On humanness & honoring the dead:

...Perhaps this passage may serve as a guide through the theme of whether, and how, the living must respect the dead...

...And so we find our fellow human beings honoring the dead or not harming the dead, actively carrying out obligations to the dead...

...these are the taking of human life, sexual functions, family duties and obligations, and the administration of justice according to the laws and customs of a given society...

...By suffusing death with ritual and symbol, life to the living was enhanced...

...the imagery surrounding them is more fundamental and it is captured, or at least a glimmer of it is tapped, in and through the notion of innate human dignity, of the intrinsic dignitas of the human subject...

...This deliberate burial, with its non-utilitarian sensibility and delicate specificity, is described by Leakey and Lewin as an act by human survivors that "betrays a keen self-awareness and concern for the human spirit...

...nor can I treat my ties and relations, obligations and duties to others (particularly the dead or the missing or the absent) by some argument from analogy...

...One must take up evidence from the past, like the burial at the Shanidar Cave, as a clue to a vast and awesome mystery that embodies, at one end of a range of possibilities, authentic human imperatives and sets of basic notions...

...What all this means is not simply that we are social beings but that we are, profoundly, beings with certain needs or yearnings of spirit as well as body...

...We know of no continuing way of life, past or present, in which the dead were casually tossed out, were defiled, degraded, and left unburied to rot, in which the dead were bartered, bargained-after, or turned into dog food...

...Put as a question, my argument seeks to answer the following: what must human beings be like in order to have experiences in the way in which they have them...

...In scattering the flowers and grains as remembrances in an orderly fashion over the grave of a loved one - a family member, a tribesman, one of their own - these "primitive" forebears of ours were acting within and acting upon presumptions which help to form the bedrock, then and now, of any recognizably human existence...

...Barnaby's thistle, groundsel, grape hyacinths, woods horsetail, and a kind of mallow...

...That drive can be damaged and deflected, and to the extent that it is we become less fully human...

...But "my body"is not the only embodied feature of "my self...

...A morality is, at the very least, the regulation of the taking of life and the regulation of sexual relations...

...Freud once said, "The dead are mighty rulers," by which he meant that our introjections of the voices of the powerful dead live on to govern us, sometimes unaware...

...From the orderly distribution of the grains around the fossil remains, there is no question that the flowers were arranged deliberately and did not simply topple into the grave as the body was being covered...

...STUART HAMPSHIRE has sketched a non-utilitarian starting point for reflections on human beings and their social universe (I have already given one clue, 60,000 years old) by demonstrating, powerfully, that human motivations cannot be narrowly subsumed within utilitarian and self-interested categories or calculations...

...therein lies one's meaning and one's honor...

...I assume that even our more primitive forebears, if they were capable of honoring the dead through the aesthetic creation of a burial place involving the self-conscious arrangement of remembrances and symbols, possessed a need to "make sense" of things and a desire for things to "make sense...

...That is, I am not related to other human beings as one preexistent social atom is to another...

...on a June day some sixty thousand years ago a man was buried in unusual circumstances...

...The special dignity of the human subject does not disappear with death...

...This means that an injury to the dignity of an other (especially a special other) is experienced, not as an external event or abstract affront, but as an assault upon myself...

...The humidity of the cave was far from favorable for preserving the bones of a dead man...

...Leakey and Lewis write: . . . from the Shanidar Cove in the Sagros Mountain highlands of Iraq...

...Within a framework that stresses our sociality, and that couches, at least implicitly, an account of the human subject as a being who exists in a body and in and through definite, specific relations which are themselves imbedded in a social context, human beings will be seen not so much, certainly not exclusively, as self-interested or even as bearers of rights (at least not along the touchstones of our most basic human ties to loved ones and kin) but as beings whose sufferings and joys, pains and pleasures, triumphs and tragedies, make them members of a human community, participants in a sacred compact, not a corrigible contract...

