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vi C ONTENTS
Conclusion 38
Summary 39
Discussion Questions 39
Glossary 40
Suggested Readings 41
CHAPTER 2 The American Experience of Death 43

Defining Death 46
International Definitions 47
American Definitions 49
The Meaning of Dying and Death 53
Deriving Meaning from the Audience 54
Deriving Meaning from the Situation 54
Death as a Lost Relationship 54
Creating and Changing Death-Related Meaning 56
The American Experience of Death 57
Living Death (1600–1830) 58
The Dying of Death (1830–1945) 59
The Resurrection of Death (1945–the Present) 60
Contemporary Attitudes Toward Death 62
Denial or Acceptance of Death? 62
Fearing Death? 67
Content of Death Fears 69
Death Fears, Gender, and Age 73
Relieving Death Anxiety through Religion 74
Contemplating One’s Own Death 77
Conclusion 78
Summary 79
Glossary 80
CHAPTER 3 Growing Up with Death/Growing Old with Death 83

Childhood 85
How Do Children Learn About Death? 85
Personal Experiences 87
Mass Media 88
Religion 91
Children’s Understanding of Death 92
Birth to Age Three 93
Ages Three Through Five 94
Ages Six to Twelve 96
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C ONTENTS vii
Explaining Death and Dying to Children 97

Be Honest and Open 98
Avoid Euphemisms 99
Show Emotion 100
Adolescence 101
Identity Crisis and Death Anxiety 103
Media Influences 103
Learning Adult Rituals 105
Communicating About Death 106
Adulthood 107
Young Adulthood 108
Middle-Aged Adulthood 108
Panic and Denial 109
Reflection and Acceptance 110
Personal Growth 110
Older Adulthood 110
Achieving Integrity 112
Diminishing Death Fears 113
Choosing a Place to Die 115
Conclusion 116
Summary 117
Glossary 118
CHAPTER 4 Perspectives on Death and Life after Death 121

The Need to Look Beyond Death 122
Diversity in Perspectives 124
Cross-Cultural Views 124
Case Study: The Sacred World of Native Americans 126
Religious Interpretations of Death 128
Judaism 128
Christianity 129
Islam 132
Hinduism 133
Buddhism 134
Temporal Interpretations of Death 138
Symbolic Immortality 139
Near-Death Experiences 144
Defining a Near-Death Experience 144
Explaining Near-Death Experiences 147
viii C ONTENTS
Conclusion 150
Summary 151
Glossary 152
CHAPTER 5 The Dying Process 155

Death Meanings 157
Time Meanings: Dealing with the Prognosis 157
Space Meanings: Isolation and Confinement 161
Norm and Role Meanings: Expected Dying Behavior 163
Value Meanings: Reassessing the Value of Life and Death 164
Object and Self-Meanings: Accepting the Self as Terminal 165
Detachment from the Living 165
Kübler-Ross’s Five Stages of Dying 166
Social Situation Meanings: Definition of the Environment 169
Relating to the Dying Person 170
Medical Personnel 171
The Socialization of Physicians 172
Awareness Contexts 175
Family and Friends 176
The Stress of Dealing with a Dying Family Member 178
Helping Children Cope with a Dying Parent 179
Dying with Dignity 180
The Dying Child 184
Relating to the Dying Child 185
Helping the Child Cope with Dying 186
Parents of the Dying Child 188
Siblings of the Dying Child 189
Conclusion 190
Summary 191
Glossary 192
CHAPTER 6 Living with Dying 195

Understanding and Coping with the Illness 197
The Loss of Physical Functions 197
The Loss of Mental Capacity 198
Dying of Cancer and Heart Disease 198
Cancer 198
Heart Disease 201
C ONTENTS ix
Treatment Options 202

Evaluating Treatment Options and Symptoms 202
Treating Drug Side Effects 203
Pain and Symptom Management 205
Pain Management 207
Managing Dehydration 209
Organ Transplantations 210
Palliative Care 213
The Hospice Movement 215
The Hospice Team 219
The Patient–Family as the Unit of Care 222
The Cost of Hospice Care 223
Public Attitudes 226
Evaluation of Hospice Programs 227
Conclusion 229
Summary 230
Glossary 231
CHAPTER 7 Dying in the American Health Care System 233

The Medical Model Approach to Dying 234
Dying as Deviance in the Medical Setting 235
Labeling Theory 235
Deviance Results in Punishment 236
Normalization of Dying in the Medical Setting 237
Dying in a Technological Society 238
The Environment of the Dying Person 240
Hospital 240
Home 241
Nursing Home 242
Hospice Inpatient Care 244
End-of-Life Education in Medical and Nursing Schools 245
Gross Anatomy Lab in Medical Schools 246
Developing a Sensitivity to Social and Psychological Needs 248
Developing Communication Skills 249
The Cost of Dying 252
Conclusion 257
Suggested Research Topics Related to End-of-Life Issues 257
Summary 258
Glossary 258
x C ONTENTS
CHAPTER 8 Biomedical Issues and Euthanasia 261

Ethical Behavior 263
What Is Ethical Behavior? 263
Bioethicists 265
Use of the Body in Medical Research and Training 266
Organ Transplantation 268
Euthanasia 273
Sanctity-of-Life Versus Quality-of-Life Debate 276
Sanctity-of-Life View 276
Quality-of-Life View 277
The Right to Die 278
Passive Euthanasia 281
Distinguishing Between Ordinary and Extraordinary Measures 281
Nutrition and Hydration 282
CPR Versus DNR 284
Active Euthanasia 286
Organizations Supporting Active Euthanasia 288
The Slippery-Slope Argument 291
Physician-Assisted Death 292
Conclusion 300
Summary 301
Glossary 302
CHAPTER 9 Suicide and Other Sudden, Unnatural Traumatic Deaths 305

Changing Attitudes Toward Suicide 306
The Stigma of Suicide 307
Defining Suicidal Acts 308
Social Factors Involved in Suicide 309
Age, Gender, Region, and Marital Status Factors 310
Socioeconomic and Cultural Factors 312
Theoretical Perspectives on Suicide 314
Durkheim’s Theory 315
Conflict Theory 317
Dramaturgical Perspective 318
Existentialist Perspective 318
Psychological Perspective 319
Suicide Through the Life Cycle 319
Childhood Suicide 319
Adolescent Suicide 320
Warning Signs of Suicide 322
Explaining Adolescent Suicide 322
C ONTENTS xi
College-Aged Students and Suicide 325

Adult Suicide 326
Elderly Suicide 329
Causes of Suicide 329
Copycat Suicides and the Media 330
Rational Suicide 334
Other Sudden, Unnatural, Traumatic Deaths 335
Homicide 335
Accidental Deaths 339
Conclusion 340
Summary 342
Glossary 343
CHAPTER 10 Diversity in Death Rituals 345

Understanding Death Rituals 346
Death Rituals as a Rite of Passage 347
Structural-Functional Explanations 349
Mourning Behaviors 352
Changes in Mourning Behaviors in the United States 355
Gender Differences in Mourning Behaviors 358
Customs at Death 359
Norms Prior to Death 359
Preparing the Corpse 360
Cleaning, Decorating, and Clothing the Body 360
Embalming 365
Final Disposition 367
Earth Burial 368
Cremation 370
Case Study: Burial and Mortuary Practices of Native Americans
Living on the Plains 377
Influence of Social Position on Death-Related Behaviors
and Rituals 379
Death Rituals of Major Religious Groups 380
Jewish Customs 380
Christianity 382
Hinduism 384
Buddhism 387
Islam 389
Conclusion 391
xii C ONTENTS
Summary 392
Glossary 393
CHAPTER 11 The Business of Dying 395

The Business of Preparing the Dead 396
The Changing American Funeral 396
The Puritan Funeral 396
The Victorian Funeral 397
The Contemporary American Funeral: Meeting The Needs of the Bereaved 400
The American Practice of Funeral Service 403
Education and Licensure 403
The Role of the Funeral Director 406
Funeral Expenses 406
Pricing Systems 409
Alternatives to the Funeral 412
New Trends in Funeral Service 422
Preneed Funerals: A “New” Trend in Planning Funerals 423
Aftercare: The Future Business Is To Be Found in Today’s Customers 426
Funeral Services on the Internet 428
The Business of Burying the Dead 430
The Changing American Cemetery 430
The Puritan Cemetery 430
The City Garden Cemetery 432
The Rural Cemetery 433
The Lawn Park Cemetery 435
Cemetery Services to Soothe the Mourners 436
Graveyard Symbols of Death 436
Cemeteries Today 438
The Government Cemetery 438
The Not-for-Profit Cemetery 440
The For-Profit Cemetery 442
Conclusion 445
Summary 445
Glossary 446
CHAPTER 12 The Legal Aspects of Dying 449

