I found Jim Palmer’s article on death a valuable contribution to the debate
Let me say, with the greatest respect I without wanting to be patronising than there is real intelligence at work here. I therefore merely intend to point out where the intelligence has outrun the argument to augment the debate not demolish it in any way
The first is in the Heidegger section. The rhetorical questions there, “why should mortality possess greater revelatory authority than birth, why not embodiment, why not dependence,” are good questions. But a question is not a refutation, and the essay never actually supplies the missing argument for why these alternative horizons are equally or more revelatory than death. It simply lists nouns, “beings-from-birth, beings-in-bodies, beings-with-others,” as though enumeration were demonstration.
Heidegger at least tried to show why death in particular individuates in a way birth cannot, since I did not experience my own birth as mine but will, in some sense, experience my own dying as mine. The essay never engages that asymmetry. It just multiplies categories and moves on.
The second problem comes in “The Demand for Permanence,” with the forty-year marriage. The passage asks what exactly has been invalidated once both parties are dead and forgotten, then answers, nothing. But that is the conclusion the nihilist denies, not a proof against him. Describing the scenario sympathetically and then declaring the verdict is not an argument, it is a mood dressed as one. The essay needed an account of why lived reality confers value independent of any witness, permanent or otherwise, and instead I get “their relationship participated in reality while they were here,” which restates the claim rather than grounding it.
The third break is “The Universe Is Not the Audience.” The observation that the cosmos has no standpoint from which to judge us is true and, frankly, trivial, nobody serious thinks Andromeda is filing verdicts. But the essay then slides from “the universe cannot judge us”, to which I wholeheartedly agree, to “therefore scale is irrelevant to significance,” and that inference does not follow.
Scale might be irrelevant to significance for reasons that need arguing, instead the essay treats the grammatical point about the universe lacking a perspective as though it settled the metaphysical one about whether smallness in time diminishes worth. That is the whole nihilist challenge, dispatched by category shift rather than confronted.
What ties the three problems together is that each time the essay reaches the load-bearing claim, it substitutes a redescription of the difficulty for a resolution of it.
That is not fatal to the project, redescription can be genuinely clarifying, and this piece often is. But I would stop calling it philosophy at those junctures and start calling it what it actually is there, eloquent reassurance.
The article is a curious case of arriving at a Stoic conclusion while perhaps rejecting the Stoic method.
Marcus Aurelius did not need a metaphysics of permanence to tell him that death was “according to nature,” nor did Epictetus need eternity to certify that a well-lived hour was already complete in itself. The Stoics got to “significance does not require permanence” two thousand years before this author did, and got there faster, because they simply refused the premise that the universe owes life a verdict. Memento mori, in Stoic hands, was never a threat to be defeated; it was a fact to be metabolise d so that I could stop postponing the only life I actually have.
The essay wants this exact sobriety, while treating “remember you will die” as part of the thanatocentric problem it is diagnosing. It has, in other words, reinvented the Handbook of Epictetus and then filed a complaint against its author.
The psychology is more honestly handled, though there is some minor sleight of hand.
Terror management theory is invoked correctly, Becker’s insight that civilisation is partly an elaborate hedge against oblivion is sound and well supported. But the essay’s own twist, that our immortality projects reveal not fear of death so much as a prior assumption that death has the authority to invalidate us, is an inference dressed as a discovery. It may be true. It is also exactly the way psychoanalytic claims usually are, convenient, elegant, and impossible to test against a control group of humans who never feared dying.
The chief merit of the article is structural, and it is a real one. The essay identifies a common move across four incompatible worldviews, Christian salvation, Heideggerian authenticity, nihilism, and pop self-help memento mori exercises, and shows that all four grant death the same unearned authority to adjudicate life’s worth.
That is a genuine piece of intellectual pattern recognition, the kind of thing that looks obvious once stated and was not obvious before. Watching the essay walk the same skeleton through four different costumes is the strongest sustained argument in the piece.
The second merit is the reversal in “Death in Its Place”: that we do not value people because they will die, we grieve because they were already valuable, and mortality only borrows its weight from what preceded it.
This is not new, we hears its cousin in Epicurus and in every decent eulogy ever delivered, but the essay states it cleanly and lets the chaplain anecdote carry it rather than over-arguing it. That restraint, rare elsewhere in the piece, is itself a mark of quality.
Third, the essay is honest about its own limits in a way many popular philosophy pieces are not. It explicitly declines to resolve what happens after death, calls this “symbolic sobriety,” and refuses the easy exits of either religious certainty or flat materialism. Refusing to manufacture false closure, while still writing seven thousand words on the subject, is harder than it sounds, and the essay largely manages it. I would call that its most underrated achievement.
I hope this analysis will be received in a manner. It is intended.
