Textual Extract
from

"The Experience
of Death"

by
Paul Louis
Landsberg.

"THE human race is the only one that knows it must die, and it knows this only through its experience," Voltaire, his mind often more unquiet than we suppose, thus sets the problem in its true light at the very beginning of his treatise on man.
Let us consider more closely the two theses contained in this highly significant statement. Each assertion is open to a dual interpretation, an interpretation which can, on the one hand, lead us into error, and on the other, open to us the heart of the matter. If man is the sole living being to know that he must die, we should remember that certain animals have, as it were, a presentiment of death, yet, to tell the truth, solely when they are threatened by its immediate presence. Then they lay themselves down and wait for death, with a calmness and dignity of manner that misanthropists have preferred to that of many humans.
But this sort of presentiment, this perception of the immediate, is not, properly speaking, knowledge, and even if it could be transformed into the corresponding knowledge, it would still fail to be a knowledge of the necessity of death. The animal would not, for instance, be aware that the death of the individual is essential to life and to the species. The comprehension of the link between birth and death, the biological necessity that the individual should disappear to the benefit of the species, and that the species should disappear in favour of the realisation of the ever-changing forms of life - such comprehension is no doubt solely reserved to man. The origin of such speculations can be found, for instance, in the inverse proportion between the power of propagation and the specific duration of existence in the species, or in the causal and temporal link between propagation and death so obvious in the life history of many creatures. It goes equally without saying that such speculations occur relatively late in the history of the human mind. Yet even such reflections are not the original source of the human certainty with regard to death. Voltaire points out that here we are dealing with an experience of which the real content is not the fact of dying, but the certainty that we have to die.