Death, Faith & Existentialism
Filiz Peach explains what two of the greatest existentialist thinkers thought about death: Martin Heidegger and Karl Jaspers.
Tell that to the Jews?
No, seriously, the actual existential deaths that we experience are always out in a particular world given a particular set of circumstances. And considerably less a reflection of all this philosophical mumbo-jumbo about dread as a “state-of-mind” that those in the death camps must learn to “turn away from…and then to be thrown back to confront itself”.
Or in regard to your own more or less imminent encounter with oblivion?
On the other hand, sure, if what some accomplish with God and religion, you can accomplish with the optimal “authentic” philosophical reasoning, well, whatever works. That will always be my own mantra. Whatever you can think yourself into believing is true about either life or death…if it comforts and consoles you considerably more than what “I” am now impaled on then bully for you.
All that’s left for those who are compatible with Heidegger’s own “general description intellectual contraptions” here is to learn how to accomplish it:
Is this or is this not a classic example of a “serious philosopher” at work? A “a phenomenology of our relationship to death”. Go ahead, the next time you come across someone who is in fact dying down here on the ground, note this for them. See if they react “authentically”.
In my view, death is “existentially significant” given a frame of mind that takes into account the things that you love and cherish…the things that your own flesh and blood death take away for all of eternity; and all the pain and suffering it takes away; and that which you have managed to believe is true about an “afterlife” in regard to God and religion.