Yin and Yang; Life and Death. You cannot have one without the other. Once humans- or our evolutionary descendants- learn to keep individual consciousness/awareness alive indefinitely, then we will have a whole new ball game. For now, it’s Yin and Yang , just the way things are. At 75, I realize how precious are my remaining days. So long as my health holds up, I plan to savor each and every one.
Achilles in Troy (Brad Pitt) said something that stuck, ‘the gods envy us. Everything is more beautiful BECAUSE we are doomed’. Our mortality makes life meaningful. (Well, it is supposed to). More is the pity that so much of it is wasted living lives lost in mediocrity, sheepeople following the herd because blending in is safer than standing apart.
A dictionary is a safe place to look up the meaning of mediocrity. Hyper individualism, ego, standing apart may be the goal of some, and that’s ok. I personally,strive for authenticity.
To ‘know thyself’. I cannot think of a more worthy pursuit, using the short time we have available while dressed as a human being and hitching a ride on a rock traveling through time and space.
What is "mediocrity" and who gets to define it? Right now, we are all living the consequences of holding up hyperindividualism, ego, and standing apart, as the highest goods. I would argue they are not. I do get a bit of what you're saying, but there is something to be said for smaller, less out-there lives. And while I've been writing this, this poem, read in college, popped into my head:
With all due respect and admiration for your long post, I found Heidegger’s existentialist, minimalist take on the subject resonated with me when I read it years ago in “Being and Time” (1927).
He argued that:
Death is "Ownmost" and non-relational.
Heidegger points out that death is the one thing no one else can do for you. Someone can die in your place (like a sacrifice), but they cannot experience your dying. Because death is entirely yours and isolates you from everyone else, Heidegger calls it your "ownmost" and "non-relational" possibility.
The Trap of the "They" (Das Man). Becker makes the default the facto drive.
Most of the time, we live in what Heidegger calls the "They"—the herd mentality of everyday society. The "They" treats death as a taboo or a vague, distant event ("Yes, everyone dies eventually, but not right now"). This social evasion is a coping mechanism. It flattens life and encourages us to live inauthentically, blindly following societal expectations to avoid facing our own radical individuality.
Heidegger argues that we should not just "expect" death (like waiting for a bus) or dwell on it morbidly.
Instead, we should anticipate it. Anticipation means bringing the certainty and constant possibility of death into our present awareness. Because death could happen at any moment, it strips away the illusion that we have infinite time.
4. Freedom for Death (Freiheit zum Tode)
When you authentically grasp that your time is limited and that you are entirely responsible for your own life, two things happen:
a) The illusion shatters: The petty anxieties, social gossip, and rigid expectations of the "They" lose their power over you.
b) Authentic choice begins: You are shocked into realizing that you must choose how to project yourself into the future.
Ultimately, “Being-towards-death” is not a depressing or nihilistic philosophy. In Heidegger's original framework, it is an energizing call to action.
It is the realization that unlocks your freedom to stop living a life scripted by others and start living existential wholeness (from birth to death) that is truly your own.
Martin Heidegger is not typically labeled a "thanatocentrist," but his magnum opus, “Being and Time,” places mortality at the very center of authentic human existence.
I find Becker’s description of the “denial of death” overly simplistic, especially given that ancient cultures, religion, and Christianity promote such denial. I don’t find “existential meaning” in Becker, just a reductionistic perspective. He viewed religion as an “immortality project.” It could well be in the case of “distorted religion.” I don’t agree with such a view from a perspective that enriches existence by seeing death as part of existence. Heidegger caught something much more relevant.
I studied psychiatrist Elisabeth Kübler-Ross intensively in graduate school. In her 1969 landmark book “On Death and Dying,” she argued that dying is our best teacher on the meaning of existence and introduced five emotional stages people experience when facing death: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. Kübler-Ross provides a process, an evolution in which humans deal with death. Becker narrowed his conclusions to a terminal condition. Thank you, Jim.
Jim, you write that prehistoric people "imagined continuities between the living and those who had disappeared." You're assuming that those continuities are "imagined." A fairer term would be that they "experienced" continuities.
Tomorrow is my birthday, I shall be 74! And your article spoke so eloquently to me and gave me such a better understanding on how we should all be living life. I consider this to be the best birthday present ever!
I found Jim Palmer’s article on death a valuable contribution to the debate
Let me say, with the greatest respect I without wanting to be patronising than there is real intelligence at work here. I therefore merely intend to point out where the intelligence has outrun the argument to augment the debate not demolish it in any way
The first is in the Heidegger section. The rhetorical questions there, “why should mortality possess greater revelatory authority than birth, why not embodiment, why not dependence,” are good questions. But a question is not a refutation, and the essay never actually supplies the missing argument for why these alternative horizons are equally or more revelatory than death. It simply lists nouns, “beings-from-birth, beings-in-bodies, beings-with-others,” as though enumeration were demonstration.
