Insofar as our own lives can become phenomena or appear-  [215] ances to ourselves, and insofar as the very life we live phenomenally bears the implication of death, we are faced with an odd problem: we clearly experience, in some sense, our own lives; but who ever experiences his own death?

My death is one thing that in principle I cannot experience or render "phenomenal." For as Epicurus said, while I am, Death is not; when Death is, I am not. And so no one has ever experienced his own death, which everyone is nevertheless convinced is absolutely certain, and which everyone dreads. We can perhaps feel for a moment the paradox of life dreading that which it will never experience, since death is the extinction of experiencing altogether. But there is no particular point now in pausing over this phenomenon, that the great enemy of life, death, can never be met head on. There are other, similar cases: my own existence is in some fashion always within the world, its very sense is to be within the world, and yet no one has ever seen anything like the world, and in principle never can. The world remains an unencounterable horizon within which everything we do see has its own sense; and yet the world itself is never encountered, never seen, and always eludes direct observation.

And so with death. Hence we must make do with what we have: life regarding death as its enemy but never being in a position to grapple with it directly or straightforwardly. The phenomenology of death is not a simple description of it, which would hardly be worth the trouble, since the description is completed in a word: nothing. It is instead an exploration of what death means to life, from the point of view of the living. Does it mean anything or nothing? Is it nothing but the great enemy who always wins?

Our responses to the certainty of death are most revealing of us; and perhaps in one way life is most properly considered as a response to death, its own extinction. What are some re- [ 215] sponses to death? Perhaps first of all there is a simple and flat opposition to it. To the extent that we are alive, we resist and oppose death, and that's that. To be alive is to affirm life and its values; death is the simple enemy of the whole project, to be opposed to the last. This plain opposition can never be forgotten. The absolute enmity between life and death cannot be softened or veiled by any other considerations. But then matters immediately become more complex: there is also most certainly within everyone something like a love of deathFreud's "death wish." In all of us, as we have observed, it expresses itself as a fascination with the horrible; in some it becomes a passion for suicide. For the profoundly pessimistic, the universe, as Paul Valery's Serpent says, is a flaw in the purity of nonbeing. And so life has an ambiguous attitude toward itself: is it to be affirmed with full and simple heart, or is it itself a defect in the purity of death and nothingness? The doubt that life conceals in its own heart concerning itself is ancient: one of the earliest Greek philosophers, who evidently had never heard how sunny and vigorous the Greeks were supposed to be, said, "Best it is never to be born; second best to die young."

From the viewpoint of life, precisely what can be the role of its great enemy, death? Is it a question of simple affirmation and negation? Do we choose either life or death, or perhaps, hesitantly, a little of each?

There can of course be no "right answer" to such a question. But perhaps there may be some profit in turning the matter over in our minds. Perhaps the opposition between life and death is not absolute; maybe they can even be friendly enemies.

In this hope, let us perform an experiment in imagination. Let us imagine ourselves immortal, living forever and ever, incapable of dying. Is this indeed the dream of life? Or doesn't it at once become a nightmare, a condemnation to live forever? If we were incapable of dying, would any particular [217] moment of life have any meaning at all? Is there, in other words, not an essential and necessary connection between the value of any particular experience and our own mortality? Would anything have the slightest value if we had to be around forever, testing it again and again, endlessly repeating everything that in our own actual mortal lives can be done once and once only? Our experiment in imagination might disclose that the entire poignancy and value of whatever we do or suffer in life is necessarily bound up with our mortality; each moment is unrepeatable, unique, irreplaceable. The value of every experience is bound up with the fact that we are always experiencing it for the first and last time. Simple affirmation of life, taken all by itself, turns into a nightmare of endless, flat existence in which nothing retains anything recognizable as value at all. Or let us consider passion. What is the energy of passion, what gives it its intensity, except the imminence of death? It is always now or never. Without that "never," would anything rouse us to passion? The "never more" is our own felt death, the lived essence of the very life of any passion. And so if at first glance life and death look like enemies, each excluding the other, at second glance they still appear enemies, but perhaps not quite so antagonistic as we thought. Neither has any sense without the other.

It is clear, then, that two particular phenomena in life disclose their inherent dependence upon death: that value in any event which lies in its uniqueness, its unrepeatability, the fact that it can never happen again; and that energy in any passion which lends it its urgency: now or never! This is why, if simple life were granted its wish to live forever, it would be condemned to both a senseless and a passionless continuation. An immortal being would be devoid of passion and could never prize the uniqueness of any moment or of its own immortal life.

