Adam Buben

Technology of the Dead: Objects of Loving Remembrance or Replaceable Resources?

Abstract This paper addresses ethical questions surrounding death given imagined but not unlikely technological advancements in the near future. For example, how will highly detailed interactive simulations of deceased personalities affect the way we deal with dying and interact with the dead? Most cultures have at least a vague sense of duties to the dead, and many of these duties are related to the memorial preservation of decedents. I worry that our advances might be paralleled by a deteriorating grasp of what proper preservation is all about. With the phenomenological assistance of the 19th and 20th century philosophers Søren Kierkegaard, Martin Heidegger, and Jean-Paul Sartre, we can get a sense of some potential problems for what we ordinarily call ‘progress’.

Heidegger's Reception of Kierkegaard: The Existential Philosophy of Death

After briefly drawing attention to two key strains in the history of philosophys dealings with death, the Platonic and the Epicurean, I describe a more recent philosophical alternative to viewing death in terms of this ancient dichotomy. This is the alternative championed by the likes of Søren Kierkegaard, the father of existentialism, and Martin Heidegger, whose work on death tends to overshadow Kierkegaards despite the undeniable influence exerted on him by the nineteenth century Dane. By exploring this influence, a deep connection between them on the topic of death becomes apparent. Although both of these thinkers arise from the Platonic/Christian tradition, I discuss how they handle Epicurean insights about death in their work, and thereby prescribe a peculiar way of living with death that falls somewhere in between the Platonic and the Epicurean strains. This way of approaching life through death, in which Kierkegaard and Heidegger show signs of reaction to (and in some cases, influence from) both strains, is what I call the ‘existential philosophy of death’.

Living with Death: Kierkegaard and the Samurai

‘In the eleventh hour one understands life in a wholly different way.’1 Many of Kierkegaard’s works, both pseudonymous and signed, briefly address the issues of death and thinking about death. But as is shown in the introduction, Kierkegaard’s interests here are not with death itself, but rather with the meaning or symbolism that death can have for us when we are living. This is also evident in his concept of ‘the fellowship of the dead’, something Kinya Masugata discusses in the final chapter. Thus, Kierkegaard addresses the issues of death within the context of a broader topic in order to change the way we live. Although these discussions of death are often brief, in Three Discourses on Imagined Occasions (1845), Kierkegaard dedicates an entire discourse, ‘At a Graveside’, to describing the use of the thought of death for guidance on the road to living earnestly.2 Around the same time that Kierkegaard is offering this description and confronting his own impending death, on the other side of the world, the long era of feudalism in isolated Japan is drawing to a close.3 Interestingly, some of the more thoughtful members of the ancient warrior class that epitomize this feudalism, known in the Western world as samurai (literally, ‘retainer’), advocate a life with death in mind that is uncannily similar to the one Kierkegaard prescribes. But is this similarity so striking that it would allow one to draw philosophically significant conclusions from it?

An Attempt at Clarifying Being-Towards-Death

In Being and Time, Heidegger offers an account of death that is both one of the most challenging parts of the book, and also one of the most controversial and difficult treatments of the topic in the history of philosophy. Although there is no shortage of attempts to clear up the most confusing aspects of Heidegger’s death chapter, there still remains a fair amount of disagreement in the various interpretations. My contribution to this volume consists of a section-by-section exegesis of this chapter with the goal of correcting some errant readings. Obviously, the death chapter cannot be taken in isolation, and so, I also explain its connections to what comes before and after, both within Heidegger’s magnum opus and, in some cases, in the history of the philosophy of death. In the course of examining his claims, I find it helpful to appeal to the work of Charles Guignon. In two recent articles, he has made significant contributions to the formulation of a better and more thorough understanding of Heidegger on death.

The Paradoxical Rationality of Søren Kierkegaard

improved version Davies introduces later in that paper (p. 455) precisely in order to justify the idea that the states corresponding to semantic axioms should be viewed as possessing a kind of informational content. Perhaps the argument in this later section of Davies’ paper is unconvincing: but G&T are surely culpable for simply ignoring it. Having despatched the idea that speakers tacitly know an axiomatic semantic theory à la Davies, G&T outline their own view of tacit knowledge and linguistic competence: