Rainer Maria Rilke

Rainer Maria Rilke is invoked as a poet who helped recast death not as an alien limit imposed on human life, but as its humanized and individualized culmination. Sartre presents Rilke’s account as making each person’s end resemble the life that has prepared for it, so that mortality gives a life its singular, irreversible form.

Role in the Argument

Sartre sets Rilke among poets and novelists who first advanced an idealist, humanistic recovery of death. Rather than leave death as contact with a nonhuman absolute, this view treats it as the final term within life’s own series. Because the end belongs to that series, it is interiorized: death becomes a human phenomenon, still part of life, and can give meaning to the life that leads toward it.

The argument’s central image is a resolved chord that gives meaning to a melody. In the same way, death is not simply an event outside life; as its ending, it retrospectively shapes the whole. Rilke’s significance in the passage is therefore conceptual: his poetry helps make thinkable a death that belongs to a person’s life rather than confronting humanity only as an unknowable external boundary.

Individual Life and Its End

For Sartre, interiorizing death also individualizes it. Death becomes not merely the general limit of human existence but the end of this particular person’s life, making that life unique: it does not begin again, and one never recovers one’s stroke. The point is not that a person chooses the empirical fact of dying, but that finitude makes life, including its ending, one’s own.

Sartre attributes to Rilke the view that each person’s end resembles their life because the whole of an individual life has been a preparation for that end. The ending thus gathers what came before without making life repeatable or reversible. It is a culmination whose meaning is bound to the particular life it completes.

Relation to Sartre’s Critique

Sartre places this poetic account within a broader attempt to understand death as internal to human existence, later given philosophical form by Heidegger through the idea of existence as being-toward-death. He acknowledges the appeal and the truth in such accounts: by bringing death within the horizon of a person’s life, they appear to recover it for human freedom. But he does not simply endorse that recovery. After outlining its attraction, he insists that the question must be taken up again from the beginning, leaving Rilke’s position as an important stage in the argument rather than its final resolution.