Constructive and Destructive Catharsis:

The Humanistic Approach To Dealing With Death

          There is no easy way around dealing with death.  From the paralyzing fear and unknown moment of every man’s impending death, to the thoughts of slow process of sickness and dying itself, to the anxieties of future grieving over a lost beloved, all these disorienting thoughts find their way into the human consciousness at some point in a person’s life and occupy a relatively large amount of time being tossed around.

For some, death becomes a part of human awareness that they are willing to tuck away to a quiet place in the human mind, to be retrieved only when needed.  For some, death becomes a common everyday thought.  For some, death and the horrors it come along with, occupy their artwork: movies, writings and poetry, music and songs; some engage in extreme sports and human endeavors that ridicule death in the face.  Albeit whether these new conceptions on the arts and human life as imitative of human death is justifiable to the classical humanist or not, is not the question, as new trends in fashion and in the humanities take on even more than subjects and themes on death and as post-modernism gives rise to the murdered classical beauty through the emergence and proliferation of avant-garde artists. Could this be man’s unconscious effort to deal with that which he has no control over?  Could this manifestation of death in an increasingly-growing sub-culture of death in the media and in the humanities be man’s call for an understanding of death?

            Sadly enough, the sensationalism and romanticism of death in the arts and in the media does little to provide an objective understanding of death and the frequency of thoughts on death does not cancel death itself.  But it does, however, provide man with a venue for concretizing and realizing subjective perceptions on death.  The apparent obsession and romanticizing of death as seen in the media and the arts allows man a revelation and glorification of his own human sorrow and human pain where he may be empowered by his own participation in the juxtaposition of reason and passion, of love lost and love found, of fluidity and stability, of the interminable play of life and death.

            Indeed, there is no easy way around dealing with death.  Even the humanistic approach to dealing with death offers its own possible set of questions: until when is the expression of death in the arts and the media considered therapeutic?  When does it become obsessively unhealthy and destructive to the individual and to his society, offering man its own autolysis?   Is it possible that art, reflective of human action, may become the puppet master of the society who conceived it? 

            Catharsis and the purging of death through the creative arts pose its own constructive and destructive pull.  It is up to the grieving man to temper subjectivity with objectivity in dealing with death and pain in his creative artwork.   Until then, this society has yet to witness more brilliant works of art patterned after gruesomeness, violence, death and pain and this society can only do so much as empathize and recognize its own existence’s frailty in these and cross its fingers in the hope that these artworks do not prove themselves blueprints to the further disintegration and destruction of an already-suffering humanity.