the horizon enabling the world to appear— to be—at all. It is this NOTHINGNESS analyzed as a complete absence of anything that Valberg believes we inevitably find awful and incomprehensible. 70 Death is not only awful but in a sense impossible, solipsistically understood. 71 A temptingly easy solution would be to emphasize the mortal other exactly at this point, urging us to take seriously the other’s horizon and its existential fragility before our own, but here we should remember (as we saw above in relation to Levinas) the tendency of solipsism to return: if my horizon collapsed into NOTHINGNESS, I would no longer have the other, either, as someone to whom I would be infinitely responsible from within my horizon. The other needs (and, in Levinas’s language, “summons”) me, and thus my horizon. There are no metaphysical equals here: “I alone face absolute NOTHINGNESS.” 72 Interestingly, it is only toward the end of his extremely rich and detailed book that Valberg employs the concept of the transcendental self, which he in the end identifies with the “horizonal self.” 73 It is, then, precisely the absence of the transcendental self that amounts to the absolute nothingness that death is. It is the transcendental self that has, and can have, no metaphysical equals (or “ontological neighbors,” which Wittgenstein reminds us our visual field analogously lacks). If it did, it would simply be an object in the world. Mark Johnston criticizes Valberg’s views in his own attempt to deal with death and the self. In a chapter he aptly titles, “The Impossibility of My Own Death,” Johnston discusses—with references to both the Tractatus and Valberg’s book, among others—what he calls the “arena of pres-

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ence,” at the center of which we seem to find ourselves, his version of Valberg’s “horizon.” However, unlike Valberg, he attacks solipsism— and more generally the transcendental considerations of authors like Wittgenstein and Valberg. Yet, the death of a given human being that just happens to be me is different, he says, from my “ownmost” death. I cannot really imagine my ownmost death, as it is the disappearance of the “arena.” 74 However, the problem is that the transcendental subject cannot just “disappear” from the world like any object, or like the empirical subject, can (or even, perhaps, an “arena” can). The disappearance of the transcendental self is, again, the end of the world. I am not convinced that Johnston sufficiently appreciates the quite different transcendental consideration of the matter in the Tractatus and in Valberg’s study. The transcendental subject—the center of the (my) arena of presence—is not an object of any kind, not even an intentional object, not a thing in the actual world or any possible world, and therefore its end is the end of the (or any) world. Only objects in the world can have identity conditions, not the arena or the world-limiting and world-categorizing self. Thus, while Johnston’s discussion comes close to what has sometimes been labelled the “no-self” solipsism of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus, it avoids (question-beggingly, in my view) transcendental solipsism. 75 Here again Johnston simply seems to assume (unlike Valberg) that there are many arenas of presence, not just one (mine), and that there is thus a straightforward sense in which mine could disappear. The problem is whether one can actually even meaningfully say this, insofar as one starts from transcendental considerations. Wittgenstein’s argument is based on a transcendental examination of the necessary conditions for the possibility of meaning and representation; the result of such an examination is that the world can only be limited by me (my subjectivity) in order to be linguistically representable at all. In employing his vocabulary of “picking out” as applied to the Tractatus and its metaphysical or transcendental subject—or the arena—Johnston in my view fatally overlooks the necessity of a truly transcendental treatment of the matter. The subject of the arena cannot be “picked out” from among others. Any picking out will inevitably take place, in Valberg’s terms, within the (my) horizon. No horizon can be picked out, as there is no meta-horizon within which to do that. Nevertheless, one of Johnston’s crucial ideas (preparing the ground for his striking overall thesis that there is a sense in which “the good” may literally survive death, because they are not tied to their individual personal identities) is that the arena of presence, and one’s occupying it, is in an important sense illusory. We are in a way hallucinating that we are in the center of an arena of presence. We are dealing with merely intentional objects here. 76 Johnston concludes: “The real problem in principle with the idea of the resurrection of the self is that not even God could re-create this very arena of presence. (The same could be said of your

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arena of presence.) God could no more do that than he could re-create Macbeth’s dagger or any other mere intentional object.” 77 Johnston further argues that the (Buddhist) doctrine of there being no persistent self (anatta) leads to the doctrine of agape, the commandment to take others’ interests as seriously as one’s own. The unreality of the self, allegedly demonstrated along the lines of the argument for the illusoriness of the arena of presence, thus leads to the observation that our identities are relational and relative, “Protean,” and this in turn motivates (without logically entailing) the idea that we should take others’ interests into account as our own—and that “the good” among us do. “A certain kind of hallucination—that of a container or arena—bounds even our veridical experience of the world,” Johnston tells us, and therefore “our selves are [. . .] creatures of the unreal.” 78 The self’s importance thus vanishes. So anatta, the view that there is no persistent self worth caring about, leads to agape: “The reasons of prudence, or reasonable self-care, are none other than the reasons of impersonal altruism, applied to one’s own case. One’s own interests are not worth considering because they are one’s own but simply because they are interests, and interests, wherever they arise and are legitimate, are equally worthy of consideration.” 79 The agape, then, commands us to treat ourselves as if we were arbitrary others, “albeit one whose life one is called to live” 80 —but now, who is this “one” here? The transcendental subject all over again? I find Johnston’s argument intriguing but ultimately flawed, because it commits the basic “naturalistic fallacy” of all nontranscendental philosophies of the self, that is, an underlying conception of the self (and/or its “arena”) as an object in a world “ready-made” prior to and independently of the self. There is a sense, then, in which Johnston remains a metaphysical realist— which is impossible to reconcile with a truly transcendental approach to our mortal condition. And he does not seem to be able to get rid of the transcendental self, either, which leads to a tension right at the center of his position. Indeed, as Valberg puts it, the “naturalizer”—or, in the terminology I have employed in this chapter and the previous one, the one who views the self and subjectivity from a naturalistic and metaphysically realistic standpoint—“lacks, philosophically, a grasp of the horizonal conception of the self.” 81 Lacking such a grasp, we won’t get very far in the philosophy of death and dying, nor anywhere else. A failure to appreciate the transcendental character of the subjectivity existentially concerned with its mortality leads to absurdities such as the view that one’s being able to die only “one’s own death” is no more dramatic than one’s being able to, say, have only “one’s own haircut” or “one’s own lunch” instead of (strictly speaking) having anyone else’s. In a trivial sense, those things are one’s own, too; we all have our own lunches and haircuts rather than others’. But our deaths are our own in a much more pregnant sense—a sense calling for a transcendental and even solipsistic analysis. A failure

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to take seriously the transcendental dimension of the problem leads to the tendency to view everything—deaths, haircuts, lunches—on a par, as belonging to the same empirical nature whose metaphysical structure is fixed independently of our subjective constitutive contribution. When that metaphysically realistic background assumption is given up, a considerably enriched picture of the special significance of one’s own mortality opens up. Johnston’s argument is perhaps comparable to William James’s conception of pure experience and the relationality and construal-dependence of our identities. 82 James could say that our identities depend on our purposive practices and that they are always already in the field of pure experience. However, as we will see in chapter 6 (as well as the concluding chapter 7), even a Jamesian pragmatist approach to death and mortality will not liberate us from the need to consider the issue of death from a transcendental perspective. SUICIDE AND THE MEANING OF LIFE We should not, when discussing death from the point of view of ethical and transcendental solipsism, overlook the problem of suicide, which, according to Albert Camus’s well-known remark, is the single important problem in philosophy. For the young, pre-Tractarian Wittgenstein who wrote the Notebooks 1914–1916, suicide was an “elementary sin.” 83 Wittgenstein’s idea resembles Dostoyevsky’s conception of our moral need to believe in God: just as Dostoyevsky argued that if God does not exist, then everything is permitted, Wittgenstein points out that if suicide is permitted, then everything is, and if anything is morally prohibited, then suicide is. Why does he make such a peculiar statement, and how is it related to the above-discussed conception of death he developed in the Tractatus (or to transcendental views on death and the subject in general)? Since only the empirical facts of the (my) world disappear in suicide, couldn’t even the act of suicide itself just be seen as an empirical event, albeit the last one? Perhaps the act could, but its outcome cannot: the death of the subject should, again, be regarded as the disappearance of the transcendental conditions that make the empirical world possible. Hence, death, whether suicidical or not, is not a merely empirical event but also a transcendental one, or, rather, a transcendental pseudoevent that makes all subsequent genuine events in the world impossible. The true novelty of Wittgenstein’s position may lie in his trying to say, simultaneously, (1) that empirically speaking life and death, like all contingent, empirical or factual events in the natural world, are ultimately trivial and (2) that death is, despite its empirical triviality, something important or even sublime. Apparently he was trying to overcome our ordinary distinctions between what is sublime or “higher” and what is ordinary,

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empirical, or trivial. But Wittgenstein’s solipsistic approach to death is nowhere more clearly visible than in his attitude to suicide. 84 His discussion even touches theological themes (in a highly unorthodox manner) when he states in the Notebooks that there are two “God-heads,” the metaphysical I (i.e., the inner limit and the transcendental condition of the world) and the world that is independent of my will. 85 In a way, as he identifies the world (which is “mine”) and my life with each other, he also has to identify the metaphysical subject with God. This identification is natural insofar as I must play God’s role if solipsism is true and the world is my world. Now, if this equation holds, my death is not only the end of the world but the death of God as well. And if such a death is an act of the subject her-/himself (me), then it is a kind of divine suicide. Since this is close to being a contradiction in terms, God being, presumably, necessarily eternal, one may perhaps understand why Wittgenstein held suicide to be an elementary sin. It is a crime against the very worldorder he thought reason and morality required—against the transcendental status of both logic and ethics. Moreover, my disappearing from my solipsistic world is not only an end of that world; it is also an end of my mortality and thus (if our analysis thus far is correct) the end of what makes ethical value possible. The novelty of Levinas’s position, on the other hand, lies in his being relatively uninterested in the notion of suicide. We can hardly find in Levinas anything resembling the Wittgensteinian considerations of God being somehow identical to the metaphysical subject. There is nothing ethically significant in suicide, Levinas thinks, since only the death of the Other, not my own death, is (quasisolipsistically, as we saw) the locus of my ultimate responsibility. “Suicide is a contradictory concept,” Levinas claims, 86 but this hardly disengages him from the problematique of solipsism. The problem will have come back, once again, as soon as I note that I should not draw ethical attention to the notion of (my) suicide and that I ought to focus on the death of the Other instead, being prepared to substitute myself for the Other. (On the other hand, would such a substitution, stepping to one’s own death instead of an Other, be a suicide?) We are, hopefully, close to seeing what Wittgenstein’s notion of the “problem of life,” 87 which of course includes the problem of death, eventually comes down to: the impossibility of arguing, in a demonstrative way, against the solipsistic view of death (and, correspondingly, of life). An ethical perspective on death as the death of the Other should be seen as a continuous challenge to me, a challenge of avoiding solipsism. Yet, again, it is me and me only to whom such a challenge is directed, throughout my life. Death, whether my own or the Other’s, permanently calls me and my identity into question. This is the key thanatological result we seem to arrive at through our consideration of Wittgensteinian, Heideggerian, and Levinasian themes. Hence, instead of being a minor subfield of philosophy, thanatology, transcendentally worked out, ought

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to be seen as the ultimate area of philosophical reflection. As was already speculated, virtually all philosophical problems and efforts to understand the world may be traced back to their origins in our awareness of our mortality. A philosophy of death should be part and parcel of any broad philosophical account of the place of humans in the world. 88 If, as has been argued in this chapter, philosophical thanatology can do important work here by adopting the transcendental, first-personcentered perspective on death which I have sketched, then a transcendental interpretation of the ideas of such philosophical thanatologists as Wittgenstein and Heidegger may lead us to appreciate the insight that only a mortal, finite being can understand anything about the Being (to use a Heideggerian term) of which it is a part. 89 The transcendental approach, viewing mortality as a condition for whatever is possible for us in our lives, can thus lead us to take seriously our finitude, our mortality, as something that provides significance to our lives. It has been suggested that the capacity to put one’s life into question is required for one to have a unified life at all; 90 this suggestion, again, can be interpreted transcendentally. It is our mortality alone that enables us to take a responsibility for our life as a human life. The transcendental philosophical thanatologist can easily subscribe to the following statement by Jeff Malpas: “The grasp of one’s life as a whole is [. . .] also a grasp of the perspectival and situated character of one’s life [. . .]. For creatures that are finite, having a grasp of their lives as a whole in this way must ultimately mean having a grasp, no matter how rudimentary, of the way in which their lives extend from their birth to that end of possibilities that is their death.” Malpas adds that “for a life without end there need be no limit on the orderings that are possible within that life and no sense in which that life need depend on any finite number of choices.” There could be no situatedness in such an infinite life—no projects, no fragility, no unity, no meaning. As Malpas concludes: “To be a creature that has a life, to be a creature that has a world, to be a creature that has a sense of value and significance, is also to be a creature that has a grasp of the possibility of its own ending. It is, in other words, to be a creature capable of death.” 91 I am tempted to describe this as a transcendental argument, establishing our awareness of our own mortality as a necessary, though of course not sufficient, condition for our being able to live a fully human life, a life that has, or can have, unity and structure, and thereby also, possibly, “meaning”—or a life that can lack unity, structure, and meaning. It certainly has the general structure of a transcendental argument seeking to analyze the necessary conditions for the possibility of humanly given actualities. Admittedly, the conclusion of the argument may seem to be inherently paradoxical: we cannot know what the “meaning” of our lives is until we are dead, because only then does the life become a totality, and after death there is no one to know this meaning, either. Nevertheless, the prospect of death, our capability of bringing our lives to a close

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(including, of course, the permanent possibility of suicide), is required for us to formulate the idea that our lives, when closed, might have, or might have had, a meaning (although we, when living, cannot yet say what that meaning is—and, when dead, can no longer say what it was). This is an argument not far removed from Heidegger’s struggle with authenticity, but it can, I think, be stated without the almost inaccessible jargon known as “Heideggerese.” The paradox must perhaps be accepted. Did anyone, after all, believe that we could discuss the problem of our mortality without any air of paradox? CONCLUDING QUESTIONS It should not be forgotten that a serious problem has been identified in this chapter: the transcendental approach, with which I have expressed considerable sympathy, seems to lead to a solipsistic view of death. This is a conclusion that brings us one step further from what we arrived at through the discussion of transcendental subjectivity in the previous chapter—and presumably several steps further from the philosophicalanthropological considerations of chapter 2. The antisolipsistic maneuvers by thinkers like Levinas and Bauman were found wanting because of their implicit ethical solipsism, and explicitly antitranscendental philosophers of death like Johnston do not seem to get rid of the transcendental predicament, either. The transcendental reflections we have pursued may have only shown that the subject concerned with death and mortality, whether her/his own or the Other’s, is in a sense fundamentally alone (and is, thus, the “first person”) in that concern. Consequently, in the end, one can perhaps only speculate about the resources of human reason, even transcendental reason, to deal with the vast topic at hand. Do we need something quite nonhuman in order to develop a humanly satisfactory conception of death and (im)mortality? 92 Do we, in other words, have to rely not only on the notion of a transcendental subject, but on the notion of a transcendent subject (i.e., God) in order to account for the mystery that death (and, correspondingly, life) is for us? Only such an immortal subject, as being truly the other of mortality, i.e., as something that is not just the inner limit of the world but transcends any conceivable limit my mortal world may have, might be able to view death genuinely as the Other’s (another human being’s) death and to take full responsibility for the mortality of us mortals. The image of such a transcendent being might serve as a model of the infinity of our ethical quest as finite mortals. I do not want to enter theological thanatology here, however. From the philosophical point of view, there would of course be a lot to say about the grounds for postulating, or for refusing to postulate, a transcendent being. Human beings’ natural fear of death has, as has often been noted, been one of the background forces

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of religious beliefs for ages. This topic lies outside the present investigation, which remains resolutely this-worldly. The need for God’s help in our understanding of mortality and of the responsibility we have for others’ mortality remains as much an open question as that mortality itself. NOTES 1. This chapter is indebted to my early examination of transcendental philosophical thanatology in Sami Pihlström, “Death—Mine or the Other’s? On the Possibility of Philosophical Thanatology,” Mortality 6 (2001). 2. Miguel de Unamuno is one of those who have argued that the human craving for immortality is the basis of all philosophical and religious thought; see Unamuno, The Tragic Sense of Life in Men and Nations (1913), trans. A. Kerrigan (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1977). For a discussion of philosophy as a “preparation for death,” see Ann Hartle, Death and the Disinterested Spectator: An Inquiry into the Nature of Philosophy (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1986). Hartle rightly reminds us that philosophy, even when craving for immortality, presupposes our mortality (Gods, if there are any, are truly immortal and do not philosophize). 3. This is not to say, of course, that there would not be interesting analytic philosophy of death around. That, however, is the nontranscendental mainstream paradigm in current philosophizing about death. I have referred to some of the leading works in that field in the earlier chapters and will cite some of them again in this one. One of the most balanced general discussions of philosophy of death available today is Bernard N. Schumacher, Death and Mortality in Contemporary Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010). 4. See Thomas Nagel, Mortal Questions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979); Nagel, The View from Nowhere (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1986); Jay F. Rosenberg, Thinking Clearly about Death, 2nd ed. (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1998). 5. See, e.g., Fred Feldman, Confrontations with the Reaper (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992). See also Feldman’s and John Harris’s entries (“Death” and “Life and Death,” respectively) in Edward Craig (ed.), The Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy (London and New York: Routledge, 1998). An up-to-date survey of the analytic issues in the philosophy of death—such as the concept and criteria of death, the harmfulness of death, etc.—is provided in Steven Luper, “Death,” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (2014). (Luper, interestingly, is one of those analytic philosophers of death who find it unnecessary to even mention Heidegger—presumably the most widely discussed classical figure in modern philosophy dealing with death. See also Luper, The Philosophy of Death [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009].) 6. See also Michael Quante, “‘Wann ist ein Mensch tot?’ Zum Streit um den menschlichen Tod,” Zeitschrift für philosophische Forschung 49 (1995), 167–93; Quante, “Todesdefinition, Hirntodkriterium und Organentnahme: eine philosophische Skizze,” Transplantationsmedizin 9 (1997), 211–16. 7. Cf. here also Robert C. Solomon’s description of the dialectic between the “denial of death” (of which analytic philosophy is often accused) and “death fetishism,” the glorification of death as the ultimate meaning of life (which may seem to happen in Continental, especially Heideggerian, philosophy); see Solomon, “Death Fetishism, Morbid Solipsism,” in Jeff Malpas and Robert C. Solomon (eds.), Death and Philosophy (London and New York: Routledge, 1998), pp. 152–76. While it may be true that sometimes too much is being made of death, Solomon’s statement that death is just “one fact of life among many” (ibid., p. 164) sounds too empirical and factualizing from the point of view of the transcendental thanatologist.

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8. Cf. here several essays collected in Malpas and Solomon (eds.), Death and Philosophy, especially Solomon article cited in the previous note. 9. See I. Leman-Stefanovic, The Event of Death: A Phenomenological Inquiry (Dordrecht, GER: Martinus Nijhoff, 1987), p. 121. 10. I am here, as in the entire book, working within the Western traditions of philosophy here. Interesting comparisons between Western and Eastern perspectives on death can be found in Malpas and Solomon (eds.), Death and Philosophy (cited above). 11. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1921), trans. David F. Pears and Brian F. McGuinness (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1974), §§ 6.431–6.4311; Martin Heidegger, Sein und Zeit (Tübingen, GER: Max Niemeyer, 1961; 1st ed. 1927). The “event of death” is often spoken about rather carelessly, for example in the debates over whether dying is good or bad for us; cf. Ivan Soll, “On the Purported Insignificance of Death,” in Malpas and Solomon (eds.), Death and Philosophy, pp. 22–38 (here p. 36). See, however, also Leman-Stefanovic, The Event of Death. 12. See the relevant chapters in Emmanuel Levinas, The Levinas Reader, ed. Sean Hand (Cambridge, MA and Oxford: Blackwell, 1989); Zygmunt Bauman, Mortality, Immortality and Other Life Strategies (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1992). 13. This is an application of the “pragmatic maxim” well known in the tradition of pragmatism (see also the previous chapters and especially chapter 6 below). Since pragmatism assesses philosophical conceptions and ideas in terms of future, in terms of their practical outcome in people’s lives, one might argue that it has to take death seriously. Death is, after all, our eventual future in any case. Thus, if one is committed to the pragmatist project of tracing the “practical results” of philosophical worldviews in terms of human conduct and future prospects, one will have to consider how a given philosophy helps one live with the prospect of death. Hair-splitting attempts to analyze the concept of death may not be pragmatically valuable in this sense (although, again, I do not want to claim that there is no value in them at all). 14. Solomon, “Death Fetishism, Morbid Solipsism,” p. 154. 15. Immanuel Kant, Kritik der reinen Vernunft (1781/1787), ed. Raymund Schmidt (Hamburg: Felix Meiner, 1990). 16. Rosenberg, Thinking Clearly about Death, chapters 1–4. 17. See ibid., pp. 322–23, and chapter 10 passim. Sometimes, admittedly, Rosenberg succeeds in formulating ideas that the transcendental thanatologist may find interesting, too: “The events of birth and death form a sort of frame into which each person must necessarily fit his conception of his own life and of the lives of others” (ibid., p. 324). [T]he fact of universal human mortality structures the very concepts in terms of which we experience the living out of our lives. [. . .] [T]he fact that each of us will someday die shapes and colors our consciousness. Our deaths are then indeed, in a sense, present to us here and now—not as the private objects of a special, privileged, first-person acquaintance, but as inherent structural aspects of those concepts in terms of which we humans uniquely, as rational beings, experience ourselves and our world (ibid., p. 325). 18. Leman-Stefanovic, The Event of Death, pp. 5, 70–71. 19. Ibid., pp. 285ff. For phenomenological investigations of death, see also Robin May Schott (ed.), Birth, Death, and Femininity (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2010), especially Sara Heinämaa’s chapters in the volume. 20. See Stephen Mulhall, Heidegger and Being and Time (London and New York: Routledge, 1996). In addition to Mulhall’s commentary, P. Kraus’s (“Death and Metaphysics”) and J. Young’s (“Death and Authenticity”) essays, both in Malpas and Solomon (eds.), Death and Philosophy, should be mentioned as useful and highly accessible recent discussions of the notion of death in relation to Heidegger’s other basic concepts (Dasein, authenticity, Being, metaphysics, nothingness, etc.). 21. Mulhall, Heidegger and Being and Time, p. 120.

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22. Kraus, “Death and Metaphysics,” p. 99; see also, e.g., Leman-Stefanovic, The Event of Death, pp. 5, 11, 81, 258, 290, and passim. 23. Mulhall, Heidegger and Being and Time, p. 115. 24. Cf., e.g., Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989/1994). Jeff Malpas, in “Death and the Unity of Life” (in Malpas and Solomon [eds.], Death and Philosophy, pp. 120–34) also employs the notion of a narrative unity of a life in his discussion of the necessity of mortality for our being able to grasp our lives as unified wholes. 25. Lucretius, The Nature of the Universe (De rerum natura), trans. R. E. Latham (Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin, 1957), p. 121. 26. See again Nagel, Mortal Questions, chapter 1 (“Death,” pp. 1–10). Cf. also Feldman, “Death,” and Peter Loptson, “The Antinomy of Death,” in Malpas and Solomon (eds.), Death and Philosophy, pp. 135–51. Some background assumptions of the Epicurean picture and Nagel’s arguments against it have been investigated by Soll (“On the Purported Insignificance of Death,” cited above). Loptson (“The Antinomy of Death,” p. 151), in turn, suggests that one might adopt an Epicurean attitude precisely because death is such a great evil it is and we can do nothing about it. Solomon (in his “Death Fetishism, Morbid Solipsism”), finally, tries to diminish our fear of death as a great evil, tragedy, or punishment—without celebrating death, either. He suggests that death is much less significant than some philosophers (either positively or negatively) think. All these discussions suffer, on my opinion, from their lack of a truly “firstperson,” transcendental, perspective. 27. See Unamuno, Tragic Sense (cited above). On Canetti, see R. Steiner, “Against Death,” in Malpas and Solomon, Death and Philosophy, pp. 16–21. As another example of rejection, also cited by Geoffrey Scarre, in his Death (Stocksfield: Acumen, 2007), is the famous poem, “Do not go gentle into that good night,” by Dylan Thomas (see pp. 74–75) This is far from Stoic resignation: “Thomas urges us to reject [death] with anger” (ibid., p. 75). Rather, it is a form of radical nonacceptance and life-affirmation. Thomas’s poem is available online at: www.poets.org/poetsorg/poem/do-not-go-gentle-good-night. 28. The philosophical issue of realism might also be applied to the phenomenon of death more generally. The realist sees death as an objective event in the mind-independent world (and is thus unable to see it as mine in any philosophically interesting sense). The antirealist definitely need not be a solipsist, however. He or she may defend, for instance, social constructivism (a view popular in contemporary philosophy and sociology of science), claiming that death is a social construction rather than a natural phenomenon independent of our socially shared conventions and practices. It is we who classify the world in terms of notions such as life and death, mortality and immortality. It may be difficult for the constructivist, too, to offer a philosophical conception of one’s own death. Whether death is primarily a natural or a social phenomenon, it seems to be something that happens to other people (or other living organisms), to something that is an object of my (or our) investigation. Neither in realism nor in constructivism is there, then, enough room for a first-person perspective on death. 29. See Wittgenstein, Tractatus, §§ 5.62–5.64. 30. Death is not an “event” for Heidegger, either (see Leman-Stefanovic, The Event of Death; Kraus, “Death and Metaphysics,” p. 100). 31. Richard Brockhaus, “On Pulling up the Ladder: Tractatus 6.54,” Idealistic Studies 15 (1985), 249–70 (see pp. 261–62, 266). For Brockhaus’s more comprehensive reading of the Tractatus, with a special emphasis on Wittgenstein’s Schopenhauerian background, see Brockhaus, On Pulling Up the Ladder: The Metaphysical Roots of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (La Salle, IL: Open Court, 1991). I will not refer to the vast secondary literature on Wittgenstein in any detail here. An excellent starting point for a transcendental investigation of the solipsistic issue of death in relation to the Tractarian metaphysical subject would be Heikki Kannisto, Thoughts and Their

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Subject: A Study of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus (Acta Philosophica Fennica 40, Helsinki: The Philosophical Society of Finland, 1986). 32. The notion of a “natural death” in this sense (that is, the notion of a death which is an event in the natural world) of course covers deaths that are in colloquial language referred to as “nonnatural”—e.g., deaths whose cause is war, murder, or suicide. 33. Ernest Gellner, Language and Solitude: Wittgenstein, Malinowski and the Habsburg Dilemma (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), p. 63. Geoffrey Scarre (Death, cited above) also considers the first-personal versus third-personal approaches to death, emphasizing the social meanings of death (contra “morbid solipsism,” as termed by Solomon). Our relation to the dead is also to a large extent socially and culturally determined, and we should, Scarre says, be “true to the dead” (pp. 19–21). While there is the existential dimension of the problem, even here, too, social dimensions, other mortals, are important. Subjective and objective perspectives are both needed. “Subjective insight is therefore not only supplemented by, but also in part dependent on, knowledge from the objective perspective.” (Ibid., p. 35) Scarre thus partly argues against the Heideggerian exclusive emphasis on the “insider’s” point of view. He goes on: “Our acquaintance with others’ deaths thus alerts us to aspects of the meaning of our own mortality, our Being-towards-death, that we could never learn from our unaided self-reflection.” (Ibid.) “Part of what my death means to me is constituted by what I understand it will mean to others. [. . .] So what I make of my own death is inevitably dependent on how death is understood within my community.” (Ibid., p. 36.) And even more strongly: “Our identities are constructed through our being with others, in their living and dying” (ibid.). This relational theory of personal identity (coming close to what was said about the constitutivity of relations of recognition in chapter 3 above) offers a conception of death that doesn’t diminish the first-personal seriousness of the issue but interprets this first-personality itself in a different way. To be a “first person” the subject cannot be a solitary (solipsistic) self. First-personal seriousness is not to be conflated with solipsism. Yet there is an aspect of solipsism in these considerations. Referring to Unamuno, Scarre talks about “the immortal yearning for immortality” (ibid., p. 50) and equates, with Wittgenstein, the loss of my world with the loss of the world (ibid., p. 51). Thus, as will also become clearer in what follows, the solipsism issue will not easily disappear. 34. Among Levinas’s main works, Totality and Infinity (1961) addresses this famous issue most directly. I will in this chapter mostly cite the relevant formulations available in Emmanuel Levinas, The Levinas Reader, ed. Sean Hand (Cambridge, MA and Oxford: Blackwell, 1989). 35. See, e.g., Heidegger, Sein und Zeit, § 9. 36. For a critical account of existentialist philosophies of death, see Walter Kaufmann, Existentialism, Religion, and Death (New York: New American Library, 1976). Bauman (Mortality, Immortality and Other Life Strategies, pp. 3 ff., 15, 18, 34, 50–51, 130, 142) also provides a powerful analysis of the ultimate subjectivity (mineness) of death, also focusing on the idea that my death (and my death only) is not an event but something unexperienceable and utterly lonely. His wider concern is to analyze both mortality and immortality as “life strategies” and, hence, to understand the ways in which our knowledge of our mortality shapes and has shaped human culture. As Bauman puts it, modernity “deconstructs mortality” (and medicalizes death), whereas postmodernity “deconstructs immortality.” 37. One might argue, furthermore, that my realizing the responsibility I have within my life for others must be based on my recognizing the others as something in particular (see the brief discussion of the concept of recognition in chapter 3). On the other hand, the Levinasian relation otherness does not necessarily require any recognizing as but the mere acknowledgment of an irreducible otherness beyond my own “sameness.” 38. Cf. Emyr Vaughn Thomas, “From Detachment to Immersion: Wittgenstein and ‘the Problem of Life,’” Ratio 12 (1999), 195–209.

