I have never understood why Dasein, that being for whom being (I
want to write: Being) is an issue, should be essentially orientated towards
death. I can see how, for being/Being in general, or the fact of one’s own
being, to be an issue, one might need to have a conception of not being. And so
it might seem that the way that comes about is via an orientation towards, or
awareness of the possibility of, one’s own death. But I don’t see why that should
be necessary. Why couldn’t the possibility that one might not have existed be
enough, for example? Perhaps an orientation towards one’s contingent birth?
I mention this in the context of a health scare this year which –
rationally I think – made me at least take seriously the more than merely
abstract possibility of ceasing to be: the sense of not having a future. Hence
a quick thought on that.
Bill Fulford has taught me the use of a thought experiment or
class exercise to illustrate the diversity of values in values based practice
beyond moral values. It turns on this scenario:
You have an illness which will prove fatal in n
weeks/months/years.
There is a potential treatment which has a 50% complete success rate and a 50% instant fatality rate but you must take it today.
Question: for what value of n would you prefer to risk the treatment?
There is a potential treatment which has a 50% complete success rate and a 50% instant fatality rate but you must take it today.
Question: for what value of n would you prefer to risk the treatment?
Typically this question prompts a wide range of student answers
from months to nearly a normal expected full life term. At one extreme, a young trainee
medical student at Warwick University preferred the fixed fatality over the
50:50 life or death providing that n was, merely, at least a week or two. That is, for a
value of n as small as two weeks, he preferred that small fixed life to the 50% chance of dying
that day. When questioned, he replied that he would want to put his affairs in
order and that would be possible in a couple of weeks and so even a fortnight
was to be preferred to the potential treatment which might rule out any time for sorting things out.
But this student’s sang-froid was way beyond my own resources of
character this year. With the normal (perhaps presumptuous, given the standing
possibilities of being knocked off one’s bike) confidence in some sort of future undermined, I found that I wanted to take to my bed or pour a stiff drink, not as positive
project of enjoying the sleep or the drink but merely as an escape. With the prospect that the future might not exist simply made more than normally concrete, the practices that constitute a life seemed unavailable to me.
