The Death of Ivan Ilyich or being-toward-death

 The book of enigmas

Being and Time (Sein und Zeit, 1927) is an enigmatic book. It was written in a rush; Martin Heidegger had not published much since 1916 and his academic career was somehow stagnating. When it came out, however, the book became an instant classic. It has had such an overwhelming influence on subsequent philosophers, that, as George Steiner put it, “there is, in the history of Western thought, no other work like Sein und Zeit” (Steiner 1980: 76). Like most classics, the book is as unread as it is famous. That it was written in a rush and had tremendous success does not mean that the book is an easy read, should anyone want to give it a try. On the contrary, Sein und Zeit—at least in parts—is one of the most difficult books of philosophy ever devised; for many readers it takes longer to read it than it took Heidegger to write it. Certainly, the book’s lasting success over the decades is another of its many enigmas.

Intermezzo (where the philosopher turns out to be a master of disguise)

Heidegger’s peculiar use of language—not only in Sein und Zeit, but throughout his work—has given him the reputation of being, at once, one of the worst philosophers who have ever put pen to paper (if you listen to his detractors) and one of the greatest masters of the German language (if you believe his admirers). His language does not simply happen to be difficult, it is deliberately so. Indeed, an important objective of his philosophical project was to re-invent philosophical language itself. For Heidegger, Western philosophy has been in a serious crisis for almost as long as it has been in existence. “Almost” because there was a time, before Socrates and Plato, when philosophy flourished: the pre-Socratic period. Whereas for most philosophers Western thought begins with Socrates and Plato, for Heidegger it ends there. Heidegger has a name for this disease: Seinsvergessenheit (“forgetting of Being”). Starting with Plato, philosophers have lost themselves in the multiplicity of particular entities (Seiende), forgetting to pay attention to that which makes all of them what they are: Being as such (Sein).11Since Being entertains a special relation with language,12the “forgetting of Being” manifests itself in the degeneration of philosophical language itself. Philosophers, Heidegger believes, cannot find answers to their questions because they don’t know how to ask them. A new philosophical language is needed. “New” is not exactly the right term: for what Heidegger is really after is a recovery of a primordial linguistic layer, the innocent state in which language was before being corrupted by philosophers. To unearth this supposedly uncorrupted layer, Heidegger uses the etymological method.13Heidegger is a violent writer. Not in the sense of using “violent language,” but in the subtler one of doing violence to language, as though to “bring some sense” into it. A text by Heidegger looks more like a torture chamber than a piece of writing: you come across words that have been butchered (a beheaded noun here, an eviscerated verb there), and sentences mercilessly tortured to death. It is as if his plan is to put the words to some test of resistance, to find out where their “breaking point” is. David E. Cooper recounts a typical scene of linguistic butchery in Heidegger: “Nouns become verbs, and vice-versa; new words are coined; old ones are used in unfamiliar senses, and then assembled together into such concoctions as ‘Being-already-alongside-the-world.’” (Cooper 1996: 5–6)14Some of Sein und Zeit’s central concepts are born in this painful fashion—for example, “readiness-to-hand,” and “presentness-at-hand.” Although they sound rather abstract, both concepts are rooted into something as concrete as the human hand (Hand in German, as well). The language of the hand, again, proves crucial for understanding the life of the mind. To make sense of something is to “grasp” it. You understand what is going on when you have a good “hold” on things. Someone is said to be smart when she knows how to “handle” a situation. Heidegger makes the most of this insight and places the hand at the center of his philosophical anthropology. He divides that which we come across according to how the hand encounters it: first, as something concrete, in a process of “concernful dealing” with the world around, in which case things are “directed” toward the hand so that it can actually “catch” them (“Readiness-to-hand” / Zuhandenheit, he calls it) or, second, as objects of theoretical knowledge, situated, vaguely, somewhere “in front of” the hand (which he calls “Presentness-at-hand” / Vorhandenheit). Heidegger seizes an ordinary word, places it in isolation, presses it harder and harder, and “handles” it as if in some interrogation room until the poor thing has to spill out all its secrets.The reason for such a peculiar use of language, he suggests, is the need to change the way philosophers ask questions, but there could be other reasons as well, which might account for deliberate philosophical obscurity more generally. For there has always been a class of philosophers who, when making their arguments, use veiled pronouncements, half-uttered statements, and difficult terminology. It is as though for these people to communicate is to build a thick wall of words between what goes on in their minds and their audience.15There is a double movement in this rhetoric of concealment. The philosopher wants to give something out—she seems to extend a hand. Clearly, she means to say something, to be heard out, otherwise she would not have published anything. She is on the lookout for an audience, maybe even a following. When it comes to saying it, however, she does so in such a manner that the audience is left perplexed. Through the peculiar rhetoric she employs, her delivery puzzles rather than enlightens. The hand, which initially seemed to promise to offer something, now only wants to push you away.The situation is replicated by a similar pattern we encounterin the history of religion. In some Christian monastic orders,when someone wanted to become a monk he was firstunkindly turned away; often stones were thrown at him. Ifhe insisted, he was left to wait. After a while,if he was still there, he was reluctantly let in,yet again treated harshly. Elsewhere—in Zen Buddhism, for instance—when someonewanted to become the disciple of a sought-after master, hewas first asked to perform humiliating jobs, or even meaninglessacts (such as filling a bottomless barrel). Such practices arenot empty ritual, but serious gestures meant to test thedetermination of the novice. They operate as a screening deviceand make admission both competitive and meaningful.Just as a Zen master ritually subjects candidates for discipleship to excruciating pains, so Heidegger greets his readers with tests and ordeals. Granted, he does not throw stones at them like the ancient fathers, but something just as heavy. Sentences like this: “Whenever Dasein is, it is a Fact; and the factuality of such a Fact is what we shall call Dasein’s ‘facticity’.” (Heidegger 2000: 82) It is as though, to make sure that he does not end up hooked with the wrong kind of readers, he keeps everybody out. Those easily disheartened will soon go away, but they are no loss. Those genuinely interested will find their way in somehow. The few who, after having faced the refined torture and syntactical ordeals of Heidegger’s German, will be found still standing will have passed the test. They are the bravest: they have wrestled with the torturer’s writing until it started to give in, and kept hammering their way into the text until they faced no resistance.16Being toward death

