Philippe Ariès (1914–1984)

Philippe Ariès’in klasikleşmiş, tarih yazımında ve özellikle zihniyet tarihinde çok önemli bir yer tutan bu kısa ve yoğun kitabı, tarihe, insan bilimlerine, kültüre merakı olan, dünü öğrenip bugünü anlamaya çalışan herkesin zevkle, keyifle okuyacağı, elinden düşüremeyeceği bir eser.
Ariès’in, genellemelerle ayrıntılı özel vakalar arasında gidip gelerek, niceliksel ile nitelikseli bir arada ele alarak, edebiyat ve sanat eserleriyle günlük hayatın maddi show more izlerini bir araya getirerek kurguladığı eseri, yaklaşık 1500 yıllık bir süreci ele almak, bunu “Batı” adı verilen ve tam olarak sınırlarının nasıl çizileceği belli olmayan bir kategori içinde değerlendirmek ve ölüm kadar çetrefilli bir kavramın algılanışının zaman içinde değişimini izlemeye kalkışmak gibi son derece güç bir görevin altından ustalıkla kalkıyor.

“Bu kitabı okuyan tarih öğrencisi veya meraklısının kazanacakları saymakla bitmez: Ariès’in çalışması, tarihte yöntem, zihniyet tarihi, Avrupa tarihi ve din tarihi konularında ufuk açan, merak uyandıran ve eleştirel düşünceyi tetikleyen, kuyumcu maharetiyle işlenmiş mücevher niteliğinde bir tarihçilik şaheseridir.
Dayandığı geniş bilgi dağarcığı, kullandığı malzemeyi yoğurmak için gösterdiği duyarlık, bu denli karmaşık bir meseleyi kolaylıkla aktarabilmesini sağlayan tecrübe ve bütün bu sürecin arkasında daima varlığı hissedilen merak ile deha karışımı, okuyucuda ancak hayranlık uyandırabilir. Herhalde buna bir de en büyük sanat ve kabiliyetin alamet-i farikası olan şeyi eklemek gerekir: Yapılanın kolay olduğu hissini uyandıracak derecede bir akıcılık ve zarafet. Küçük bir kitapta gerçekten çok büyük tarihçilik…” show less

In this magisterial history, Philippe Ariès presents Western Man’s changing attitudes toward death over the last thousand years. It may seem like a morbid occupation of one’s time, but Ariès has gathered a seminal representation of the West’s often inconsistent attitude toward the end of life, the afterlife, and even life itself. Although Ariès has focused mostly on French documentation, he has gone to great lengths to show how this is applicable to all of Western culture, including show more Britain and the United States (which obviously only comes into the picture after about 1600 AD). Ariès does a tremendous job of reconstructing the cultural milieu and viewpoints of contemporary people from the Middle Ages up till the present day. Although I found myself occasionally disagreeing with some of his cultural interpretations, I found the book immensely informative and detailed. Ariès gives a sweeping overview, but also manages to give specific information on customs and beliefs. This is both the history of hard facts and dates, and the more diffused history of culture.

Ariès divides his analysis into five categories, each concerned with broad time-periods (which tend to overlap somewhat) and specific attitudes towards death and its related cultural baggage. I will not go into each in great depth, although each is interesting in its own right; this is merely a very crude and broad overview of Ariès’s categories. The first is the Tame Death, which coincides with the early Middle Ages, and which is illustrated by the death of Roland, one of Charlemagne’s paladins. The second, the Death of the Self, is concerned with a burgeoning individuality at the end of the Middle Ages and towards the Renaissance. The third is Remote and Imminent Death, which basically covers the period from the 1500s to the 1700s. As Ariès says, ‘Where death had once been immediate, familiar, and tame, it gradually began to surreptitious, violent, and savage… death, by its very remoteness, has become fascinating…’ This is the age of the Marquis de Sade, with disturbing developments like the idea, if not the practice, of necrophilia. The fourth category is The Death of the Other, which consists of the Romantic idea of the Beautiful Death. Death has, broadly, shifted from a concern of one’s own death to a concern about the death of family and friends. Of course, these concerns have always been there, but Ariès shows how they become overpowering during this period. The final category, the Invisible Death, is concerned with contemporary attitudes towards death. Again broadly, this category covers the way in which industrialised society has banished death from everyday consciousness. Because of modern man’s more delicate sensibilities, death and its more unpleasant aspects have been removed to peripheral institutions, like hospices and funeral homes. Ariès does, however, note that in the later twentieth century, some changes are also noticeable in this attitude, as exemplified by Elisabeth Kübler-Ross and other thanatologists’ attempts to re-personalise death.

The part of the book that I was most interested in was that dealing with the Macabre in art and literature. Although not necessarily an enjoyable subject, I found the 15th and 16th century attitudes towards death (or personified Death) fascinating. I found it interesting how Ariès inverts commonsensical expectations by associating the Macabre with a love of life, instead of a fascination with death. I do not completely agree with him, but I found his arguments refreshingly different.

Another place I disagreed with him was his interpretations of the Brontës’ attitude toward death. Obviously, they were quite intimately acquainted with death: they lived in a parsonage surrounded by a churchyard, after all. But I think Ariès makes some conceptual leaps when he tries to relate their literary output to their attitudes toward death. Having read most of Emily’s works, I find it somewhat reductive to say that nearly everything she wrote reflected a deep-seated morbidity. Admittedly, Ariès makes a more subtle argument than this, but I still find it dangerous to too closely tie biographical details to literary composition.

On the whole, I found Ariès’s book fascinating and even enjoyable, despite the subject matter. I think modern man is almost morbidly averse to morbidity. People fear death for many, complex reasons. Having experienced grief first-hand, I do not want to deny the power of this fear, but I would like to posit that an intense fear of death is one of the most detrimental approaches to life. As Ariès’s book shows, man has come up with many reasons to fear death. As he also shows, however, there are more to embrace it. show less

This little work, really a long essay, is a fascinating overview of burying, dying, and funereal practices in America and Europe from ancient times into the Twentieth Century. The author tracks the dying experience from personal to a gathering of intimates to a sterile, lonely act in a modern hospital. Burying goes from a dispassionate "mystical trust" into graves which are readily exhumed for re-use, filling the charnel houses, which graves become more personal and pushed in on churches show more until pushed out of even the city.

The implications of the rise of embalming and plots reserved indefinitely... Fascinating, thought-provoking. show less

A big brick of a book about ideas and practices concerning death and dying. Despite its subtitle ("The Classic History of Western Attitudes Toward Death Over the Last One Thousand Years"), The Hour of Our Death largely reflects the areas of special interest/expertise of Philippe Ariès, and should be better understood as "a history of attitudes towards death among Christians in France between late antiquity and the 19th century, with occasional digressions into England and American show more examples." As a compendium of information and examples, this is a useful book, and clearly the kind of book that you can only write when you've amassed many decades' worth of expertise in the archives. But I do think it's a book that shows its age in its methodologies/approaches, and whose sweeping generalisations were at points frustrating. A milestone but not a touchstone. show less