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39. Kraus, “Death and Metaphysics,” p. 109; Young, “Death and Authenticity,” p. 113. 40. Mulhall, Heidegger and Being and Time, pp. 115, 117. 41. Levinas, The Levinas Reader, p. 83; see also Emmanuel Levinas, Alterity and Transcendence, trans. M. B. Smith (London: The Athlone Press, 1999), pp. 24–25, and chapter 11. 42. This is, in my view, a symptom of the profundity of Levinas’s position rather than a vice. His being caught in the web of solipsism through the notion of one’s infinite personal responsibility is far more subtle than the relatively simple and unargued rejection of solipsistic conceptions of death in, e.g., Elias, The Loneliness of the Dying. For a critique of the view that the human self, when dying, is a “solipsistic atom,” see also Solomon, “Death Fetishism, Morbid Solipsism,” pp. 171ff. Solomon argues that such a position, “morbid solipsism,” forgets “the social dimension of death” (ibid., p. 175). I am not sure that Solomon is free from the solipsism issue, either. It is still me for whom death is a problem because of the others to whom I have various social relations. The same remarks may apply to Leman-Stefanovic’s interesting attempt to develop a basically Heideggerian account of the significance of the Other’s death (see The Event of Death, cited above). Leman-Stefanovic argues that, despite Heidegger’s insistence that death is an ontological structure of Dasein’s existence rather than an event, we should take seriously the “event of death” as something that is not merely inauthentic but a happening in the world that “recasts the ontological meaning of our existential horizons” (ibid., p. 135, and passim). The significance of the Other’s death shows that Dasein is not an isolated self (ibid., p. 203); if there is authentic Being-with, then finding authentic significance—“ontological ‘social’ significance”—in the event of the Other’s death should be possible (ibid., pp. 266, 268). In short, the death of an Other who is significant for me may, according to LemanStefanovic, be “A Death, a genuine ontic e-vent which transforms my world for all time” (ibid., p. 233), as the Other’s “no-being opens me to the no-thingness and the mystery of Being itself” (ibid., p. 262). What should be added is obvious: it is inevitably me for whom the Other’s death is significant as an opening into the mystery of my Being. See, however, again the phenomenological reflections on otherness and death in Robin May Schott (ed.), Birth, Death, and Femininity (cited above). 43. Levinas, The Levinas Reader, pp. 82, 84; see also p. 181. 44. Cf. Emmanuel Levinas, Discovering Existence with Husserl, eds. and trans. R. A. Cohen and M. B. Smith (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1998), p. 177. 45. See Levinas, The Levinas Reader, p. 82. 46. Ibid., pp. 104–6, 115–16, 123; see also p. 243. 47. See also Levinas, Alterity and Transcendence, pp. 5, 24–25, 27, 30. 48. Levinas, The Levinas Reader, pp. 107, 226; cf. pp. 245–46; and Levinas, Alterity and Transcendence, pp. 105–6. Things get complicated, however, when one adds Levinas’s concept of God to the picture. God, for him, is “other than the other,” “other otherwise, other with an alterity prior to the alterity of the other, prior to the ethical bond with another and different from every neighbour” (The Levinas Reader, p. 179). Could I meaningfully be said to be responsible even for the responsibility of such an extremely, unspeakably, other? Another problem is that even though I always have one responsibility more than the Other, my responsibility originates in the Other. As Anthony F. Beavers notes, in his Levinas beyond the Horizons of Cartesianism: An Inquiry into the Metaphysics of Morals (New York: Peter Lang, 1995), “I cannot be the source of my own responsibility [. . .]. As author of my responsibility, the other cannot be possessed— reduced to the self—without also dissolving my responsibility. To kill the other is, then, to destroy the very origin of my responsibility” (pp. 96–97). If this is correct, could I ever be responsible for killing the Other? In the act of killing, the conditions of the possibility of responsibility seem to be taken away. 49. Beavers, in his intriguing study, firmly situates Levinas in the Cartesian tradition. Levinas shares with Descartes, among other things, a view of “the finite mind turned inside out by the idea of infinity” (ibid., p. 2).

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50. Ibid., pp. 100–102. 51. Levinas, Alterity and Transcendence, p. 23. 52. Ibid., p. 28; see also p. 164. 53. Bauman, Mortality, Immortality and Other Life Strategies, pp. 40–48, 200–210. Cases where someone has really died for another human being, taking the other’s place, are of course rare, but such cases are known and sometimes documented in detail. One is the case of the Polish Franciscan Father Maksymilian Rajmund Kolbe who, in the summer of 1941, volunteered to take the place of Franciszek Gajowniczek, who had been condemned to death by starvation at Auschwitz. Gajowniczek survived, thanks to Kolbe’s offer. See Francizek Piper and Teresa Swiebocka (eds.), Auschwitz: Nazi Death Camp, trans. D. Selvage (Oswiecim, POL: Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum, 1996), p. 205. 54. One might recall here Solomon’s (“Death Fetishism, Morbid Solipsism”) arguments against “morbid solipsism.” The object of his critique is, however, a nontranscendental view different from the solipsistic attitude to death that has been discussed in this chapter. 55. See J. J. Valberg, Dream, Death, and the Self (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007); and Mark Johnston, Surviving Death (Princeton, NJ. Princeton University Press, 2010). Unsurprisingly, both are neglected by Luper in his allegedly definitive encyclopedia entry “Death.” Needless to say, I am here only referring to these two contributions very briefly and inconclusively; I cannot possibly do justice to the richness of their discussions. 56. Valberg, Dream, Death, and the Self, p. 11. 57. Ibid., p. 12. See also pp. 96–97, 185ff. 58. Ibid., p. 129. 59. Ibid., p. 144. 60. Ibid., p. 178. 61. Ibid., p. 179. The absence of what Valberg calls THIS is NOTHINGNESS, there being no horizon. Puzzlingly, even then, the world “would still be there, just as it is,” but “it would not be present” (ibid., p. 180). A Wittgensteinian-like interplay between solipsism and realism seems to be at work here. 62. See ibid., p. 181. 63. Ibid., p. 185. 64. Ibid., p. 182. 65. Ibid., p. 186; see also p. 484. Elsewhere, he points out that becoming open to the truth of solipsism is making a philosophical discovery (ibid., p. 205), responding to a challenge of self-understanding (cf. ibid., p. 234). 66. Ibid., p. 187. 67. Ibid., p. 189. Of course, the kind of solipsism at work here is (as Valberg notes; see ibid., p. 186) very different from the rather naive epistemological solipsism that philosophers like Russell addressed (see, e.g., Bertrand Russell, Human Knowledge [New York: Simon & Schuster, 1948]); such solipsism deserves no serious philosophical attention any more than the nontranscendental thought experiments of the “immortals” briefly discussed above. 68. Valberg, Dream, Death, and the Self, p. 198. 69. Ibid., p. 207. 70. Ibid., pp. 215ff. 71. Ibid., pp. 227–28; see also pp. 482–83. 72. Ibid., p. 232. 73. Ibid., pp. 403ff., especially p. 407. 74. See especially Johnston, Surviving Death, pp. 168–69. 75. Cf. especially the critical discussion of Wittgenstein and the Tractatus in ibid., pp. 182–83, and of Valberg on pp. 184–85. 76. Cf. ibid., p. 225, though, in a Wittgensteinian vein, I would suggest that the very idea of dealing with objects, intentional or not, here at all is misleading. 77. Ibid., p. 222.

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78. Ibid., pp. 230–31. 79. Ibid., p. 236 (see also p. 234). For Johnston’s summary of his argument, see pp. 237–38. 80. Ibid., p. 236. 81. Valberg, Dream, Death, and the Self, p. 262. 82. It is also explicated by Johnston in ibid., chapter 4, “What Is Found at the Center?,” in terms of the concept of response-dependence (pp. 272–73). 83. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Notebooks 1914–1916 (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1961), entry on January 10, 1917. 84. One may speculate that it is, as so often, Arthur Schopenhauer’s (and presumably to some extent Otto Weininger’s) influence on Wittgenstein’s early thought that was crucial here. From the Schopenhauerian perspective, suicide, as an apparent rejection of my will, is only a rejection of this particular will and hence an “ultimate affirmation of the individual” instead of being a liberation from the suffering caused by the noumenal will (cf. Brockhaus, On Pulling Up the Ladder, p. 63; for Schopenhauer’s views on death, see Dale Jacquette, “Schopenhauer on Death,” in C. Janaway [ed.], The Cambridge Companion to Schopenhauer [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999], pp. 293–317). This may be one of the background ideas that led Wittgenstein to his conception of suicide as an elementary sin. It should be noted that Wittgenstein did not advance the doctrine of suicide as a sin as a universal ethical norm or as a theological dogma. On the contrary, he must have held (on the basis of the conception of language that he developed in the Tractatus) that such norms and dogmas did not make much sense. The prohibition of suicide was, for him, a personal ethical and religious conviction, meant to apply to his life—which, for a solipsist, would of course have been the only life there was (though I am certainly not claiming that Wittgenstein was a solipsist). 85. Wittgenstein, Notebooks, entry on July 8, 1916. 86. Levinas, The Levinas Reader, p. 42. 87. Wittgenstein, Tractatus, § 6.521. 88. Various philosophical disciplines may be enriched through thanatological considerations. For example, environmental philosophy can be seen as focusing on the theme of the death of the natural environment; cf. Carolyn Merchant, The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology and the Scientific Revolution (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1983). One might ask whether nonhuman nature could here be seen as the Other in Levinas’s sense—and whether, again, solipsism comes back to the picture through the observation that it is me who is responsible for the death of nature. Arguably, it is only on the basis of my own mortality that I can take seriously the mortality of other natural creatures. It is only as a mortal human being that I can be ethically concerned and responsible for the others’ (whether other humans’ or nonhuman species’) mortality. On the other hand, the death of nature is also partly my own death, since I am undeniably a part of nature (empirically, not transcendentally, considered). Furthermore, environmental philosophers discussing the death of nature should perhaps also pay attention to the Heideggerian point, mentioned above, that only humans (only Dasein, which is mine) are mortal and can properly speaking die, instead of merely perishing. 89. Cf. Kraus, “Death and Metaphysics,” p. 111. 90. Malpas, “Death and the Unity of a Life,” p. 123. 91. Ibid., pp. 129, 131, 134. 92. Could such a need be pragmatically justified? Here we are close to pragmatist developments in the philosophy of religion, which cannot be discussed here; cf. Sami Pihlström, Pragmatic Pluralism and the Problem of God (New York: Fordham University Press, 2013).

FIVE Death, Guilt, and (In)equality

The previous chapter sketched a transcendental philosophical thanatology taking seriously not only the idea of the self as a “limit of the world” (already explored in chapter 3) but also the problem of solipsism, or the distinctiveness of my own personal horizon of death and mortality, that is, my death’s being for me something fundamentally different from all other people’s deaths. We even noticed how the problem of solipsism tends to return even when we seek to focus on the mortality of another human being rather than our own mortality. This chapter can be read as a further examination of this general issue. I will explore the ways in which we can be guilty of others’ deaths and mortality—or, better, guilty in a metaphysical and existential (or transcendental) sense without being exactly guilty “of” anything in particular. The starting point of my reflections in this chapter is a certain kind of conception of ethics, which I must here basically state instead of directly arguing for—while hoping that this chapter as a whole will function as an indirect argument for its plausibility. According to this conception, ethics is not primarily about the good life or about the legitimacy of moral principles. Rather, ethics, pretty much like religion, exists because we die, because we suffer, and because there is a lot of evil in the world. A certain kind of “negativity” is, in this sense, a key to morality, and therefore the ethics of death and dying needs to be studied from the perspective of negative moral concepts, such as the concept of guilt. As philosophical anthropology, just like its subdiscipline philosophical thanatology, must focus on normative issues concerning human life (and death), on what is “wrong” in the ways we live (and die), an extended study on the concept of guilt in this context is particularly important. Explicating this concept in a transcendental manner, following the transcendental methodology already introduced and employed in the previous chapters and elaborat127

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ing on the concept of the transcendental self, will thus crucially supplement the project of philosophical thanatology I am engaging in in this volume. THREE KINDS OF GUILT I want to begin by suggesting that we ought to distinguish between (at least) three quite different ways in which death (or, more generally, death, dying, and mortality) and guilt are conceptually—and, therefore, ethically and also metaphysically—connected in our lives, moving from the more ordinary (empirical) to the more metaphysical (or, in a sense to be specified in due course, “transcendental”). My list is certainly not exhaustive but it is, I hope, illustrative: 1. There are, obviously, factual (empirical, ordinary) forms of guilt based on our causing death(s) by, e.g., killing other human beings. This category includes causing deaths by means of omission, assuming that omissions are actions of some kind: when, for instance, we fail to provide a sick person with medicine, we may cause her/his death precisely by not doing something that ought to have been done in order to save her/his life. 1 These forms of guilt invoke a number of important applications to special topics in applied ethics, such as abortion, euthanasia, and war. 2. However, in addition to the first category that is perhaps too obvious even to be mentioned, there is another form of guilt connected with the topic of death, namely, guilt based on our not having done something with or to someone during her or his life, i.e., before her/his death. This is, accordingly, a form of guilt resulting from our failure to be sufficiently strongly present or “available” in another person’s life. This form of guilt should be distinguished from the guilt resulting from our failure to do something specific, e.g., to save a life; it is based on a more general kind of omission. Yet, ultimately this form of guilt may be reducible to ordinary factual guilt, insofar as all omissions are understood as actions and our “general omission” is a sum of a large number of particular ones. 3. Finally, there is something like guilt based on one’s life as a whole, on our life being fundamentally wrong or questionable. 2 This metaphysical or transcendental guilt can be compared to the guilt of the innocent Oedipus, for instance. Oedipus, like many other tragic heroes, is guilty of a horrible action which he has tried to avoid but, given his tragic fate, cannot escape. It may also come close to the guilt felt by, say, some Holocaust survivors, or the survivors of other genocides or events of mass murder. A survivor may ask why s/he was saved while so many others died. Hence, transcendental guilt should also be further connected with the ethics of

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memory, our duty to remember, and the guilt involved in remembering certain horrible events of history—or, perhaps worse, in our inevitable failures to remember—even if we never did anything particular ourselves, or even if we were not even born when such events took place. 3 I will try to philosophically illuminate the deep link between death and guilt by considering the third form of guilt, in particular. This chapter can thus partly be read as an attempt to apply the idea of transcendental guilt to the specific issue of death and mortality, 4 and thus to continue the transcendental investigations of the previous chapters. In a sense, the transcendental analysis of guilt will add another—fundamentally ethical—dimension to the transcendental analysis of the mortal self pursued in the previous chapters. More importantly, my discussion in this chapter should, however, be read as an attempt to redirect the philosophy of death and mortality: the issue of guilt is unfortunately often only incompletely addressed in mainstream philosophical thanatology. Insofar as both death and guilt lead us to consider fundamental issues of human finitude, an integration of these concepts deserves detailed attention. Special topics that could and should be discussed from the perspective of the transcendental versus empirical/factual distinction include (among others) the following, the ongoing discourse on each containing a distinctive element of guilt but each (in its received form) typically ignoring the full-blown transcendental aspect of the problem of death and guilt: (i) moral nihilism versus the fundamental importance of morality— and the possible survival of “the good”; 5 (ii) suicide—recalling Albert Camus’s famous question: why doesn’t everyone commit suicide, given that the world is absurd? (cf. chapter 4 above)—and (iii) the ethics of memory (including the ethics of political history). 6 I cannot discuss these topics comprehensively in a single chapter, of course, but I will try to show through brief exemplary discussions how the general theme of transcendental guilt should in my view be approached in relation to death and mortality. WHOSE GUILT? NONTRANSCENDENTAL AND TRANSCENDENTAL SUBJECTS REVISITED The transcendental versus empirical distinction is clearly not unique to the phenomenon of guilt. There can be analogous accounts of other death-related emotions. Fear, hope, and other emotions relevant to our mortality may also be available both in their ordinary (or factual) and transcendental versions (see also below). When these emotions are discussed in relation to, for example, the Epicurean controversy regarding the question whether it is irrational to fear death, the relevant notions are usually employed in their ordinary or factual sense, though occasionally

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such discussions may—and should—be enriched by transcendental considerations drawn from the Kantian and existentialist traditions. 7 The problem of the transcendental subject inevitably rearises here: whose emotions are we talking about when investigating (say) death and guilt? Am I, in addition to being (or having) an ordinary psychological self with a flesh-and-blood body in the empirical world, also a transcendental self, or do I perhaps “have” one? (And if so, who would this “I” be?) This issue needs to be settled in some way, as transcendental guilt, in particular, can hardly be ascribed to the ordinary empirical, factual self. It might be seen as a version of “the paradox of subjectivity” discussed in the phenomenological tradition. 8 It is typical of nontranscendental philosophers to avoid such complications—for better or worse. Richard Sorabji, for instance, completely ignores the transcendental aspect of the issue of subjectivity, despite his otherwise extremely detailed and comprehensive discussion of the history of the concept of a self and its current relevance for understanding personal identity and death. Let us take a brief look at two recent reflections on death and the subject of death and mortality, Sorabji’s and Bernard Schumacher’s, in order to provide some context for the distinctively transcendental perspective (in this chapter focusing on ethics and guilt) that I am defending. Sorabji deals much more with the concept of the self and its history, especially in ancient but also in early modern philosophy, than with the concept of mortality as such, but there are learned reflections on death, the possibility of survival, and the (ir)rationality of the fear of death in his major book on the self that we may briefly examine here. (For classical quotations, including the Epicureans, his work is a great source.) The self the existence of which Sorabji defends is “not an undetectable soul or immaterial ego, but an embodied individual,” something that “has or owns psychological states as well as having or owning a body and bodily states”—neither of which is its essence. 9 Sorabji, however, fails to distinguish between the transcendental and the empirical self, as most philosophers approaching this problem in terms of pre-Kantian (Aristotelian) metaphysics. There is, on the other hand, a trace of transcendental argument in the way he defends his postulation: “I could not even survive infancy, or develop in the direction of being able to learn language, if I did not already see the world in terms of its relationship to me as the owner of properties, including eventually psychological properties.” 10 Sorabji also refers to a Kantian argument: “If one does not think of oneself as a unitary perceiver, one cannot think of the sweet and white qualities that one perceives as belonging to one and the same external object.” 11 But he applies these transcendental-sounding considerations to a nontranscendental self, I must say. His fundamentally non-Kantian approach is also manifested in his comment that Kant “suspended judgment” regarding to the existence of the self as a question of “what actually exists.” 12

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Sorabji comments on personal identity by noting that an individual’s survival “cannot depend exclusively on the survival of another individual,” because survival is not a relative notion. However, if individuality itself is relative—if all individuals are relational 13—this is not convincing. An individual’s survival as the individual he or she is may depend on others’ being what they are, because no individual is what it is without a framework or context in which there are others. Sorabji himself refers to Plotinus’s idea that “other people may enter into one’s conception of oneself and hence into one’s identity,” which comes close to “a modern German tradition that sees the self as a relationship with other people.” 14 Sorabji also takes Buddhist ideas into account (such as the emptiness of the self). He even suggests a kind of relativity of facts about the self to purposes (perhaps implicitly coming close to a kind of pragmatism): “For purposes of compassion it is best to think of there being selves that suffer. For purposes of avoiding selfishness, such thoughts are best avoided. [. . .] [However,] there must be some [nonrelative?] facts to be expressed, or it will not be a fact that there has been a change of attitude, or that it has promoted compassion or selflessness.” 15 Philosophy, according to Sorabji, is “a preparation for death” (as Plato taught us), and he also considers different options for survival. 16 However, what if we do not survive? Sorabji reflects: the horror can be shown to be irrational, because we do not feel corresponding horror at the thought of our past nonexistence before birth. Nonetheless, although irrational, the horror may be inevitable for those who feel it because natural selection has adapted us to feel anxiety about the future that we do not feel about the past. This raises a question about the limits of philosophy. Can it not calm an emotion by showing it to be irrational? [. . .] [I]t does not get rid of the horror for those who feel it. But it should prevent the horror from growing, as emotion often can, through the belief that it is justified. 17

Sorabji’s detailed considerations, with the help of ancient materials, of the different options for survival—e.g., disembodied survival, circular time, etc. 18 —are highly interesting, also from the point of view of the entanglement of philosophical anthropology in general and philosophical thanatology in particular, but not particularly relevant to our concerns here. He sympathizes with the “idea of resurrection” because it “eliminates the problems” he has raised with the other conceptions: The familiar range of experiences would be available to embodied persons, if that was thought appropriate, and there would be no puzzle about what kind of owner the experiences could belong to. Even so, [. . .] [i]t was not clear that the reassembly of our particles scattered through the universe, after having passed through other people, would give us back the very same bodies, or the very same persons. 19

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These issues are discussed in more detail—not as historically but in a more systematic and argumentative way—by Mark Johnston, to whom we will return. 20 Toward the end of his book, Sorabji appeals to the symmetry argument in the Epicurean controversy, referring to relevant sources like Lucretius: “we do not feel horror at our past nonexistence before our birth, so it must be irrational to feel horror at the prospect of future nonexistence, since the two are mirror-images of each other.” However, we could feel horror not at the past nonexistence but “the infinitude of time,” feeling our own brief existence “dwarfed by it.” The horror might even be intensified by the realization that “a tiny turn in events could have brought it about that one never came into existence at all.” 21 So this is not an asymmetrical horror of future things only but of something depending on both prebirth and postdeath nonexistence. Natural selection, however, may have “programmed” us so that we feel horror mostly toward future nonexistence, trying to avoid it at all costs: With fears that are not so strongly programmed, I believe that philosophy can often help. [But not with this strongly programmed fear!] But even here, I think that philosophy can still do something. By making us see that the fear is [. . .] irrational and merely the product of evolutionary forces, it can help us to take our own agitation less seriously. It makes fear worse if we feel that the fear is justified. The “Lucretian” argument that the fear is not justified does not remove it, but it can keep it in check and prevent it from growing. 22

Somehow this does not seem to me convincing. Sorabji does not appear to take seriously the Heideggerian and more generally modern idea of human beings’ being strongly future-directed beings. There is a genuine asymmetry here, not shaked by the “mirror-image” argument, an asymmetry leading to anxiety if not horror. 23 It is this asymmetry that encourages us to view our mortal existence “from within”—transcendentally. In comparison, another contemporary theorist of death, Bernard Schumacher, is no less historically oriented but more receptive to the idea of the transcendental. Discussing death within philosophical anthropology, 24 Schumacher is one of the few who discuss with competence both analytic and Continental (phenomenological) approaches to death in contemporary philosophy. He also inevitably goes through some of the standard discussions of the definition of death, of personhood, and related issues. Unlike the mainstream analytic philosophical thanatologists, Schumacher also focuses on the death of the other as a possible object of “thanatological knowledge,” in relation to Heidegger—emphasizing, however, the “mineness” and “nontransferability” of death. 25 Death, as something first-personal, can only be a problem for me. Accordingly,

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Heidegger, according to Schumacher, is an existential solipsist, more or less as was suggested in chapter 4 above. 26 Let us take a look at how Schumacher comments on the relation between death and life: “death in life and the extraterritoriality of death with respect to life—are situated at two different levels of understanding death,” though often conflated, as the state of death is confused with the fact of being a mortal being. 27 Could this difference be the one between empirical and transcendental levels of understanding death? This is an important distinction. Schumacher, unlike most other recent thanatologists, explicitly refers to transcendental philosophy in connection with Edmund Husserl’s phenomenology. The “original transcendental life” is “immortal” in the sense that it “ultimately creates the world” and is not limited by nothingness. 28 There are, then, transcendental limits framing life and its possible experiential states. This is something that nontranscendental discussions of the metaphysics of death—based on metaphysical realism—fail to take into consideration at all. 29 In sum, while Schumacher’s discussion remains partly unclear, he more explicitly than most other recent philosophers of death (though not at any great length) takes into consideration the transcendental anthropological approach that I am interested in defending and rearticulating in this book. The basic view I am proposing in the rest of this chapter is similar, or at least very close, to the one defended in my Transcendental Guilt (2011): the irreducibility, superiority, and “overridingness” of the ethical point of view, the necessary role played by (potential) guilt in constituting this point of view (or its very possibility), and the deep, mutually constitutive relation between guilt and mortality must all be taken extremely seriously when we reflect on the challenge mortality poses to our ethical relations to each other and to the world we live in. 30 We also need to take seriously the philosophical significance of related religious concepts, such as sin and grace—or their secular analogies. Death and guilt are joined into a single problem framework inviting not just a purely philosophical response but, possibly, a religious and/or theological one, even if one subscribes to no specifically religious worldviews. We just cannot completely ignore the role that religious concepts, or what originally were religious concepts, play, or may play, in shaping our moral relations to the world and to our mortal lives. Furthermore, there is a sense in which a certain kind of solipsism— transcendental solipsism—emerges as a philosophical framework for any properly transcendental inquiry into the significance of human mortality: both death and guilt are fundamentally my problems, primarily concerning not the mind-independent world but, rather, the world as “limited” by my transcendental subjectivity (cf. chapters 3 and 4 above for an extended discussion). This does not mean that I would be a solipsist, or that I would be urging any transcendental investigator of death and mortality (or guilt) to be one. Rather, I am making a methodological point—without

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subscribing to a sharp dichotomy between methodological and “real” solipsism, either. What I mean is that the distinctive nature of the transcendental method, in the sense in which such a method has been employed in the philosophical tradition by thinkers such as Kant and Wittgenstein, requires, when applied to this special case, that we examine the meaning (or the lack of meaning) of the life, or lifeworld, limited by mortality from within those limits that our mortal condition itself sets us (cf. again chapter 3). This view is an explication of the cryptic remarks on the metaphysical (transcendental) subject as a “limit of the world” in Wittgenstein’s Tractatus. 31 I am not here hoping to offer any correct interpretation of Wittgenstein, but I do think that our understanding of the Tractatus may be enhanced by reading Wittgenstein in the light of transcendental philosophy of death and mortality. Thus, what I am hoping to do here is to make some of the reflections on the transcendental method and solipsism offered in chapters 3 and 4 above more explicit in the context of the philosophical examination of death and guilt. THE SURVIVAL OF THE GOOD? At this point, I will digress from the explicit topic of guilt for a moment and add some reflections on why Mark Johnston’s ingenious theory of the “survival of the good,” as developed in his Surviving Death (2010), is in my view insufficient, given the deep entanglement of death and guilt. Johnston is, for the purposes of this chapter, interesting not primarily because he would offer a correct answer to our questions—indeed, his answers are highly problematic—but rather because he is asking the right question, the properly transcendental question (though he does not call it by that name) about the meaning of life, especially the meaning of morality, given the ineliminable facts of mortality and finitude. Johnston begins from the observation that death is a threat to the “importance of goodness.” “Death is the great leveller; if the good and the bad alike go down into oblivion, if there is nothing about reality itself that shores up this basic moral difference between their lives, [. . .] then the distinction between the good and the bad is less important. So goodness is less important.” This serious threat is genuine even if moral considerations are regarded as “overriding,” because “we can ask about the importance of the moral point of view itself, given that reality—as depicted by secular naturalism—is indifferent to the very distinction that point of view treats as so important.” The world itself seems to be “deaf” to the cries that injustice deserves punishment and goodness reward. 32 Johnston notes that he is not dealing with the Epicurean refutation of death at all. It is “simply not designed to address the threat death makes to the importance of goodness” 33—and here I fully agree. The Epicurean argument that the fear of death is irrational because death is “nothing for