What is Being and Time about exactly? The title almost says it all: being is (to be related to) time. The opening page of Heidegger’s book states its purpose: “Our … aim is the Interpretation of time as the possible horizon for any understanding whatsoever of Being.” What Heidegger seeks to do is to ask “the question of Being” (Seinsfrage)—that is: “Why is there something rather than nothing?” A crucial aspect of this question is the existence of the one who does the asking. A methodical mind, Heidegger believes that, before addressing the question of Being, he has to raise the issue of the one who does this questioning:

The very asking of this question is an entity’s mode of Being; and as such it gets its essential character from what is inquired about – namely, Being. This entity which each of us is himself and which includes inquiring as one of the possibilities of its Being, we shall denote by the term “Dasein.” (Heidegger 2000: 19)

The analysis of Dasein, which means literally “being-there,” but is left in the original by most translators, occupies most of Being and Time.17Dasein, as an “entity which, in its very Being, comports itself understandingly towards that Being,” (Heidegger 2000: 78) refers to a type of experience of being in the world that is specific to humans alone. Heidegger analyzes it in its fundamental structures, in relationship to other entities with which it comes in contact, as well as with entities like itself, in its “basic state” (care), in its “thrownness” into the world, in its moods and, finally, in its relation to time and finitude.

The topic of death plays a central role here. When Heidegger defines Dasein as Sein-zum-Tode (“Being-toward-death”), thus placing death at the heart of the human condition, in fact he re-establishes a connection with an old meditative tradition, whose essence is expressed briefly in a medieval homily: “as soon as man enters on life, he is at once old enough to die.” Death, this line of thinking goes, is not an event that will occur at some point in the future, but is already here because it is part and parcel of life. Death is not something coming to us from the outside, but something we carry within. Indeed, in this tradition, to live a good life is to accept the presence of death in its midst. Your existence as a whole acquires meaning insofar as you learn how to attune yourself to this ontological arrangement.18 For Heidegger the “essence, the motion, the meaning of life are totally at one with being-toward-death” (Steiner 1980: 104). To live better, Montaigne advises us to allow death into our lives. Heidegger might quip: that’s not necessary, death has always been there: being human is “being toward death.”

Heidegger employs a striking metaphor to illustrate the force of this “toward-ness.” He likens human life to a process of ripening: we can be said to be living only as long as we are “unripe.” The state of “ripeness” toward which life is directed is also its end—the riper we become the closer to death we are. “The fruit brings to ripeness,” says Heidegger, and “such a bringing of itself is a characteristic of its Being as a fruit.” The fruit’s ripeness is in it from the very beginning. “Nothing imaginable which one might contribute to it, would eliminate the unripeness of the fruit, if this entity did not come to ripeness of its own accord” (Heidegger 2000: 287–8; author’s emphasis). The insight evoked by Heidegger’s metaphor is chilling: a fruit is nothing unless it is ripe, yet as soon as it reaches ripeness it is as good as dead.

