The "social inconvenience" of death

The German philosopher Martin Heidegger has a reference to "Death of Ivan Il'ich" towards the beginning of the second part of Heidegger's magnum opus, Being and Time. The reference to Tolstoy comes right after a discussion of the ways in which we, all of us, "flee" in the face of death. Specifically, it is attached to the sentence: "Indeed, the dying of Others is seen often enough as social inconvenience, if not even a downright tactlessness, against which the public is to be guarded." Heidegger's footnote to this sentence reads: "In his story 'The Death of Ivan Il'ich" Leo Tolstoi has presented the phenomenon of the disruption and breakdown of having 'someone die.'"

Heidegger's right. No other literary account so pitilessly exposes the inconvenience of death, the fact that death disrupts the flow of public life. Everyone near Ivan is bummed out, but not because Ivan has died: Instead, now "the public" has to go through all the hassle involved in dealing with the tactlessness of death.

But death does not inconvenience the public in any but the most superficial way. We flee the knowledge that "I will die," and instead focus on the fact that "he has died." Here's Tolstoy's mordant, caustic recounting of society's reaction to death:

Besides considerations as to the possible transfers and promotions likely to result from Ivan Ilych's death, the mere fact of the death of a near acquaintance aroused, as usual, in all who hard of it the complacent feel that, 'it is he who is dead and not I.' Each one thought or felt, 'Well, he's dead but I'm alive!' But the more intimate of Ivan Ilych's acquaintances, his so-called friends, could not help thinking also that they would now have to fulfill the very tiresome demands of propriety by attending the funeral service and paying a visit of condolences to the widow.

Lenin, who after his fashion loved and respected Tolstoy the artist and social critic, wrote that Tolstoy's greatest talent was the "ripping off of masks," exposing the tawdry and low that hides behind civility and tradition and good manners. He might have had this passage in mind.

Ivan has "made a mess of things," as Schwartz's wink conveys to Peter Ivanovich when they meet on the stairs before the funeral service. But this mess of things extends beyond the social -- Tolstoy indiscreetly reminds us, when describing how Gerasim is strewing something (carbolic acid) on the floor, that dead people (especially before the advent of modern mortuary care) stink.

If we think that our death will matter to society, that our death will disrupt the flow of life around us, the "happiness" of others, we are wrong:

[Schwartz's] look said that this incident of a church service for Ivan could not be a sufficient reason for infringing on the order of the session, that it would certainly not prevent his unwrapping of a new pack of cards and shuffling them that evening.

Tolstoy's point here, in the first few pages of the story, is not only to reveal the cruel indifference of society to an individual's death. (You can buy Tolstoy's analysis of the hypocrisy of society, or not.) But he surely has a point: We all know that we're mortal, that "one dies," but it is an entirely different realization that "I die." When Peter Ivanovich learns that Ivan spent three days screaming incessantly ("Oh, what I have suffered!" his wife remarks in telling of Ivan's awful death!), it occurs to Peter that "this might suddenly, at any time, happen to me." And for a moment he is terrified:

But—he did not himself know how—the customary reflection at once occurred to him that this had happened to Ivan Ilych and not to him, and that it should not an could not happen to him, and that to think that it could would be yielding to depression which he ought not to do, as Schwartz's expression plainly showed.

What would it mean to live with the real, unflinching understanding of what it means to say, "I will die?"

Let me end with one of many excellent observations on this point from the French philosopher Pascal's Pensées:

Picture a number of men in chains, and all condemned to death; each day some are strangled in the sight of the rest; those who remain see their own condition in that of their fellows, looking at one another with sorrow and without hope, each awaiting his turn. This is the picture of the condition of man.

A full accounting of our lives (say Heidegger, Tolstoy and Pascal) must begin (and of course end) with the realization that we are condemned to death.

But here, I think, is a glimmer of hope in Tolstoy: Must we look "with sorrow and without hope" at one another, at our fellows? Is there some way out, or no exit?