Establishing the Cause of Death 451
Death Certificate 451
C ONTENTS xiii
Autopsy 453
Coroners and Medical Examiners 459
Advance Directives 460
Living Wills 462
Durable Power of Attorney for Health Care 466
Life Insurance 472
Life Insurance as Protection 473
Life Insurance as an Investment 474
Disposition of Property 474
Intestate and Inheritance 475
Long-Term Care Insurance 476
Wills 477
Holographic Wills 480
Probate 481
Estate and Inheritance Taxes 481
Saving Money, Time, and Privacy: Trusts and Pour-Over Wills 483
Would a Trust Be Better than a Will? 483
Who Should Have a Trust? 484
Closing the Loopholes: The “Pour-Over” Will 486
Conclusion 487
Summary 487
Glossary 488
CHAPTER 13 Coping With Loss 491

The Bereavement Role 492
The Grieving Process 494
Normal and Abnormal Grief 494
Stages of Grief 496
Shock and Denial 497
Disorganization 498
Volatile Reactions 498
Guilt 499
Loss and Loneliness 499
Relief 500
Reestablishment 501
Disenfranchised Grief 502
Four Tasks of Mourning 504
Accept the Reality of the Loss 506
Experience the Pain of Grief 506
Assume New Social Roles 507
Reinvest in New Relationships 508
Assisting the Bereaved 508
xiv C ONTENTS
Coping with Violent Death 511

Accidents 514
Disasters 515
Recovering from Tsunami or Typhoon 517
Murder 517
Mass Murders 520
War 520
Conclusion 522
Summary 522
Glossary 523
CHAPTER 14 Grieving Throughout the Life Cycle 527

Grieving Parents and the Loss of a Child 528
The Loss of a Fetus or an Infant 528
Fetal Death 530
Perinatal Death 532
Sudden Infant Death Syndrome 538
The Loss of a Child 541
The Loss of an Adult Child 542
Grieving Children and Adolescents 544
Loss of a Parent 545
Loss of a Sibling 547
Loss of a Grandparent 547
Grieving Adults 548
Loss of a Spouse 549
Loss of a Parent 549
Loss of a Pet 550
Dying, Death, and Bereavement in the 21st Century: A Challenge 553
Conclusion 555
Summary 555
Glossary 556
REFERENCES 559
CREDITS 585
INDEX 591
ABOUT THE AUTHORS
Michael R. Leming is professor emeritus of sociology and anthropology at

St. Olaf College in Minnesota and co-director, Spring Semester in Thailand.
He holds degrees from Westmont College (B.A.), Marquette University
(M.A.), and the University of Utah (Ph.D.), and he has done additional
graduate study at the University of California at Santa Barbara.
He is co-editor (with George E. Dickinson) of Annual Editions: Dying,
Death and Bereavement, 14th ed. (McGraw-Hill, 1993, 1994, 1995, 1997,
2000, 2002, 2004, 2005, 2007, 2008, 2010, 2011, 2012, 2014) and
co-author of Understanding Families: Diversity, Continuity, and Change
(Allyn & Bacon, 1990; Harcourt Brace, 1995). He is also co-editor (with
Raymond DeVries and Brendan Furnish) of The Sociological Perspective: A
Value-Committed Introduction (Zondervan, 1989; Wipf & Stock Publish-
ers, 2009). In 1995 he produced a documentary film entitled The Karen of
Musikhee: Rabbits in the Mouth of the Crocodile. His most recent film
project is a documentary film on the Karen produced by the BBC, for
which he was the chief research consultant.
Dr. Leming was the founder and former director of the St. Olaf College
Social Research Center, former member of the board of directors of the
Minnesota Coalition on Terminal Care and the Northfield AIDS Response,
and has served as a hospice educator, volunteer, and grief counselor. He
has been teaching courses on death and dying for over 35 years. For the
past 14 years he has directed The Spring Semester in Thailand program
(http://www.springsemesterinthailand.com), which is affiliated with Chiang
Mai University, and he lives in Thailand during Minnesota’s coldest months.
xv
xvi A BOUT THE A UTHORS
George E. Dickinson is professor of sociology at the College of Charleston

in South Carolina. He holds degrees from Baylor University (B.A. in biol-
ogy and M.A. in sociology) and Louisiana State University (Ph.D. in sociol-
ogy, minor in anthropology). He has completed postdoctoral studies in
gerontology at Pennsylvania State University, thanatology at the University
of Kentucky School of Medicine, and medical sociology at the University of
Connecticut. He was visiting research fellow in palliative medicine at the
University of Sheffield’s School of Medicine in England in 1999, the Inter-
national Observatory on End of Life Care in the Institute for Health
Research at Lancaster University in England in 2006, and the University of
Bristol School of Veterinary Science’s Department of Animal Behavior and
Welfare in England in 2013.
He has published more than 90 articles in professional journals and
has co-authored other books with Michael Leming, as noted above. Like
Dr. Leming, he has been teaching courses on death and dying for nearly
40 years and has been actively involved as a hospice educator. Dr. Dickinson
is on the international editorial board of Mortality in the United Kingdom
and on the editorial review board of the American Journal of Hospice &
Palliative Medicine. He received the South Carolina Governor’s Distin-
guished Professor Awards in 2003 and 2008 and was the recipient of the
2009 Death Educator Award from the Association of Death Education and
Counseling. At the College of Charleston he was awarded the Distinguished
Teacher-Scholar Award in 2002 and the Distinguished Research Award
in 2008.
PREFACE
WHY DID WE WRITE A BOOK ON DEATH AND DYING?

Back in the early 1970s, following a Nobel Conference at Gustavus Adolphus
College in St. Peter, Minnesota, entitled “The End of Life,” George Dickinson’s
cultural anthropology students began writing term papers on how different cul-
tures dealt with dying, death, and bereavement. About this same time one of his
former students, then in his third year of medical school, stopped by the office for
a visit. Dickinson naïvely asked about the student’s death and dying course in
medical school. With a somewhat bewildered look on his face and a shrug of his
shoulders, he replied that they did not have anything like that. Would not one
think that medical schools offered a course on dying and death? Both the students’
written papers and the encounter with the medical student sparked an interest in
Dickinson’s research and teaching in the area of death and dying.
Soon thereafter, Michael Leming, a friend and former colleague who had writ-
ten his Ph.D. dissertation about terminally ill cancer patients, contacted Dickinson
about co-authoring a textbook on dying, death, and bereavement. Both were then
teaching death and dying courses. There were very few texts available at the time.
Leming and Dickinson became frustrated over a lack of reading materials appro-
priate for students. Thus, the conception of this textbook back in the early 1980s
came from the experience of having limited classroom materials and from the
interest and enthusiasm of students in the topic of thanatology.
WHAT DO WE HOPE TO ACCOMPLISH IN THIS BOOK?

