A Genealogy of Death

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Classical German philosophy saw both the completion of modernity and the beginnings of post-modernity. One could point to Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit for the former, and Nietzsche’s aphoristic attack on modernity in The Birth of Tragedy for the latter. Nietzsche’s criticism of modernity presents it as the latest stage in a story beginning with the Socratic and Platonic privileging of the “Apollonian” values of reason, clarity and knowledge over Dionysian mysteries. The critique of Platonism that one finds in late classical German thought is both its most influential and pernicious export. It describes a world where will precedes reason, where dark unknowable secrets are accessed through the passions, and clarity and distinctness are suspect. There are many lenses through which one can view German thought’s distinctive tenor, but perhaps the most telling is an examination of the view of death in German thought. We will begin by contrasting this view with Plato’s and then turn to a more contemporary critic, the Mexican philosopher and journalist Jorge Portilla.

In The Apology, Socrates presents his jurors with a dilemma: death either is the end of existence or the transition to a new existence. During his trial, he professes uncertainty, but his final peroration leans toward the latter horn. In The Phaedo (and The Republic) he argues at length that the soul lives on after death, albeit in a way unfamiliar to most people, who are ruled by their senses. Philosophy’s ascent from matter toward intelligible and eternal truths is training for death. In the final pages of The Apology, he uses the possibility of spending eternity in conversation with other souls as the final proof for the perfection of his life. Socrates’ belief in the immortality of the soul enables him to face his death with equanimity. The point here is not to enter into a detailed exegesis of Plato, but to notice the connection, made early on in the history of philosophy, between (a) the affirmation that the soul exists after death, (b) the claim that there is an intelligible order to reality, and (c) the cultivation of a philosophical life.

Late classical German philosophy’s attack on Platonism required a different view of death. Like Socrates, they argued for the close link between death and one’s way of life, but they endorsed the alternate horn in The Apology’s dilemma. This is clearest in the work of Heidegger: death is, as Heidegger puts it in Being and Time, the possibility of my impossibility. The end of my projects and projections, death is profoundly disturbing. Rather than Socratic equanimity, it gives rise only to angst. Consequently, we tend to flee from it, hiding from the inevitability of death in idle chatter, truisms, and mass media. To live authentically, Heidegger continues, one must anticipate one’s own death with resoluteness. Philosophy does not anticipate and train for the separation of the soul from the body but contemplates final non-existence. To be sure, Heidegger thinks there are gains to this awareness: death, by facing us with our unavoidable non-being, raises the question of being. When I realize that one day I will become nothing, I wonder even more urgently, why is there something rather than nothing? While this is reminiscent of traditional metaphysics, the emphasis is reversed; it is not the permanence of being at which one wonders, but the fleetingness of being and the finality of death.

Jorge Portilla, perhaps the most important Mexican philosopher of the twentieth century, sharply disagreed with Heidegger’s account of death and provides an alternative. Although he never held a university position, he was actively involved with El Grupo Hyperion’s work of introducing and adapting existentialism and phenomenology for a Mexican context. This is precisely what happens in his lecture on “Thomas Mann and German Irrationalism.” The lecture is not only about Mann, but also about the “intellectual and affective climate of his work”—i.e., the late stages of classical German philosophy. He names this stage “German Irrationalism” and summarizes it as endorsing (among other things), “the primacy of life and the irrational over intelligence and reason; the primacy of death over life.” This climate, Portilla frankly tells us, disgusts him.

According to Portilla, irrationalism’s first step is to subordinate the logical interplay of ideas and principles to the demands of life. Schopenhauer, he says, took the first step, and Nietzsche radicalized and elevated it: life precedes ideas, and philosophy is in the service of life and its urgings. This inverts the Socratic idea that one’s life should conform to one’s knowledge of the just or the good. Rather, the good attends upon the demands of life; ethics is the handmaid of the will. The second element is to assert the primacy of death over life. Death (understood as the end of life) highlights the arbitrary nature of the will; it casts a pall of meaninglessness over the world in which we live. The will wills to will, but it wills nothing other than its willing. Yet at the same time, this realization becomes the pearl of great price:

Death as a tremendous mystery, as an ennobling experience of a metaphysical rank higher than life itself is one of the central themes of German irrationalism. There is a tendency in this philosophy to see death as something sacred, as a higher value.

