But Kropotkin, why are you being so morbid?
Why are you thinking of death? are you suicidal or have cancer?
Only “sick” people think of death.
I am 59 and have no illness of any kind and I don’t intend, at least not until
my facilities become impaired, to kill myself.
So why death? Because death is an experience all humans/living things must
go through. What are the only guarantee’s in life? Death and taxes. Old joke…
Anyway, how are we going to face death? With denial, treating it like a taboo?
Death must be faced as it is one of the fundamental experiences of life.
To live is to die.
And so how can we approach death? Possibly with the Kantian-Kropotkin
questions… What can we know? What should we do? What ought we hope for?
What values do we need? should we expend energy on it? I can’t remember the other
Kropotkin questions. Anyway, what can we know about death? not much. What
should we do (about death), what ought we hope for, about death?
What values should we approach death with? Should we expend energy on death?
We must approach death with the same questions we approach life with, for
death is an essential experience of life.
So what do we hope for, what ought we hope for in death?
For some, death is a second chance, in death we shall receive the
justice we should have gotten in life. “The meek shall inherit the earth”.
For some, heaven is a place where we eternally contemplate god, but this
goal shows how deeply Greek philosophy infiltrated the Christian religion
for this eternal contemplation is what the Greeks philosophers thought
was the goal of life.
For in the answer the question, what is the goal of life, lies the
answer to the question of how we approach death. Because the Christian
thinks/feels that this life is preparation for the next life. This life is a test
for the next life and that makes this life far less important. All eyes, all actions
are shaped for entry into the next life and not about this life. Thus the Christian
negates this life in favor of the next life. This Christian form of nihilism has
has shaped our understanding of life for the last 2000 years. For Christianity
has been carried into all 4 corners of the earth and thus has affected/infected
all the earth.
We have been infected with the Christian viewpoint that makes life
less important then death and the eternal contemplation of god, that
we cannot, at least in the west, escape that viewpoint. It is a part of
the childhood indoctrinations, the myths, habits, prejudices, biases,
superstitions that we must come to understand in our quest to know
ourselves and then we must overcome those indoctrinations
and then we can discover our true values and when we act
upon our true values, not our childhood indoctrinations, then
we have become who we are… not until then……
As I am an atheist, I have, at least I am aware of my childhood
indoctrinations, but I have become aware of them… but most
people due to their childhood indoctrinations, pay lip service to
Christians values which are an attempt to get to heaven, as heaven is the
goal, not life as lived…people offer up lip service but have no
real commitment to Christian values. People just say they are
Christians without any attempt to be Christians. Social forces
require people to proclaim allegiance to the Christian religion, but
few if any actually practice what they preach and this bad faith is, in
part, what is wrong with America. We practice bad faith as official policy.
to begin the philosophical process of becoming who we are, we
must first become aware and then we must overcome, then and only
then can we, as a people, as a country, become who we are…………
As death is tied up into religious attitude, we must engage
with death in a religious manner, at least at first…
Kropotkin