Death, Faith & Existentialism
Filiz Peach explains what two of the greatest existentialist thinkers thought about death: Martin Heidegger and Karl Jaspers.
North, South, East, West. Scientifically, philosophically, theologically, technologically. Intellectually or for all practical purposes.
One thing remains the same. We know that everyone dies. We don’t know what that means. Science merely employs a methodology that seems considerably more intent on focusing in on what may or may not unfold given actual hard evidence. What can we verify about death? What can we falsify about it?
Not much at all in regard to what in fact does happen to “I” on the other side of the grave.
Yes, faith has declined. And no doubt about it: capitalism has created a frame of mind that is increasingly preoccupied with all of the things the mind can concern itself with on the journey from the cradle to the grave: Politics. Relationships. Sports. The arts. Entertainment. All you need here to make death go away for a while is the money that creates the actual options.
On the other hand, that doesn’t make the “morality here and now, immortality there and then” part go away. And for that God and religion are still basically the only game in town. At least to the extent that you crave the very, very best of assurances.
Mankind perhaps. But when it comes down to individual men and women faced with a set of circumstances in which death seems either miles and miles away or in which death is staring you down eyeball to eyeball, the “existential-phenomenological approach” is just one more intellectual contraption. That some pursue this philosophically doesn’t make the fear or the terror that many feel in confronting their very own death less suffocating.