Death is the key to human existence

by Giovanni Cucci

Denying the thought of one's own death poses serious questions to man and to the philosopher: in the death event, in fact, not only does the individual have to give up his longing for life, but the very fullness of the Absolute Spirit becomes damaged.

In the reflections towards the end of Benedetto Croce, especially in the face of the atrocities of the Second World War, the irreducible role that the individual has in history shines through, with his desires, his sufferings which cannot be reabsorbed by the All that constitutes him. In the Soliloquy, a sort of spiritual testament, the philosopher from Abruzzo describes with dignity and awareness his own state of mind in the face of death, renouncing the possibility of understanding the meaning of his temporal story: «Sometimes to friends who address me the usual question: “How are you?”, I reply with the words that Salvatore di Giacomo heard from the old Duke of Maddaloni, the famous Neapolitan epigrammatist, when, on one of his last visits, he found him warming himself in the sun and replied to him in dialect: "Do not you see it? I am dying" […]. As melancholy and sad as death may seem, I am too much of a philosopher not to see clearly how terrible it would be if man could never die, locked in the prison that is life, always repeating the same vital rhythm."

In this touching page, the hiatus emerges again between the "vital rhythm" of the concrete man, who "runs out", and the Whole from which he is called to separate. It is precisely death that says that there can be no identity between the two aspects. Nicola Abbagnano, commenting on the Soliloquy, acutely highlighted this dissymmetry: «Who is dying on the Cross? Certainly not the work of Croce which is, like an acquisition forever, nor the Spirit of the world who is its true author; Who can die and how? Croce himself answers this question: the individual dies, who possesses the vital rhythm "only within the confines of his individuality", and to whom "a task is assigned that runs out". Faced with death, the individual feels stripped of everything and defrauded of what he holds most dear.

The perspective of another famous philosophical proposal, in vogue until a few decades ago, is no different: Marxism. For Marx, individuality must disappear in favor of the collective which surpasses it and which alone remains. Yet, as for Croce, Marx also must note that death belongs only to the individual, which contradicts the alleged fusion between individual and collectivity: «Death insofar as it is a harsh victory of the species over the individual and his unity seems in contradiction with what has been said...". And in fact this is precisely a contradiction, because if the subject were truly one with the genus, the death of the individual would have to be followed by the death of the genus. Which however doesn't happen. This is why Marx speaks of a "harsh victory" of one over the other, which highlights the inhuman face of dying. It is a significant text, precisely because it is the only one (excluding the preparatory materials of the thesis) in which the theorist of "scientific communism" reflects on death, recognizing its incurable aporeticity towards the dialectical conception of history. But in this way man is reduced to a mere object, reconfirming in another way the commercial alienation of capitalist society, from which Marxism would like to radically distance itself.

This lack of attention to the individual who dies will have serious historical and political consequences, leading to the justification of the killing of millions of people in the name of historical necessity and reason of state, an inevitable consequence of revolutionary politics. In this vision, closed to any transcendent perspective, the human being is also cancelled, together with death, reduced to a mere cog in the system.