It has been over 30 years since we began work on the first edition of Understand-
ing Dying, Death, and Bereavement. Our goal in the eighth edition, as in the pre-
vious editions, has been to create a book that is both informative and practical, yet
theoretical, and a book that was reader-friendly to the students. We visualized a
xvii
xviii P REFACE
humanistic text that was cross-cultural, multidisciplinary in orientation, and inclu-

sive of the major foci of the interdisciplinary subject of social thanatology. Indeed,
many changes have occurred in end-of-life issues since the first edition. The topic
of dying, death, and bereavement has come out of the closet and is less a taboo
topic than it was in the early 1980s. Though thanatology is not yet a household
word, it is certainly better known than it was a quarter century ago. End-of-life
issues are more “in” today, especially in the context of highly publicized and all-
too-frequent school shootings, terrorist attacks in various parts of the world, and
the much-debated U.S. Affordable Care Act of the 21st century, which was, at
one juncture, falsely accused of including a measure to euthanize the elderly. Addi-
tionally, body disposition options are changing in the 21st century, as environmen-
tally correct ways of disposal are evolving. The current edition reflects these
changes. Specifically, we have the following objectives for this book:
1. To sensitize students to the subject of dying, death, and bereavement.
2. To aid students in adjusting to the death of a significant other.
3. To help individuals examine their own feelings and reactions to death and
grieving.
4. To make readers aware of different cultural groups’ death and bereavement
customs in America and internationally.
The eighth edition of Understanding Dying, Death, and Bereavement will equip
the reader with the necessary information to both understand and cope with the
social aspects of dying, death, and bereavement. Because we have each taught
courses on thanatology for some 40 years, we are convinced that every student car-
ries both academic and personal agendas when approaching the subject. Although
every student reading this book may not have family crises such as divorce and vio-
lence, every individual will eventually have to deal with deaths in her or his family (if
they have not already done so). Having been exposed to the material in this text, we
hope that each student will be in a better position to cope with dying and death. One
does not “get over” the death of a significant other, like getting over the flu or a bad
cold, but one must learn to live with the fact that the loved one is indeed dead and
will never again physically be with us. One of our more satisfying experiences in aca-
demia is the occasional e-mail, letter, or phone call from a former student who shares
with us the usefulness of this book in his or her dealing with the death of a signifi-
cant other. For some, it is the benefit to themselves; and others relate how they were
a good information source and support for other family members.
This textbook will make a significant contribution to your class because it is a
proven text informed by some 80 years of combined experience of teaching and
researching on this topic. Understanding Dying, Death, and Bereavement, Eighth
Edition, is comprehensive and covers the wide range of topics in social thanatology.
It is scholarly and academically sound, and it is practical for students because it
addresses personal issues relating to an individual’s ability to cope with the social
and psychological processes of dying, death, and bereavement. The book has a strong
cross-cultural emphasis that allows one to understand both the universality of death,
dying, and bereavement and also the incredible diversity and similarity of social cus-
toms relating to this experience. This text appeals to a vast audience, not only
because of its wide adaptability on college and university campuses, but also because
P REFACE xix
of its practical implications for all persons. Although intended primarily for under-
graduate students in sociology, psychology, anthropology, nursing, social work,
kinesiology, religion, gerontology, health science, family studies, public health, philos-
ophy, and education courses, it is also appropriate for professional courses in medi-
cine, nursing, mortuary science, social work, child life, and personal and pastoral
counseling. We have been somewhat surprised at the variety of disciplines and profes-
sional schools where earlier editions of this book have been used, including one large
business school where the focus was on consumer efforts about dying and death.
WHAT’S NEW ABOUT THIS TEXT IN THE 21ST CENTURY?

We have both added and removed boxed inserts in the chapters but have maintained
the four box categories: (1) Practical Matters boxes basically offer practical advice;
(2) Listening to the Voices boxes consist of excerpted material from people writing
about their own experiences with dying and death; (3) Words of Wisdom boxes
contain excerpted materials—poems, literature, and other words of wisdom; and
(4) Death Across Cultures boxes examine cross-cultural examples of death practices
and beliefs. In addition to the boxes, chapter conclusions, summaries, and discussion
questions at the end of each chapter serve as study aids. A glossary also appears at
the end of each chapter with definitions of words in bold print in the chapter. Addi-
tionally, suggested readings are given at the end of each chapter for additional read-
ing if desired. New tables have been added in several chapters at the request of
reviewers. Some new boxes include child life specialists, death and the musical
requiem, lessons for the end of life, resistance to pain medication across cultures,
U.K. and U.S. prison hospice programs, animal hospices, veterinarians and end-
of-life issues, a guide to survival following a suicide of a friend or family member, a
letter to one’s dad some ten years after his suicide, a suicide risk assessment, suicide
rates in the military, bullying and suicide, capital punishment, a letter on why one
should always go to a funeral, a story of Hmong funeral traditions and why one
needs to return home, an explanation of the high cost of saying goodbye, and a box
on diversity in death—body disposition and memorialization.
New material in the eighth edition includes updates of statistical material
throughout the text and new information on various topics since the 2010 edition,
including new sections on homicide and accidental deaths, personal death trends in
body disposition and memorialization, and pet loss.
As in previous editions, pictures and cartoons are scattered throughout the book.
Numerous new pictures and cartoons have been added to this edition, making it the
most comprehensive of all of our books on the topic.
SUPPLEMENTS
An online test bank and online instructor’s manual are available for instructors. The
test bank contains 25 to 30 true/false questions, 25 to 30 multiple-choice questions,
and 10 to 15 essay questions for every chapter, to save time creating tests. Answers
to the true/false and multiple-choice questions are provided. The instructor’s manual
contains detailed chapter outlines and sample syllabi, which list suggested readings
and class projects.
xx P REFACE
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
We gratefully acknowledge those who reviewed previous editions and made valu-
able suggestions, which are incorporated in this edition.
We are indebted to Adansi Amankwaa, Albany State University; M. Terry
Andrews, Mount Wachusett Community College; Angela Andrus, Fullerton
College; Catherine Bacus, Chaffey College; Stephanie E. Afful, Missouri Baptist
University; John Baugher, University of Southern Maine; Meredith McGuire,
Trinity University; Carol Nowak, State University of New York at Buffalo; Paul
Rosenblatt, University of Minnesota; Sylvia Zaki, Rhode Island State College;
Dale Lund, University of Utah; Tillman Rodabough, Baylor University; John R.
Earle, Wake Forest University; Clifton D. Bryant, Virginia Polytechnic Institute
and State University; Dennis E. Ferrara, Mott Community College; Lori Henderson,
Southeastern Community College, Burlington; Jennifer Keene, University of Nevada,
Las Vegas; Patricia Kolar, University of Pittsburgh; Leslie A. Muray, Lansing Com-
munity College; Kelly Niles-Yokem, York College of Pennsylvania; Mari Plikhun,
University of Evansville; Rebecca Reviere, Howard University; Julia Tang, Mount
St. Mary’s College; Alban L. Wheeler, Morehead State University; Martha Shwayder,
Metropolitan State College of Denver; James F. Paul, Kankakee Community College;
Catherine Wright, Mitchell College; Dolores Mysliwec, Glenville State College; and
Gerry R. Cox, University of Wisconsin–La Crosse.
As in the past, we acknowledge those we have encountered in life. We have
learned so much from significant others and our students who have shared their
experiences with dying and death. Our own lives have indeed gained from these
experiences. We hope our readers will experience an appreciation for life as they
begin to understand, both intellectually and emotionally, the social-psychological
processes of dying, death, and bereavement. This book is about dying and death,
but it is really about living and life. May your reading of this book help to make
your life more meaningful.
Michael R. Leming and
George E. Dickinson
The symbols of death say what life is and those of life define what death must be.
The meanings of our fate are forever what we make them.
—Lloyd Warner, The Living and the Dead
The day we die the wind comes down to take away our footprints.
—Song of the Southern Bushmen
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2 CHAPTER 1
You are enrolled in a course in death and dying. Note the reactions of others
when you inform them of this. They are likely okay with your saying you are
taking such courses as Principles of Biology, English Literature, Introduction to
Philosophy, History of the United States, or Calculus, but Death and Dying?
Being informed of this course may raise some eyebrows. That sounds weird and
certainly morbid, or so some seem to think. We often experience startled reac-
tions when we tell that we teach a course entitled “Death and Dying.” We won-
der what images pop into individuals’ minds when so informed. One woman,
when introduced to George Dickinson and told that he taught a course on
death and dying, drew back and in a rather startled voice said, “How could
you do such a thing?” She must have imagined Dracula team-teaching and Fran-
kenstein working as a lab assistant, along with the Grim Reaper. She then said,
“What do you do in a course like that?” After giving her a quick synopsis of
the course, she seemingly breathed a sigh of relief and said, “Oh, that doesn’t
sound so bad.”
Imagine the responses funeral home personnel must endure if we receive such
startled looks from just teaching about dying, death, and bereavement, and not
actually dealing with dead human remains. Stephanie Schim and colleagues (2007)
in various health care professions note that responding honestly at a party to the
question of “What is your area of study?” with “Oh, I’m working with death and
dying” is a real conversation terminator. From reactions that many individuals
have to death-related issues, it appears that death discussions are considered in
bad taste and something to be avoided. Road Scholar programs (formerly called
Elderhostel), for example, can present any topic of interest to older persons except
dying and death. Likewise, at least according to a survey in the late 20th century,
U.S. high school physical education and health teachers spend less time teaching
death and dying than any of the 21 health topics, and the topic of dying and
death is less likely to be required in the 50 states than are any of the other 21
health topics.
Dying in the United States occurs offstage, away from the arena of familiar
surroundings of kin and friends, with 80 percent of deaths occurring in institu-
tional settings—hospitals and nursing homes. Back in 1949, deaths in institutional
settings accounted for 50 percent of U.S. deaths; thus there has been a rapid rise
in away-from-home deaths. Grandfather seldom dies at home today, where he
spent most of his life; rather his death likely occurs in an impersonal institutional
setting. Over the course of U.S. history, death has migrated “from a position of
prominence to one of near invisibility” (Jones, 2008, p. 2). The removal of death
from the usual setting prompted Dumont and Foss (1972, p. 2) to raise the ques-
tion: “How is the modern American able to cope with her/his own death when
the deaths experienced are infrequent, highly impersonal, and viewed as virtually
abnormal?” For some time now, modern-day Americans have been as repressed
about death as the Victorians were about sex. We have become rather adept as a
society at avoidance tactics, at removing sickness and dying from everyday life
(Thomson, 2008).
Death and dying is a topic to which college students should be able to relate
easily—the dead body and its management are mysterious, yet most students likely
STUDYING DYING, DEATH, AND BEREAVEMENT 3
have aged relatives at or near the end of their lives, notes British sociologist Tony
Walter (2008). Death and sexuality are exotic, yet familiar. Our bodies, being
living organisms, eventually deteriorate and die, yet the death of a human body is
also inherently social. How we understand dying and death and how we explain
our reactions to death are major themes throughout this book. We will look at
how academics approach the study of death. A medical doctor will focus on the
biological aspects of dying and may rely on an autopsy to definitely determine the
cause(s) of a particular death. There are also social, psychological, and spiritual
aspects of dying and death as well. Dying and death can be examined from a devel-
opmental perspective, viewing death at all stages of the life cycle. In the end,
however, what is important to many individuals is the meaning of death. We feel,
therefore, that an examination of the meaning of death and death-related behaviors
is one of the most important ways to approach the study of dying, death, and
bereavement.
CURRENT INTEREST IN DEATH AND DYING

