Walter Kaufmann
* Prepared for a conference on "Human Values and Aging: New Challenges for Research in the Humanities," November 1975.
Death has come to be associated with old age. That is a recent development. In many parts of the world more people are still dying as infants than in old age, and death has generally been distributed over the whole life span. One never felt immune from it.
Death has always been a staple of religion and literature. Those writing about death should not forgo research about different attitudes toward death in different religions. To a large extent, the fear of death, or the anxiety associated with death, is a product of Christianity, and we encounter very different attitudes at the burning ghats in Varanasi in India and in Buddhist lands.
Fascinating and important as this question is, one cannot deal with it well in a brief space because the great religions are not monolithic. Unquestionably, Christianity has spread the horror of death through its threats of hell and its perennial attempts to frighten people into repentance on the threshold of eternity. Yet in the early days of Christianity so many Christians coveted martyrdom with its assurance of heaven that a Roman proconsul felt unable to oblige such multitudes, although the Romans were not squeamish about dying and even less so about killing. Not only have there been vast changes in the great religions over the centuries, but there are also countless sects and geographical variations in Christianity as well as Islam, Hinduism, and Buddhism.
The variety of religious attitudes is vast, but it is really crucial to realize that our attitudes are not due to the timeless constitution of the human mind but to historical and cultural conditioning. Immanuel Kant, writing in the last two decades of the eighteenth century, bequeathed to us the notion that our certainties are due to the structure of the human mind and not subject to change. Almost 150 years later, Martin Heidegger still played essentially the same game, but played it worse. Kant had looked for a firm foundation for Euclidean geometry, Newtonian science, and the categorical imperative, and we can still see how a wise man in his time and place might have supposed that history 'and psychology or, in one word, conditioning, would be irrelevant here. But Heidegger came after the rapid growth of the historical consciousness in Germany and after Freud and the explosion of interest in anthropology and sociology, and there is no longer any excuse for supposing that the attitudes toward death and original sin on which Heidegger was brought up as a Roman Catholic are immutable features of human existence, or Dasein. Yet many people who have never read Heidegger are still influenced by his claims. For it is comforting to be assured that one's own attitudes are the only ones, and that one need not choose between alternatives - or at least only between two, of which one is authentic and the other inauthentic. Such simplistic Manichaean schemes have always had appeal, and if one is full of anxiety it is pleasant to be told that it takes courage to be scared and that all those who are unafraid are inauthentic.
What Nietzsche said of Kant is no less true of Heidegger and, alas, a great many philosophers: He "tried to prove in a way that would dumfound the common man that the common man was right." And F.H. Bradley's definition of metaphysics applies to other branches of philosophy as well: "the finding of bad reasons for what we believe on instinct." Only the word "instinct" suggests once again something immutable, and it would be more. precise to say that a great deal of philosophy is a way of rationalizing what the philosophers have been brought up or conditioned to believe - the common sense of their set. "If, as Bradley added, 'the finding of these reasons is no less an instinct,' it ought to be the aim of philosophy to teach men to master this instinct and become housebroken."
To that end, a good course in comparative religion should be required of all undergraduates. Courses in literature and art history should also be designed to produce multiple culture shock, exposing students to impressive alternatives. As far as written materials go, short poems have one immense advantage over all other forms: they sometimes manage to express an experience or attitude in a highly condensed way. History and religion are in a sense infinite. If you quote from some sacred scripture or relate historical incidents, scholars are bound to counter with a big But. A work of art requires some interpretation, and when you have given yours those you are trying to refute may once again say But. Short poems sometimes have a kind of finality.
Again the amount of material is too vast to survey here. Even if each poem is brief, there are simply too many of them. The following selection is no more than a small sample. In 1962 I published Twenty German Poets, which was reprinted in The Modern Library the following year. The poets ranged from Goethe to Hermann Hesse, who at that time was not widely known in the English-speaking world. A few were represented by a single poem, Goethe and Rilke by over a dozen poems each. I tried to select the best poets and some of the best poems by each, printing the original texts and my own verse translations on facing pages, and offered an introduction as well as separate prefaces for every poet. It was only in 1974, when I prepared an enlarged version of the book, Twenty-five German Poets, adding three poets before Goethe, two at the end, and a few additional poems by the twenty original poets, that I realized how many of the poems dealt with death. Most of these poets have expressed an attitude toward death in one or more brief poems, and what is striking is that for all their variety not one voiced anxiety, nor is there a single poem that associates death with old age.
