Knocking at the Door of Death with Derrida & Socrates
Beniamin Pascut, Ph. D.
What kind of question is this? The kind your Philosophy professor would waste his time asking? The question you raised as an innocent child after accidentally stepping on a beetle for the first time? Post it on your Twitter and your followers will think you’re craving for attention or being spammed with a life-insurance add. Share it with your parents and they’ll hire a therapist. Under no circumstances tell it to your Biology professor; you’ll be assigned to take a field trip to the morgue.
On the lips of French philosopher Jacques Derrida, however, this is not just an adequate, but the most fundamental question. How can an individual know death while still among the living? Doesn’t human inability to experience death from the point of view of living in the world suggest that “my death” is a blind spot or better said a dead spot? One doesn’t have to be a deconstructionist like Derrida to accept the relevancy of this question. “My death” is uncertain, never manifested in direct experience and always encountered as a closed door. We watch how and when that door is opened for others without being able to stare at whatever hides on the other side. If we could only crack it open for a moment to take a peek and close it back quickly, maybe we wouldn’t remain so curious, so puzzled and terrified. What’s worse is that for most of us, the only knowable side of this sphere of the unknown is its certainty – the certainty that the door will eventually open to pass over to the other side.
Today we stand knocking at the door of death with Derrida and Socrates, two of the greatest philosophers of all time.
PASCUT
Do any of you gentlemen have the key of death?
DERRIDA
As someone who ponders about death every 10 seconds, I say that the key is hauntology?
PASCUT
Haun…what?
DERRIDA
I came up with this word myself: hauntology. It’s about being neither present nor absent, neither dead nor alive. Haunted by a powerful presence of absence (Derrida, Spectres on Marx, 1994, 4.)
PASCUT
What are you saying exactly?
DERRIDA
I’m saying that the key to death is learning to live and learning to live is learning to die.
PASCUT
With all respect professor, this sounds kinda circular, but I think I’m beginning to understand.
DERRIDA
Really? The way to understand is to not understand.
PASCUT
So if I don’t understand, I understand?
DERRIDA
Nothing is certain. We must accept inherent contradictions; you know what I mean.
PASCUT
Not really, but it sounds to me like you don’t know what you mean either.
SOCRATES
Cheer up men of Athens or whoever you are. The key of death is not thinking one knows what one does not know (Plato, Apology 29b).
PASCUT
So you have the key?
SOCRATES
Of course, my lad, and make sure you record this! Since no one knows what comes after death and for all we know death may turn out to be the greatest good out there, the key is approaching death with dignity not dread.
PASCUT
I see. But wouldn’t you say that life is good for human beings, especially for Bowdoin students?
SOCRATES
Of course, especially for those who endorse my slogan, “an unexamined life is not worth living” (Plato, Apology 38).
PASCUT
And wouldn’t you also say that death is the loss of a known good?
SOCRATES
Whatever you just said young man sounds almost as good as if I said it.
PASCUT
Now granted that life is good and death is the loss of a known good, shouldn’t the prospect of losing a known good, whether something worse comes after it or not, matter to us deeply?
SOCRATES
I see what you’re doing, but I’m not digging my own grave.
PASCUT
And if death is perhaps a great evil, shouldn’t the prospect of death terrify us?
SOCRATES
Stop playing with words, young man; that’s my job. You’re lucky I’m wise enough not to charge you a fee for me thinking out loud.
PASCUT
What if Jesus of Nazareth has the key of death? He said, “I was dead, but look, now I’m alive forever and I have the keys of death” (Rev 1:18).
DERRIDA
Well, Jesus was a great ghost.
PASCUT
You say so professor, but historiography boasts that Jesus died and rose from the dead. There is plenty of historical proof. Would you like me to …?
SOCRATES
Go on chap, elaborate, but make it quick for the hemlock is waiting for me.