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us” does not even begin to address this issue. Johnston wants to argue, however, that “there is something in death that is better for the good than for the bad”: “the good, but not the bad, can overcome death, in part by seeing through it.” This will be a matter of degree, though, resulting from the fact that the good person “has undergone a kind of death of the self,” living a “transformed life driven by entering imaginatively into the lives of others,” as a “caretaker of humanity.” This is a different kind of personal identity. The good are not tied to the narrow identities of their own selves; so they can literally survive death. Yet, Johnston’s methodology—as well as his metaphysics—is completely naturalistic. 34 He wants to save religious (or at least religious-sounding) ideas, including survival from supernaturalism. Moreover, he argues that supernaturalism is irrelevant to this entire problem. There are no selves worth caring about, and the persons we are have a “Protean nature.” 35 We just cannot be supernaturalistically resurrected in the way religions suppose. Yet, given the response-dependent element in personal identity, living out the ideal of agape would make us live on in the onward rush of humankind and not (or not especially) in the supernatural spaces of heaven, even if such spaces existed and were inhabited by inheritors of our souls. Even if supernaturalism about death, say the existence of soulinheritors in an afterlife, were literally true, this would be morally and religiously speaking a kind of distracting, if not irritating, epiphenomenon. Our morally urgent postmortem future would remain here on earth in the onward rush of humankind. 36

We couldn’t, then, deserve heaven without remaining on earth. 37 This is an idea I do find ethically persuasive. Now the basic argument is that the good are better placed to face death as they are less attached to their individual personalities than those who are not good, and the individual personalities will indeed be obliterated in death. The good care about the flourishing of individual personality as such, not just about the flourishing of their own personality, and so they can face death more easily than the bad. And the really good—distinguished from the “reasonably good”—literally survive. 38 But what is good will, and who are the good? The good will, we are told, is “a fundamental disposition manifested in one’s style of practical reasoning and action,” “a disposition to absorb the legitimate interests of any present or future individual personality into one’s present practical outlook, so that those interests count as much as one’s own.” 39 So far so good, but what are legitimate interests? Our interests conflict, as we all know. Frankly, I am not at all sure how helpful this analysis is, practically speaking. Yet, the theoretical idea is perhaps the most important here. We

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need not know exactly what goodness is, if we can still reasonably approximate it, and if we can thereby rationally hope for a kind of survival. Johnston thus defends a “Religion of Humanity.” The good can “see through death in a way that the utterly selfish cannot,” as the latter are attached to their individual personalities, which are all that really matters to them, and they are hence obliterated in death. 40 But, again, the nagging question returns: who are (the) good—not just “reasonably good” but genuinely, really good? Is anyone, or can anyone be, good in this sense? What Johnston here offers us is this: “The only place to begin that provides any chance of self-understanding is under the standing accusation that one’s own will is not a good will, along with the horror and selfdisgust that this entails.” This brings us back to our main theme, as death and guilt are, again, intimately related here: what I have above called transcendental guilt is the fundamentally life-transforming experience that my will is not a good will. I can try to approximate goodness and try to do what I can to take others’ interests into account (insofar as I understand what those interests are and am able to regard them as legitimate), but this task is endless, infinite; I can never fully complete it. My apparently “moral” actions are often based on narcissistic motives, for instance. 41 And I am more than willing to sacrifice the demands of morality when I think my own freedom, pleasure, or “authenticity” requires such a sacrifice. One key observation here is, then, that we never have legitimate reasons or full justification to believe that we are (morally) good, or even “good enough.” (If we claim we do, we fail to understand moral goodness.) We are, then, inevitably guilty of failing to take others’ “legitimate interests” into account. Guilt and death are a problem for us, threatening our ability to find meaning in goodness (insofar as it is a morally desirable ideal for us in our lives), even though the problem could be resolved at an abstract level not really involving us. Or, more positively, goodness remains an infinite task for us. Precisely therefore guilt is a constitutive and thoroughgoing—transcendental—feature of our mortal lives. This leads to a fundamental recognition of human finitude: as we (or I) never have sufficient reasons to believe in our (my) goodness, survival is for us (me) at best a mere hope—comparable to what Kant has to say on the question, “what I may hope,” and the postulates of practical reason. 42 Yet, perhaps this is sufficient for our being able to “look through” death (as Johnston suggests)? Perhaps such “looking through” is also a way of looking through our inevitable transcendental guilt, even though that guilt, any more than our mortality, can never be completely wiped away?

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DEATH, GUILT, AND THE MEANING OF LIFE As a contrast to Johnston’s problematic argument, let us briefly turn to Merold Westphal’s discussion of the deep link between death and guilt. I have already discussed Westphal’s book in my Transcendental Guilt, as this is one of the very few books that explicitly connect death and guilt. We should, in Kantian terms, follow Westphal in saying that the person who experiences guilt experiences not just (or perhaps not at all) unhappiness as such but unworthiness of being happy. This highlights the intimate connection between moral guilt and the religious experience of sin or sinfulness. 43 Guilt, understood in this way, is a form of self-consciousness: “We have seen conscience as the self saying to itself, Thou art the man.” Westphal summarizes this view as follows: “Objectively guilt is (1) liability to punishment. Subjectively it is (2) fear of punishment, and (3) approval of my own punishment, or, more carefully stated, approval of the other’s disapproval of me which may render me liable to punishment.” 44 Religion plays a double role in intensifying guilt—our guilt becomes truly metaphysical, guilt in front of God—and offering salvation. Furthermore, Westphal plausibly argues that, especially when considered from a religious perspective, there is an intimate relation between the problems of guilt and death, and their human significance. In guilt, we may feel that our entire life has been in vain. For Tolstoy’s Ivan Ilich, “the question of death is also the question of guilt”; these are essentially a “single concern” in religious life. The story of Ivan Ilich pictures death “as an enemy which (1) leads us to deceive ourselves, (2) robs us of the meaning of life, and (3) puts us in solitary confinement.” Chapter 5 of Westphal’s book, “The Existential Meaning of Death,” provides a detailed discussion of Tolstoy’s novella in the light of existentialism. “For Ivan, dying is an experience which exposes and intensifies the personal isolation of a life lived in the forgetfulness of death and guilt.” 45 When reflecting on our guilt from the perspective of our worthiness for happiness, we inevitably reflect on our life as a whole, on whether we have lived in vain. This brings the Wittgensteinian transcendental self, as a limit of the world (which is the same as life, as Wittgenstein announces in § 5.621 of the Tractatus), back to the picture (cf. again chapters 3 and 4). It also brings the issue of death on the agenda, as our life as a whole is obviously limited by birth and death. I find Westphal’s comments on the connection between these two fundamental issues highly important. The challenge is to deal with the threatening ethical nihilism and existential anxiety: 46 our entire life, our guilty and mortal life, may lack meaning and worth in a fundamental sense, and this is something that the notion of transcendental guilt (in my vocabulary, not in Westphal’s) is intended to express. It is right here, according to Westphal, that the religious sense of these problems turns out to be decisive: guilt and death represent

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“spiritual needs”—needs that are “higher” and “deeper” than more mundane needs of happiness, such as health and wealth—linked in Martin Luther’s view that “[i]f sins are forgiven, death is gone.” In different ways, different religious traditions (a phenomenological description of which is Westphal’s main goal) attempt to deal with these problems: “the religious life is attractive to the believing soul largely because of the hope that through a proper ‘relation’ to the Sacred guilt and death can be overcome.” 47 Yet, religiously conceived afterlife is not the crux of the matter from Ivan Ilich’s point of view: “For only if there is a life free from self-deception, from guilt, and from loneliness in the crowd would any life after death be heaven instead of hell.” And Westphal goes on: “When death is looked squarely in the face, what is the meaning of this life, and how should it be lived? The answer to that question will be the key to any hopes and aspirations for what lies on the far side of death.” Heidegger can be seen as offering an (unacknowledged) commentary on Ivan Ilich. For both Heidegger and Tolstoy, “death individuates.” Yet there is an important difference: for Tolstoy, it is “bitter loneliness”; for Heidegger, “an heroic human achievement.” In addition to Heidegger, Westphal comments on Karl Jaspers’s views on death in relation to Tolstoy’s story, invoking Jaspers’s notions such as boundary situations and existential awakening: “As I allow myself to become fully aware of death as a boundary situation it becomes ‘a challenge [. . .] to live and to test my life in view of death.’” Then death becomes “the mirror of Existenz [. . .] the test that proves Existenz and relativizes mere existence.” 48 Thus, death asks “whether we have acknowledged and accepted the freedom that we are and the responsibility that goes with it,” and whether we “have exercised such freedom wisely, lovingly, and honestly,” by fulfilling the task of becoming a self. Thus, guilt is again brought into the picture: “it is just at this point where the problems of guilt and death merge, that the problem of death becomes a fully human problem and my selfhood in the truest sense becomes involved.” Thus, “death is finally a question of freedom rather than of necessity. That is to say, it is not a question about what will happen to me, but about what I will do with my life.” 49 Hence, it is at the deepest level a question about my guilt, my life’s being morally structured in terms of transcendental guilt. OTHER EMOTIONAL AND COGNITIVE RESPONSES In order to further enrich our picture of transcendental guilt, the relations between some other important emotions and/or experiential states, including cognitive states, invoked by death and mortality need to be considered. I will not discuss the possibility of reducing these states to each other, though that may in some cases be an option; rather, I assume their

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irreducibility in my brief comparative remarks. Obviously, again, my discussion does not aim at any exhaustiveness. For instance, the very important emotion in some ways close to guilt, shame, will not be discussed here at all, as it would deserve a special treatment of its own, and I could not possibly extend this brief exploration into that direction. First, fear and horror, already briefly discussed above, are of course very close to each other, but may be nevertheless be distinguished: horror, unlike fear, has no specific object—and is therefore more readily available to a transcendental account than (mere) fear. While it may be (empirically, factually) irrational to fear death, as has been argued since Lucretius’s Epicurean reflections on the matter, horror may be an inevitable emotional horizon for us at the transcendental level. As I suggested in chapter 3, it may, at the deepest level, be related to the possibility that reality might not be rationally categorizable at all—and this is a transcendental concern. Yet, admittedly, relief is also in many cases an appropriate emotional response to one’s, or someone else’s, death or anticipated death; however, one’s feeling relief does not preclude one’s also being horrified—nor being guilty. Fear, furthermore, is clearly future-directed, while horror need not be. In this respect, again, horror is more readily available to a transcendental, as distinguished from an empirical/factual, treatment. While we may or may not fear what will happen to us in our future process of dying, we may face our present—and continuous—condition of being mortal with horror even when we are not afraid of anything in particular. Secondly, our knowledge of death, especially of our own mortality, deserves detailed discussion. 50 The epistemology of death and mortality may operate, for instance, in terms of the distinction between intuitive (a priori) and empirical (say, inductive) knowledge about one’s own mortality. However, it may be asked whether there even can be any emotionally neutral knowledge about the “pure facts” of mortality. Is mortality more generally a critical test case for epistemologies allegedly focusing on our knowing “mere facts,” as distinguished from the emotional responses and attitudes those facts require from us, or the “moods” our encountering such facts in our lives may give rise to? Could it even be argued that, for instance, the continuous and ineliminable possibility of transcendental guilt must be present in all cognitive and/or epistemic attitudes to death and mortality (and, similarly, in any serious existential attitudes we may have to our lives)? Thirdly, the anxiety or anguish arising from the inevitable prospect of one’s own death (captured in Heidegger’s Sein-zum-Tode) is not only connected with horror but seems to crucially invoke memory as well: remembering and missing the lived live—or, possibly, longing for the unlived, only to be reached by imagination—contributes to our feeling anxiety about our finitude. There is obviously a lot more that needs to be said

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about all these experiential states. Let me here just emphasize the way in which they invoke—or are perhaps, rather, invoked by—the cosmic challenge of human mortality, that is, the challenge that there is no objective meaning on the cosmic scale and therefore our lives are, ultimately, insignificant. Finally, yet another relevant emotion would be rejection or revolt. Geoffrey Scarre cites the famous poem by Dylan Thomas, “Do not go gentle into that good night,” 51 a poem that expresses a reaction very far from any calm Stoic acceptance and resignation: “Thomas urges us to reject [death] with anger.” This is a form of non-acceptance and desperate life-affirmation 52 —something that, as we have seen, we may also find in William James and Miguel de Unamuno, among others. In a somewhat different albeit related way, our cosmic reflection invoked by anxiety and rejection eventually comes close to the mood of ikävä or kaipuu that the Finnish poet Eino Leino movingly describes in his poem, “Ikävöi ihminen.” Leino notes that human beings may long for the possibility of living outside time (which is clearly something for which imagination is needed): “Kaipaatko milloin sa ajan, paikan ja kuolonkin taaksi, istuen illoin, tuntien hiljaa maatuvas maaksi?” This yields the culmination of the poem: “Itketkö, ihminen, silloin kauneinta tiedon ja tunnon, hienointa sydämen, herkintä pyrkivän pyyteen ja kunnon?” 53 Here, one’s anxiety, longing, or sorrow (or perhaps even mourning, when we have a specific life or death to be mourned, either our own or someone else’s) extends to human limits, finitude, and mortality generally: our most important and deepest cognitive, aesthetic, and ethical goals and ideals inevitably remain unrealized, or their realization is in any case only contingent, temporary, and fragile; humanity as such, not merely individual human beings’ lives, is finite and vulnerable, falling desperately short of fully realizing its moral, intellectual, and all other aims and projects. This also makes the individual human being, each one of us, feel sorry for the general human condition (or, arguably, should do so). Or at least it may make us feel guilty about it, and feel guilty, perhaps even more guilty, if we do not feel sorry. DOES DEATH MAKE US EQUAL? The general human situation of transcendental guilt that has been articulated above can now be applied to a specific philosophical question central to thanatological investigations, namely, our fundamental equality versus inequality in the face of death. Death and mortality raise, rather obviously, difficult issues of social and political equality and inequality. People in different countries and different socioeconomic classes face their deaths—and the often painful processes of dying leading up to their deaths—in quite different ways. Differences in life expectancy and the

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availability of adequate medical services and end-of-life care tend to vary considerably, and increasingly, across socioeconomic classes even in relatively “equal” and homogeneous societies (e.g., the Nordic “welfare societies”); typically, such variations are enormous in third world countries. However, this socioeconomic-political notion of equality versus inequality is not my focus here. Instead, I propose, continuing my reflections on guilt, to discuss the topic of equality in a more metaphysical, or even existential, sense. (Such an approach to this issue may, I hope, be indirectly relevant to the more political questions of inequality as well.) While I thus primarily continue to adopt the perspective of individualistic ethics, the basic concerns raised regarding our equality in the face of death need to be addressed by anyone hoping to understand this phenomenon from the point of view of social ethics and political philosophy. Politically, inequality may be the problem, but existentially the situation may be reverse: equality, rather than inequality, may be what troubles us in our relation to human mortality. Death has been regarded as the “great leveler”—this, as we just saw, is how Johnston puts the matter, beginning his inquiry from the observation that death is a threat to the “importance of goodness.” As I hope has already become clear, I agree with him that we should not regard our lives as morally indifferent just because we all die; yet, I disagree with him on the kind of solutions available to this ethically and metaphysically demanding problem. Let us, however, now consider some other dimensions of the equality (or inequality) of death and mortality. Even immortality, not only mortality, can be and has been examined by drawing attention to the notion of equality or its analogues. There are thinkers according to whom it is important to make sure that we would be equal in the face of death not just because we all equally die but even if we in some sense survived death. For instance, some twenty years ago a minister of the Finnish Lutheran Church, Antti Kylliäinen—who then became a public figure because of the minor scandal he caused—claimed that “everyone goes to Heaven.” God’s mercy, according to this highly democratic version of the Christian doctrine (which conservative critics unsurprisingly found heretical), is equally available to us all, including the worst of sinners. A benevolent and merciful God cannot, according to this view, eternally punish or disregard even those who never repent their sins and refuse to believe in Christ—even the worst of sinners. 54 There are also more philosophical examples of a similar idea. In the closing pages of his lecture, “Human Immortality” (1898), the American pragmatist and scholar of religion William James argued that while it may be difficult for us to give up our “aristocratic” conception of immortality as something that concerns only some elected few, we definitely should, for ethical reasons, give it up, embracing a “democratic” view instead, trying to get rid of “the blindness in human beings” (to quote the title of another famous essay by him) that often makes it impossible for

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us to perceive the inner meaningfulness and worth of another’s—of another human being’s or even a non-human being’s—individual life. What this concretely means is, in a rather Levinasian tone (cf. chapter 4 above), that we must not be “blind” to the life, suffering, death and possible immortality of others, even those “brutish” creatures (as he calls them) that seem very different from us, so different that it is very hard for us to take seriously the possibility of their enjoying any kind of meaningful life. We might even summarize James’s point by saying that a pragmatic test case for the validity of our belief in immortality is our ethical ability to accommodate others’—even very different creatures’—hope and need for immortality. Let me quote James’s “Human Immortality” at some length here. After having described the “aristocratic” view of immortality, he goes on to defend his preferred democratic conception as follows: But, with our own generation, an entirely new quantitative imagination has swept over our western world. The theory of evolution now requires us to suppose a far vaster scale of times, spaces, and numbers than our forefathers ever dreamed the cosmic process to involve. Human history grows continuously out of animal history, and goes back possibly even to the tertiary epoch. From this there has emerged insensibly a democratic view, instead of the old aristocratic view, of immortality. For our minds, though in one sense they may have grown a little cynical, in another they have been made sympathetic by the evolutionary perspective. Bone of our bone and flesh of our flesh are these halfbrutish prehistoric brothers.

And he continues to describe those “prehistoric brothers” as possessing a specific existential and meaning-bestowing perspective on the world just as we do, although it may be difficult or impossible for us to recognize the relevance or even legitimacy of their distinctive perspectives: Girdled about with the immense darkness of this mysterious universe even as we are, they were born and died, suffered and struggled. Given over to fearful crime and passion, plunged in the blackest ignorance, preyed upon by hideous and grotesque delusions, yet steadfastly serving the profoundest of ideals in their fixed faith that existence in any form is better than non-existence, they ever rescued triumphantly from the jaws of ever-imminent destruction the torch of life, which, thanks to them, now lights the world for us. How small indeed seem individual distinctions when we look back on these overwhelming numbers of human beings panting and straining under the pressure of that vital want! And how inessential in the eyes of God must be the small surplus of the individual’s merit, swamped as it is in the vast ocean of the common merit of mankind, dumbly and undauntedly doing the fundamental duty and living the heroic life! We grow humble and reverent as we contemplate the prodigious spectacle. Not our differences and distinctions,—we feel—no, but our common animal essence of patience

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under suffering and enduring effort must be what redeems us in the Deity’s sight. An immense compassion and kinship fill the heart.

Now, this compassion leads us to postulate a postmortem existence (immortality) for those “half-brutish” creatures as well if we dare to postulate (or imagine) something similar for ourselves: An immortality from which these inconceivable billions of fellow-strivers should be excluded becomes an irrational idea for us. That our superiority in personal refinement or in religious creed should constitute a difference between ourselves and our messmates at life’s banquet, fit to entail such a consequential difference of destiny as eternal life for us, and for them torment hereafter, or death with the beasts that perish, is a notion too absurd to be considered serious. Nay, more, the very beasts themselves—the wild ones at any rate—are leading the heroic life at all times. And a modern mind, expanded as some minds are by cosmic emotion, by the great evolutionist vision of universal continuity, hesitates to draw the line even at man. If any creature lives forever, why not all?—why not the patient brutes? So that a faith in immortality, if we are to indulge it, demands of us nowadays a scale of representation so stupendous that our imagination faints before it, and our personal feelings refuse to rise up and face the task. The supposition we are swept along to is too vast, and, rather than face the conclusion, we abandon the premise from which it starts. We give up our own immortality sooner than believe that all the hosts of Hottentots and Australians that have been, and shall ever be, should share it with us in secula seculorum. Life is a good thing on a reasonably copious scale; but the very heavens themselves, and the cosmic times and spaces, would stand aghast, we think, at the notion of preserving eternally such an ever-swelling plethora and glut of it. 55

Clearly, I am not here recommending that we should embrace any belief in immortality—either James’s or anyone else’s version. But if we choose to do so, for any reasons, religious or not, we may have to take seriously the ethical demand of equality James sets us (while abandoning his chauvinist or even racist remarks on “Hottentots” and “Australians” as mere remnants of ways of thinking typical of his times). Whoever our Jamesian “fellow strivers” are and whoever are included among those who share a “common animal essence,” those creatures are, James argues, as much concerned with their own individual lives and deaths as we are. No ethical thinker can neglect this basic demand for equality; otherwise our lives lived in the hope of possible immortality (if anyone of us can still entertain such a hope) would be misguided or wrong in a fundamental ethical way, and we would be even more deeply guilty than we otherwise are. Regarding our equality in the face of death, we should furthermore note that the Epicurean and the so-called privation view theorist, whose positions define the basic opposition in the debate on the evil of death, in

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a way hold symmetrical views regarding this question—even though their controversy is one of the key issues in contemporary mainstream philosophy of death and dying. Either death is “nothing to us” because there will be no “us” anymore experiencing anything after death (just as, symmetrically, the time preceding our birth is not a bad thing, as there was no “us” then, either), as the Epicurean argues, following Lucretius’s formulation in De rerum natura, or a “bad end is in store for us all,” as Thomas Nagel concludes, arguing for the view that death deprives us of many things that could have been good in our lives had we not died. In both cases, dying and death do again make us equal. I will not try to settle the debate between Epicurean and Nagelian (or other) views on the evil of death here. 56 I just want to point out that both positions may—perhaps precisely because of their tendency to arrive at a metaphysically egalitarian conception of death—lead to the kind of moral nihilism we started from. As death, in a metaphysical sense, strikes us equally, saving no one, we may be led to think that nothing ultimately matters—whether or not that stroke is something bad or evil (Nagel’s privation view) or merely something indifferent (Epicureanism). Another contemporary debate that seems to me to be neutral in relation to the equality issue is the one on the “tedium of immortality” launched by Bernard Williams’s essay, 57 another modern classic of philosophy of death in addition to Nagel’s article attacking Epicureanism. Those who argue, with Williams, that an immortal life would be boring because the one who lived forever would have time to do anything, and everything, and those who oppose this argument by pointing out that human beings could always ingeniously invent new activities and therefore immortality would be a good thing for us, if it were real, 58 seem to maintain that the inevitable tedium of immortality or, alternatively, the evil of death resulting from the fact that immortality would not necessarily be tedious but actually a good thing concern, in principle, all human beings equally, although there could be major individual differences in how the immortals could, for instance, rejuvenate their desires and invent new ways of life. 59 THE LAST READER Let us take up a more literary—but for that reason no less philosophical—example. The British writer Julian Barnes, in his great semiautobiographical essayistic book dealing with death, 60 discusses the peculiar situation of the writer (and this applies to anyone who writes, not just novelists but philosophers and other scholars as well) positioned in a kind of grey area between being remembered and being forgotten. Just as death eventually equally concerns us all—though we can find highly personal responses to this universal human condition that is equally

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yours, mine, and ours, such as Barnes’s very elaborate self-reflection on his own peculiar fear of death—so does being forgotten. Barnes describes how the writer gradually falls into oblivion, until eventually “at some point—it must logically happen—a writer will have a last reader. [. . .] At some point between now and the six-billion-years-away death of the planet, every writer will have his or her last reader.” And that final reader will die, too, though the speed at which one is forgotten of course varies significantly; as Barnes notes, “while, in the great democracy of readership, all are theoretically equal, some are more equal than others.” 61 Yet, at some point the last reader and her/his eventual death will hit us all. Barnes observes that we might want to be sentimental about our last readers—until we realize that there is no good reason for that: “your last reader is, by definition, someone who doesn’t recommend your books to anyone else. You bastard! Not good enough, eh? You prefer that trivial stuff [. . .]? I was about to mourn your passing, but I’m getting over it fast. You’re really not going to press my book on anyone else? [. . .] Then you don’t deserve me. Go on, fuck off and die. Yes, you.” 62 We all, we who write and read books, should consider this seriously, perhaps from the standpoint of both the “I” and the “you” of Barnes’s passage. Furthermore, just as necessarily as every writer will have her/his last reader, every grave—and in that sense every human being who lived and died—will have the last visitor. So this is again another kind of equality in the face of death, the final posthumous equality: So here’s another logical inevitability. Just as every writer will have a last reader, so every corpse will have a last visitor. By whom I don’t mean the man driving the earth-digger who scoops out your remnants when the graveyard is sold off for suburban housing. I mean that distant descendant; or, in my own case, the gratifyingly nerdy (or, rather, charmingly intelligent) graduate student—still bibliophilic long after reading has been replaced by smarter means of conveying narrative, thought, emotion—who has developed a quaint and lonely (or rather, entirely admirable) attachment to long-forgotten novelists of the distant Print Era. 63

For some of us it might just be the man driving the earth-digger. But for each of us, it is someone. There is no way of escaping the last visit (or, well, the only way to escape it is by being dead). Again, whether or not this is a bad end (and it is, necessarily, a posthumous end), it is certainly in store for us all. However, we clearly want our lives to matter to how we face death, and vice versa. While we may want to fight political and economic inequalities in the practices of dealing with processes of dying (and while James, in “Human Immortality,” as we just saw, argues against “aristocratic” conceptions of immortality, in a manner we may find legitimate,

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whether or not we believe in immortality), we do not want death itself, and hence life, to be “completely equal.” Otherwise nothing matters—the way we live and face death won’t matter—and therefore life, like death, collapses into absurdity. This is the kind of equality, the equality of moral nihilism, that we must, for ethical reasons, avoid. (Or otherwise, I suppose, we can just not only stop reflecting on life and death but stop living.) The metaphysics of death ought to be based on ethics—this is something that I am in a way arguing throughout this volume, at least implicitly, and also something that could be defended on the basis of a pragmatist approach to metaphysics (cf. also chapter 6 below). What a metaphysical investigation of death and mortality comes down to according to such a pragmatist proposal is an ethical investigation of what it would mean for a human being to live in a world in which a certain conception of death and mortality would be true. In particular, whether death equalizes our lives in the sense of the “equality of moral nihilism,” as we may fear, is a crucial question that may shape our entire lives; it makes a fundamental difference to us whether we take the world to be such a nihilistic place or not. Therefore, directing attention to the ethical pictures that inevitably influence our metaphysical reflections is itself an ethical must, just like James’s democratic immortality is (according to him, as we just saw). The ethical quality of one’s life determines, or ought to determine, how exactly, and indeed whether, death matters to that particular person whose life is at stake. The premise here is, of course, that it does matter; the argument says that it can matter only if the ethical dimension of our metaphysical commitments is taken seriously. We need to explore the metaphysical implications of this transcendental-sounding argument. Such an exploration is, I would like to suggest, an instance of the “pragmatic method” applied to metaphysical problems—as proposed by James, among others (as we will see in more detail in chapters 6 and 7). We might distinguish different ways of developing this idea, such as Johnston’s above-cited view on the “survival of the good” and Terry Eagleton’s account of evil as a certain kind of inability to face or accept one’s own death and mortality. 64 My discussion of Johnston above should be seen as an attempt to contribute to this exploration of the ethical basis of metaphysical views of death and mortality. Equipped with our transcendental account of the relation between death and guilt we might conclude that perhaps it is guilt, then, that makes us fundamentally equal in the face of death. Guilt in this metaphysically pregnant sense—a transcendental sense, as I prefer to describe it—is, I have argued, ineliminably present in the question concerning the ethical meaning of life. Death makes us ask whether we have lived rightly or wrongly. This question makes us equal, although our different individual answers to it may lead to extremely unequal lives.

