I just read a paper called “HEIDEGGER’S ANALYSIS OF DEATH: A REFLECTION ON MODERN MAN’S ‘LOSS’ OF DEATH’S MEANING AND REFERENCE TO LIFE.” By Ssekanjakko Vincent Bonny.
I wanted to share some thoughts on how it connects to my interests.
Heidegger wasn’t interested in death as a clinical event. He wasn’t concerned with the moment your heart stops beating. He was after something more existential: the idea that our relationship to death—specifically, our awareness of it—is what allows us to live authentically. He called this orientation Being-towards-death. And for me, as an artist working at the intersection of mortality and meaning, that phrase really connected with me.
It’s not a call to be morbid. It’s not about dwelling in despair. Being-towards-death is about lucidity. It’s about seeing clearly that life is short, that it ends, and that this fact—when we allow ourselves to face it—can shape how we live, what we create, and how we treat each other.
Heidegger said that most of us live in what he called “everydayness.” We defer death. We keep it abstract. It happens to other people, over there, someday. But not now. Not to me. That denial, he argued, keeps us anesthetized. It keeps us disconnected from our own agency and freedom. We live borrowed lives, following borrowed scripts. I’ve talked and written about this a lot.
But when death stops being a distant rumor and becomes a personal horizon, everything shifts. We’re thrown back onto ourselves. We’re forced to ask: What really matters? What am I doing with the time I have?
That’s the ground of authenticity.
And that’s where art comes in.
I believe artists—at least the ones doing honest work—are already living in that space. Whether we’re aware of it or not, creativity pulls us toward the edge of things. Toward memory, toward loss, toward impermanence. Every meaningful work of art is a kind of death ritual. It involves sacrifice. Vulnerability. A confrontation with what’s been lost—or what will be. To make anything real, you have to give something up. You have to face what can’t be controlled. That’s mortality talking.
But there’s more. This isn’t just a personal or creative stance—it’s an ethical one.
If I’m truly aware of death—my own and yours—it becomes harder to objectify, to other, to harm. I start to recognize that we’re all temporary. All finite. And maybe, if I’m paying attention, I start to live with more urgency, more care, more attention to what matters and less to what doesn’t. Death becomes a mirror—and sometimes, a compass.
So no, Being-towards-death isn’t a philosophical abstraction for me. It’s a way of living. A way of creating. A refusal to go numb. A refusal to let denial have the last word. It’s not about having answers. It’s about not looking away.
And that’s where I think the work begins.
What do you think? Is any of this landing for you?