...How can one explain the fact that the actions of beings we would scarcely recognize as human (though they were hominids proper), are immediately recognized actions whose inner rationale we ourselves deeply feel...

...A being not unlike oneself, perhaps a loved one, a family member or friend, chews meat or grains around the campfire one night and the next day, without warning, is felled by an unexpected blow, falls over a precipice, takes ill and collapses, gets ripped apart by wild animals, or simply, inexplicably, fades away...

...First, human beings have a need, not merely or simply an interest or a desire, to live with and among others in relations of concrete particularity, in space, extending over and through time...

...Death remains mysterious, foreboding, fearful, but the rituals surrounding death, giving it structure and a certain predictability, enlarge life and round out and off its beginning and its projected end-point...

...The gods may be fickle but humans can be constant...

...These dimensions are not covered, cannot be captured adequately within, the ambience of arguments from analogy, or within the frame of formal logic...

...My argument does not turn on a series of formal deductions...

...This being the case, what does the universal "not-harming" or respecting of the dead say about the human species...

...Honoring the dead as did those ancestors of ours, with their offerings of thistle and hyacinth, horsetail and groundsel, forms one dimension or side to a set of deeply felt imperatives which includes, as a prohibitive injunction, not harming the dead...

...Attempts to answer the "why" of death go back as far as human history, myth, and symbol-creation take us...

...Second, that human beings - and here, too, the evidence stretches from prehistory through the present - experience an imperative to discover, to understand, and to create meaning...

...I shall begin with the question of meaning and its relation to non-honoring the dead...

...It is a recognition that a human subject can only emerge through social relations of particular kinds...

...What New Discoveries Reveal about the Emergence of our Species and its Possible Future (E.P...

...We link ourselves up with a web of human meanings and social imperatives that go back as far as recognizably human creatures go and will continue so long as recognizably human creatures continue to walk the face of the earth, to be born, to live, and to die...

...Later, the authors remark that the sociality of human beings runs like a vital thread through our most distant origins...

...As human beings slowly differentiated themselves from other natural objects, as the distinction between physis and nomos got firmly lodged, humans became more self-consciously aware of their drive to create and sustain meaning...

...We must hold onto the strength, the profundity, the irreducibility of these imperatives against the crasser, individualistic demands of our age.stic demands of our age...

...Bodily identity is one essential dimension of the dignity of the human person, a constituent feature of the intrinsic value of personhood...

...If we are deprived of such relations, we are damaged and distorted in body and spirit...

...If we keep in mind my previous presuppositions - that we are intrinsically and exquisitely social beings and that we are beings driven to create and sustain meaning - we can sketch the outlines of a series of unfolding intimations...

...Such an argument, to have any force, must be, in some way, universal and strong enough to ground a sense of morality...

...It would appear that the man's family, friends, and perhaps members of his tribe had gone into the fields and brought back bunches of yarrow, cornflowers, St...

...Here are two presumptions that may be taken as "bedrock" principles...

...The action of our forebears honoring their dead tribesman can only be explained with reference to such presumptions or others like them that might coherently and plausibly form the basis for human morality within a shared social life...

...but pollen grains survive very well under these circumstances, and researchers at the Musee de I'Homme in Paris who examined the soil around the Shanidar Man discovered that buried along with him were several different species of flowers...

...For, as he argues, every way of life is built up on notions of morality and contains "prohibitions, barriers to action, in certain quite distinct and clearly marked areas of action...

...The ties go deeper...

...A SET OF DEEPLY FELT IMPERATIVES On humanness & honoring the dead JEAN BETHKE ELSHTAIN I ASK THE READER to picture in his or her mind's eye, at a time long ago and far away, the scene described by Richard E. Leakey and Roger Lewin in Origins...

...ONE SLOGAN which has emerged from the contemporary women's movement is "my body, myself...

...This sociality goes so deep and is so fundamental that it is constitutive of the self...

...But there is also a way in which one's ties to the dead are special relationships that can nourish and sustain and give courage...

