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“Depend on it, Sir, when a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates his mind wonderfully.”—Dr. Johnson
A fascination with death conjoins the lives of numerous creators, from Emily Dickinson to James Agee, from Edgar Allan Poe to René Magritte, from John Berryman to Jack Kerouac to Sylvia Plath. Existentialists like Martin Heidegger and Albert Camus, among others, crafted an entire philosophy out of the dread subject. Ernest Becker and Norman Brown used it as a means of revising Freudian “metatheory.” Søren Kierkegaard proclaimed death mastery to be a critical prerequisite for true religiosity. Arthur Schopenhauer called death “the truly inspiring genius of philosophy” (quoted in Scharfstein, 1980, p. 254).
Serving an “apprenticeship in death”1 (as abstraction or as eventuality, willfully or fatefully) sometimes leads to art or to epiphany. But when intolerable, it can also become an impediment to full creative expression, not to mention psychological well-being. Ludwig Wittgenstein, the designated father of modern language theory and to many the most influential philosopher of the twentieth-century, lived both ends of that spectrum. The brutality of death touched him early and repeatedly, and in the process, threw an immensely cultured, immensely comfortable life into emotional disarray. At the same time, the idea of death inflamed his genius, the culmination of which amounted to no less than the creation of a new version of philosophy.