Death and Existential Angst

Name: Death and Existential Angst
Start: 2025-05-22T18:00:00-04:00
End: 2025-05-22T20:00:00-04:00
Location: The Fiddlin Pig

Hosted By

Vincent R.

Details

The apprehension associated with the anticipation of death is difficult to define. Regardless of what you believe happens after life ends, death is an uncomfortable door we all must pass through. Kierkegaard and Sartre believed death renders life meaningless. However, while Kierkegaard believed God can provide a sense of meaning, Sartre said there is no God and life has no purpose. Once you lose the illusion of being eternal, life does become meaningless. Other non-believers insist life can still have meaning for you despite no ultimate purpose.

The phrase "existential angst" can describe several human emotions or states of mind. You could have angst about death, the meaning of life, the problem of evil, and simpler things like asking someone for a date or starting a new job. Thoughts of death can bring on existential angst when you face its unavoidable certainty.

As humans, we seem to be the only creatures able to contemplate death's inevitability, and we must go through life with that awkward awareness lingering in our minds. It's the ultimate gorilla in the room. At times, we must force it out of our minds so that we can function in our daily lives. We deal with death regularly, whether it's the funeral of a friend or relative, or the constant barrage of news informing us of someone's death by natural disaster or evil act. Yet, we have an uncanny ability to switch gears and press on with weddings, parties, sports events, and dozens of other joyful events. There is a simultaneous paradoxical awareness of death and the capacity to ignore the slow but inexorable path we must travel to meet it.

Philosophers views:

Socrates: Death is a door to another life; therefore, fear is pointless.

Descartes: The immortal soul persists as consciousness after our body dies, because existence after death wouldn't make sense without a mind to verify such existence.

Epicurus: Death is simply the end of existence. Without heaven or hell, the time to perfect our virtues and live life to the fullest is today.

Michel de Montaigne "To begin depriving death of its greatest advantage over us, let us deprive death of its strangeness, let us frequent it, let us get used to it; let us have nothing more often in mind than death."