Abstract
In Concluding Unscientific Postscript, Kierkegaard draws attention to the difference between death as an objective fact and death as something to be subjectively understood. This process of understanding what it means to die is at the center of my project. I argue that a critical confrontation with our mortality plays a substantial role in achieving a meaningful human life. This project has two central goals: first, to properly understand death, and second, to investigate the role that a proper understanding of death plays in meaning through death’s influence on authenticity. I open with a discussion of the metaphysical aspects of death, arguing that death is a comparative harm because of what it deprives us of, inspired by Bernard Williams’ arguments. When death is understood in this way, we are given reason to confront our mortality because death, as a comparative harm, maintains influence on our lives; this influence is missing when death is understood as being value neutral. Because comparative harms inhabit a middle-ground, we are able to avoid the misleading dichotomy in terms of a response to death wherein there are only two appropriate reactions: profound fear or complete disregard. The evil of death, then, connects to meaning qua meaning as the fact that death is an evil prompts a confrontation with it. This confrontation pushes us towards authenticity in a way similar to Heidegger’s jolt, helping us realize what things are meaningful for us. Meaning on a conceptual level is understood here as a project of justification, and the applied notion of meaning follows Susan Wolf’s fitting fulfillment view. I then use Tolstoy’s The Death of Ivan Ilyich to complement my arguments for how confrontations with our mortality elicit authenticity and how authenticity is connected to meaning, leading to the conclusion that living a meaningful human life is done in part through a critical confrontation with our mortality.
In short, I argue that confronting our mortality, which relies on a proper understanding of death’s value, is something that we should do because there exists a relationship among how we relate to our mortality, which is necessarily based in our understanding of death’s value, how we relate to ourselves, either authentically or inauthentically, and how we relate to others. Investigating these relationships brings out the connections of our mortality with both authenticity and meaning while simultaneously demonstrating the centrality of interpersonal relationships in a meaningful human life.
Advisor
Rudisill, John
Department
Philosophy
Recommended Citation
Thomas, Gabriel, "In Balance with This Life, This Death: An Analysis of the Evil of Death and the Ways in Which Death Leads to Meaning" (2024). Senior Independent Study Theses. Paper 11043.
https://openworks.wooster.edu/independentstudy/11043
Disciplines
Agency | Ancient Philosophy | Arts and Humanities | Christianity | Classical Literature and Philology | Classics | Comparative Philosophy | Continental Philosophy | Dramatic Literature, Criticism and Theory | English Language and Literature | Literature in English, Anglophone outside British Isles and North America | Literature in English, North America | Metaphysics | Other Classics | Other Philosophy | Philosophy | Philosophy of Mind
Keywords
death, dying, meaning, the meaning of life, objective value, Stoicism, the metaphysics of death, Aeneas, Ivan Ilyich, Willy Loman, Epicureanism, Existentialism, harm, dimensional frameworks, authenticity, inauthenticity, bad faith, consciousness, categorical desires, grief
Publication Date
2024
Degree Granted
Bachelor of Arts
Document Type
Senior Independent Study Thesis
© Copyright 2024 Gabriel Thomas