painting a Nude Male laying down in a triangular position - Video

Sheldon Salomon said:
Most people don't go to the school of anxiety. They flee from death anxiety by embracing their cultural beliefs. Kierkegaard says they then tranquilize themselves with the trivial. And I love that phrase. It's a beautiful phrase, because at the end of The Denial of Death, Becker's like, look, the average American is either drinking or shopping or watching television, and they're all the same thing. But Heidegger says the same thing. He says, look, and he acknowledges Kierkegaard. He says, what makes us feel unsettled, and evidently that's an English translation of angst, that it's, we don't feel at home in the world. Heidegger says that's death anxiety. And one direction is the Kierkegaard one. Heidegger calls it a flight from death. You reflexively cling to your cultural constructions. Then Heidegger borrows the term tranquilized, but he points out that he doesn't care for that term because tranquilized sounds like you're subdued, when in fact what most culturally constructed meat puppets do is to be frenetically engaged with their surroundings to ensure that they never sit still long enough to actually think about anything consequential. Heidegger says there's another way, though. He's like, yo, but what you can do is to come to terms with that death anxiety in the following way. Thing number one is to realize that not only are you going to die, but your death can happen at any given moment. So for Heidegger, if you say, I know I'm gonna die at some vaguely unspecified future moment, that's still death denial because you're saying, yeah, not me, not now. Heidegger's point is you need to get to the point where you need to realize that, you know, I need to realize that I can walk outside and get smoked by a comet, or I can stop for gas on the way home and catch the virus and be dead in two days. There were any number of potentially unanticipated and uncontrollable fatal outcomes, but I mean, to bring it to the now. Yeah, it's brilliant. I agree, Les, and this is why I'm wondering, why didn't Heidegger notice this? Because that's the being at a time thing. It's got to be now. And then he says, okay, so now I've dealt somewhat with the death part, and now he says, now you've got to deal with what he calls existential guilt. And he says, well, all right, what you have to, you have to realize that, like it or not, you have to make choices. You know, this is Jean-Paul Sartre. We are condemned by virtue of consciousness to choosing. But Heidegger's a little bit more precise. He's like, look, as I was saying earlier, you're, in reality, you're an insignificant speck of respiring carbon-based dust, born into a time and place, not of your choosing, when you're here for a microscopic amount of time after which you are not. And for Heidegger, you have to realize that, like I said, I didn't choose to be born a male, or Jewish, or in America, the offspring of working-class people. And Heidegger, says, yeah, but you still have to make choices and accept responsibility for those choices, even though you didn't choose any of the parameters that ultimately limit what's available to you.
And moreover, you're going to not always make good choices. So now you're guilty of your choices. And then he uses the poet Rilke. He has a phrase, Becker uses in The Denial of Death, the guilt of an unlived life. I just love that. You have to accept that you have already diminished, and in many ways, amputated your own possibilities by virtue of choices that you've made, or just as often have declined to make, because you are reluctant to accept responsibility for the opportunities that you are now able to create by virtue of seeing the possibilities that lay before you.