The Meaning of Death
Laszlo Makay, George Marosan Jr. and David Vatai consider whether death destroys meaning or creates it.
Ever and always, how can this not be but a point of view? Assuming that oblivion is in fact the fate of “I” at death nothing can matter to a corpse. And one’s death will have meaning [or no meaning] to someone as the embodiment of dasein. The point here being that there does appear to be an argument able to encompass what one’s death ought to mean to others.
And then suppose next week or next month or next year or the next century the really Big One comes hurtling down from space, smashes into Earth and literally wipes out the entire human species. No minds are around for the life and the death of anyone to have meaning.
So this part…
…is no less embedded in that part. Sure, as long as minds are around that remember you, minds that engage in behaviors that precipitate consequences derived precisely from the fact of knowing you, you can take some sort of comfort “here and now” that even beyond death “you” stick around. “You” matter.
If this takes a bit of the sting out of oblivion for you, all the better. It just doesn’t for me.
Come on, only to the extent that “I” itself is able to participate in one or another measure of existence on a “cosmic scale”, does it make sense [to me] to even bring it up. Instead, the sheer mind-boggling mystery of existence is something we can cling to as one or another measure of hope. Maybe in that 95% we know little or nothing of at all there is a place for “I”. And in a way that we can’t even begin to imagine.
It’s just that when the body disintegrates in the grave or comes down to a pile of ashes in an urn, the part about “I” then becomes reconfigured into a “soul”. And that can be pinned down…how exactly? In faith?
Maybe to you all of this makes finding our existence meaningless a long shot. If so, that’s all that matters. I just wish I could come up with a way to convince myself of the same.