Philosophy as Antidote to Fear of Death

How Does Awareness of Death Change Our Desire?

Zohar Atkins @ZoharAtkins

Life is an accumulation of: Socrates: opinions Aristotle: habits Augustine: sins Hegel: contradictions Kierkegaard: personae Marx: commodities Nietzsche: artistic material Wittgenstein: games Debord: spectacles Suzuki: attempts

Ernest Becker says that our fundamental motivation in life is not simply to survive, but to forget and escape death. One of the most basic ways we do this is by accumulating things and imbuing them with meaning and value. We do this even though, when all is said and done, we won’t be able to take any of our acquisitions with us.

Still, it’s instructive to think about the different kinds of things that we might try to accumulate. What is our “coin of the realm?”

Marx thought that most of us most of the time desire things not for their use value, but for their exchange value, that is we want a pair of shoes not because they help us walk, but because they demonstrate to others the kind of person we are, hopefully making ourselves more desirable and valuable in the process. For Debord, who thinks we are living in a “society of spectacle,” it is not enough that we treat ourselves and one another as commodities, but that we do so in a way that is designed to garner maximal attention. Marx and Debord weren’t recommending that we seek to accumulate commodities or spectacles, they were simply suggesting that our age forms our desire through these. The second-hand smoke, as it were, of living in a particular age is that you pick up on the types of desires of that age.

In Plato, Socrates contrasts the pursuit of knowledge, which begins by admitting ignorance, with the pretense to knowledge that is in fact just “opinion.” In many ways, Marx and Debord follow Socrates’s initial form. Socrates’s question might be asked psychologically: What can and should we desire that others don’t desire? What isn’t just opinion? What isn’t just commodity? Or spectacle?

But you can also be less normative about it and simply say, “Look, this is just how life is. We accumulate stuff. It’s neither good nor bad.” Aristotle would say we are our habits. Now, given that, will I have good habits or bad ones. But I can’t not be a habituated being for the most part. Even if I were to aspire to be a more spontaneous, more free, more open person, I would have to develop habits that would enable this!

In Kierkegaard, we play many roles, wear many masks. We could formulate the question on Kierkegaard in similar ways: is the goal to remove all the masks (which is likely impossible) or simply to have more control over and more awareness about the masks we wear and the roles in which we find ourselves? If that were the case, authenticity would be more akin to accepting a role and reworking it rather than attempting to discard all roles and becoming “a person without qualities.”

In Beginner’s Mind, Suzuki suggests that the practice of mindfulness is not acquisitive, because the practice of the novice who is unable to sit still and the practice of the master both just are. From the point of view of a beginner’s mind, you can’t, as it were, “take the meditation with you.” From an outside perspective it seems that people return to a spiritual practice in an effort to improve and/or to build habit. But Suzuki might say that mindfulness is more of an attempt than an achievement—what we are attempting to achieve is to move out of a state of grasping for achievement into a state of gracious curiosity.

If Becker is right that fear of death plays a role in motivating our desire, then a question for all these thinkers is whether the goal is to come up with a desire that can help us live the fact that we are going to die, or whether the goal to be less motivated by fear of death and more motivated by something else. Perhaps we never abandon the fear of death, but more awareness of death transforms our fear, and helps shape our desires in ways that are nourishing for a meaningful life.