Why Death is Important

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.

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