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On the other hand, guilt, as existentialist thinkers have recognized at least since Heidegger’s Sein und Zeit, and indeed earlier, individualizes us, makes our moral problems truly ours. And so does death. This is why it was necessary to examine Westphal’s approach to the existential meaning of death and guilt, epitomized in the question of whether one’s life is completely “in vain.” 65 We again arrive at the conclusion that it is in relation to the question concerning the very meaningfulness or meaninglessness of life—a question inextricably intertwined with the question of guilt, with the possibility of our life having been a wrong kind of life entirely—that we are equal in the face of death. Yet this fundamental equality leads to the possibility of arriving at very different (hence “unequal”) moral responses to life and death. Those who recognize their guilt and engage in existential self-reflection may be able to face death quite differently from those who find nothing wrong in their lives and are unable to accept their finitude. The equality is in the way life and death challenge us to reflection; the individual differences can be found in those reflections themselves and in the kind of lives, and deaths (as well as, perhaps, dyings), they yield. This brings me to a final observation. Insofar as we find guilt central, even constitutive, in the conceptual network explored here, we should also note that there is a sense in which guilt, though social, is deeply “first-personal.” According to Dostoyevsky, every human being is guilty for the sins of the entire humankind—and I am more guilty than anyone else. (This theme runs through many of Dostoyevsky’s major novels, including The Brothers Karamazov in particular.) Thus, there is a tension here between equality and inequality. In a sense guilt equalizes, as we have seen; humanity as such is equally faced with the same question of whether life is fundamentally wrong or “in vain.” At the same time, this horizon of guilt dawns on each one of us (equally) individually and personally, inescapably concerning me first and foremost. There is no way of sharing this kind of guilt; it is, solipsistically, mine. This is a transcendental result of our inquiry into death and guilt. Moreover, this dialectic between “first-personal” and “third-personal” ways of understanding guilt might in fact be seen as analogous to the similar kind of dialectic, or tension, between the first- and third-personal ways of relating to death in general—or to the basic issue of philosophical anthropology, the nature of the human condition. We are finally in the position to see the deepest symmetry between the rival approaches in these areas: those who try to view death, or guilt, or the human being from a purely objective, third-personal point of view (such as classical essentialists or scientistic naturalists in philosophical anthropology) simply fail to adopt the properly transcendental perspective from which it is a fundamental and urgent issue for me what it means to be guilty, what it means to die, and what it means to be a human being.

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CONCLUDING REMARKS Through a transcendental consideration of the different emotions characterized above, we may again arrive at the insight—though this is not explicitly part of Eino Leino’s poem cited above—that guilt is essential in our entire network of emotional responses to mortality. Therefore the concept of guilt must play a fundamental role in any philosophical thanatology, assuming that philosophical thanatology ought to be not only metaphysically but also (perhaps more fundamentally) ethically appropriate. At least guilt needs to be considered in any attempt to examine, with Johnston, whether death is a “threat to the importance of goodness.” It also needs to be considered in any attempt to determine whether we are in a fundamental way equal in the face or death or whether the moral status of our lives actually make a difference to how death matters us. The reflections of this chapter have barely begun what is needed: a transcendental examination of human finitude and its “meaning-threatening” nature, both personally and generally. They have, however, hopefully supplemented the transcendental insights of the previous chapters. Our human finitude, in the transcendental sense, is not just a contingent limitation of a natural creature, although it is of course that, too. Just as guilt, I have argued, is a constitutive element of morality—to the extent that it can be regarded as transcendentally constitutive of the moral point of view itself—so mortality, leading us to the guilt-invoking question of whether we have lived wrongly, is a transcendentally constitutive feature of humanity. This may come close to the Heideggerian view of being-toward-death as an existential feature of human being-in-theworld. Preferring to avoid the Heideggerian terminology, however, I believe we could speak about the transcendentally, and hence metaphysically, necessary character of human mortality. While our mortality in the biological sense is of course a mere natural necessity, comparable to the necessity of the laws of nature (however that necessity in the last analysis ought to be construed), this natural fact about us manifests a deeper metaphysical necessity. Without being mortal we would not be the kind of beings we are—namely, human beings—and without being able to live in the horizon of guilt we would not be the kind of ethically engaged beings that we, inevitably, find ourselves being. Guilt and death, then, define us in a way that goes beyond mere natural facts about human biology. As a social emotion par excellence—despite its deep first-personal nature—guilt also highlights the ways in which we as mortal subjects are transcendentally constituted through certain basic (metaphysical) relations to other subjects, relations that are, precisely in their metaphysical constitutivity, also ethical (cf. chapter 3 above). That is, we may say that we are transcendentally constituted through our relations of recognition to other mortal selves, including especially relations of mutual recogni-

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tion of the other’s mortality. Without this community of mortals capable of guilt there would hardly be human life as we know it. Again we are not dealing with merely contingent natural and/or social facts about human existence but about more deeply metaphysical—transcendental— features that nevertheless need to be manifested in natural circumstances and processes of life (and death). The metaphysics of death clearly needs further philosophical attention in relation to the ethics of death; more generally, ethics and metaphysics cannot eventually be dichotomously separated, although I cannot argue for this general idea here. 66 This also concerns guilt, transcendentally analyzed. We are, I have suggested, guilty in the transcendental sense, even if we are not “factually” (empirically) guilty of anything in particular, and therefore our mortality and finitude, as ethico-metaphysical elements or characteristics of our common humanity, make us anxious about our lives as wholes, and about human life in general. Furthermore, while both death and guilt are something universally human, their capacity of being shared is, as we have noted, also severely limited: each one of us must face them—in the transcendental sense—individually, or even solipsistically. And so must each one of us face the more general question at the heart of philosophical anthropology, the question concerning what it means to be human. The notion of the transcendental self (or transcendental subject), understood as a “limit” of the world in the Wittgensteinian sense (see especially chapter 3 above), therefore crucially deepens our understanding of not only death and guilt but also of humanity generally, though it hardly leads us to anything like adequate comprehension of this perennial mystery. Appreciating this insight is an important step in the process of coming to appreciate the universal human significance of one’s (my) death not being just another event among others in the world but the (or, acknowledging otherness, an) end of the world. NOTES 1. Conversely, of course, we may, by omitting a possible act of euthanasia or assisted suicide, cause unbearable pain and suffering to someone who wishes to die but is not able or allowed to. 2. Cf., e.g., Merold Westphal’s analysis of something like this form of guilt as represented in Tolstoy’s famous short novel, The Death of Ivan Ilyich; see Westphal, God, Guilt, and Death: An Existential Phenomenology of Religion (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984). I will return to Westphal’s views below. 3. On transcendental guilt, see Sami Pihlström, Transcendental Guilt: Reflections on Ethical Finitude (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2011). See also Pihlström, “Death and Guilt: A Transcendental Account,” in Outi Hakola, Sara Heinämaa, and Sami Pihlström (eds.), Death and Mortality: From Individual to Communal Perspectives, COLLeGIUM 19 (Helsinki: Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies, available online: www.helsinki.fi/collegium). Another possible formulation of this concept of guilt is Martin Heidegger’s concept of Schuldenwerdenkönnen: according to Heidegger, the hu-

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man Dasein is guilty “authentically” (see, e.g., Martin Heidegger, Sein und Zeit [Tübingen, GER: Max Niemeyer, 1961; first published 1927], pp. 287, 333–34). I am indebted to Leena Kaunonen’s paper presented at the Death and Emotions symposium (Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies, November 2011) for a reading of Heidegger along these lines, in the context of Finnish poet Eeva-Liisa Manner’s Heideggerian influences. 4. Pihlström, Transcendental Guilt. 5. Cf. Mark Johnston, Surviving Death (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010), and below. 6. See Avishai Margalit, The Ethics of Memory (Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 2002). 7. See, e.g., Thomas Nagel, Mortal Questions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979); Richard Sorabji, Self: Ancient and Modern Insights about Individuality, Life, and Death (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2006); Bernard N. Schumacher, Death and Mortality in Contemporary Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010). 8. Cf. David Carr, The Paradox of Subjectivity: The Self in the Transcendental Tradition (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1999); and chapter 3 above. 9. Sorabji, Self, p. 4. 10. Ibid. 11. Ibid., p. 13. 12. Ibid., p. 31. 13. Compare this to Johnston’s view to be discussed later in this chapter, as well as to James’s pragmatist position which will a topic for the next two chapters. 14. Ibid., p. 10. 15. Ibid., p. 12. 16. Ibid., p. 10, and chapter 18. 17. Ibid., p. 14. 18. See ibid., chapters 17–18. 19. Ibid., p. 315. 20. However, the issue of bodily resurrection is inseparably related to the philosophy of religion: the idea is hardly plausible or even intelligible without being based on a religious tradition of thought, such as Christianity. It is obvious that this idea is at odds with modern science, so inquiring into its conceptual plausibility purely philosophically/metaphysically, in the absence of considerations related to the rationality of religious beliefs generally, strikes me as somewhat odd. 21. Ibid., pp. 337, 339. 22. Ibid., p. 341. 23. Still, I agree with Sorabji’s final words: “What I see as the ideal attitude is to think that what matters is not the location of our life in the flowing series of past, present, and future, but the quality of our life.” (p. 341) 24. See Schumacher, Death and Mortality, pp. 5, 45. 25. Ibid., pp. 68ff., 72. 26. Ibid., pp. 76, 95. Heidegger’s way of thinking about death “in terms of a radically finite temporality” (Dasein) can, Schumacher says, be contrasted with “the ontological possibility of a transtemporal immortality of the Dasein” (p. 81). Otherness (which he also examines with reference to Sartre in ibid., chapter 5) is neglected by Heidegger: “the experience of another’s death is necessary to arrive at a consciousness of the mortal condition of the human being” (p. 112). In what sense, however, is this necessary: conceptual, ontological, transcendental? 27. Ibid., p. 138. 28. Ibid., pp. 146–47. 29. The category of possibility, discussed again by Schumacher in connection with Heidegger (ibid., pp. 188–89), is crucial to any transcendental approach to death, but it is also related to the Nagelian privation discussions. In the privation view, we are also deprived by death of the ability to have experiences, hopes, and possibilities (ibid., p. 205). There is a double modality here: the ability to have possibilities is lost in death.

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The importance of others is, again, closely related to these modal structures: the Heideggerian being-toward-the-end is “unthinkable without an experience of the human being’s finitude, in other words, unless one experiences the decease and the corpse of the other” (ibid., p. 214). “Death is the impossibility of possibles, because it interrupts the subject’s projection of his possibles” (ibid.). 30. I cannot here argue for these views in any detail; I am basically applying the considerations of my Transcendental Guilt to the topic of death and mortality. 31. See also, e.g., chapter 4 above. This issue is closely connected with what J. J. Valberg argues in his intriguing book, Dream, Death, and Self (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007)—and with Mark Johnston’s criticism of Valberg’s employment of the notions of “horizon” and “arena” briefly examined in chapter 4 above. 32. Johnston, Surviving Death, pp. 4, 8. 33. Ibid., p. 13. 34. Ibid., pp. 13–16; see also p. 291. 35. Ibid., p. 292. 36. Ibid., p. 293. 37. Ibid., p. 297. 38. Ibid., p. 318, and passim. 39. Ibid., p. 332. 40. Ibid., pp. 339–41. 41. Ibid., pp. 341–42. 42. Kant’s Kritik der praktischen Vernunft (Critique of Practical Reason) (1788) is the key reference here. 43. See Westphal, God, Guilt, and Death, p. 76; also pp. 86–87. 44. Ibid., pp. 81, 89; see also p. 118. 45. Ibid., pp. 93, 251, 90, 94. 46. Cf. ibid., pp. 99–101. 47. Ibid., pp. 108, 160. 48. Ibid., pp. 94–100. Westphal here cites Jaspers’s Philosophy II (1932/1970). 49. Ibid., pp. 100–102. 50. We already saw about how Schumacher, in Death and Mortality (cited above), deals with our knowledge about our mortality, combining the empirical and the transcendental perspectives. 51. Geoffrey Scarre, Death (Stocksfield, UK: Acumen, 2007), pp. 74–75. Scarre’s book was already cited in chapter 4 above. For Thomas’s poem, see www.poets.org/poetsorg/poem/do-not-go-gentle-good-night. 52. Ibid., pp. 75–76. 53. Free English translation: “Do you ever long to move beyond time, place, and even death, sitting still in the evening, feeling you are gradually decaying? [. . .] Do you weep then, man, for the most beautiful feelings of knowledge and emotion, the finest feelings of the heart, the most sensitive emotions of pursuit and courage?” 54. Kylliäinen’s views are unfortunately available only in a book published in Finnish. The doctrine itself has a longer history, but I leave it to theologians to examine it further. 55. All these three quotations are from William James, “Human Immortality” (1898), in James, Essays in Religion and Morality, eds. Frederick H. Burkhardt, Fredson Bowers, and Ignas K. Skrupskelis (Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 1982), pp. 97–99 (emphases mine). The other highly relevant essay by James, “On a Certain Blindness in Human Beings” (1899), is available in James, Talks to Teachers on Psychology and Some of Life’s Ideals, eds. Burkhardt et al. (Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 1988). 56. The issue of the harmfulness of death has already been raised, in relation to the Epicurean controversy, repeatedly in the previous chapters. For a recent summary statement, see Stephen Luper, “Death,” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (2014).

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57. Bernard Williams, “The Makropulos Case: Reflections on the Tedium of Immortality,” in Williams, Problems of the Self (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1973), pp. 82–100. 58. See, e.g., D. W. Bruckner, “Against the Tedium of Immortality,” International Journal of Philosophical Studies 20 (2012), 623–44. 59. As a side remark, I should point out that I find Bruckner’s position utterly implausible, because it hardly makes sense to speak about the rejuvenation of human desires or the invention of new ways of spending time in the context of an imagined situation of immortality in which human life would no longer have the kind of natural limitations we know it to have, limitations that largely define the ways in which we take our lives to be capable of making sense, or of failing to do so. This, however, is not the topic of the present chapter. In any case, Bruckner’s essay (ibid.) is helpful also because it summarizes much of the literature responding to Williams’s original paper. 60. Julian Barnes, Nothing to Be Frightened of (London: Jonathan Cape, 2008). 61. Ibid., pp. 225–26. 62. Ibid., p. 226. 63. Ibid., p. 248. 64. See Johnston, Surviving Death; and Terry Eagleton, On Evil (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2010). 65. For another highly illuminating discussion of this fundamental challenge that death poses us, that is, that we may have “lived wrongly,” see H.-J. Schneider, “Die Bedeutung des Todes für das Leben,” Neue Deutsche Hefte 28 (1981), 499–512 (also referring, like Westphal, to Tolstoy’s Ivan Illich). 66. See, however, Sami Pihlström, Pragmatist Metaphysics: An Essay on the Ethical Grounds of Ontology (London: Continuum, 2009); and Pihlström, Pragmatic Pluralism and the Problem of God (New York: Fordham University Press, 2013).

SIX Controlling Death? Pragmatist Philosophy of Mortality

Individual self-control is a widely shared and powerful cultural value, particularly in Western liberal societies. People are encouraged to seek control of their lives—to “take life in their own hands.” Such expectations arise, for example, from popular culture and self-help literature and magazines, but also to a considerable extent from more “official” elements of contemporary culture, including authorized healthcare practices. It is widely maintained that only by controlling one’s life (including one’s health) can one find happiness; if one loses control, then one may lose many other things as well. Miserable examples of people who have “lost control” of their lives—say, economically, as a result of some severe addiction, or by losing family relations or health-promoting life habits—are often seen as warnings for those who still are able to control their lives. We are, thus, encouraged to control ourselves when it comes to, say, eating and drinking habits, physical exercise, social relations, and other considerations that need to be taken into account in any attempt to lead a “good life.” 1 Death, however, obviously challenges this ideal of self-control. 2 As mortals, we are ultimately helpless and unable to fully control our situation. At least our mortal condition itself crucially restricts our abilities to control the events of the world we live in; it is something that is simply given to us as a fact of life, a necessary characteristic of the kind of beings we are. There is no way we can change these circumstances. Medical technologies may, of course, in the future advance so significantly that considerable lifetime extension becomes a real possibility. However, at the moment it is difficult to see how this promise of technological advancement could be more than science fiction. And even if our lives 153

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could be significantly prolonged, we would still be mortal. Someday, sooner or later, our lives would end. Therefore, I am not going to discuss such technological possibilities of increasing medical control over mortal human lives in this chapter. I do not see this topic as offering any truly philosophically interesting perspective on death and dying, 3 although the hypothesis of considerable lifetime extension has recently also received attention among applied ethicists. 4 It may be a topic for future philosophical anthropologists and thanatologists, but at the moment we should focus on genuine human capacities and restrictions, on the human condition as we currently know and experience it. Furthermore, while presumably no one has ever maintained that we have full control of our lives and/or the world we live in (we are obviously affected by various natural and cultural forces independent of ourselves), I think it is undeniable that control and self-control as general cultural ideals are widely, and perhaps increasingly, promoted in contemporary societies. The autonomous individual in charge of what is going on around her/him is a powerful picture that holds us captive. I will therefore in this chapter briefly discuss this idea of control in general and especially the need to give up control in particular in relation to the topic of death. Special attention will be drawn to the way in which pragmatist philosophy of death and mortality is both a vitally needed perspective in this discussion and also, potentially, problematic because of its tension between control and the giving up of control. Pragmatism thus offers a case study of what may be called the dialectics of control and the giving up of control. 5 Most importantly, pragmatism also serves as an example of the way in which the dialectics of control cannot be finally resolved. Toward the end of the chapter, I will again—from the specific perspective of the problem of control—briefly propose that pragmatism ought to be entangled with transcendental reflection on mortality as a limit to human life and as a constitutive feature of our finitude (see also the more detailed discussion of transcendental methodology in the previous chapters). Even that entanglement will not, however, lead to a final resolution to the issues I introduce. In this sense, this chapter, I hope, takes some further steps toward an increased appreciation of the depth of certain philosophical and conceptual problems surrounding the topic of human mortality that I have tried to address in this book. CAN DEATH AND DYING BE CONTROLLED? Even if we set science fiction scenarios aside, death and dying can, it is often suggested, be controlled to a certain degree. Euthanasia and (assisted) suicide are obvious ways of maintaining some kind of control through the final moments of one’s life. The ultimate fear for many of us

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is the loss of control and thereby genuine agency, that is, becoming a mere helpless patient at the mercy of others. 6 A “good” death (if there is such a thing), then, is a “controlled” death. Even suicide (see also chapter 4) has been seen as a way of demonstrating that we “belong to ourselves” instead of belonging to any external authority such as the state, religion, or any other institution and that we can, therefore, control our own life until the last moment. This is what, for example, Jean Améry (who was a Holocaust survivor and eventually committed suicide himself) argues in his well-known work, On Suicide. 7 In popular culture, teenager vampire stories consumed by adolescents all over the world also address self-control and the lack thereof: one can control one’s life and death by choosing the vampire’s perverse life of immortality. In vampire books, especially popular book and film series such as Stephanie Meyer’s Twilight, such a choice is also depicted as a special kind of romantic option for a young person “seeking herself.” While popular culture of this kind may reveal something important about our culture in general, also about its “deeper” layers as well as cultural ideals, fears, and expectations, I want to continue my exploration of the issues of controlled versus uncontrolled death by referring to more philosophical attempts to understand human mortality. 8 Metaphysically and existentially, a particularly strongly “self-controlling” attitude to death, dying, and mortality can be found in Heideggerian philosophical thanatology based on the concept of “being-towarddeath” (Sein-zum-Tode), thematized in Sein und Zeit (cf. chapter 4 above): death is the ultimate existentially defining moment of the human Dasein, something that enables one to demonstrate one’s authenticity, i.e., one’s true individuality and (thereby) self-control. 9 Dasein’s being-towarddeath is its “ownmost” feature. We are, and can be, fully in control only of our own individual mortal and temporal existence. There is no way in which anyone could die for, or instead of, someone else; each one of us must face, and control, one’s own death individually. In death, of course, we lose control, but living up to it we may, and should, seek to control our existence as authentically as possible, thus recognizing our finite lives as truly our own. This “first-personal” conception of death could, as suggested in chapter 4, be regarded as solipsistic, comparable to the peculiar kind of solipsism endorsed by Wittgenstein in Tractatus: the world is “my world,” and my death is not simply an event among others in the world; rather, it is the end of the world. 10 Others’ deaths are events we can experience and describe—but not control—whereas my own death simply cancels the entire world for me. Heidegger and Wittgenstein, despite their enormous philosophical differences, share the view that dying is ultimately one’s own business, and no one else’s. Insofar as the metaphysical subject of the Tractatus is not just one entity among others in the world—an object whose disappearance from the world would just be, as it were, an uncon-

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trollable event among others—but, transcendentally, a “limit” of the world, in a sense making the world possible (for me) as a world of state of affairs describable in (my) language, it could be suggested that this very conception of subjectivity, transcendentally articulated, emphasizes a metaphysical kind of control. The subject ultimately controls the world as its “limit” and condition of possibility. Thereby it even controls its own way of controlling the world. Yet, its control of the world is of a very special kind: it cannot change the facts of the world—the states of affairs that contingently obtain and are describable in language. It can, then, only control its own attitude to the world, roughly in the way in which the Stoics argued that we ought to accept our fate, that is, whatever the world presents us with, and modify our attitude instead of trying to transform the world itself. 11 It does not follow, however, that the Wittgensteinian metaphysical subject would be capable of the ultimate form of self-control that might seem to be available in suicide. As we saw earlier, Wittgenstein wrote in his posthumously published Notebooks 1914–1916 (in January 1917) that suicide is an “elementary sin”: if anything is forbidden, then suicide is; and if suicide is allowed, then everything is. 12 This is presumably because suicide would be an active—and hence perversely “controlled”—removal of the necessary condition for the possibility of the world. It would be a controlled annihilation of the world. In any event, we may say that the Wittgensteinian position, just as the Stoic one whose distant echoes can be heard in the Tractatus, seeks to control death at a metalevel by moving the focus of control from mere worldly facts to the subject’s way of relating to the world. This Stoic solution to the problem of human mortality is recommended also in contemporary discussions, for example (without reference to Wittgenstein) in Todd May’s book, Death (2008), but its basic ideas are already available, as May clearly acknowledges, in Marcus Aurelius’s and other ancient Stoics’ writings. 13 The Stoics famously emphasized that the facts of the world around us are as irrelevant to us as they are uncontrollable: the key to happiness and a good life is to control one’s attitudes to the world, rather than the world itself. AGAINST EXCESSIVE SELF-CONTROL It seems, then, that both Heideggerian and Wittgensteinian (as well as Stoic) philosophical thanatologies still provide us with fundamentally control-centered conceptions of the subject’s relation to the world that makes her/him/it (me) mortal. However, it can be argued that this ideal of full self-control—self-control to be maintained until the very end—both in its “high” (e.g., philosophical, such as Heideggerian) and “low” (e.g., popular-cultural) manifestations, is a problematic or even dangerous cul-

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tural ideal. A healthier attitude to mortality might be reached by deliberately giving up self-control in certain situations. As the ultimate mystery of life, death challenges us to abandon the ideal of self-control as a key “individualizing” capacity. We may, perhaps, face death most profoundly—and, pace Heidegger, most “authentically”—by accepting that we cannot control the world and our fate, or that we can control them only to a very restricted degree. We finally simply have to accept our life as it is given to us, living toward our deaths without protests or complaints. Arguably, a version of this criticism can be found in Emmanuel Levinas’s attack on Heidegger’s “solipsistic” philosophy of death. 14 As we saw in chapter 4, from Levinas’s perspective Heidegger fails to consider the death of the other person and arbitrarily restricts the philosophical issue of death to my being-toward-death. Ethically, the fundamentally important dimension of mortality is my relation to another mortal human being. The other’s face—Levinas’s famous visage—sets me an uncompromised moral demand: responsibility for the other. This is a way of giving up full control of one’s own individual life. The other, especially the other’s vulnerable face, intervenes and demands that I extend my concern beyond what I can control. That is, according to Levinas, I must open myself to the uncontrolled and the uncontrollable, the mortal other that is external to me and that I cannot reduce to myself (or, in Levinasian language, to “the same,” as the mainstream tradition of Western philosophy has tried to do, neglecting genuine otherness). Note that my brief articulation of Levinas’s critique of Heidegger is only a reconstruction. I am not saying that Levinas, or anyone else, explicitly argues against the conception of self-control at work in the Heideggerian conception of authenticity and being-toward-death (or that he even interprets that conception in terms of the concept of self-control, nor that we must do so). I am only proposing a way of reconstructing the presence of certain concepts, and tensions between them, in these philosophers’ well-known positions. Similarly, the need to accept something that is uncontrollable is also a theme we find in Wittgenstein’s Tractatus, albeit in a very different way. Wittgenstein tells us that “my will” steps to the world “from the outside” and thus cannot change the world. There is, then, a certain element of determinism or even fatalism in Wittgenstein, in a way not very dissimilar from Stoicism. The will, however, can change the “limits” of the world, that is, the subjectivity that limits and thereby controls the world (cf. chapter 3). It can change its ethical attitude to the world as a whole. Such a change of attitude could, at least in principle, also lead to the giving up of (excessive) control in the sense of giving up the futile attempt to control the facts and events of the world, while it is a way of maintaining control at a metalevel; this dialectics between control and noncontrol cannot be easily escaped. Wittgenstein’s (early) philosophy of subjectivity is still solipsistic, as we saw in chapters 3 and 4, pretty much like Heidegger’s and unlike

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Levinas’s, but it might be argued (as I did in chapter 4) that a remnant of the solipsistic approach remains even in Levinas, too. It is, after all, me who has the primary moral responsibility for the other. I cannot be replaced by anyone else; just as no one, according to Heidegger, can take my place in death; no one, according to Levinas, can substitute me in my responsibility to and for the other mortal person. True, I am no longer fully in control, but on the other hand it is me for whom this giving up of control is set as a moral duty. So there is a sense in which I must be able to control my choice of living my moral—and mortal—life in a way that my relation to the mortal other demands. Paradoxically, I must open myself to the uncontrolled and the uncontrollable in a self-controlled way. The rather purely philosophical argument against the ideal of pervasive, exaggerated self-control sketched above could also be developed with reference to, for instance, the very important role played by the norm of autonomy in healthcare. Obviously the autonomy of patients, both dying patients and others, must be a top priority value in any morally acceptable healthcare organization. On the other hand, it should also be possible to create, for dying individuals, spaces of encountering their mortality that enable them to give up control, which also at least to some extent means giving up autonomy. It should be possible for a dying patient to say (and think), “I’m exhausted; I cannot and need not control my life (and death) any more. Now I can finally give my autonomy away.” This is something he or she should be able to say, and think, when he or she still maintains the power of autonomous decision making. Being able to say and think anything like this would, for such a patient, be a way of autonomously acknowledging, possibly for the last time, her/his human finitude and the limits of control. Nothing directly follows regarding (say) euthanasia from this dialectics of control and the lack of control. It is possible to understand euthanasia as a form of ultimate control or as a way for the dying person to give up her/his control over the life that is ending. It all depends on the ethical way in which the euthanizing action is administered; whether or not euthanasia is generally endorsed or not, each individual case will require complicated ad hoc consideration and decision making, in which the notion of control, particularly self-control, must play a crucial role. Neither healthcare professionals nor ordinary people concerned with dying can escape such reflection. Another important practical application of the issues of control to the topic of death and mortality can be found in the debates over the politics of historical memory: are we trying to control our past—private and public—by controlling, individually or collectively, privately or publically, our memories (especially our memories of the victims of historical atrocities)? In his celebrated book, The Ethics of Memory (2002), Avishai Margalit observes that our “human project of memory, i.e., commemoration” can

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be seen as a version of the originally religious project of seeking immortality and avoiding extinction and “utter oblivion,” to the extent that national collectivism is sometimes seen as a “secular substitute for the religious idea of an afterlife.” 15 As we are horrified by the idea of dying without leaving any trace whatsoever, of simply disappearing, we expect to be remembered. While Margalit does not explicitly discuss the notion of control in this context, it is easy to see that the hope to be remembered, not to be forgotten, is again an attempt to exercise some kind of control beyond one’s own lifespan. On the other hand, our practices of commemoration—our remembering the dead, including relatives and friends as well as national heroes or victims of war and other atrocities—can also be seen as our attempt to control our individual or common past. Nation states, in particular, apparently relatively strongly seem to need to control the ways in which their histories are remembered—for better or worse, as remembering, clearly, can be both inclusive and exclusive. It could be suggested that historical memory is a continuous reflection on who we actually are and how we have become the persons (or nations) that we are. In such reflections, there should, again, be a “space” for both control and the giving up of control. We should be able to control the ways in which the past is given to us, or the ways we relate to our past, but we should also be able to give up our control in the sense of simply accepting what happened (though of course not in the sense of morally accepting horrible actions). We can never fully control—or, in an obvious sense, we cannot at all control—the past. We can only “control” it in the sense of creating new historical readings, interpretations, or narratives of what happened. 16 In seeking to face the past in an ethically adequate way, acknowledging the full reality of past suffering and death, we should—just like in the Levinasian case of taking responsibility for the mortal other irreducible to our own self and our controlling powers— be able to open ourselves to the uncontrollable. We will never be able to fully control the narratives of, say, the Holocaust. Rather, that historical event, and the ones in relevant respects comparable to it, controls us by challenging us to give up our self-control, opening toward otherness, toward an ever more attentive listening to the voices of the victims whose experiences can never be reduced to our (controlled) interpretations of them. However, at this point, a reflexive issue should be considered: are we, by abandoning excessive self-control in these different spheres of life (e.g., healthcare and historical memory), in the end attempting to gain control of our lives at a metalevel, that is, to maintain ultimate control by giving up what may be regarded as its corrupt form? This in fact is what was already pointed out in the remark on Levinas above: when we give up (full) self-control, facing the uncontrollable, and accepting our own mortality as well as that of others as a manifestation of the uncontrollable, we must do so in a controlled and autonomous way. It is we ourselves