Heidegger at least tried to show why death in particular individuates in a way birth cannot, since I did not experience my own birth as mine but will, in some sense, experience my own dying as mine. The essay never engages that asymmetry. It just multiplies categories and moves on.
The second problem comes in “The Demand for Permanence,” with the forty-year marriage. The passage asks what exactly has been invalidated once both parties are dead and forgotten, then answers, nothing. But that is the conclusion the nihilist denies, not a proof against him. Describing the scenario sympathetically and then declaring the verdict is not an argument, it is a mood dressed as one. The essay needed an account of why lived reality confers value independent of any witness, permanent or otherwise, and instead I get “their relationship participated in reality while they were here,” which restates the claim rather than grounding it.
The third break is “The Universe Is Not the Audience.” The observation that the cosmos has no standpoint from which to judge us is true and, frankly, trivial, nobody serious thinks Andromeda is filing verdicts. But the essay then slides from “the universe cannot judge us”, to which I wholeheartedly agree, to “therefore scale is irrelevant to significance,” and that inference does not follow.
Scale might be irrelevant to significance for reasons that need arguing, instead the essay treats the grammatical point about the universe lacking a perspective as though it settled the metaphysical one about whether smallness in time diminishes worth. That is the whole nihilist challenge, dispatched by category shift rather than confronted.
What ties the three problems together is that each time the essay reaches the load-bearing claim, it substitutes a redescription of the difficulty for a resolution of it.
That is not fatal to the project, redescription can be genuinely clarifying, and this piece often is. But I would stop calling it philosophy at those junctures and start calling it what it actually is there, eloquent reassurance.
The article is a curious case of arriving at a Stoic conclusion while perhaps rejecting the Stoic method.
Marcus Aurelius did not need a metaphysics of permanence to tell him that death was “according to nature,” nor did Epictetus need eternity to certify that a well-lived hour was already complete in itself. The Stoics got to “significance does not require permanence” two thousand years before this author did, and got there faster, because they simply refused the premise that the universe owes life a verdict. Memento mori, in Stoic hands, was never a threat to be defeated; it was a fact to be metabolise d so that I could stop postponing the only life I actually have.
The essay wants this exact sobriety, while treating “remember you will die” as part of the thanatocentric problem it is diagnosing. It has, in other words, reinvented the Handbook of Epictetus and then filed a complaint against its author.
The psychology is more honestly handled, though there is some minor sleight of hand.
Terror management theory is invoked correctly, Becker’s insight that civilisation is partly an elaborate hedge against oblivion is sound and well supported. But the essay’s own twist, that our immortality projects reveal not fear of death so much as a prior assumption that death has the authority to invalidate us, is an inference dressed as a discovery. It may be true. It is also exactly the way psychoanalytic claims usually are, convenient, elegant, and impossible to test against a control group of humans who never feared dying.
The chief merit of the article is structural, and it is a real one. The essay identifies a common move across four incompatible worldviews, Christian salvation, Heideggerian authenticity, nihilism, and pop self-help memento mori exercises, and shows that all four grant death the same unearned authority to adjudicate life’s worth.
That is a genuine piece of intellectual pattern recognition, the kind of thing that looks obvious once stated and was not obvious before. Watching the essay walk the same skeleton through four different costumes is the strongest sustained argument in the piece.
The second merit is the reversal in “Death in Its Place”: that we do not value people because they will die, we grieve because they were already valuable, and mortality only borrows its weight from what preceded it.
This is not new, we hears its cousin in Epicurus and in every decent eulogy ever delivered, but the essay states it cleanly and lets the chaplain anecdote carry it rather than over-arguing it. That restraint, rare elsewhere in the piece, is itself a mark of quality.
Third, the essay is honest about its own limits in a way many popular philosophy pieces are not. It explicitly declines to resolve what happens after death, calls this “symbolic sobriety,” and refuses the easy exits of either religious certainty or flat materialism. Refusing to manufacture false closure, while still writing seven thousand words on the subject, is harder than it sounds, and the essay largely manages it. I would call that its most underrated achievement.
I hope this analysis will be received in a manner. It is intended.
The point I took away from the essay is that one's life experience would very likely be enhanced by looking at death with a more balanced perspective.
Precisely said, but old academics get paid for by the word so of course we are long winded, but get to the same point
And so eloquently!
Yin and Yang; Life and Death. You cannot have one without the other. Once humans- or our evolutionary descendants- learn to keep individual consciousness/awareness alive indefinitely, then we will have a whole new ball game. For now, it’s Yin and Yang , just the way things are. At 75, I realize how precious are my remaining days. So long as my health holds up, I plan to savor each and every one.
