It seems that humans cannot come to grips with death. Even
when someone has died, we hold on to shreds of belief about their continued
existence in realms that are independent of us. This vestige of residual
existence is represented throughout all religions, to varying degrees of
realism and ceremony. Our present clinical age has transformed death from a
natural—but incomprehensible—cycle of life to one of clinical failure. Death is
a medical embarrassment.
Of all disciplines, biologists are perhaps at an advantage
in accepting death not only as a natural process but as a necessary process.
Leonard Hayflick, the renowned biologist/gerontologist was perhaps the most
succinct in saying that (paraphrasing) “death might be detrimental to the
individual but necessary for the species.” Biologists understand death because
they look at species and how species develop. Because higher turnover (death
rate) means that the species is more adaptive—these are known as r-selection
coined by the ecologists Robert MacArthur and E. O. Wilson (Pianka, 1970). The
alternative biological strategy would be to have fewer offspring but to invest more
into their nurturing (such as humans.) This type of strategy is referred to as K-selection
species. Biologists are so good at dealing with death that they categorized
species on the basis of their death rate.
Such an important construct as death should have more
relevance to us as humans. And it does, especially when we need to understand
the foundation for our sense of being, as in metaphysics--a branch of
philosophy interested in the first principle of things. Metaphysics asks
radical questions include abstract concepts such as being, knowing, substance,
cause, identity, time, and space. How can we understand that we are not just
performing actors on the stage of life following a genetic narrative, but that
we are participating directors as well. It seems that death—an idea of the
expectation of death—provides us with an urgency to live. When Simon Critchley
compiled the thoughts about death by more than 190 philosophers, the central
theme that he summarized was the idea that death provides an urgency to live in
the present. Philosophers use the concept of death to define the interactions at
the present as the only real aspect of the passage of time. The idea of death
defines our idea of the reality of the present. But death has to be more than
idea. At the turn of the 1900s Sigmund Freud was the first one to assign the
idea of death as a drive.
Thanatos--the hypothesis of a death drive, that lead to an
inanimate state--was originally proposed by Sigmund Freud in 1920 in Beyond the
Pleasure Principle. Freud was trying to explain the First World War. How can
virile men willingly go to their death rather than follow their true desire for
sexual gratification? However Freud’s interpretation of why patients repeated
relive the traumatic experience as it is still happening to them now (as
personal), rather than as a past and abstract experience (as actors) indicates
a certain lack of understand of the ontological belief of how the self, the “I”
remains constant across time. For such an interpretation Martin Heidegger has a
better interpretation of death.
Martin Heidegger’s book “Being and Time” refers to time as
finite defined at the end by our understanding of death. In our being, death
provides the final full stop/period. To be an authentic human being, we must be
aware of our ultimate death. This is what Heidegger famously calls
"being-towards-death". Heidegger needed death in order for us to
care. For Heidegger, caring is not being nurturing and showing empathy, for
Heidegger caring is owning your being. To care we have to appreciate death and
because we cannot truly know and experience death we have to accept the "possibility
of impossibility”--our non-existence. One cannot fully live unless one
confronts one's own mortality through a courageous "anxiety" (Heidegger,
1927, p. 310). Michel de Montaigne said this much better when he said that: "The
premeditation of death is the premeditation of liberty; he who has learned to
die has unlearned to serve.” (Montaigne, 2012, Chapter XIX). This anxiety about dying is why we care--we feel
responsible for our lives. It is the primary fulcrum that energizes human
engagement in a world that we own, that is personal and not a backdrop for a
theatrical existence.
Death is important in constructing theories about how people
behave because death--and our internal appreciation of death—means that we
start to care about our world, our behavior and existence. All philosophers have discussed death, some in
passing other in more detail. However Heidegger’s interpretation of pinning the
basis of knowing about oneself on the idea that we have an appreciation of our
ultimate non-existence is the strongest. Freud’ analysis is too specific to a
wish to die, which does not translate well nowadays with our narcissistic
cohorts. Heidegger’s interpretation does however suggest that there is a
developmental process in that our appreciation of our own demise translates
directly to our caring to us owning our world and doing something about it.
References
Critchley S (2009). The book of dead philosophers. Vintage
Books.
Freud S (1920) Beyond the Pleasure Principle
Heidegger M (1927) Being and Time. Reprint, New York: Harper
and Row, 1962.
Montaigne deM (2012) The Essays of Montaigne. Reprinted Ebook.
Accessed on 10/31/2015 from: http://www.gutenberg.org/files/3600/3600-h/3600-h.htm
Pianka ER (1970). On r and K selection. American Naturalist
104 (940): 592–597.
© USA Copyrighted 2015 Mario D. Garrett
