Why we should fear death: A phenomenological approach
Death is of course a central issue in human life. This is made evident in various ways and from various things. From the way death is reported in the media, from the way that inflicting death on a human being is the worst offence in the criminal code, from the way some states use capital punishment (which rightly provokes reactions from human rights activists), from the way that it is, along with love, the most prevalent theme in the arts, from the way religions are organized around the issue of death (and the expectation of life after death), from the way states channel resources to prevent death (through Healthcare Systems) and the way vast amounts of money are channelled to inflict death on the enemy (through weapons), etc.
In one sense, death is a complicated subject, still surrounded by many questions and shrouded in mystery. The mystery concerns not only ontological-philosophical aspects of death, but also scientific ones, for example from the point of view of biological definitions (in biology there is no absolute agreement on the definition of “life” and, by implication, the definition of “death”. On the other hand, death is a simple phenomenon that we all - or almost all - understand. And this understanding is almost always accompanied by a fear of death - a fear all too familiar to humans.
Yet, although death and fear of death are at the heart of much human activity, it is a liminal issue, with two senses of the word “liminal”: On the one hand, it is a liminal issue in the sense that although death is at the core of human life and activities, death itself is rarely placed at the centre of everyday interest in a profound and straightforward way, but its essence, its depth, is pushed away from our attention – it is pushed aside to the marginal limits of attention. What remains in daily attention are some practical consequences of death, which we are called upon to manage. Death itself, as a subject, becomes “diluted” through euphemistic expressions and concepts that characterize death as “sleep,” as “the great journey,” the “other life,” the “other world,” and other metaphorical expressions that strip away the abysmal depth and mystery, and put in its place a future meeting place, something on which thought and imagination can attach so that daily life can continue. Thus, in our everyday life we are not in the habit of discussing death in depth, nor do we talk about the prospect of generalized death of humanity, or the end of the universe, the end of space-time, the death of all meaning and significance, or the death of history: in other words, we never talk about radical and general finitude, about radical and generalized death. In this sense I have just developed, then, of the general suppression or difficulty of bringing and holding death itself into focus, death is a liminal issue.
On the other hand, death is a liminal issue in the sense that death is the limit of life: it sets human limits as such, the finite character of life. Thus, when death per se becomes the focus of philosophical analysis, what is addressed is the limit, and in this sense it is the liminal issue par excellence that thought is called upon to consider.
Before turning to the philosophical issues pertaining death, I am compelled to express a caveat about the philosophical arguments I will present. This lecture is an introductory and layman’s type of philosophical lecture, and as such I will make some simplifications in the way I summarize certain currents in the history of philosophy and certain ideas and philosophers. The purpose of the lecture is to introduce, or reintroduce, this particular philosophical issue into the public sphere in a fruitful and creative way, in the hope of sparking future and more in-depth discussions.
The two tendencies in philosophy concerning death and the fear of death
What is the relation of philosophy to death and fear of death? First of all, let us distinguish death itself from fear of death. Death is a phenomenon, a thing or an event that manifests itself in perception. Fear of death is an emotion that accompanies the thought or perception of that event. One can be confronted with death without being afraid. The feeling depends on various factors, e.g. how we interpret and understand death, what death means. If death is interpreted as some kind of redemption, either because it comes to deliver one from terrible pain or because one believes in an afterlife and reunion with loved ones, then the thought of death may be accompanied by positive emotions, joy, for example. Or a person may have damaged their amygdala (in the brain) that would allow them to think of death as the ultimate catastrophic event, but without it causing any fear. My point is that the feeling of fear is an additional aspect that can be distinguished from the idea or event of death itself. It is an important distinction to remember so that we do not conflate death with fear of death, even though they are interrelated things.
Philosophy has been repeatedly described as a process of studying death and preparing for it. Several philosophers have directly associated philosophy with death. Plato defines philosophy as a study of death. In the Phaedo, we read the following exchange between Socrates and Simmias:
- “Well, then, this is what we call death, is it not, a release and separation from the body?”, asked Socrates.
- “Exactly so,” said Simmias.
- “But, as we hold, the true philosophers and they alone are always most eager to release the soul, and just this—the release and separation of the soul from the body—is their study, is it not?”
