Why do we care for the dead body? There are two sorts of answers: The first is grounded in the vast time spans of anthropology, the second in a narrower historical context. The first is repeated again and again, iteratively, through the ages. The second tells us why and how the care for the dead body changes in particular times and places. One answer is almost cosmic; the other local.
I raise the question because there is a logically plausible but outrageous argument made by Diogenes the Cynic, the 4th-century-BC “dog philosopher” — “a Socrates gone mad,” Plato said of him — that we might as well toss the dead out as carrion.
He ordered himself to be thrown anywhere without being buried. And when his friends replied, “What! to the birds and beasts?,” “By no means,” saith he; “place my staff near me, that I may drive them away.” “How can you do that,” they answer, “for you will not perceive them?” “How am I then injured by being torn by those animals, if I have no sensation?”
Diogenes was testing the limits of culture and convention as he tried to live in accord with nature: The dead body is nothing, and it makes no difference what we do with it. And while praised and quoted for thousands of years, Diogenes’ argument has remained universally unacceptable. The collective voice, in thousands of timbres, says that the dead are not refuse like the other debris of life; they cannot be left for beasts to scavenge. They remain part of culture; base as they may be, they do not revert into nature easily.
Rather, they bear the historical continuity of intimacy and humanity; they are the temporal foundation of human communities; they are the ciphers of memory. We care for the dead body less because of what we might loosely call our own or anyone else’s metaphysical “views” about death or because of specific religious beliefs than because of the ethical obligations that we, the living, owe them, the dead, for what they do for us.
The fact that the unfeeling dead body matters is the consequence of qualities that we attribute to it in a primordial sense. The history of much of human culture and thought can be written in our resistance to Diogenes, grounded in primal idolatry: We know the dead body is like stone or wood, and yet it is always more than that.
Dead bodies are the temporal foundation of human communities; they are the ciphers of memory.
Why should this be the case? One set of answers depends on the claim that we have a primal aversion to the uncared-for dead body: “The natural Spirit of Life is afraid of a Dead Body and has an abhorrence of it,” as an 18th-century clergyman put it. Julia Kristeva says something of the same in the language of psychoanalytic anthropology: “The corpse, seen without God and outside of science, is the utmost of abjection. It is death infecting life.” Without a god, outside science, and most important outside culture, the corpse as Diogenes proposes to treat it is foundationally and unbearably abject.
A second type of answer to why we care for the dead is that the care of the dead stands at the center of a cultural origin story. Hegel argued that the tomb is the first work of the symbol-making architect in distinction to the house. The house for the dead is the entry into symbol making and memory.
Hugo Grotius, the 17th-century father of the modern law of war, compiled a library of opinions and practices from antiquity to show that the denial of burial was so fundamentally at odds with any conceivable account of humans as creatures in culture that it constituted a just cause of war. Pages of classical citations support this view: The right to burial was “common to all civilized Nations”; it came from the gods; it was evidence of “our common nature” and “of compassion and religion.” Seneca and Quintilian called burial “A piece of publick Humanity.” The Olympic gods triumphed over the “Giants, who used to devour the dead Bodies of Men, the Abolition of which brutal practice is signified by Burial.”
All of this is to say that the care of the dead is a, if not the, sign of our emergence from the order of nature into culture. It is foundational; it begins in the liminal time of human origins. It is, as the philosopher Hans-Georg Gadamer puts it, “the immutable anthropological background for all the human and social changes, past or present.”
My most general answer to why Diogenes’ argument is universally unacceptable is that care of the dead represents, in Gadamer’s words, culture “spiraling out of the order of nature.”
A more limited response to Diogenes claims that in general and particular circumstances, the dead do work for the living: They make civilizations.
The dead are not really dead, and we need them more than they need us. “The most dangerous person at a funeral is the one in the coffin,” the historian Richard Cobb reminds us. The history of the work of the dead is thus a history of how they dwell in us — individually and communally — and of how, from where they lie, they act in the world. It is a history of how we imagine them to be, how they give meaning to our lives, how they structure public spaces, politics, and time.