There is a third element in life that would also disappear, [218] and we can see what it is by asking a question: At precisely which age is life to continue forever? No doubt about it, a mighty chorus would thunder back: "Youth!" Ponce de Leon sought the fountain of youth, they say, and what did he find? A land he called Florida, presently graced by a bewilderment of edens--Palm Beach, Miami Beach, and all the minor meccas in between, holy cities for those too sensible now for the rites of spring at Fort Lauderdale and not yet ready for the benches standing row on row in St. Petersburg. Let us take a second look at the charms of youth. For youth does have its charms, but few who have not passed beyond them suffer from the illusion that they would remain charming forever. The deepest desire of youth itself is to get it over with as soon as possible and pass into something it envisages as "maturity"; and no sooner does it accomplish this than it too falls into nostalgia for what has gone forever. Is it indeed possible for youth to escape this dialectic? Or for that matter, can the "mature" now affirm at last that maturity is a stage that is self-sufficient, and which, if it were possible, they would willingly prolong forever? If it is characteristic of youth to see the old world with fresh eyes and enthusiasms, is it possible philosophically to see the world with fresh eyes forever, repeatedly to see things for the first time? Or is not such a dream predicated on a profound loss of memory and therefore of individuality? For indeed living things do experience a second youth when their memory for the recent past is enfeebled by senility and they enter their second childhood.

Or if this seems senseless, perhaps youth might be artificially sustained by a frantic shift of experiences or styles of experience, one succeeding another in rapid succession, each new style consigning the old one to oblivion. Is this not precisely what happens when youth desires to settle into itself for longer than its own nature permits? We now find ourselves in a  [219] world of hard rock, mod clothes, hip talk, and speed, where nothing lasts longer than a weekend at Aspen or a summer on the beach. Here the sense of each thing is exhausted in its first performance. All this is of course fresh and charming for a while, but extended beyond a critical point, it becomes the very image of the boring; it too must be gotten through on the way to the much hated "maturity." Perhaps, then, maturity can at last wish to prolong itself forever, and rest in a settled attitude against its own forthcoming extinction? If youth is characterized through and through by a wonderful, carefree existence-that is, by the spirit of fun-maturity is characterized by taking something seriously at last, by care and caring. What does it care about? First of all, it cares about its young, who are carefree either because they cannot yet take care of themselves or because they are granted a certain vacation from care by the mature before they too must begin to care. And second, the mature care for themselves. Their decisions are no longer made in the domain of games, with only make-believe victories at stake; now one's unique and only life is the prize, and the consequences determine not merely the present, but also the foreseeable future, and even what the past shall come to mean. From the position of care, the carelessness of youth must appear trivial, since it is wholly dependent upon the care of others; and yet could care ever wish to prolong itself forever? Can the sense of care be final to existence, or must not it too long at last for a release from its own burden? If our experiment in imagination has ruled out fatigue, must care not wish, precisely because it cares, to be free at last from care, not as youth is, but only as old age is-an old age, moreover, that also must be supported by the care of the mature?

And old age? It hardly requires much argument to demonstrate that it could hardly wish to perpetuate itself, now with- [220] out care, but with only its previous existence to reflect upon and the blank wall of its future to contemplate. It too finally longs to confront its old enemy, death; to get it all over with at last.

In sum, life has its internal sense only in development. The static perpetuation of any particular phase would render it at once senseless; its sense lies only in the dialectical development of its phases, each with its own value, which itself lies in self cancellation. Without this self-canceling development, a form of spiraling finally into its absolute other, death, the entire career of existence looks senseless. Again we see that death is not simply the absolute enemy, but both an enemy and the absolute condition of meaning for life itself.

We have been looking at some features of youth in general, maturity in general, old age in general; let us take a glance now at the individual man in general, if such a thing can be imagined. There surely is some truth in the common view that we don't know who a man is until we know what he will die for; nor does he know who he is until he knows what he would die for. And he won't know what he would die for until he dies for it. In imagination we are all Walter Mittys; we have rushed the blazing machine-gun nest, have died heroically, and are invisibly present at our own impressive funeral, or we are magically revived to receive our Medal of Honor. Clearly our fancies of ourselves are one thing, the truths of existence another; and this particular fact is in no way obviated by a cynicism that, in trying to avoid heroics or self-inflation, pretends to such a self-deflation that no experience could debase its claims, since it has made none. Nothing is more common in war than utter verbal cynicism among men who later exhibit in their conduct what can only be called heroism. And so there is no escape from what existence itself, and only existence, can disclose: who I am is what I in fact die for--that is, what I [221] choose to die for, even when such a "choice" is not to be un- derstood as a deliberate or reflective weighing of possibilities. If I do die through my choice, my death has the capacity of disclosing who I was, what I stood for unto death. If my death is not chosen, but is accidental, as in an automobile accident, then indeed it has no sense, is accidental to the sense of my life precisely because it was not chosen. And if, to take a less dramatic and more common situation, I go on until a natural and biological extinction comes upon me, then that too discloses the sense of my existence: that I did not find anything I chose to die for, that my life was not challenged by anything in it. When no such challenge has occurred, that too is an accident.

