The Mystery of Death. Ladislaus Boros

phantasma) is nothing but the translation into a metaphysical terminology of the tension between being caught up out of oneself (ecstasis) and being thrown back upon oneself of which we are conscious in the experiencing of philosophical wonder. We shall now attempt to open up the basic philosophical reaction of wonder by turning the keys leading to four forms of experience. In this way, we shall be laying the foundations for our analysis of death.

      The first point at which we make the experience of philosophical wonder is, no doubt, the shock with which we realize the uncertainty and mysteriousness of existence. At the beginning of thought we always find an experience of this subjective uncertainty, dubiousness and indecision. Suddenly we are struck by some occurrence, perhaps something quite ordinary; a strange feeling of uncertainty comes over us and we feel all at once that we have lost our bearings in a world of insecure objects. This brings upon us a feeling of distress that, at times, can be so excessive that we cannot bear to be alone for one single moment. We know ourselves to be lost, and feel our own personal existence to be a mere plaything of inscrutable events, a solitary, aimless and isolated thing. Perhaps we can go on living in society, but we take part in events as if they did not properly concern us. Things have lost their name, almost even their form; it is as though they had no permanent individuality. In this abstraction of ours we make the fundamental discovery of an inner quality which seems to envelop all the actions, deeds and experiences we have mentioned. We are incapable of overtaking, of coming alongside our own deeds, of fully entering into our own acts, of stamping upon them our personality; we are incapable of being fully persons. Our own self constantly eludes us, and, it would seem, without our contributing in any way to this strange effect. The initial stirrings of existence never proceed really from ourselves; we simply follow them, as if impelled by something alien to ourselves.

      Furthermore, to take up the point of the mysteriousness of existence: it is precisely in this impossibility of our ever catching up, an impossibility that forms the basis of our powerlessness both with ourselves and with the world, that we discover that our situation is worth questioning from the point of view of philosophy. In us there lives an unknown, in face of which we feel powerless; it is, therefore, something superior to us and seems to make our actions a priori of no account. As such, then, this unknown appears to us to be what we have always been aiming at in all our questionings. When, in our philosophical wonder, the fundamental powerlessness of existence is all at once removed from the periphery of consciousness into the centre of reflexion, our own existence is seen to be both bound up with impermanence and yet for ever breaking out of its provisional limitations; that is, it is shown to be something very questionable indeed: a disconcerting vacuum empty of meaning, and challenging us to a search for meaning. This is the beginning of philosophical reflexion.

      There is a second point in our experience of philosophical wonder—a feeling of uncertainty in the realm of the familiar. The moment we feel insecure in our habitual system of relations with the world, we lose our grip on our mastery of the world as we had hitherto practised it. In the framework of the basic philosophical experience, there occurs the specific one Kierkegaard so impressively describes in his Stages on Life’s Way—one’s existence, on the level on which it has hitherto moved, comes up against a limit and perceives that on this level of existence life can progress no further. Courage must be found for a leap to a higher level, and this means that the whole system of relations with the world is involved in a crisis affecting all bed-rock principles. A new world is opened up to our existence, a world whose ways are untrodden, its promises untried and its hopes still uncertain. The leap itself, however, can no longer be put off, for the call of this new life becomes ever more pressing; so a man goes out from his old habitat and tries to find a footing in the unknown. The uncertainty experienced in philosophical wonder lies at a deeper level than the ordinary, everyday threats made to our existence, deeper than our ordinary experiences of failure. This need to make a leap into the dark reveals to us that there has been some obscure kind of loss, of existential loss. It is precisely in the urgency of this inescapable surrender of ourselves that we realize that the uncertainty of which we have now become aware has always been, without our knowing it, a component in all our actions, in the general tone of our existence, in our attitudes and our premonitions of the future. It (this uncertainty) has always been rising up from within us in varying emotional forms, assuming shapes, putting on masks or playing parts in our waking experiences, and still more, in our dreams. Whatever the different manifestations, one thing they all had in common—a feeling that we do not belong “here”, that “somewhere” we have lost something, something very significant. What, we do not know and never have known. That is why we feel so much uncertainty about making the new leap in our existence, because we have always been so uncertain in our world, uncertain despite our superficial air of security in a self-made and forcibly maintained world-structure of practical utility. But, precisely in this uncertainty, we gain anew the knowledge that there is a sure guarantee. Even as we tried, amid the temporary expedients of our daily life, to build up for ourselves a safe situation out of small assurances, and palpable certainties, we were longing, all unconsciously, for a guarantee that would dominate them all. This quest for certainty is an unconscious return, a groping after something that lies far beyond the concrete forms of our search. We constantly strive to push our way across the mysterious boundary which runs through things, persons and events. We live in a constant expectation of infinite encounter and ineffable security.