death – GV Loewen

Encountering Finitude

Encountering Finitude (Coming face to face with one’s personal death)

Three weeks ago, I almost died. After five days of inability to eat I went to the hospital at the bidding of my close friend, a nationally recognized lung cancer specialist in the USA. It turned out I had the uncommon and unfriendly ‘Necrotizing Pancreatitis’, and at that point I had but two days to live. That I am writing this now is testament to a combination of luck and solid medical care. But each day remains a subtle Damoclean existence. There is no cure and only management by diet provides some vague guarantor against relapse. That this was the seventh time I had confronted my own personal demise may seem astonishing, but this most recent experience was quite different. Each of the previous times was had in a moment, the subito of evil which Kierkegaard discusses, equally abruptly, in his book on anxiety. Mostly automobile related, one does not have time to reflect upon what is happening. The most interesting was me being taken out to sea on an ebbing tide while exploring coral reefs in Hawaii. Growing up on the ocean, I had enough nautical sense to simply begin to hold on to the corals when the swell slacked, and then I pushed along when it flowed towards the shore. It took about twenty minutes or so but I regained land to see my much-relieved girlfriend taking a picture of me straggling up on the beach.

But in all such cases there is either a place, a time, or an event that can in the future be utterly avoided. It may be reckless driving, a specific intersection or stretch of road, or an activity, like ocean snorkelling on an outgoing tide. But with a health condition, that place is you, inside you, and there is no escape from it. One can learn to ‘manage’ it, but this is at best a practice, like yoga or meditation, and not a return to health from being otherwise. Chronic conditions present to the self a new kind of selfhood. ‘This is what I am now’, one must say to oneself, and further, more profoundly, ‘This is what I will be and will continue to be.’ In the hyletic realm, the space of the world and of the social world, health is paramount. One cannot be anything else without one’s health in hand. Even so, in the interior life, that of a consciousness which includes both conscience and self-consciousness, alterations in the vehicle of being do not fundamentally change Dasein’s elemental orientation. If anything, they heighten its proclivities, make one feel that time is short and that life is, after all, solely for the living.

Yet it is a curious mix: one desires to accomplish this or that, but one is also wary of making plans. There is an instant contradiction between the Pauline feeling of anxious pilgrimage, where the next step may well be one’s last, and the futurity which is one of Dasein’s essential conditions of and for itself. Mediating these conflicting sensibilities is one’s presence in the present. This more pragmatic issue says to us, ‘Until and unless you hear otherwise, carry on more or less as before’. At the end of each day, this is the only thing one can reasonably do, for it is a betrayal of the will to life itself to simply stand and wait for death, while it is a mistaken interpretation of anxiety as fear to be driven to work overtime simply to accomplish some personal goal. Just as chronic illness presents itself as a fait accompli, so one must respond with one’s remaining health and reason by attempting to live, not as if one had remained unchanged, but within the full authenticity of Dasein’s unaltered existential lot. This includes resoluteness, anxiety, being-ahead, and the call to conscience, amongst a few others. And if resolute being seeks to take the fore, like the Jungian warrior who vows to protect one at all costs, one must step back a little at this juncture and remind oneself that life is not what illness says it is; in a word, render unto crisis what is critical alone.

What then does it mean to experience finitude rather than become aware of one’s own finiteness? The latter is measurable, and for human life finds its expression in actuarial tables, suicide rates, life expectancies and mortality rates at birth, usually ‘per 100,000’ or some other such denominator. Humans too have a ‘half-life’, on average, given the presence or absence of what social scientists refer to as ‘life-chance’ variables. These include genetic markers, made manifest in family histories such as my father having the same condition, though misdiagnosed, and my maternal grandmother having the same again, diagnosed correctly. But most life-chance variables are what are commonly called ‘environmental’. Taken in its loosest sense, an environmental variable list would include level of education, family composition and birth order, poverty rate, intensity of community, rural or urban, and so on. Finiteness can never be utterly specified for an individual life, but it can be framed in a manner completely distinct from finitude. Finiteness has both an objective probability to it, as well as a fraudulent personal equivalent, as when we say to ourselves, ‘well, we all have to go sometime’. Heidegger is particularly critical of this use of ‘all’. Who is ‘all’?

Any time we generalize death we are participating in what he calls Uneigenlichkeit, inauthenticity. We do so in order to avoid the intimate confrontation with ‘the death which is mine ownmost’. In fact, we die only our personal deaths, and indeed cannot experience death itself at all. That is, an objective death is beyond our being, and it can only indirectly be understood through the deaths of others coming before our own. Transposing finiteness as if it were an expression of human finitude is one of modernity’s’ great self-frauds. Heidegger makes intimate the confrontation between Dasein’s being-in-the-world as a thrown project and the completion of being in death. Surely, I desire to remain in this sense incomplete for as long as reasonably possible. And just as we cannot experience our own deaths – dying, yes, but this too is a life process and represents also a phase of life, not of death – we can also never understand completed being. Only the Being of the world and of the wider cosmos is of this marque.

