Lately when I catch movies on television, I notice that I am paying attention to who is dead or who is still alive. I like old movies and when I happen to see one, I first look at when it was made and try to guess the ages of the actors. Noticing that some or many, maybe even all are dead, I hang around and watch the movie a bit and let my thoughts take me to the set of the movie and I try to imagine between takes what these people did and what concerns they had. They had a car parked in the parking lot of the studio, maybe they were waiting for a call from a child or a parent.. you know… they had a life. And now no more. All those concerns, dreams, things they had to do that day or that week, their vacation plans, all of it are gone…. no more. No concerns, no dreams, no tomorrow, no today, nothing to itch or put a band aid on. No cola can that is half full in the refrigerator, no tire to fill, no shopping to do, not dentist appointment, no laundry…. nothing, nothing, nothing. Dead is dead.

Now that I got you there. I want to let you know that one of our century’s greatest philosophers; Martin Heidegger, had a lot to say about human beings and death. I think it is a shame that his works are not made more publicly available or translated in such a way that people get to read him. So… I am going to write about his thoughts from a book I found, that gives us access to a few things Heidegger talked about.

Here is what is going to happen: One; you will notice a person can think and recreate his or her mood. Two; you will see that he is a brilliant thinker and what you will not notice, is that this kind of thinking is available to you, if you are willing to take your self through mastering your own ass everyday, you don’t have to study philosophy, you have a philosophy by the virtue of being on the planet as a human. Three, you will get the insights he is offering and possibly forever change how you live your life and your attitude towards death.

From the book, ” How to Read Heidegger” by Mike Wrathall my comments are in parentheses.

… Epicurus (an old old philosopher) believed that it was incoherent to have anything but a stance of indifference towards our own death. … (he suggests death is nothing to us)
His argument follows something like these steps:

1. Something can matter to us only if we can experience it.
2. We can experience something if and only if we exist when it is present. (meaning we would have to be alive and conscious)
3. We do not exist when our death is present (you are not around if you are dead)
4. Therefore, we cannot experience death.
5. Therefore, death cannot matter to us.

It seems true…. At the same time, Epicurus’s conclusion seems absurd; of course my death matters to me. Heidegger’s view of death helps us understand where Epicurus argument goes wrong.

For Epicurus ‘being present to’ means something like ‘being in causal contact with….’ but ‘being present’ doesn’t always require actual causal contact. Somethings are present to us even when they are not exercising a causal contact on us (we don’t have a causal contact with death, meaning we are not around when death is there. We do have a causal contact with our demise; the event of dying, but not to our death)

(But death exists as a possibility)… when we ‘have possibilities’ they shape our experience of the world. Suppose I know that there is a possibility that a friend will pay me a visit this afternoon. Having that possibility makes me keenly aware of the disarray in my home and the lack of anything suitable to serve a visiting guest. Things of which I would otherwise have been oblivious are made suddenly prominent. The fact that we don’t exist when death is actual is thus irrelevant. We do exist when death is possible, and this possibility changes not just our awareness of certain things in the world, but the significance of those things…..

… Epicurus is wrong — death is not nothing to us.

… Let’s look a little more carefully at the idea of having a possibility present to us. There is a difference between having a possibility, and having the possibility present to us as a possibility( just hang in there he is going to explain). I can have a possibility without having the slightest (awareness) of it… There is probably… some chance that I will be struck by a meteor this afternoon, but the likelihood is so small that I never give it a thought. It is not present to me as a possibility: the minor probability of being killed by a meteor does not effect how I act in the slightest. By contrast, a possibility is present as a possibility for me when it shapes the meaning of the situation that I now find my self ( the author gives an example of driving on a highway where the ‘possibility of an accident’ is present as an accident and that this shapes what one pays attention to). …. The possibility is present to me as a possibility, by determining the significance of the things that I encounter and the actions I perform .

… death is present to me if it shapes the meaning of the situations I find myself in and guides the kinds of actions I perform in those situations. How does death shape our existence? Heidegger’s answer is: death “individualizes (the human being) down to itself ( in being present to our own death as a possibility, what most matters to us –each and every one, as an individual– shows up in our thinking, we get to hear the voice that wants to be heard, the being that wants to be).

… What others say I should do or think I should do is, in the face of death, revealed as irrelevant. This is the non-relationality of death – in it, my relations to the other people around me are thus severed, and I am revealed as not ultimately dependent on the others around me. In anticipating death, I take responsibility for myself. I become authentic, my own person, meaning that I accept that my decisions are not required or essential, because there is no right way to be a human being. As a consequence of my anxiety in the face of death, I am set free to live my life as my own rather than doing things merely because others expect me to do them.

Because it makes it possible to be authentic, Heidegger believes that death is not in and of itself to be resented and avoided. Indeed, far from interfering with life, anxiety in the face of death brings ‘an unshakable joy’ … After all, the fact that our lives will end only gives that much more weight and significance to the particular choices that we make in life…

What fallows beyond this point are my thoughts

This is not even a matter of accepting that you will die. It is a matter of knowing in your core that you will die. It is a matter of making the possibility of death be present in such a way that you don’t care but do the boldest things that calls you as a human being. When you get present to the possibility of death, you will be afraid of the calling you will hear. It will be so big that it will scare you. It will be so demanding that you will put it off and fall back to your comfortable places. You will be left with wanting to do what you love to do because “they” say you should do what you love. In getting present to death as a possibility, you will most likely hear something else, some impossibility, and you will be asked to declare it as possible.

So there is nothing to overcome. You don’t want to overcome the fear of death. You want it in your life. You want to run towards it. You want the anxiety of it, because it is your door to what is calling you in this world.

I think in all of this lies the future of being human. I don’t know what it looks like but I can see something through the peephole.

Thank you for reading.