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who must do that. It seems to me that this tension, or dialectics, of control and self-control will stay with us as long as we seriously reflect on death and dying as philosophical issues. It could be suggested, more constructively, that control and the giving up of control are reciprocally contained and “interpenetrated,” like some philosophers (including leading neopragmatist Hilary Putnam) have claimed fact and value to be. 17 We cannot have either in a pure form; there is an inevitable entanglement instead of any neat dichotomy. This tension might in the end be related to another dialectical tension arising from our mortality: both death (mortality) and immortality (if anything like that were available to us) are, arguably, a threat to the very possibility of meaningful life. The fact that we die may be experienced as depriving life, or even human culture generally, of any permanent value and meaning. Even the most important things in life, such as moral goodness and virtue, will eventually be lost; death will equally swipe away the good and the evil. Yet, conversely, eternal life would make life meaningless in an opposite way: nothing would have to be done by anyone in particular (including me) at any particular moment, because anything and everything could and presumably would be done (by everyone!) sooner or later during eternity. All individuality and authenticity would then be lost. 18 DEATH AND PRAGMATISM In the remainder of this chapter, I would like to adopt a somewhat different perspective by suggesting that the pragmatist tradition—already discussed repeatedly, albeit not in any great detail, in the previous chapters—may offer us ways of “mediating” between the two poles of control and the giving up of control. This is done by investigating, pragmatically, the meaning of death (and, for that matter, the meaning of control) in terms of its (their) conceivable practical effects in our lives. However, the pragmatist pursuit of a via media, or a critical middle ground, may itself be seen as an attempt to control our choice between control and noncontrol; this is why it eventually turns out, I will argue, that pragmatism does not deliver us any final solution to the problem we are considering. Moreover, I will argue that the pragmatic method itself presupposes our mortality and finitude. A traditional way of identifying a philosophical pragmatist refers to her/his use of the pragmatic method (also known as the pragmatic maxim or the pragmatic principle). As Charles Peirce advised us in his famous 1878 essay, “How to Make Our Ideas Clear,” we should, when figuring out what a given concept or conception means, “consider what effects, that might conceivably have practical bearings, we conceive the object of our conception to have” and then consider our conception of those effects

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to be “the whole of our conception of the object.” This principle, as is well known, was interpreted somewhat differently by William James, who started from Peirce’s relatively narrow maxim—initially restricted to a scientific context—but broadened it to cover human ethical and religious life as well. We may, according to James, not only specify the meaning of scientific theoretical concepts in terms of the potential (conceivable) practical effects their objects might have, but we can also better understand our human lives and their moral and religious commitments by inquiring into the ways in which those commitments (or their objects—James himself is notoriously ambivalent here) might function in experiential situations. Thus, what is for Peirce essentially a principle to be employed in determining the meaning of concepts becomes, for James, something like a philosophical way of life. 19 Pragmatists have, unfortunately, only rarely reflected on how far into our experiential future the potential practical consequences of our ideas and/or their objects ought to be extended. Peirce, as a “scholastic realist” about possibility, insisted on including not just actual concretely realized experiences but potential, conceivable ones. However, even Peirce seems to have omitted something: the ultimate human experience—though it is debatable whether it can be called an experience at all 20 —that could and should be included in our employment of the pragmatic method is an individual person’s final experiential moment, death. The pragmatic method can obviously be applied to philosophical (and other) conceptions of death. 21 This would mean that those conceptions are analyzed and evaluated in terms of their potential practical outcomes: what does it mean for an individual person in her/his practical life situations to adopt a certain philosophical conception of death and mortality; what kind of experiences can s/he expect from the rest of her/his life if s/he embraces that particular conception (or, in an alternative formulation, if that conception is true); does that conception, for instance, relieve her/his fear of death—or perhaps intensify it (and so forth)? It is easily imaginable that, for example, one’s adoption of theories of personal survival after death—religious or nonreligious—may lead to future life experiences different from those resulting from one’s adoption of thoroughgoing atheism according to which there is no hope for survival. Even if death is considered the end of all experiential life, there is an enormous practical difference between those affirming an Epicurean conception according to which death is “nothing to us,” because there will be no one experiencing any harm (or pleasure) after the subject of experience is gone, and those following Thomas Nagel in regarding death as a privation of the goods that life might bring with it. 22 However, the link between the pragmatic method, on the one side, and human death and mortality, on the other, can be understood more radically. Not only can philosophical conceptions of death be pragmatically analyzed, explicated, and evaluated; the horizon of death—our in-

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evitable mortality—can be seen as the fundamental experiential perspective that should be taken into account in attempts to place any philosophical (or nonphilosophical) conception of virtually anything at all into a serious pragmatic and experiential perspective. It is right here that pragmatism and transcendental philosophy, developed as philosophical thanatologies, can be integrated. 23 Pragmatists—with the exception of James—have been surprisingly silent about death. Contemporary philosophy of death and mortality is largely dominated by analytic theories of personal identity, the persistence of individuals through time, the (ir)rationality of the fear of death along Epicurean and Nagelian lines, and related topics. The phenomenological and existentialist traditions, with the now classical account of mortality as a deep ontological feature of human existence, have, in turn, dominated the “nonanalytic” discussions; only rarely have these two rival traditions of twentieth-century philosophy been brought together in attempts to understand death and mortality from a more comprehensive point of view. Even when they are brought together and are seen to address largely similar issues with somewhat different vocabularies and styles of argumentation, as in Bernard Schumacher’s recent volume, 24 they are hardly ever connected with pragmatism. Curiously, pragmatism—the philosophy that ought to emphasize the fundamental connection between philosophizing and the practical concerns of our lives and experiences, including mortality—has never been a major strategy in dealing with death, dying, and mortality. Thus, part of my proposal here is that pragmatism, ideally, could be a framework that integrates not only different philosophical anthropologies (e.g., naturalist and culturalist, as suggested in chapter 2) but also analytic and “Continental” (e.g., phenomenological or existentialist) approaches to the philosophy of death—even though it has up to now fallen short of achieving this ideal. Obviously, pragmatism could also be a framework within which the issue of control and the tension invoked above between control and surrendering control receive a fruitful treatment, given that pragmatists have generally inquired into the ways in which human beings control their environments through responding to and critically transforming the problematic situations arising in the course of their habitual action. There is, clearly, some top-quality, pragmatistically inspired work in applied ethics, particularly bioethics, that also deals with death and mortality in concrete practical contexts of, say, palliative care, in which issues of control and autonomy are highly central. 25 What I mean by saying that pragmatists typically do not pay sufficient attention to death is that they have so far failed to extensively inquire into the more existential dimensions of mortality (let alone into philosophical thanatology in a transcendental sense). There are, however, some important exceptions. I will in the next two sections consider pragmatist ways of dealing with death and

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mortality by commenting first on James and secondly, moving from classical pragmatism to neopragmatism, Richard Shusterman and John Lachs. 26 Before moving on to a discussion of James, Shusterman, and Lachs— as three different representatives of pragmatist philosophical thanatology—let me point out that pragmatism, if successful as a philosophy of death and mortality, may and should lead us beyond any simple dichotomies between control and the lack of control. This is the specific—or even unique—challenge and promise of pragmatism in this field of inquiry; moreover, this ought to be kept in mind throughout my discussion of pragmatism, even when we seem to be led far from the explicit topic of control. Just as pragmatists are typically critical of traditional philosophical dichotomies, such as mind versus body, nature versus culture, fact versus value, or theory versus practice, it may be argued that a proper pragmatist approach to the issues considered above is the questioning of the dichotomy between control and the lack of control. Even if pragmatism does not completely succeed here, it is philosophically valuable to examine the attempt itself. To put this in terms recently proposed by Ulf Zackariasson, 27 a “solution” to the problem of death, as well as to a number of other human problems, may be attempted either through an active reconstruction of our problematic situation or through surrender. This distinction does capture something extremely important regarding the different pragmatic attitudes or strategies we may adopt to the contingencies of life; yet, from a pragmatist perspective, it should not be construed as an essentialistic dichotomy, because in most cases, our attitudes are a mixture of these two poles. Surrender, in a sense, is itself a form of agency; it may be one way of actively reconstructing and resolving a problematic situation (or, more precisely, an active choice of passivity as a way of resolving such a situation). 28 Thus, instead of a dichotomy, what we should perceive here is a reciprocal containment between agency (control) and surrender (the giving up of control). In fact, any meaningful (especially social) human activity presupposes some form of surrender, as we simply cannot do everything ourselves but must continuously surrender our fate to the hands of others, accepting a certain loss of control. My basic thesis is that there are resources in pragmatism that are useful for articulating this idea of a reciprocal containment, but even pragmatism in the end falls short of entirely moving beyond the tension between control and the giving up of control. Rather, this is a tension we ought to learn to live with. CLASSICAL PRAGMATISM: JAMES The first pragmatist to be considered here, William James, was in many ways a philosopher of life rather than of death. The melioristic, life-

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affirming character of his pragmatism may even hide the necessity of examining death. James did, however, especially in late works, touch this topic when he, referring to Schopenhauer, discussed our tendency to arrive at ultimate questions, especially the question later made famous by Heidegger—why there is something rather than nothing. This he finds the “darkest question” of philosophy, 29 inescapably arising when we reflect on our mortal life. When asking why we have to die, or whether there is any meaning in death or in the life leading up to it, we ask why we live at all or why there is anything at all instead of sheer nothingness. Insofar as James’s investigations were guided by this “existentialist” worry about the radical contingency (and, thus, uncontrollability) of existence, we may see them as centrally addressing mortality, even if death or (im)mortality is only seldom their explicit topic. Although James defended the pragmatic legitimacy of beliefs in immortality (along with other religious beliefs), he hardly firmly believed in immortality. According to Ralph Barton Perry, James was not among those who find the thought about their own death unbearable. 30 In the beginning of “Human Immortality” (1898), an essay already discussed from a different angle in chapter 5 above, he noted that he is not personally strongly concerned with the topic: “I have to confess that my own personal feeling about immortality has never been of the keenest order, and that, among the problems that give my mind solicitude, this one does not take a very foremost place. Yet there are individuals with a real passion for the matter.” 31 James always took seriously individuals’ “real passions”—or what he elsewhere called “philosophical temperaments.” There is a plurality of philosophical temperaments seeking answers to the grand challenges of human life; hence, no single correct pragmatist conception of death is available, as individuals may have quite different needs and interests. 32 Perry points out that it was only toward the end of his life that James started to believe in immortality. In 1904, he recognized the “practical need” for this belief; while still observing that he had never felt a “rational need of immortality,” he now experienced a “growing faith in its reality.” 33 Death, though natural, is not simply to be tolerated; instead of acceptance, it requires a reaction, engagement, and resistance. 34 Such a struggling attitude to mortality is, presumably, an equally “natural” element of our humanity as death itself. James argued already in an early essay that philosophy should conceptualize the world and define our future “congruously with our spontaneous powers.” 35 The quest for a “moral order” of the universe, for the fulfilment of our deepest human needs, is a pervasive theme of his writings. Possibly, the account of immortality whose plausibility (and compatibility with science) was defended in “Human Immortality” gradually became more and more James’s own. Yet, I do not want to speculate either about immortality itself or about James’s attitude to the issue.

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What is crucial here is that the problem of death and mortality provides a framework or context of meaning within which James’s pragmatism itself develops. Pragmatist philosophy must address this issue. To employ a pragmatic method is to consider philosophical issues of metaphysics, ethics, and religion (or whatever) under the aspect of mortality (even if one defends, as James does, immortality). 36 As William Gavin perceives, James’s Pragmatism begins and ends with remarks on death; moreover, each individual personal death is, these remarks suggest, “tragic.” 37 Gavin also (at least implicitly) links James’s concern with death to his pragmatic method. Referring to James’s formulation of the pragmatic method as a method of resolving metaphysical disputes that might otherwise remain “interminable,” he notes that there is an “urgency” in the kind of issues James deals with—something not found in, say, Peirce’s pragmatism: “What difference does it make—to me, if the universe is viewed as one or as many?” 38 This urgency, I submit, is precisely the horizon of mortality that “colors” any metaphysical problems we may be troubled by: we do not have an endless number of future experiences in store—our days are numbered—and our struggle with understanding the way(s) the world is, and all our attempts to construct our engagements with the world, must take this fundamental finitude into account. To put this in our vocabulary of “control,” we may say that our metaphysical explorations need to somehow take into account the limits of control, our uncontrollable finitude. There is, in this way, a sense in which our being in and inquiring into the world is colored by what has been called a “tragic sense of life.” 39 There is no such melancholic sensitivity to “the tragic” to be found in the other classical pragmatists—not at least in the way there is in James, who admits that “something permanently drastic and bitter” may always, irreducibly, remain, even when life is interpreted along the lines of melioristic religion—insofar as we attribute a fundamental “seriousness” to our lives. 40 Therefore, whenever we set out to philosophize about “ultimate” metaphysical questions, we do so from the standpoint of mortal human life, an individual life inevitably existentially concerned with its finitude. The pragmatist following James may also find it natural to argue, as I have tried to do in the earlier sections of this chapter, that there are situations of life where we ultimately should give up (self-)control. Even tragedy—or, more specifically, seeing the events of life in the light of the concept of tragedy—is a way of controlling one’s life and of arranging its narrative into a meaningful shape; therefore, we are not actually giving up (excessive) self-control simply by applying to our mortal condition the concept of the tragic. However, there may be a sense in which a mere acceptance of human finitude—which does not, as such, include an interpretation of that finitude either in tragic or any other specific terms—is not, at least not necessarily, a way of controlling our finite lives. This observation needs to be related to the ways in which pragmatist and Stoic per-

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spectives on mortality may, instead of necessarily conflicting, supplement each other. NEOPRAGMATISM: SHUSTERMAN AND LACHS As is well known, Richard Shusterman employs American pragmatism— often in unorthodox ways—in his explorations of not only aesthetics (for which he is most famous) but also what can be called “philosophy of life.” It is in the context of the latter that the philosophy of death obviously plays a key role. If we follow James in linking our existential concern with mortality to the urgency that metaphysical questions may have for us, we should also join Shusterman in emphasizing the central importance of the problem of death to the pursuit of philosophy as an “art of living”—both classical and modern (e.g., pragmatist). While James is in my view the classical pragmatist who offers us the richest resources here, Shusterman focuses on Dewey, along with Wittgenstein and Michel Foucault. 41 Wittgensteinian and pragmatist ideas may be employed to criticize the strongly established paradigm of analytic philosophy of death because of its overly theoretical stance whose insights into what it is like to live a mortal life, instead of just discussing, e.g., the criteria of death with intellectual sophistication, may be scarce. This is what Shusterman’s discussion of pragmatist philosophy as a way of life helps us appreciate. Again, the truly important issue is not whether, say, one’s surviving death as a disembodied spirit is a coherent conceptual or metaphysical possibility, or whether we can find exact criteria for personal identity, enabling us to determine in any particular case whether an organism is dead or alive, but how we should think about our own ethically challenging mortal existence—how we should live forward, “being toward death,” in a situation of Jamesian “urgency.” Mortality, as a human problem, invites something more than mere exercises in conceptual analysis and argumentation. A merely theoretical analysis deflates the problem from its central human—metaphysical and ethical—importance. 42 Joining the tradition from Plato through Montaigne to Heidegger, a tradition viewing death as an ultimate issue in philosophy—or philosophy itself as a “practice of dying”—Shusterman’s three heroes of philosophical life (Dewey, Wittgenstein, and Foucault) were all in their distinctive ways concerned with death (and suicide), with the exception of Dewey, who according to Shusterman unduly “neglected” the issue. We ought to, these thinkers maintained, come to terms with death and mortality; the meaning and value of our existence depends on our being able to “master” death—or even to “enjoy” it in Foucault’s sense. Thus, once again, controlling (“mastering”) death, or perhaps better, controlling the process of life (dying) eventually leading up to death, is seen as a major

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goal of life. This does not mean that we should adopt a gloomy and pessimistic attitude to life, unable to forget even for a moment that everything ends with death, but that we should perceive the value and importance of life from within the finitude of existence. The existentialists were not the only thinkers to appreciate this; resources for an existentially rich philosophical thanatology can be found in classical American philosophy. Shusterman rightly emphasizes the resources of pragmatism here— but fails to deal with the control versus noncontrol dialectics at any depth. Dewey’s pragmatism is criticized by Shusterman because of his “silence” about death; his “neglect of this theme is a weakness,” though he also seems to have held, more positively, that death should be “accepted” as a natural part of life. 43 This acceptance goes together with Deweyan naturalism but is in tension with Jamesian struggle for immortality. Moreover, it should be admitted, even (or especially) by naturalists, that the fear of, or revolt against, death belongs to our “human nature.” Death does not seem to be a matter of metaphysical or existential “urgency” for Dewey, while James does not seem to believe we could ever fully “master”—or control—death and mortality. 44 In this sense I find Shusterman’s criticism of Dewey justified. A somewhat different (neo)pragmatist perspective on the issue of mortality is provided by John Lachs in his Stoic Pragmatism, which contains one of the relatively few explicitly pragmatist explorations of death and mortality in recent philosophy. 45 Lachs surprisingly proposes to integrate pragmatism with Stoicism, arguing that this synthesis yields a more satisfactory overall philosophy than either pragmatism or Stoicism by itself does. These two philosophies can supplement each other, though both are by themselves unsatisfactory: while pragmatism insists on active effort and meliorism (that is, controlling and changing the world) and Stoicism on passive acquiescence, detachment, and acceptance (that is, changing the self or its attitude to the world), Lachs persuasively argues that Stoics “give up too soon” whereas pragmatists make the opposite mistake of “never wanting to give up.” 46 The most promising path, as so often, can be found between the extremes. We should acknowledge that though things may and must often be transformed to make the world better, there are limits to how far this amelioration of the human condition can go. A healthy Stoic pragmatism encourages us to accept our finitude. There is no need, then, to see these standpoints as opposites: “Pragmatists are just as vitally interested in habits of self-control as stoics are committed to appropriate social ameliorative action”; both pragmatist “strive” and Stoic “surrender” are necessary for a good life. 47 Stoic pragmatism is of course directly applicable to the issues of control and death. Lachs does not see the point of the existentialist worry (also briefly voiced above) that the meaningfulness of doing anything might be lost because of the ultimate horizon of death: it is, he says,

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“sensible to concern ourselves with the near consequences of our acts, but not with what might flow from them in the unforeseeably distant future.” 48 The pragmatic attitude to death is to “fend it off one day at a time.” 49 There is “no wholesale solution to anything,” 50 he reminds us, particularly not to the problem of death. Certainly he succeeds in articulating an important dimension of the control versus surrender problematic; even so, his attempt to settle the issue of death strikes me as inadequate—more specifically, inadequate to a pragmatist. Lachs refuses to observe the significance of (Heideggerian and, arguably, Jamesian) transcendental anxiety resulting from the realization that mortality colors our existence generally, right now and continuously, including the “near consequences” of whatever we do, because any moment could be the last one. It is almost as if he forgets, when discussing death, his Stoic pragmatist principles and tries to fully control death, and our attitude to it, to control it more than we in the end really can, ignoring the need to accept that anxiety cannot be finally removed. In brief, while I theoretically agree on the basic idea of Lachs’s Stoic pragmatism—indeed, this chapter and implicitly this entire book are very much concerned with the need to find a subtle balance between control and the giving up of control, just as Lachs’s position is—I strongly disagree about how exactly the division of labor between control and acceptance, or effort and surrender, ought to be pragmatically administered in our attempts to deal with the momentous philosophical issue of human mortality. Surrender should not take place by sacrificing the existential depth of the issue. Far from providing any wholesale solutions to our problems, the pragmatist contributions we have briefly reviewed all seem to face, in somewhat diverging ways, the dialectics of control versus noncontrol. One aspect of our pragmatic examination of this dialectical situation must, then, be a metalevel inquiry into how exactly we should face the dialectics—by further activity and inquiry, or ultimately by surrendering the attempt to control our thinking about death any further? THE PRAGMATIC METHOD AND THE TRANSCENDENTAL METHOD I have repeatedly referred to Wittgenstein’s treatment of the subject and the world (including death as the end of the world) as “transcendental.” We should at this point finally reemphasize that pragmatism and transcendental reflection on death and mortality are not incompatible with each other—contrary to what is often believed. The transcendental method is often regarded as a method that a pragmatist must firmly reject as an example of a pure a priori methodology that pragmatists have attacked since Peirce. However, the pragmatist can very well engage in,

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e.g., (naturalized, historicized, contextualized) transcendental argumentation seeking to identify the necessary conditions for the possibility of a certain given (actual) phenomenon. 51 Now, the transcendental method can be pragmatically naturalized (or “pragmatized”) when we realize that the relevant kind of transcendental conditions are found in our practices themselves. Conversely, transcendental arguments and reflections can be examined in terms of their pragmatic value for our lives. The transcendental limits of the human condition can be examined from within the practices partly defined by such limits. Thus, when saying that a certain philosophical approach to death and mortality is “transcendental,” what we should mean is that it deals with mortality as a constitutive condition of human life and experiences. As we saw in chapter 4, for Heideggerian philosophers of death and mortality, the role played by death as a limit that shapes an individual’s life as a whole is also transcendental: it is only against the horizon of being-toward-death that an individual human being can be, or become, the individual he or she is. The transcendental character of mortality roughly in this sense need not at all be denied by the pragmatist. On the contrary, the pragmatist—for instance, a Jamesian pragmatist—may engage in a pragmatic critical examination of the transcendental limits and conditions of human life that mortality sets us. This is an example of transcendental reflection pragmatically naturalized. The philosophy of death and mortality—and more generally, the philosophy of human finitude—can, then, offer an illuminating case study of the possibility of integrating pragmatic and transcendental methodologies. The transcendental method, given its focus on constitutive conditions and limits, may also be employed (in its pragmatically naturalized form) to point out some inevitable limitations in our attempts to deal with the dialectics of control and the giving up of control (or agency and surrender). When critically analyzing these phenomena from within the practices framing our employment of them, we should note that there is also something like “metasurrender”: we cannot and should not try to define surrender (or anything else for that matter) essentialistically and ahistorically, fixing its relevant criteria once and for all, because we should remain open to the future in the sense of acknowledging (again) our human limits and finitude. We do not know for certain when exactly we should continue our active agency and control and when we should, rather, give up this control and surrender, or even how exactly the conceptual boundaries defining these notions are to be drawn. These boundaries may shift as our experience and history unfold. Simultaneously, we should again observe that there is also something we can call “metacontrol” or “meta-(re)construction”: surrender itself, or our giving up of control, may be understood as a way of reconstructing our situation and thereby to some extent controlling it, instead of being completely separable from control, agency, and reconstruction. Finally, when attempting to identify

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the situations in which agency and control are needed and those in which, rather, surrendering control is the appropriate action (or how exactly these concepts ought to be used in different contexts), we need to engage in a process of inquiry, which is itself an active (and inevitably to some extent controlled and world-controlling) process. Thus, while at a theoretical level we should—and the pragmatic method can, as explained above, be helpful here—be willing to give up control when we arrive at a situation in which nothing else can be done any more, our process of arriving at such a situation is itself inevitably to a large extent a “controlled” one, simply because it is, in a pragmatist sense, a process of inquiry seeking to adequately respond to a problematic situation. This is another way of showing that the dialectics of control and the giving up of control will be with us to stay, even if (or perhaps especially if) we adopt a pragmatic method enriched with transcendental dimensions. The pragmatist approach integrated with Stoicism (à la Lachs; cf. above) and with a Kantian- and/or Wittgensteinian-inspired transcendental methodology emphasizing the constitutivity of mortality for our specifically human finite existence may, I submit, be our best way of dealing with the issue of controlling death versus giving up control. However, qua pragmatic, this is inevitably a fallible and contingent approach. We do not have any full control of this process of inquiry, just like we have no full control of any projects and processes of life; no success is guaranteed. Yet, pragmatically, we just cannot give up our search for the best way of facing the dialectics. Starting from pragmatism, we might eventually end up with Stoicism, realizing that controlling only the controllable and staying calm regarding what we cannot control is the best philosophy to live with. However, this solution will not eliminate the constant struggle to draw (and redraw) this boundary between the controllable and the uncontrollable. Pragmatism is a philosophy of active yet fallible inquiry, and there is no way of escaping the need to inquire into the ways in which our conceptualizations, including the transcendental limits based on constitutive features of our experience, shape the human world we live and die in. CONCLUDING REMARKS By way of conclusion, it should be observed that William James’s (as well as, to some extent, other pragmatists’) approach to death, mortality, and immortality integrates ethical and metaphysical perspectives. We cannot just start from the metaphysical issues and solve them first, only then moving on to consider the ethical ones; on the contrary, we must pragmatically consider metaphysics itself from an ethical point of view. This can even be seen as a transcendental “must”: it is only within an ethical

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context that metaphysics—about death, dying, and mortality, and possibly about anything at all—is so much as possible for us as a process of inquiry. That is, in a Jamesian way, our ethical concern with finitude makes metaphysics “urgent” for us. The same entanglement can be perceived in philosophical anthropology generally, but pragmatist philosophical thanatology makes it particularly intensified. The fact that James, while focusing on concrete experiential life, was deeply concerned with mortality is a key difference between James’s and Dewey’s pragmatisms, a difference reflecting James’s well-known distinction between the “sick soul” and the “healthy-minded.” 52 When reading James’s reflections on metaphysical problems, such as the free will and the reality of God, or the possibility of immortality, we should take seriously his pragmatic way of approaching the notion of reality generally: “What we say about reality [. . .] depends on the perspective into which we throw it.” 53 When attempting to understand the world, including mortality, we are not just “readers” of the “cosmic novel” but its “very personages,” involved in a reality “in the making,” a reality whose structure is to some extent up to us to (re)construct, when we seek a “living understanding of [its] movement.” 54 As James remarked, possibly influenced by Ralph Waldo Emerson (another classical American thinker profoundly concerned with reintegrating philosophy with life), “the trail of the human serpent is [. . .] over everything.” 55 The great challenge for a pragmatist philosophical thanatologist is to understand the “transcendental” significance of these insights—that is, the idea that it largely depends on our own human, finite perspective on the kind of mortal life we are leading whether and how that life becomes available to us as a meaning-bestowing or “authenticating” process—while avoiding the problematic idea of an all-embracing control of life that has been criticized in this chapter. Therefore, a truly pragmatist investigation of death and mortality should, as James’s does, incorporate both metaphysical and ethical elements, inseparably entangled. The issue of death is a problem of human finitude, and this topic cannot be reduced to either metaphysics or ethics. Mortality, pragmatically approached, can serve as a striking illustration of the general pragmatist recognition of the (re-)entanglement of ethics and metaphysics. There is, once again, a tension here, however: on the one hand it seems that death and mortality must be pragmatically categorized as natural elements of the human world (whose categorizations are, for pragmatists, inevitably human, valuationally and practically embedded); on the other hand the finitude resulting from our mortality seems to be necessary for us to be able to employ the pragmatic method at all, to turn our gaze toward future experiences that can only be significant for us if there is a finite number of them. The pragmatic method, then, should not only be understood in the radical sense of requiring any pragmatically significant phil-