Many Americans express death anxiety, yet many also have an obsessive fasci-
nation with death, dying, and the dead. This paradox is apparent in our popu-
lar culture, as television programs, movies, songs, and the print media are
fraught with thanatological content (Durkin, 2003). The fascination has been
fueled by various legal bodies and by legal gymnastics surrounding several pro-
longed and much-observed deaths of individuals. Though we have a tendency in
general to avoid the topic of death, Americans are finally willing to acknowl-
edge that death is part of life and seem to want to talk about it (Foderaro,
1994). As Muriel Gillick (2000) noted, “Death happens 55 million times each
year throughout the world and 2.3 million times annually in the United States.
Of the tens of billions of people that have ever existed, everyone born before
1880 has died, and nearly everyone currently alive today will perish in this
century.” Today’s thanatology (the study of dying, death, and bereavement) stu-
dent is bombarded by pressing issues of the day that involve death and death-
related matters: memories of September 2001; terrorist attacks on the United
States and threats of future attacks; the tsunami caused by the earthquake off
the West Coast of Northern Sumatra in 2004; Hurricane Katrina hitting the
Gulf Coast in 2005; the shootings at Virginia Tech in 2007; the war in Afgha-
nistan; the shootings at Fort Hood, Texas in 2009; the earthquake in Haiti in
2010; the “perfect storm” Hurricane Sandy in New England in 2012; the shoot-
ings at the elementary school in Newtown, Connecticut in 2012; the typhoon in
the Philippines in 2013; the bombings at the Boston Marathon in 2013; the
Malaysia Airlines Boeing Flight 370 disappearance with 239 individuals on
board in 2014: the worldwide AIDS crisis; the prolongation of dying from can-
cer; the growing incidence of chronic illnesses with uncertain courses; murder;
ecological disasters; fetal transplants; cloning; and abortion. The topic of death
is alive and well in today’s contemporary society. Let’s look at some of the rea-
sons why dying and death as topics of discussion have come into their own in
recent years.
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is put in no ironic spirit. Shaw is the one thinker of eminence who
has consistently advanced in the same direction as that of the true
Nietzsche—namely, productive criticism of the Western morale—
while following out as poet the last implications of Ibsen and devoting
the balance of the artistic creativeness that is in him to practical
discussions.
Save in so far as the belated Romanticist in him has determined
the style, sound and attitude of his philosophy, Nietzsche is in every
respect a disciple of the materialistic decades. That which drew him
with such passion to Schopenhauer was (not that he himself or
anyone else was conscious of it) that element of Schopenhauer’s
doctrine by which he destroyed the great metaphysic and (without
meaning to do so) parodied his master Kant; that is to say, the
modification of all deep ideas of the Baroque age into tangible and
mechanistic notions. Kant speaks in inadequate words, which hide a
mighty and scarcely apprehensible intuition, an intuition of the world
as appearance or phenomenon. In Schopenhauer this becomes the
world as brain-phenomenon (Gehirnphänomen). The change-over
from tragic philosophy to philosophical plebeianism is complete. It
will be enough to cite one passage. In “The World as Will and Idea”
Schopenhauer says: “The will, as thing-in-itself, constitutes the inner,
true and indestructible essence of the man; in itself, however, it is
without consciousness. For the consciousness is conditioned by the
intellect and this is a mere accident of our being, since it is a function
of the brain, and that again (with its dependent nerves and spinal
cord) is a mere fruit, a product, nay, even a parasite of the rest of the
organism, inasmuch as it does not intervene directly in the latter’s
activities but only serves a purpose of self-preservation by regulating
its relations with the outer world.” Here we have exactly the
fundamental position of the flattest materialism. It was not for nothing
that Schopenhauer, like Rousseau before him, studied the English
sensualists. From them he learned to misread Kant in the spirit of
megalopolitan utilitarian modernity. The intellect as instrument of the
will-to-life,[459] as weapon in the struggle for existence, the ideas
brought to grotesque expression by Shaw in “Man and Superman”—
it was because this was his view of the world that Schopenhauer
became the fashionable philosopher when Darwin’s main work was
published in 1859. In contrast to Schelling, Hegel and Fichte, he was
a philosopher, and the only philosopher, whose metaphysical
propositions could be absorbed with ease by intellectual mediocrity.
The clarity of which he was so proud threatened at every moment to
reveal itself as triviality. While retaining enough of formula to produce
an atmosphere of profundity and exclusiveness, he presented the
civilized view of the world complete and assimilable. His system is
anticipated Darwinism, and the speech of Kant and the concepts of
the Indians are simply clothing. In his book “Ueber den Willen in der
Natur” (1835) we find already the struggle for self-preservation in
Nature, the human intellect as master-weapon in that struggle and
sexual love as unconscious selection according to biological interest.
[460]
It is the view that Darwin (via Malthus) brought to bear with

