The Sacred Beauty of Finite Life: Re-Imagining the Face of the Other

ABSTRACT

With Freud’s brief 1915 meditation “On Transience” as a point of entry, the present article draws on the author’s relationship with his mother during the ten years of her dementia as a vehicle for exploring the process by which “sacred beauty” may be revealed amidst the inexorable movement of psychophysical decay and the inevitability of death. As the author avows, the capacity to discern such beauty may be long in coming; owing to both the ravages of dementia and the ego-driven needs and wishes of the caregiver, it may be all but occluded. The task, therefore, is to become present enough to the afflicted person to let her be in her otherness. Doing so is not a matter of effort or will; it is a matter of allowing what the philosopher Emmanuel Levinas refers to as “the face of the Other” to assume priority and to thereby displace one’s needs and wishes by attentive care. At the center of this inquiry are the terms “sacred,” “beauty,” and “finite life.” By examining them one-by-one and discerning the nexus of their interrelationship, we may be better poised to re-imagine the face of the Other and to recognize, in life’s transience, what is most precious and enduring.

Acknowledgments

Portions of this article were presented as a keynote lecture at a conference on “Sacred Encounters: Bridging Hope and Faith,” in conjunction with Spiritual Care Day, co-sponsored by Calvary Hospital and Fordham University, New York, NY.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

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Mark Freeman

Mark Freeman, Ph.D., is Distinguished Professor of Ethics and Society and Professor of Psychology in the Department of Psychology at the College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Massachusetts. His writings include Rewriting the Self: History, Memory, Narrative (Routledge, 1993); Finding the Muse: A Sociopsychological Inquiry into the Conditions of Artistic Creativity (Cambridge, 1994); Hindsight: The Promise and Peril of Looking Backward (Oxford, 2010); The Priority of the Other: Thinking and Living Beyond the Self (Oxford, 2014); and numerous articles and chapters on issues ranging from memory and identity to the psychology of art and religion. Winner of the 2010 Theodore R. Sarbin Award in the Society for Theoretical and Philosophical Psychology, he also serves as editor for the Oxford University Press series “Explorations in Narrative Psychology” (York: Oxford University Press).