An Inquiry In How the Practice of Cryonics Effects Identity

The practice of cryonics could only flourish in the postmodern era, a time peppered by society’s growing emphasis on body and identity. Western culture has progressed to a denial of age and as a symbiotic result, death. This essay will particularly utilise the work and ideology of Zygmunt Bauman, Anthony Giddens, David Ray Griffin and Mark C. Taylor among others. Attempting to show that our changing relationship with death, promoted by cryonics, is a reaction to our time and cultural conditioning, as Bauman argued our society no longer provides a reliable frame of reference . We are left to carve out our own identities without any sense of community, and the shared identity that a community can make possible, to help us negotiate socially acceptable behaviour. Death today has become a threat to our sense of rationality and undermines the control we desire to have over our bodies, souls and identities. Arguments presented by this essay regarding the changing understandings of body, death and identity need to be considered from both a theological and sociological perspective. Human identit

Our relationship to death is inevitably linked to the time that we live in and the products of our society, for example art literature and the media, are capable of displaying these beliefs. Just as the literature of modernism highlighted religious questioning examples of cryonics in the media today provide an explorative tool to examine existential questions such as: What happens after death? Placing this argument in context, Bauman’s case for the development of immortality from modernism to postmodern becomes particularly relevant. For Bauman the postmodern era…has modified the cultural perception of time in a significant way. Strategies of collective and individual immortality have shifted from a modern deconstruction of death to a postmodern deconstruction of immortality. Culturally we have broken our concept of death into smaller deaths, resulting in a belief that death is something that we can defeat. Bauman urges us to acknowledge the danger of these underlying beliefs because without death life loses it’s meaning. The meaninglessness of death in society today also points, disturbingly, to the meaninglessness of life, as the two surely have an alliance with each other.

Modernity brought with it a shift from a god centred to a man centred universe society began to question how they saw things, not just why they saw them. Christianity also went under the microscope people wanted to believe in god and an eternal afterlife, but they needed more proof as their spiritual beliefs were now, more than ever set against scientific beliefs. The weakening of religious beliefs has…altered our attitudes towards death. The far more unified and magical belief of an eternal afterlife does not seem to have been regained with the same confidence as it had before the height of modernity, leaving a void where the ‘pearly gates’ had once been. It is this instability that has led to a new emphasis upon…the material, the body and its desires. The vacuum left by our growing reluctance to fully reassume the possibility of an afterlife is a likely constituent in the decision making process of those willing sign up for cryonics. If a person believes that after death they will live forever in paradise why pay to try and come back to earth?

y itself, and the means of grasping and expressing our knowledge of the human, the episteme, is not possessed by any one discipline or field of knowledge precisely because of the evolutionary differentiation and changing basic configurations of the disciplines in the absence of overarching means of integration. This is a convincing a

Some topics in this essay:
Zygmunt Bauman, Taylor Attempting, EXAMPLES Alcor, David Aames, Sofia Reassuringly, , Vitrification Vitrification, Mary Shelley, body death, Cameron Crow, relationship death, Vanilla Sky, understandings identity body, film david, practice cryonics, identity body, identity body death, understandings identity, zygmunt bauman, life trying, control situation, death life,