Coming face to face with one’s own finitude is a moment wherein the call to conscience can no longer be ignored. For me, I had to come to terms with the looming potential of no longer being, not only not alive, but being at all. My chief concern was for my wife; that she could, would, and should live on and attain a new life without me in it. But I also had to confront the part of conscience which leveled an indictment upon my character. This part literally told me that I deserved to die. This may seem outlandish, but each of us accumulates a litany of litigious libel over the life course. All of the mistakes I have made, all the others I have hurt, all the chances passed by or wasted, all of the time spent doing nothing of merit. For me, it felt like a lengthy list, and if each of us is our own St. Peter – who, we are told, himself knew very well what remorse and regret meant – then we appear before the mysterious limen before being able to pass over its threshold. In such a moment, evaluation comes to the fore and one hopes for a deeper self-understanding through its unfailing interrogation. That objectively one neither deserves nor does not deserve to die is bracketed, not as unmeaning or yet a fraud, as the cowardly use of ‘all’ connotes, but rather as a reminder that the world is itself value-neutral, and that ‘deserves got nothing to do with it’.

Finitude is our authentic existential condition. It is both shared by all and intimately experienced by the self. Because we are historical beings, beings of language and ‘social animals’, my ownmost expression of the zoon politikon reaches back into the world, not for justification any more than for judgment, but rather in the hopes that the perspective of the world, which we are said to love as we love life, will allow us to come to terms with our own mortality. Ideas of legacy through work, of continuance through children, even of memory through the ongoingness of others whom we had known, all come from this worldly perspective. Together they make up our idea of a human future, whether or not I am to be part of it anymore. Joined to this, for many yet, is a second perspective which can legitimately be called otherworldly. This otherness to the world speaks also of a future, but a non-historical one, wherein some version of myself persists and thus exists apart from the purely human ambit. Can it be any more called speculative than its worldly counterpart? Perhaps the less so given the travails of said social world, the evils of its politics and the wider Damocles of its dark technologies and elite desires alike. However this may be, it is clear that on two fronts do we set our faces and step forward toward the unknowable Otherness which is completed being.

It is a sign of ongoing health that we do so. The human imagination, the harbinger of all futures, is coupled with its curiosity, the presage of the present. Not that which Heidegger also includes within his analysis of entanglement, the curiosity that ‘tarries along’ and distracts, but rather that by which we involve ourselves in the world as a child of its own Being. In spite of any fear, or in my case, bad conscience, we remain curious, even about death. Our imagination seeks to frame it, not to make it less potent, but rather to come to know it in some manner, since it already and always seems to know us so well. One is given to say that death has the drop on us, which is a residue, if you will, of the Promethean gift to humanity of hiding from us the precise moment of each of our personal ends. Without this absence of perfect knowing, nothing would be possible; no human project would be begun let alone completed. In this sense, the Promethean trickster in all cultural traditions was a paragon of pragmatism. The apical metaphor is clear: I live on in the face of not living on, and I will continue to do so until or unless I hear otherwise.

G.V. Loewen is the author of 56 books in ethics, education, health, social theory and aesthetics, as well as fiction. He was professor of the interdisciplinary human sciences for over two decades.

The Misplaced Love of the Dead

The Misplaced Love of the Dead

We can be said to have a future as long as we are unaware that we have no future – Gadamer

All those who yet live must accept both the happenstance of their birth and the necessity of their death. Though we are not born to die, but rather to live, living is an experience which is very much in the meanwhile, for the time being, in the interim, even of the moment, pending global context and possible crisis. We neither ask to be born nor do we ask to die, as Gadamer has also reminded us. And beyond this, these are the truer existential conditions which connect us with all other human beings, not only our living contemporaries, but also the twice honoured dead. Birth and death overtake all cultural barriers, and thence undertake to be the furtive guides which travel alongside us during that wondrous but also treacherous intermission between inexistences.

It is a function of the basic will to life that generates both the shadow of ressentiment, especially towards youth, as well as the orison of immortality as an ideal and now, more and more a material goal. Indefinite life, a more modest version of the same will, is nonetheless radical to the species-essential experience of coming to understand human finitude. It is not enough to comprehend finiteness, as with the limits of bodily organicity, including the gradual breakdown of the brain. Because we humans are gifted with the evolutionary Gestalt of a consciousness beyond mere sentience and instinct, forward-looking and running along ahead of itself in spite of knowing its general end, we have to come to grips, and then to terms, with a more subtle wisdom; that of the process of completion.

