1. For men it is hard not to look at dead bodies.
2. In order to show Glaucon what the spirited part (thymos) of the soul is, Socrates recalls the example of Leontius, son of Aglaion, who could not, as he came up from Piraeus, resist looking at the corpses lying outside the North Wall. He desired to look, was ashamed, covered his face for a time, and flnally gave way to his desire; he opened his eyes wide and hastened toward the bodies saying, “Look, you damned wretches, take your fill of the fair sight.” Because of this example, what Socrates thinks about spiritedness (thymos) is hard to tell. Does it show itself in the desire to look or in the restraint of that desire? Is thymos the part of the soul which wants to look at corpses or that part which is ashamed of such corpses and the desire to look at them? Is it evident in the open eyes or in the cursing speech of Leontius? Glaucon is persuaded that it is the latter and Socrates does not dissuade him.[1]
3. What Xenophon relates inclines us to think that thymos is the part of the soul which wants to look at the corpses, for he shows us the young Cyrus after his first engagement with a human enemy. Young Cyrus cannot restrain his eyes, for young Cyrus does not wish to restrain his eyes. Long after the battle when the other warriors seek repose, the young Cyrus is found beside the corpses, gazing, gazing, gazing.7 These gazing eyes are the same which the old Cyrus will cover as he dies. To those gathered around him, he says, “When I shall have covered my face I request you, my sons, let no man, not even yourselves, look upon my body.” Having given directions for his funeral, he covers his face and expires.3 Does his hand shield himself or others?
4. After making an effort to satisfy the death-fearing inquiries of his interlocutors,4 Socrates hears Crito ask what shall we do with you after you are dead. Upon hearing this Socrates laughs; it is the final and one of the very few laughs of his life.S Upon taking the poison, he lies down and soon covers his eyes. He uncovers them only to remind Crito to offer a sacrifice to the god of healing.6 Crito’s question, are you sure there is nothing else? goes unanswered. When they move his hand from his face, his eyes are open and fixed. (Alternatively: when they move the hand of his body from the face, the eyes and the mouth of the body or corpse are open.) It is Crito who closes his eyes and his mouth. They would find it hard not to close those eyes and that mouth. Where is Socrates?
5. Thucydides makes us look at many bodies. The bodies of the dying and the dead lie mixed inside the city. Even the temples fill with bodies. Those unable to bury their dead throw them on the pyres of others. First terror and then indifference grip the citizens. Neither fear of the gods nor fear of the laws of men restrains the conduct of the citizens. 7 The plague is a stern teacher and it teaches few men. Only a year before, the splendid Pericles delivered a funeral oration whose beauty has something to do with the fact that death is barely mentioned. 8 Thucydides does no more than mention that the plague carried away this beautiful speaker, and he does not mention that he himself caught the plague. His own written speech or inquiry, biding us look at so many bodies, is unlike the beautiful public speech of Pericles.
6. Lucretius begins with a beautiful laudation of the lively and fecund Venus.9 To properly understand the beautiful things we must understand the repellent and ugly things. To properly gaze at beautiful bodies, we must learn to look at corpses. The dread and darkness of the mind make it hard for us to do so. Dread of the repellent things led men to fashion the beautiful and immortal gods. Sleeping, they saw the dead quickened and beheld the gods.’ ° Thus, to the natural shocks men added supernatural shocks delivered by vindictive or capricious gods. I ranquility resides in truth. The gods are not and the walls of the world will not always stand. I l The three ever-
~ Plato,Repuhlic. 439e-440c
2 C’yropaedia. 1, iV, ~4.
3 Ihid ., Vlll, vii, ~S-l8. a Phaedo. 77e. s Ihid., 115c-d: cf. 84d. 6 Ihid., I 1 7c-cnd: cf. I I X a witll Nic~z~cllc, Gotzendammerun~, “Dass Problem des Sokrates,” I . 7 Peloponnesian War, 1l, 5. ~ Ihid.,11,4. 9 De rerum natura, 1,1-49. Ibid., IV, 780fr.
” Ihid .,11, 1148ff.