irresistible success in the field of zoology. The economic origin of
Darwinism is shown by the fact that the system deduced from the
similarities between men and the higher animals ceases to fit even at
the level of the plant-world and becomes positively absurd as soon
as it is seriously attempted to apply it with its will-tendency (natural
selection, mimicry) to primitive organic forms.[461] Proof, to the
Darwinian, means to the ordering and pictorial presentation of a
selection of facts so that they conform to his historico-dynamic basic
feeling of “Evolution.” Darwinism—that is to say, that totality of very
varied and discrepant ideas, in which the common factor is merely
the application of the causality principle to living things, which
therefore is a method and not a result—was known in all details to
the 18th Century. Rousseau was championing the ape-man theory
as early as 1754. What Darwin originated is only the “Manchester
School” system, and it is this latent political element in it that
accounts for its popularity.
The spiritual unity of the century is manifest enough here. From
Schopenhauer to Shaw, everyone has been, without being aware of
it, bringing the same principle into form. Everyone (including even
those who, like Hebbel, knew nothing of Darwin) is a derivative of the
evolution-idea—and of the shallow civilized and not the deep
Goethian form of it at that—whether he issues it with a biological or
an economic imprint. There is evolution, too, in the evolution-idea
itself, which is Faustian through and through, which displays (in
sharpest contrast to Aristotle’s timeless entelechy-idea) all our
passionate urgency towards infinite future, our will and sense of aim
which is so immanent in, so specific to, the Faustian spirit as to be
the a priori form rather than the discovered principle of our Nature-
picture. And in the evolution of evolution we find the same change
taking place as elsewhere, the turn of the Culture to the Civilization.
In Goethe evolution is upright, in Darwin it is flat; in Goethe organic,
in Darwin mechanical; in Goethe an experience and emblem, in
Darwin a matter of cognition and law. To Goethe evolution meant
inward fulfilment, to Darwin it meant “Progress.” Darwin’s struggle for
existence, which he read into Nature and not out of it, is only the
plebeian form of that primary feeling which in Shakespeare’s
tragedies moves the great realities against one another; but what
Shakespeare inwardly saw, felt and actualized in his figures as
destiny, Darwinism comprehends as causal connexion and
formulates as a superficial system of utilities. And it is this system
and not this primary feeling that is the basis of the utterances of
“Zarathustra,” the tragedy of “Ghosts,” the problems of the “Ring of
the Nibelungs.” Only, it was with terror that Schopenhauer, the first of
his line, perceived what his own knowledge meant—that is the root
of his pessimism, and the “Tristan” music of his adherent Wagner is
its highest expression—whereas the late men, and foremost among
them Nietzsche, face it with enthusiasm, though it is true, the
enthusiasm is sometimes rather forced.
Nietzsche’s breach with Wagner—that last product of the German
spirit over which greatness broods—marks his silent change of
school-allegiance, his unconscious step from Schopenhauer to
Darwin, from the metaphysical to the physiological formulation of the
same world-feeling, from the denial to the affirmation of the aspect
that in fact is common to both, the one seeing as will-to-life what the
other regards as struggle for existence. In his “Schopenhauer als
Erzieher” he still means by evolution an inner ripening, but the
Superman is the product of evolution as machinery. And
“Zarathustra” is ethically the outcome of an unconscious protest
against “Parsifal”—which artistically entirely governs it—of the rivalry
of one evangelist for another.
But Nietzsche was also a Socialist without knowing it. Not his
catchwords, but his instincts, were Socialistic, practical, directed to
that welfare of mankind that Goethe and Kant never spent a thought
upon. Materialism, Socialism and Darwinism are only artificially and
on the surface separable. It was this that made it possible for Shaw
in the third act of “Man and Superman” (one of the most important
and significant of the works that issued from the transition) to obtain,
by giving just a small and indeed perfectly logical turn to the
tendencies of “master-morale” and the production of the Superman,
the specific maxims of his own Socialism. Here Shaw was only
expressing with remorseless clarity and full consciousness of the
commonplace, what the uncompleted portion of the Zarathustra
would have said with Wagnerian theatricality and woolly
romanticism. All that we are concerned to discover in Nietzsche’s
reasoning is its practical bases and consequences, which proceed of
necessity from the structure of modern public life. He moves
amongst vague ideas like “new values,” “Superman,” “Sinn der
Erde,” and declines or fears to shape them more precisely. Shaw
does it. Nietzsche observes that the Darwinian idea of the Superman
evokes the notion of breeding, and stops there, leaves it at a
sounding phrase. Shaw pursues the question—for there is no object
in talking about it if nothing is going to be done about it—asks how it
is to be achieved, and from that comes to demand the transformation
of mankind into a stud-farm. But this is merely the conclusion implicit
in the Zarathustra, which Nietzsche was not bold enough, or was too
fastidious, to draw. If we do talk of systematic breeding—a
completely materialistic and utilitarian notion—we must be prepared
to answer the questions, who shall breed what, where and how? But
Nietzsche, too romantic to face the very prosaic social
consequences and to expose poetic ideas to the test of facts, omits
to say that his whole doctrine, as a derivative of Darwinism,
presupposes Socialism and, moreover, socialistic compulsion as the
means; that any systematic breeding of a class of higher men
requires as condition precedent a strictly socialistic ordering of
society; and that this “Dionysiac” idea, as it involves a common
action and is not simply the private affair of detached thinkers, is
democratic, turn it how you may. It is the climax of the ethical force of
“Thou shalt”; to impose upon the world the form of his will, Faustian
man sacrifices even himself.
The breeding of the Superman follows from the notion of
“selection.” Nietzsche was an unconscious pupil of Darwin from the
time that he wrote aphorisms, but Darwin himself had remoulded the
evolution-ideas of the 18th Century according to the Malthusian
tendencies of political economy, which he projected on the higher
animal-world. Malthus had studied the cotton industry in Lancashire,
and already in 1857 we have the whole system, only applied to men
instead of to beasts, in Buckle’s History of English Civilization.
In other words, the “master-morale” of this last of the Romantics is
derived—strangely perhaps but very significantly—from that source
of all intellectual modernity, the atmosphere of the English factory.
The Machiavellism that commended itself to Nietzsche as a
Renaissance phenomenon is something closely (one would have
supposed, obviously) akin to Darwin’s notion of “mimicry.” It is in fact
that of which Marx (that other famous disciple of Malthus) treats in
his Das Kapital, the bible of political (not ethical) Socialism.[462] That
is the genealogy of “Herrenmoral.” The Will-to-Power, transferred to
the realistic, political and economic domain, finds its expression in
Shaw’s “Major Barbara.” No doubt Nietzsche, as a personality,
stands at the culmination of this series of ethical philosophers, but
here Shaw the party politician reaches up to his level as a thinker.
The will-to-power is to-day represented by the two poles of public life
—the worker-class and the big money-and-brain men—far more
effectually than it ever was by a Borgia. The millionaire Undershaft of
Shaw’s best comedy is a Superman, though Nietzsche the
Romanticist would not have recognized his ideal in such a figure.
Nietzsche is for ever speaking of transvaluations of all values, of a
philosophy of the “Future” (which, incidentally, is merely the Western,
and not the Chinese or the African future), but when the mists of his
thought do come in from the Dionysiac distance and condense into
any tangible form, the will-to-power appears to him in the guise of
dagger-and-poison and never in that of strike and “deal.” And yet he
says that the idea first came to him when he saw the Prussian
regiments marching to battle in 1870.
The drama, in this epoch, is no longer poetry in the old sense of
the Culture days, but a form of agitation, debate and demonstration.
The stage has become a moralizing institution. Nietzsche himself
often thought of putting his ideas in the dramatic form. Wagner’s
Nibelung poetry, more especially the first draft of it (1850), expresses
his social-revolutionary ideas, and even when, after a circuitous
course under influences artistic and non-artistic, he has completed
the “Ring,” his Siegfried is still a symbol of the Fourth Estate, his
Brünhilde still the “free woman.” The sexual selection of which the
“Origin of Species” enunciated the theory in 1859, was finding its
musical expression at the very same time in the third act of
“Siegfried” and in “Tristan.” It is no accident that Wagner, Hebbel and
Ibsen, all practically simultaneously, set to work to dramatize the
Nibelung material. Hebbel, making the acquaintance in Paris of
Engels’s writings, expresses (in a letter of April 2, 1844) his surprise
at finding that his own conceptions of the social principle of his age,
which he was then intending to exemplify in a drama Zu irgend einer
Zeit, coincided precisely with those of the future “Communist
Manifesto.” And, upon first making the acquaintance of
Schopenhauer (letter of March 19, 1857), he is equally surprised by
the affinity that he finds between the Welt als Wille und Vorstellung
and tendencies upon which he had based his Holofernes and his
Herodes und Mariamne. Hebbel’s diaries, of which the most
important portion belongs to the years 1835-1845, were (though he
did not know it) one of the deepest philosophical efforts of the
century. It would be no surprise to find whole sentences of it in
Nietzsche, who never knew him and did not always come up to his
level.
The actual and effective philosophy of the 19th Century, then, has
as its one genuine theme the Will-to-Power. It considers this Will-to-
Power in civilized-intellectual, ethical, or social forms and presents it
as will-to-life, as life-force, as practical-dynamical principle, as idea,
and as dramatic figure. (The period that is closed by Shaw
corresponds to the period 350-250 in the Classical.) The rest of the
19th-Century philosophy is, to use Schopenhauer’s phrase,
“professors’ philosophy by philosophy-professors.” The real
landmarks are these:
1819. Schopenhauer, Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung. The will
to life is for the first time put as the only reality (original force,
Urkraft); but, older idealist influences still being potent, it is put
there to be negatived (zur Verneinung empfohlen).
1836. Schopenhauer, Ueber den Willen in der Natur. Anticipation
of Darwinism, but in metaphysical disguise.
1840. Proud’hon, Qu’est-ce que la Propriété, basis of
Anarchism. Comte, Cours de philosophic positive; the formula
“order and progress.”
1841. Hebbel, “Judith,” first dramatic conception of the “New
Woman” and the “Superman.” Feuerbach, Das Wesen des
Christenthums.
1844. Engels, Umriss einer Kritik des Nationalökonomie,
foundation of the materialistic conception of history. Hebbel, Maria
Magdalena, the first social drama.
1847. Marx, Misère de la Philosophie (synthesis of Hegel and
Malthus). These are the epochal years in which economics begins
to dominate social ethic and biology.
1848. Wagner’s “Death of Siegfried”; Siegfried as social-ethical
revolutionary, the Fafnir hoard as symbol of Capitalism.
1850. Wagner’s Kunst und Klima; the sexual problem.
1850-1858. Wagner’s, Hebbel’s and Ibsen’s Nibelung poetry.
1859 (year of symbolic coincidences). Darwin, “Origin of
Species” (application of economics to biology). Wagner’s “Tristan.”
Marx, Zur Kritik der politischen Ökonomie.
1863. J. S. Mill, “Utilitarianism.”
1865. Dühring, Wert des Lebens—a work which is rarely heard
of, but which exercised the greatest influence upon the succeeding
generation.
1867. Ibsen, “Brand.” Marx, Das Kapital.
1878. Wagner “Parsifal.” First dissolution of materialism into
mysticism.
1879. Ibsen “Nora.”
1881. Nietzsche, Morgenröthe; transition from Schopenhauer to
Darwin, morale as biological phenomenon.
1883. Nietzsche, Also sprach Zarathustra; the Will-to-Power, but
in Romantic disguise.
1886. Ibsen, “Rosmersholm.” Nietzsche, Jenseits von Gut und
Böse.
1887-8. Strindberg, “Fadren” and “Fröken Julie.”
From 1890 the conclusion of the epoch approaches. The
religious works of Strindberg and the symbolical of Ibsen.
1896. Ibsen, “John Gabriel Borkman.” Nietzsche, Uebermensch.
1898. Strindberg, “Till Damascus.”
From 1900 the last phenomena.
1903. Weininger, Geschlecht und Charakter; the only serious
attempt to revive Kant within this epoch, by referring him to
Wagner and Ibsen.
1903. Shaw, “Man and Superman”; final synthesis of Darwin and
Nietzsche.
1905. Shaw, “Major Barbara”; the type of the Superman referred
back to its economic origins.
With this, the ethical period exhausts itself as the metaphysical had
done. Ethical Socialism, prepared by Fichte, Hegel, and Humboldt,
was at its zenith of passionate greatness about the middle of the
19th Century, and at the end thereof it had reached the stage of
repetitions. The 20th Century, while keeping the word Socialism, has
replaced an ethical philosophy that only Epigoni suppose to be
capable of further development, by a praxis of economic everyday
questions. The ethical disposition of the West will remain “socialistic”
but its theory has ceased to be a problem. And there remains the
possibility of a third and last stage of Western philosophy, that of a
physiognomic scepticism. The secret of the world appears
successively as a knowledge problem, a valuation problem and a
form problem. Kant saw Ethics as an object of knowledge, the 19th
Century saw it as an object of valuation. The Sceptic would deal with
both simply as the historical expression of a Culture.
CHAPTER XI
FAUSTIAN AND APOLLINIAN
NATURE-KNOWLEDGE
CHAPTER XI
FAUSTIAN AND APOLLINIAN NATURE-

