Below is one answer to the question posed above. It was written by philosophically inclined psychiatrist, Warren Ward, and published earlier this year in Aeon. https://aeon.co/ Ward, citing Heidegger, Tibetan Buddhism and the teachings of the historical Buddha, takes up the position that Western people tend to take life for granted because they lack an awareness of the inevitability of death. Scientific materialism and reductionism treat human beings as living things to be analyzed like any others (say, cells, plants, etc.) despite the fact that we seem to be uniquely aware of finitude or the knowledge that we will one day no longer exist. This awareness is not all that sets us apart from inanimate and (most) animate objects of scientific inquiry, but it is the focus here since the claim is that by putting this awareness of inevitable death on the "back burner," we block out the wonderment of life itself which is fleeting and precious and not to be taken for granted, but appreciated. Such appreciation, it is claimed, can only occur against the backdrop of coming to peace with the fact of inevitable death without succumbing to a sense of futility or despair. But in the process of doing so, it is necessary (on this view) to experience"angst" or "dread" as you confront the fact that the the very person that you are will have to die. This is not an abstraction of the form, "all men are mortals; I am a man; therefore I am mortal." Rather what is stressed is the concrete emotional resonance that comes with knowing in your guts, that you must die at some unknown point in the future. This personal grasp of your own inevitable death is the sort of thing that makes the stomach drop. But the angst impresses on you the significance of the limited time you have, which then allows you to really consider your possibilities and "projects" while alive. Without this process of confronting death, existentialists and some Buddhists hold, we cannot live "authentically" or without self-deception. Thus we cannot achieve our potentialities and find individual meaning in life. Rather we sink to the level of "inauthenticity" (e.g. conformity, idle and shallow talk, blending in with the crowd, etc.). This is the theme of this short but representative article on that position.
There are, however, other thinkers who have endorsed a very different approach to achieving the same end (a full and meaningful individual life lived without self-deception). In the early modern period, Spinoza comes to mind. He writes:
The free person thinks least of all of death, and his wisdom is a meditation not on death but on life. https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691183848/think-least-of-death
Spinoza's overall philosophy includes the claim that Nature is deterministic right down to our own thoughts and feelings, and that it is Abrahamic and other "supernatural" religions that constitute the denial of life as it really is. Without going into his complex theories of nature and ethics, he thinks that human life is thoroughly natural, and can be understood in terms of rational and law-like relationships. It might help here to think of Einstein's sense of wonder at the universe combined with his concern for ethics in human society. Einstein said that if he had a religion it was that of Spinoza, who says that Nature and God are one and the same. There is no personal creator-god, no god with whom to communicate or ask for boons or mercy, etc. However, the ability to understand the wonders of nature-- not least of all ourselves, our emotions and desires-- confers a sense of profound awe and holds out the possibility that we may learn the "laws of the mind" and in ceasing to fight them, find freedom in the release from ignorance-born passions (e.g. to obtain prestige, wealth and power or the favor of an invented God and his earthly representatives). So it is clear that not only must each of us die, but that there is no afterlife, according to Spinoza. Yet it is also clear that living with the existentialist's "dread" and "angst" is, for
Spinoza, a dead end (no pun ). What is needed to appreciate and experience the fullness of life is the joyful and inspired study of life, of the causes of happiness, misery, apathy, and all the myriad of emotional states that Spinoza (who profoundly inspired Nietzsche, Freud and Einstein) was one of the first to examine closely.
There are other positions that fall between the extremes of claiming the necessity of cultivating a clear awareness of inevitable death on the one hand, and concentrating rather on reaching a deep understanding of human life (while knowing it is transient and without an otherworldly sequel). But here I wanted to set up the bookends of the ongoing debate about the value of contemplating death. Is it a morbid dead end? Is it the sine qua non of living well? Something in between? Following is the case for the latter view of being aware of the fragility of life and inevitability of death in order to be truly and 'authentically' alive in the ongoing present.
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Sooner of Later We All Face Death. Will a Sense of Meaning Help Us?
by Warren Ward (fr. Aeon Magazine)
‘Despite all our medical advances,’ my friend Jason used to quip, ‘the mortality rate has remained constant – one per person.’
Jason and I studied medicine together back in the 1980s. Along with everyone else in our course, we spent six long years memorising everything that could go wrong with the human body. We diligently worked our way through a textbook called Pathologic Basis of Disease that described, in detail, every single ailment that could befall a human being. It’s no wonder medical students become hypochondriacal, attributing sinister causes to any lump, bump or rash they find on their own person.