These poems were chosen initially for their high quality and not to round out an anthology on death or to prove a point. It so happens that many of the best short German poems deal with death. And it seems worthwhile to see how very different they are from the platitudes mouthed by so many recent writers whose claims are based, as dogmas generally are, on a studied disregard for experience. I shall begin in 1779 and end in 1923, spanning a period of 144 years, which is considerably less than twice the life span of an old person. So far from claiming that this tiny sample of German poetry is representative of all of world literature, I should like to issue an invitation to others to broaden the range in at least two ways.
First, it would be interesting to have similar samples from Greek and Latin authors, French and English, Indian and Chinese, as well as other literatures. Secondly, one might proceed, perhaps at a later stage, to arrange the materials according to themes, such as suicide, death in battle, dying of tuberculosis, cancer, or some other disease, dying of old age, dying very young. But for a start I shall deal with my small sample, which was not chosen to begin with to prove any thesis. Of course, these are all poems that appealed to me, and one might therefore wonder whether attitudes I find congenial may be represented disproportionately. While this would not be surprising, I doubt that anyone could find a sizable number of short German poems of comparable quality that voice anxiety in the face of death or that associate death with old age.
II
Friedrich Gottlieb Klopstock (1724-1803) was the most renowned poet in Germany before the young Goethe eclipsed him, and the following poem is quite possibly his best.
Separation
You turned so serious when the corpse
was carried past us;
are you afraid of death? "Oh, not of that!"
Of what are you afraid? "Of dying."
I not even of that. "Then you're afraid of nothing?"
Alas, I am afraid, afraid… "Heavens, of what?"
Of parting from my friends.
And not mine only, of their parting, too.
That's why I turned more serious even
than you did, deeper in the soul,
when the corpse
was carried past us.
Klopstock disliked rhyme, and this unpretentious little poem is an early example of free verse. Of course, the poet admits to being afraid but insists that he is not afraid of death or dying. Those who assume that all men are afraid of death may charge him with transparent self-deception and inauthenticity. I should argue on the contrary that he makes needful and illuminating distinctions. He is right in distinguishing being afraid of death and being afraid of dying, and he is also right in suggesting that there are still further possibilities, of which he mentions two: parting from our friends as well as their parting from us. For many of us it makes perfectly good sense to wonder how our children, our old parents, or our wife or husband will fare after our death, and anxiety of that kinds needs to be distinguished from the fear of death and the dread of dying slowly in great pain.
Matthias Claudius (1740-1815) wrote two fine short poems about death. The first, "Death and the Maiden," was set to music by Franz Schubert and sung unforgettably by Marian Anderson.
Death and the Maiden
The Maiden:
Oh, go away, please go,
Wild monster, made of bone!
I am still young; Oh, no!
Oh, please leave me alone!
Death:
Give me your hand, my fair and lovely child!
A friend I am and bring no harm.
Be of good cheer, I am not wild,
You shall sleep gently in my arm.
Again the fear of death is not simply ignored, but the whole point of the poem is to suggest an alternative. We are made to feel that the anxiety is irrational even when one is still young and might feel cheated of a long and happy life, for death is like a gentle sleep.
Another poem by the same poet suggests that it is irrational to lament the death of a woman, or a girl, we loved. But the counterimage is different this time, not sleep but more nearly an awakening. Death spells liberation from the earth. The poem gets off the ground and takes wing only in the last few lines; but given the text, that makes excellent sense, and the final image is very strong. There is a suggestion, going back at least to Plato and the Orphics before him, that, as they put it, the body (soma) is the tomb (sema) of the soul, and that life is a period of exile.
The Sower
The sower sows the seed,
The earth receives it,
and before long
The flower comes out of the soil –
You loved her. Whatever else
Life may offer you, seemed small to you,
And eternal sleep took her hence.
Why do you weep at her grave
And raise your hands to the cloud of death
And decomposition?
Like grass in the field are men,
Gone like leaves. Only a few days
We walk here, disguised.
The eagle visits the earth,
Tarries not, shakes from his wings the dust and
Returns to the sun.
Goethe (1749-1832) did not dwell much on death. Even in his old age he still wrote poems about love, not death. Nor did he associate love with death - except in one great poem that appeared in his West-Eastern Divan in 1819, when he was seventy. Here we have a love night and death, but the hero seems to be, quite literally, a butterfly.
Blessed Yearning
Tell it none except the wise,
for the common crowd defames:
of the living I shall praise
that which longs for death in flames.
In the love night which created
you where you create, a yearning
wakes: you see, intoxicated,
far away a candle burning.
Darkness now no longer snares you,
shadows lose their ancient force,
as a new desire tears you
up to higher intercourse.
Now no distance checks your flight,
charmed you come and you draw nigh
till, with longing for the light,
you are burnt, O butterfly.
And until you have possessed
dying and rebirth,
you are but a sullen guest
on the gloomy earth.
To most readers, the "butterfly" at the end of the penultimate stanza comes as a surprise that explains everything that went before, and being pleased to understand, few indeed go on to wonder why it is a butterfly rather than a moth. After all, it is moths and not butterflies that are attracted to burning candles at night. But Goethe knew that the Greek word for the human soul, psyche, also meant butterfly. And what attracted Goethe to this image was that there is no more striking example of a metamorphosis than the transformation of a caterpillar into a butterfly. The final stanza alludes to that the caterpillar is "a sullen guest on the gloomy earth." But the suggestion is not mainly that our death, too, may be the beginning of another existence; it is above all that the richest life is a series of deaths and transformations. Any existence lacking that is drab and dull.
This theme, powerfully voiced in the last stanza of this poem, was developed by Nietzsche, who, perhaps alone among philosophers, could say even of his prose: "…it is my ambition to say in ten sentences what everyone else says in a book - what everyone else does not say in a book." While Kant had set a vastly influential example of unprecedented verbosity, Nietzsche managed again and again to write sentences as pregnant as the best short poems; for example, "One pays dearly for immortality; one has to die several times while still alive." Or: "Some are born posthumously." And another somewhat different passage is relevant to this theme, too:
"The secret for harvesting from existence the greatest fruitfulness and the greatest enjoyment is - to live dangerously." The context makes it clear that Nietzsche is not thinking of big-game hunting but of not clinging to the life, the views, the world that are familiar to us and spell security. This is a central theme in his philosophy and was later taken up by Rilke, who celebrated it in his late poetry. It belongs here both because it was inspired by Goethe's great example and because it makes for a different attitude also toward death. It is those who are most afraid of having missed something who are also most afraid of missing out on something when they die. This as well as the converse has never been said more beautifully than by Holderlin (1770-1843). Though twenty-one years younger than Goethe, he ceased writing long before "Blessed Yearning" appeared; but shortly before insanity reduced him to imbecility he wrote this poem.
To the Parcae
A single summer grant me, great powers, and
a single autumn for fully ripened song
that, sated with the sweetness of my
playing, my heart may more willingly die.
The soul that, living, did not attain its divine
right cannot repose in the nether world.
But once what I am bent on, what is
holy, my poetry, is accomplished:
Be welcome then, stillness of the shadows' world!
I shall be satisfied though my lyre will not
accompany me down there. Once I
lived like the gods, and more is not needed.
Friedrich Schiller (1759-1805), whom Holderlin vastly admired, had tried to say something similar even more briefly, if somewhat more prosaically. He lived with the knowledge of a relatively early death as he had consumption, but lived intensely and left a large and magnificent body of work.
Immortality
You are frightened of death? You wish you could live forever?
Make your life whole! When death takes you that will remain.
Much has been done since the early nineteenth century to prolong life as if that were an end in itself. Many people have so little imagination and are so unthoughtful that they think they would enjoy living forever. With death not very likely before old age, they have got into the bad habit of living without any sense of having only so much time and without asking themselves how to make good use of it. They assume that everybody is like them and swallow the dogma that, deep down, nobody believes in his own death and everybody thinks that he will live forever and is pleased with this prospect, while the thought of one's own death is too painful to face honestly. What I find astonishing is how unwilling even deeply humane scholars are to examine such dogmas in the light of evidence. Some have actually written up the evidence that disproves their own dogmas, but go on professing them with the thoughtlessness of ritual. It would seem more reasonable to assume at the outset that there are many different attitudes, and then to ask later if all of them are really reducible to one.
