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Lack and Transcendence: The Problem of Death and Life in Psychotherapy, Existentialism, and Buddhism. By David Loy. Atlantic Highlands, New Jersey: Humanities Press, 1996. Pp. xxii + 196.
Lack and Transcendence, by David Loy, analyzes two main approaches in comparative philosophy to the relation between death and transcendence. One approach sees these as separate or even opposing dimensions, with transcendence understood as the attainment of an eternal or everlasting realm that marks the overcoming of death, which is the hallmark of human finitude or mutability. This view is associated, according to Loy, with mainstream trends in Western monotheistic theology and eschatology, which maintain a belief in the unending survival of the soul after death; the conception of Platonic Ideas, or of mental forms subsisting in a timeless realm distinguished from the visible world of everchanging sensory phenomena; and Vedantic claims of an unchanging Brahman. Even in these standpoints, however, there is a connection between realms in that death can be understood as a necessary entranceway to the experience of eternity.
The second approach considers death and transcendence inextricably linked in that a full awareness of and an encounter with dying is essential for a realization of a transcendental state. This view is associated with various strains of modern psychotherapy and existentialism, particularly Kierkegaard's focus on anxiety and despair, Nietszche's view of the eternal now, and Heidegger's notion of Dasein as being-unto-death,...