Death is always fuller than life. For life is nothing but passing from one state to another, while death is completion—ending but also fulfillment. Since death is the only direction toward which we move, we are placed in a paradoxical situation: to live is to come closer and closer to that which denies life. “Death is the possibility of the absolute impossibility of Dasein.” Heidegger reiterates this aporetic statement in several places, marking this possibility as a defining feature of the Dasein. Using a formula that will become a mantra in Sein und Zeit, he states that death reveals itself as that “possibility which is one’s ownmost, which is non-relational, and which is not to be outstripped.” Death is something “distinctively impending. Its existential possibility is based on the fact that Dasein is essentially disclosed to itself, and disclosed, indeed, as ahead-of-itself” (Heidegger 2000: 294; author’s emphasis). Unlike other entities in the world, Dasein knows that it will die.

Yet death is not something “unfortunate” that Dasein is “doomed” to experience. Dasein needs death. For Dasein death can be a blessing. In its absence, it would be a failure because it would not have access to a deeper sense of its own Being: “As long as Dasein is an entity, it has never reached its ‘wholeness’” (Heidegger 2000: 280). Only through a decisive insight into our “no-longer-being-there” can we get access to what we really are. It is crucial, then, that we learn how to look at our condition from the standpoint of our own non-being.19 More important still, it is through our relation to our own death that we can individualize ourselves. Death, says Heidegger, does not “just ‘belong’ to one’s own Dasein in an undifferentiated way; death lays claim to it as an individual Dasein. The non-relational character of death … individualizes Dasein down to itself” (Heidegger 2000: 308). This process of individuation is very important if Dasein is to become an authentic Dasein. Indeed, death is something each Dasein experiences individually:20 “No one can take the Other’s dying away from him” (Heidegger 2000: 284, author’s emphasis). Each Dasein dies its own death. Due to Dasein’s fundamental character of “Being-with,” when I am a witness to the other’s death, I can feel sympathy and have a representation of her death; by witnessing the other’s death I form some knowledge of death in general.21 However, I can never die the other’s death. Death is by definition an inalienable experience. “Dying,” says Heidegger, is “something that every Dasein itself must take upon itself at the time.” I cannot delegate my death to others, just as I cannot die for them. By its nature, “death is in every case mine, in so far as it ‘is’ at all.” In dying, “it is shown that mineness and existence are ontologically constitutive for death” (Heidegger 2000: 284).

Since death is such a highly individualized and individualizing experience, it brings about an infinite solitude in the one experiencing it. When dying one is completely on one’s own, no matter how many people happen to be around; this is why Heidegger calls death a “non-relational possibility.” When Dasein, as Being-toward-its-end, is to finally encounter its end, it cannot “share” it with anybody else. This is its own death, irreducibly so.22 The dying Dasein occupies a space that no other Dasein can occupy at the same time, no matter how much affection it has caused in others in the course of its life. This is a space in which only that particular Dasein can dwell—that Dasein along with its anxiety, that is.

“Being-towards-death,” says Heidegger, is “essentially anxiety,” which is a central concept in Sein und Zeit. He defines anxiety as “the state-of-mind which can hold open the utter and constant threat to itself arising from Dasein’s ownmost individualized Being” (Heidegger 2000: 310; author’s emphasis). Anxiety (Angst) is no ordinary fear: its concern is not with some particular occurrence in the surrounding world, but with the possibility of the world itself. The “threat” that Dasein experiences in anxiety is ontological. Anxiety is not about something, but about everything, and therefore about nothing—more exactly, nothingness. That’s why anxiety plays a major role within the economy of Dasein: it gives it access to its very essence, as “Being-toward-death.”23 As such, it is a “privileged” state of mind.24 Anxiety is Dasein’s chance to die in such a manner that will allow it to make the most of its life.25*

I can see you smiling. And you are right to smile. Everything sounds so abstract and dry. Yet given the unusual cut of this thinker’s mind, this is unavoidable. That’s why, to make the discussion a touch more tangible, I propose an experiment: a reading of Heidegger’s considerations on “Being-toward-death,” anxiety, the “they,” and authenticity, through Leo Tolstoy’s Death of Ivan Ilyich.

