The Many Times of Death

Abstract

Professor Wartofsky is right to emphasize that we are social and historical beings who lose our being if we are abstracted from our specific societies and histories. He is also right when he says that criteria by which we determine when we are dead are significant in the processes by which we form ourselves and give ourselves identity. If, for example, we abstract our deaths from our social and individual history, we build into our society a severance of our lives and deaths from our own specificity and concreteness. We make a schizzy kind of alienation for ourselves, sew it into the fabric of our lives, and make certain that we will not be able to feel attuned to our own lives in the ways in which we live and die them.