- “Obviously.” (Phaedo, 67d-e).
Several centuries after Plato, the French Enlightenment philosopher Michel de Montaigne would write in the Essays that “to philosophize is to learn to die,” and he would defend the idea that the best way to prepare for death is to think about it constantly throughout one’s life, but admitting that this thinking is perhaps at odds with our nature, which teaches us not to think about death except at the time of death.
The entire history of philosophy is permeated by a constant confrontation with death, a confrontation that branches off into two opposing philosophical tendencies. One tendency is an attempt by philosophy to overcome death, to transcend death; the other tendency is an attempt by philosophy to accept death and finitude as a necessary condition of life and as its inevitable conclusion. These two tendencies do not correspond unambiguously with particular philosophers in such a way that any given philosopher’s thought falls into either one tendency or the other - such a grouping would be oversimplifying, misleading and unfair. The thought and work of all philosophers bears characteristics of both tendencies, in different combinations.
As regards the first tendency, the tendency of overcoming of death, this tendency is historically expressed through the idea of transcendence, which is manifested in the thought of philosophers in various ways. For example, the idealist Plato argues that the soul, as well as the ideas it conceives, can exist separately from the body and the physical world, with the result that they survive bodily death. The Platonic idea of the immortality of the soul, of course, is also at the heart of Christianity and the entire philosophical tradition that follows from Christianity. On the other hand, Plato’s disciple Aristotle believes that the soul and the body are inextricably linked, and that the soul does not survive nor transcend bodily death. (However, let me note that Aristotle’s thought also carries to some extent the tendency to transcend death, for example through the idea of the “poetic mind” (ποιητικὸς νοῦς), which is immortal, or in his cosmology, in which he describes eternal and perpetual motion of the planets). Epicurean philosophy as well as Stoic philosophy treat death as an insurmountable event, as an integral part of nature. The human is conceived as part of nature, with which we have the duty to live in harmony. I will not provide a further account of the history of philosophy around these tendencies, partly because I simply wanted to give a sense of the branching historical context, and partly because it would fall outside the scope of the lecture; it would divert attention from the subject matter, turning it into a historical or doxographical one, which would trigger a different kind of discussion from the one the lecture intends to trigger.
What we have mentioned so far, as regards the two tendencies of philosophy, has been concerned with the attitude of philosophy towards death itself. I have not yet referred to their emotional aspect, the “emotional economy” as I would call it. This aspect, as I have indicated, is an additional, distinct, aspect. So how do the two trends relate to emotions? Is there a dominant emotion that accompanies or organizes the attitude towards death? The two tendencies seem to me to be isomorphic in terms of the emotional economy that underlies them: that is, both tendencies have as their starting point, or as the epicentre, of their analyses, an overwhelming fear of death, an existential angst, which philosophy is called upon to “manage”. In other words, whether the philosopher aims at overcoming death and grasps the essence of existence as something that transcends death, or whether the philosopher aims at accepting death as an insurmountable and necessary part of nature, the dominant emotion is one, and that is fear; and the dominant attitude towards this fear is also common: a negative attitude towards fear. Fear of death is judged as something bad that we must overcome.
In ancient Greek philosophy, two competing philosophical attitudes towards death result in the same attitude towards fear of death. The idealist-rationalist Plato, through Socrates in the Apology, argues that death is either non-existence, in which case it will be like sleep and not a terrible thing, or death will be like a relocating of the soul to another place, and therefore not non-existence, and therefore again death will not be a terrible thing. By this reasoning, Plato scorns fear of death as some kind of intellectual crime that right reasoning can (and must) overcome. There is, in other words, an appeal from Plato to overcome fear of death, regardless of what we believe about death itself: whether or not death is the end of life, fear of death must be overcome. But in the Phaedo too, going back to the dialogue cited earlier, Socrates makes the case against fear of death:
- “Then, as I said in the beginning, it would be absurd if a man who had been all his life fitting himself to live as nearly in a state of death as he could, should then be disturbed when death came to him. Would it not be absurd?”
- “Of course.”