PASCUT
We find attestation in non-Christian sources, like Josephus and Tacitus, that Jesus was crucified by Pontius Pilate (Josephus, Antiquities 18:63-64; Tacitus, Annals 15, 44:2-3). If a Roman crucifies you, you’ve got yourself the nastiest death (Josephus, War 7:201-203)– stripped of clothes, beaten with whips, nailed to a pole, suspended like a criminal, not to mention the ….
DERRIDA
Enough! Enough about crucifxion; you’re giving me the creeps.
PASCUT
Moving to resurrection then, it is often assumed that Jesus’ resurrection is nothing but a big fat lie. But judge for yourselves!
Much like a chameleon changes its color to avoid predators, Jesus’ disciples changed their association with Jesus at his Roman arrest to save their own skin. Only three days later to turn their cowardice into commitment. Why such quick change of heart?Consider hallucination as a possibility. With Jesus in the grave, you and your comrades experience a great deal of shame, stress and self-doubt. But in an incomparable chain reaction, you begin seeing flashes of light and the face of Jesus glowing in the dark. Then you wake up a new person. You begin worshiping a resurrected Jesus and replace your love for self with a surrender to his purposes. Having left your guilt behind, you take the moral lead in social justice, bringing a revolution of freedom and love in the world. But wait a second; there’s a problem with this theory: 500 other people experienced similar Jesus hallucinations in different places at relatively the same time. Doesn’t a mass hallucination constitute as great of a miracle as a resurrection?
Why would thousands of Jews follow a crucified Messiah? If you’re a true Messiah, the royal throne is your end and the sword is your friend (1 Enoch 62:1-3; 2 Baruch 37:7-40:2; 2 Esdras 12:32-33; 1QM 11:5-10; Targum Isaiah 53). If you can’t reach this end and you lose your friend to your enemy or if you meet defeat and the enemy stops your heart’s beat, your messianic movement is caput. It dies and never rises again, like that of Judas the Galilean, Simon bar Giora or of Simon bar Kochba, to name a few. Messianic followers showed no more commitment to their dead messiahs than to their broken pots, ‘Well, don’t you worry. We’ll get another one that actually works!’ How can we account then for the stunning post-mortem development of Jesus’ messianic movement among Jews in Jerusalem and beyond? The requiring historical explanation is that he must have been very much alive after his death as was before it.
You’re a conspirator. Your conspiracy is a single word – resurrection. Intelligently, you orchestrate all the details in order to convince everyone that Jesus is alive without raising any doubt. On your witness bench, you place men of honorable status. You invite unbiased Roman officers or Jewish Pharisees from the opponents’ camp to testify. Yeah, that’s what you or any other conspirator would do. Why then do all the gospel accounts of Jesus’ resurrection, have women as the first witnesses of the empty tomb? There’re not only Jesus’ most faithful disciples hardly unbiased – but they can’t even testify in a Jewish court of law. Doesn’t this contradict a legendary status of the resurrection?
Let’s face it, the idea of someone coming back to life seems far-fetched. Call it weird. Call it what you want. It’s hard to accept. Preach a resurrected Jesus to the theological gurus of Jerusalem and they’ll arrest you (Acts 4:1-3). Tell it to the most elite Athenians and they’ll mock you (Acts 17:32). Why then make up a story like that with the resurrection at the center of your religious rhetoric? If your prime directive is to gain acceptance and convert the masses through a lie, why in the world would you do it with something you know people will reject or worse kill you? Unless, of course, it has to do with that fact that “we cannot but speak of what we have seen and heard” (Acts 4:20).
Saul of Tarsus, intellectual genius and killer of Christians, joins the parade of converts. It bears asking, why? What was his gain? A social status to lose, severe beatings to endure, directed to be tried, imprisoned and executed. And yet he found an enthusiastic acceptance of Jesus among other eyewitnesses, “For what I received I passed on to you as of first importance: that Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures, that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day according to the Scriptures, and that he appeared to Cephas, and then to the Twelve. After that, he appeared to more than five hundred of the brothers and sisters at the same time, most of whom are still living, though some have fallen asleep. Then he appeared to James, then to all the apostles, and last of all he appeared to me also, as to one abnormally born” (1 Cor. 15:3-8).