Friedrich von Hardenberg (1772-1801) died of consumption before he was thirty, a few years before Schiller did. He belonged to the small circle of the original German romantics who, however much they owed to Schiller, liked to denigrate him. His reaction to his fate, like his personality and his work, was rather different from Schiller's. At the age of twenty-two he had met a girl of twelve; they fell in love and were engaged; but in 1797 she died at the age of fifteen. "That he sang himself to death with his 'Hymns to the Night' - aided by consumption - is better known than the fact that within a year of his fiancée’s death he became engaged to another girl whom he desired to keep him company in this world until he succeeded in becoming reunited with his true love after death." The "Hymns" appeared in 1800, two years before the poet's death, and introduced the romantic glorification of death that reached its apotheosis in Richard Wagner's "Liebestod" in Tristan und Isolde.
It will be noted that I am put off by what strikes me as a certain affectation in the "Hymns." The tone is not wholly authentic. But it does not follow that the poet really would like to live until old age. Far from it. The basic feeling strikes me as wholly believable. I shall quote only the rhymed portion of the "Fourth Hymn to the Night."
Beyond I wander,
all pain will be
ere long a spur
of ecstasy.
A short span of time,
I'm free and above,
and drunken I lie
in the lap of love.
Infinite life
surges in me with might;
and down toward you
I incline my sight.
Your splendor is dying
on yonder hill.
A shadow brings
the wreath of chill.
Suck me toward you, beloved,
with all your force
that I may slumber
and love at last.
I am touched by death's
youth-giving flood,
to balsam and ether
is turned my blood.
I live by day
full of courage and trust,
and die every night
in holy lust.
This
is an extreme expression of a voluptuous feeling about death that is not
fashionable nowadays. It may help to remind us that there are fashions in such
matters, too, and that attitudes some people nowadays take for granted and
believe to be part of human nature are in fact also fashions. Certainly, Novalis
– to give the poet his pen name under which he is remembered – was far from
unique in feeling as he did; he merely voiced with rare intensity the
fascination of death and dying.
Instead
of sampling other romantic poems about death, I shall proceed straight to
Heinrich Heine (1797-1856), who was twentyfive years younger than Novalis and
only four years old when Novalis died. Heine, like Goethe, mastered the accents
of romanticism, but just as Goethe enjoyed puncturing Faust's effusions with
Mephistopheles' sardonic wit, Heine frequently did the same sort of thing even
in short poems. The next poem does not illustrate this point but shows restraint
throughout. It was written during the years in Paris when Heine was lying,
without any hope of recovery, in what he called his Matratzengruft, his
mattress vault or tomb. Is there any reason to doubt that death often seemed
desirable to him?
Morphine
Great is the similarity of these two
Youthful figures, although one of them
Looks so much paler than the other one,
Much more severe – I almost said, much
nobler –
Than does that other one who, all affection,
Enclosed me in his arms: How sweetly tender
His smile was then, what bliss was in his
eyes!
Then it could happen that the poppy wreath
He wore upon his head touched my brow, too,
And the strange perfume drove away all pain
Out of my soul. But such relief endures
So short a time; complete recovery
Can be mine only when' the serious looking
Brother who is so pale lowers his torch –
Good is sleep, but death is better – yet
What would be best is not to have been born.
The
last line is virtually a quotation from a chorus in Sophocles' last tragedy, Oedipus
at Colonus (line 1225ff.):
Nothing surpasses not being born;
but if born, to return where we came from
is next best, the sooner the better.
The
poet who wrote these lines shortly before his death was ninety and could look
back on a life's work that included one hundred and twenty plays of which
ninety-six had won first prize (that is, twenty-four tetralogies) and the rest
second prize. He had never placed third, was beloved by the people of Athens,
and had reaped many other honors. But his tragedies give unsurpassed expression
to despair, and although the lines are spoken by a chorus in a play, a study of
the seven extant tragedies shows plainly how at ninety Sophocles felt no dread
in the face of death.
Close
to two hundred years earlier, Jeremiah had exclaimed (20: 14):
Cursed be the day
on which I was born!