Jason’s oft-repeated observation reminded me that death (and disease) are unavoidable aspects of life. It sometimes seems, though, that we’ve developed a delusional denial of this in the West. We pour billions into prolonging life with increasingly expensive medical and surgical interventions, most of them employed in our final, decrepit years. From a big-picture perspective, this seems a futile waste of our precious health-dollars.
Don’t get me wrong. If I get struck down with cancer, heart disease or any of the myriad life-threatening ailments I learnt about in medicine, I want all the futile and expensive treatments I can get my hands on. I value my life. In fact, like most humans, I value staying alive above pretty much everything else. But also, like most, I tend to not really value my life unless I’m faced with the imminent possibility of it being taken away from me.
Another old friend of mine, Ross, was studying philosophy while I studied medicine. At the time, he wrote an essay called ‘Death the Teacher’ that had a profound effect on me. It argued that the best thing we could do to appreciate life was to keep the inevitability of our death always at the forefront of our minds.
When the Australian palliative care nurse Bronnie Ware interviewed scores of people in the last 12 weeks of their lives, she asked them their greatest regrets. The most frequent, published in her book The Top Five Regrets of the Dying (2011), were:
- I wish I’d had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me;
- I wish I hadn’t worked so hard;
- I wish I’d had the courage to express my feelings;
- I wish I had stayed in touch with my friends; and
- I wish that I had let myself be happier.
The relationship between death-awareness and leading a fulfilling life was a central concern of the German philosopher Martin Heidegger, whose work inspired Jean-Paul Sartre and other existentialist thinkers. Heidegger lamented that too many people wasted their lives running with the ‘herd’ rather than being true to themselves. But Heidegger actually struggled to live up to his own ideals; in 1933, he joined the Nazi Party, hoping it would advance his career.
Despite his shortcomings as a man, Heidegger’s ideas would go on to influence a wide range of philosophers, artists, theologians and other thinkers. Heidegger believed that Aristotle’s notion of Being – which had run as a thread through Western thinking for more than 2,000 years, and been instrumental in the development of scientific thinking – was flawed at a most fundamental level. Whereas Aristotle saw all of existence, including human beings, as things we could classify and analyse to increase our understanding of the world, in Being and Time (1927) Heidegger argued that, before we start classifying Being, we should first ask the question: ‘Who or what is doing all this questioning?’
Heidegger pointed out that we who are asking questions about Being are qualitatively different to the rest of existence: the rocks, oceans, trees, birds and insects that we are asking about. He invented a special word for this Being that asks, looks and cares. He called it Dasein, which loosely translates as ‘being there’. He coined the term Dasein because he believed that we had become immune to words such as ‘person’, ‘human’ and ‘human being’, losing our sense of wonder about our own consciousness.
Heidegger’s philosophy remains attractive to many today who see how science struggles to explain the experience of being a moral, caring person aware that his precious, mysterious, beautiful life will, one day, come to an end. According to Heidegger, this awareness of our own inevitable demise makes us, unlike the rocks and trees, hunger to make our life worthwhile, to give it meaning, purpose and value.
While Western medical science, which is based on Aristotelian thinking, sees the human body as a material thing that can be understood by examining it and breaking it down to its constituent parts like any other piece of matter, Heidegger’s ontology puts human experience at the centre of our understanding of the world.
Ten years ago, I was diagnosed with melanoma. As a doctor, I knew how aggressive and rapidly fatal this cancer could be. Fortunately for me, the surgery seemed to achieve a cure (touch wood). But I was also fortunate in another sense. I became aware, in a way I never had before, that I was going to die – if not from melanoma, then from something else, eventually. I have been much happier since then. For me, this realisation, this acceptance, this awareness that I am going to die is at least as important to my wellbeing as all the advances of medicine, because it reminds me to live my life to the full every day. I don’t want to experience the regret that Ware heard about more than any other, of not living ‘a life true to myself’.
Most Eastern philosophical traditions appreciate the importance of death-awareness for a well-lived life. The Tibetan Book of the Dead, for example, is a central text of Tibetan culture. The Tibetans spend a lot of time living with death, if that isn’t an oxymoron.
The East’s greatest philosopher, Siddhartha Gautama, also known as the Buddha, realised the importance of keeping the end in sight. He saw desire as the cause of all suffering, and counselled us not to get too attached to worldly pleasures but, rather, to focus on more important things such as loving others, developing equanimity of mind, and staying in the present.
