Philosophy, Death and Education

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The Complicated Conversation series is part of the Peter Lang Education list., Every volume is peer reviewed and meets the highest quality standards for content and production.

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Table of Contents

1. Introduction: Death: An Educational Perspective

   Peter Roberts, R. Scott Webster & John Quay

2. Chapter One: Philosophy, Death and Education

   Peter Roberts

3. Chapter Two: Dancing with Death

   R. Scott Webster

4. Chapter Three: Education, Attention and Transformation

   Peter Roberts

5. Chapter Four: Immortality, Uncertainty and Education

   Peter Roberts

6. Chapter Five: Educating the Horizon of Understanding

   R. Scott Webster

7. Chapter Six: Learning From the Death of Others

   John Quay

Introduction Death: An Educational Perspective

Often regarded as one of life’s few certainties, death is both instantly familiar to us and deeply mysterious. Every adult will have encountered death in some form, sometimes through the loss of a family member, sometimes less directly via friendships with others or the viewing of news items on television or the Internet. Yet, few take the time to examine death closely and to consider its significance in shaping and potentially educating human lives. This is, in part, because death can be a highly sensitive, ‘charged’ topic. Indeed, in the realms of human experience and thought, it is perhaps the most difficult subject of all. No reflective person can approach the question of death lightly. In existential terms, death holds us all to account: we cannot escape its clutches, yet we often spend our lives attempting to do just that. Death can be dignified but it can also be horrific. Death takes many forms, and attitudes towards it have varied greatly across different cultures and historical periods. Death generates its own distinctive rituals, reflecting the diverse pathways taken in understanding and responding to this one event that all lives have in common.

For centuries philosophers have wrestled with the meaning and significance of death, examining its ontological, epistemological, ethical, and aesthetic dimensions. The rich body of philosophical work associated with death stretches back more than 2000 years, in both the East and the West. Death has been a favorite theme too for novelists, playwrights, poets, and film-makers, and has featured prominently in the history of painting and sculpture. Death has been studied at length in a range of other academic fields, including Theology, Psychology, Sociology, and Anthropology. Educational theorists have, with some exceptions, been more reluctant to tackle this topic. The reasons for this relative lack of engagement are not clear. It may have something to do with the sensitivities to which we referred above. Or, perhaps it is believed that death is simply not relevant to the theory and/or practice of education and that little of value will come from work in this area. This book sets out to suggest otherwise. Drawing on insights from Kierkegaard, Tolstoy, Unamuno, Heidegger, Levinas, and Weil, among others, the book considers some of the key elements of death as an object of philosophical investigation and explores its educational implications.

It is important at the outset to distinguish the terrain being traversed here from two other areas of inquiry. First, there is an established body of work on ‘death education’ (Fonseca & Testoni, 2011; Wass, 2004), but this is predominantly concerned with something quite specific: the provision and evaluation of educational initiatives designed to assess and enhance understanding of death and dying. Research in this area has been undertaken in a number of institutions and professional contexts, including schools (Puolimatka & Solasaari, 2006), universities and colleges (Brabant & Kalich, 2008; Fowler, 2008; Mak, 2011, 2013; Wong, 2009, 2017), community rehabilitation centers (Leung et al., 2015), social work and human services (Cacciatore et al., 2015; McClatchey & King, 2015), nursing (Cui et al., 2011), and counselling (Servaty-Seib & Parikh, 2014). There is also a substantial literature on the ‘philosophy of death’ (Luper, 2009; see also, Cholbi, 2016; Scarre, 2007), but this has been mainly the preserve of those working in philosophy departments, not educationists. Scholarship in this domain has focused on whether death is ‘bad’ for us (Belshaw, 2000; Bradley, 2004, 2007; Brueckner & Fischer, 1986; Cyr, 2016; Draper, 1999; Feldman, 2013; Hetherington, 2013; Johansson, 2013; Nagel, 1970; Stoyles, 2011), on the nature and desirability of immortality (Fischer, 2005; Fischer & Mitchell-Yellin, 2014; Smuts, 2011), and on whether it is rational to feel fear or terror in the face of death (Bradley, 2015; Draper, 2004; Murphy, 1976), among other areas.

