Everyday philosophy

Everyone has been trying to understand Michael Jackson's death this summer. While medics are still picking at his slender carcass, cultural pundits squabble like vultures over his reputation. Should he be remembered as a great singer, a possible paedophile, an emblematic black artist who tried to bleach his face white, the Fred Astaire of the 1980s, the first to master the MTV pop video, "Wacko Jacko" or a troubled victim of a domineering father? His difficult journey from unhappy childhood, to weird quasi-adulthood has been told and re-told ad nauseam across the world.

Yet Jackson's current predicament is an extreme version of a process that will happen to us all. For, as Jean-Paul Sartre put it, at death we become prey to the "Other"—our identity dissipating into the sum total of what is thought about us. While we are alive, Sartre explained, we can resist this pressure: we can defy the opinions that other people try to project onto us. We can't erase our pasts, but we can always subvert future expectations. It's a struggle Sartre saw as central to our existence as moral beings: we must do more than act out the roles others have scripted for us.

This is the existential condition of humanity—we are the artists of our own lives, albeit with the anguish that comes from being condemned to be free. Given the weight of expectations heaped on his shoulders, it's something Michael Jackson felt more crushingly than most: a burden reflected in his lifelong modifications of his own appearance. The human body, Ludwig Wittgenstein once declared, is the best picture we have of the human soul. And Jackson's body in his last days legibly expressed torment.



Death, of course, takes everything away. The back catalogue of Jackson's songs is now the complete catalogue. Yet, according to Sartre, death is not the final chord of a melody that suddenly resolves and makes sense of what went before. Instead, it merely begins an endless new squabbling over meanings from which the core—the real person—is perpetually absent. Michael Jackson is no longer with us. Instead, "Michael Jackson" is becoming the sum of what others hope to make of him.