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lasting things are the atoms, empty space, and the sum total of things;l 2 the everlasting things are neither beautiful, nor lovable. Are the perishable, especially the human things, lovable? Listen. Before we touch a smooth human body we should think of a corpse. When we listen to panting breath escaping between sensually parted lips, we should think of the body, breathless and still.l 3 Lucretius ends his account of things with an unadorned description of the plague. 14 It is a test of whether we have become numb. What cannot be touched, cannot touch. I 5
7. “It is a fearful thing to love what death can touch,” says a grave stone in a village among green mountains. According to the Ancients we can only love the things which death cannot touch. Anything which dies is hardly deserving of our ardor. 16 “Human things” is a term of contempt. We must cultivate what in ourselves resembles or participates in the deathless.l 7 Above the city and its honorloving warriors lies the true world; this world of intelligible ideas never disappoints, never decays, never changes; it is unmixed with baser stuff such as ourselves. What is most excellent in us is most akin to it. He who catches a glimpse of these beautiful ideas is priviledged; he will no longer care for a fair name, a statue, or a smooth body. 18 Looking at the corpse of Socrates reminds the philosopher to look away to the ideas. Thus, the best student of Socrates is not present at his death. (Yet Socrates lets the secret out that he could not look at the sun.) 17
8. According to the Christians the genuinely lovable things are indeed those which cannot be touched by death, but these things are available to all men. Men are creatures. They owe their being to the Holy God who created them with an immortal soul, a precious fluid in a frail vessel, one day to be resurrected. To Paul a corpse reminds us that from Adam, the first of men to die, death is the wages of sin. Of death we are to be ashamed except as we believe on one man raised from the dead. Whoever calls upon this god/man shall be saved.2° According to Christ, “Let the dead bury their dead.”2 1 Nine centuries after his death crosses and images of his crucifixion appear in the churches of Catholic Europe. In the Cross of Lothar and the Crucifix of Gero at Cologne and in others, Europe gazes at a suffering god, who so loved men that he became a man, even this corpse. Reflective eyes must ask two questions: where is his divinity and where is my afterlife? That God became man is as marvelous and aweful as that soul be born in body. Ten centuries after Christ’s death Anselm proves the existence of God, than which nothing can be greater, 22 and inquires why God became man.23 According to a letter of the later Heidegger, Christianity is a humanism for everything comes down to the salvation of the soul of man and the history of mankind appears in the frame of the history of salvation. 2 4 Luther might agree but not Thomas.
9. Father Abraham dies. He who begat Issac and Ishmael is buried by Issac and Ishmael in a cave, in a field, a field which he purchased. Sarah already lies there. He dies after he has given all that he had unto Issac. Of him it is said, he “gave up the ghost, and died in a good old age, an old man, and full of years; and was gathered to his people.”2 5 Dying he neither weeps nor laughs; he does not gnash his teeth, nor does he cry out. He who said nothing all the way to Mt. Moriah now says nothing as he dies. There are no last words.
10. “It is a fearful thing to love what death can touch.” According to the Modems there are no deathless things, save perhaps the sun, the atoms, or the sum total of things and these are not lovable. Both God and the good are idols. Self-esteem and self-mastery alike convince us that there cannot be beings more willful or exalted than ourselves. 2 6 Scrupulous exegesis of biblical religion points to a corrupt text 2 7 or a hidden God. 2 8 Contempt for comfort deprives the honest of a world beyond the growing (metaphysics). A critical geneology of metaphysics leads to the fear of death. According to Galileo the altering earth is nobler than an incorruptible moon. More precious than “precious” jewels is soil. Who would choose to gaze at a bushel of diamonds when he couiu “plant a jasmine in a pot or sow an orange seed and watch it sprout, grow, and produce its handsome leaves, its fragrant
12lbid ~ 8osl’f
3 Ibid ., IV, 1037-1191.
1 4 Ibid., Vl, 1090-1286. Ibid., V, lSOfi.
16 Phaedo, passim; cf. Poetics 1448bl4 which hints that tragedy is a looking at corpses.
7 Ethics. 1177b26-1 178a8.
‘ ~ Symposium, 210a-21 2b. When eros rathcr than thymos is the subject, dead bodies are barely mentioned; Diotima is said to havc postponed a plaguc for tcn years (201c).
