Heidegger, death and our renewal

My apologies for the late post.

This week we covered Heidegger, especially his views on death. I have decided to take some time discussing a few things I think our society struggles with when it comes to death, and why it leads to problems. 

Immortality has been something that has fascinated westerners for hundreds of years. One of Columbus’ hopes was to find the infamous fountain of youth that promised eternal life. Through immortality, empires like Spain could ensure that their leaders could go on leading the ignorant masses forever. Imagine the feats great men could achieve if only they were given more time! Or so we think.

Though we no longer believe in mythical fountains of youth, we have kept the dream of immortality alive through ideas like cyber-technology, advances in medicine and even storing our consciousness, so that it might be transferred to another body or maybe even a machine. (Of course we’d have to find the neural correlates of consciousness in order for the last one to work.) 

Though I have no longing for death, I have always felt that our obsession with immortality and our cultural refusal to accept the cyclicality of the world, and the absolute necessity of death. Even stars die! What makes us think that we are meant to go on and on forever? What would that even mean? To go on and on without end? Think about it. Reallllllyyyy think about it. I think if anyone spends enough time thinking about immortality, it will lose a good deal of its luster. Because it is only through death that we get renewal. Life becomes stagnant, rooted in its old ways of doing things. Death shakes things up, and allows for novelty to arise, something new and interesting, a fresh take on the world. If death were eliminated, evolution would be impossible. And so would life.

And yet we ignore death, pretend that it isn’t there, except when tragedy strikes. When grandma or grandpa are dying, we like to tell them that they aren’t, and that things will be okay and they’ll get to go home soon. You’ll see! Soon they’ll be on the porch reading their favorite newspaper, with their morning cup of coffee and all this horrible hospital and sickness business will be behind us. And so we never come to terms with our death. We pretend that life is a static image, something like polaroid, and if we hold onto that image hard enough, it will remain burned into space. But it isn’t so. Life is in constant motion, and so is death. Neither is a permanent state of things, they are each dependent upon the other. They are like two sides of the same coin, which are dependent upon the other to form the coin. 

I think that this whole relationship we have with death is one of the bigger problems plaguing our society. We worship youth and shun the elderly, who are virtual outcasts. Once they reach an age we no longer wish to be exposed to or deal with, we shove them off onto someone else by putting them into assisted living facilities. And so they’re insecure, and suspicious of society. They are the ultimate outsiders, no longer of any use to society. Which is why you see the elderly move to places like Sun City, and fight tax codes that make them pay for schools. The way they see it, since society no longer wants anything to do with them, why should they have to continue supporting it. It’s a bad argument, since they benefited from free schooling and other public services, however it’s not difficult to see where they are coming from. 

Therefore I think it is important that we come to grips with death and do a better job incorporating it into our culture. It does us no good to continue pretending that life is good and death is bad; and that life is something we should focus on prolonging indefinitely, and death is something to be avoided at all costs. This attitude is, in my opinion, decidedly anti-life because it is only through acceptance of a finality of your life and this experience that it has any kind of meaning (which is what you make of it). If this life went on indefinitely, what would you do with it? How would you really live if you KNEW you could not die? Sayings like carpe diem would go entirely out the window. 

So let us accept death as a necessity of life, and perhaps through our acceptance of death we can begin anew, creating a world full of love for life, because we finally understand how beautiful and sacred it really is.