Dasein is completed in mine ownmost death. Heidegger’s existential phenomenology is clearly also an ethics, and a profound one, and if it is somewhat shy of the conception of the other, as Buber has duly noted, it is not quite fair to say on top of this, that it is also at risk for fraud regarding death, as Schutz declared. Such ‘phoniness’, as reported by Natanson, might be felt only insofar that death is in fact the least of our living worries, especially in the day to day. Poverty, illness, alienation, loneliness, victimization, illiteracy, hunger, all these and others authentically occupy our otiose rounds and do not, in their feared instanciation, immediately prompt us to meditate upon the much vaunted ‘existential anxiety’. Rather they compel us to act in defence of life, our own and perhaps that of others as well. So it is also part of the will to life that we truly fear such umbrous outcomes and it is commonplace to second-guess many of the decisions we thus make in our personal lives with the sole purpose of maintaining an humane equilibrium.

But what if this balancing act breaks apart, even for a moment? For eight young women in Toronto, possessed of only the beginnings of self-understanding and equipped with none of the perspective that only living on for perhaps decades more begrudgingly bequeaths to any of us, the fragile balance of common humanity, the ounce of compassion for every weighty pound of passion, the spiritual eagle who pecks at our conscience rather than our liver, fell away. The result was the death of a much older man, needless and therefore almost evil in its import. No matter the intent, no matter the force, no matter the loyalty nor the rage, neither the desperation nor the anxiety, none of these things can vouchsafe such an act. Even so, for the rest of us, we must be most alert to not feeling so much love for the dead that we forget what the living yet require of us. That one is dead must be recognized as not even tragic, for there was no noble drama being played out. It was rather an absurdity, an intrusion upon not only civility but also upon human reason itself. That eight live on, now to be shipwrecked for a time on a hardpan atoll of their own making, is in fact where the call to conscience next originates.

These young women clearly need our help and guidance if they are to honour the death of the one who was denied the remainder of his own challenging life. This is a far wider point for any who live in the midst of a history which is at once my own but as well so abstracted and distanciated from me that I am regularly compelled to relinquish any direct control over events or even of the knowledge of the human journey emanating from just yesterday, let alone of remote antiquity. I have no doubt that for all eight, real remorse mixed with a sullen distemper is disallowing sleep. For even if ‘the murderer sleeps’, as Whitman reminded us, the character of her sleep is not quite the same as is our own. It is thus the burden which falls upon the rest of us to help the newly-made pariah back into the human fold, for it was her original alienation from that succor which was the root cause of her vacant evil.

In doing so, we must also remind ourselves that on the one hand, such a death could have been my own, but yet more importantly, and on the other, that I too might have killed if I had been in similar circumstances, young and enraged, desperate and anxious, alienated but in utter ignorance of the worldly forces which are the sources of my stunned and stunted condition. And in the meanwhile my wealthy peers attend yet Blytonesque private schools and though they look like me and consume the same popular culture as me and are fetishized alike by adults whose leers I must endure each day, they might as well be of a different species entire. And all the more so now that I have killed.

Would not the parents of the privileged also kill to defend their lots? Would I, speaking now in my real self, not kill to protect my family? What is the threshold of the needless? Where do we make our stand and state with always too much unction that this death was justified and this one was not? Why would someone attack my family? Why would someone offend privilege? Why would eight young women attack an utter stranger? For the living, upon whom our love both depends and is called forth daily, this is the time to ask the deeper questions whose responses shall expose our shared and social contradictions. For the misplaced love of the dead serves ultimately only the self-interest of those who are content with the world of the living insofar as it continues to privilege they and them alone. The misplaced hatred of the others, including these eight young people, serves only as a decoy for our self-hatred and self-doubt, charged with the background radiation which is the simmering knowing that we have strayed so far from our ideals that such dark acts are not only possible but have indeed occurred.

The only way to prevent their recurrence is to work actively for a just society, an ennobled culture, a compassionate individual, a responsible State. Those who need our love in the highest sense of the term are those who have acted in a manner that shows that they are themselves outside of human love. That each of us may descend to such inhumanity must remain the patent frame in which the love we proffer to all those affected by this event is rendered. Do not love the dead, do not hate the living. I will be the one but I am yet the other. I do not stand with the victim for he now stands beyond all human ken. Rather, however uncomfortably and even ironically, I must stand with the criminals, because they are faced with the same challenges as am I myself; to regain each day the highest expression of the will to life in spite of any descent the past has conferred upon us.

