Education to finitude: pedagogic reflections and paths of death education

Abstract

Heidegger, in Being and Time, wrote: “The abandonment of things and the opening to mystery belong to one another. They offer us the chance to live in the world in a fully different way, they promise us a new foundation” (Heidegger, 1959). A step that underlines the importance of accepting life, its temporality and the capacity to look at “the shadow that accompanies it”: death (Fadda, 2003). As Ciuffi claims, reflection upon death pertains to pedagogy, as the education of the sense of limit, finitude and human caducity (Ciuffi, 2018). But today, reflection on death is lacking, we don’t have the ability or willingness to think about it and “talk about it in its ontological radicalness, because it’s too outrageous and uncomfortable” (Roveda, 2005). The paper, moving from the theoretical framework explicated, addresses the complex issue of how education can help subjects in formation and particularly the elders to be more aware and competent (on both emotional and cognitive level) in managing their own or other people’s death (Bobbo, 2009). Old age, illness, physical decadence seem to be components of life no longer represented in a society obsessed by the young and beautiful; in a culture of consumption that highly valorizes youth and physical efficiency, the eldery are perceived as a marginal, incongruous presence: “to be elderly is an incapacitation, because it represents limitation of desires, moderation of needs, insensitivity to the seductions of marketing: in short… it’s an anathema” (Bauman, 2004). The paper illustrates the orientation of andragogy towards a gerotranscendence approach on old-age that accompanies the person towards the full and serene awareness of one’s own caducity, looking further into paths of death educations, also for the new generations.