Death in the Western World

Death in the Western World – 331

IV Coming late in the crucial eighteenth century, the work of Immanuel Kant …

THAT THE DEATH of every known human individual has been one of the central facts of life so long as there has been any human awareness of the human condition does not mean that, being so well known, it is not problematical. On the contrary, like history, it has needed to be redefined and newly analyzed, virtually with every generation. However, as has also been the case with history, with the advancement of knowledge later reinterpretations may have some advantages over earlier.

I start from the proposition that if we are to speak of the death of individuals, we need some conceptualization, beyond common sense, of what a human individual, or "person," is. First, I do not propose to discuss the meaning of the deaths of members of other species, insects, elephants, or dogs, but only of human individuals. Second, I propose to confine discussion to individual persons and not to examine societies, civilizations, or races in this sense.

Within these limitations I should like to start with the statement that the human individual is a synthesized combination of a living organism and a "personality system," conceived and analyzed at the level of "action" in the sense in which I and various others have used that term.¹ In older terminology, he is a combination of a "body" and a "mind." The concept of a personality as analytically distinguished from an organism is no more mystical than is that of a “culture" as distinguished from the human population (of organisms) who are its "bearers." The primary criterion of personality, as distinguished from the organism, is an organization in terms of symbols and their meaningful relations to each other and to persons. In the process of evolution, personalities should be regarded as emergent from the organic level, as are cultural systems in a different, though related way.

¹ Talcott Parsons, Social Systems and the Evolution of Action Theory (New York: Free Press, 1977).

Revised version of the article appearing in the Encyclopedia of Bioerhics, Warren T. Reich, ed. (New York: Free Press, 1978). Copyright © 1978 by Georgetown University. Used by permission of the Publisher.

332 THE HUMAN CONDITION

Human individuals, seen in their organic aspect, come into being through bisexual reproduction - and birth - as do all the higher organisms. They then go through a more or less well defined life course and eventually die. The most important single difference among such individual organisms is the duration of their lives, but for each species there is a maximum span: for humans, it is somewhere between ninety and one hundred years. In this sense death is universal, the only question being "at what age?" Within these limits the circumstances of both life and death vary enormously.

It seems that these considerations have an immediate hearing on one of the current controversies about death, namely, the frequent allegation that American society - and some say others - attempts to "deny death." Insofar as this is the case (and I am skeptical), the contention has to be in the face of a vast body of biological knowledge. If any biological proposition can he regarded as firmly established, it is that, for sexually reproducing species, the mortality of individual, "phenotypical" organisms is completely normal. Indeed, mortality could not have evolved if it did not have positive survival value for the species, unless evolutionary theory is completely wrong. This fact will he a baseline for our whole analysis.

The human individual is not only a living organism but also a special kind of organism who uses symbols, notably linguistic ones. He learns symbolic meanings, communicates with others and with himself through them as media, and regulates his behavior, his thought, and his feelings in symbolic terms. I call the individual in this aspect an actor. Is an actor "born"? Clearly not in the sense in which an organism is. However, part of the development of the human child is a gradual and complicated process, which has sometimes been called socialization, whereby the personality becomes formed. The learning of patterns of relation to others, of language, and of structured ways of handling one's own action in relation to the environment is the center of this process.

² See Peter Berger and Richard Liban, “Kultorelle Wertstruktur und Bestattungpraktiken in den Vereiniglen Staaten," Kölner Zeitschrift fur Soziologie und Social Psychologie, no. 2 (1960); and Robert Fulton in collaboration with Robert Bendiksen (eds.), Death and Insanity (rev. ed.). (Bowie. Md.: Charles Press, 1976), especially the articles by Robert I. Lifton, “The Sense of Immortality On Death and the Continuity of Life" (pp. 19-34), and by Erik Lindemann, “Symptomatology and Management of Acute Grief" (pp.20-771).

Death in the Western World 333

Does a personality, then, also die? Because the symbiosis between organism and personality is so close, just as no personality in the human sense can be conceived to develop independently of a living child organism, so it is reasonable to believe that no human personality can be conceived as such to survive the death of the same organism, in the organic sense of death. With respect to causation, however, if the personality is an empirical reality, it certainly influences what happens to the organism, the person's "body," as well as vice versa. The extreme case is suicide, which surely can seldom be explained by purely somatic processes, without any "motives" being involved, as often can a death from cancer. But more generally there is every reason to believe that there are "psychic" factors in many deaths, all manner of illnesses, and various other organic events.

It is firmly established that the viability of the individual organism, human and nonhuman, is self-limiting. Thus, even in the absence of unfavorable environmental conditions, in the course of the "aging" process, there will occur gradual impairment of various organic capacities, until some combination of these impairments proves fatal. Organic death can be staved off by medical measures but cannot be totally prevented. There seems every reason to believe, but there is less clear-cut evidence on this point, that the same is in principle true of the action-personality component of the individual. This means that, with aging, various components of that complex entity lose the necessary capacities to maintain its balances, which eventually will lead to a breakdown. The cases in which there is virtual cessation of personality function without organic death are suggestive in this sense. More generally, if, as I strongly believe, the phenomena of mental illness are real and not merely epiphenomena of organic processes, then it stands to reason that some of them can be severe enough to eventuate in personality death, partly independent of organic death.

We have already noted that at the organic level the human individual does not stand alone but is part of an intergenerational chain of indefinite, though not infinite, durability, most notably the species.

The individual organism dies, but if he/she reproduces, the "line" continues into future generations.

This intergenerational continuity is as much a fact of life as are individual births and deaths.

There is a direct parallel on the action side: An individual personality is "generated" in symbiosis with a growing individual human organism and dies with that organism. But the individual personality is embedded in transindividual action systems, at two levels, social systems (most notably, whole societies) and cultural systems. There is a close analogy between these two and the relation between somatoplasm and germ plasm on the organic side, both of which are "earned" by the individual organism. Thus, the sociocultural "matrix" in which the individual personality is embedded is in an important sense the counterpart of the population-species matrix in which the individual organism is embedded.

At the organic level the individual organism dies, but the species continues, "life goes on." Also, the individual personality dies, but the society and cultural system, of which in life he was a part, also "goes on." I strongly suspect that this parallel is more than simple analogy.

334 THE HUMAN CONDITION

What is organic death? It is of course a many-faceted thing, but as Freud and many others have said, it is in one principal aspect the "return to the inorganic" state. At this level the human body, as that of other organisms, is made up of inorganic materials but organized in quite special ways. When that organization breaks down, the constituent materials are no longer part of a living organism but come to be assimilated to the inorganic environment. In a certain sense this insight has been ancient religious lore; witness the Gospel, "Dust thou art, to dust thou shalt return."

Is the death of a personality to be simply assimilated to this organic paradigm? Most positivists and materialists would say, yes. This answer, however, has not been accepted by the majority in most human societies and cultures. From such very primitive peoples as the Australian aborigines, especially as their religion was analyzed by Durkheim,³ to the most sophisticated of the world religions, there have persisted beliefs in the existence of an individual soul, which can be conceived both to antedate and to survive the individual organism or body, though the ideas of pre-existence and of survival have not always coexisted in any given culture. The literature of cultural anthropology and of comparative religion can supply many instances.⁴ The issue of the individuality of this nonorganic component of the human individual, outside its symbiosis with the living organism, is also a basis of variability.

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