Death’s real horror is that it ends our capacity for experience itself

Evidence

Death, he wrote, is the great enemy not merely because it deprives us of all the future things we might do, and all the pleasures we might experience. It takes away the ability to experience anything at all, ever. It puts an end to our being a Heideggerian clearing for things to emerge into. Thus, as Wollheim says, ‘It deprives us of phenomenology, and, having once tasted phenomenology, we develop a longing for it which we cannot give up.’ Having had experience of the world, having had intentionality, we want to continue it forever, because that experience of the world is what we are. — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café, 935

Categorization

• DEFINE: Wollheim’s phrasing makes connection between death and phenomenology/human experience vivid — helps orient reader to why the phenomenology project matters.
• DEEPTHINKING: The line that we are our experience of the world — that experiencing is what we are — condenses a whole phenomenological anthropology into one sentence worth sitting with.
• SHARE: Good passage to send to someone interested in philosophy of death or phenomenology — Wollheim’s framing is memorable and quotable.
• XREF: connects to: Death cannot be an authentic human possibility because it negates all projects