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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 25 October 2013
Tolstoy's The Death of Ivan Ilyich describes how a man's exposure to imminent death allows him to secure redemption from a flawed life. Through close textual attention to Tolstoy's novella and extensive engagement with Frances Kamm's treatment of it, this article quarrels with this ‘Redemption View’ of Ivan's case, offering a sourer, more pessimistic view. It is argued that Ivan's reconciliation to death is facilitated by a series of mistakes he makes en route to his dying moments. Two more general lessons are drawn: first, that we are all vulnerable to the mistakes Ivan makes, and second, that reflection on the quality of our lives does not present us with any obvious resources for coming to terms with our own deaths.
1 I shall use the translation of it by Anthony Briggs in Tolstoy, Leo, The Death of Ivan Ilyich and Other Stories (London: Penguin Books, 2008)Google Scholar. Page references in the main text will be to this particular edition, accompanied by the abbreviation ‘DI’.
2 Kamm, F. M., ‘Rescuing Ivan Ilych: How We Live and How We Die’, Ethics 113 (2003), 202–33CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
3 Ibid., 209.
4 Ibid., 207.
5 However, I do want to express some misgivings about Kamm's Limbo Man argument for the separateness of Type-1 fears and Type-2 fears (ibid., 208). Limbo Man can postpone death by electing to spend certain periods of the future in a quasi-comatose state of limbo. It follows, then, that Limbo Man can stay alive for longer, so that he can realize future goods, but not through the realization of any additional future goods; the unusual option available to him is that of distributing a fixed quantity of goods across a longer life span. Limbo Man's options are not Ivan's: for Ivan, future goods just are additional future goods. The Limbo Man argument thus cannot demonstrate that Type-1 fears and Type-2 fears are genuinely separate for Ivan. I say more about the phenomenology and progression of Ivan's fears in section 3; see, in particular, my discussion of Ivan's ‘First Mistake’.
6 Ibid., 207.
7 Ibid., 204.
8 Ibid., 206.
9 It is noted in passing that two of Ivan's children have died in infancy (DI, 172). The brevity and cursory nature of this reference carry the implication that their deaths have not thrown him off his stride to any great extent.
10 Kamm, op. cit., 219.
11 Ibid., 212; original emphasis.
12 Ibid., 223.
13 Ibid., 221.
14 Ibid., 209–11.
15 Ibid., 211.
16 Kamm actually provides a parenthetical acknowledgement of this possibility (ibid., 203), yet fails to see that it considerably blunts the force of the Disconnectedness Complaint.
17 See Kagan, Shelly, Death (Yale: Yale University Press, 2012), 196–204Google Scholar.
18 Ibid., 204.
19 Ibid., 201.
20 Draper, Kai, ‘Disappointment, Sadness, and Death’, The Philosophical Review 108 (1999), 387–414CrossRefGoogle Scholar, also emphasizes these characteristics of death as a means of pinpointing death's distinctive badness.
21 Though not, I think, by reading it in Kamm's way.
22 See Nozick, Robert, Anarchy, State, and Utopia (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1974), 33Google Scholar, and also Rawls, John, A Theory of Justice (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1972), 26–7Google Scholar.
23 How much work the ‘separateness of persons’ claim can do for deontology is, of course, a moot point. But I don't think it fails at the first hurdle. See Hirose, Iwao, ‘Aggregation and the Separateness of Persons’, Utilitas 25 (2013), 182–205CrossRefGoogle Scholar, for a recent discussion of how far it gets us.
24 Kamm, op. cit., 212.
25 These approaches are not meant to be exhaustive.
26 Ivan reveals no stable religious impulses, although his wife arranges for him to be attended by a priest towards the end (DI, 214), and though some of his private reflections and entreaties appear to be addressed to God (DI, 208). There is therefore no deep reason why Ivan should conceive of death as the pathway to an afterlife, rather than as extinction.
27 But it is rather similar to the Fifth Mistake, which I discuss below. Of course, Ivan is not aware of any of these mistakes qua mistakes.
28 See Elster, Jon, Sour Grapes: Studies in the Subversion of Rationality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and Bruckner, Donald, ‘In Defense of Adaptive Preferences’, Philosophical Studies 142 (2009), 307–24CrossRefGoogle Scholar, for relevant discussions.
29 The ‘wrong kind of reasons’ problem has received much recent discussion in connection with T. M. Scanlon's ‘buck-passing’ account of value, which attempts to analyze values in terms of reasons. For relevant discussion, see Scanlon, What We Owe to Each Other (London: Harvard University Press, 1998), 95–8Google Scholar, Rabinowicz, Wlodek and Rønnow-Rasmussen, Tonni, ‘The Strike of the Demon: On Fitting Pro-Attitudes and Value’, Ethics 114 (2004), 391–423CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and also Lang, Gerald, ‘The Right Kind of Solution to the Wrong Kind of Reason Problem’, Utilitas 29 (2008), 472–89CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
30 Apart from those qualities as they are manifested in Gerasim; I shall return to Ivan's (problematic) relationship with Gerasim below.
31 Kagan, op. cit., 193, seems to agree.
32 See Velleman, David, ‘Well-Being and Time’, Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 72 (1991), 48–77CrossRefGoogle Scholar, for a view which emphasizes the importance of narrative structure to human lives. For a dissenting view, see Strawson, Galen, ‘Against Narrativity’, Ratio 17 (2004), 428–52CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
33 I want to thank Ward Jones, in particular, as well as the wonderful students enrolled in a class on the philosophy of death held at Rhodes University in 2012, for the initial inspiration for this essay. An earlier version of it was presented at the Centre for Ethics and Metaethics at Leeds; I thank the audience for helpful and interesting suggestions.