19 Phaedo, 99d; cJ: Republic, Vll.
20 Epistle to theRomans, 6.5; 6.23; IU.I I; 10.13.
21 Mattheu~, 8 .2 2 .
2 2 PrOslogium
2 3 Cur Deus Homo. 2 4 Platons l.ehre von der Wahrheit Mit einem Brief uber den “Humanismus. ‘ ‘ Cf: Wille zur Macht, 917 . 2 5 Cenesis. 25 .8 . 2 6 I)cscartcs, Meditations, IV, approachillg thc middlc. 2 7 Spinoza. Theologico-Political Treatise.
Looking at Bodies 89
flowers, and fine fruit.”29 Those who prefer the incorruptible moon to the moon visible in the telescope should become statues. It is, then, the penshable things which are lovable; what perishes is precious. The deathless bodies of the Struldbruggs are repellent; no less repellent are their superfluous lives.3° Nothing born is immortal. How or why we came to be, we do not know Let be. We can only love ourselves and the human things, close to us. Indeed, it is a fearful thing to love what death can touch. What does one love but things touched by death? Looking at the corpse of Cordelia, Lear does not cease to love. Love and be silent.3 1
11. While walking on a highway outside the gates of the city of Louvain in 1536, the young Andraeus Vesalius saw a corpse, the body of a criminal, hanging from a gibbet, there by the order of the town fathers and for the edification of strollers. Climbing the stake, Vesalius grasped the femur and pulled it away. On following nights he returned until he had secreted the whole skeleton through the gates of the city and could gaze in the secret of his rooms upon a complete articulated skeleton.3 2 Many bodies later, Vesalius presented the fruits of his exact looking to the eyes and the mind of others. In 1543 all of Europe could hold in its hands something to read and something to look at, for accompanying the text of De Hu~nanis Corporis Fabrica are plates, a novelty in anatomy text books, executed by a student of Titian. The title page shows us an open air anatomy theatre crowded with spectators. Their attention is fixed upon the author and the female corpse he has begun to anatomize.33 While he teaches about the organs of generation, we look at the corpse of this young woman and wonder that life springs from life. Is there a beginning?
12. Is Falstaff a coward? His death is reported by a woman named Quickly. The dread and darkness of her mind cannot obscure the fear which gripped the witty old man. As death approached he tried to repeat a psalm composed by the Israelite King David. This fearful recitation is broken by the fearful cry, “God, God, God.”— neither witty, nor the cause of wit in other men. The hand of Mistress Quickly felt the body of Falstaff, travelling up from the feet, above the knee, upward and upward, and finding him as cold as any stone. The most famous pupil of Falstaff is not present at this death, nor is it reported to him, yet its substance is entirely known to him. The absent English King Henry, on the eve of ruin prepares his army as if it had the soul of Falstaff. Upon Christian dread he founds his modem civil religion and his new model army. The resemblance between the death of Falstaff and that of Socrates would seem to be both deliberate and mysterious.
13. Hamlet returns too late to see his father’s corpse. In his mind’s eye his father lives.34 The ghost turns image into terror. Old Hamlet is no corpse. Look where he comes stalking, a voice you cannot hush with a rapier. It is a wonder that this bodyless thing cherishes all his smooth body35 and also his smooth spouse’s.35 He who obeys this pale commander will never cleave unto his own spouse. The mind of Hamlet is darkened with the dread of something after life.37 That we are not our corpses saves the kneeling Claudius.38 The very first corpse Hamlet views is one he has made. To be, to act, to kill, proves easy. Rashness be praised. Polonius dead begins to clear madness and dread from the mind of Hamlet. The second corpse Hamlet sees lacks flesh. He is never more his own master than when he stands beside an open grave and listens to a witty digger. The skull of a jester is a cheerful thing to he who dreads some thing after life. Gazing at the skull, seeing Yorick in his mind’s eye, Hamlet does not say to Horatio, “To what base uses our bodies must return.” He does say, “To what base uses we must return, Horatio.”39 He will never see the ghost again. Too curiously for Stoic friend he traces the atoms of Alexander and imperious Caesar to dust. Can the world be in awe of earth? Clarity of mind is a sign of native resolution but being resolute means being numb. Next the corpse of Ophelia. A talkative young man leaps into her grave. By imitating him Hamlet shows what it means to love and to bury. Really Laertes is not so grief stricken that he wishes earth piled upon him.40 In the presence of this corpse Hamlet says, “I loved Ophelia.”41 Last we find him midst corpses speaking. According to his repeated words, “I am dead,”42 he too is a corpse. What matters is a story, a story Horatio could not begin to tell; its brief wit is ” Let it be.”43
2 9 Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems. First Day, past the middle, Sagredo spcaking. 3 ° Swilt, Gulliver’s Travels, ill, ] O.