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osophical conception (about, e.g., metaphysical topics) to reflect on its relation to the horizon of death—to human mortality as something that makes us finite, limited subjects of experience with an “urgent” need to settle metaphysical issues that make a difference to our lives—but also in the further sense of being itself dependent on mortality. If there were an endless number of experiences to expect, none of those potential experiences would be significant enough to be employed in a pragmatic explication of our ideas. 56 Our future must, hence, be finite in order for it to be pragmatically significant. A tight conceptual relation between mortality and the pragmatic method emerges—even if this method is employed (e.g., by James) in defending immortality. Beginning from mortality as an inescapable horizon—as the context of meaning inevitably present in our lives—we might come to maintain a belief in some version of immortality (following, e.g., James), but even then we would do this within the framework of finitude colored by mortality. This tension parallels the one between control and surrender, or may be interpretable as a special version of that more general tension. By employing the pragmatic method, we introduce conceptual order into our thought and inquiry, seeking to “make our ideas clear” 57 and precise enough to steer us in our habits of action, which include constant control of our life environments. However, we have observed that this method itself ultimately depends on the acknowledgment of mortality—that is, finitude and uncontrollability. Further investigations, historical and systematic, of these issues will therefore have to take into account the ways in which the pragmatic method is itself a way of controlling our ideas, and our lives and habits incorporating such ideas—including the idea of death—while also being an attempt to transcend any simplified dichotomies between control and the lack of control. I have argued that while the ideal of autonomous selfcontrol finds its sophisticated philosophical expressions in some of the most influential thanatological thinkers of the past century (including Heidegger and Wittgenstein, in particular, but also the pragmatists, or at least some of them), this ideal should not be carried into an extreme. There is a sense in which we are, through our mortal lives, challenged to accept life as it comes. Part of this acceptance is, arguably, the Levinasian acceptance of the fundamental ethical demand of responsibility that the face of the other (mortal) person sets to us. This responsibility makes us give up full control and accept the uncontrollable. On the other hand, it is we ourselves, or I myself, that ought to exercise full control of this situation of moral vision and attitude. Roughly in the way in which Kant thought that the moral law is something that the autonomous moral subject itself legislates and freely subordinates itself to, we must submit ourselves to the uncontrollable, accept our responsibility to and for the other, in a self-controlled and ethically “vigilant” manner (to borrow another

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Levinasian idea, referring to a kind of “insomnia”: our infinite moral responsibility does not let us rest). 58 My general conclusion is that there is no single issue of control in relation to death. The problem emerges in various overlapping contexts: suicide, transcendental philosophical thanatology, historical memory, pragmatist attempts to resolve problematic situations of life, and so forth. The dialectics between control and noncontrol shapes the many different ways in which we need to respond to such intellectual and ethical challenges of life. More concrete questions must be addressed when considering how these philosophical reflections could be turned into new practical innovations regarding, e.g., the habits of action shaping end-of-life care today. In such extreme life situations, the dying should have the opportunity to continue self-controlling as long as they feel they are capable of doing it. But they should also have the opportunity to give up that control in a way that still preserves their human dignity. This is more easily said than done. The same is true about the challenge of creating an “open space” from which one can both adopt a “controlled” or even “controlling” attitude to the past—including the atrocities and victims of the history—as well as (again) open oneself to the uncontrollable. Ultimately, all these challenges reflect the tensions shaping the ideal of control we have discussed. Therefore, when approaching these challenges pragmatically, we should keep in mind that the pragmatic method itself incorporates a version of the very same tension between control and surrender. Thus, pragmatism is no final solution to the dialectics this chapter has examined—but pragmatism also teaches us to live, toward death, without final solutions. NOTES 1. This chapter is partly based on Sami Pihlström, “Controlling Death: Pragmatism Meets Philosophical Thanatology,” Mortality 20 (2015). 2. Let me once again note that, for the purposes of this chapter or even of this entire book, I have not found it necessary to adopt any specific technical definition of either death or mortality. By “death,” I simply mean, in a standard sense, a permanent and irreversible termination of the vital processes of a being that was once alive. Much more detailed definitions could be given; moreover, keeping in mind the distinction between a definition and a criterion, it could be argued that, e.g., the permanent cessation of brainstem activity can function as a medical criterion of (human) death, while death itself means (or “is”) something different, that is, the termination of the processes of life. Furthermore, I must skip the traditional philosophical puzzles related to the concept of control. We need not, for instance, settle the perennial issue of determinism versus indeterminism in order to use the notion of control in the everyday sense in which we talk about our being able, or unable, to control our actions and the events of our lives. Nor do we need to restrict our concept of control to, say, a scientific notion of causal influence; control in the relevant sense could be something looser and more comprehensive, e.g., something that we mean when saying that a person is “in control” of her or his life. That is, I hope my reflections on death and control (in the more or less colloquial sense of these terms) may be philosophically relevant to people

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maintaining possibly quite different metaphysical views on the nature of death and/or control. On the conceptual and metaphysical issues of defining death, see, e.g., Steven Luper, The Philosophy of Death (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009); for related discussions in (broadly) the same analytic tradition, see Christopher Belshaw, Annihilation: The Sense and Significance of Death (Stocksfield, UK: Acumen, 2009); Ben Bradley, Well-Being and Death (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2009); John Martin Fischer, Our Stories: Essays on Life, Death, and Free Will (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2009); and Héctor Wittmer, Philosophie des Todes (Stuttgart: Reclam, 2009). 3. The notions of death and dying, of course, must also be distinguished from each other. Whatever death exactly means (e.g., the complete termination of the life processes of a being that once lived), dying is the process leading up to it. Death, in a simple approximation, is the limit between the process of dying (a process which, in a sense, lasts throughout the living being’s life) and the state of being dead that follows after the event of death. Again, we may here safely ignore the metaphysical question about whether there is a momentary “event” of dying or whether, perhaps more plausibly, the passage from life to death is a temporally extended process. Technically, we could distinguish between several issues of control, related to dying, death, and our mortal condition, respectively; for instance, it could be argued that the process of dying can be controlled (to a certain extent) while the event of death cannot. 4. See, e.g., Matti Häyry, Rationality and the Genetic Challenge: Making People Better? (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011). 5. There are also—in contrast to my transcendental approach—instrumentalist views on pragmatism that emphasize its usefulness in combating the fear of death; see, e.g., Mathew A. Foust, “Experience as a Prelude to Disaster: American Philosophy and the Fear of Death,” Mortality 18 (2013), 1–16. There are, furthermore, more straightforwardly instrumentalist or (arguably) naively pragmatic views on philosophy generally as a source of alleviating that fear; see Stephen Buetow, Carol McAllum, and Ross Upshur, “Using Philosophy to Help Manage the Fear of Death,” Journal of Palliative Care 25 (2009), 111–16. My way of developing pragmatism in this chapter and the next one is very different. In general, it would be a good idea to avoid speaking about “usefulness” in the context of pragmatism. 6. Again, even in the absence of a general philosophical definition of “control,” we easily understand what people mean when they say that they would rather choose a euthanasia than become helpless patients unable to control their lives any more. This way of speaking seems to have a role to play in our natural language games (to employ a Wittgensteinian expression). 7. Jean Amery, On Suicide: A Discourse on Voluntary Death, trans. John Barlow (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999; originally published in French in 1976). 8. On vampires, see also chapter 3. I will not in this chapter discuss religious attempts to “control” death, dying, or mortality. There is a sense in which a religious believer believing in personal survival after death attempts to “control” her or his death, and there is another sense in which religious communities may attempt to control our ways of thinking about life and death generally. These are very important issues in philosophy of religion, but I must set them aside here. For my own attempt to develop a pragmatist (yet transcendental) philosophy of religion, see Sami Pihlström, Pragmatic Pluralism and the Problem of God (New York: Fordham University Press, 2013). 9. See Martin Heidegger, Sein und Zeit (Tübingen, GER: Niemeyer, 1961; originally 1927), especially §9. 10. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus: Logisch-philosophische Abhandlung (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1961; originally 1921), §§ 6.4 ff. See chapters 3 and 4 above. 11. The purpose of reintroducing Heidegger and Wittgenstein into this discussion (cf. also chapters 3–4) is not to offer any novel scholarly interpretations of their ideas but to note again the strong presence of first-personal, or even solipsistic, conceptions of death and mortality at work in these thinkers’ views. I hope my points about

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control and death can be appreciated independently of what I have to say about Heidegger and Wittgenstein in particular; on the other hand, my discussion of transcendental approaches to the philosophy of death and dying do, I hope, enrich the topic of control. 12. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Notebooks 1914–1916, eds. G. H. von Wright and G. E. M. Anscombe (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1961). 13. Todd May, Death (London and New York: Routledge, 2008), chapter 3. 14. See Levinas’s critique of Heidegger in (e.g.) Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University Press, 1974; originally published in French in 1961), and elsewhere. 15. Avishai Margalit, The Ethics of Memory (Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 2002), pp. 25, 99. 16. Again, this indicates that we have to use “control” in a relatively loose and even partly metaphorical sense here. We do have to be able to say that publically authorized interpretations of the history of a nation state, for instance, “control” the past as (re-)experienced and reconstructed by the citizens of that state, even though we obviously, in the absence of a time machine, lack control over the past in the sense of lacking supernatural causal capacities of intervening in past causal processes. 17. See Hilary Putnam, The Collapse of the Fact/Value Dichotomy and Other Essays (Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 2002). 18. A Stoic response emphasizing the contingency and fragility of life may, as May suggests in his above-cited volume, Death, be the only even remotely plausible way of dealing with this dialectical situation. However, cf. also chapter 5 above. 19. I must avoid commenting on the details of the history of the pragmatic method here. The classical texts by Peirce and James can be found in Charles S. Peirce, The Essential Peirce, vol. 1, ed. Nathan Houser et al. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992; see chapter 5 for the 1878 essay), and William James, Pragmatism: A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking (1907), eds. Frederick H. Burkhardt, Fredson Bowers, and Ignas K. Skrupskelis (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1975), Lecture II. 20. For example, according to Wittgenstein, death is not an experienced fact but the end of the world. See again Tractatus, §§ 6.431–6.4311. 21. See Charles A. Hobbs, “Why Classical American Pragmatism Is Helpful for Thinking about Death,” Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society 47 (2011), 182–95. 22. For a recent exploration of this and related issues not only in Anglo-American philosophy but in the “Continental” traditions as well, see Bernard N. Schumacher, Death and Mortality in Contemporary Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010). Another relatively rare example of engagement in both Heideggerian and analytic approaches is Ernst Tugendhat, Über den Tod (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2006; first published 1998). The Epicurean position is in its best-known formulation available in Lucretius’s metaphysical poem, De rerum natura (“On the Nature of Things”), ca. 50 BC, available online: http://classics.mit.edu/Carus/nature_things.html. 23. In this sense, my inquiry in (the rest of) this chapter is not only about how to apply pragmatism to death and mortality but also about how to better understand pragmatism itself, or the pragmatic method, through its relation to mortality. 24. Schumacher, Death and Mortality in Contemporary Philosophy. 25. Micah Hester, End-of-Life Care and Pragmatic Decision Making (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009). 26. Note that Peirce and Dewey did not completely neglect the topic of death, either: the former postulated a kind of immortality in the framework of his “synechism,” while the latter explored the contingency and “precariousness” of our natural existence. See, e.g., Charles S. Peirce, “Immortality in the Light of Synechism” (1893), in The Essential Peirce, vol. 2, The Peirce Edition Project (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998); and John Dewey, Experience and Nature (Chicago: Open Court, 1986; first published 1925). Yet, as Richard Shusterman notes, Dewey’s silence on the question of death is “disturbing,” given his devotion to a close connection between

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philosophy and life. See Richard Shusterman, Practicing Philosophy: Pragmatism and the Philosophical Life (New York: Routledge, 1997), p. 48. Note also that my focusing on Shusterman and Lachs below inevitably ignores other contemporary pragmatist perspectives on these topics. In particular, William J. Gavin, in his Cuttin’ the Body Loose: Historical, Biological, and Personal Approaches to Death and Dying (University Park, PA: Temple University Press, 2005), defends a “multilevel” approach to the topic of death that is indebted to pragmatism (or pragmatic pluralism). A major contemporary pragmatist and scholar of classical pragmatism who has interestingly addressed the topic of death and mortality in his reflections on the meaning of life is John McDermott; see, e.g., his “Why Bother: Is Life Worth Living?,” Journal of Philosophy 88 (1991), 677–83. 27. I am here indebted to Ulf Zackariasson’s (unpublished) contribution to the Nordic Pragmatism Network panel on “Pragmatism and (Im)mortality” in the 39th Meeting of the Society for the Advancement of American Philosophy at Fordham University, New York (March, 2012). 28. This talk about reconstructing and resolving a problematic situation is, of course, Deweyan; cf., e.g., Dewey’s Experience and Nature, cited above. 29. See William James, Some Problems of Philosophy: A Beginning of an Introduction to Philosophy (1911), eds. Frederick H. Burkhardt, Fredson Bowers, and Ignas K. Skrupskelis (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1977), chapter 3. 30. Ralph Barton Perry, The Thought and Character of William James: Briefer Version (New York: Harper & Row, 1964; originally 1935), p. 267. 31. James, “Human Immortality: Two Supposed Objections to the Doctrine” (1898), in William James, Essays on Religion and Morality, eds. Frederick H. Burkhardt, Fredson Bowers, and Ignas K. Skrupskelis (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982), pp. 75–101 (see p. 78). 32. For a discussion of this important point, see Hobbs, “Why Classical American Pragmatism Is Helpful for Thinking about Death” (cited above), especially p. 188. 33. James’s letter to Carl Stumpf, July 17, 1904; quoted in Perry, Thought and Character, p. 268. Cf. Gerald E. Myers, William James: His Life and Thought (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1986), p. 475. Here I am not going to deal with James’s “overbeliefs” in there being something “more” in reality in addition to what science tells us there is; such a discussion would require a lengthy treatment of James’s The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902), eds. Frederick H. Burkhardt, Fredson Bowers, and Ignas K. Skrupskelis (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1985). 34. In this regard, Miguel de Unamuno’s famous notion of a “tragic sense of life” is (as Unamuno explicitly acknowledges) indebted to James. See Unamuno, Tragic Sense of Life, trans. J. E. Crawford Flitch (New York: Dover, 1954; originally published in Spanish 1913); available online at Project Gutenberg: http://archive.org/stream/tragicsenseoflif14636gut/14636.txt. 35. “The Sentiment of Rationality” (1879), reprinted in William James, The Will to Believe and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy (1897), eds. Frederick H. Burkhardt, Fredson Bowers, and Ignas K. Skrupskelis (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1979), pp. 57–89 (see p. 70). 36. The problem of evil and suffering is part of this general framework of James’s philosophy, a framework characterized by a thoroughgoing commitment to a recognition of radical human contingency as fully and sincerely as possible. Cf., e.g., Sami Pihlström, Taking Evil Seriously (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave, 2014). 37. William J. Gavin, “Pragmatism and Death: Method vs. Metaphor, Tragedy vs. the Will to Believe,” in John J. Stuhr (ed.), 100 Years of Pragmatism: William James’s Revolutionary Philosophy (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010), pp. 81–95 (see especially pp. 83, 90). 38. Ibid., p. 86. 39. Cf. again Unamuno, Tragic Sense of Life, cited above. 40. See Gavin, “Pragmatism and Death,” p. 89; cf. James, Pragmatism, p. 141. While I agree with Gavin that, from a Jamesian perspective, death could be “appropriated by exercising the will to believe, that is, exercising hope, unfounded hope,” I find his

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equation between death being “tragic” and its being “unintelligible” or “inexplicable” (“Pragmatism and Death,” pp. 91–93) hard to understand. Doesn’t the concept of tragedy attach intelligibility to events that otherwise seem unintelligible? It is, I think, inappropriate to speak about a tragedy when, say, meaningless evil takes place. I would not call the Holocaust a tragedy, because that would attach to it a meaningfulness it never had. It might be more advisable to speak about James’s fundamental “melancholy” instead of invoking the notion of the tragic. For further reflections, see Pihlström, Taking Evil Seriously. One question that might be asked here (but must be left for another inquiry) is whether the mere threat of death and suffering makes it impossible for the Jamesian sick soul (to employ the terminology of the Varieties of Religious Experience) to truly enjoy the good things of life, or whether the relevant kind of life enjoyment available to the sick soul is quite different from the shallower kind of enjoyment that the “healthy-minded” enjoys. Perhaps the genuine realization of contingency and the acknowledgment of the reality of mortality and suffering add a dimension of depth to our life enjoyments, rendering them more real as well as fuller and deeper? 41. See Shusterman, Practicing Philosophy, pp. 42–50. For my engagement with Shusterman on life and death, see Sami Pihlström, “Philosophy and Life: Pragmatism, Wittgenstein, and Metaphysics,” in Dorota Koczanowicz and Wojciech Malecki (eds.), Shusterman’s Pragmatism: Between Literature and Somaesthetics (Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2012), pp. 101–13 (with a response by Shusterman in the same volume). 42. Note, however, that I am not saying that intellectual sophistication (about the criteria of death or anything else) would be irrelevant to living a mortal life; yet, analytic philosophical thanatology is stuck with conceptual problems whose resolution may not significantly help us in appreciating our own mortal condition—pragmatically, experientially, existentially. It may even be suggested that an excessive analytic concern with the meaning and criteria of death is a form of pseudocontrol only apparently leading to an authentic mortal existence. It may conceptually control a phenomenon whose uncontrollability ought to be acknowledged. 43. Shusterman, Practicing Philosophy, p. 48 (see note 25 above). 44. Even so, Deweyan pragmatic naturalism can also be employed in philosophical discussions of death, as has been suggested by Charles Hobbs, who defends a naturalistic, “functional” conception of immortality partly on Deweyan grounds. See Charles A. Hobbs, “Naturalism, Death, and Functional Immortality,” Contemporary Pragmatism 6 (2009), 39–65. Cf. also, again, Dewey’s Experience and Nature for related discussions of precariousness, natural contingency, and our dependence on natural forces greater than ourselves. 45. John Lachs, Stoic Pragmatism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2012), chapter 2. 46. Ibid., p. 23. 47. Ibid., pp. 47, 52. 48. Ibid., p. 59. 49. Ibid., p. 60. 50. Ibid. 51. The paradigm case of such argumentation is Kant’s attempt to demonstrate that spatiotemporality and causality are among the necessary conditions for the possibility of cognitive experience of an objective reality; another famous (though debated) example is the later Wittgenstein’s so-called private-language argument, which seeks to show that public language is a necessary condition for the possibility of meaning. See again chapter 3 above. I am referring, of course, to Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations, trans. G. E. M. Anscombe (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1958). For discussions of these and other arguments as both transcendental and pragmatic, see, e.g., Sami Pihlström, Naturalizing the Transcendental: A Pragmatic View (Amherst, NY: Prometheus/Humanity Books, 2003). On the entanglement of pragmatist and transcendental methodologies, see also Sami Pihlström, Pragmatist Metaphysics: An Essay on the Ethical Grounds of Ontology (London and New York: Continuum, 2009).

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52. See again James, The Varieties of Religious Experience (cited above). 53. James, Pragmatism, p. 118. 54. William James, A Pluralistic Universe (1909), eds. Frederick H. Burkhardt, Fredson Bowers, and Ignas K. Skrupskelis (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1977), pp. 27, 117–18. 55. James, Pragmatism, p. 37. 56. This could, again, be understood as a version of the broadly Heideggerian conception of mortality as something that makes us “authentically” individual. 57. Quoting again the famous title of Peirce’s “How to Make Our Ideas Clear” (1878), available in The Essential Peirce, vol. 1 (cited above). 58. For an attempt to connect this notion with James, see Megan Craig, Levinas and James (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010).

SEVEN Conclusion A Pragmatic Transcendental Anthropology

This concluding chapter will seek to do three things. I would first like to summarize what I have tried to do in the chapters above—also by having placed the chapters in their specific order—as an attempt to develop a single, albeit rather complex, line of argument. I then want to continue developing a pragmatist, more specifically Jamesian, philosophical thanatology. Finally, I will return to transcendental considerations, seeking to further illuminate the mortality and finitude of the transcendental self itself. Insofar as the transcendental subject is an aspect of our own subjectivity, as has been argued throughout the transcendental considerations above, and insofar as mortality and finitude are necessary structures of our human condition, then there is a sense in which the transcendental subject itself must be mortal and finite. A SUMMARY OF THE ARGUMENT In the beginning of this book, I argued that the tasks and basic approaches of philosophical anthropology can be characterized in terms of the fourfold scheme of chapter 2 (essentialism, naturalism, culturalism, and existentialism), raising the issue of normativity, in particular. I then suggested that philosophical anthropology should focus on limits and finitude (chapter 3) and that the transcendental method—in some form, at least—is a key to philosophical anthropology, yielding “transcendental anthropology” of the human self conceived as a “limit of the world.” By applying the general idea of philosophical anthropology to philosophical thanatology, I was led to apply the transcendental method to the investi179

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gation of death and mortality and thereby to consider the problem of solipsism, which may seem to follow from such applications (chapter 4). The concept of guilt was then argued to be inevitably involved in any properly transcendental investigation of the ethical aspects of human mortality, and it was suggested that this notion also needs to be connected with the question concerning our fundamental equality in relation to death (chapter 5). In chapter 6, finally, pragmatism integrated with the transcendental method was proposed as a plausible synthesis of culturalism and naturalism in philosophical anthropology and philosophical thanatology. This synthesis also yields a nonreductively naturalized version of the transcendental method—hence, a pragmatic transcendental anthropology of human mortality and finitude—and an appreciation of a kind of dialectics of control and surrender. Yet, is there anything truly distinctive about the pragmatic transcendental philosophy of death and mortality formulated in this book? What are the main novelties developed as my response to the irreducibly philosophical (not reductively naturalizable) issues of human mortality generally described in the introductory chapter 1? A quick answer is that the approach I defend takes fundamentally seriously the need to investigate the (lack of) meaning of the human (life)world from within our finite subjectivity—that is, from within our mortal condition “limiting” and thereby profoundly shaping the world we live in. 1 In contrast, mainstream philosophies of death, mostly based on an “objective,” third-personal approach that seems to rely on the prior assumption of metaphysical realism, adopt a “God’s-Eye View” even when trying to examine the subjective meaning of death. Such examinations typically assume a relatively crude form of consequentialist ethics which hardly captures the existential dimensions of the problem of death. This criticism of mainstream philosophical thanatologies is spread throughout the volume, though another study would be needed to assess the detailed arguments of the criticized approaches. Moreover, the transcendental philosophy of death and mortality developed here is not just another version of transcendental philosophy but, crucially, a pragmatically “naturalized” and, hence, “anthropologized” one. My pragmatic transcendental anthropology—an anthropology of human finitude and mortality analyzing those aspects of the human condition “from within” our human practices and replacing the traditional concept of a transcendental subject by a historicized, social, and dynamically practice-embedded transcendental subjectivity—is motivated by and developed through philosophical diagnoses of, first, human finitude in general, taking up different perspectives on the notions of a limit and a boundary, and secondly, our mortality as the key dimension of that finitude. The upshot is, as I hope has emerged by now, a metaphysical, or philosophical-anthropological, account of humans as limited and

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bounded—mortal—beings. This metaphysics of the human world is, however, crucially grounded in an ethical understanding of our finitude. It is for these reasons that the discussion started from general issues of philosophical anthropology as well as nonexistence, limits, and boundaries (chapters 2 and 3), moving toward a more explicitly transcendental discussion (chapter 3), and culminating in the ethico-metaphysical limits and finitude—concerning mortality in particular—to be examined in the chapters of the latter half of the book (chapters 4 to 6). As such, the book has constituted, I hope, a thoroughgoing exploration of human limits, our finitude, and the ways we continuously seek to transcend that finitude and transgress our inevitable, yet historically changing and never essentialistically fixed, limits. One starting point and basic philosophical idea I have (hopefully) implicitly developed is the insight that human life is constituted by the continuous tension between the need to acknowledge our finitude and the temptation to reach out for transcendence (i.e., the infinite). This tension—its irresolvability—is itself a limit for us, constituting the very special kind of finite life we must lead. More metaphilosophically, the book has argued that philosophical anthropology, transcendentally explored and developed, is itself essentially an inquiry into limits and finitude, particularly the limit and finitude constituted by our mortality, which is also a key to our common humanity. 2 Keeping in mind the endlessness of this inquiry—the “infinity” of the task of understanding and coping with our finitude—it could be suggested that transcendental philosophical anthropology and thanatology regard mortality as a condition for the possibility of our being able to ask the question about the meaningfulness versus meaninglessness of our finite lives, instead of being (directly) any condition for the possibility of such meaningfulness as such (or simply destroying any possible meaningfulness). This is, I submit, a properly transcendental way of articulating the level at which the question of meaningfulness versus meaninglessness can and ought to be pursued. It goes without saying that this is a way of approaching the question very different from its articulations in nontranscendental philosophical thanatologies that analyze, e.g., the harmfulness of death from a third-person objective point of view. The radical openness of the question about meaningfulness vs. meaninglessness is also what makes the anxiety we experience regarding our mortality transcendental, too. Pragmatist and transcendental philosophicalanthropological approaches discussed in this book are variations of this general theme. I have also argued that the concept of the transcendental self or subject is needed to tackle these issues in a properly transcendental way (and I will briefly return to this by way of conclusion below). Furthermore, the transcendental character of our mortality and the related anxiety should also be understood in the medieval tradition of transcendentalia that still lives in Kant’s much more modern way of speaking about the transcendental: we are here dealing with matters that are

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general (and “transcategorial”) in the sense of transcending the limits between, say, ontological categories. When saying that mortality is a transcendental condition for the possibility of asking questions about meaning in life, we are also saying that mortality is, as such a condition, generally present in our lives. It is not a specific issue to be dealt with separately. It is as generally involved in our human existence, in everything we are engaged in within our mortal lives, as Kantian transcendental conditions for the possibility of experience, such as the categories of understanding, are involved in all objects and events of possible experience. Any transcendental engagement with limits must, indeed, recognize as its main historical precursors Kant’s transcendental account of the limits of humanly possible cognition or cognitive experience and Wittgenstein’s equally transcendental account of the limits of sense or meaning (or meaningfulness)—even though transcendental interpretations of Wittgenstein are controversial. I have argued that the kind of limit that human mortality sets us—our mortal finitude—is transcendental in a relevantly similar sense. Analogously to the Kantian and Wittgensteinian transcendental limits of cognitive experience and linguistic meaning (respectively), it is a transcendental limit of something more general: of human life as we know it, or again, of “our common humanity.” One of the open questions considered throughout this volume, from various points of view, has been the one familiar from recent controversies over interpreting Wittgenstein: is this limit a genuine one in the sense of invoking an “inability” of some sort, that is, something that, while being in principle a meaningful goal, we human beings, as the kind of beings we are, are incapable of achieving (i.e., we just cannot live forever, although it would make sense to live forever), or rather something that is not even meaningful to aspire to, that is therefore not a “real” limitation at all (and hence no failure of ours), and that, therefore, needs therapy instead of philosophical theorization, somewhat like our temptation to cross the bounds of sense by talking philosophically sophisticated nonsense, which does not point toward any meaningful possibility of transgressing certain boundaries that simply contingently cannot be transgressed? 3 I do not have any clear, definite answer to this question, and I am not sure that I ever will, but the question has at least been illuminated from various angles in the book. I am at the moment tempted to defend a “middle ground” position: the limit is genuine—our mortality does set limits to our life, or our humanity—yet it is no “failure” or “inability” on our part, a matter of our inevitably failing to do something that we in some sense should or even could do, that is, not a contingent or factual limitation at all. The book has, hopefully, also (at least indirectly) dealt with and responded to the question of why mortality is a problem for us (or, specifically, why it might be regarded as something bad or even evil—though I do

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not want to pose this question, let alone answer it, in the traditional Epicurean terms, which tend to mislead rather than illuminate). Here, the problem of nihilism emerges in its many versions: our mortality may be seen as depriving human life of any (possible) meaning and value whatsoever. This absurdity of life, ending with death, was discussed by the existentialists in mid-1900s and was taken up in more analytically oriented philosophical thanatology by Thomas Nagel in the 1970s, yielding an active debate still going on in analytic philosophy of death. 4 Some philosophers have also been worried about the challenge that everything is, after all, permitted because we will all die. It makes no difference whether we are good or bad. As Mark Johnston puts it in his important recent work, frequently cited above, death is “the great leveler”: the good and the bad seem to be equally vulnerable to death and mortality, and therefore there does not seem to be any special motivation for being good, if we view things from a cosmic perspective; hence, death is a threat to “the importance of goodness,” to the significance of the moral perspective itself. 5 Similarly, William James seems to have maintained that death, in the absence of a religious hope for immortality or survival, would be a threat to our being able to find our human condition meaningful, or our life worth living, at all; in the absurd situation of mere existence blindly unfolding toward annihilation, we would not be able to “make a difference” to the world through our actions in any genuine way. 6 In Merold Westphal’s terms, inspired by Leo Tolstoy’s famous The Death of Ivan Ilyich, the problem of death is in the end the same problem as the problem of guilt: in my mortality, I encounter the question of whether my life as a whole is, or has been, “wrong” in a fundamental sense. 7 This is the problem of guilt seen under the aspect of the problem of death—perhaps, for some individuals, calling for a pragmatic adoption of religious grounds for something like immortality or survival. Moreover, the experience of guilt as a core of our mortal existence may be intensified when we realize that our life is not merely dying but also killing. Even vegetarians must kill plants, or at least living cells. “We eat the world. We sit in the world and consume it.” 8 What is more, we consume parts of the world that someone else could have consumed. It is by no means clear that we have the right to do this, that is, to consume the bits of the world we do consume. We kill the food we eat, and we may indirectly kill our fellow human beings by eating food they could have eaten. These “first-personal” explorations of death, killing, and mortality as ethically fundamental aspects of our being in the world also lead us to appreciate the significance of the problem of suicide (also one of the topics already touched upon above in chapter 4). Wittgenstein famously pointed out, in his Notebooks written before the Tracatus, that suicide is an “elementary sin”; 9 more “existentially” oriented thinkers like Albert Camus and Jean Améry have regarded suicide as not merely a special prob-

