Death, Faith & Existentialism
Filiz Peach explains what two of the greatest existentialist thinkers thought about death: Martin Heidegger and Karl Jaspers.
And of course that has absolutely nothing to with how people feel when contemplating that everyone and everything they know and love will be obliterated for “I” at the moment of death. Including, one supposes, how those millions upon million of men, women and children felt before they died in Hitler’s death camps.
Instead, let’s pin down the “existential significance” of death here as it relates – philosophically? – to “Dasein’s being-in-the-world”.
No, really, what important “technical” distinction am I missing here?
Like it takes a philosophical mind to grasp that being born is a death sentence. Like the human species, in being the only species on Earth able to grasp this self-consciously [given free will], is the only species that needs to find a way to fit death into life itself.
Okay, in the face of one’s existential death, does authenticity then come to revolve for some around being or not being a Nazi? Or, given that death here is only explored as a conception, are things of that sort largely irrelevant?
Unless, of course, historically, culturally and experientially, different communities of men and women come to configure living and dying in very different ways. And, in so doing, configure the relationship between I and we, I and you, us and them etc., in very differernt ways.
The part where, among other things, memes and my own understanding of dasein come into play.