Death, Faith & Existentialism
Filiz Peach explains what two of the greatest existentialist thinkers thought about death: Martin Heidegger and Karl Jaspers.
Again, the gap between any particular one of us facing our own particular death as dasein, and attempts by philosophers [existentialist or otherwise] to speak of this in terms of either authentic/dignified behavior or inauthentic/undignified behavior.
As though this is something that philosophers can actually accomplish!
Well, unless of course they can. In the interim however…
Just as there are countless numbers of profoundly problematic contexts in which we can live our lives, there are just as many problematic contexts in which we can die. Sure, up to a point we can communicate the thoughts and the feelings we have about our own demise, but only up to a point. Beyond that the ever fluid permutation of existential variables that can differ so dramatically for each of us will always be a barrier that, in my view, philosophers are, like the rest of us, unable to really transcend.
Or, perhaps, as Orson Welles once surmissed:
“We’re born alone, we live alone, we die alone. Only through our love and friendship can we create the illusion for the moment that we’re not alone.”
You have your rendition of this, I have mine.
Likewise, our individual reaction to conjectures of this sort is rooted in dasein. Is there an optimal manner in which to grasp it? Is how you relate it to your own life and the death of loved ones more reasonable then how I relate it to mine?
You tell me:
In regard to your own loved ones lost “phenomenally”, what “existential communication” have you managed to “preserve” for all of eternity? Isn’t this precisely the sort of intellectual contraption that some philosophers think up to take death itself up into the stratospere of abstraction?