The history of the work of the dead is therefore a history of the imagination, a history of how we invest the dead — and especially the dead body — with meaning. It is the greatest possible, most expansive history of the imagination. “St. Paul preached to the Hebrews that ‘He being dead yet speaketh,’ " an 18th-century clergyman reminds his audience. We endlessly invest the dead body with meaning because somehow through it the dead — that is, the human past — speak to us.
This is the case independent of specific views or theories about death. But there is a moment during the Enlightenment in which history seems to take the place of metaphysics as the foundation for our investment in the dead. Consider the English Enlightenment deist philosopher and radical William Godwin’s 1809 Essay on Sepulchres.
Godwin’s tract calls itself “a proposal for erecting some memorial of the illustrious dead in all ages on the spot where their remains have been interred.” It was intended to be the first step of a utopian plan to map necro-geography in such a way as to resist the inevitable erosion by time. The places where noteworthy bodies were buried would be identified by name and marked on maps like those that already existed “in which the scenes of famous battles were distinguished with a particular mark.” This exercise would result in what he called an “Atlas of those who Have Lived, for the Use of Men Hereafter to be Born” that would keep in memory those who might otherwise be forgotten: a virtual national cemetery.
The “recollection and admiration of the dead” made possible by knowing where they are buried would, Godwin argues, make the world a more virtuous place. He proposes a psychology and theoretical anthropology of the dead. For those who survive, he says, everything “which has been practically associated with my friend, acquires a value from that consideration; his ring, his watch, his books, his habitations.” The immanent corpse remains for Godwin strangely still who it — he, she — was, lacking only what seems so little yet so great — the breath of life, the “rosy hue.” So the answer to the universal question, “Where are the dead?,” is given to an important extent by a tombstone, an indexical sign: “hic jacet,” here they are.
The dust that covers a great man’s tomb is, for Godwin, “simply and literally the great man himself.” We can attain, he continues, “the craft and mystery, by which we may spiritually, each in his several spheres compel the earth and ocean to give up their dead alive” — this necromancy by a man who explicitly rejected any such thing as rank superstition.
The history of the dead is a history of the imagination.
Godwin is appropriating the civilizational weight of the dead for a specific historical and memorial task in the early 19th century: imagining a new historical necro-geography for the nation. He is proposing secular enchantment in a new age, an age in which the dead would come to do all manner of new work.
In the late 18th and early 19th centuries a new venue was created for this work — the cemetery. The cemetery was not a churchyard. Churchyards were exclusive. Priests controlled entry, and “anyone the bishop sees fit to ban,” as reads a Norse law, was ostentatiously not allowed in. In contrast, anyone could be buried in a cemetery.
The cemetery, unlike the churchyard of a parish, did not make the dead evident in mounding soil and wavy church floors but instead hid them decorously in specially designed landscapes amid a flurry of monuments that proclaimed their memory. It rejected the deep historical roots of the churchyard in favor of other and far more secular histories. The cemetery was a genuinely new and spectacularly versatile stage for the work of the dead.
While the churchyard was a matrix of Christians, living and dead, the cemetery was the space in which the dead supported the interest of the major cultural and political innovations of the 19th and 20th centuries, a point not lost on contemporaries. For example, in 1849, Otto von Bismarck visited the cemetery in Berlin where the dead of the March Revolution of 1848 are buried. Afterward, he wrote to his wife with a heart full of bitterness; he could not “forgive the idolatry practiced at the graves of these criminals whose every tombstone boasts of ‘Freedom and Rights,’ a mockery of God and man.” He cannot, he continues, stop his heart from swelling with poison when he thinks about the “idolatrousness” with which Berliners come to these graves. And they kept coming, forbidden in some years, tolerated in others, with and without disturbances. To this day, the cemetery in the Friedrichshain Park, unthinkable in the old regime, remains a site of memorial reflection for the German Left.