The portrait of Ivan Ilyich as Dasein

Scholars have noticed that the way Heidegger talks of Dasein as “Being-toward-the-end” in Being and Time is close to Tolstoy’s treatment of death in The Death of Ivan Ilyich (Smert’ Ivana Il’icha, 1886).26 At times it is so close that the term “pastiche” would not be out of place. Yet, oddly enough, Heidegger cites Tolstoy’s book only once—and then only to exile it to a footnote. He acknowledges that he has read it, but does so in such a furtive manner that the possibility of any significant influence is dismissed. Indeed, as if to put the reader on the wrong track, he gives the impression that he has misread it. “In his story The Death of Ivan Ilyich,” says Heidegger, “Leo Tolstoy has presented the phenomenon of the disruption and breakdown of having ‘someone die’” (Heidegger 2000: 495). Tolstoy’s book is not about that—not primarily so, in any case.

The most remarkable aspect of this parallelism is that the death of both characters—Heidegger’s Dasein and Tolstoy’s Ivan Ilyich—is projected against the background of a “they” existence. Ordinarily, Heidegger thinks, we are not ourselves: we live in a state of alienation. We think as the “they” thinks, dress as the “they” dresses, and in general we live as the “they” does.27 Dasein, says Heidegger, “stands in subjection to Others.” Properly speaking, Dasein “itself is not; its Being has been taken away by the Others. Dasein’s everyday possibilities of Being are for the Others to dispose of as they please.” Dasein is the plaything of the “they,” and as such it doesn’t belong to itself. “One belongs to the Others oneself and enhances their power.” The Others are here the indistinct mass, a faceless, nameless entity. If you asked the Others who exactly they are, you would ask in vain: “The ‘who’ is not this one, not that one, not oneself [man selbst], not some people [einige], and not the sum of them all. The ‘who’ is the neuter, the ‘they’ [das Man].” The “they” is virtually anybody and nobody in particular. “They” is imitable and replaceable ad infinitum. If any one of them expires, in no time another will take its place. No one will notice the difference because there is no difference: “every Other is like the next.” That “they” is replaceable does not mean that it is powerless. Its power is tremendous and comes precisely from its infinite replicability. “In this inconspicuousness and unascertainability,” says Heidegger, “the real dictatorship of the ‘they’ is unfolded” (Heidegger 2000: 164). One of the most important functions of the “they” is to generate norms, rules, and standards of taste. If you want to live in society, you have to behave as the “they” says you should, and in so doing you let the “they” permeate your life.

In its average everydayness, then, it is as “they” that Dasein exists—just as Ivan Ilyich has lived his life. Indeed, in Tolstoy’s vision, this is one of Ivan’s most “distinctive” features: “from his earliest youth he had been drawn to people of high standing in society as a moth is to light.” Ever eager to please, he “had adopted their manners and their views on life.” In the novel, the “they” acts as “people of high standing,” who remain appropriately nameless and faceless, but exert a crushing influence on individuals like Ivan. Tolstoy analyzes his hero’s awareness as he transforms himself following impact with the “they.” We see how any good natural impulses he may have had are gradually replaced with whatever the “they” decrees as desirable. As a student, for instance, Ivan had done things that “at the time, seemed to him extremely vile and made him feel disgusted with himself.” Yet later, noticing that “people of high standing had no qualms about doing these things,” he dismissed the unpleasant feeling and ended up not being “the least perturbed when he recalled them” (Tolstoy 1981: 44).

As long as Ivan Ilyich behaves according to the norms set up by the “they,” he has nothing to be afraid of. Indeed, such behavior only increases his social “respectability.” The “they” is a magnanimous master and conformity to its dominion comes with handsome rewards. Later, as a young prosecutor, Ivan would get involved in “drinking bouts” and “after-supper trips to a certain street on the outskirts of town.” There were also attempts to “curry favor with his chief and even with his chief’s wife.” Yet all this had “such a heightened air of respectability that nothing bad could be said about it” (Tolstoy 1981: 45). Social respectability is one reward that the “they” always grants in abundance.

Appropriately enough, even occasional acts of rebellion are allowed as long as they follow the way of the “they.” Indeed, provided that it comes with prior approval from higher up, a bit of dissidence is good—both for the contested authority and for the dissenter. It makes the former look more legitimate in society and the latter less of a coward in his own eyes. At some point, for example, Ivan Ilyich put “a suitable amount of distance between himself and the provincial authorities,” assuming an “air of mild dissatisfaction with the government” (Tolstoy 1981: 47). All this is very touching. Heidegger’s Dasein would do nothing else: “we shrink back from the ‘great mass’ as they shrink back; we find ‘shocking’ what they find ‘shocking’” (Heidegger 2000: 164). The distance that both Ivan and Dasein take from the “they,” however, is not an inch larger than the amount of illusory freedom that the “they” has given them to play with.

