[Imagining the End: Mourning and Ethical Life by Jonathan Lear (Harvard University Press, 2024; 176 pp.)]
Jonathan Lear, who died earlier this year, was an eminent philosopher with a wide range of interests, including ethics, Greek philosophy (especially the thought of Aristotle), and psychoanalysis. (So great was his interest in the last topic that he became a lay analyst and had clients.) In Imagining the End, Lear addresses various topics involving death, and one of the chapters of the book is likely to be of interest to many readers, as it is about Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address. In what follows, I’ll comment on a few points that he raises.
From the time Lear learned about the Gettysburg Address, he admired Lincoln and identified with the Union cause, which he took to be the ending of slavery—wrongly took, as readers will know. As he learned more about the Address and the circumstances in which it was delivered, some things shocked him. The bodies in the cemetery where Lincoln delivered the Address had been buried in haphazard fashion. Because of this, Lear tells us,
Civic and political leaders knew there had to be a second burial—one that was proper, dignified, and symbolic. The details of the formation of Gettysburg National Cemetery are well documented. The salient issue is that the Confederate dead were to be excluded from this reburial. This fact is easily knowable. But it came as a shock to me—in part, because that boy who used to be me, who filled his body with Lincoln’s words, had no inkling that he was re-enacting a ritual that excluded the defeated, unburied, and poorly buried dead. I admit to a certain horror at the image of these dead being left unburied or scantily buried—a sense that there is a wrong here too primordial to explain. The horror is in part with the all rightness of it all—with the fact that in that social world, people felt sufficiently comfortable living with this state of affairs (and opposed to doing anything more), even if they were living right there in Gettysburg. I suppose I could have heard a similar tale about people fighting in some faraway place in some ancient period, and it would not have made such a difference to me. Part of the shock, then, was that of this having something to do with me, of this possibly being my past.
And not only that. While every effort was made to give the Union soldiers a decent burial, the bodies of the Confederate soldiers were removed from the battlefield helter-skelter. This led to the building of the Hollywood Cemetery in Virginia by Confederate families who wished to give their loved ones a decent burial. The removal of the Confederates, which was not yet completed when Lincoln spoke, was what he wanted: when he spoke of “these honored dead,” he of course did not want to honor those who had fought on the side opposed to his own.
Lear is troubled by Lincoln’s remark. Quoting Lincoln, Lear says: “‘We have come to dedicate a portion of it, as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live.’” The aim is now specified as dedicating a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. That is certainly not what the Confederates had been doing. So, this sentence becomes a statement of the principle of division and separation. And yet, there is a countervailing thought that persists throughout the Address.
Lincoln famously says that it is our fathers who brought forth this new nation. So, he describes the nation as a family affair. But then, who gets to count as the descendants? It is internal to the idea of family that the descendants remain family, even if they begin to fight among each other. One might try to object that the only true descendants are those who endorse the proposition that all men are created equal. This strains at the idea of family, but in any case, it is not the route Lincoln went down. He insists on conceiving of this strife as “a great civil war”—that is, as a fight among ourselves. And he certainly intended that when the war was won, when peace was restored, and the rebellious states were again an uncontested part of the United States, that the citizens there would count as descendants of “our fathers” who brought forth this nation. What, then, to think of their immediate fathers, the ones who were left dead and unburied on the battlefield? Lincoln’s conceptualization transforms this scene of carnage into a mythic, tragic structure. The unburied Confederate corpse over there is a family member, and thus, there hangs over this scene the specter of a primordial wrong, refusing to bury a family member. This is the stuff of Sophoclean tragedy. And it haunts Lincoln’s use of the phrase “a final resting place for those who died here” to mean these and not those.
Despite the tenor of this remark, though, Lear does not end up condemning Lincoln. Still in thrall to the myth that the war was necessary to end slavery, which he deems a noble cause, he retains his admiration for him, though he readily acknowledges that Lincoln overthrew the Constitution which he had professed to uphold.
But this leaves him with a problem. He wants to say that the Union soldiers fought for a noble cause, but the Confederates did not, since in his view, the Confederates fought to defend slavery, which can hardly be deemed a noble cause. Nevertheless, he thinks the efforts of the Confederates merit our sympathy. These positions appear to be inconsistent. What is he to do? His answer is this:
I do, however, have sympathy for people who are trying to live a kalon [i.e., noble] life but who, for historical and cultural reasons, along with character flaws of their own, get caught in a vision that is wildly wrong and profoundly unjust due to misunderstandings and misperceptions and social pressures—and then waste their lives, sometimes doing terrible harm, in a cloud of misapprehension and falsity.
As a colleague has pointed out to me, this is not a satisfactory view. We should not sympathize with those who fought to defend evil. Instead, we should recognize that the Confederates were fighting for a noble cause—the preservation of their lands and their constitutional rights from the efforts of the North to destroy them. In brief, they were fighting for what Ludwig von Mises calls “a war to defend kith and kin,” and this is indeed a noble cause. If the view I suggest is correct, the issue arises of the extent, if any, to which the Union soldiers merit our respect; but this is not my problem.
