Sooner or later we all face death. Will a sense of meaning help us?
Warren Ward from AEON website
Not just being there. But existing “out there” in a particular world that is embedded in a particular historical and cultural context. And what makes our own consciousness a “wonder” along side the “rest of existence” is our awareness of death. The knowledge that we ourselves will one day die. And, assuming some measure of human autonomy, this awareness is understood by each of us as individual daseins.
In other words, there are many, many different ways in which to think about death. Our own and others. And to the best of my knowledge philosophers are unable to “think up” the most rational manner in which mere mortals are obligated to think about it. This “existential contraption” can then precipitate human behaviors that rationalize everything from the taking of one’s own life to historical instances of genocide.
For some, sure. But what of those who have come to conclude that this meaning will be derived largely from within the existential parameters of the life that one lives. That one cannot merely assume that what he or she concludes encompasses a “moral, caring person” is the template that all others are required or compelled to embrace in turn. For example, my own understanding of dasein in the is/ought world.
Indeed, the “search for meaning, purpose and value” can bring some to conclude that there is no overarching moral narrative able to be reconfigured into an overarching social, political and economic agenda. A few in fact coming to conclude that the most reasonable frame of mind here will lead one to suicide.
That someone like Victor Frankl survived the death camps enabling him to make that constructive leap forward in his own “search for meaning”, does not entail that others in similar or very different sets of circumstance are being irrational if they choose a very different outcome.
When it comes to death, there appears to be only a frame of mind that one’s lived life predisposes one toward. Unless of course someone here is able to convince me that this is not the case at all. Having already convinced himself.