As Ivan Ilyich moves up the social ladder his life turns into one of total conformity to the postulates of the “they.” He is so good at the art of obedience that even when making what should be rather personal decisions—such as picking a book to read—it is not him who does the choosing, but the “they”: sometimes, after dinner, Ivan would read a “book that was the talk of the day” (Tolstoy 1981: 60). That’s precisely what Heidegger’s Dasein would do in a similar situation: “we read, see, and judge about literature and art as they see and judge” (Heidegger 2000: 164). I may be holding the book in my hands, but it is not me who does the reading, it is the “they.” Indeed, most of the time it is also the “they” who does the writing.

Confirming Heidegger’s observation that, in our everydayness, we “take pleasure and enjoy ourselves as they [man] take pleasure” (Heidegger 2000: 164), Ivan adopts a lifestyle that, far from individualizing him, aligns him to the dominant tastes and fashions set up by the “they.” Take the decoration of his new home. Freshly promoted, and seeking to upgrade his social standing, Ivan embarks on a grand project to create the most original and attractive of homes for himself and his family. The result, from his point of view, is “stunning.” His extreme efforts were worth making. Yet, as Tolstoy remarks with fine irony, the home “was like the homes of all people who are not really rich but who want to look rich, and therefore end up looking like one another.” Eventually Ivan’s place looked “so much like the others that it would never have been noticed” (Tolstoy 1981: 57–8). Of course it did—as long as it was not Ivan who decorated the house, but the “they,” it could not have been otherwise. No matter what he does, Ivan Ilyich is never himself, always somebody else: a faceless, nameless entity. Ivan is the “they.”

“And so they lived,” says Tolstoy. They moved in “the best circles” and their home “was frequented by people of importance.” So Ivan Ilyich lived, but how did he die? Did he for once escape the ways of the “they”?

The business of dying

As we open the book, before we even know who Ivan Ilyich is and what his life has been like, we learn of his death. We learn of it through the reactions of other people (close friends, colleagues) towards it. Despite the different relationships they’ve had with Ivan while he was alive, their reactions to his death display a surprising consistency. These are reactions of people who couldn’t care less. Indeed, for whom this death could turn out to be something—how shall I put it?—profitable. His colleagues assess the possible gains literally as they receive the news—Ivan’s death means that his position in the hierarchy is now vacant, which will trigger promotions and transfers and relocations. A few pages later, as Ivan is lying in his coffin, everybody in attendance is busy with something. His wife has a pressing “business” with Ivan’s friend, Pyotr Ivanovich—that is, “how, in connection to her husband’s death, she could obtain a grant of money from the government” (Tolstoy 1981: 39–40). His daughter will now have to change her wedding plans (something for which she will never forgive him). Schwartz, one of his colleagues, seeks to pre-empt any change to the plans they’ve already made for the night.

Ivan’s colleagues go on to play their game of cards, his family resumes its routines, everything falls back into place. Small inconveniences aside, the death of Ivan Ilyich has not caused that much distress after all. There is even something soothing about it. In some obscure way, everybody was relieved: “the very fact of the death of a close acquaintance evoked in them all the usual feeling of relief that it was someone else, not they, who had died” (Tolstoy 1981: 33). Heidegger talks of a process of “tranquilization” in relation to the “relief” we tend to feel about the other’s death. The “they” has its means to reduce the discomfort caused by someone’s death and to keep anxiety at bay. “The ‘they’ provides a constant tranquilization about death,” says Heidegger. In its essence, this is “a tranquilization not only for him who is ‘dying’ but just as much for those who ‘console’ him” (Heidegger 2000: 298; author’s emphasis).

