What Does It Mean to Love the Dead?

The question of what it means to love the dead touches both our relationships to specific others and our relationship to history as such. To address the question at the level of the individual, I examine Søren Kierkegaard’s account of loving the dead as a non-reciprocal love that deepens the consciousness of the lover. I then re-examine reciprocity within a phenomenological framework of being for others, specifically Jan Patočka’s account in “Phenomenology of Afterlife”. With a better understanding of what it means to remain open to the other who has died and of how the other lives on through me, I turn to Kierkegaard and Patočka’s combined reflections on relating to historical events and on the meaning of history for the present, drawing from Kierkegaard’s idea of “becoming contemporary with” the past and Patočka’s philosophy of history.