Sooner or later we all face death. Will a sense of meaning help us?
Warren Ward from AEON website
Indeed: How would being associated with fascists and Nazis not be the existential equivalent of being associated with but one more historical “herd”?
How is political and racial ideology not just another manifestation of the inauthentic man?
And, in fact, isn’t the whole point of ideology to subsume death in the authentic life? Okay, you die. And maybe that’s all there is. But at least your life came to reflect necessary truths on this side of the grave.
In regard to either life or death, what can it mean philosophically to speak of a “fundamental flaw”? After all, as soon as the focus becomes “who or what is doing all of this questioning” we are immediately confronted with all of the many, many historical, cultural, and individual narratives there have been. And that’s just so far. Sometimes they overlap, other times they are very much at odds.
Instead, it is basically the objectivists who set philosophers to the task of “classifying and analyzing” human interactions as though they too were just one more function of the “scientific method”. Thus philosophers like Ayn Rand came to champion Aristotle. And for her there was absolutely no distinction made between the either/or and the is/ought world. Even human emotions could be analyzed and classified as either the right or the wrong emotion to have in any particular context.
As for death: atlassociety.org/commentary/com … 4280-death
Sure, if, as an Objectivist, someone is able to think him or herself into approaching death “objectively” in this manner, and, thus, is able to learn not to fear it, more power to them. That just doesn’t work for me.