readings

mc

January 25, 2012 at 3:00pm
Home

I will review—or at any rate visit—three strategies of restoring meaning to life that are widely on display as human responses to anxiety about death.

  • Discount the future—and live for the present.
  • Disindividuate—and identify yourself with cultural entities that will survive you.
  • Deny the finality of bodily death—and believe the individual self to be immortal.

— Humphrey, Nicholas. Soul Dust: The Magic of Consciousness. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2011.

Notes