Tolstoy highlights this tranquilization process in the novel. Not even Pyotr Ivanovich, Ivan Ilyich’s childhood friend, can escape a persistent feeling of indifference. All along, upon learning the news of his friend’s death, even in proximity to his dead body, then on his way home, Pyotr Ivanovich simply cannot mourn. It is as if to understand someone else’s death one needs a specific organ, which Ivanovich lacks. This death has nothing to do with him; it was “as though death was a chance experience that could happen only to Ivan Ilyich, never to himself” (Tolstoy 1981: 39). Tolstoy doesn’t say it clearly, but we are given to understand that this is precisely how Ivan, too, would have reacted to someone else’s death. Stylistically, this is one of the finest accomplishments of the opening chapter. To the death of a close friend, Ivan Ilyich would have reacted in the same manner Pyotr Ivanovich reacted to his. For Ivan and Pyotr are one and the same: they are “they.” Ivan would have behaved no differently because he was “they” and always reacted as “they” did.28For most of his life, Ivan Ilyich did not know anything about death. Nor did he want to. He had been one of those people (the vast majority of us) for whom death is of no concern. In Being and Time Heidegger talks specifically about people like Ivan. “Factically,” he says, there are many who “do not know about death .… Dasein covers up its ownmost Being-towards-death, fleeing in the face of it” (Heidegger 2000: 295; author’s emphasis). Ivan’s knowledge of death has been strictly theoretical, as an abstract possibility: death might happen in theory, but not to him. Just like Pyotr Ivanovich, he must have felt that death was “a chance experience” that could only happen to someone else, “never to himself.” When Ivan was learning logic in school, the sample syllogism in the textbook—“Caius is a man, men are mortal, therefore Caius is mortal”—looked fine to him. Caius may have had to die, but Ivan was a different matter altogether: that man represented “man in the abstract, and so the reasoning was perfectly sound.” But Ivan had always been “a creature quite, quite distinct from all the others” (Tolstoy 1981: 79–80).

That’s a lofty feeling, but Martin Heidegger has news for Ivan Ilyich: he is not distinct at all. Indeed, Ivan’s attitude is symptomatic of the approach the “they” typically takes to death. For the “they,” death is by definition “an indefinite something.” To the extent that I am “they,” death is something that always happens to others, never to me:

The expression “one dies” spreads abroad the opinion that what gets reached … by death, is the “they.” In Dasein’s public way of interpreting, it is said that “one dies,” because everyone else and oneself can talk himself into saying that “in no case is it I myself,” for this “one” is the “nobody.” Dying … belongs to nobody in particular. (Heidegger 2000: 297)

The fact that death has been of no concern for Ivan does not prevent him from getting closer to it every day. For death is wherever life is, it “takes place” continuously in the midst of life. Ivan Ilyich has been dying for as long as he has been alive. And so has Dasein, “proximally and for the most part.” Dasein, says Heidegger, “is dying as long as it exists,” and it “does so by way of falling” (Heidegger 2000: 295). At this juncture, what is striking about a parallel reading of Being and Time and The Death of Ivan Ilyich is that Tolstoy uses the term “falling” in his story to designate pretty much the same process. When Ivan, shortly before his death, comes to revisit his earthly existence, he realizes that there was “only one bright spot back at the beginning of life.” After that, everything “grew blacker and blacker,” and “moved faster and faster”:

“In inverse ratio to the square of the distance from death,” thought Ivan Ilyich. And the image of a stone hurtling downward with increasing velocity became fixed in his mind. Life, a series of increasing sufferings, falls faster and faster toward its end – the most frightful suffering. “I am falling …” He shuddered, shifted back and forth, wanted to resist, but by then knew there was no resisting. (Tolstoy 1981: 105)29For most of the time Ivan has “evaded” death, even as he was falling faster and faster toward it. Like the “they” always does, Ivan has never looked death in the face, never “anticipated” it, all of which—from a Heideggerian standpoint—is equivalent to an “inauthentic death.”30 David E. Cooper would say that, in the absence of a picture of life as defined by his death, Ivan is in the position of a story-teller who has no idea how his narrative will end31—indeed, a story-teller with no story to tell.

Not only has the “they” shaped Ivan’s life, but also his dying. His struggle with his sickness is for the most part the struggle of the “they” with sickness and mortality. An important point of Tolstoy’s story is to show just how ordinary one’s death can be. Still, a question persists in the reader’s mind: isn’t there anything that redeems Ivan Ilyich’s death from utter inauthenticity? Hasn’t he experienced any genuine anxiety in those moments, which from a Heideggerian perspective would have redeemed his death?

He may have. As Ivan realizes that he is soon going to die, a question starts to haunt him: “What if my entire life, my entire conscious life, simply was not the real thing?” For someone only days away from dying, such a question must be more than just an intellectual proposition. It takes considerable courage just to ask, let alone answer, it. At first, Ivan is dismissive of it. When it dawns on him that maybe he “had not lived as he should have,” he recalls “how correct his whole life had been.” (Tolstoy 1981: 102–8) A “they” existence is always “correct.” For all his efforts to push it away from his mind, however, the question keeps returning—until finally, shortly before his death, Ivan gives in and receives the ultimate revelation, the story of his life. What is this story exactly about? It is a summary of Sein und Zeit: a story about the “they” and its traps, about the fundamental lie on which “publicness”32 is based, and the effects it can have on life. It is the story of most of us.

