Year: 2017
Type: other
Abstract: “Call no one happy until they are dead.” “Never speak ill of the dead.” If we still heed the injunctions of Solon and Chilon of Sparta, then obituaries, which represent a prominent way of expressing the human universal of grief, are a resource for philosophical anthropology. Philosophers have emphasized that we can determine what counts as a virtue for a given type of person in a given cultural context by analyzing what people say about the dead [ 1 ]. Such judgments summarize the deceased’s life and place it in a meaningful narrative context. This is why practitioners of Acceptance and Commitment Therapy ask patients to write their own obituaries: doing so helps people clarify what they value, how they want to live, and what their lives mean [ 2 ]. In popular culture, this attitude has recently cropped in the Black Obituary project, which was founded by Ja’han Jones in 2016 to enable Black Americans to write their own obituaries in case they become the victims of lethal police violence. He characterizes the texts as “agonizingly introspective works,” saying, “These are Black lives, as told by those who experience them in all their glory—tragedy—frustration—triumph.” Footnote 1 The ability — one might even say the right and the duty — to tell the story of someone’s life, whether that life is one’s own or another’s, is a capacity we dare not neglect as self-presenting creatures. Moreover, praising the dead is a way of performatively identifying with them, which is why Aristotle said of Plato after his death that he was a “man whom bad men have no right even to praise” [ 3 ]. And recent research on healing in social networks suggests that the death of one member often draws together those who survive [ 4 ].
Source: The Journal of Value Inquiry
Authors: Mark Alfano, Andrew Higgins, Jacob Levernier
Language: English
Subfield: Anthropology
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: hybrid
Estimated APC paid: $3,190
OpenAlex ID: W2623304523