DE Weekly: Finitude, Nothingness, & Meaning
Below is an archived email originally sent on May 26, 2025.
Finitude, Nothingness, & Meaning
In existentialism, there are some concepts with relative consensus, and others with lots of varying theories. Life itself (specifically the meaning of life) is one of those major questions with many answers. Another is Death itself. We’ve all heard the question “What is the meaning of life?”, but here’s another question: what is the meaning of death?
The existentialists had widely differing views on the importance of death and on the meaning of death, each with their own unique input. The two authors I’ll discuss today are Jean-Paul Sartre and Martin Heidegger.
As similar as they were in their philosophies (Sartre borrowed inspiration from Heidegger immensely), these two men were worlds apart in their philosophies on death. Let’s start with Heidegger.
Recall that Heidegger’s key concept was Dasein––lifted from the German word for “existence” and evoking the mode of human beings in the world.
Dasein draws our gaze from the world as a whole to the world as experienced on the individual level. It’s concerned with how we experience the world and ourselves, and what we must do with our unique mode of being-in-the-world.
Like any other experience in life, Dasein helps us to approach death––our own death––the same as any other experience in life.
Heidegger emphasized the finite nature of Dasein’s existence, because Dasein encompassed our existence. For Heidegger, Dasein, or life itself, is marked by the inevitability of death.
Further, and an important distinction to make from Sartre, is that Heidegger didn’t necessarily believe death is the end of time; rather, death is simply the ultimate horizon within which time itself is understood in our minds.
In other words, even though there is a sense of finitude in death and dying, especially as we imagine our own death, Heidegger says we cannot be sure what lies beyond it. It’s simply out of our imagination.
Now over to Sartre…
Sartre had a completely different view of death. According to Sartre, I am not capable of expecting nor experiencing “my death.”
He wrote that death is “extrinsic” to life; that is, death is not a part of life at all, but something else and outside of life entirely.
What then is death, we ask Sartre?
Nothing but an aspect of life we cannot escape nor rid ourselves of––part of our facticity––and a byproduct of our being-for-others.
Sartre believed that we cannot experience our own death, because when we’re gone, well… we’re gone. There’s nothing left to be experienced. All experience disappears once we cease to exist.
To Sartre, since death is something that cannot be experienced, it’s not only meaningless, but also deprives life of meaning. It takes meaning from life since it actually takes us out of life.
I must be honest. I find Sartre’s view on death to be absolutely absurd.
It comes down to one question: how the hell do you know what happens when we die? The answer is I don’t. In refusing to claim certainty on this question, Heidegger was leaps and bounds ahead of Sartre in wisdom.
Heidegger described us as beings-towards-death. We are all born into life and we will all die one day. That would mean death is just as important a part of life as life itself. One could say our lives culminate in death, that it is a huge experience––that the meaning of life includes death!
What I would have loved to ask Sartre is this: why run from death? Why turn our heads from it? Why give it the cold shoulder and try to downplay its importance?
Of course death is important.
If death were “extrinsic” from life, meaningless and senseless, and was nothing more than an aspect of our facticity, why, then, do we cry at the loss of a loved one? Why do we care when we see and hear of death? Why do we despair when we know death is to come?
Even if Sartre were correct––and I don’t believe he is––why would “nothingness” after death be something that renders life meaningless?
Heidegger believed nothingness was a fundamental aspect of being. He believed nothingness was not the absence of being, but rather a condition of being––one that reveals the possibility of being.
This just so happens to align with the Catholic church’s teaching on nothingness. (Ironic, since we’re discussing existentialism, of which so many proponents were self-proclaimed atheists.)
Creatio ex nihilo is the doctrine that all matter in the universe was created out of nothing, by God, in an act of creation whereby the entire cosmos came into existence (essentially the creation in the Book of Genesis).
This happens to describe the way Heidegger views existence and death. If he believes nothingness is a condition for existence to exist, then it’s also plausible we are created out of that same nothingness.
We are not nihilo (nothing); we are ex nihilo (out of nothing). And so, if we are out of nothing, what is the danger of returning to that same nothing?
All this to say… death is not meaningless. Of course it’s meaningful. It’s alright to admit this. It’s all a part of life.
“The meaning of life is that it stops.” –– Franz Kafka
Thanks for reading.
Sincerely,
Brandon J. Seltenrich
P.S.––
Happy Memorial Day.
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