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lem of applied ethics but as a major philosophical problem of our time, epitomizing fundamental philosophical issues of freedom and individuality. 10 The Wittgensteinian conception of suicide as an elementary sin becomes understandable in the absence of any dogmatic religious background beliefs when we pay attention to the transcendental context of this position: suicide not only removes the subject from the world; by removing the transcendental subject to whom the world is given, it removes the world itself. My aim in this work has not been to settle these issues by formulating a foundational philosophical theory that would once and for all “solve” the problems I have very briefly described here. Nor do I find any comfort in the Epicurean pseudosolution according to which “death is nothing to us,” because such a view basically ignores the problem of death as a serious first-personal problem. Instead, I have tried to encourage philosophical reflection—from within our mortal condition, from within our finitude—on this mortal condition itself, the ways in which it “colors” our lives, especially our ethical lives in relation to other mortals. 11 It is in this sense that mortality is a transcendental problem, invoking issues of (in)conceivability and solipsism as much as issues of existential and religious meaningfulness (or meaninglessness). 12 In this sense, it is also clearly a “philosophical-anthropological” problem and can, from the point of view of pragmatically “naturalized” (“anthropologized”) transcendental philosophy, be enriched not just purely philosophically but also with reference to various empirical—e.g., medical, historical, sociological, psychological, educational, anthropological, and many other—perspectives. The recognition of there being genuinely philosophical approaches to death thus leads to the recognition of the philosophical relevance of various empirical approaches, too, and of the need to avoid reducing the topic of death to any of those approaches. One particularly important philosophical-anthropological concept in our reflections on mortality, only briefly mentioned in the chapters above, is memory, recently examined by leading philosophers like Paul Ricoeur and Avishai Margalit. 13 Even if our philosophical (transcendental) anthropology is pragmatic in the sense of being “forward-looking,” seeking to understand our present life—with the concepts we use—in terms of conceivable future experiences and practical results, we inevitably prepare for the future on the basis of the past. On the other hand, the value of our different interpretations of the past lies in the future expectations associated with them. Hence the politically hot debates on historical memory, often concretized in our—or others’—rights and duties to remember certain historical facts (e.g., atrocities such as the Holocaust) in certain ways. In memory, especially in our remembering the long gone past, as well as the experiences of those that are very different from us, we are ultimately responsible for what we are, and are doing, in the present in the field of experience—the world—we share with other hu-

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man beings. We are responsible for and to the other, even when remembering “the third.” The ethics of memory is a crucial aspect of our philosophical attempt to understand our limits and finitude in our relation to the past (and to the future). By offering some philosophical reflections on and insights into such irreducibly first-personal, and therefore deeply transcendental, issues as these, inescapable themes surrounding human mortality, this book has sought to contribute to our understanding of the human condition. I have attempted to articulate what is distinctive about the transcendental approach to death and mortality, yet in a way that is sensitive to the special problems related to developing any “transcendental” position in contemporary largely naturalistic philosophy. Even within a “naturalized” (albeit not reductively naturalized) transcendental approach, my approach has clearly defined a striking contrast to the mainstream analytic philosophy of death that fails (like mainstream approaches in other fields as well) to adopt a truly transcendental perspective. The final result is, I hope, a sound philosophical anthropology, both pragmatically and transcendentally structured, with its focus on human finitude that reaches its culmination in the uniquely human integration of morality and mortality. 14 There is a sense in which this position as such can be understood as a rearticulation of Wittgenstein’s view on the self as a “limit” of the world rather than a “thing” in the world, but this view, I here argue, also needs a pragmatist naturalization. 15 A JAMESIAN PRAGMATIC PHILOSOPHICAL THANATOLOGY, TRANSCENDENTALLY ARTICULATED Let us for a moment return to the themes of chapter 6, where I defended pragmatism as an approach to the topic of this book. I want to suggest one way of articulating a pragmatic transcendental philosophical thanatology based on William James’s pragmatism, in particular. No detailed scholarly treatment of James has been possible in this book, but I will try to offer some concluding Jamesian reflections before returning once more briefly to the concept of the transcendental subject. James, famously, defended immortality, or at least its possibility. However, if an individual’s future is infinitely long, does the pragmatic method lose its applicability? Does any conceivable pragmatic effect of a belief make any difference (as the pragmatic method requires it should) if there is an infinite period of time ahead of us for it to make that difference? These are difficult questions, and we cannot hope to answer them before having (re)introduced some Kantian ideas into James’s position. It is clear, at least, that a pragmatist philosopher should not endorse any naive metaphysical doctrine of the immortality of the soul as an eternal transcendent existence of an immaterial substance somewhere outside

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space and time. On the contrary, the hope for immortality, if it is to be legitimated on the basis of the pragmatic method, should be an ethically motivating ideal here and now, in this very this-worldly life. We may speculate that William James sought to formulate something like this idea in his “will to believe” reflections on the moral grounds of religious faith. In Kantian terms, immortality was, for him, something that we may legitimately hope for, given that we take the requirements of morality seriously enough in our lives; there can be no way of knowing the (mind- and morality-independent) truth of such a postulate of practical reason. In other words, whatever “truth” such a view may possess, this is pragmatic, “existential” truth roughly in the sense in which James uses the notion in Pragmatism and in his subsequent writings on truth. 16 Moreover, if we really believe, with James, that the genuine meaning of the concepts we use and the conceptions we entertain is grounded in their conceivable practical effects, we have no choice but to employ the pragmatic method in considering the possibility of immortality in relation to our ethical attitudes toward human life, even though the very coherence of that method itself may, as we saw in chapter 6, be threatened by the conception of immortality that it aims to justify. Everything, including not only our conception of (im)mortality but pragmatism itself, is fallible and revisable here. Mortality, signifying a limit to human life, is a crucial test for the applicability of the pragmatic method, designed to render our concepts and conceptions meaningful in terms of their outcomes in relation to that limited life. We should note here the profound irrelevance, from a Jamesian perspective, of most contemporary science-fiction-like metaphysical discussions of the possibility and desirability or undesirability of immortality. 17 The hope for immortality should be grounded, if anywhere, in our actual, experientially rich religious traditions and ethically loaded ways of life, based upon our “vital needs,” which make it possible for us to engage in the moral struggle James found essential. It is simply unbelievable that someone genuinely concerned with our mortal life and the hope for immortality as a part of that life would be convinced by a prior metaphysical argument concluding the possibility (or impossibility) of immortality, and would adjust her/his moral and religious beliefs accordingly. The moral struggle to which James invited us is, pragmatically speaking, so much more fundamental in human life than abstract metaphysical arguments that the philosophers who consider the latter more basic than the former quite clearly put their cart before the horse, begging all the crucial questions. Or so, at least, the matter must look from a pragmatist point of view. If we are prepared to reconstruct (rather than just to interpret) James’s views along the lines just suggested, mortality may (again) be understood as a transcendental, limiting notion that makes it possible for us to examine the value and meaningfulness of human life in an ethically rele-

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vant way. It is impossible to defend in this chapter alone the broader position upon which this view depends, namely, that (Jamesian) pragmatists may, even when philosophizing about religion, employ (Kantian) transcendental concepts, arguments, and principles, and that pragmatism is in a sense a Kantian, albeit transformed, transcendental philosophy; 18 so, let me just briefly explain why we may even have here a paradigmatic case of a pragmatistically characterized transcendental concept based on our actions and practices. What I mean is this: The hope for immortality is possible and meaningful only against a background colored by human mortality—that is, only if we join James in thinking that immortality is not, as some idealist and traditionally religious views would have it, guaranteed. 19 This is a transcendental argument. The hope for immortality, qua “natural need,” is actual in human life, hence possible; it would not be possible if immortality were simply certain, something that we could not fail to achieve; therefore, immortality is highly uncertain, and we have to orientate in our lives and hopes on the basis of mortality. It is only within the context of a mortal life that immortality becomes an issue, a meaningful goal for our religious and/or philosophical efforts. It is only in a Jamesian “adventurous” life that living forward, toward either death or survival, can be meaningful. James has occasionally been interpreted as a phenomenologist or even as an existentialist, and it may not be farfetched to compare his views on mortality and human existence to the emphasis on individual freedom and responsibility one finds in Sartre, or to Heidegger’s conception of “being towards death” as Dasein’s ownmost way of being. 20 The view of death as a transcendental limiting concept briefly defended here does not claim that death or mortality would merely amount to a contingent natural limitation of human life. On the contrary, mortality is an essential feature defining our life as a whole, something that is unavoidably present in everything we do, each moment. 21 It is a limit that limits and defines all our factual, contingent limitations and possibilities, everything that is possible or impossible for us as humans. In this sense, it also limits our striving for immortality, whether this striving is religious or irreligious. Mortality thus defines our lives themselves, whether or not those lives are structured by a humble acceptance of mortality or by a revolt against it, by metaphysical or religious search for immortality. What we have arrived at is, as I already remarked, a transcendental argument, ending up with the dependence of all questions concerning the meaning or value of life on our mortality and on our acknowledging that mortality with full force. (Insofar as we are always unable to acknowledge it “with full force,” we may say that we also remain unable to ask such questions about meaning or value as profoundly as we should.) This may be our fate. True, James himself did not consider his philosophy transcendental in Kant’s sense; nor did he think of himself as presenting

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transcendental arguments validating the necessary conditions for the possibility of experience. Nothing prevents us, however, from reinterpreting his pragmatism in this manner, inasmuch as we admit, minimally, that he was, perhaps against his own will, influenced by Kantian themes through his reception of earlier philosophical views as different as Arthur Schopenhauer’s and, say, Charles S. Peirce’s. In particular, it must be observed that a Schopenhauerian emphasis on our “metaphysical need” turns James’s pragmatism into a philosophical method respectful and tolerant of metaphysics. The purpose of pragmatism is not to eliminate metaphysical problems, least of all the problems related to mortality and immortality, but to discover their essence, their practical kernel, for us to view with open, practice-oriented eyes, to define their genuine practical meaning in terms of human experience always living forward, turned to the future, facing death. Now, if one applies the pragmatic (and/or the transcendental) method to the metaphysical problem of death, one will have to refuse to view death in a metaphysically realistic fashion as a fundamental reality “out there,” as independent of our experiences, beliefs, practices, or vital needs. Our mortality or immortality is, for a Jamesian pragmatist, ontologically or metaphysically dependent on our need to believe in (im)mortality, on the value or relevance of (im)mortality in our practices, especially ethical ones. 22 The pragmatist approach should, then, be contrasted to various kinds of metaphysically realist approaches, such as the ones examining the soundness of the Epicurean argument according to which death cannot possibly harm the one who dies. 23 If we follow James, we should resist the view—not restricted to the philosophy of death but easily found in contemporary (analytic) philosophy more broadly—that metaphysical questions ought to be settled first, that is, that in the case of death, the abstract metaphysical puzzles concerning the fundamental nature of death and, say, the subject of the (possible) harm that death brings with it are “more basic” than ethical issues. 24 From the Jamesian and more generally pragmatist perspective, this is clearly a simplified picture. It is in many cases our ethical needs, instead of any allegedly prior metaphysical arguments, that tell us what we ought to think about metaphysical problems, such as (im)mortality. The more general entanglement of ethics and metaphysics in philosophical anthropology was discussed in chapter 2 above. What we may conclude at this point, then, is the irrelevance of the standard contemporary way of approaching metaphysical questions concerning death and immortality as questions more fundamental than ethical ones. From a Jamesian (or, equally clearly, Kantian) point of view, ethics grounds metaphysics here, not vice versa, although even ethical needs are not any absolute grounding for anything, because they can and should be revised in the course of the changes that may take place in our lives. Our need to account for certain moral requirements legitimates, for

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James, the metaphysical postulation of immortality (or at least of its possibility). This, close enough to the idea of immortality as a postulate of practical reason, is a splendid example of the Kantian features of Jamesian pragmatism, although James himself rejected Kant’s complex philosophical system in many significant respects. By extending Kant’s terminology, we may even see our mortality and immortality as phenomena constructed by ourselves (i.e., as not anything ready-made independently of our needs and purposes), that is, as transcendental constructions dependent on us roughly in the sense in which space, time, causality, and other conditions of experience depend on us according to Kant’s transcendental idealism. Applied to this particular case, transcendental idealism would amount to the view that mortality and immortality are “appearances” rather than things in themselves, something that our (transcendental) subjectivity imposes on the world in which we feel the need to live harmoniously, “at home.” Neither mortality nor immortality would be an experience-transcending reality in itself. 25 Although James does not address immortality directly in the passages that may be referred to as textual evidence for my interpretation, his concerns with an ethical-religious fight for a moral order of the universe can be extrapolated to the topic of immortality, too. After all, according to James, there is no reason why “the very existence of an invisible world may not in part depend on the personal response which any one of us may make to the religious appeal,” and that even “God himself [. . .] may draw vital strength and increase of very being from our fidelity.” 26 So why should not immortality, which clearly is an aspect of James’s “invisible world,” be subject to this same humanistic logic? From the Jamesian point of view, the reality of the world, including the reality of death and/ or immortality, ought to be seen as dependent on, or even constructed by, the needs, purposes, and interests of personal human beings engaged in their various practices. If “the trail of the human serpent is [. . .] over everything,” 27 is it not over death and mortality, or immortality, as well? Is James’s constructivist pragmatism really applicable to the central issues of the philosophy of religion, such as God’s existence or immortality? 28 When James asks, “What shall we call a thing anyhow?” and answers that it “seems quite arbitrary, for we carve out everything [. . .] to suit our human purposes,” does this “carving out” apply to death and (im)mortality, conceived as “things” in our human world? “What we say about reality [. . .] depends on the perspective into which we throw it”; 29 thus, is it sufficient just to “throw” the inevitability of death into the pragmatically rewarding “perspective” of immortality and thereby to rid ourselves from the life-threatening fear of death? It would be difficult, and even unpragmatic, to simply answer in the affirmative. The hard facts of life, which we often cannot change, however strongly we will to believe otherwise, are among the most pragmatic

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things to be taken into account. There must, presumably, be something out there independently of us, something in the world outside human life that makes us mortal. Our very mortality can hardly be just a pragmatic, perspective-dependent construction. Nor, then, can immortality, should it be real. But on the other hand these are not “ready-made,” mind- and perspective-independent things or facts, either. It seems that we are here approaching the vague area between the constructed and the independently existing. It is exactly here that we are dealing with transcendental, limiting concepts that give shape to our entire conceptual structure through which we interpret the reality we live in, including, reflexively, the very transcendental conceptual structure which philosophers may use in order to interpret that interpretive, world-shaping activity itself. A problem remains, though, if we attempt to carry through this kind of a transcendental reinterpretation of James’s pragmatist account of the possibility of immortality in a mortal world. Can we really use the notion of death as referring to our ultimate future any more in our appeals to the pragmatic method (as the basis of a pragmatist ontology or metaphysics), if we genuinely believe in immortality? Shouldn’t we see death as something much more fundamental, metaphysically more basic, if we view it as a transcendental concept rendering our life projects significant (or insignificant)? We cannot possibly just pragmatically (and in a plurality of different ways) construct our own (im)mortality, or can we, pragmatically speaking? This philosophical worry, entangled with the broader issue of realism, is one further element of our uneasy relation to our mortality; pragmatism must by no means underestimate this uneasiness. In short, if death is a transcendental notion in the way explained in this book, then it is presumably illegitimate to apply to death the same pragmatic considerations of fruitfulness, relevance, etc., that determine the acceptability of our practice-laden ontologies of the (empirical) world, simply because death, transcendentally construed, defines our “world,” or any one of them we care to construct, instead of being just a part of any such world. 30 It is not a phenomenon at all; it is the limit of the (transcendental) subjectivity constituting phenomena. Thus, in a more full-blown transcendental philosophy (such as Wittgenstein’s), death is the disappearance of the transcendental subject—and hence the end of the world. Clearly, then, not all transcendental philosophies of death and mortality are simply carved from the same material; there are genuine differences. At any rate, the human world and our human lives must be finite, limited by death, if pragmatism, as a philosophy that “will make some positive connexion with this actual world of finite human lives,” 31 is to have any use and purpose for us. In the absence of the limits set to us in death, there would be no workable criteria of purposefulness, relevance, etc., that we must use to constrain our pragmatic metaphysical constructions. Hence, these criteria are as inapplicable to the notion of death (and surrounding notions like mortality and immortality) as Kantian transcen-

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dental principles are to the things in themselves which Kant needed to postulate in order to deny that we simply make up the world by our mental powers. On the other hand, we seem to be claiming here that even transcendental principles such as mortality (insofar as we have any humanly relevant use for them) are, in a Jamesian pragmatist view, based on our vital needs. We need, according to James, a philosophy that is relevant to our finite lives, namely, pragmatism. This insight leads to a circle, and indeed to a challenging one, though not necessarily a vicious one. Apparently, in a Jamesian view, there can be no use for a sharp dualism between transcendental and nontranscendental concepts; death is no exception here. Or is it? Is death somehow essentially different from other pragmatically contextualizable and thus “naturalizable” transcendental concepts? If so, why? Because of its fundamental existential-ontological role as a (or, rather, the) “limit”? These remain open issues, as our mortality inevitably does. DEATH AND THE TRANSCENDENTAL SUBJECT (AGAIN) Let us once more return to the notion of the transcendental self (or subject) and thereby also take a stock of one fundamental strand in the argument of this book, one that is common to the pragmatic and the transcendental methodologies I have recommended for philosophical anthropology and thanatology. We have seen in this volume that the naturalistic mainstream approaches in contemporary metaphysics of death (as well as their applications to various ethical issues of death and dying) are largely, if not exclusively, based on a metaphysically realistic understanding of the relation between the self (the subject) and the world (cf. chapters 2 and 3). Deaths are simply natural events in the world, and my own death is no exception. Death, dying, and mortality—like any other phenomena—are in such approaches viewed from an objective, “third-personal,” or even theocentric perspective, from a “God’s-Eye-View.” This presupposes a broadly “Aristotelian” conception of metaphysics as a general category theory; death and the mortal (or dying) subject then just fall in their place in the categorial structure of reality. However, this metaphysically realistic understanding of death—of the world in which subjects live and in which their deaths take place—has throughout my inquiry been contrasted with a transcendental position, according to which the world is in a transcendental sense dependent on the structures of (human) subjectivity. This move from metaphysical realism to a transcendental approach to the self and its mortality is, we might say, metaphilosophically pragmatist, urging us to adopt another perspective, one more relevant to our mortal life.

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Death is, from the transcendental point of view, as we have seen, an end of the world rather than simply an event in the world. This is, roughly, how Wittgenstein formulates the matter in the Tractatus, maintaining that the metaphysical (transcendental) subject is a “limit of the world” instead of being a thing in the world (see chapter 3). From the Kantian (in contrast to the Aristotelian) point of view, we should avoid the metaphysically realistic “mind and its place in nature” question and its application to the philosophy of death and dying, replacing such questions with a transcendental examination of death as a horizon of human life, as a limit of my (the) world, like the self itself. Thus, the ontological structure of reality, including the structure in terms of which death and dying are categorized, is ultimately grounded in activities of the mortal transcendental subject. This seems to hold even if the subject is primarily responsible to and for the other in Levinas’s sense; even this primordial ethical relation to another mortal self is a transcendental structure of the subject. There is, then, a kind of methodological solipsism inevitably involved in a transcendental philosophy of death and subjectivity (see chapter 4). While there are powerful arguments in Kant himself as well as postKantian transcendental philosophy (e.g., Wittgenstein) that can be employed in defending a transcendentally idealistic conception of the (mortal) subject and in criticizing the metaphysically realistic assumptions of mainstream analytic metaphysics of death and dying, which doesn’t seem to take the subjective, “first-personal” character of mortality seriously enough, there is a reflexive problem that needs to be addressed. Even the transcendental philosopher must—in order to take the phenomenon of death seriously, ontologically and ethically—view the subject as genuinely mortal. There is a sense in which the subject, even qua transcendental, must be truly “natural” (material), because otherwise its real mortality will be sacrificed. The question is, then, whether a transcendental approach to death and mortality, in a sense critically overcoming naturalism, can recognize its own dependence on a certain kind of naturalism. Does metaphysical realism, then, return to transcendental philosophy, like solipsism returns to (e.g., Levinasian) accounts of otherness? Is this the true meaning of Wittgenstein’s remarks in the Tractatus about the solipsistic self disappearing into the world and solipsism thus coinciding with realism? It is only in terms of a pragmatic pluralism that the required integration of the naturalist and the transcendental perspectives on the subject and its mortality can succeed. Whether the subject—or its death—is viewed naturalistically or transcendentally depends on the pragmatic perspective of inquiry. In any event, this requires a firm rejection of metaphysical realism, even in a naturalized or pragmatic form of transcendental philosophy. 32 I am not proposing a full-sale rejection of naturalism, but rather saving both naturalism and realism within a more inclusive pragma-

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tism which also incorporates transcendental reflection on the human condition. What this does mean, however, is a rejection of the contemporary paradigm in the philosophy of death and dying which simply does not seem to recognize the transcendental subject at all. We might perceive an illuminating analogy between analytic philosophy of death and analytic philosophy of religion pursuing “theodicies” as explanations for the reality of suffering. 33 This analogy does not follow from these orientations’ sharing common metaphysical views. On the contrary, analytic philosophy of death is typically atheist and naturalist, while analytic philosophers’ of religion theodicy arguments are typically based on theism and supernaturalism. 34 The analogy is deeper. Both analytic philosophy of death and analytic theodicism are fundamentally irrelevant to the human attempt to live through our mortal lives that are full of suffering, to live toward our deaths (though the philosophy of death in this paradigm may not be immoral in the way in which theodicism, arguably, is; it is just irrelevant, at least mostly). The kind of idealized (or, better, fictional) welfare comparison calculations routinely presented in the discourse on the harmfulness of death 35 are, it seems to me, as much a parody of the “harm” of death—in contrast to the horror and anxiety we experience when facing death—as theodicist speculations about God’s possible moral reasons for allowing suffering are both comic and terrible from the perspective of someone like the innocent sufferer Job. 36 The approaches I am criticizing here are based on an imagined and unattainable metaphysically realistic attempt to occupy a God’s-Eye View, a theocentric perspective. They should be replaced by an anthropocentric perspective, which is shared by antitheodicism and transcendental (pragmatist) philosophy of death—investigating human mortality “from within” this condition itself, reflexively, not “from above.” This move from theocentrism to anthropocentrism 37 is metaphilosophically motivated on the basis of pragmatism: philosophy of death (and, analogously, of evil and suffering) must be humanly relevant—in a word, must be engaged in a philosophical-anthropological attempt to examine the human condition. Moreover, the pragmatist and transcendental philosopher of death and mortality should also maintain that the unattainability of the theocentric perspective in our explorations of our mortal condition, comparable to the unavailability of things in themselves in a Kantian conception of human cognition, is not a contingent limitation but a necessary transcendental limit; this, however, is something that can be shown (transcendentally) only from within the anthropocentric perspective. This is why philosophy of death must ultimately be philosophical anthropology.

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CONCLUSION One moral do be drawn from the reflections presented in this volume is that it would be seriously misleading to construe our philosophical investigations of thanatological problems, especially an individual person’s engagement with his or her own mortal life and, possibly, with its fragile prospects of immortality, as resembling scientific inquiries, because it is hard to see whether any clear “results” could ever be achieved in such deeply personal investigations. Hence, the analogy between scientific and religious “inquiries” must be understood as a limited one. James himself waited for more facts to settle the issue of immortality; on the basis of his own will to believe strategy, he should have observed that it was unnecessary to do so. The philosophy of death and mortality, or philosophical thanatology, is probably the field of philosophical thought in which it is easiest to perceive the utter insignificance of “scientific progress” toward new results—of a pursuit today largely defining our academic philosophical practices. It is right here that we run against the limits of humanly possible rational inquiry and thought. Our questions about mortality and the world in which our mortal life is possible and actual always return to their beginning, to the basic wonder and “darkest question” from which philosophy begins, to what Wittgenstein in the Tractatus labeled the “problem of life.” This is a wonder that James, as I read him, always respected, as deeply as Wittgenstein did. (Thus, these two philosophical heroes of the present inquiry seem to agree here.) It is a wonder to which the metaphor of life as a gift can also easily be geared. Probably such a metaphysical wonder, which can also be seen as a wonder directed at the possibility of metaphysics itself as a human enterprise, was simply appealing from the point of view of James’s individual philosophical temperament. 38 As no final results or even clearly definable progress are ever achieved in problems like the problem of life or of existence in general, James’s often unfinished and inconclusive work on these topics should not be evaluated in terms of results, either, but in terms of its pragmatic outcome in a more inclusive sense, viz., the various ethically relevant insights it may produce in his readers. The same, I hope, is true about this inquiry that is now drawing to a closure in this Jamesian and Wittgensteinian spirit. I have found now final results, made no groundbreaking new discoveries. But I hope to have been able to provide some illumination to how death and mortality are at the core in our continuous challenge of being human, and how philosophical anthropology and philosophical thanatology can thus hang together in their pragmatist-cum-transcendental articulation.