The last thing the Buddha said to his followers was: ‘Decay is inherent in all component things! Work out your salvation with diligence!’ As a doctor, I am reminded every day of the fragility of the human body, how closely mortality lurks just around the corner. As a psychiatrist and psychotherapist, however, I am also reminded how empty life can be if we have no sense of meaning or purpose. An awareness of our mortality, of our precious finitude, can, paradoxically, move us to seek – and, if necessary, create – the meaning that we so desperately crave.
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Thoughts in Response to Ward:
There was a time I was largely in agreement with the position Ward takes, and I still think there is something to it (I'll explain below just what I have in mind). But the sociological and anthropological presuppositions in play seem to be unduly biased against "Western" cultures, while glossing over the basic historical facts of cultures in both the East and West, and in most other places and times. As a rule, the history of civilizations and cultures reveals the extraordinary power of a belief in the continuation of life in some way, shape or form. Far from "accepting finitude" all sorts of belief systems regarding the infinity of the spirit world, the world of souls, ghosts, gods, demons, rewards, punishments, rebirths or their cessation as a result of nirvanic consciousness, all these seem to animate most people at most times in human history. Not just this, but only a tiny fraction of, for example, Buddhists, have interpreted their religion in sophisticated philosophical terms that come anywhere close to matching the approach recommended by Ward in his article. Most people have been drawn to religion, "holy men" and gurus to find a way out of pain and suffering hopefully in this life, but certainly in the "next" if possible. People in many faiths collect relics of allegedly powerful wise persons or saints, prostrate themselves before whichever gods or deities they have been taught to regard as protectors and benefactors, etc. And this brings me back to Spinoza who relegated all such supernaturalism to the realm of denying life on its own terms and replacing what is real with fantasy.
Now, there are non-religious (agnostic and atheistic) versions of the thesis that we must come to terms with the inevitability of death to live well (e.g. Sartre). But I think it is fair to set such versions of the thesis apart from Buddhism, Hinduism, Christian Existentialism (e.g. Kierkegaard, and possibly Heidegger who wanted and received a Catholic burial) theistic mysticism etc. If we take away the Buddhist's prayer wheel, the deities, the conviction of rebirth (Buddhists), reincarnation (Hindus), heavens and hells and other conceptions of the afterlife-- what then are the inner-resources of the person who would acknowledge the finality of death? Not the death of one of many forms of life, but finality as far as we know? Would this create a sense of Heideggerian "dread" that would alone show the way to an honest and purposeful life (authenticity)? Why? Why not?
I think the Western "denial of death" is not completely different from the denial of final death found in religious cultures elsewhere. Unlike Spinoza, I can't say with certainty whether or not human death is the final end or whether there is some kind of afterlife we don't know very much about. That is, I'm agnostic on the metaphysics here. However, I think that dogmatic certainty regarding doctrines of afterlife whether Abrahamic, Indian, African, Egyptian, Chinese or whatever else, is very different from accepting even the *possibility* that all we are, have been and will be could end once and for all. That conscious experience itself, of any kind, is finite.
Still, I said there is something the view of Ward, following Heidegger and others gets right in my view. I do think that the recognition that our opportunities must be grasped now, in this life or not at all, is an important component of living a mature and realistic life. We needn't become morbidly preoccupied with death, nor cultivate "dread and angst" per Heidegger. Rather, the lesson of death is with us each and every day. Just as life itself is temporary, so are our most valued moments whether with ourselves, nature and/or others. Even within the lifespan, it is inevitable that relationships we cherish will fade away, that loved ones will die, and so finitude is built into life from childhood to our own deaths. When experiencing something of great value such as love, human connection or the magnificent beauty of nature, it is not uncommon to have a flash of awareness that these experiences are mysterious, and transient. They come and surely they will go, as will we. How much more reason to seek them out while we can do we reauire? Not in a maniacal or pleasure-hungry way, but with an open mind and willing heart-- an affirmation that those things we most cherish needn't exist forever or lead to some afterlife to make the game worth the candle. I used to call this "humanism" but that word has become just another way of arguing about the existence of God, which is not what I mean at all. If anything, I have come to value living with uncertainty, without needing to convince others of this/that metaphysical position; but again, knowing that there's no reason to expect that conscious life continues, and that if not, that does not diminish the value of our living opportunities and experiences here and now.