- “In fact, then, Simmias,” said Socrates, “the true philosophers practice dying, and death is less terrible to them than to any other men.” Consider it in this way. They are in every way hostile to the body and they desire to have the soul apart by itself alone. Would it not be very foolish if they should be frightened and troubled when this very thing happens, and if they should not be glad to go to the place where there is hope of attaining [68a] what they longed for all through life—and they longed for wisdom—and of escaping from the companionship of that which they hated? When human loves or wives or sons have died, many men have willingly gone to the other world led by the hope of seeing there those whom they longed for, and of being with them; and shall he who is really in love with wisdom and has a firm belief that he can find it nowhere else than in the other world grieve when he dies and not be glad to go there? We cannot think that, my friend, if he is really a philosopher; for he will confidently believe that he will find pure wisdom nowhere else than in the other world. And if this is so, would it not be very foolish for such a man to fear death?”
- “Very foolish, certainly,” said he. (Phaedo, 67d-68-c).
On the other hand, the materialist-empiricist Epicurus argues that death for us is nothing that our senses can feel, and therefore death cannot be something terrible since without senses there is no such thing as terrible: “Death is nothing for us. For everything that perishes ceases to feel. And what is not felt does not concern us.”
Let us pause to reflect and draw some conclusions. We have said that through the history of philosophy it emerges that philosophical reflection has been associated with death in such a way that philosophy itself is interpreted as a study of death, as an activity that prepares man for death. We have also said that two competing tendencies have developed within philosophy with regard to death: one tendency aims at overcoming death, the other tendency at accepting death. We said, moreover, that both of these tendencies are governed by the same dominant attitude towards fear of death: they evaluate fear of death as something bad, as something that must be overcome in one way or another. From what we have seen so far, it can be deduced that to a large extent philosophy is motivated by the desire to overcome fear of death, by the desire to overcome this particular fear, and this desire is largely connected to a generalized devaluation of emotions, if not of all emotions, at least of negative or even extreme emotions, what we would call “passions”. In this context, emotions, and especially fear of death, are an unnecessary reaction, a useless reaction even, which adds nothing worthwhile from an existential or cognitive perspective, and which is a product of poor reasoning. Let us now turn to Heidegger’s phenomenological analysis, to see how it differs from what we have seen so far, especially with regard to fear of death.
General introductory comments on phenomenology and emotions/dispositions
First of all, let me make a brief comment on phenomenology as a philosophical approach, and especially a comment on the phenomenology of emotions, which was originally developed by Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger (and continued by others through the 20th century and up to the present day). Phenomenology is a method of knowing, which aims to lead us to the origins of the world. That is, it aims to describe the world as a phenomenon and to analyze the origins of that phenomenon, that is, to identify the deeper conditions that allow that phenomenon to exist. (In philosophy we call such analyses “transcendental”). In this context, phenomenology introduces a method that allows the world in its wholeness and its phenomenality to be an object of intuition and analysis, preventing us from projecting any philosophical preconceptions on what we observe and polluting our observation with any preclusions as to what is real and what is “merely phenomenal”, and preventing us from taking a position (the so-called “position-taking”) as to the ontological status of the phenomenon we observe (i.e. whether it is real or not). Phenomenology is an attempt to restart philosophy, in which nothing given to experience and the senses is qualified as “unreal” or “illusory” or, to put it ontologically, as “non-being”. Hence, from the perspective of phenomenological analysis, all phenomena are part of the world, all carry some meaning. Phenomenology comes to bracket some preconceptions that the natural sciences have. The sciences, which are characterized by what phenomenologists call the “natural attitude”, make certain distinctions and hierarchies of reality, which phenomenology suspends. For example, the distinction between physical reality and spiritual or subjective experience, where one side is either judged as real and the other as unreal or simply “phenomenal”, where “phenomenal” means “epiphenomenal”, i.e. a level of experience that is derivative and not part of the real world. In the context of these distinctions, emotions, such as fear of death, are judged as non-beings, that is, as subjective phenomena that are not part of the real world, and thus have nothing to tell us about the real world that is “out there”.