There is something morally wrong about saying that the core-disciple group of Jesus came up with a cover story to deceive others. Pick up the New Testament. Read it from cover to cover. Make a chart with its moral demands, including its attitude toward lying and ask yourself, ‘Are the people responsible for this movement capable of fabricating a story to deceive the masses, including their family members and friends?’ Only people with no moral conscience would conspire to such a lie and defend it with their lives. That’s not the impression one gets about them from the New Testament.
PASCUT
Must we not then conclude from this evidence that Jesus rose
bodily from the dead?
SOCRATES
I’m willing to give Jesus a try for I believe in the power of reason. Above all, reason prevails. But wait a second, I shouldn’t renounce my hemlock or should I? Why am I always overthinking everything?
PASCUT
If I were you, I would trade the hemlock for Jesus’ key. To take the key is to accept his resurrection.
SOCRATES
But to drink or not to drink, that’s the question!
PASCUT
I’d rather say, to be or not to be, both in the present and future tense.
SOCRATES
But to my defense an infnitive doesn’t have tense.
PASCUT
You’re missing my point.
SOCRATES
How so?
PASCUT
When you take hold of Jesus’ key, death is no longer the great unknown and time takes on a new meaning. Now, in this very moment you can say, ‘my death is possible’ (John 11:25; Rom 6:4-5)!
SOCRATES
My hemlock will soon evaporate, so I’ll break my pattern of tormenting folks with lists of questions and limit myself to one, ‘Why make such a big deal about a single person in history?’
PASCUT
Well, the death of Jesus embodies for the only time in history the full depravity and destiny of the human race.
SOCRATES
Does this mean then that his resurrection is God’s prototype of renewal for the whole of dying reality, which the crucifed Jesus represents and restores?
PASCUT
I couldn’t have said it better myself! What about you, professor? What do you think about all of this?
DERRIDA
That what you just said, like everything else, is purely arbitrary and open to multiple interpretations. Meanings are largely fabrications, alterations, shifting narratives, oversimplifcations, misrepresentations and so on. Since I don’t want to be biased or deceived, I can only affrm a plurality of undecidability of meaning.
PASCUT
In that case why not deconstruct deconstructionism? If everything is arbitrary and potentially deceptive, then so is your theory.
DERRIDA
Since we cannot fully define things, we shouldn’t fully decide things.
PASCUT
And yet you have clearly made up your mind about the thing you just said.
DERRIDA
Logic to a death and resurrection meta-narrative? Doubt puts a claim on me in way that belief never could. We humans must destabilize binary oppositions.
PASCUT
A cynical consciousness confused about the difference between the infinite and the finite, good and evil, life and death vanishes into obscurity away from truth and love.
DERRIDA
Now you’re using big words like truth and love?
PASCUT
Precisely! Truth, because eternal time, goodness and life belong to God, while passing time, evil and death belong to man. Love, because in and through Jesus the infinite God walks in time to vindicate the finite man from evil and death (Rom 6:23)
DERRIDA
Intriguing; it sounds to me like binary oppositions are destabilized in Jesus. And what difference does this make for us?
PASCUT
Life after death and moral order before it in the present now.
DERRIDA
You know, I still think you’re biased and somehow flawed.
PASCUT
You find me flawed, I find you odd. But wouldn’t you rather be biased for life than in perpetual strife with the end of your life? “Your death” is possible too.
Dr. Beniamin Pascut, Ph. D. Campus Minister and Fellow. Brunswick ME.
Ben’s preparations for the end of the world include more talking than lifting at the gym and a penchant for matchmaking.
Agathos Journal 