G.V. Loewen is the author of fifty-five books in ethics, education, health and social theory. He has worked with alienated youth for three years and for a quarter century before taught thousands of young people through transformative and experiential learning. He was professor of the interdisciplinary human sciences for over two decades in both Canada and the USA. He may be reached at viglion@hotmail.com

On the Fear of ‘Death-in-itself’

On the Fear of ‘Death-in-itself’

Though we remain mortal beings, and though we are, at some level, aware of this most of our lives, we do not tend to dwell upon this existential condition. Life is not only ‘for the living’, as the chestnut runs, it is also true, and by definition, that it is we the living who are charged with living it. Brooding upon its also definite limits, its mortal immortalities, is at the least a distraction from going about the business both at hand and, at least as existentially oriented, planning for a future, no matter how murky may be its details. This said, there is a thread of twentieth century thought that seems to have overtaken this at most pragmatic outlook we bring to the day to day and made it into more of an anti-philosophical credo. I do not think such a supercharging of ‘being practical’ is warranted. I do think that such an issue, however ephemeral or even ethereal it may at first appear to be, is important in that it takes away, or downplays, the authentic condition of human beings who, though we both face and face down a basic finitude, cannot know death ‘in itself’.

Heidegger is well known as speaking of our basic thrownness as ‘being towards death’. The motion of this original existential arc can be understood as ‘running-along’, also towards death. Though this is the common lot, nevertheless we must at last actually face death alone. Our own personal death is what is at stake for Heidegger and his followers, and the deaths of others can only serve as some kind of analogical dress rehearsal for this. The place of the other is to witness for us our own deaths, as I have written elsewhere, and thus we reciprocate this duty, solemn and profound, when we find ourselves living on after this other departs from us.

There seems to be nothing objectionable about this phenomenological view. On the one hand, it acknowledges a simple ‘fact of life’, and on the other, it seeks to interpret this facticality as a ‘facticity’, or an existential and historical experience of selfhood in the world. But how do we experience this facticity? What does it mean to run along towards something which in itself cannot be experienced? Isn’t Heidegger trying to have it both ways, or all ways, or, worse, is he trying to avoid having it any specific way at all; this last by making death so specifically my own that I cannot, once again, by definition, experience it in any meaningful manner while yet alive? Heidegger is also famous for stating that the ‘Nothing’ of this existential anxiety is emblematic of a facticality that rests beyond the usual sense experience of fact and world. Gadamer, for one, pushes this along by declaring that ‘we cannot experience our own deaths,’ once again and at first, seemingly a simple enough description that one would not think offensive in any way.

Even so, given that the twentieth century – the ‘century of death’ as it has become known both historically, aesthetically, politically and existentially – has seen the closest to what we can imagine as the very bottom of the abyss of meaning and the end of everything – a kind of furtive and shadowy companion to our aspirations to observe the Big Bang, perhaps, the ‘creation’ or origin of everything – any writer who casts doubt on our ability to understand mortality might appear to be disdainful of, or at least, indifferent to, this other kind of facticity; the glaring factuality of we humans being quite capable of inflicting the experience of death upon another. Couple this with Heidegger’s brief stint as a Nazi party member for one, and his marginal notebook editorials venting his own personal bigotries against ‘the Jews’, for two, and one might be tempted to imagine that death in general was something with which this writer – still, the most important single thinker of that same century, warts and all – wasn’t all that concerned. I think this is a temptation that we should avoid.

And it is easy enough to do so. Let us begin with the sense that in Heidegger’s ethical phenomenology death is the counterfoil to Care. This is a different sensibility than had his early period influences, if indeed they had one at all. Compare Mahler’s powerful dichotomy of death versus love, for instance, and though we are aware that it takes two to tango, we already danced that other dance back in Wagner. It is this earlier pairing that the real Nazis latched themselves onto, thanks much to Wagner’s own political writings. One can only imagine, aside from anything personal Wagner and Nietzsche may have had against one another – we can only recall they were both in love with the same woman who so happened to be Wagner’s wife – what I tend to think precipitated the ultimate break between them ran more along the lines of Nietzsche critiquing Wagner’s politics, rather than his art or even his love. For Wagner grasped, fairly early on, the retarding effects of strict ethnic identity on general human maturity. He notoriously declared to his many Jewish friends and musicians, that they were ‘perfect human beings’, and all they needed to do was ‘lose their Jewishness’. If this were meant only as a simple example, with no other implications, it is an idea with which Nietzsche, for one, would have certainly agreed. But Wagner made the conception of maturing beyond strict ethnic loyalties, perhaps originally stated with clarity in Vico in 1725, too specific in light of his own political tracts. On top of this, instead of following through on such an emancipatory doctrine, he instead with much of his own art fronted a mostly fraudulent Nordic mythos as the best future answer to the ‘ethnic question’. This is not of mere historical or even ethical interest, as we may be observing a similar sensibility coming of age in China, where to ‘be Chinese’ is considered superior and where other loyalties should be overcome by whatever means. Not that ‘Chineseness’, excuse the term, is any single ethnicity, of course, but since this culture, profound in its historical gravitas and willing to make great sacrifices to attain some kind of global standing worthy of its own history – this is something that we in the West tend to both misunderstand and underestimate – is most definitely on the make, leaving many others in its expanding wake, Wagner’s call to abandon archaic loyalties resonates.