Phenomenology undoes such abstract reordering of phenomena, restores and brings back to philosophical interest the full richness of experience. “World” no longer means what is “out there” in a naturalist way, but means whatever is given to consciousness-perception as something meaningful and recorded in experience. What remains, after this enriching return to the primary experience of the phenomenal world, is for phenomenology to analyze each phenomenon in order to interpret what each phenomenon reveals in relation to the world and the origin of the world, and in relation to the deeper structures of the world and existence. Some things in the world will emerge as more important than others, as more fundamental in relation to the origin, that is, the foundation, of the world. It is in this context that emotions will become the focus of philosophical interest and will play an important role.
Martin Heidegger’s ontology in Being and Time and the role of fear of death
Martin Heidegger in his magnum opus, Being and Time (1927), poses the most fundamental ontological question, which is: What is being? What does being mean? The question of being is the most fundamental question that also answers all the subordinate or secondary ontological questions, such as what is the world, what is an object, etc. The meaning of “being” is already understood by humans. If humans did not understand what “being” means, they would not be able to use the verb “to be” in everyday (and not only) language. Therefore, if we want to analyze the structures of the meaning of “being”, the structures of the meaning of existence, we can turn our attention to everyday life so as to describe it phenomenologically, to describe its structures, and then to elucidate what it is that allows man to understand “being”.
In Being and Time, Heidegger focuses on the practical everyday understanding of the world, and interprets the structure of existence as care(rather than as consciousness, res cogitans, for example) through which we understand being in all its various manifestations. In Being and Time, Heidegger attempts to show that the understanding of “being” emerges through the understanding of time, of temporality: time is the (transcendental) horizon through which ontological understanding and the ontological question emerge. What is it that reveals these structures to the philosopher and that allows him/her to interpret time as the condition, the horizon, within which existence, Being, acquires meaning? Here comes the role of death and fear of death. The reason why man can conceive of existence as care, and why humans can conceive of temporality as the foundation of his understanding of “being” is fear of death. It is through fear of death that time is revealed as the essence of “being”. But let’s unpack what we have just said.
The first thing to clarify is how emotions in general are interpreted in Heidegger’s phenomenology. What do emotions do, what do they reveal? Emotions are not just something “in the subject” that only concern the subject and reveal his/her subjective state, but they reveal “findingness”, that is, how humans find themselves in the world. Now is a good time to make a conceptual correction: Heidegger does not use the word “feeling” or “emotion”, but he refers to “dispositions” or “moods”, which reveal the facticity of the world in a way that intuition or thought cannot reveal. Moods have a special and unique way of revealing the world in a way that other senses cannot. Through moods, humans have already come before themselves and have conceived themselves not perceptually as an entity (object), but with the special meaning of finding-oneself-in-a-mood The way findingness (mood) discloses by turning towards (something), being positively disposed towards what is manifested, or by turning away (from something), being negatively disposed towards what is manifested. That is, it has a dynamic-kinetic mode of manifestation.
Mood has another important characteristic in the way it conceives and manifests, which, in order to explain, we must make a technical distinction between mood and emotion. An emotion has an object. It is associated with an object or a thing that a person has in front of them, what in phenomenology we call “intentionality”. An emotion is intentional in the sense that it refers, it is connected, to an intentional object. For example, fear is connected to something fearful. What fear reveals in this case is something that refers to a thing present in the world (but it does not have to be a physical thing, it can be a concept, a memory, etc.). Emotion, then, is something that arises together with the thing to which it refers and/or from which it comes, and when this thing is removed then the associated emotion also goes away. Here, however, the thing in question to which the emotion is related is not a common intraworldly thing, but it’s death, the nothingness, and worldhood in general. We are referring, then, to an emotion that has the potential to reveal not something specific in the world, but to reveal the whole world as a whole, that is, it allows humans to grasp the whole, what Heidegger calls being-in-the-world as a whole. At this point, Heidegger (not in Being and Time but in earlier lecture notes) refers to Aristotle’s On the Soul, where Aristotle refers to instances where an emotion arises, fear in particular, without there being anything fearful out there, and what it demonstrates or reveals, according to Heidegger’s interpretation, is the fact of corporeality as such, the existence of the body as matter, as a necessary condition, as a horizon in which passions emerge. As Aristotle says: “in the absence of any external cause of terror we find ourselves experiencing the feelings of a man in terror. From all this it is obvious that the affections of soul are enmattered formulable essences.” (On the Soul, 403a 25)
Let us now turn to fear of death. Let us be reminded that the context is an attempt to explicate how humans conceive of time, how the understanding of time is the condition through which existence acquires meaning. How does humans conceive of existence as a whole, in such a way that this conception is conceived as time, in other words, in such a way that world means time? This is when the human being conceives their death. When they project themselves forward into the future at the moment of death and confront the finitude of their existence, and conceives of themselves in terms of temporal duration. That is, when the human being conceives of time as the essence of his/her world, the world as a counterpart of time. But why and how do human beings conceive of themselves and their essence through their own death? This is because the way to grasp the essence of anything and to define it as what it is is by grasping its beginning and end, its limits –the limit of its creation (birth) and the limit of its end as it “breaks down” (death). When something is broken and put “out of action,” it reveals itself as what it was, through its absence. By the same token, human beings can grasp their essence when they contemplate their end, when they have now grasped themselves as “complete” through death. As long as one lives, one’s essence is not exhausted. It is exhausted and acquires a definite meaning when all open perspectives and possibilities have been closed, and life is now complete.
