Death cannot be an authentic human possibility because it negates all projects
Evidence
Since death does not appear on the foundation of our freedom, it can only remove all meaning from life. If I am a waiting for waitings for waiting and if suddenly the object of my final waiting and the one who awaits it are suppressed, the waiting takes on retrospectively the character of absurdity. … Thus death is never that which gives life its meanings; it is, on the contrary, that which on principle removes all meaning from life. If we must die, then our life has no meaning because its problems receive no solution and because the very meaning of the problems remains undetermined. — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 1256 (
#corroborates, via linked claim)
If we are temporal beings by our very nature, then authentic existence means accepting, first, that we are finite and mortal. We will die: this all-important realisation is what Heidegger calls authentic ‘Being-towards-Death’, and it is fundamental to his philosophy. — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café, 292 (
#contradicts, via linked claim)
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 (
#expands, via linked claim)
Categorization
- XREF: connects to: Death removes all meaning from life because it suppresses the project that awaited judgment — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness: An Essay on…, 1256; Authentic existence requires accepting that we will die — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café: Freedom,…, 292; Death’s real horror is that it ends our capacity for experience itself — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café: Freedom,…, 935 (+3 more)
Broader Connections
- Death removes all meaning from life because it suppresses the project that awaited judgment
#corroborates(0.90) — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 1256 - Authentic existence requires accepting that we will die
#contradicts(0.90) — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café, 292 - Death’s real horror is that it ends our capacity for experience itself
#expands(0.75) — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café, 935 - Suicide cannot escape absurdity because it too awaits a future meaning it denies itself
#expands(0.75) — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 1257 - Death cannot be waited for because its causal conditions are indefinite and uncountable.
#expands(0.72)