What does all of this have to do with our experience, or lack thereof, of death? What Heidegger is asking of us as individuals is not entirely different from what Vico – or Wagner, in his own clipped and thence disingenuous fashion – asked of us as persons. Gadamer is also well known for stating that one of the crucial elements of mature being is the recognition of one’s own mortality. This generally comes to us, in Western culture, around age twenty-five or so, perhaps earlier or later depending on one’s individuated experiences of life thus far. But this is, to borrow from Stendhal, just the ‘first crystallization’ of this evolving maturity. The second and more important aspect of self-existential recognition is not that ‘I can die’, the post-adolescent sensibility which lasts for perhaps a further quarter century, but rather that ‘I will die’. It is this second level of understanding that transforms what was mere knowledge into a knowing. And it is this knowing that represents to us an experience of what phenomenologists refer to as facticity. Just so, an example of facticality is the first realization that strict ethnic loyalties – putting your group ahead of all others and identifying your very personhood as a ‘kind’ – is a regression, a throwback, and a reactionary stance against the future orientation of both modernity and individuality as Dasein. But to establish this as a facticity is a different, more complex matter. Wagner, needless to say, cannot make this more profound step, though his art remains, as art, firmly ensconced within a realm transcendent to petty loyalties of any kind. Perhaps he as an artist remains the most ironic of the great aesthetic figures precisely because of this disconnect. One can as well certainly think of Bach’s religiosity, or for that matter, Brahms’s atheism, as somehow impediments to not only creative work of the highest order, but also challenges for us as listeners or what-have-you. But these other examples pale beside Wagner, if for only the dark events that later transpired long after his death.

Similarly Heidegger, where what appear to be quite personal feelings might get in the way of fully understanding the works at hand. Nietzsche himself provided the necessary caveat, which should be generalized to any important thinker or writer, artist, composer et al. ‘I am one thing, my books are another’. This is no mere cop-out. In a much smaller fashion, I myself have difficulty imagining ‘someone like me’ having done all of the work I have done thus far. I ask myself, ‘how has this been possible, given the other?’ But just as we as readers and listeners, viewers and lovers need to remind ourselves that great work is not at all enthralled to great personhood – it has been said often enough that only Goethe as a life was worthy of his own great works – the creator themself must remind this very person that their work is only one aspect of existence, and that life is equally, if you will, ‘not for the working’.

If we have so far suggested that there must be a separation between work and life in order for the rest of us to authentically understand the other’s work – after all, we have neither lived their life nor, all the more self-evidently, created their work – this should by now ring another bell for us. What we are born into is also separate from what we must become. This firstness of birth includes ethnicity, gender, lineage, nation, creed and worldview. Vico, though unable to predict with any detail what a species-wide conscious maturity might look like – it was left to Marx and Engels to provide the first response to this, a response that is still a challenge for many of us today to reimagine – was nevertheless correct in pointing out the road towards it. If the twentieth century was the century of death, it was also, perhaps in a more roundabout manner, the century of the individual. And it had, in its chronological infancy, the very best of exemplars as role models for this second characterization: Nietzsche, Freud, Mahler, Schoenberg, Stravinsky, Camille Claudel and Lou Salome, Richard Strauss and Marie Curie, amongst many others. That today we have seen a halting yet growing return to larger forms of being which are backward-looking truly represents a regression in human maturity. The way in which we often view recent history, allowing ourselves to be tempted by that other siren, the idea that the great individual is foremost a transhistorical menace – ‘Hitler’s war’ and not a war of competing nations and ideologies, most grossly – travels concomitantly alongside the sense that we are somehow better off as part of a strictly sanctioned and bounded group, with all others as, at best, allies with similar goals. This constitutes the gravest threat to the human future we have yet devised, precisely because it combines the ancient bigotry of identifying ‘we’ as human and ‘they’ as other and possibly non-human with our hyper-modern technologies of self-destruction. This combination of ancient and modern was precisely the same dark alchemy that the Nazis effected in their military operations and their purges, their sense of both gender roles and public loyalties. Perhaps the two are related even more intimately, as tools and politics alike have always been developed in the face of the need to survive in an anonymous and sometimes dangerous world.