Fear of death has a key function in this realization, since it is that which reveals time as the essence of finite existence. Here it is necessary to make another correction: we are no longer talking about fear, but about existential angst. Fear is associated with an object or thing. But death, as I said before, is neither a thing nor an object, nor even a temporal event (a moment in time), since it marks the end of time in general! Death is not a thing in the world, but it is the end of the world. It is nothing. And nothing is not a thing: it is no-thing. So that’s why we talk about angst instead of fear. Anxiety does not reveal a particular thing, but it reveals what we are anxious about: the world itself as such.
In angst, entities in the world become insignificant, and what is revealed, what is meaningful, what is “imposed” on us, is the world in its worldhood. Suddenly the meaning of worldliness (what it means to have a world) is revealed to us. Through angst what is revealed is the world as temporality. Angst of death individualizes the humans, places them before their freedom and loneliness (solus ipse). Here, we are talking about a kind of solipsism where man exists alone. In philosophy this term –solipsism—is used to mean the prevalence of scepticism, that is, that a subject knows no world outside herself, and cannot even prove the existence of other human beings. My personal opinion is that the solus ipseof existential angst does not refer to socio-political loneliness, but to a lonely humanity with an absent and non-existent God. Angst means loneliness in the sense that humans are alone in finite existence, without any God to save them from impending nothingness. Moreover, through angst, humans experience radical uncanniness and the unhomely. Through the individuation brought about by angst, the world now reveals itself as alien and strange, since all meaningful things and structures are given as meaningless.
As we are getting close to the end of the lecture, please allow me to some thought-provoking comments on Heidegger’s relationship to Christianity. Heidegger borrowed quite a bit from the Christian tradition. He believed that early Christians had grasped factical life in its essence, that is, they had grasped existence in terms of temporality, existence as linear eschatological time with a beginning and an end. Heidegger appropriated the concept of “care” from the Christian tradition, from St Augustine (although the concept exists too –it is mentioned already in Plato’s Phaedrus). From the Christian tradition, Heidegger also inherits the relation of the angst with care and the eschatological conception of time. Angst and fear of death is everywhere in the Christian tradition. St John of Damascus’ poem, which is read out in the funeral service of Orthodox Christians, is a prime example: “Truly most frightening is the mystery of death, how the soul is violently separated from its concord with the body and, by divine decree, the most natural bond of their cohesion is severed.”
I close this lecture with some questions. We have seen why fear of death, i.e. existential angst, in Heidegger’s phenomenological analysis reveals the essence of existence and the understanding of existence as temporality. Therefore, fear of death performs an important methodological role. But could we have the same gain through other emotions? Could we conceive of temporality as the horizon of Being without anxiety, through other dispositions, or even without any disposition at all? If so, then fear of death is not a necessary disposition, and the title of the lecture “Why we should fear death” loses its imperative-normative power.
*The lecture is dedicated to Andreas Tsangaridis of Potamitissa, who died unjustly last week.
**The lecture was translated from Greek.