1. The Discovery of Death.
It is a matter of debate
whether animals have an awareness of
mortality, but
it is certain that man alone among all living creatures
knows that he has to die. Yet even Homo sapiens ac-
quired this knowledge relatively late in the long history
of the
species. It is reasonable to assume, as Voltaire
did in his Dictionnaire philosophique (article, “Tout
va
bien”), that man has learned about death
“through
experience.” More recently some
philosophers, notably
Max Scheler, asserted that man possesses an
intuitive
awareness of his mortality, and Paul Landsberg sug-
gested that it is not through experience in
the usual
meaning of the term but by way of a particular “expe-
rience of death” that one
realizes one's own finitude.
There is undoubtedly some truth in this view
but as
numerous anthropological studies have shown, primi-
tive man is totally unaware of the inevitability as
well
as the possible finality of death. For him it is neither
a
natural event nor a radical change: death occurs only
as a result of
violence or of a disease brought on by
magic, and those who do die merely
enter into another
mode of living in which the need for food, drink,
and
clothing does not cease.
Therefore it is misleading to speak of the primitive's
belief in
immortality, because his view of death is
rooted not in a denial of death
but in the ignorance
of its nature. And the term
“immortality” would have
to signify deathlessness as well as survival after death,
whereby survival would be that of the whole man and
not merely of a
hypothetical incorporeal entity. It was
only after it had become apparent
that death was not
a mere temporary lapse and that the change was irre-
versible and extreme that the notion
could occur that
what survives is something other than the whole man.
Even then the “survivor” was not conceived of as
something immaterial, but as a replica of the body,
a
“ghost” or “shadow,” and only much
later did it
become the completely disembodied
“soul.”
The primitive's misconception of death is due pri-
marily to his inability to draw the proper conclusions
from his
observations, but it is also strongly favored
by the difficulty of
visualizing the end of one's exist-
ence. This
psychological peculiarity is not charac-
teristic of the primitive alone. As Freud, and Schopen-
hauer before him, have pointed out,
“deep down” even
contemporary man does not
“really” believe in his own
death. And Martin
Heidegger shrewdly observed that
the proposition, “all men are
mortal” usually involves
the tacit reservation “but
not I.”
Neither the time nor the historical sequence of the
two elements in the
discovery of death—its inevita-
bility as well as its possible finality—can be determined
with any degree of accuracy. On the one hand, the
realization of the
inevitability of death may conceiv-
ably
have preceded the suspicion of its finality. On the
other hand, the
finality of death is in no way predicated
on its inevitability. But if we
judge by the testimony
of the first written record of man's discovery of
death,
the Gilgamesh Epic (ca. 2500 B.C.), the realization of
the
inevitability of death as well as its possible finality
would seem to have
occurred simultaneously. If this
is so, it is pointless to ask which of the
two produced
the greater shock. But again on the basis of the
Gilgamesh legend, there can be no doubt about its
severity. As a result we
find in Gilgamesh most of the
themes of the meditation on death as we know
them
today. But while King Gilgamesh strongly suspects that
death may
well be total extinction, the predominant
view of death of his
contemporaries, obviously still
rooted in primitive ideas, was that the
dead somehow
continue to exist. But one cannot help but be impressed
by the somber and frightening nature of the afterlife
as it appears in the
Babylonian and Greek mythologies.
Typical is Achilles' complaint in the Odyssey that it
is better to be a slave on earth
than a king in the realm
of phantoms. Such an image of a miserable
existence
as a mere “shadow” ought to throw
considerable doubt
on the usual interpretation of the belief in
immortality
as a mere “wish fulfillment,” at least as
far as the
earliest manifestations of this belief are concerned. This
kind of survival must have appeared, at least to some,
as worse than complete extinction. For most peo-
ple, however, the prospect of total annihilation was
as frightening and repulsive as that of a miserable
afterlife. Seen against
this background, the earliest
philosophical speculations about the soul's
ultimate
blissful immortality must have appeared as welcome
news.
We shall deal with these, and subsequent, doctrines
of immortality in the
second part of this article and
consider the various attempts to come to
terms with
mortality without taking refuge in comforting visions
of
post-mortem existence.