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NOTES 1. Compare this to Wittgenstein’s famous comment (in the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, 1921, § 5.621) about the world and life being “one.” 2. I am adopting the expression, “our common humanity,” from Raimond Gaita’s intriguing book with the same title: see Gaita, A Common Humanity (London and New York: Routledge, 2000). 3. The relevant references here include especially the growing literature on “New Wittgensteinianism”; for a now classical collection of interpretive essays, see Alice Crary and Rupert Read (eds.), The New Wittgenstein (London and New York: Routledge, 2000). One of the best constructively critical discussions of these problems in Wittgenstein scholarship is Thomas Wallgren, Transformative Philosophy: Socrates, Wittgenstein, and the Democratic Spirit of Philosophy (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2006). I have to some extent been engaged with these issues: see, e.g., Sami Pihlström (ed.), Wittgenstein and the Method of Philosophy (Acta Philosophica Fennica 80, Helsinki: Philosophical Society of Finland, 2006). 4. Nagel’s “Death,” first published in 1971, reprinted in his influential collection, Mortal Questions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), is the modern classic here. In any event, while Nagel to a large extent gave rise to a debate within what I am calling “mainstream” philosophy of death and mortality, he seems to have recognized the existential—and what I am calling the transcendental—dimension of the problem, as he connects it with the human search for meaning in life and the threatening cosmic meaninglessness. Other (very different) philosophers who have emphasized this existential dimension and who have therefore to some extent been commented on in this book include, e.g., Heidegger, Levinas (whose critique of Heidegger’s apparently solipsistic and too strongly first-personal approach is famous), Merold Westphal, J. J. Valberg (who not only explicitly discusses the issue of transcendental solipsism in his intriguing book, Dream, Death, and the Self [Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007], but also illuminates the phenomenon of death through a comparison to the also philosophically interesting phenomena of sleep and dream), and Mark Johnston (whose theory of survival was commented on in chapter 5). While Heidegger is certainly a key figure here, not to be neglected in any philosophical investigation of death, I must point out again that I am not a Heidegger scholar, and my very general remarks have been restricted to Heidegger’s early views, as put forward in Sein und Zeit. 5. See Mark Johnston, Surviving Death (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010). Johnston insightfully, albeit controversially, challenges this nihilistic outcome in his naturalistic theory of survival. By developing a new theory of personal identity, he seeks to offer a naturalistically acceptable version of the view that the good, but not the bad, survive their deaths. In my view, Johnston’s work is of great interest primarily because he is asking the right kind of question (what happens to the seriousness of morality if we fully acknowledge our mortality and finitude?), which is in effect a transcendental question about the meaning of finite life (especially morality), given the fact of mortality, rather than because of his (in itself highly elaborate even if problematic) positive theory. Even so, for a pragmatist, there might be ethical and/or pragmatic reasons for endorsing Johnston’s metaphysical theory of personal identity, because it is a theory enabling us to maintain the view that the morally good survive. Johnston’s argument could perhaps be spelled out in terms of “holistic pragmatism” (cf. Morton White, A Philosophy of Culture: The Scope of Holistic Pragmatism, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002): metaphysical (including theological), factual (scientific, naturalistic), and ethical beliefs may be considered as a holistic totality, a “seamless web,” and may thus be holistically “tested” against both ordinary and scientific experience and our experience of moral demands. All these beliefs can, then, be “weighed” together instead of being evaluated individually. By revising some of our standard ideas concerning personal identity, we may thus (according to Johnston) defend survival (of “the good”) without giving up scientific naturalism. William James’s views on immortality (see his “Human Immortality,” 1898) could be analyzed

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similarly: a relational theory of personal identity (cf. here especially José Medina’s reading of James in his contribution to John Stuhr, ed., 100 Years of Pragmatism [Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010]) enables us to endorse (some kind of) survival together with naturalism. Ethical contexts and values thus set demands for metaphysical theorizing. 6. This problem, as well as James’s pragmatic response, is discussed in my “The Trail of the Human Serpent Is over Everything” (cited above). 7. See Merold Westphal, God, Guilt, and Death: An Existential Phenomenology of Religion (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984). I discuss Westphal’s views briefly in chapter 5 above. 8. I owe this formulation, emphasizing our deep connectedness with the world we are parts of, to Douglas Davies. 9. See Ludwig Wittgenstein, Notebooks 1914–1916 (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1961). These are among the very last entries in the notebooks, written early in 1917. 10. See especially Jean Améry, On Suicide (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999; German original 1976). 11. Cf. here Levinas’s concept of the Other—and of ethics as being primarily about our relation to the mortal and vulnerable Other that should always be seen as primary to our own well-being—as well as James’s reflections on the deep and inevitable relationality of our individual identities in the field of “pure experience.” 12. In addition to the phenomenology of religion developed in Westphal’s God, Guilt, and Death, see J. J. Valberg’s very interesting struggle with solipsism in Valberg, Dream, Death, and the Self (cited above). As noted in a previous note, Valberg also deals with the notions of sleep and dream in relation to the topic of death. This important comparison deserves further reflection. It can also be connected with the topic of ethical vigilance, traced back to “insomnia,” in Levinas’s philosophy—as recently interestingly discussed in Megan Craig, Levinas and James (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010). If ethics requires “staying awake,” and if sleep and death are analogous, our ethical insomnia—our inability to fall asleep in a world demanding continuous ethical attention—might be a certain kind of (metaphorical) immortality. This thought, which might make our mortal existence meaningful in a very special way, must be developed in much more detail in the book. Regarding the questions of meaning and meaninglessness, cf. further Bernard N. Schumacher, Death and Mortality in Contemporary Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010). 13. See, e.g., Avishai Margalit, The Ethics of Memory (Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 2002). 14. See Hans Jonas, Mortality and Morality, ed. Lawrence Vogel (Chicago, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1996). 15. Cf. chapter 3. An additional worry needs to be addressed at this point. Critics may legitimately point out that I have not done enough to justify the synthesis of the pragmatic and the transcendental I am defending (and applying to the topics of death and mortality, or finitude generally). This is undoubtedly true. I have reflected on this theme in a series of publications spanning ca. fifteen years. I have here hardly been able to offer a full defense of this approach, but by attempting to show its applicability to the chosen special topic, and thereby demonstrating its appropriateness for the project of “philosophical anthropology” more generally, I hope to have been able to go at least some way toward offering a philosophical defense of the pragmatic naturalization of the transcendental. This does not mean that I would simply wish to downplay the genuine differences between the transcendental and the pragmatist approaches or methodologies, as they are traditionally understood. Rather, I am suggesting that there is a way of bringing them together that yields an interesting philosophy of human finitude. 16. See William James, Pragmatism: A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking (1907), and The Meaning of Truth: A Sequel to Pragmatism (1909), eds. Frederick H. Burkhardt, Fredson Bowers, and Ignas K. Skrupskelis (Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 1975 and 1978, respectively).

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17. Cf. John Martin Fischer (ed.), The Metaphysics of Death (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1993), passim; see also Antony Flew, The Logic of Mortality (Oxford and New York: Blackwell, 1987). 18. See Sami Pihlström, Naturalizing the Transcendental: A Pragmatic View (Amherst, NY: Prometheus/Humanity Books, 2003). 19. It may be noted that the central opposition, at least from a Christian point of view, is not the one between mortality and immortality, because resurrection and eternal life after death are regarded as obvious by many believers, but rather the one between eternal damnation and salvation. Thus, traditional religious views, such as Catholicism, may in the end be closer to Jamesian pragmatism than it might first seem. Neither Catholics nor (e.g.) Lutherans need to regard salvation as guaranteed; on the contrary, we are always uncertain about whether we will be saved or damned. (Cults believing in an indubitable salvation are a different matter.) On the other hand, James was deeply suspicious of the unpragmatic metaphysical assumptions one finds in Catholic and other traditional Christian theologies, namely, a freezing of the individual variability of religious experiences into universal theological constructions. Another major difference between James’s views on immortality and those of the leading Christian churches is, of course, the emphasis on bodily (and not merely mental) resurrection by the latter. For James (as for most thinkers interested in “psychical research”), the question was primarily one about the survival of experience, (stream of) thought, consciousness, etc., after the death of the physical body. On the other hand, if someone adopts a religious faith on Jamesian principles, employing, for instance, a “will to believe,” nothing prevents her/him from framing her/his faith in terms of more traditional Christian views, including bodily resurrection. 20. For a comparison between James and Sartre, from the point of view of the “will to believe” doctrine, interpreted as a reflection on what it means to choose “existentially,” see Hilary Putnam, Renewing Philosophy (Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 1992), chapter 9; for a more extended discussion of death as a transcendental concept, and for an account of Heidegger’s views on death as fundamentally transcendental, pace Heidegger himself, cf. chapter 4 above. 21. The use of the word “essential” by no means commits us to an unwarranted essentialism here, any more than the talk about living toward death as Dasein’s essential project would commit a Heideggerian thinker to such an essentialism. (Rejecting essentialism is part and parcel of both existentialism and pragmatism.) Paradigmatic examples of discussions of death as a contingent and factual limitation are, again, provided by analytic philosophical thanatologists like Fred Feldman (see his Confrontations with the Reaper [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992]) and Jay F. Rosenberg (see his Thinking Clearly about Death [Indianapolis: Hackett, 1998]). On essentialism and its alternatives in philosophical thanatology, see chapter 2 above. 22. Again, we may note that also existentialist accounts of death as the key dimension of the temporality of human existence can be seen as investigations of this kind of relevance. 23. Metaphysical realism is the common background assumption of those who simply start from the conception of death as the final (entirely natural) end of human (or any) life and go on to debate over the question of the possible harmfulness of this for the one who dies. See Fischer (ed.), The Metaphysics of Death, as well as Feldman, Confrontations with the Reaper. 24. Cf. here especially John Martin Fischer, “Introduction: Death, Metaphysics, and Morality,” in Fischer (ed.), The Metaphysics of Death, pp. 3–30. 25. That James himself was confused about, or deliberately ignored, the crucial Kantian distinction between the transcendental (pertaining to the conditions and thereby limits of experience) and the transcendent (viz., something that exceeds those limits) is demonstrated, for instance, by his reference to a “transcendental world” in “Human Immortality” (in James, Essays on Religion and Morality, eds. Frederick H. Burkhardt, Fredson Bowers, and Ignas K. Skrupskelis [Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 1982], p. 93) and by his way of speaking, in the same lecture, about

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“transcendental Idealism” as a metaphysical theory of the “absolute Mind” (ibid., p. 89, n5). We may speculate that, had he made the Kantian distinction more carefully, he would have been more sympathetic to the transcendental approach in philosophy in general. The pragmatist tradition from Dewey to Rorty abounds in similar confusions, which sometimes makes it difficult to perceive its Kantian roots. See further Pihlström, Naturalizing the Transcendental. 26. William James, The Will to Believe and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy (1897), eds. Frederick H. Burkhardt, Fredson Bowers, and Ignas K. Skrupskelis (Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 1979), p. 55. 27. James, Pragmatism, p. 37. This humanistic, metaphysically constructivist view has sometimes been compared to the similar positions one finds in neopragmatists like Hilary Putnam and Nelson Goodman. See, e.g., Goodman’s notorious theory of “worldmaking” as presented in his book, Ways of Worldmaking (Hassocks: Harvester Press, 1992 [first published 1978]), and elsewhere; cf. Putnam, Realism with a Human Face, ed. James Conant (Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 1990). Should we, in Goodmanian terms, say that we “make” the “world” of mortality or immortality? Could we just make ourselves immortal by “making” the corresponding “world,” a “world version” in which we survive death? An immortality made by us does not sound very promising, does it? More metaphorically speaking, both scientific and religious “ways of worldmaking” may, of course, be acceptable in Jamesian pluralistic pragmatism; this, in fact, is what James attempted to argue at length in Pragmatism and other works. But this position should presumably somehow be connected with a pragmatic realism, rather than with a metaphysically wild theory of worldmaking. 28. A tension between constructivism and religious mysticism in James’s pragmatist philosophy of religion has been observed and emphasized by Richard M. Gale. See his paper, “Pragmatism versus Mysticism: The Divided Self of William James,” in James E. Tomberlin (ed.), Philosophical Perspectives, 5: Philosophy of Religion (Atascadero, CA: Ridgeview, 1991), pp. 241–86, as well as his more comprehensive discussion in Gale, The Divided Self of William James (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999). 29. James, Pragmatism, pp. 122, 118. 30. Cf. again Wittgenstein’s remarks on death in the Tractatus, cited above. 31. James, Pragmatism, p. 17. 32. These ideas can also be compared to the somewhat paradoxical view familiar from Wittgensteinian philosophy of religion (e.g., D. Z. Phillips), namely, that it is only by fully endorsing the radical mortality and finitude of the self that the notion of immortality can have any religious significance. This suggestion can also be interpreted as a transcendental argument, though Phillips avoids such vocabulary. See, e.g., D. Z. Phillips, “Dislocating the Soul,” Religious Studies 31 (1995), 447–62. According to Phillips, we should not speak about the “soul” as an immaterial metaphysical thing or a disembodied spirit but should, rather, construe immortality in the sense of our leaving our lives in the hands of God (see also D. Z. Phillips, Death and Immortality [London and Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1970], especially chapter 1). Or so, at least, a genuinely religious language game would construe the notions of soul and immortality, and it is only within such a language game that they would have religiously relevant use. The analytic philosophers’ of mind metaphysical language game, in contrast, “dislocates” these words and their meanings. So does the pseudoreligious determination to be good in order to achieve immortality, which “falsifies the character of moral regard” rather than offering good reasons to be moral (ibid., p. 30). As Phillips puts it, the “immortality” of the genuine believer’s soul has to do, “not with its existence after death and all the consequences that is supposed to carry with it, but with his participation in God’s life, in his contemplation of divine love” (ibid., p. 38). It is this moral and religious language game that is played when we speak about, say, “the state of the soul,” “the destiny of the soul,” or “losing one’s soul” (see ibid., pp. 44–45). Following Simone Weil, Phillips sees the true religious meaning of the immortality of the soul in “self-effacement” and one’s “dying to the self,” in understanding

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that one’s own life and death are not truly important (ibid., pp. 51–54). Cf. also the discussions of “de-selfing” and otherness in chapters 3 and 4 above. 33. For a criticism of theodicies, see Sami Pihlström, Taking Evil Seriously (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave, 2014); see also Sari Kivistö and Sami Pihlström, Kantian Antitheodicy: Philosophical and Literary Varieties (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave, forthcoming 2016). 34. One obvious connection between these discourses is the fact that death could be regarded as an “evil” for which a theodicy is needed, and some theodicists even appeal to “postmortem divine compensation.” See the critical works cited in the previous note. 35. See virtually any typical analytic study in the philosophy of death focusing on the harmfulness issue, such as John Martin Fischer, Our Stories (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009); or Ben Bradley, Well-Being and Death (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2009). For an excellent summary of the basic issues on the agenda of the analytic paradigm in the philosophy of death (which, however, does not recognize it as such a paradigm but seems to view itself as the philosophy of death), see Steven Luper, “Death,” in Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (2014; first published 2002), available online: http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/death/. See also several essays in Steven Luper (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Life and Death (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014). 36. On theodicies as both “comic” and “terrible,” see the essay, “On Not Understanding God,” chapter 10 in D. Z. Phillips, Wittgenstein and Religion (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave, 2005; first published 1993). 37. On the distinction between theocentrism and anthropocentrism as a key to Kant’s transcendental idealism, see Henry E. Allison, Kant’s Transcendental Idealism: An Interpretation and Defense, Revised and Enlarged Edition (New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press, 2004; 1st ed. 1983), especially chapter 2. 38. Cf. the discussion of philosophical temperaments in James, Pragmatism, chapter 1, as well as Sami Pihlström, Pragmatism and Philosophical Anthropology: Understanding Our Human Life in a Human World (New York: Peter Lang, 1998), chapter 10.

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Index

afterlife, 53n80, 159 agape, 115, 135 agency, 60 Améry, J., 155, 183 anguish, 139 animals, 25, 33 Antichrist, 84 anxiety, 139, 168, 181, 193 applied ethics, 2, 162 arena (of presence), 113–114 Aristotle, 20, 35, 37, 48n16 atheism, 161, 193 attitude toward a soul, 27, 84, 107 authenticity (vs. inauthenticity), 99, 107, 119, 136, 155, 157, 160 autonomy, 158 babies, 26 Barnes, J., 144–145 Bauman, Z., 100, 111, 119 bioethics, 162 birth, 41, 137 blood, 94n58 Broad, C. D., 60 Brockhaus, R., 106 Camus, A., 15n17, 116, 129, 183 Canetti, E., 105 Carr, D., 72 Carroll, N., 80 Cassirer, E., 22–24 categorizability, 81 Christ, 77, 84, 141 Christianity, 35 compatibilism, 72 control(ling), 153–173 Coppola, F. F., 79 culturalism, 10, 20–23, 31, 32, 37, 45, 60, 72, 76, 179, 180

Darwin, C., 21 definition vs. criteria of death, 2, 4, 5, 173n2 Descartes, R., 110, 124n49 de-selfing, 74, 75, 93n45, 94n46 determinism (vs. indeterminism), 72, 157, 173n2 Dewey, J., 31, 58, 60, 166, 167, 171, 175n26 Dostoyevsky, F., 93n42, 116, 147 downward causation, 57 Dracula, 77–85 dualism (Cartesian dualism), 35, 38, 58 Eagleton, T., 146 emergence (emergentism), 57–61, 65 Emerson, R. W., 171 Emmett, D., 29 emotions, 8, 12, 129, 130, 138, 148 end-of-life care, 140, 173 Epicur, 97 Epicureanism, 144 Epicurean controversy (or Epicurean debate), 2, 6, 129, 132, 134–135 equality vs. inequality, 140–145, 180 essence, 18, 44 essentialism, 10, 18–23, 37, 179 ethical monism, 106 ethical solipsism, 110, 119 ethics, 43, 73, 74, 106, 107, 111, 127, 141, 146, 149, 165, 171, 188 euthanasia, 149n1, 154–155, 158, 174n6 evil, 1, 27, 79, 81, 84, 127, 146 existentialism, 10, 17, 20–23, 31, 37, 137, 179 factualization, 39 fear, 80, 82, 83, 129, 139, 161 finitude, vii, 1, 7, 8, 9, 18, 71, 75, 87, 111, 118, 129, 134, 136, 140, 147, 148, 149, 211

212

Index

154, 158, 160, 165, 167, 169, 171, 172, 179, 180, 181, 184, 185 first-personal character of death (firstpersonal approaches to death), 7, 8, 12, 123n33, 155 first-person point of view (first-person perspective), 37, 99, 106, 108, 147 forms of intelligibility, 62 form(s) of life, 28, 32, 34, 67 Foucault, M., 166 freedom, 21, 72, 91n30, 136, 138, 184 Gaita, R., 24–30, 36, 39, 43, 45, 49n35 Galileo, 21 Gavin, W., 165 Gehlen, A., 17 Gellner, E., 106–107 ghosts, 78, 79 God, 117, 119, 141, 189, 191, 193 God’s-Eye-View, 42, 45, 59, 73, 102, 180, 193 Goodman, N., 63 goodness, 134–136, 141, 148 Gothic fiction (the Gothic), 76, 77, 81. See also Dracula Gould, S. J., 21 grammar, 27 grammatical investigation, 28, 44 guilt, 1, 8, 12, 74, 88, 93n42, 127–149, 180, 183 Haberman, D. L., 22, 45 happiness, 137, 153, 156 Hawking, S., 21 Heidegger, M., vii, 2, 36, 37, 43, 82, 99, 100, 103, 104, 107, 108, 109, 110, 112, 118, 119, 132, 138, 147, 155, 157, 158, 164, 166, 172, 174n11, 187 Herder, J. G., 23 Hitler, A., 81 holistic evaluation (holistic pragmatism), 41, 95n68, 195n5 Holocaust, 128, 159, 184 hope, 129 horizon, 112, 113 horizonal self, 113 horror (horror fiction, the horrible), 10, 75–87, 131, 139, 193

Husserl, E., 1, 7, 23, 68, 69, 100, 108, 110, 133 idealism, 71 imagination, 139 immortality, 13, 19, 34–35, 36, 38, 39, 42–43, 98, 102, 103, 105, 119, 141, 142, 143, 144, 145, 159, 160, 164, 165, 167, 171, 172, 183, 185, 186, 187, 189, 190, 194, 198n32 intelligibility, 79 interests, 135–136 intersubjectivity, 60 irrationality, 76, 79, 83, 86, 87 James, W., 1, 13, 31, 35, 43, 61, 65, 68, 72, 92n35, 116, 140, 141–143, 145, 146, 161, 162, 163–166, 170, 171, 172, 183, 185–191, 194, 195n5, 198n27 Jaspers, K., 138 Johnston, M., 9, 13, 112–116, 119, 132, 134–136, 141, 146, 148, 183, 195n5 Kafka, F., 81 Kannisto, H., 10, 20–24, 37, 45 Kant, I., 1, 10, 23, 28, 38, 56, 62, 66, 68, 69, 72, 88n3, 100, 101, 102, 104, 110, 130, 133, 136, 172, 182, 187, 189, 190, 192 Kierkegaard, S., 35–36, 43, 49n35 killing, 183 Kim, J., 58 knowledge, 139 Kylliäinen, A., 141 Lachs, J., 163, 166–168, 170 language games, 24 last reader, 144–145 Lear, J., 28–30, 33–34, 44, 51n54, 51n56 Leino, E., 140, 148 Levinas, E., 7, 100, 107–111, 117, 119, 157, 158, 159, 192 limit(s), vii, 8, 10, 11, 42, 55–88, 97, 101, 102, 103, 104, 113, 119, 127, 133, 134, 140, 149, 156, 157, 180, 182, 187, 190, 191, 192, 193 love, 26 Lovecraft, H. P., 79, 81 Lucretius, 19–20, 104–105, 132, 139, 144

Index Luther, M., 137 Malpas, J., 118 Marcus Aurelius, 156 Margalit, A., 158, 184 Margolis, J., 32, 65 Marx, K., 43 materialism, 35 May, T., 156 McDowell, J., 33, 48n22 meaningfulness (vs. meaninglessness), 9, 99, 160, 181, 186 meaning of death, 7 meaning of life, 24 meaning vs. criteria of death, 19 melancholy, 176n40 meliorism, 167 memory (historical memory), 8, 129, 139, 158–159, 173, 184, 185 metaphilosophical pragmatism, vii metaphysical guilt, 128 metaphysical realism, 62, 65, 66, 67, 68, 72, 90n25, 133, 180, 192 metaphysical subject, 70, 117 metaphysics, 43, 65, 74, 146, 149, 165, 170, 171, 181, 188, 190, 191, 194 Meyer, S., 155 Montaigne, M., 166 moral realism vs. antirealism, 25 moral reasons, 41 moral skepticism, 45 Mulhall, S., 103–104, 108 Nagel, T., 20, 59, 98, 105, 144, 161, 183, 195n4 naturalism, 6, 7, 10, 20–23, 31, 35–37, 44, 56–60, 63, 66, 67, 69, 71, 72, 76, 106, 134, 179, 180, 192 naturalistic fallacy, 115 naturalization, 48n27, 63, 71, 73, 92n41 nature, 126n88 negativity, 71, 127 neopragmatism, 166–168 Newton, I., 21 Nietzsche, F., 43, 97 nihilism, 129, 137, 144, 145, 146, 183 normativity, 17–46 nothingness, 69, 71, 72, 74, 75, 87, 112, 113, 164

213

ontological pluralism, 106 other(s) (otherness), 7, 11, 37–38, 100, 107, 108, 109, 111, 113, 115, 117, 119, 127, 155, 157, 158, 159, 192 pain, 1 palliative care, 162 panpsychism, 57–61, 65 paradox of subjectivity, 68, 72, 130 passivity, 163 Peirce, C. S., 8, 35, 160, 161, 165, 168, 175n26, 188 Perry, R. B., 164 personal identity, 71, 73, 130, 131, 135, 162, 166 phenomenology, 1, 7, 17, 61, 64, 67, 110 Phillips, D. Z., 28, 32, 49n35, 198n32 philosophical anthropology, vii, 1, 3, 4, 6, 9, 17–46, 55, 60, 66, 69, 72, 75, 77, 85, 97, 99, 104, 127, 131, 132, 147, 149, 162, 171, 179–194 philosophical temperament(s), 164, 194 philosophical thanatology, 1, 2, 6, 8, 9, 10, 11, 13, 19, 30, 31, 35, 37, 39–42, 43, 45, 55, 77, 97–119, 127, 129, 131, 148, 155, 156, 162, 163, 167, 171, 173, 179–194 Plato, 20, 42, 97, 131, 166 Plessner, H., 17 Plotinus, 131 possibility, 161 postulates of practical reason, 102, 136, 186, 189 practices, 31–32, 34, 65, 116, 169 pragmatic maxim, 121n13, 160 pragmatic method, 13, 65, 88, 146, 160, 161, 165, 168–173, 185, 186 pragmatic pluralism, 5, 71–75, 192 pragmatic realism, 62, 65 pragmatism, vii, 2, 13, 30–34, 38, 56, 63, 64, 66, 67, 70, 71, 72, 121n13, 131, 153–173, 179–194 privation view, 19, 143 problem of life, 117, 194 Putnam, H., 23, 58, 60, 89n17, 160 Quine, W. V., 6, 18 rationality, 20

214

Index

realism, 67, 71, 75, 105, 106, 122n28, 190 recognition, 43, 56, 71–75, 88, 148 reconstruction, 163 reflexivity, 86 rejection, 140 relativism, 32–33, 38, 39 relief, 139 remorse, 24 Rescher, N., 32 responsibility, 109, 110, 111, 117, 118, 119, 172 resurrection, 35, 76, 131, 197n19 revolt, 140 Rhees, R., 28, 32 Ricoeur, P., 184 Rosenberg, J. F., 98, 102 Sartre, J.-P., 21, 91n30, 187 Satan, 84 Scarre, G., 123n33, 140 Schacht, R., 43–44 Scheler, M., 17 Schopenhauer, A., 97, 100, 126n84, 164, 188 Schumacher, B., 130–133, 162 scientific realism, 86 self (subject), 11, 55–88, 97–119, 127 self-consciousness, 137 self-control, 153, 156 self-understanding, 46, 55 shame, 138 Shusterman, R., 163, 166–168, 175n26 sin, 137, 156 social constructionism (social constructivism), 61–62, 122n28 Socrates, 42 solipsism, 7, 11, 15n18, 38, 40, 70, 71, 75, 99, 100, 104–119, 127, 133, 134, 155, 180, 184, 192 Solomon, R., 101 Sorabji, R., 130–132 sorrow, 140 soul(s), 25, 28, 30, 38, 78, 101, 130, 185, 198n32 Stevenson, L., 22, 45 Stoic pragmatism, 167–168 Stoics (Stoicism), 156, 157, 167, 170 Stoker, B., 76–85 subjectivity, 55–88

suffering, 1, 159, 193 suicide, 11, 15n17, 116–118, 129, 155, 156, 166, 173, 183 supernaturalism, 135, 193 supervenience, 57–61 surrender, 163, 169, 172 survival of the good, 134–136 Taylor, C., 23, 45 theism, 193 theocentrism vs. anthropocentrism, 193 theodicies, 193 third-person point of view, 181 Thomas, D., 140 timelessness, 108 Tolstoy, L., 137, 138, 183 tragedy, 165, 176n40 tragic sense of life, 165 transcendence, 102, 181 transcendental anthropology, vii, 1, 10, 11, 13, 24–30, 56, 179–194 transcendental apperception, 56 transcendental argumentation (arguments), 10, 44, 63, 64, 75, 118, 130, 168, 169, 187 transcendental chaos, 86, 87 transcendental conditions, 10, 101 transcendental constitution, 56, 61–64 transcendental death, 7 transcendental fear, 82 transcendental guilt, 128, 129, 130, 136, 139 transcendental idealism, 56–57, 61–65, 71, 101, 189 transcendental mediation, 44 transcendental method(ology) (transcendental investigation), 13, 39, 134, 154, 168–173, 179 transcendental necessity, 34 transcendental philosophy, vii, 7, 10, 55–88, 97–119, 133, 162, 184, 192 transcendental pragmatism, 65–67 transcendental reflection, 34 transcendental solipsism, 105, 114, 116, 133 transcendental subject (transcendental self), 11, 12, 28, 34, 55–88, 97, 100, 105, 128–130, 133, 137, 149, 179, 180,

Index 181, 184, 190–193 transcendental tradition, 10, 103 transcendental “we”, 70, 74 transcendental vs. transcendent, 102, 197n25 truth, 14n5

215

Valberg, J. J., 112–114, 115 vampires, 77–85, 155

Westphal, K. R., 87 Wespthal, M., 137–138, 147, 183 Williams, B., 144 will to believe, 186, 194 Winch, P., 39 Wittgenstein, L., vii, 1, 4, 7, 10, 22, 23, 27, 28, 32, 34, 37, 55, 63, 67, 69, 70–71, 74, 99, 100, 105–108, 113, 114, 116, 117, 118, 126n84, 134, 155–157, 166, 168, 172, 174n11, 182, 183, 185, 190, 192, 194, 195n3 wonder, 194 world-categorization, 75–78, 86, 88

Wallgren, T., 29 Weiler, A., 23

Zackariasson, U., 163 zombies, 78, 79, 83

de Unamuno, M., 43, 105, 120n2, 140, 176n34, 196n12 undead, 77, 78, 80, 83, 86, 87

About the Author

Sami Pihlström received his PhD in theoretical philosophy from the University of Helsinki, Finland, in 1996. He is, since 2014, professor of philosophy of religion at the Faculty of Theology, University of Helsinki. He was previously, among other things, professor of philosophy at the University of Jyväskylä (2006–2014) and the Director of the Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies (2009–2015). In relation to his current professorship at the University of Helsinki, he is in charge of the research group, “Contemporary Philosophy of Religion,” within the Academy of Finland Center of Excellence, “Reason and Religious Recognition” (hosted by the Faculty of Theology, University of Helsinki, and led by his colleague Professor Risto Saarinen). Pihlström is also, since 2016, vicechair of the Research Council for Culture and Society at the Academy of Finland, as well as the president of the Philosophical Society of Finland. He is a board member of various international learned societies and networks, including the Nordic Pragmatism Network (which he cofounded in 2006), the Central European Pragmatist Forum, the European Pragmatism Association (which he cofounded in 2012), and the Nordic Society for Philosophy of Religion. Pihlström has published widely on pragmatism, transcendental philosophy, philosophical anthropology, metaphysics, ethics, and metaphilosophy. He is the author of sixteen scholarly books (ten in English, six in Finnish) and hundreds of articles and reviews. His recent monographs include Pragmatist Metaphysics: An Essay on the Ethical Grounds of Ontology (Continuum/Bloomsbury, 2009), Transcendental Guilt: Reflections on Ethical Finitude (Lexington Books, 2011), Pragmatic Pluralism and the Problem of God (Fordham University Press, 2013), and Taking Evil Seriously (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014). His joint monograph with Sari Kivistö, Kantian Antitheodicy: Philosophical and Literary Varieties, is forthcoming in 2016 from Palgrave Macmillan. In addition, Pihlström is the editor or co-editor of several volumes, including Wittgenstein and the Method of Philosophy (Acta Philosophica Fennica, 2006), Pragmatist Perspectives (with Henrik Rydenfelt, Acta Philosophica Fennica, 2009), Reappraisals of Eino Kaila’s Philosophy (with Ilkka Niiniluoto, Acta Philosophica Fennica, 2012), William James on Religion (with Henrik Rydenfelt, Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), and The Bloomsbury Companion to Pragmatism (Bloomsbury, 2015; 1st ed. 2011). He was the editor-in-chief of Ajatus, Yearbook of the Philosophical Society of Finland, from 2004 to 2011. 217