And
in the Book of Job we find almost the same outcry (3.3). Not all have always
loved their lives so well or shut their eyes to the miseries of others to the
point of feeling that no fate could be worse than death. The claim, popularized
by Heidegger, that those not afraid of death are inauthentically shutting their
eyes to their own anxiety may apply to some. But many who are afraid of death
have closed their eyes to their own wretched condition and the sufferings of
humanity.
Our
poems here include no war poems. The one that comes closest to that genre is
"Hagen's Dying Song" by Felix Dahn (1834–1912), a professor who
achieved a great success with his four-volume historical novel, Ein Kampf um
Rom (A Fight for Rome), which dealt with the defeat and destruction of the
Ostrogoths and appeared in 1876, the year when Wagner's Ring was first performed
in Bayreuth. Dahn also dealt with the Nibelungen story, writing a play on
Kriemhild's revenge and the destruction. of the Burgundians under King Gunter,
but the play was forgotten while his poem about Hagen survived in anthologies to
influence the attitudes toward death of generations of German boys throughout
two world wars.
Hagen's
Dying Song
Now I am growing lonely. The princes are all
dead,
and in the moonshine glimmers the hearth in
bloody red.
The once so gay Burgundians are still, their
revels stop.
I hear how from their bodies the blood runs
drop on drop.
Out of the house arises a heavy smell of
blood,
and screeching vultures circle, impatient for
their food.
King Gunter is still sleeping his
fever-maddened sleep,
since a well sharpened arrow struck from the
tower steep.
And Volker fell with laughter, and thus bade
me adieu:
"Take all I leave, dear Hagen, my strings
I leave to you."
Secure from Hunnish cunning, he carried
without awe
the fiddle on his safe back that no foe ever
saw.
Like nightingales it sounded, strummed by the
fearless bard;
no doubt. it will sound different in my hand,
which is hard.
Three strings remain to play on, the other
four are gone;
I am not used to singing, I am no fiddle man.
And yet I feel like trying how Hagen's tune
might go:
I think some good sound cursing is a good
prayer, too.
Above all, cursed be women; woman is falsity:
here, for two soft white bodies, perishes
Burgundy!
And cursed be the illusion of morals, love,
and law:
love is a lying fiction, and only hate is
true.
Repentance is for idiots. Nothing has worth
beside
enduring still when dying with wrath and sword
and pride.
If I must reconsider my deeds now, one by one,
I should not leave a single act that I did
undone.
And if, the world's enchantment, another
Siegfried came,
I'd stab him in the back, too, with the same
deadly aim.
You tear, strings? Are you cowards, afraid of
such a song?
Hah, who comes down the courtyard, with
strides that are so long?
That is no Hunnish lookout, those are the
steps of fate –
and nearer, ever nearer – I recognize his
gait.
Up, Gunter, now awaken, this is the final
turn:
Up, up! Death, the avenger, and Dietrich comes
from Bern!
Dahn
was not a great poet, but this is, at least in the original, a strong poem. It
represents a defiant readiness for death that has been anything but exceptional
in times of war; and unfortunately times of war have rarely been exceptional.
Although
Nietzsche (1844–1900) exerted a profound influence on existentialism, he did
not make much of death, and in The Gay Science he said in a section (278)
entitled "The thought of death":
How strange it is that this sole certainty and
common element makes almost no impression on people, and that nothing is further
from their minds than the feeling that they form a brotherhood of death. It
makes me happy that men do not want at all to think the thought of death! I
should like very much to do something that would make the thought of life even a
hundred times more appealing to them.
Six
years later, Nietzsche included in Twilight of the Idols a section
called "Morality for physicians." All of it is interesting, but I
shall here quote only a small part of it.
To die proudly when it is no longer possible
to live proudly. Death freely chosen, death at the right time, brightly and
cheerfully accomplished amid children and witnesses: then a real farewell is
still possible, as the one who is taking leave is still there; also a real
estimate of what one has achieved and what one has wished, drawing the sum of
one's life - all in opposition to the wretched and revolting comedy that
Christianity has made of the hour of death. One should never forget that
Christianity has exploited the weakness of the dying for a rape of the
conscience…
Nietzsche
failed to shoot himself as Van Gogh did, and when he collapsed, insane, in
January 1889, his mother and later on his sister managed to keep him alive for
another eleven and a half years. But he wrote a poem shortly before his
breakdown and also managed to finish four superb books during his last few
months. The poem is one of his so-called Dionysus Dithyrambs, which influenced
Rilke's Elegies, but is not Dionysian in any crude sense. It is the voice of a
man who has found peace and leaves life without regrets.