Today, however, there is no such world. What I mean by this seemingly odd statement is that we have moved, fully and bodily, from a world of autochthonous Nature to a world of culture. ‘Nature’ in its very conception is now wholly cultural in both its import and its origins. We, as humans, have no ‘natural enemies’, to put it ethologically. That we have so far failed in the main to understand that our only enemy is ourselves and not some murky ‘otherness’ whose ethnicity or credo might differ from our own in some equally petty manner speaks to that same general regression in maturity to which we have above alluded. We highlight the Taliban as a danger or yet even castigate the Evangelical as at the very least a reactionary, but some of this is certainly a mere and transparent projection. As well, today there are ‘good’ ethnicities, such as those with Jewish background – horribly ironic and perhaps a façade for something else given how these particular humans who have very much ‘value-added’ to our shared and wider culture have been treated historically – and ‘bad’ ones, unnamed here. All of this makes one both suspect and a suspect; one becomes suspicious of oneself.

Rightly so, given that both death and personhood have taken center stage at the same time and in the same place. Perhaps, if we are to credit all human acts as having their basis in a basic will to life, those who desire regression into enclave identities, whether based on sexuality, gender, ethnicity, or still, most glaringly and most evilly, wealth, are striving for mere survival in the twilight of knowing that to be a singular being is to accept death as personal. This is what I think lies at the heart of the matter: we are anxious to avoid the radical personalization of death. No compassionate being would disdain such an anxiety, and Heidegger himself often calls attention to it at least as a general state. It is the corresponding inner turmoil of what he refers to as ‘entanglement’. Its function, as it were, is to provide some insulation against the horror of Nothing, which for human consciousness, is unimaginable. This is reflected in art, for instance, at least since the Greek ceramic period where the ‘horror vacui’ was seen by art historians as driving creativity. Yet Eastern world-systems have had much less difficulty imagining this Nothing, and some aspects thereof actually strive to experience it both in life and as a kind of blissful afterlife. So once again what we are observing is an effect of insularity, of taking one’s own beliefs to be what must be for all. In this way, all of us, for shame and again, are evangelicals.

Instead, Heidegger specifically, and ethical-ontological phenomenology more broadly, is asking us to consider taking up the authentic challenge of thrownness. Perhaps it is a little hyperbolic to envisage ourselves as ‘running along’ towards death, or even that our primary orientation in life is to be present as Care – Sorgeheit – in the face of death, but even so, it is also quite incorrect to give a cold disdainful shoulder to this sensibility, as, for instance, do both Schutz and Heller. Nor can this reaction be put down to the fact that many thinkers of Jewish backgrounds have been critical of Heidegger along these lines and others. Schutz, who died in 1959, was no ideologue and remains the greatest social phenomenologist in the history of thought. He was also a student of Heidegger, and the fact that Natanson reports that Schutz told him that he thought Heidegger’s analysis of death to be ‘perfectly phony’ should not imply anything other than a criticism directed at the possibility that phenomenology as a whole has overdone the ‘existential anxiety’, and this mainly thanks not so much to Heidegger but rather to Kierkegaard before him. This orientation, opposed to but also part of the very Care we bring to life and that we embody as Dasein, could also be impugned with an impracticality to the point of decoying one away from the matters of an equally authentic existence in the day to day, as does Agnes Heller charge. Though she reports that she came to Schutz only after completing her seminal work, Everyday Life, she states that her work is unequivocally ‘anti-Heideggerean’, and that only certain ‘twentieth century intellectuals’ worry about death as an existential or fundamental anxiety, which in turn, considering this supposedly disconnected source, casts aspersion on whether or not this should even be a concern for us. Yet Heller, herself a superior intellectual, could have no possible business courting the kind of anti-intellectualism her apparent stance would entail. So what, in reality, is at stake here?

