Death, meaning and tragedy

Abstract

In this article, the author submits Zygmunt Bauman's analysis of post-modernity as a life strategy entailing the 'deconstruction of immortality' to critical scrutiny. ‘Deconstructing’ the striving for immortality suggests the transformation of life into a continual rehearsal of the transcience and demise of all things, the celebration of moments or instances of short-lived fame or notoriety, and the effacement of the opposition between the transient and the durable. This idea—with its implicated suggestion that everything, including life itself, loses meaning and importance, and that the striving for durable effect becomes obsolete—is found to be both logically and morally incoherent. The author suggests and develops the idea of life as tragedy within the spectre of death as key to developing a more cogent life strategy, drawing on insights from Aristotle and Nietzsche, and countering the pessimism of Schopenhauer in this regard.