When Death Comes

CFS Lecture by Evan Thompson, Professor of Philosophy, University of British Columbia, Canada

The lecture is open to all and all are welcome

Abstract

Leo Tolstoy’s The Death of Ivan Ilyich, despite being a work of fiction, remains unsurpassed for its description of dying as the ultimate transformative experience and still holds untapped insights for philosophy. I will use Tolstoy’s story for the following philosophical ends. My first aim is to investigate dying as a transformative experience. My second aim is to describe in phenomenological terms what I will call “the ungraspability of death.” This will involve defending Freud’s claim that “one’s own death is beyond imagining.” My third aim is to use Tolstoy’s story to show the failures in Heidegger’s account of death: one cannot understand one’s own death without understanding the loss and radical absence of the other from the world, experienced foremost in the loss of the close other or loved one, such that being-towards-death is also always being-with-dying, which constitutes a unique instance of we-intentionality. My fourth and final aim is to show how Tolstoy’s story culminates not in a denial of death, as one critic has argued, but rather in a kind of mysticism about death, one which calls into question Heidegger’s fundamental ontology of our finitude.