In this light suppose we look at some philosophical martyrs, beginning with Socrates. Who was Socrates? Well, as we all know, he was a Greek who thought about things, and thought about them in such a way as no one else had ever done, so far as we know. But while this is one essential meaning to his life, it is not the only one; he was also a man who, when accused by his own community of "teaching false gods," refused to alter his conviction that rational thought alone could lead to any truth worth having-precisely the conviction his fellow citizens regarded as "devotion to false gods." Socrates was, as we know, offered the opportunity to escape; his friends would have been happy to offer a bribe to the jailer, who would have been happy to accept it and let Socrates go, thus sparing the entire community the shame and  embarrassment of murdering its best citizen. But Socrates refused to live under any such conditions; and so he chose his death, thinking far less of it than of betraying his own gods and living in hypocrisy. And with this choice, Socrates became Socrates, or rather disclosed who he had always been. It would be easy for us now to suggest psychological explanations of the old man's behavior; for he was indeed old, and perhaps was tired of living anyway; or perhaps he had a [222] martyr complex and was enchanted by a vision of the figure he would cut posthumously, in the eyes of others; or, since he was not in fact anything remotely like an atheist and did argue for the immortality of a part of the soul, perhaps he wished too eagerly to taste his own immortality. But all these easy efforts to debunk Socrates presuppose that instead of being the clearest eyed of the Greeks and of men, he was dominated by childish delusions, and far from being a sober man among drunkards, was more confused than the worst of us. Certainly Socrates did not pursue his death or welcome it, but equally certainly he did not fear it; it seems to have been rather a friendly enemy. Only because its sense could be incorporated in his life was he able to stand firm against the demands of his fellow citizens and oppose them unto death. What will a man die for? That tells us an essential thing about the sense of his life; it tells us who he is. Martin Luther at Worms, well aware of the fate of Jan Hus in a similar crisis, could say, "Here I stand, I cannot do otherwise"; and a few years later Thomas More declined his king's enticements and went joking to the headsman's block.

It should be noted also that when a man chooses his death, he is not choosing the same for all mankind; the choice is his death, and its sense remains essentially bound up with his unique and personal life. Socrates did not urge his students to join him in drinking the hemlock if they agreed with him. Aristotle later made a different choice, saying "I will not permit Athens to sin twice against philosophy." Luther did not say, "Here we all stand, we cannot do otherwise," since clearly others could do otherwise and stood elsewhere. And Thomas More did not try to dissuade Reginald Pole from choosing exile, and one can imagine the jokes he would have made if he could have seen Pole later in his cardinal's hat. The sense that emerges from such stands unto death is the unique sense of each unique man's life; it is not a truth that is generalizable, [223] or a truth for all; if it is any truth at all, it is the truth in a unique and unrepeatable life.

Furthermore, it is never an unambiguous disclosure. No sooner are such decisions made than they fall into the public domain, where their real sense becomes a matter of debate, usually to prove that the decisive event is explainable by the psychology of men who are not in the same position-men like us. We have an almost unsuppressible tendency to debunk. And yet the significance of the event does not lie in what it may or may not disclose to us; it lies in what it discloses to the man who has made the choice. It may have the function of at last disclosing to him who he has always been, or who he is here and now. When a man takes such a radical stand, a certain total significance is decided. The stand is irrevocable, it touches the totality of his existence, and it therefore puts other choices in their proper places. If we have certain ambiguities in our existence prior to any such radical choice, if we are never perfectly certain what anything means to us, whether any effort is worth the candle, whether anything we do has any consequences that are unambiguously desirable, then the choice of death clears the air. From having been distracted, dissipated, and ambiguous, each man who makes the decision chooses or decides ultimately and irrevocably what he is to be. Hence the chosen death, whether others know of it or not, touches the choosey in his own self, since no one can die for him, and may serve to disclose to him for the first time exactly where he stands. Hence living in the light of death is not an ill-chosen metaphor, nor does it connote morbidity, nor is it the product of despair, nor is it designed to weaken vitality; in short, existential thinkers are not personally responsible for the importance death may have, let alone for the fact that we all die.

