A Night in Arzamas - Jordan Smith - The American Interest Magazine

• A Night in Arzamas - Jordan Smith - The American Interest Magazine
  tags: philosophy religion
  • Is there any meaning in my life that will not be destroyed by my inevitably approaching death?
  • But in 1973, cultural anthropologist Ernest Becker published The Denial of Death. In it, Becker argued that the fear of death “haunts the human animal like nothing else; it is a mainspring of human activity—activity designed largely to avoid the fatality of death, to overcome it by denying in some way that it is the final destiny of man.” Man’s subconscious fear of death and desire to transcend its inevitability leads him to create or achieve something “heroic”, so that the immortality of that creation or act might redeem the mortality of its maker. Fear of death is universal, and denial of it is equally cross-cultural.
  • Nearly every individual secretly believes himself exempt from the rules of mortality that govern all living creatures.
  • Becker also echoes Tolstoy in his description of what he calls the paradox of existence: “the ever-present fear of death in the normal biological functioning of our instinct of self-preservation, as well as our utter obliviousness to this fear in our conscious life.” This is what Becker means by the denial of death.
  • Terror Management Theory (TMT)
  • Kubler-Ross’s On Death and Dying strikingly confirms the insights of Ivan Ilych. Tolstoy had in effect provided a fictional representation of the Kubler-Ross model, which was based on more than 200 patients with terminal illnesses similar to Ilych’s. Tolstoy “anticipat[es] freely and indirectly the revelations of the medical analyst”,
  • Stanford psychoanalyst Irvin Yalom, who in the late 1970s developed an approach known as existential psychotherapy. This method, based on the idea that individuals’ inner conflicts frequently occur due to confrontations with facts of existence,
  • The inevitability of death is only one of these conflicts in Yalom’s framework—the others being freedom and the burden of responsibility it confers, isolation, and meaninglessness
  • According to Yalom, humans develop a false sense of specialness as a defense against the certainty of death. “[D]eep, deep down, each of us believes, as does Ivan Ilych, that the rule of mortality applies to others but certainly not to ourselves.”
  • Staring at the Sun: Overcoming the Terror of Death (2008). There he argues that death anxiety is lessened by the sense that one has lived a full, meaningful life. Ilych “is dying so badly because he has lived so badly”, he writes (emphasis in original). Yalom argues that individuals usually require a climactic or irreversible experience to be awakened to the finitude of existence.
  • eading The Death of Ivan Ilych causes profound, somber reflection; the novelist Zadie Smith wrote, “Every time I read it, I find my world put under an intense, unforgiving microscope.”

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