What is it about?
To think deeply about death is fundamental to human experience and therefore human finitude. But what is the meaning of death for life? Instead of thinking death merely as the cessation or conclusion of life, or as an aspiration to the infinite, or merely as a being-toward-death as Heidegger did, this essay explores Maurice Blondel's proposal of a metaphysics of death in terms of the existential value of resistance and perseverance in life. In the experience of our resistance to death, something spiritual and deeply existential emerges, such that it is in resistance to death that we are truly living.
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Why is it important?
This essay holds that there is something original and deeply helpful in Blondel's understanding of human finitude as the revelatory value of our resistance to death. Blondel's proposal goes beyond Heidegger's well-known existential "being-toward-death", but rather gestures towards the positions of thinkers such as Deleuze and Foucault in their radicalising of the positive metaphysical value of resistance and perseverance.
Perspectives
The proposals here are helpful in reorienting our reflection and experiencing of the value of death away from purely reflexive and cognitive categories to the real interaction of forces of resistance -- the somatic, the psychological, and the spiritual.
Dr Victor Emma-Adamah
University of Austin
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Finitude in Maurice Blondel, Journal for Continental Philosophy of Religion, October 2022, Brill,
DOI: 10.1163/25889613-bja10034.
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