‘Death education’ has a strong practical and professional focus; the ‘philosophy of death’ draws primarily on the analytic philosophical tradition in its methods and aims. Other approaches to the question of death are possible. There is, in particular, a longstanding interest in death among existentialist thinkers, and it is in this tradition that we place most chapters of the present volume. Death, we argue, has a valuable educational role to play in allowing us to better understand the nature, meaning and significance of human existence. The book begins, in the first chapter, with an overview of ideas on death from antiquity to the present day. The chapters that follow build on the philosophical foundations established in Chapter 1 and offer fresh perspectives on contemporary themes, questions and debates in education. In keeping with the history of existentialist inquiry, we do not construct rigid boundaries between different genres of work, drawing on literature as well as philosophy and educational theory in developing our argument. We have also been influenced by Kierkegaard and other existentialists in our decision to retain author names for each chapter. This is a co-authored volume, not an edited collection, and this project has been conceived and developed jointly, over several years, in a spirit of collegiality, dialogue and friendship. The book has been designed to be read holistically, not in parts, and there are clear thematic links across chapters. At the same time, we wanted to uphold the existentialist principle of respecting the integrity and distinctiveness of each individual authorial voice. Both our similarities and our differences are important in shaping the ideas developed in the pages that follow. As one of the first book-length studies of death from an educational perspective, there are risks associated with the scholarly exploration undertaken here. But we believe these are risks worth taking. We hope the book will be of interest to anyone who has probed this most troubling of subjects and will open up new areas for educational inquiry.

Chapter 1 starts with the ancient idea of philosophy providing a preparation for death. Often traced back to Socrates, the notion of ‘learning how to die’ has been explored by a number of thinkers over the ages. Philosophy, as conceived and practiced by the ancient Greeks, was more than an intellectual exercise; it was a way of life. We frequently fear death but there is, as Socrates, Plato and Aristotle counselled, no need for this. Lucretius, following Epicurus, argued that death should be ‘nothing’ for us. Schopenhauer embraced a similar view, taking the position that if we did not concern ourselves with non-existence before birth, there is no need to do so when facing our non-existence after death. Some writers, such as Montaigne, have stressed the need to always be ready for death, such that when it comes, we will have left nothing undone and will fear neither what we leave behind nor what lies beyond our life on Earth. Death, and its links with uncertainty, despair, freedom, and responsibility in life, also figures prominently in the work of existentialists. The second part of the chapter introduces the work of several key contributors to this tradition, including Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Unamuno, Sartre, Camus, and Beauvoir. The final section considers the educational implications arising from the preceding philosophical discussion, acknowledging insights already gained by other scholars while also signaling possibilities for further inquiry.

In Chapter 2 our interest in Kierkegaard is picked up again, specifically through his well-crafted pseudonymous author Johannes Climacus. We explore this character of Johannes and come to see him as living a life of skepticism and critical thinking, specifically in the form of doubt. This is understood to be central both for religious faith and for living an authentic – and educated – life which is essential for democracies. Understanding Johannes’s character better assists in making sense of his provocation that “the thought of death is a good dancing partner” (Kierkegaard, 1985, p. 8). Here the ‘weighty thought’ of one’s own death provides an opportunity to ‘dance’ in the form of existential dialectics. This focus upon authentic thinking is provokingly contrasted with the sort of doublethink conceptualized in Orwell’s novel Nineteen Eighty Four and characteristic of inauthentic life within authoritarian societies. Johannes’s ‘dancing’ with the thought of death enables individuals to resist succumbing to the sort of cognitive dissonance which works against education and democracy.

Chapter 3 considers what it might mean to engage in an educative struggle with death. It takes as its central reference point Leo Tolstoy’s famous story, “The Death of Ivan Ilyich” (Tolstoy, 2009). “The Death of Ivan Ilyich” depicts the life of a man who, when suddenly faced with the prospect of his own death, is at first unable to comprehend the reality of his situation. He is angry, fearful and disgusted. As he gradually comes to terms with his mortality, he undergoes a harrowing, but ultimately liberating, process of decreation. Drawing on ideas from the French philosopher and pedagogue Simone Weil (1997, 2001), it is argued that Ivan’s experience is consistent with the passage from ‘gravity’, through the void of intense suffering, toward a state of grace. Educational transformation, this story suggests, is often difficult, uneven and incomplete. From Tolstoy, and from Weil, we can learn that right up to the moment of our death, there is always more work to do.