The history of specific cemeteries is linked to creation of the cemetery as a new kind of space of the dead. The story begins in the early 18th century and ends in the early 19th in Paris, in Père Lachaise, the ur-cemetery. It is a history of the imagination. Around 1720 the architect Sir John Vanbrugh and his patron, Charles Howard, Third Earl of Carlisle, conceived and began to build the first free-standing mausoleum since antiquity in the vast gardens that were being built around the earl’s new country house. Whole villages and the parish church were razed to create a utopian setting free of real peasants and their hovels: an Elysium, an Arcadia. To some extent this grand gesture was negative: a rejection of the Christian necro-geography. The earl’s burial, Vanbrugh wrote, would comport with what “has been practic’d by the most polite peoples before Priestcraft got Carcasses into their keeping.” But the tomb also stood for something lost since antiquity. Charles Howard’s tomb was in a garden. Not Eden. But Elysium.
At more or less the same time, Sir Richard Temple, Viscount Cobham, began to build what became the most influential English garden of the 18th century: Stowe, in Buckinghamshire. It had Elysian fields. There was a tomb, indeed the archetypal great tomb, modeled on that of the ancient King Mausolus. There was a small valley alongside a stream that was dammed to create two lakes that represented the River Styx. And there was a community of the dead — no bodies, only memorials — of a select number of great leaders and poets from different eras joined in a neoclassical paradise imagined through the poetry of Virgil and the landscape architecture of William Kent.
In 1776 this early gesture toward a virtual national cemetery was made more grandly. That year the King of Denmark commissioned for the royal park at Jaegerspris 54 gravestones for the empty graves of his most worthy subjects: faux tombs that together look like a cemetery. Still no real dead. But around the same time, Elysium finally did get a real body that would bring the mythic fields of the dead to a wide public. Rousseau was buried in a tomb on an island in the midst of the picturesque gardens of Ermenonville, which were themselves modeled on the Elysium at Stowe, which, in turn, was purportedly the model for Heloise’s garden — her Elysium — in the immensely popular novel. The tomb quickly became a pilgrimage site.
Indeed, the bois de tombeaux became a landscape genre, a kind of cemetery before the cemetery. In 1791, Alexandre Lenoir, director of the Commission on Monuments, began gathering despoiled tombs and bodies, which he put in what he called the Elysium of Musée des Monuments Français. Among his prizes were the bones and the tomb of Abelard and Heloise. These became the imaginative nidus of Père Lachaise, which was founded in 1804 but amounted to little until it was cross-fertilized by the inhabitants of Lenoir’s Elysium.
An enormous funeral brought Abelard and Heloise from the old museum Elysian Fields to the new one. Their tomb followed. And so the medieval pair from a distant world could be reimagined as bourgeois lovers in a new memorial park for the dead on the eastern outskirts of Paris: new relics for a new day, idols of the cemetery in a postrevolutionary world. A new kind of space of the dead — or rather a reinvention of classical spaces real and imagined — had come into being in the early 19th century.
The dead — alone and collectively — had always worked for grand civilizational projects and for a large number of far more limited ones. They worked over the millennia in the interests of a community linked through a transcendent religion. They work today largely in the interest of history and memory.
The art critic David Hickey notes — while discussing a show in Las Vegas — that we watch elephants disappear without inquiring how this is done and we listen to a chorus asking that they be made to reappear in the same spirit. We understand that “the whole tradition of disappearing things and restoring them is located where it should be: in rituals of death and resurrection.”
I think we simply take pleasure in seeing the impossible appear possible and the invisible made visible. Because if these illusions were not just illusions, we should not be what we are: mortal creatures who miss our dead friends, and thus can appreciate levitating tigers and portraits by Raphael for what they are — songs of mortality sung by the prisoners of time.
Largely beyond metaphysics, the dead body conjures this sort of magic, a magic we can still believe in.
Thomas W. Laqueur is a professor of history at the University of California at Berkeley, and the author of The Work of the Dead: A Cultural History of Mortal Remains (Princeton University Press). This essay is adapted from the First Annual Humanities Lecture sponsored by Princeton University Press, the College of Arts and Science at New York University, and the New York Institute for the Humanities at NYU.