Achilles in Troy (Brad Pitt) said something that stuck, ‘the gods envy us. Everything is more beautiful BECAUSE we are doomed’. Our mortality makes life meaningful. (Well, it is supposed to). More is the pity that so much of it is wasted living lives lost in mediocrity, sheepeople following the herd because blending in is safer than standing apart.
A dictionary is a safe place to look up the meaning of mediocrity. Hyper individualism, ego, standing apart may be the goal of some, and that’s ok. I personally,strive for authenticity.
To ‘know thyself’. I cannot think of a more worthy pursuit, using the short time we have available while dressed as a human being and hitching a ride on a rock traveling through time and space.
What is "mediocrity" and who gets to define it? Right now, we are all living the consequences of holding up hyperindividualism, ego, and standing apart, as the highest goods. I would argue they are not. I do get a bit of what you're saying, but there is something to be said for smaller, less out-there lives. And while I've been writing this, this poem, read in college, popped into my head:
Women Die Like Trees
by Marilou Awiakta
Women die like trees, limb by limb
as strain of bearing shade and fruit
drains sap from branch and stem
as weight of ice with wrench of wind
split the heart, loosen grip of roots
until the tree falls with a sign—
unheard except by those nearby—
to lie… mossing… mouldering…
to a certain softness underfoot,
the matrix of new life and leaves.
No flag is furled, no cadence beats,
no bugle sounds for deaths like these,
as limb by limb, women die like trees.
This is so wonderful for me. Thanks for providing clarity to what I'm experiencing. And thanks as well for the references to the work you built on.
"Life does not need death’s permission to be vivid." 💫❤️
With all due respect and admiration for your long post, I found Heidegger’s existentialist, minimalist take on the subject resonated with me when I read it years ago in “Being and Time” (1927).
He argued that:
Death is "Ownmost" and non-relational.
Heidegger points out that death is the one thing no one else can do for you. Someone can die in your place (like a sacrifice), but they cannot experience your dying. Because death is entirely yours and isolates you from everyone else, Heidegger calls it your "ownmost" and "non-relational" possibility.
The Trap of the "They" (Das Man). Becker makes the default the facto drive.
Most of the time, we live in what Heidegger calls the "They"—the herd mentality of everyday society. The "They" treats death as a taboo or a vague, distant event ("Yes, everyone dies eventually, but not right now"). This social evasion is a coping mechanism. It flattens life and encourages us to live inauthentically, blindly following societal expectations to avoid facing our own radical individuality.
Heidegger argues that we should not just "expect" death (like waiting for a bus) or dwell on it morbidly.
Instead, we should anticipate it. Anticipation means bringing the certainty and constant possibility of death into our present awareness. Because death could happen at any moment, it strips away the illusion that we have infinite time.
4. Freedom for Death (Freiheit zum Tode)
When you authentically grasp that your time is limited and that you are entirely responsible for your own life, two things happen:
a) The illusion shatters: The petty anxieties, social gossip, and rigid expectations of the "They" lose their power over you.
b) Authentic choice begins: You are shocked into realizing that you must choose how to project yourself into the future.
Ultimately, “Being-towards-death” is not a depressing or nihilistic philosophy. In Heidegger's original framework, it is an energizing call to action.
It is the realization that unlocks your freedom to stop living a life scripted by others and start living existential wholeness (from birth to death) that is truly your own.
Martin Heidegger is not typically labeled a "thanatocentrist," but his magnum opus, “Being and Time,” places mortality at the very center of authentic human existence.
I find Becker’s description of the “denial of death” overly simplistic, especially given that ancient cultures, religion, and Christianity promote such denial. I don’t find “existential meaning” in Becker, just a reductionistic perspective. He viewed religion as an “immortality project.” It could well be in the case of “distorted religion.” I don’t agree with such a view from a perspective that enriches existence by seeing death as part of existence. Heidegger caught something much more relevant.
I studied psychiatrist Elisabeth Kübler-Ross intensively in graduate school. In her 1969 landmark book “On Death and Dying,” she argued that dying is our best teacher on the meaning of existence and introduced five emotional stages people experience when facing death: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. Kübler-Ross provides a process, an evolution in which humans deal with death. Becker narrowed his conclusions to a terminal condition. Thank you, Jim.
Socrates’ last words were: ‘the cure to life, is death’.
Jim, you write that prehistoric people "imagined continuities between the living and those who had disappeared." You're assuming that those continuities are "imagined." A fairer term would be that they "experienced" continuities.
Tomorrow is my birthday, I shall be 74! And your article spoke so eloquently to me and gave me such a better understanding on how we should all be living life. I consider this to be the best birthday present ever!