Sooner or later we all face death. Will a sense of meaning help us?
Warren Ward from AEON website
Can you say that?
But that’s always my point. We think and we feel and we say what we do about death based largely on our own personal experiences with it. With our own death and with others.
Think about it this way…
One day in your youth you come to think about death in a way that you had never thought about it before. Given whatever context, you have an experience that for the first time propels you into thinking — really thinking – about death.
My experiences emanated from the jungles of Vietnam. Yours from situations that, no doubt, were entirely different.
Okay, but what can we learn about it by probing the minds of all the great thinkers who have, down through the ages, themselves written about it. Scientists, philosophers, theologians. Is there a frame of mind that seems to encompass it the most rationally? Are you convinced that there is a way that reasonable men and women are most likely to accept as the most profound, least problematic assessment?
Or, instead, is your thinking far more likely to be derived from a personal experience such as is described above by the author?
And if that is the case how can you adequately respond to the assessments of others who have not had your own experiences? And how can they adequately respond to you not having had your experiences? What you share in common is the fact of death. But the facts embedded in any particular death can vary in ways that may well be beyond our capacity to communicate.
As for the cliche about dealing with your own death by living whatever is left of your mortal existence to the fullest – and on your own terms – that to is no less an existential contraption embodied in the lives of others that we may or may not be able to grasp with any real degree of empathy. Or even sympathy.