Recall the discussion of Heidegger above: resoluteness in the face of death opens up the royal doors of authenticity, revealing the holy secret that life has no meaning. The denial that life has meaning independent of the will refuses the norms and obligations of ethical life. It entails, Portilla thinks, a fascist politics that replaces a community based on the recognition of reality with one appealing to the will. He faults Mann not for fascism—he knows that Mann was a severe critic of it—but for not realizing that he swims in the same waters as Heidegger and other fascist intellectuals.

It is worth noting here that Portilla explicitly opposes German irrationalism only with “Aristotelian and Platonic theology.”  This is a bit surprising: nothing in Portilla’s other writings suggests a strong affinity with Scholasticism—he typically cites phenomenologists and existential philosophers. Yet, it is the only doctrine cited by Portilla as resisting irrationalism. Why? Scholasticism denies the two principles adduced above. It claims that a system of ideas precedes life and life should conform itself to those ideas; life has primacy over death. Death is not the end. It does not signal the collapse of being into nothingness but (recalling Socrates) the translation from one state to another.

At this point, there is an obvious objection: in criticizing this glorification of death, isn’t Portilla simply testifying to his own inability to confront that final mystery? Isn’t this what Heidegger would call inauthenticity? Moreover, don’t his criticisms of “German irrationalism’s” emphasis on death apply equally well to Mexico’s well-known infatuation with death? To these, I think, the answer is no. To be sure, the Mexican (says both Emilio Uranga and Octavio Paz) lives with death; death is ever present. This is similar to Portilla’s Germans, but only superficially. Mexican Death, so to speak, is not the possibility of my impossibility, as in Heidegger, but one of the grounds of my possibility. One lives with and in death; death is not coming toward the Mexican as the possibility of impossibility. Rather, the Mexican (according to Uranga and Paz) comes out of death; death is, in a strange way, a source of possibility. Death does not show that life is meaningless. Instead, death is part of the meaning of life.

It is beyond the scope of this essay to attempt to address the complexity and richness that is “Mexican death.” I am neither sociologist nor historian enough to offer anything more than what follows: one may venture to say that Mexican death shares more with Socratic death than German death insofar as it weaves death into life. Death becomes, as one says, a part of life. As a part, it cannot assert primacy over the whole. The mixture of Catholic theology and indigenous traditions that contribute to the richness of Mexican death is, itself, opposed to the irrationalism of Portilla’s Germans. Portilla devotes pages in his lecture detailing the anti-Semitic and anti-Christian themes in Nietzsche precisely to lead readers to the realization that German irrationalism’s approach to death is inevitably atheistic. The folk religion of Mexico (or, for that matter, other traditional cultures where Weber’s iron cage had not yet taken hold) interprets death through a belief in the afterlife and ongoing connection with the dead via ritual and practice.

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The way Mexican culture avoids German irrationalism’s exaltation of death over life is through a religious sensibility. Both indigenous Mexican tradition and the Catholic Church encourage visits to graveyards and prayers for the dead, and for the same reason: the dead are not merely dead, and even after death, through prayers and offerings one can interact with them, not as necromancers but as neighbors. As with Socrates’ arguments, death opens into a new way of being, not the end of being. Here one may profitably oppose the happy skeletons of Dia de los Muertos to the death’s heads and ornate coffins of the third Reich that Portilla mentions in his essay. The happy skeletons smile, as if to say, “I am alive, I am well, and death is not the end,” while the death’s head functions as a boundary stone, marking the end of life. Portilla is disgusted, in the end, not only by the German attitude toward death, but also the attitude towards life that it entails, where life is meaningless and values are arbitrary. For Portilla, like Socrates before him, a good and meaningful life requires the endorsement of life after death. Without that, as The Crito puts it, one merely lives but never lives well. Without that, it should come as no surprise that classical German philosophy collapsed into the irrational fury of the third Reich.

Brian Harding is author of “Augustine and Roman Virtue” and “Not Even a God Can Save Us Now: Reading Machiavelli after Heidegger.”  He lives in Denton, Texas, and teaches at Texas Woman's University.