31 King Lear, 5 .3.
3 2 J B. de C. M. Saundcrs and Charles D. O’Malley, The Illustrations From the Works of Andreas Vesalius of Brussels; with Annotations and Translations, A Discussion of the Plates and Their Background, Authorship and Influence, and a Biographical Sketch of Vesalius (Cleveland and New York: World Publishing Co., 1950), pp. 14-15.
331bid., pp.4245. 34 Hamlet, 1.2.185. 3 5 Ibid., 1.5.73. 3 6 Ibid., 1.5.86. 3 7 Ibid., 1.3.78. 3 ~ Ibid., 3.3.74. 39 Ibid.~ 5.1.190. (my italics). 4° Ibid., 5.1.245. 4 1 Ibid., 5.1.256. 4 2 Ibid., 5.2.323, 327. 4 3 Ibid., 5 .2.327.
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14. According to Vico, after the flood feral or gentile man did not bury his dead. He did not recogni7~e his dead. He lived solitary, nomadic, and kinless, without patrimony or marriage. The emergence of the civil theology of the gentes is marked by the institution of marriage, burial, and divination or augury.44 Burial was accompanied by discovery of the immortal soul; the immortality of the souls of the forefathers requires burial and burial makes an indiscriminant land into a patrimony. The founders of the common civil theology of the gentes called the grave the “underworld” (an expression also found in Holy Scripture).45 Fear of divinity is the mother of humanity or civil society. These founders were poets and in that time every man was a poet. The first poets frightened themselves with their own creations. (That men can only know what they make is the foundation of the new science.)46 Upon seeing a corpse, all civil men should feel, here too the gods are dwelling. Where the dead go unbuned, there is barbarism or returned barbarism.4 7 Indeed, humanitas comes first and properly from humando, burying.48
15. Freely Nietzsche’s Zarathustra goes down from the mountains. At the end of his prologue addressed to the people, addressed “to everyone,” the tightrope walker walking above the square falls. Only Zarathustra does not move. The body hits the pavement right next to him, not yet dead. When the man says that the devil tripped him and will now drag him to hell, Zarathustra answers that upon his honor neither devil nor hell exist. The man takes this to mean that he has only been a beast, taught to dance by blows and meals. On the contrary, Zarathustra promises to him that because of the danger of his vocation and his perishing in that vocation, he Zarathustra will bury him with his own hands. The dying man moves his hand in thanks. Man is a rope over an abyss; he will become something more than what he is when he buries without the conviction of an afterlife. Zarathustra does not flinch for the falling body because he knows that God is dead, and because he knows this he buries the body of the tightrope walker in the hollow of a tree. The last men would let the dead bury the dead; they would blink and pass by. Zarathustra buries the body in a tree and passes by.49 To look at the crucified Christ is “to esteem the entrails of the unknowable.” To do so is to sin against the earth. Truth is a woman about whose fidelity we have reason for suspicion. Bless it. Leave life blessing but not loving it.50 Later, addressing undiscovered companions, addressing “no one,” Zarathustra teaches “free death.” “Die at the right time,” and “I want to die myself, so that my friends may love the earth more for my sake.”S I
16. For men it is hard not to look at dead bodies and for men it is hard to look at dead bodies. 5 2
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44 r~lew Science, 333-337. 4 5 Ibid., 715. 4 ~ Ibid., 331, 332. 4 7 Ibid ., 337 4′ Ibid., 12. 49 Zarathustras Vorrede. s o Jenseits von Gut und Bose, 96. 51 Die Reden Zarathustras, “Vom frcien Tode.” 5 2 Cf . Michael Platt, “Looking At the Body,” Hastings Center Reports, Apr.l, i 97s, pp. 21-28 .
[1] Plato,Repuhlic. 439e-440c.
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