The Funeral as a Work of Art

Extract

in the attempt to give order to a diffuse and contradictory experience each individual is an artist, as he or she proposes an ideal solution for a particular difficulty and directs every effort towards achieving the closest practicable approximation to such a solution. Looked at in this way, it might be said that the action of the human mind is inevitably directly towards a synthesis of content and form. Society itself – the arrangements men make in order to live together in mutual security and provide for their well-being in organised interchange – could be considered to be a work of functional art, designed to solve problems and overcome difficulties encountered in living.

The greatest difficulty, the most intractable problem which faces mankind is the problem of death. To say that we are deeply pre-occupied with the fact of our own mortality is not to say, of course, that death occupies the forefront of our conscious awareness all the time. On the contrary, our awareness of the certainty of our eventual death and the accompanying knowledge of the vulnerability of our bodies, a vulnerability which may at any time prove fatal, forms a kind of unacknowledged background to all our thinking, a mental and emotional sitz-im-leben which has lost all precise definition because of its sheer familiarity as an idea. In fact, we might turn inside out the arguments of the common language philosophers, who hold that death cannot be thought about because it has never been experienced as a fact of life, by saying, with Heidegger that we cannot contemplate our own mortality because we are unable to distinguish the thought of death from all our other judgments and attitudes, which can only exist as humanly meaningful propositions in the context of finitude and limitation. Life exists in the context of death, human meaning in the presence of its own extinction.