KNOWLEDGE
I
Helmholtz observed, in a lecture of 1869 that has become famous,
that “the final aim of Natural Science is to discover the motions
underlying all alteration, and the motive forces thereof; that is, to
resolve itself into Mechanics.” What this resolution into mechanics
means is the reference of all qualitative impressions to fixed
quantitative base-values, that is, to the extended and to change of
place therein. It means, further—if we bear in mind the opposition of
becoming and become, form and law, image and notion—the
referring of the seen Nature-picture to the imagined picture of a
single numerically and structurally measurable Order. The specific
tendency of all Western mechanics is towards an intellectual
conquest by measurement, and it is therefore obliged to look for the
essence of the phenomenon in a system of constant elements that
are susceptible of full and inclusive appreciation by measurement, of
which Helmholtz distinguishes motion (using the word in its everyday
sense) as the most important.
To the physicist this definition appears unambiguous and
exhaustive, but to the sceptic who has followed out the history of this
scientific conviction, it is very far from being either. To the physicist,
present-day mechanics is a logical system of clear, uniquely-
significant concepts and of simple, necessary relations; while to the
other it is a picture distinctive of the structure of the West-European
spirit, though he admits that the picture is consistent in the highest
degree and most impressively convincing. It is self-evident that no
practical results and discoveries can prove anything as to the “truth”
of the theory, the picture.[463] For most people, indeed, “mechanics”
appears as the self-evident synthesis of Nature-impressions. But it
merely appears to be so. For what is motion? Is not the postulate
that everything qualitative is reducible to the motion of unalterably-
alike mass-points, essentially Faustian and not common to
humanity? Archimedes, for example, did not feel himself obliged to
transpose the mechanics that he saw into a mental picture of
motions. Is motion generally a purely mechanical quantity? Is it a
word for a visual experience or is it a notion derived from that
experience? Is it the number that is found by measurement of
experimentally-produced facts, or the picture that is subjected to that
number, that is signified by it? And if one day physics should really
succeed in reaching its supposed aim, in devising a system of law-
governed “motions” and of efficient forces behind them into which
everything whatsoever appreciable by the senses could be fitted—
would it thereby have achieved “knowledge” of that which occurs, or
even made one step towards this achievement? Yet is the form-
language of mechanics one whit the less dogmatic on that account?
Is it not, on the contrary, a vessel of the myth like the root-words, not
proceeding from experience but shaping it and, in this case, shaping
it with all possible rigour? What is force? What is a cause? What is a
process? Nay, even on the basis of its own definitions, has physics a
specific problem at all? Has it an object that counts as such for all
the centuries? Has it even one unimpeachable imagination-unit, with
reference to which it may express its results?
The answer may be anticipated. Modern physics, as a science, is
an immense system of indices in the form of names and numbers
whereby we are enabled to work with Nature as with a machine.[464]
As such, it may have an exactly-definable end. But as a piece of
history, all made up of destinies and incidents in the lives of the men
who have worked in it and in the course of research itself, physics is,
in point of object, methods and results alike an expression and
actualization of a Culture, an organic and evolving element in the
essence of that Culture, and every one of its results is a symbol.
That which physics—which exists only in the waking-consciousness
of the Culture-man—thinks it finds in its methods and in its results
was already there, underlying and implicit in, the choice and manner
of its search. Its discoveries, in virtue of their imagined content (as
distinguished from their printable formulæ), have been of a purely
mythic nature, even in minds so prudent as those of J. B. Mayer,
Faraday and Hertz. In every Nature-law, physically exact as it may
be, we are called upon to distinguish between the nameless number
and the naming of it, between the plain fixation of limits[465] and their
theoretical interpretation. The formulæ represent general logical
values, pure numbers—that is to say, objective space—and
boundary-elements. But formulæ are dumb. The expression s = ½gt²
means nothing at all unless one is able mentally to connect the
letters with particular words and their symbolism. But the moment we
clothe the dead signs in such words, give them flesh, body and life,
and, in sum, a perceptible significance in the world, we have
overstepped the limits of a mere order. θεωρία means image, vision,
and it is this that makes a Nature-law out of a figure-and-letter
formula. Everything exact is in itself meaningless, and every physical
observation is so constituted that it proves the basis of a certain
number of imaged presuppositions; and the effect of its successful
issue is to make these presuppositions more convincing than ever.
Apart from these, the result consists merely of empty figures. But in
fact we do not and cannot get apart from them. Even if an
investigator puts on one side every hypothesis that he knows as
such, as soon as he sets his thought to work on the supposedly clear
task, he is not controlling but being controlled by the unconscious
form of it, for in living activity he is always a man of his Culture, of his
age, of his school and of his tradition. Faith and “knowledge” are only
two species of inner certitude, but of the two faith is the older and it
dominates all the conditions of knowing, be they never so exact. And
thus it is theories and not pure numbers that are the support of all
natural science. The unconscious longing for that genuine science
which (be it repeated) is peculiar to the spirit of Culture-man sets
itself to apprehend, to penetrate, and to comprise within its grasp the
world-image of Nature. Mere industrious measuring for measuring’s
sake is not and never has been more than a delight for little minds.
Numbers may only be the key of the secret, no more. No significant
man would ever have spent himself on them for their own sake.
Kant, it is true, says in a well-known passage: “I maintain that in
each and every discipline of natural philosophy it is only possible to
find as much of true science as is to be found of mathematics
therein.” What Kant has in mind here is pure delimitation in the field
of the become, so far as law and formula, number and system can
(at any particular stage) be seen in that field. But a law without
words, a law, consisting merely of a series of figures read off an
instrument, cannot even as an intellectual operation be completely
effective in this pure state. Every savant’s experiment, be it what it
may, is at the same time an instance of the kind of symbolism that
rules in the savant’s ideation. All Laws formulated in words are
Orders that have been activated and vitalized, filled with the very
essence of the one—and only the one—Culture. As to the
“necessity” which is a postulate in all exact research, here too we
have to consider two kinds of necessity, viz., a necessity within the
spiritual and living (for it is Destiny that the history of every individual
research-act takes its course when, where and how it does) and a
necessity within the known (for which the current Western name is
Causality). If the pure numbers of a physical formula represent a
causal necessity, the existence, the birth and the life-duration of a
theory are a Destiny.
Every fact, even the simplest, contains ab initio a theory. A fact is
a uniquely-occurring impression upon a waking being, and
everything depends on whether that being, the being for whom it
occurs or did occur, is or was Classical or Western, Gothic or
Baroque. Compare the effect produced by a flash of lightning on a
sparrow and on an alert physical investigator, and think how much
more is contained in the observer’s “fact” than in the sparrow’s. The
modern physicist is too ready to forget that even words like quantity,
position, process, change of state and body represent specifically
Western images. These words excite and these images mirror a
feeling of significances, too subtle for verbal description,
incommunicable to Classical or to Magian or to other mankind as like
subtleties of their thought and feeling are incommunicable to us. And
the character of scientific facts as such—that is, the mode of their
becoming known—is completely governed by this feeling; and if so,
then also a fortiori such intricate intellectual notions as work, tension,
quantity of energy, quantity of heat, probability,[466] every one of
which contains a veritable scientific myth of its own. We think of such
conceptual images as ensuing from quite unprejudiced research
and, subject to certain conditions, definitively valid. But a first-rate
scientist of the time of Archimedes would have declared himself,
after a thorough study of our modern theoretical physics, quite
unable to comprehend how anyone could assert such arbitrary,
grotesque and involved notions to be Science, still less how they
could be claimed as necessary consequences from actual facts.
“The scientifically-justified conclusions,” he would have said, “are
really so-and-so”; and thereupon he would have evolved, on the
basis of the same elements made “facts” by his eyes and his mind,
theories that our physicists would listen to with amazed ridicule.
For what, after all, are the basic notions that have been evolved
with inward certainty of logic in the field of our physics? Polarized
light-rays, errant ions, flying and colliding gas-particles, magnetic
fields, electric currents and waves—are they not one and all
Faustian visions, closely akin to Romanesque ornamentation, the
upthrust of Gothic architecture, the Viking’s voyaging into unknown
seas, the longings of Columbus and Copernicus? Did not this world
of forms and pictures grow up in perfect tune with the contemporary
arts of perspective oil-painting and instrumental music? Are they not,
in short, our passionate directedness, our passion of the third
dimension, coming to symbolic expression in the imagined Nature-
picture as in the soul-image?
II
It follows then that all “knowing” of Nature, even the exactest, is