It is thus revealed to Ivan Ilyich that those “scarcely perceptible impulses of his to protest what people of high rank considered good,” which he had always sought to suppress, “might have been precisely what mattered,” the real thing. His “official duties, his manner of life, his family, the values adhered to by people, in society and in his profession—all these might not have been the real thing.” There is certainly a note of anxiety here: Ivan has suddenly gained access to the “nothingness” behind the beautiful façade of his “easy, pleasant, cheerful, and respectable life.” This anxiety tears down the convenient certainties in which he had wrapped himself up, and leaves him in all the nakedness of his condition. On the brink of life, death firmly in sight, Ivan is now the closest he could ever be to what may be called an “authentic existence.”33Does this mean that Ivan Ilyich died “authentically” in a Heideggerian sense? One of the greatest merits of Tolstoy’s story is that it doesn’t provide an answer. Tolstoy the artist respects his character too much to take us inside Ivan’s death. Tolstoy the philosopher does not allow himself to suggest one answer or the other. He simply lets Ivan die his death. In this respect he is one step ahead of Heidegger. One criticism that has been brought against the latter’s account of death (by Blanchot and Levinas, for example) is that, from a strictly phenomenological standpoint, as long as one is alive, one cannot experience one’s own death, only the death of the others. If these critics are right, then Tolstoy is a better phenomenologist than Heidegger. Tolstoy knows where to stop; he feels that there is no (honest) way of knowing whether his hero dies authentically or not. Phenomenologically, one can only talk of experiences one has had, or can have, personally. Death is a personal experience, but of such an ultimate nature that it does allow any accounts of it by the one who does the dying. In a rigorous sense, the experience of death can only be lived, not articulated. As long as we are in a position to talk, we haven’t experienced it yet; once we have died, we are done talking. In a fundamental sense, death escapes us. This is all the more ironical as we never escape death.

Intermezzo (where the possibility of a farce is raised)

Sein und Zeit belongs to that rare class of masterpieces with which, as you delve in, you have an unsettling experience: you come to ask yourself, over and over again, whether what you are reading is something monumentally serious or just a monumental farce. And the attraction of such works comes precisely from the impossibility of deciding one way or the other—not even after you’ve finished reading them, not even after several re-readings. There is seriousness in Sein und Zeit, depth of thought and a sense that its author has stumbled upon something important about what it means to be human. But there is also, at times, a sense that the book was written with tongue in cheek, and in a mode of playfulness and self-subverting irony. One of Heidegger’s best biographers even talks of his “involuntary self-parody.”34The book’s writing style and terminology often creates the impression that what you are reading is a work of pure fiction, if a brilliant one. Heidegger’s language, which pretty much excludes him from the ranks of the “serious” scholars, placing him instead among poets, prophets, and magicians, is a language that does not so much describe a world as it creates one. Indeed, Heidegger’s text often comes across as a concatenation of spells, charms, and incantations. You can never quite decide, for example, what he really had in mind when playing with the infinite possibilities of the German prefixes, as he did with Um- (Umsicht, Umwelt, Umgang, etc.). Did he really mean something deep here or is he just caught in a game from which he didn’t know how to get out?

11Heidegger fully develops this notion in his later work, after the Kehre, but even in Sein und Zeit he offers sufficient hints in this regard.

12As Heidegger would famously put it later, “language is the house of Being” (Die Sprache is das Haus des Seins) Being cannot be (articulated) in the absence of language; it would be nothing without it. Any ontological engagement, any gesture toward Being is also a “linguistic” gesture. It follows that any mistreatment of Being is reflected in the language itself and the use people make of it. Indeed, language in general, says Heidegger, “is worn out and used up—an indispensable but masterless means of communication that may be used as one pleases, as indifferent as a means of public transportation” (in Steiner 1980: 45).

13George Steiner writes: “The figura etymologica, the excavation of meaning from verbal roots and the history of words, is in the fullest sense an ‘emergence,’ a stepping into light” (Steiner 1980: 47). Heideger’s heavy reliance on etymologies, with all the allusions, inside knowledge, and philological expertise it presupposes, makes his writing particularly dense. Sometimes, it takes a command of ancient Greek, medieval Latin, and old German just to go through a Heideggerian paragraph.

14“In the earlier writings,” says Cooper, “readers suffers the heavy-weight vocabulary of phenomenology (‘ecstasis,’ ‘categorial intuition,’ and the like), while some of the later work still strike them as more akin to the incantations of a mystic poet than to the essays of a professional philosopher” (Cooper 1996: 5–6).

