Fairfield - Death: A Philosophical Inquiry

Death

From Nietzsches pronouncement that God is dead to Camus argument that suicide is the fundamental question of philosophy, the concept of death plays an important role in existential phenomenology, reaching from Kierkegaard to Heidegger and Marcel.

This book explores the phenomenology of death and offers a unique way into the phenomenological tradition. Paul Fairfield examines the following key topics:

the modern denial of death

Heideggers important concept of being-toward-death and its centrality in phenomenological ideas, such as authenticity and existence

the philosophical significance of death rituals: what explains the imperative toward ritual around death, and what is its purpose and meaning?

death in an age of secularism

the philosophy and ethics of suicide

death as a mystery rather than a philosophical problem to be solved

the relationship between hope and death.

Death: A Philosophical Inquiry is essential reading for students of phe-nomenology and existentialism, and will also be of interest to students in related fields such as religion, anthropology and the medical humanities.

Paul Fairfield is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Queens University, Canada.

Death

A Philosophical Inquiry

Paul Fairfield

First published 2015
by Routledge
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and by Routledge
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Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business

2015 Paul Fairfield

The right of Paul Fairfield to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

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British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data

Fairfield, Paul, 1966

Death: a philosophical inquiry / Paul Fairfield. -- 1 [edition].

pages cm

Includes bibliographical references and index.

1. Death. I. Title.

BD444.F285 2014

128.5--dc23

2014008315

ISBN13: 978-0-415-83761-3 (hbk)

ISBN13: 978-0-415-83762-0 (pbk)

ISBN13: 978-0-203-78983-4 (ebk)

Typeset in Garamond
by Taylor & Francis Books

For Gwyneth and Evangeline Fairfield

Contents

Behind every beautiful thing theres been some kind of pain.

Bob Dylan

The existing individuals fundamental condition is to strive perpetually to know what there is, to judge what is good, and to understand what things mean. One desires knowledge, perhaps even by nature as Aristotle would say, but more than this one fashions interpretations, invents significance, creates artifacts, and decides upon what is important. Beneath the preoccupations of everyday life is an ontological understanding of being and of human being, and an imperative to impose some order on an existence that always threatens to dissolve into nothingness. Human existence is characterized by strivings of a great many kindsfor knowledge and security, power and overcoming, pleasure and happiness, but the pursuit of meaning may be the most fundamental. It is an existence that is organized around meanings that are less found than made and that afford lives with a basic orientation and structure.

Viktor Frankl spoke in this connection of the will to meaning as the primary motivation in human life:

This meaning is unique and specific in that it must and can be fulfilled by him alone; only then does it achieve a significance which will satisfy his own will to meaning. There are some authors who contend that meanings and values are nothing but defense mechanisms, reaction formations and sublimations. But as for myself, I would not be willing to live merely for the sake of my defense mechanisms, nor would I be ready to die merely for the sake of my reaction formations. Man, however, is able to live and even to die for the sake of his ideals and values!

This existential psychiatrist repeated an observation frequently articulated by philosophers of existence that human beings are sustained by meanings that are ours to determine. The human being inhabits a lifeworld of relations, practices, and significations that constitute our historical inheritance, while remaining open in an important measure to free decision. Its condition as a being-in-the-world and a being in culture is, in the words of Clifford Geertz, to be suspended in webs of significance he himself has spun.characterized in every case by contingency and fragility. It is because meaninglessness remains an ever-present possibility that Jos Ortega y Gasset spoke of our existence as a living problem:

man lives in perpetual danger of being dehumanized. With him, not only is it problematic and contingent whether this or that will happen to him but at times what happens to man is nothing less than ceasing to be man. And this is true not only abstractly and generically but it holds of our own individuality. Each one of us is always in danger of not being the unique and untransferable self which he is.

Our very existence is a problem, a question or, as Martin Heidegger expressed it, an issue. Shall one be oneself or something that is not oneself, the anonymous anyone or some dehumanized entity? Like Nietzsches tightrope walker, the human being ventures on a rope stretched between animal and overman and suspended over an abyss. Nothingness beckons, yet the will to meaning persists and an imperative, in the words of Albert Camus, to live and to create in the very midst of the desert.

The abyssloss, meaninglessness, dehumanization, and ultimately mortalityconditions our existence, and the vital matter is to see how this is so. The formulations of the point are many: the death of God makes possible and necessary a revaluation of values; experiencing the absurd is a necessary condition of creative rebellion; the poverty of immanence creates the possibility of transcendence; the anticipation of death is a precondition of authenticity. The philosophers of existence had an eye for this, and a vital part of their legacy is a sense of life that refuses false consolation at the same time that it refuses all pessimism. The human being comports itself by understanding, and the meanings and values that orient it are grounded in no absolute but are inventions in every case. He was speaking of a life task that faces formidable obstacles and at which one can easily fail.

Among the imperatives of human existence is the invention of meanings which may be broadly shared or specific to ones circumstances but which must be authentically self-chosen if ones life is to be properly ones own. This requires the cultivation of inwardness. Death itself is an affair of inwardness. This ownmost potentiality-of-being and certainty of our existence conditions everything about it and affords an invaluable perspective on its possible meaningif, that is, we have a way of thinking about the matter and an inclination to pursue it. This is not unlike the inward turn for which reflection upon death calls, a call to put aside the distractions of everydayness and to know thyself. Conditions of modern life often lead us to overlook that there are deeper, quieter ways of being alive, that in addition to material gain and respectability there are the tasks of pursuing what is good and being something that is inherently worth being. This requires retreat from the mundane, some venturing of mind that is easily mistaken for escapism or self-indulgence but that is their antithesis. This point finds metaphorical expression in what Ortega y Gasset has called the great withdrawals into the self undertaken by so many of the ancient prophets of religion: