Death, Humanistic Perspectives

Death is a biological phenomenon: All living organisms die. Biology, medicine, and other disciplines examine death scientifically. However, death is also a human phenomenon investigated by the human sciences, such as cultural anthropology, history, religious studies, and literary theory, as well as social sciences, such as sociology or sociopsychology. Philosophical perspectives on death constitute an important class of these humanistic perspectives.

This entry discusses the humanistic perspectives on death by drawing attention to the difference between naturalistic and humanistic approaches to human nature in general, and to death as a key aspect of human existence. First, this contrast is described in broad terms. The humanistic perspectives on death are then divided into three: essentialist, existentialist, and culturalist. The distinctions between these are based on general philosophical anthropology (the philosophical study of human nature), providing helpful categorizations across the humanistic disciplines. Another subdivision is the one between empirical and conceptual approaches to death. It is the task of philosophers to contribute to conceptual investigations of death and mortality, while others in the human sciences explore these issues on empirical grounds.

Humanistic and Naturalistic Perspectives

Naturalist accounts of human existence, including death, emphasize that human beings are natural creatures among other animals. They are not essentially different from other organisms, although their skills and capacities exceed those of animals. Naturalism arises from the advancement of the sciences in the modern age. From a scientific perspective, human beings occupy their distinctive place in the world simply as natural beings. They do not have any special “task” or purpose (telos) beyond itself. Scientists observe human life and death from an objective, thirdperson point of view, describing and explaining facts about how people live and die. Death, then, is not essentially different from, or more mysterious than, any other natural phenomenon. It is part of nature. If it is natural to live, it is natural to die. Science can describe and explain all the facts about death and dying that are explainable.

According to naturalism, there is no immortal soul (or its equivalents, as conceptualized in different religious traditions). There is nothing to seriously qualify as the subject that could survive death; the very idea of survival, immortality, must be rejected as unscientific. Death is the final, irreversible cessation of the processes of life. This kind of naturalism, or materialism, is the paradigm not only of science but of recent analytic philosophy of death, defining the context within which it is examined, for instance, whether or not death is bad for the one who dies—a question originally discussed by the ancient atomist Epicurus and his followers, especially Lucretius. (Yet, there are also analytic philosophers, such as Richard Swinburne, who defend dualistic and Christian ideas of immortality.)

From a more humanistic perspective, however, a reductive naturalist picture of humanity, including death and the experience of death, remains unsatisfying. For most people, death is something “more”—more mysterious and terrifying—than ordinary natural phenomena. Even those who deny the existence of supernatural beings (such as deities) or survival after death may find the naturalist perspective on death too restrictive. One need not adopt pseudoscientific beliefs about any “afterlife” in order to maintain that a natural-scientific treatment of human mortality is insufficient. [Page 275]Humanistic perspectives on death receive part of their motivation from the inadequacy of the purely scientific perspective, which, despite its enormous significance for understanding death as a biological event, fails to appreciate its human significance.

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