...I am running a modest transcendental argument here, not in the sense of an argument that makes reference to a world that rises above the natural and social world, but refers instead to a set of necessary presuppositions - axioms we, and others, basically agree on or would if we brought our presuppositions to the surface...

...What does it tell us about ourselves...

...RESPECTING THE DEAD becomes one's honor...

...The living, knowing that at their deaths they will be honored by a ritual they have undertaken in order to honor others, achieve an enhanced sense of life as embracing past and future...

...projecting meaning into, upon, and within death enlarges life as a meaningful activity...

...Without such a set of moral rules and prohibitions, basic notions and symbolic forms, no human society could exist...

...A relationship to a dead loved one does not cease with his or her death, for so long as one lives on, the life of the dead that helped to constitute one's own identity (and I mean much more here than simply "living on" in memory or legend or song or family history) remains, in some powerful if elusive sense, alive...

...Dutton, 1977...

...According to Hannah Arendt, the Greeks constructed an entire theory of human life on the basis of human mortality, on the recognition and acceptance that human life from birth to death "is distinguished from all other things by the rectilinear course of its movement, which, so to speak, cuts through the circular movement of biological life . . . The task and potential greatness of mortals lie in their ability to produce things - works and deeds and words - which would deserve to be and, at least to a degree, are at home in everlastingness, so that through them mortals could find their place in a cosmos where everything is immortal except themselves...

...We possess an inborn imperative, a power aspotentia, to find and to create meaning...

...To ask "why" is to seek meaning...

...One treats the body, the self, of a dead member of the human community as an end-in-itself, not as the rationalist outgrowth of an abstract debate but because our deepest well-springs of human moral reason and sensibility lead us to repudiate utilitarian or callous alternatives...

...In not harming the dead, in respecting the dead, we do more, much more, than enact, unthinkingly, tribal custom, or carry out, unfeelingly, abstract obligation...

...One cannot, perhaps, plumb the depths of "why" death as some generic question, or even why "this" death or that, but one can surround the event, when it occurs, with actions which have meaning f6r the surviving human subjects who engage in them and, in so doing, both honor the dead, or keep the dead from harm, and simultaneously reaffirm one's own meaningfulness by giving expression to the depths of one's sociality...

...There are hideous counter-examples from extraordinary situations - Nazi horrors perpetrated on the dead and the living come to mind - but these do not qualify as a self-sustaining and continuing way of life...

...The human being, they declare, is ' 'an animal with its own unique reasons for living in communities...

...To harm such a dead person is not to damage his interests but to assault the very foundation of the human community...

...Second, our intrinsic sociality goes beyond some simple "need" for others in functional or utilitarian senses...

...Surely death has always posed one of the greatest challenges to the human mind's intrinsic urge to find meaning...

...One way in which human beings structure the meaning after which they thirst is through the creation of rituals and symbols, deeds and actions that can be repeated, that have a temporal continuity that challenges life's capaciousness and its ephem-erality...

...For I, profoundly, find the groundwork of my own identity, "my self,'' in and through the bodies of those nearest and dearest to me...

...Each way of life will embody within its social forms a cluster of basic notions as the moral grounding required, in the first instance, for the creation and sustenance of any way of life...

...She is the author of Public Man, Private Woman: Women in Social and Political Thought (Princeton University Press...

...rather, it flows, first, from historical and anthropological evidence and second, from an interpretive approach to human subjects as meaning-bearing moral agents...

...The human being's life took on meaning, death was meaningful, if one left behind a story to be remembered and honored and to live after one...

...it is to rend the social fabric, to wreak havoc with the bases of ordinary human moral sensibility, to threaten to plunge the social world into a nightmare of nihilism...

...that is, one's own self-identity is necessarily and intrinsically tied to and bound up with the identities of others...

...JEAN BETHKE ELSHTAIN is associate professor of political science at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, where she teaches courses on feminist theory and psychological and political theory...

...Life acquires a rhyme and a reason...