15In a famous book, Leo Strauss relates these philosophers’ “esotericism” to the fear of political persecution that their texts may bring about (Strauss 1988); such a rhetoric of convolution, artifice, and ambiguity is meant to mislead potential persecutors. Strauss’ argument may work in some cases and not in others. Moreover, such a theory could hardly explain Heidegger’s preference for an obscure style.

16In Contributions to Philosophy (From Enowning), Martin Heidegger explicitly says, first, that clarity is a bad thing in philosophy and, second, that the work is only written for the very few, special ones.

17Technically, the work is unfinished.

18It is precisely death that makes us what we are; the experience of death is “an essential distinguishing mark of what it is to be human. The nature of human life and the nature of human death are tied inextricably together” (Wrathall 2005: 62).

19As George Steiner has put it, “Dasein can come to grasp its own wholeness and the meaningfulness that is indivisible from integrity only when it faces its ‘no-longer-being-there’ (sein Nicht-mehr-da-sein)” (Steiner 1980: 102).

20“Death individualizes, even though dying takes place in huge numbers” (Safransky 1998: 164).

21Dasein can gain an “experience of death, all the more so because Dasein is essentially Being with Others” (Heidegger 2000: 281).

22“When it stands before itself in this way, all its relations to any other Dasein have been undone. This ownmost non-relational possibility is at the same time the uttermost one” (Heidegger 2000: 294).

23In this state Dasein finds itself “face to face with the ‘nothing’ of the possible impossibility of its existence.”

24For Safransky anxiety is “the shadowy queen among the moods” (Safransky 1998: 152).

25“Anxiety is anxious about the potentiality-for-Being of the entity so destined, and in this way it discloses the uttermost possibility. Anticipation utterly individualizes Dasein, and allows it, in this individualization of itself, to become certain of the totality of its potentiality-for-being” (Heidegger 2000: 310).

26Philippe Ariès, for example, mentions it (Ariès 1974), and so does George Steiner (Steiner 1980: 105).

27“They” is the usual translation of Heidegger’s das Man, for which a literal translation is impossible in English. Man does not have an English equivalent, but its function is performed satisfactorily by “they” (as in “as they say”). In other languages Man can be translated unproblematically—in French, for example, with on, in Spanish and Romanian with se, in Italian with si, and so on.

28The Death of Ivan Ilyich has a peculiar structure. The story unfolds in chronological order, narrating Ivan’s life from childhood on, with one exception: the first chapter, where we are introduced abruptly to his death. This irregular structure has puzzled scholars, most of whom have a hard time figuring out Tolstoy’s rationale for it. In his book, The Death of Ivan Ilich. An Interpretation, Garry R. Jahn discusses this in detail (Jahn 1993). Yet in light of what I’ve been arguing, starting the story of Ivan’s life with his death, and more specifically with the others’ attitude to it, makes perfect sense. For it is in the “they” that his life truly originates; the “they” has made him who he is. The first chapter does a wonderful job at setting the stage for the unfolding of Ivan’s deeply alienated life.

29George Steiner talks of The Death of Ivan Ilych as some sort of exercise in controlled falling. For him the novel “descends, with agonizing leisure and precision, into the dark places of the body. It is a poem—one of the most harrowing ever conceived—of the insurgent flesh, of the manner in which carnality, with its pains and corruptions, penetrates and dissolves the tenuous discipline of reason” (Steiner 1996: 283).

30For Heidegger death “offers us an opportunity to take responsibility for our existence if we will face up to it” (Wrathall 2005: 61).

31“Anticipation of my death,” says Cooper, induces “a sense of my ‘Being-a-whole,’ for I am capable of ‘taking the whole of [my existence] in advance,’ viewing the possibilities that lie before me in relation to that final one, my death. Lacking such a view, I am in the position of a novelist with no conception of his book’s ending, for I am without guidance on structuring my life in a coherent fashion” (Cooper 1996: 45).

32By “publicness” he means an invisible, frightful force pressuring everybody into submission and uniformity. “Publicness” is the enemy of anything distinguished, rare, outstanding. Because of it, “everything gets obscured, and what has thus been covered up gets passed off as something familiar and accessible to everyone” (Heidegger 2000: 165).

33In his study on Tolstoy, Richard Gustafson sees The Death of Ivan Ilyich as an “autopsychological prose fiction” that describes “the discovery of life in the face of death” (Gustafson 1986: 159).

34See Safransky 1998: 154.

DYING FOR IDEAS

The Dangerous Lives of the  Philosophers

COSTICA BRADATAN