Image by Oliver Waters

Keith Wilson

Thinking about one’s own death is not an easy thing to do. Quite apart from the emotional attachments that we feel towards our world and the various people and objects that inhabit it, there is a peculiar difficulty in conceiving of death from a first-person perspective. On the one hand, it is easy to imagine the cessation of bodily processes and activities that marks the demise of the living body. On the other, the idea that our own consciousness will at some point come to an end has a curious and disturbing effect upon our world view. Reflecting upon death can cause us to lose our grip upon the values that normally motivate and inform our lives, generating an existential anxiety that can easily lead to hopelessness, indifference and despair. Alternatively, we may feel a sense of panic as we realise that our time is finite, rushing to make the best of what limited time is left to us. Even the mere thought of one’s own death can seem difficult to get hold of, generating a state of avoidance and denial. Why do such thoughts have such a disorientating effect upon us? In what follows, I will try to make sense of this with reference to the work of two philosophers who have sought to shed light upon the subject: Martin Heidegger and Thomas Nagel.

Whilst we might be tempted to think of death as a kind of eternal sleep, or featureless emptiness, the analogy is misleading. Just as we don’t experience anything when we are sleeping, except perhaps in dreams, it isn’t like anything to be dead, and death presents us with no possibility of reawakening. Indeed, it is precisely this closing off of possibilities that makes death so distinctive. We are accustomed to the idea of life presenting us with a series of possibilities that are directed towards the realisation of future goals and projects. Death, however, is not a mere possibility, but an inevitability. It represents not only the cessation of future possibilities, but of the very conditions for subjectivity and agency. Consequently, we do no—indeed we cannot—experience our own death as an event at all. It is, rather, the end point in a series of events that constitutes the life of each and every one of us. We are, as Heidegger puts it, ‘unfinished’ beings, incomplete until the very moment that we cease to exist. At this point, we make the transition from a living consciousness to the ‘mere objective presence of a corporeal thing’, i.e. a body or corpse.^[1] Even this, however, is not experienced as a ‘lifeless, material thing’, but as ‘something unliving which has lost its life.’^[2] Unlike dying, which is the process by which death comes about, death is not something that we experience directly, but the cessation of the possibility of experience itself. It is a transition between one mode of being and another in which we possess the ghost-like presence of beings that no longer are, but whose nature and significance has yet to be forgotten.

To explain the uncanniness of thoughts about our own death, however, we must also grasp its significance for the structure of our world. By ‘world,’ I do not mean the public and objective world of facts that is studied by the sciences, but the lived or life-world (Lebenswelt) that we ordinarily inhabit. Objects in the life-world are characterised not in terms of their physical properties, but by the practical function or purpose they hold for us; clothes to keep us warm, houses to shelter us from the elements, maps to help us to navigate our environment, and so on. This network of significance is structured around a particular embodied agent, or self, for which such actions have significance. From the subjective point of view then, our existence features not as a merely contingent fact, as it seems from a more objective perspective, but as an essential precondition for the relations of significance that constitute our own personal life-world. According to Nagel, it is the tension between these two viewpoints—subjective and objective—that is responsible for the peculiar character of our reflections upon death.^[3] From an objective point of view, we realise that our existence is just another contingent fact within a vast and complex world of which we are but one small and insignificant part. From a subjective point of view, however, the notion that we will one day cease to exist calls into question a fundamental presupposition of the very framework of relations that underpins our everyday lives. Since both points of view coexist within each conscious agent, we find ourselves oscillating between panic and indifference as we attempt to assimilate the intractable fact that our entire existence rests upon a contingency, thus threatening to unravel the very structure of significance that gives life its meaning.

How then are we to respond to this dilemma? One response would be to retreat into the impersonal realm of what Heidegger calls the ‘they’ (das Man). The ‘they’ does not regard death as something that must be confronted or dealt with, but merely as something that happens—and generally to others at that. ‘One dies,’ we say, tacitly acknowledging the possibility of death in a way that avoids any serious engagement with the issue, for fear that it might upset our already busy lives. However, as Heidegger points out, death is not something that can be passed over or experienced collectively, but an inescapable aspect of existence that can only be faced by each of us alone.^[4] His solution lies in adopting an attitude, or manner of being, in which rather than avoiding the thought of death we face up to it squarely, acknowledging our limited natures and yet acting nonetheless. This awareness of our own mortality cuts through the often repetitive and banal nature of life in the ‘they’-world, bringing us back to our authentic selves and our possibilities for action in the time that we have remaining. Far from being a morbid, inward-looking affair, reflecting upon death confronts us afresh with the challenge of how best to live. For Heidegger, it is only by accepting the inevitability of death and the role that it plays in the structure of our being that we find the means by which to pursue a more authentic form of life. One that does not simply repeat the patterns of the past, but that generates new meaning and significance in spite—or perhaps because—of its finitude.

Keith Wilson is a PhD student in philosophy at the University of Warwick.