Saturday, September 26, 2009

Being-Towards-Life?

As we were going over Heidegger's Being-towards-death the other day, I began to ask myself what motivates me to act in a certain way. Heidegger would say it is the realization of my own finitude actualized in my death. I would disagree. I would say it is the desire to enjoy or experience things in my life future. I do not go to college because I think I must make something of myself before I die--I do it because I want to enjoy a higher quality of life. Am I misreading my motivation?

6 comments:

  1. But why do you want a higher quality of life? So that you can have nice things and do things that you wouldn't be able to do otherwise? I agree, but I think Heidegger would say that you want to enjoy these things before you die, therefore you are still, in a way, living towards death, right?

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  2. I think that because of death you only have a certain amount of time to make your life meaningful. This sense of urgency is what drives your actions. If you had immortal life on this earth, you wouldn't have to scramble to try to make meaning of your life, you could put off going to college and know that you would enjoy the education later. Death is the looming event that gives you immediate motivation.

    Also, if you had unlimited time to do anything, you would never have to prioritize. Sure, going to college may give you pleasure, but writing a novel may also give you enjoyment. Because of your limited time, you can only choose to do so many things in your lifetime and this is what makes your choices meaningful.

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  3. I think that our aspirations in life are indirectly related to Heidegger's discussion of death. Without death, there is no structure or purpose to life; life would be an endless, incoherent stream of events. Just like we understand pleasure through our understanding of the lack of pleasure, pain, so we have motivations in life because we implicitly understand that we will not have life at some point in the future. Whether we realize it or not, I think that our desire to enjoy or experience things is fueled by the fact that we will not desire or experience anything once we die.

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  4. I disagree with Heidegger in the sense that focusing on death is more beneficial than life. If you look at death as an organization there are many parallels in their structures. An organization is a group of people that share a common purpose with goals. At the top of the organizations structure is the President/CEO, or overseer, and at the very bottom you have the laymen workers. I see death as the master overseer and life as the layman. I think its human nature to want to work ourselves up the organization ladder, and the same goes for a person’s life. I feel as though we live our lives trying to figure out how we will reach the position of the overseer. Why would anyone ever want to do that? I think it’s this question that Heidegger’s philosophy attempts to answer but fails at doing.

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  5. I think death does motivate you. It makes people get up and start doing things. It makes it so people try to leave a mark after they are gone. I hope that I will be able to leave my mark. I think the CEO's and the successful businessmen want to make money so they can leave behind an impression to the rest of the world. I think death makes people wake up in the morning.

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  6. I completely agree with Carol on this one. There is definitely an expectation for us to attend college immediately or essentially immediately after high school. If there was no living-toward-death, or infinite life, we could bop around and explore many other possibilities before attending college.

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