Just as the existential anxiety is lensed through mundane life, taking up an enormous variety of forms from addiction to reactionary and archaic group loyalty, so we should come to recognize more authentically the dynamic between the harsh sentence of mortality and equally firm demand that life is for the living. We are told, in Promethean fashion, that we cannot have one without the other. Aside from fire, Prometheus’s more profound gift to humanity was hiding from us the moment of our own deaths. In this ironic ignorance, all things thence became possible. If our Godhead is fleeting, if our freedom is limited, if our consciousness is historical, if our Dasein is care, then so too is our divinity keenly curious, our liberty loving, our imagination unbound, and our very being also a taking care. And if this last entails itself as caring for both ourselves and others, the everyday by way of life and the transcendental by way of art, then at once we are freed from both the suspicion of self-limiting apparatus and the very desire to limit ourselves by reactionary means. This is the deeper instruction that phenomenology bequeaths to us, and it is with this that I would recommend coming to terms, for it represences with the utmost gravity the fundamental maturity authentic human consciousness has in fact become. That this becoming, for the first time in history, entails of each of us the radical acceptance of our own personal death, should not be understood as also being that other death which would, in its current regression and its contemporary reaction, eclipse us all.

G.V. Loewen is the author of over forty books in ethics, aesthetics, education, health and social theory as well as more recently, metaphysical adventure fiction. He was professor of the interdisciplinary human sciences for over two decades.

Closer to our Hearts: In Memoriam: Neil Peart

Consummate musician, insightful lyricist, concernful being; Neil Peart (1952-2020).

Closer to our hearts: In memoriam; Neil Peart

“No his mind is not for rent

To any god or government.

Always hopeful yet discontent,

He knows no changes are permanent.

But change IS.” (1981).

Almost thirty years ago I travelled from Victoria to Kingston to give my first professional scholarly paper. I was nervous, not so much about the event itself but about the journey. I travelled alone, leaving my partner at home, meeting up with a childhood friend in Toronto, staying with him, and then being driven up the 401 the next day, some four hours plus, to Queen’s University campus. This once close friend of mine was a drummer, a jazz guy, for whom Tony Williams, Billy Cobham and Jack DeJohnette were the gods. Neil Peart had always received a tepid response from him. ‘He can’t swing’ was it in a nutshell, something even John Bonham was said to be able to do. For my friend, ‘swing’ was not meant to refer to the popular music of my parent’s era, but something to do with feeling, drive, vibe, and the throbbing character of the human heart. Needless to say, I couldn’t tell either way, being merely a guitarist. But by this time, long after high school graduation, music itself had faded into the background of my own life. I was an aspiring academic, about to present in front of an international audience for the first time. And the paper that had given me access to this elite world was a paper about Neil Peart.

I called it, somewhat pompously, ‘An hermeneutics of the heart: Neil Peart as poet and philosopher’. It went over well enough but not without some raised eyebrows. It was an inauspicious start to a truncated career which morphed from teaching into writing. Now, in attempting to do both at once, I feel a closer kinship with all popular writers who have something to say. Neil Peart was one such writer, teaching about feeling, using the head to communicate the heart. Though doubtless a consummate musician, my connection with Peart came through his often insightful, sometimes profound, lyricism. It was ten years before my journey that I first came into contact with Rush, as did many of my generation. It was 1981 and I was fifteen years old. I had just seen my family implode, never to recover. I had just lost my first girlfriend, a woman for whom I still have feeling. Though the music was different, I was able to first connect because I had heard that the trio were staunch fans of the UK progressive rock innovators Yes. When, in 2018, Yes were inducted into the hall of fame, it was Lee and Lifeson who did the honours. At the time, I too was a dyed-in-the-wool Yes fan. But Jon Anderson’s lyrics were of the mystical variety; Yeats-like, abstruse, and high-flown. Peart’s verse was punchy, epigrammatic, political, critical. It didn’t take long for me to become a follower. I never collected every LP, but I had everything from the 1980s and somewhat beyond. Decades later I returned to Rush through the DVD concert fashion and indeed, my wife and I own every concert and major documentary yet produced.

I am not much of a musician anymore. Though music is part of my being, my soul, I was trained in the classical world, and popular music was always at some slight distance from me. But as a writer, as a public critic, as a thinker, Neil Peart as a writer came to mean a great deal to me over the years. Engaging, witty, clever in the good way, sometimes sardonic, but with an unexpected detail that bordered on the ethnographic, Peart’s memoirs nonetheless would appeal more to a world traveller in the strictest sense, something I am very much not. His intimate effort concerning his own tragic losses was frustrating if poignant, groping if also gripping, and ultimately a failure. Not due to his efforts or his prose, but because all such efforts must, in the end, fail. We do not overcome such losses as these, we rather find substitutions, replacements. And what we find is loved perhaps all the more. For me, knowing only what everyone else knows about the man, the greatest tragedy is that he never saw either of his children grow up.