based on a religious faith. The pure mechanics that the physicist has
set before himself as the end-form to which it is his task (and the
purpose of all this imagination-machinery) to reduce Nature,
presupposes a dogma—namely, the religious world-picture of the
Gothic centuries. For it is from this world-picture that the physics
peculiar to the Western intellect is derived. There is no science that
is without unconscious presuppositions of this kind, over which the
researcher has no control and which can be traced back to the
earliest days of the awakening Culture. There is no Natural science
without a precedent Religion. In this point there is no distinction
between the Catholic and the Materialistic views of the world—both
say the same thing in different words. Even atheistic science has
religion; modern mechanics exactly reproduces the
contemplativeness of Faith.
When the Ionic reaches its height in Thales or the Baroque in
Bacon, and man has come to the urban stage of his career, his self-
assurance begins to look upon critical science, in contrast to the
more primitive religion of the countryside, as the superior attitude
towards things, and, holding as he thinks the only key to real
knowledge, to explain religion itself empirically and psychologically—
in other words, to “conquer” it with the rest. Now, the history of the
higher Cultures shows that “science” is a transitory spectacle,[467]
belonging only to the autumn and winter of their life-course, and that
in the cases of the Classical, the Indian, the Chinese and the
Arabian thought alike a few centuries suffice for the complete
exhaustion of its possibilities. Classical science faded out between
the battle of Cannæ and that of Actium and made way for the world-
outlook of the “second religiousness.”[468] And from this it is possible
to foresee a date at which our Western scientific thought shall have
reached the limit of its evolution.
There is no justification for assigning to this intellectual form-world
the primacy over others. Every critical science, like every myth and
every religious belief, rests upon an inner certitude. Various as the
creatures of this certitude may be, both in structure and in sound,
they are not different in basic principle. Any reproach, therefore,
levelled by Natural science at Religion is a boomerang. We are
presumptuous and no less in supposing that we can ever set up
“The Truth” in the place of “anthropomorphic” conceptions, for no
other conceptions but these exist at all. Every idea that is possible at
all is a mirror of the being of its author. The statement that “man
created God in his own image,” valid for every historical religion, is
not less valid for every physical theory, however firm its reputed
basis of fact. Classical scientists conceived of light as consisting in
corporeal particles proceeding from the source of light to the eye of
the beholder. For the Arabian thought, even at the stage of the
Jewish-Persian academies of Edessa, Resaïna and Pombaditha
(and for Porphyry too), the colours and forms of things were
evidenced without the intervention of a medium, being brought in a
magic and “spiritual” way to the seeing-power which was conceived
as substantial and resident in the eyeball. This was the doctrine[469]
taught by Ibn-al-Haitan, by Avicenna and by the “Brothers of
Sincerity.”[470] And the idea of light as a force, an impetus, was
current even from about 1300 amongst the Paris Occamists who
centred on Albert of Saxony, Buridan and Oresme the discoverer of
co-ordinate geometry. Each Culture has made its own set of images
of processes, which are true only for itself and only alive while it is
itself alive and actualizing its possibilities. When a Culture is at its
end and the creative element—the imaginative power, the symbolism
—is extinct, there are left “empty” formulæ, skeletons of dead
systems, which men of another Culture read literally, feel to be
without meaning or value and either mechanically store up or else
despise and forget. Numbers, formulæ, laws mean nothing and are
nothing. They must have a body, and only a living mankind—
projecting its livingness into them and through them, expressing itself
by them, inwardly making them its own—can endow them with that.
And thus there is no absolute science of physics, but only individual
sciences that come, flourish and go within the individual Cultures.
The “Nature” of Classical man found its highest artistic emblem in
the nude statue, and out of it logically there grew up a static of
bodies, a physics of the near. The Arabian Culture owned the
arabesque and the cavern-vaulting of the mosque, and out of this
world-feeling there issued Alchemy with its ideas of mysterious
efficient substantialities like the “philosophical mercury,” which is
neither a material nor a property but some thing that underlies the
coloured existence of metals and can transmute one metal into
another.[471] And the outcome of Faustian man’s Nature idea was a
dynamic of unlimited span, a physics of the distant. To the Classical
therefore belong the conceptions of matter and form, to the Arabian
(quite Spinozistically) the idea of substances with visible or secret
attributes,[472] and to the Faustian the idea of force and mass.
Apollinian theory is a quiet meditation, Magian a silent knowledge of
Alchemy the means of Grace (even here the religious source of
mechanics is to be discerned), and the Faustian is from the very
outset a working hypothesis.[473] The Greek asked, what is the
essence of visible being? We ask, what possibility is there of
mastering the invisible motive-forces of becoming? For them,
contented absorption in the visible; for us, masterful questioning of
Nature and methodical experiment.
As with the formulation of problems and the methods of dealing
with them, so also with the basic concepts. They are symbols in
each case of the one and only the one Culture. The Classical root-
words ἄπειρον, ἀρχή, μορφή, ὕλη, are not translatable into our
speech. To render ἀρχή by “prime-stuff” is to eliminate its Apollinian
connotation, to make the hollow shell of the word sound an alien
note. That which Classical man saw before him as “motion” in space,
he understood as ἀλλοίωσις, change of position of bodies; we, from
the way in which we experience motion, have deduced the concept
of a process, a “going forward,” thereby expressing and emphasizing
that element of directional energy which our thought necessarily
predicates in the courses of Nature. The Classical critic of Nature
took the visible juxtaposition of states as the original diversity, and
specified the famous four elements of Empedocles—namely, earth
as the rigid-corporeal, water as the non-rigid-corporeal and air as the
incorporeal, together with fire, which is so much the strongest of all
optical impressions that the Classical spirit could have no doubt of its
bodiliness. The Arabian “elements,” on the contrary, are ideal and
implicit in the secret constitutions and constellations which define the
phenomenon of things for the eye. If we try to get a little nearer to
this feeling, we shall find that the opposition of rigid and fluid means
something quite different for the Syrian from what it means for the
Aristotelian Greek, the latter seeing in it different degrees of
bodiliness and the former different magic attributes. With the former
therefore arises the image of the chemical element as a sort of
magic substance that a secret causality makes to appear out of
things (and to vanish into them again) and which is subject even to
the influence of the stars. In Alchemy there is deep scientific doubt
as to the plastic actuality of things—of the “somata” of Greek
mathematicians, physicists and poets—and it dissolves and destroys
the soma in the hope of finding its essence. It is an iconoclastic
movement just as truly as those of Islam and the Byzantine Bogomils
were so. It reveals a deep disbelief in the tangible figure of
phenomenal Nature, the figure of her that to the Greek was
sacrosanct. The conflict concerning the person of Christ which
manifested itself in all the early Councils and led to the Nestorian
and Monophysite secessions is an alchemistic problem.[474] It would
never have occurred to a Classical physicist to investigate things
while at the same time denying or annihilating their perceivable form.
And for that very reason there was no Classical chemistry, any more
than there was any theorizing on the substance as against the
manifestations of Apollo.
The rise of a chemical method of the Arabian style betokens a new
world-consciousness. The discovery of it, which at one blow made
an end of Apollinian natural science, of mechanical statics, is linked
with the enigmatic name of Hermes Trismegistus,[475] who is
supposed to have lived in Alexandria at the same time as Plotinus
and Diophantus. Similarly it was just at the time of the definite
emancipation of the Western mathematic by Newton and Leibniz that
the Western chemistry[476] was freed from Arabic form by Stahl
(1660-1734) and his Phlogiston theory. Chemistry and mathematic
alike became pure analysis. Already Paracelsus (1493-1541) had
transformed the Magian effort to make gold into a pharmaceutical
science—a transformation in which one cannot but surmise an
altered world-feeling. Then Robert Boyle (1626-1691) devised the
analytical method and with it the Western conception of the Element.
But the ensuing changes must not be misinterpreted. That which is
called the founding of modern chemistry and has Stahl and Lavoisier
at its turning-points is anything but a building-up of “chemical” ideas,
in so far as chemistry implies the alchemistic outlook on Nature. It is
in fact the end of genuine chemistry, its dissolution into the
comprehensive system of pure dynamic, its assimilation into the
mechanical outlook which the Baroque age had established through
Galileo and Newton. The elements of Empedocles designate states
of bodiliness (bezeichnen ein körperliches Sichverhalten) but the
elements of Lavoisier, whose combustion-theory followed promptly
upon the isolation of oxygen in 1771, designate energy-systems
accessible to human will, “rigid” and “fluid” becoming mere terms to
describe tension-relations between molecules. By our analysis and
synthesis, Nature is not merely asked or persuaded but forced. The
modern chemistry is a chapter of the modern physics of Deed.
What we call Statics, Chemistry and Dynamics—words that as
used in modern science are merely traditional distinctions without
deeper meaning—are really the respective physical systems of the
Apollinian, Magian and Faustian souls, each of which grew up in its
own Culture and was limited as to validity to the same.
Corresponding to these sciences, each to each, we have the
mathematics of Euclidean geometry, Algebra and Higher Analysis,
and the arts of statue, arabesque and fugue. We may differentiate
these three kinds of physics (bearing in mind of course that other
Cultures may and in fact do give rise to other kinds) by their
standpoints towards the problem of motion, and call them
mechanical orderings of states, secret forces and processes
respectively.
III
Now, the tendency of human thought (which is always causally