The Sun Sinks
I
Not long will you thirst,
burnt out heart!
A promise is in the air,
from unknown lips it blows at me
– the great chill comes.
My sun stood hot over me at noon –
be welcome that you come,
you sudden winds,
you chilly spirits of afternoon!
The air moves strange and pure.
Does not with warped
seductive eyes
night leer at me?
Stay strong, courageous heart!
Do not ask: why?
II
Day of my life!
The sun sinks.
Already the smooth
flood stands golden.
Warm breathes the rock:
whether at noon
joy slept its noonday sleep upon it?
In greenish lights
Joy is still playing over the brown abyss.
Day of my life!
Toward evening it goes.
Already your eye
glows half-broken,
already your dew's
tear drops are welling,
already runs still over white seas
your love's purple,
your last hesitant blessedness.
III
Cheerfulness, golden one, come!
you of death
the most secret and sweetest foretaste!
Did I run too rash on my way?
Only now that my foot has grown weary,
your eye catches up with me,
your joy catches up with me.
Round me but wave and play.
Whatever was hard sank into blue oblivion –
idle stands now my boat.
Storm and drive – how it forgot that!
Wish and hope have drowned,
smooth lie soul and sea.
Seventh
loneliness!
Never felt I
nearer me sweet security,
warmer the sun's eye.
Does not the ice of my peaks still glow?
Silver, light, a fish,
my bark now swims out.
The
last two poets I wish to consider belong to my parents' generation and thus in a
sense to our time. Let us begin with Rilke, who wrote more superb short poems
than any other German poet after Goethe and who remains one of the world's
greatest masters in this genre. A lovely poem in his Neue Gedichte (1907)
deals with Orpheus' descent into the underworld to bring back from death his
wife, Eurydice. He goes down accompanied by the god Hermes, it being understood
that if he looks back even once to see if his wife follows him, she has to
remain dead. Although this poem is longer than any of the others I am using, I
shall quote the whole of it. For the wish to bring back the dead is an important
part of our subject and among the most ubiquitous attitudes toward death.
Orpheus.
Eurydice. Hermes
That was the souls' weird mine.
Like silent silver ores they penetrated
as veins its dark expanses. Between roots
welled up the blood that flows on to mankind,
and in the dark looked hard as porphyry.
Else nothing red.
But rock was there
and woods that had no nature. Bridges spanned
the void
and that great gray blind pond
suspended over its far distant depth
as rainy skies above a landscape.
And between meadows, soft and full of
patience,
appeared the ashen streak of the one way
as a long pallor that has been stretched out.
And it was on this one way that they came.
In front, the slender man in the blue mantle
who looked ahead in silence and impatience.
His paces, without chewing, gulped the way
in outsized swallows; and his hands were
hanging
heavy and sullen from the fall of folds,
knowing no longer of the weightless lyre
grown deep into his left as rambler roses
into the branches of an olive tree.
His senses were as if they had been parted:
and while his glances, doglike, ran ahead,
turned back, and came, and always stood again
as waiting at the next turn of the way –
his hearing stayed behind him as a smell.
Sometimes it seemed to him as if it reached
back to the walking of those other two
who were to follow him this whole ascent.
Then it was but the echo of his climbing
and his own mantle's wind that was behind him.
Yet he said to himself that they would come;
said it out loud and heard it fade away.
They would come yet, only were two
walking most silently. And if he might
turn only once (and if his looking back
were not destruction of this whole endeavor
still to be ended), he would surely see them,
the quiet two who followed him in silence:
the god of going and of the wide message,
the travel hood shading his brilliant eyes,
bearing the slender staff before his body,
the beat of wings around his ankle bones;
and given over to his left hand: she.
The one so loved that from a single lyre
wails came surpassing any wailing women;
that out of wails a world arose in which
all things were there again: the wood and
valley
and way and village, field and brook and
beast;
and that around this wailing-world, just as
around the other earth, a sun revolved
and a vast sky, containing stars and
stillness,