The Mystery of Death. Ladislaus Boros

to it that our eyes no longer see it. What is closest to us is often farthest away. That is why we are never consciously and explicitly aware of death as a basic cause of the movements that occur in our mental activity. Death is the unreflexive, uncoordinated factor in our existence, one of those primitive metaphysical data that precede immediate experience. Human existence is lived out on different levels. It builds up from within, from an inner nucleus which ever eludes our grasp. It is, however, possible for philosophy to isolate and lay bare this thing in us which is constantly rising to the surface but is never actually grasped. This can be done by the transcendental method, that is to say, by an investigation of the acts of consciousness in order to find out just what implications they convey.¹¹ In other words, the transcendental method is the way that discloses how, in our acts, there is always being effected at the same time an accompanying process of penetration into the sphere of what gives birth to them, something welling up out of the depths of our human being.

      Some historical examples will show us how this method has been used. Plato directed his efforts to revealing the absolute contained in every experience. He had recognized intuitively that there is in us a primitive knowledge which is not obtained from experience, but precedes and conditions experience. He called these primitive data “ideas”. Therefore, in working out his theory of ideas, Plato was actually using a philosophy based on the transcendental method. St Augustine dealt with the same basic problem. In every act of concrete existence he decried something transcendent that constantly eludes the grasp of our thought. He called this “the realm of eternal truths”, and held that man unconsciously gains possession of it in every act of knowing, and that its presence, though realized only in an unconscious manner, floods the spirit with “light”. His theory of “eternal truths” and “illumination”, and hence his transcendental method, influenced both early and later Scholasticism. There is no doubt that the method is present in St Thomas Aquinas and that it played a decisive part in his teaching about the apriority of our knowledge. In the later developments of Scholasticism it was more and more concealed by a preponderance of Aristotelianism until it disappeared almost completely. Kant discovered it afresh and used it in his Critique of Pure Reason to re-establish the connexion between our empirical knowledge and its a priori foundations. In German idealist philosophy, in Fichte, Schelling and Hegel, the transcendental method attained a perfection which, until then, had not been thought possible. Vast areas of the activity of human consciousness were studied with its help, so as to reveal the a priori data which are contained in them, providing them with both a foundation and norms. In twentieth-century philosophy the transcendental method has been recognized as the appropriate instrument and process of metaphysical thought. Husserl’s “reductions” and Heidegger’s “expositions” bear witness to the effectiveness of this method. With Maréchal it provided a new foundation for metaphysics—in the immediate, it is true, for epistemology alone—and it has made a decisive contribution to the development of a completely new atmosphere in Scholastic thought. Perhaps the most important representative of the transcendental method is Blondel. His system is a veritable ordnance survey of the regions of the human person right up to their extreme limits, and a bringing to light (i.e. conscious perception) of what in its deepest reality the person had always been and willed. He has described his method as follows: “The method we must use … may be called a method of ‘implication’ and ‘explicitation’. These expressions simply mean that, instead of running away, as it were, from the data of reality and from concrete thoughts, we have to bring to light what they envelop, what they, in the etymological meaning of the word, suppose; what makes them possible and gives them their consistency.” “Implication means the discovery of what is, indeed, present but not adverted to, not yet expressly recognized or formulated.”¹²

      All these achievements of thought, as varied, even as contrary to one another as they may be, are related in one respect: the basis for all of them is the conviction that man, although he is in the world and, therefore, primarily not in his right place, at ease with himself, yet goes out to encounter the world from a spiritual depth that reaches further than any leadline can plumb. Into every act of his encounter with the world there enters, imperceptibly, an element from out of the unfathomable. In the view we are examining, man’s fundamental metaphysical constitution lies in the fact that, while he draws his life from an incomparable abundance of spiritual wealth, he is yet condemned ever to deal with a superficial and fragmentary world. From this original experience, from the perception of the fact that man is, in each of his acts, more than the single act itself, grew the transcendental method. We shall have to make use of it if we wish to get beyond the merely superficial interrelations of our conscious activities and discover, at their roots, the fact of our dedication to death, which is their condition and reason. Discovering this dedication to death we shall also grasp the essential nature of man’s death.

5. STARTING-POINT FOR THE PHILOSOPHICAL ANALYSIS OF DEATH

      Death is present in the whole structure of existence; therefore, any spontaneous activity of existence we may like to choose can be taken as the start of a philosophical analysis of death. There is, however, one act of existence which would seem to be peculiarly suited to this purpose, and that is the experience which philosophers since Plato have pointed out as the basic act of the philosopher, namely “wonder”. This is an experience it is difficult to define. In it our existence is transplanted from its everyday experience and snatched away to the exalted realm of being. It can assume different forms. Buddha felt deeply the suffering of the world, and this set him off on a train of wondering reflexion. We are told of this young prince that he got up one day and “went forth into homelessness”. His action is a symbol of the initial philosophical shock.

      Augustine learnt of the death of a friend in a way which placed him with shattering suddenness before the ultimate questions of existence. “In the years when I first began teaching in my native town, I found, thanks to our common interest in learning, a true friend of the same age as myself and, like me, in the full vigour of youth. He had grown up with me from childhood; we had both gone to the same school, and played the same games. This friendship was very close indeed, ripened in the warmth of a like mutual affection.” One day, however, death carried off this friend, and the emptiness left by his loss, opened up for Augustine the road to philosophy. “My heart grew dark for grief and pain, and everything I saw turned into an image of death. Even my native town became a torment, my parents’ house an unbearable agony. Everywhere my eyes sought him out, nowhere did they find him, and all things seemed hateful to me, for they were not my friend. I became for myself a great riddle.”¹³

      It was by a mystical experience of which he informs us in his Mémorial that Pascal was summoned to the ultimate loneliness of wonderment, a solitary struggle, the violence of which is attested by those fragments of thought we call the Pensées. The ways and possibilities of making the ascent to philosophical wonderment are varied in the extreme. Once in a lifetime each of us reaches a point where solitude begins to grow and the daily world of experience vanishes into an uncanny remoteness. This is when the process leading to philosophical maturity begins, and it requires a good measure of mental courage if one is going to shoulder this transformation of the hitherto familiar world into one that is remote and uncanny, and to see precisely in this transformation the invitation made us by being.

      What is the structure of this basic act of philosophy? Socrates’ dialectic gives us a first indication. It shows us that there is, in philosophical wonderment, a twofold form of experience: Socrates evokes “wonder” in his partner by continually revealing that the apparently known is, in fact, unknown, only to go on from there and demonstrate that the unknown is, in reality, something long since known. This twofold element in the initial philosophical experience remains as a constant in all subsequent reflexion. Accordingly, philosophizing appears to be the mere re-enactment in all its dimensions of the basic act of philosophy. In every philosophical act of knowing the mind is catapulted out of its familiar world to the “unfamiliar” horizon of being. In the same moment, however, the knowing subject is directed back to the things of sense, but these meanwhile have become “unfamiliar”, precisely because of the return of thought from its adventure with being. The tension between the being drawn away (i.e. the ecstasis of thought towards the infinite—which is what wisdom really is) and the being thrown back (i.e. the conversion to the contingent, which is the essence