The Mystery of Death. Ladislaus Boros

be regarded as something non-temporal, i.e. outside time, the passing and what occurs in the passing are temporal. Because of this, the moment of death offers an opportunity for decision. If the transition in death was not non-temporal, the two moments of before and after could not merge into each other, bringing about a compound and—for that very reason—temporal reality. One suspects that there is another problem at the root of this first counter-argument, and we shall answer this at length when dealing with the next objection, since it gives us the possibility of formulating still more clearly the concept of the “moment of death”.

      Secondly: “The hypothesis of a final decision compresses a number of mental acts into one single moment: the act of completely personal decision; preceding this decision in time, an absolutely personal act of perception; conditioning this perception, an awakening of the soul to its spirituality; and so forth. To be able to pose all these acts, the mind requires some length of time, however short. A single moment is not enough.” This objection touches on the problem of temporality. To grasp this in its essentials is one of the hardest tasks in philosophy. Our answer is that the difficulty in question arises from a confusion between the different levels of temporality. The proof can be summarized as follows.

      Our experience of time is founded on an observed movement of being. This occurs on different levels, according to the successive stages of being. The first stage in its totality may be called “the sub-personal time-level”. At this level we observe a regular, uniform succession, splitting our world into innumerable flashes of existence, each one of which destroys our world and then re-creates it. Things emerge into being only for a moment and at once disappear into non-being. In other words, the world of our experience arises out of the hidden depths of being as successive moment succeeds to moment.

      The second stage in the movement of being is that of our own inner, personal sense of time. At this level the successive moments no longer pass uniformly. Our personal duration takes on different forms: impetuous speed, gradual advance, indolent dawdling. His personal duration is something proper to each individual; it characterizes his mode of existence. Decisions of profound significance compress time and turn it into a kind of thick black line. Superficial decisions, on the other hand, register as mere specks in the course of our existence. We observe the difference in moments of existence when we compare our personal duration with the uniform movement of being on the sub-personal time-level. Strictly speaking the progression of personal reality ought to be measured only by this reality itself. The practical necessities of social life compel us, however, to direct our individual (i.e. intensive) movement of being in accordance with a uniform and sub-personal (i.e. extensive) progression which is independent of us. Furthermore, the sub-personal movement of being is not fundamentally alien to our existence: we are deeply plunged into the sub-personal stream of being and are constantly carried along with it. This is why we are unable to realize our own total content of being, otherwise than in partial acts, in acts dissected into different incomplete functions. Our experience is a double one: on the one side, we have an inkling of what purely spiritual duration could be; on the other, we are unable to free ourselves from the segmented succession of a subpersonal movement of being.

      It is different at the third stage, to which the soul belongs as it parts from the body and becomes fully awake to its own spirituality. In death the spiritual movement of being is liberated from the alien element of non-personal temporality. The spirit’s succession now becomes entirely interior, that is, determined solely by the succession inherent in its exercise of its own being. This occurs in a total awareness and presence of being, and not in mere flashes that reach us only fragmentarily. Thus the spirit is no longer swept along by an alien succession. It is able to realize fully the whole continuity of its being, all at once, in one and the same act.

      We cannot give complete expression to this spiritual process in our own concepts because these are formed on the second timelevel. We speak of “partial realizations”, of “single acts”, each one of which must be actualized and de-actualized individually before a new act can be posed. We speak of the “continuous succession” of different functions, although we know that on the level of spiritual duration self-realization takes place in one single act, that is, in a total awareness and presence of being. Thus, although in death there is but one single act in the completely personal exercise of being, we can grasp the completeness of this single act only by describing it as a concentration of several spiritual acts, as if in death the spirit achieved its self-realization in separate acts, succeeding one another in time. This inexactitude of our language must be constantly borne in mind when we speak of the process of death; otherwise we make unnecessary difficulties for ourselves where, in fact, none exists.

3. DEATH AS A FUNDAMENTAL MODALITY OF LIVING, CONCRETE EXISTENCE

      After this preliminary discussion of the concept “moment of death” we ask the crucial question: How can we make any statement at all about this moment? At the very beginning of this methodological introduction we referred to a difficulty that is inherent in the subject: philosophical reflexions on death seem to have no point since we have no direct experience of death. Modern philosophy has gone far towards answering this question. Martin Heidegger, in his book Being and Time, expressed himself very clearly on this point.⁷ According to him, death is a fundamental modality of living, concrete existence. Our existence carries death within itself, and not only—or, at least, not primarily—because we can in reality die at any moment. Any given existence may be defined as a dedication to, an immersion in death, not only because it is on its way to meet death, but more truly essentially because it constantly realizes in itself the “situation” of death. This presence of death is so fundamental to existence that not one of its stirrings can be understood otherwise than in the light of a constitutive ordering towards death. In every act of existence death is present from the beginning. Its own end belongs of right to every existent being as an outstanding debt, a perfectio debita. The expression indicates some thing that is proper to a being, but which it does not yet possess. For example, an unripe fruit develops towards ripeness; it, and no other, brings itself to ripeness, and this characterizes its existence as a fruit. This “not yet” is comprised in its own existence, and attains expression in “ripeness”. True, the presence of death in human existence cannot be grasped from this example without some qualification. It is much more intensive, more truly essential, more pervasive. Heidegger himself supplements the comparison in important respects.⁸

      These analyses of Heidegger’s seem to hark back to Augustinian thought. In his portrayal of man Augustine certainly makes of “dedication to death” an intrinsic determining factor of human existence. Man is, in fact, dying as long as he exists. “As doctors, when they examine the state of a patient and recognize that death is at hand, pronounce: ‘He is dying, he will not recover’, so we must say from the moment a man is born: ‘He will not recover’”⁹ Perhaps this remark again could be understood in the sense of a continual “threat” to existence by death, but Augustine’s real thought—and in it he expresses too the essence of Heidegger’s thought—may be seen in a complementary remark: “If each one of us begins to die—that is, to be in death—from the moment when death—that is, the ebb of life—began to work in him, then we must say we are in death from the moment we began to be in this body.”¹⁰

      This is an important point to make. Death has been introduced into the structure of living, concrete existence, and a path leading to a philosophy of death has in principle been opened up. For, when the figure of death makes its appearance in living existence, the philosopher is able to lay hold of death itself at the place where the various pointers to death with which existence furnishes him, intersect. To use another image: the philosopher’s task is to discern the presence of death in an existence while it is still alive, and put together the picture of death from the mosaic fragments of so many scattered experiences of death. But how are we to obtain these pointers to death? How can death be discerned in our existence?

4. THE WORKINGS OF THE DEATH-PROCESS REVEALED BY THE TRANSCENDENTAL METHOD

      If death really is a fundamental modality of living, concrete existence, then, in any given existence, it must always and everywhere be present; but what is always and everywhere present is not perceived. We take as little notice of it as we do of the beating of our heart, or of the air we breathe. It