philosophy and death

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Sooner or later we all face death. Will a sense of meaning help us?
Warren Ward from AEON website

Despite all our medical advances,’ my friend Jason used to quip, ‘the mortality rate has remained constant – one per person.’

Unless of course you are convinced that you have existed in past lives. Or are likely to be reincarnated into a new life. Then the quandary revolves more around the extent to which this is an incarnation/reincarnation of "I" [as you know yourself to be here and now] or the embodiment of a reality that is not able to actually be put into words.

Jason and I studied medicine together back in the 1980s. Along with everyone else in our course, we spent six long years memorising everything that could go wrong with the human body. We diligently worked our way through a textbook called Pathologic Basis of Disease that described, in detail, every single ailment that could befall a human being. It’s no wonder medical students become hypochondriacal, attributing sinister causes to any lump, bump or rash they find on their own person.

This reminds me of one possible take on an observation John Fowles made in [I believe] The Aristos. Human existence, he noted, is analogous to sitting at a desk awash with telephones. Big ones. Small ones. In between ones. They represent all of those different things above that can afflict our bodies. Our minds. We sit there waiting for the next one to ring...hoping that this time it is just one of the small ones. Or not more than one at a time. But we know that among the phones is the one that we dread the most. The one that, in ringing, ushers in the Big One. The physical ailment that culminates in our death. And, clearly, "a sense of meaning" here can be many different things to many different people.

Jason’s oft-repeated observation reminded me that death (and disease) are unavoidable aspects of life. It sometimes seems, though, that we’ve developed a delusional denial of this in the West. We pour billions into prolonging life with increasingly expensive medical and surgical interventions, most of them employed in our final, decrepit years. From a big-picture perspective, this seems a futile waste of our precious health-dollars.

That's how it works all right. Only, when the Big One has pounced on any particular one of us, the "big picture" can quickly be whittled down "in our head" to "me", "myself" and "I". Not the philosophy of death but our own.

What then of a "sense of meaning"? Why one and not another?

And what will yours be?

[iambiguous]

Sooner or later we all face death. Will a sense of meaning help us?
Warren Ward from AEON website

Another old friend of mine, Ross, was studying philosophy while I studied medicine. At the time, he wrote an essay called ‘Death the Teacher’ that had a profound effect on me. It argued that the best thing we could do to appreciate life was to keep the inevitability of our death always at the forefront of our minds.

It's one thing to imagine "death the teacher" when you have thought yourself into believing that, one way or another, death is not the end at all. Then what death teaches you is that in order to attain what you imagine your fate to be beyond the grave, there are certain requistes propelling you to choose particular behaviors in this side of it.

But what does death teach you when you have instead thought yourself into believing that what awaits you on the other side of the grave is oblivion...the utter obliteration of "I" for all time to come.

Many of course will see the lesson here as revolving around behaviors that sustain your existence. And that becomes problematic because you can find yourself not choosing to do things you would like to try because these behaviors bring with them an increasing possibility that one's life is endangered. Or you can find yourself in situations where others expect you to act in certain ways that you hesitate to choose because there is in turn increasing dangers involved. Someone might threaten those that you love but you note the risk that in intervening your own life is put at risk.

There are in fact countless existential contexts in which what you believe about death can have a profoundly problematic impact on how you react to them.

When the Australian palliative care nurse Bronnie Ware interviewed scores of people in the last 12 weeks of their lives, she asked them their greatest regrets. The most frequent, published in her book The Top Five Regrets of the Dying (2011), were:
I wish I’d had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me;
I wish I hadn’t worked so hard;
I wish I’d had the courage to express my feelings;
I wish I had stayed in touch with my friends; and
I wish that I had let myself be happier.

Same here. Ask that question to scores of people living in different historical, cultural and experiential contexts and you are likely to get different "top 5" answers. That some answers will occur more often than others reflects the continuities that all of us share as human beings. But individual regrets would seem to be manifestations of dasein. Each of us will regret different things for different reasons. And philosophers would not appear able to pin down the most "rational" things that one ought to regret.

[iambiguous]

Sooner or later we all face death. Will a sense of meaning help us?
Warren Ward from AEON website

The relationship between death-awareness and leading a fulfilling life was a central concern of the German philosopher Martin Heidegger, whose work inspired Jean-Paul Sartre and other existentialist thinkers. Heidegger lamented that too many people wasted their lives running with the ‘herd’ rather than being true to themselves. But Heidegger actually struggled to live up to his own ideals; in 1933, he joined the Nazi Party, hoping it would advance his career.

Indeed: How would being associated with fascists and Nazis not be the existential equivalent of being associated with but one more historical "herd"?

How is political and racial ideology not just another manifestation of the inauthentic man?

And, in fact, isn't the whole point of ideology to subsume death in the authentic life? Okay, you die. And maybe that's all there is. But at least your life came to reflect necessary truths on this side of the grave.

Despite his shortcomings as a man, Heidegger’s ideas would go on to influence a wide range of philosophers, artists, theologians and other thinkers. Heidegger believed that Aristotle’s notion of Being – which had run as a thread through Western thinking for more than 2,000 years, and been instrumental in the development of scientific thinking – was flawed at a most fundamental level. Whereas Aristotle saw all of existence, including human beings, as things we could classify and analyse to increase our understanding of the world, in Being and Time (1927) Heidegger argued that, before we start classifying Being, we should first ask the question: ‘Who or what is doing all this questioning?’

