YouTube seminar:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FIi_ocmaxYI

In the fourth part of the third seminar, we consider thinking about death from the perspectives of Nietzsche, Kierkegaard and Camus.

Nietzsche is a philosopher oriented towards life. In relation to death, he is concerned above all with living passionately. He believed that the person who fears death is the one who has not lived fully.

In the formulation presented here, Nietzsche suggests that many people die far later than they should, while a few die too early. The central question becomes: when is the right time to die? Nietzsche’s Zarathustra tells us that in death our virtues should shine upon our lives like the sun.

Joseph Campbell, the American scholar of myth, also describes death as an ornament on the tree of life, giving life a distinctive beauty through which life itself can be celebrated.

Kierkegaard, by contrast, understands death as the ultimate boundary of finitude. He believed that what we take death to be deeply shapes the way we live. In the interpretation presented here, religious traditions contaminate the meaning of infinity and transcendence when they present death merely as a road towards a more complete continuation of earthly life under the name of heaven. This is one reason Kierkegaard attacks the Judaism and Christianity of his own time.

For him, life acquires meaning only when it stands in relation to infinity. Death is the ultimate boundary of finitude, and when we participate wholly in the finitude of material and worldly thought, our lives are ultimately surrendered to death because we unite ourselves with the material and perishable forces of the world. The helplessness of living within finitude and becoming absorbed in its requirements can consume our entire lives. Entry into infinity can occur only through a leap beyond finitude and through connection with the values of life.

Two bonds must be removed from the feet of a human life that follows the path of infinity: first, the image of infinity as merely a continuation of earthly life in material form; and second, the false certainty that salvation necessarily awaits us.

Finally, Camus’s response to the absurdity of life in the face of unavoidable death, and to death’s indifference to the human desire to live, is revolt against death. Absurdity stands at the centre of Camus’s work, and death is its most ruthless expression. This theme runs through works such as The Plague, The Stranger, Caligula and The Myth of Sisyphus. For Camus, the most important philosophical problem of life is the question of suicide; other questions become worth asking only after we have judged whether life itself is worth living.