Ontology

What do the things that scare us tell us about what it means to be human?

Why do some of us enjoy being scared by horror movies, and is it good for us? 

Why do movie audiences tend to complain more about watching childbirth scenes than about watching people being beheaded? 

What are the driving forces behind disgust and fear, and are they individual, social, cultural, universal, or a mixture of all of those?

I’m researching the philosophy of fear, and more specifically uncanniness, which is only partly an excuse to spend all my spare time watching horror movies and to expense my Shudder subscription.

What is it about pregnancy and childbirth that freaks us out so much? Why will hospital-based TV shows graphically depict gnarly injuries but not babies being born? Why was Chumbawumba’s album cover banned from most shops in the UK when it's  an image of something entirely natural?

Might it all have something to do with being reminded of our mortality? Western existential philosophy has historically been obsessed with death as the thing that brings meaning to life, an argument which roughly goes:

- life is meaningful because it is finite;

- death is what makes life finite;

- therefore, death is what makes life meaningful.

However, finite things necessarily have two events that make them finite: an end, yes, but also a beginning.

Could it be, therefore, that birth is ontologically important in a similar way to death?

I’m looking at this in relation to Heidegger’s work in Division II of Being and Time, in particular Derrida’s interpretation of Heidegger’s understanding of the uncanny. Briefly, this involves thinking about how life is fundamentally meaningless and we're all just making it up as we go along. This understandably terrifies us, so we try not to think about it as much as possible, which is why we tend to avoid thinking too much about death. And, if I'm right about their ontological similarities, about birth.

My research is taking me through all sorts of interesting topics within the phenomenology of pregnancy, including subjectivity, personhood, and states of in-between-ness.