On the same road as my drummer friend and I travelled in 1991, some six years later, his first daughter was killed in a vehicle accident at all of age nineteen. His surviving daughter is around fourteen or so. Not yet being a parent, I yet wince at this more than anything else. Peart himself must have lived a full life, not so much in years, but in his own experiences. To die in our time at his age is to die young. To die from such an illness is to die horribly, lingering, knowing that living on could not be altered in its tenor, understanding that what ‘change is’, is now this and only this. Death is the completion of our being. We cannot experience our own deaths, only those of others. This is, perhaps, the most profound purpose of the other in our own lives. She is the one who will experience our death for us, as we would do for her, come what may. We are all dimly aware of this dynamic, but the writer lives within its manifold throughout the time he lives at all. Seldom did a memorable Rush song appear that did not address itself to this core aspect of human self-understanding.

And it was only through his verse that Peart publicly revealed himself to be the deeply concernful human being that he must have been. Awkward, even diffident in interview, distanciated, even dispassionate in his travel writing, Peart retained an enigmatic ambience. Simple shyness was the most likely explanation, and he was hardly the only music celebrity that evinced such a retiring stance. The humanity of any one of us comes forth most palpably through our works, and not from ourselves. Of whatever they may consist, our works are what connects us to the world at large, what survives us and what adds, however nominally, to the collective works of human consciousness. The casual phrase that nods its head to this relationship is ‘leaving the world a better place’. Neil Peart cared deeply about the world and those within it. Never having met the man, I can still know this without any uncertainty because of what he wrote about, how he wrote it, and how it was performed. Peart spoke of ‘passion and precision’, but I also hear, whenever I listen to Rush, dignity and clarity, integrity and most importantly, compassion. In short, concernfulness – Sorgeheit – a caring that emanates from our very being, the Dasein which we are.

Knowing about his epic bicycling, and seeing various footage of it in documentary form, my wife and I imagined we encountered Neil Peart no less than thrice. Once, along the Katy Trail in central Missouri. The fellow blew by us going the opposite direction without even a nod. I said ‘hey, that guy looked like Neil Peart, huh?’ My wife laughed and said, ‘for sure’. Aside from his actual features, his upright, rather Victorian posture, his unassuming equipment and his torrid pace all reminded me of the man himself. Then along the Dallas Rd. waterfront in my hometown, the same figure, the same kind of bike, tearing along in a world of his own. Rush were playing Vancouver the next day. Finally, years later, in our neighborhood in Saskatoon. This time there was a moment of contact, wherein I smiled and simply waved at the person. He raised his brows at me and took off, increasing his already allegro non troppo up the metronome. Whether any of these was the man himself I will never know. Indeed, I had forgotten all about these moments until yesterday evening.

That is, after I finished weeping at the sudden and fatal news. This too surprised me. I didn’t know the man, had never met him, and was never such a fan as to follow concert tours or their websites and certainly not any of the more personal news about any of them. The Sam Dunn documentary was tributary but also a little forced. ‘Time Stand Still’, appearing when I myself decided to call it quits as a professional, made a much deeper impact on me. In it, Geddy Lee described the fact of ending Rush as ‘feeling like a death’. Just so, that is precisely what it feels like. To do one thing your entire life, to have sacrificed more or less everything to it, and then to stop doing it and yet also commit to living on, this is one essential way we ‘die many times’, as Nietzsche suggests, with only the faintest hope of ‘becoming immortal’. From my own perspective, Peart’s passing strikes a somber chord given how little time he had to live after retiring from public life. On his behalf then, the rest of us are left to seize the day. From 1991:

“Time is a gypsy caravan, steals away in the night,

Leaving you stranded in dreamland.

Distance is a long range filter.

Memory a flickering light, left behind in the heartland.”

I will remember Neil Peart as a contemporary, a ‘fellow-man’ as Schutz has it. Someone who experienced much of the same world as have I, who understood much of it and was able to communicate this understanding in a powerful manner. I will remember Peart as a writer and as a critic before even he as a musician and an entertainer. As a clever poet and a lay philosopher, as providing the words to a soundtrack of insights and editorials and inspirations. Rush itself as a sound is the quintessentially modernist band, all glass, concrete and steel. But it is within the lyrics that one finds a wider compendium of the human ages; the wonder at the cosmos, the cosmic comedy and tragedy alike that we inevitably center round our small planet and even smaller selves. And finally, as with all good writers, one finds oneself, somehow, right in there with the rest of it. It is in this way that humanity, being bereft of final knowledge of its soul, brings itself closer to its heart.

Social philosopher G.V. Loewen is the author of over thirty-five books in ethics, education, aesthetics, and social theory as well as more recently, metaphysical adventure fiction. He was professor in the interdisciplinary human sciences for over two decades.