The truth is that if morbidity and decadence are to be found anywhere, they are to be found in the so called healthy atti- [224] tudes, the apparently clear, simple affirmations or denials, which make sharp distinctions between life and death and opt for one or the other: the attitudes of the great optimists and the great pessimists.

Let us look for a moment at the healthy optimist, and see where his dialectic carries him. His meaning can be fixed in the image of a booming baritone proclaiming, "I love life, I want to live!" His simple message is buoyant and appealing, but it conceals tendencies that will lead him to the psychoanalyst's couch if he takes them seriously. For the optimist, the love of life is measured by the hatred and fear of death, which appears to him simply as the opposite of life and nothing more. But the more one presses the simple love of life, the more life, now appearing as the sole value and the sole condition of all value, becomes an absolute to be preserved at all costs. If my sole value is my life, there will be nothing worth dying for. How then can I avoid hypochondria? I must now become the holy guardian of the sole value I have, my own life, and the slightest threat to that value must be dodged or avoided or put off. And since it is obvious that life is never anything but a prolonged victory over its own possible dissolution, when I avoid any threat to life I am no longer a whole living being but am caught in that paralysis which is the fear of losing life. Hence the more intensely I love life and life alone, the more certainly I lose it. I become the nursemaid of my own inva-lidism, an illness that I myself have precipitated by choosing the role of nursemaid.

There is a contrary simple attitude that also has a paradoxical dialectic: that of the great pessimists, who, perceiving that all things die, that death is the end of whatever makes life sweet and gives it meaning, conclude that nothing in life can have value. Since in the eternity of our nothingness our lives are but a moment, and since death will come in any event, why not [225] pursue it now? Why wait, particularly since the time of waiting is always full of frightful pains and inevitable disappointments?

But concealed within this attitude is a most curious presupposition, one that can hardly stand the light of day: the premise that the value of an experience is some function of its duration in time. Weighed against the eternity or infinity of nothingness, no finite portion of life can have any measurable worth, since the ratio between finite quantity and infinity is itself infinite. Hence the sentiment arises that nothing in life can have sense, since no life lasts forever and no part of it lasts very long. But I have just been arguing exactly the contrary-that nothing prolonged infinitely could have value in life. If duration were indeed some measure of value, then death would have it all over life, and every rational living creature would rush to embrace it at once. And so the dialectic of the pessimists reduces them to ascribing to death a ghostly form of life, in order to experience the supposed value of death. The implication is not merely absurd for life; it is also absurd for the sense of death.

By refusing to entertain the paradox of death-in-life, these attitudes of absolute optimism and absolute pessimism both end in a simple affirmation, one of life and the other of death, and either affirmation turns into its opposite. The optimistic and absolute affirmation of life becomes a living death of paralysis by fear; the pessimistic affirmation of death secretly attributes to death a ghostly life in order to experience the value of not experiencing at all. The simple attitudes miss the precise sense that death might have for life, an indispensable element of meaning, which life also gives to death. It is not difficult, I believe, to detect more than a trace of these simplistic attitudes in philosophies of naturalistic vitalism, which can see in death nothing but the ashes of life, its old enemy. They are visible too in philosophies or religions of super- [226] naturalism, which also, in their way, hardly take death seriously; why indeed take it seriously if it is only a point on an ever lasting continuum of life that extends beyond the grave? Death is then not a final termination, and the dead are only sleeping, or have "passed on."

The dialectical relationship between life and death, in which each gives meaning to the other, is preserved in modern times in philosophies of human existence such as that of Hegel and contemporary existentialists, who have preferred to elucidate the paradoxical rather than explain it out of existence. The sense that death can confer upon life is thus decisive. Since I must certainly die, each moment of life is unrepeatable and conclusive. It will not occur again, nor will my life occur again; and therefore each has a unique significance. Popular wisdom grasps the point in the phrase "Don't do what you wouldn't be. caught dead doing," because we shall most certainly be caught dead doing something; and in point of fact, since we are always dying as well as living, we are always being caught dead doing something. Thus, only a life essentially married to death could have the sense ours does. Life might factually be extended forever, but then it would no longer be recognizably ours; it would only be the senseless continuation of an unendurable process.

Now we need only ask ourselves what it can be whose life and death are so inextricably tangled together that either be comes senseless without the other. It obviously cannot be anything whose entire nature is exhausted in its vitality, or anything whose essential significance is sheer death, or nonentity. Could it be anything but the transcendental ego, which is enacting and presiding over the whole affair?