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The Importance Of Death In Sartre's My Death

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The second aspect of the Situation one shall consider is My Death. Here, the restriction on one 's freedom is the facticity of death, because it is unavoidable fact of being a living being. Sartre sees that death robs us of creating meaning in life because once dead we no longer have a perspective. Following this, once we die we become beings-for-others, meaning that we become only what exists in the memories of others, thus making us an object. Meaning that once we die we are determined by the perspectives of others and thus their individual experience of us. Sartre explains this as death being a facticity which “alienates us wholly in our life to the advantage of the Other [...] To be dead, is to be a prey for the living.” (Sartre, 2003, p. 564). Here Sartre is referring to the idea that one can die too early or too late, too soon to have an impact or too late to be remembered correctly. This leads us to the idea that My Death cannot appear in a situation because “my death is not fixed by me; the sequences of the universe determines it.” (Sartre, 2003, p. 559). Meaning that our freedom, while alive, while in a situation, has no power over our death. This may seem to offer that in fact My Death is a restriction on one 's freedom but this is only so when one is thinking under a traditional conception of death, which is concerned with the importance of the irreversibility of death only because it prevents decisions and the possibility of giving meaning. What Sartre has us
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