disposed) to reduce the image of Nature to the simplest possible
quantitative form-units that can be got by causal reasoning,
measuring and counting—in a word, by mechanical differentiation—
leads necessarily in Classical, Western and every other possible
physics, to an atomic theory. Of Indian and Chinese science we
know hardly more than the fact they once existed, and the Arabian is
so complicated that even now it seems to defy presentation. But we
do know our own and the Apollinian sciences well enough to
observe, here too, a deeply symbolical opposition.
The Classical atoms are miniature forms, the Western minimal
quanta, and quanta, too, of energy. On the one hand perceptibility,
sensuous nearness, and on the other, abstractness are the basic
conditions of the idea. The atomistic notions of modern physics—
which include not only the Daltonian or “chemical” atom but also the
electrons[477] and the quanta of thermodynamics—make more and
more demands upon that truly Faustian power of inner vision which
many branches of higher mathematics (such as the Non-Euclidean
geometries and the Theory of Groups) postulate, and which is not at
the disposal of laymen. A quantum of action is an extension-element
conceived without regard to sensible quality of any kind, which
eludes all relation with sight and touch, for which the expression
“shape” has no meaning whatever—something therefore which
would be utterly inconceivable to a Classical researcher. Such,
already, were Leibniz’s “Monads”[478] and such, superlatively, are the
constituents of Rutherford’s picture of the atom as positively-charged

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(eBook PDF) Understanding Dying,

Death, and Bereavement 8th Edition

CHAPTER 2 The American Experience of Death 43

CHAPTER 3 Growing Up with Death/Growing Old with Death 83

Explaining Death and Dying to Children 97

CHAPTER 4 Perspectives on Death and Life after Death 121

CHAPTER 5 The Dying Process 155

CHAPTER 6 Living with Dying 195

Treatment Options 202

CHAPTER 7 Dying in the American Health Care System 233

CHAPTER 8 Biomedical Issues and Euthanasia 261

CHAPTER 9 Suicide and Other Sudden, Unnatural Traumatic Deaths 305

College-Aged Students and Suicide 325

CHAPTER 10 Diversity in Death Rituals 345

CHAPTER 11 The Business of Dying 395

CHAPTER 12 The Legal Aspects of Dying 449

CHAPTER 13 Coping With Loss 491

Coping with Violent Death 511

CHAPTER 14 Grieving Throughout the Life Cycle 527

Michael R. Leming is professor emeritus of sociology and anthropology at

George E. Dickinson is professor of sociology at the College of Charleston

WHY DID WE WRITE A BOOK ON DEATH AND DYING?

WHAT DO WE HOPE TO ACCOMPLISH IN THIS BOOK?

humanistic text that was cross-cultural, multidisciplinary in orientation, and inclu-

WHAT’S NEW ABOUT THIS TEXT IN THE 21ST CENTURY?

CURRENT INTEREST IN DEATH AND DYING

It is the view that Darwin (via Malthus) brought to bear with

FAUSTIAN AND APOLLINIAN NATURE-

It follows then that all “knowing” of Nature, even the exactest, is

Now, the tendency of human thought (which is always causally

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