Miguel de Unamuno, the main focus for Chapter 4, was obsessed with death. Unamuno (1972) identified what he saw as tragic tension in the human condition between our desire for immortality and the doubt cast on this idea by our capacity for critical reason. He saw consciousness as a ‘disease’ with which we must learn to live. For Unamuno, death was a source of anguish but also of hope. The uncertainties created by death can sustain us; they can give our lives meaning and significance. The quest for immortality, Unamuno shows, is always there for us as human beings, even if we do not recognize its presence or influence over us. We seek to ‘live on’, in one way or another, and education can reinforce this impulse. Education does not allow us to forget; it seeks to preserve something of us, and the ideas we develop, while also playing its part in undermining structures of belief that might hitherto have nourished us. Unamuno’s educational purpose, as a writer, was to ‘wake up’ his readers; he wanted to create lives of restless longing. He was aware that the restlessness he fostered might lead to suffering, to inner turmoil, but he felt this was preferable to being ‘asleep’. To suffer, he pointed out, was still to live, and for Unamuno, this was always preferable to the prospect of nothingness. The chapter situates these ideas in the context of Unamuno’s broader ontology and epistemology and assesses his educational prescription from an ethical point of view.

In Chapter 5, we again continue with the importance of the ontological disposition of ‘wakefulness’ through the concept of death anxiety. The educational significance of this can be located in the exhortation given by existential philosophers to live an authentic life. A key characteristic of becoming authentic is being able to choose for oneself what is to be one’s ultimate values and purpose for life, because it is through such choosing that one’s authentic self is disclosed. However, such choosing also involves experiencing a sense of anxiety, and it is ‘death anxiety’ in particular which is considered in this chapter to be of most assistance. Being educational as well as existential, working through one’s death anxiety can expand our ‘horizon of meaning’ as explained by Gadamer, from which we give sense and meaning to all of our experiences. By including insights from Dewey and Vygotsky we explore how this horizon can itself be challenged and reformed, allowing individuals to experience educative growth.

Like Chapters 2 and 5, Chapter 6 highlights the philosophical interrelatedness of death and authenticity, but this time in the phenomenological and methodological sense striven for by Heidegger. The ontological import of Heidegger’s authenticity and inauthenticity is not lost on Levinas, who critiques Heidegger’s phenomenological interpretation of death. For Levinas, it is the death of others, rather than one’s own, which has the highest priority philosophically. Chapter 6 therefore begins by identifying the challenge to education of categorial murder (Bauman, 2004), wherein killing is justified via ontological categorization. The question is asked, ‘Can education work against categorial murder?’ In responding to this question, we provide a detailed account of the well-known philosophical challenge made by Levinas to the phenomenological ontology of Heidegger (see for example Bax, 2017; Cohen, 2006; Taminiaux, 1997, 2008). We draw on the differing phenomenological interpretations of death described by Heidegger and Levinas, to then consider the consequences for education, for teaching and learning. These consequences include those described by philosophers of education who have brought Levinas’s philosophical account into educational discourse, including Biesta (2003, 2008) and Todd (2003, 2008). However, in this chapter we reach a broader conclusion which ties teaching and learning to both ethics and ontology, by emphasizing interconnections between infinity and totality. Education is not just about truth within a totality; it must embrace the limitless possibilities that the other brings via the face to face relation. In this way, education is about the good beyond being; and there is hope, then, that education can work against categorial murder. This is what can be learned from the death of others.

Together, these chapters are intended to demonstrate the importance of death as a theme for educational inquiry and to show how the philosophical examination of death can contribute to the practices of teaching and learning. Education is a constant of life, and death is the certain uncertainty that characterizes life. In this way, death is implicated in any philosophical account of education. We should stress that the philosophical terrain covered in this volume constitutes just one part of a much bigger picture; there are many other theoretical perspectives that might be brought to bear on questions relating to death and education. This book appears in a series with a focus on complicated conversations, and few subjects lend themselves more readily to consideration in this light than death. Death has always been a complex and contested topic, and we believe there is much that can be gained by fostering further dialogue in this area among educationists. As we have prepared the book, we have recognized and respected our differences, on matters of theoretical detail, in our styles of writing, and in the ways we have responded to practical ethical dilemmas in daily life. Death, as a philosophical problem and an ever-present social reality, can repel but it can also attract, drawing us closer together in seeking to unravel some of its mysteries. Death can provide the stimulus for deep reflection on why and how we educate. It can help us to see ourselves in a new light, and in so doing, allow us to better appreciate what others, who must also face this certain uncertainty, have to offer.