In regard to either life or death, what can it mean philosophically to speak of a "fundamental flaw"? After all, as soon as the focus becomes "who or what is doing all of this questioning" we are immediately confronted with all of the many, many historical, cultural, and individual narratives there have been. And that's just so far. Sometimes they overlap, other times they are very much at odds.

Instead, it is basically the objectivists who set philosophers to the task of "classifying and analyzing" human interactions as though they too were just one more function of the "scientific method". Thus philosophers like Ayn Rand came to champion Aristotle. And for her there was absolutely no distinction made between the either/or and the is/ought world. Even human emotions could be analyzed and classified as either the right or the wrong emotion to have in any particular context.

As for death: https://atlassociety.org/commentary/com ... 4280-death

Sure, if, as an Objectivist, someone is able to think him or herself into approaching death "objectively" in this manner, and, thus, is able to learn not to fear it, more power to them. That just doesn't work for me.

[iambiguous]

Sooner or later we all face death. Will a sense of meaning help us?
Warren Ward from AEON website

Heidegger pointed out that we who are asking questions about Being are qualitatively different to the rest of existence: the rocks, oceans, trees, birds and insects that we are asking about. He invented a special word for this Being that asks, looks and cares. He called it Dasein, which loosely translates as ‘being there’. He coined the term Dasein because he believed that we had become immune to words such as ‘person’, ‘human’ and ‘human being’, losing our sense of wonder about our own consciousness.

Not just being there. But existing "out there" in a particular world that is embedded in a particular historical and cultural context. And what makes our own consciousness a "wonder" along side the "rest of existence" is our awareness of death. The knowledge that we ourselves will one day die. And, assuming some measure of human autonomy, this awareness is understood by each of us as individual daseins.

In other words, there are many, many different ways in which to think about death. Our own and others. And to the best of my knowledge philosophers are unable to "think up" the most rational manner in which mere mortals are obligated to think about it. This "existential contraption" can then precipitate human behaviors that rationalize everything from the taking of one's own life to historical instances of genocide.

Heidegger’s philosophy remains attractive to many today who see how science struggles to explain the experience of being a moral, caring person aware that his precious, mysterious, beautiful life will, one day, come to an end. According to Heidegger, this awareness of our own inevitable demise makes us, unlike the rocks and trees, hunger to make our life worthwhile, to give it meaning, purpose and value.

For some, sure. But what of those who have come to conclude that this meaning will be derived largely from within the existential parameters of the life that one lives. That one cannot merely assume that what he or she concludes encompasses a "moral, caring person" is the template that all others are required or compelled to embrace in turn. For example, my own understanding of dasein in the is/ought world.

Indeed, the "search for meaning, purpose and value" can bring some to conclude that there is no overarching moral narrative able to be reconfigured into an overarching social, political and economic agenda. A few in fact coming to conclude that the most reasonable frame of mind here will lead one to suicide.

That someone like Victor Frankl survived the death camps enabling him to make that constructive leap forward in his own "search for meaning", does not entail that others in similar or very different sets of circumstance are being irrational if they choose a very different outcome.

When it comes to death, there appears to be only a frame of mind that one's lived life predisposes one toward. Unless of course someone here is able to convince me that this is not the case at all. Having already convinced himself.

[iambiguous]

Sooner or later we all face death. Will a sense of meaning help us?
Warren Ward from AEON website

Ten years ago, I was diagnosed with melanoma. As a doctor, I knew how aggressive and rapidly fatal this cancer could be. Fortunately for me, the surgery seemed to achieve a cure (touch wood). But I was also fortunate in another sense. I became aware, in a way I never had before, that I was going to die – if not from melanoma, then from something else, eventually. I have been much happier since then. For me, this realisation, this acceptance, this awareness that I am going to die is at least as important to my wellbeing as all the advances of medicine, because it reminds me to live my life to the full every day. I don’t want to experience the regret that Ware heard about more than any other, of not living ‘a life true to myself’.

Can you say that?

But that's always my point. We think and we feel and we say what we do about death based largely on our own personal experiences with it. With our own death and with others.

Think about it this way...

One day in your youth you come to think about death in a way that you had never thought about it before. Given whatever context, you have an experience that for the first time propels you into thinking --- really thinking -- about death.

My experiences emanated from the jungles of Vietnam. Yours from situations that, no doubt, were entirely different.

Okay, but what can we learn about it by probing the minds of all the great thinkers who have, down through the ages, themselves written about it. Scientists, philosophers, theologians. Is there a frame of mind that seems to encompass it the most rationally? Are you convinced that there is a way that reasonable men and women are most likely to accept as the most profound, least problematic assessment?

Or, instead, is your thinking far more likely to be derived from a personal experience such as is described above by the author?

And if that is the case how can you adequately respond to the assessments of others who have not had your own experiences? And how can they adequately respond to you not having had your experiences? What you share in common is the fact of death. But the facts embedded in any particular death can vary in ways that may well be beyond our capacity to communicate.

As for the cliche about dealing with your own death by living whatever is left of your mortal existence to the fullest -- and on your own terms -- that to is no less an existential contraption embodied in the lives of others that we may or may not be able to grasp with any real degree of empathy. Or even sympathy.

[Meno_]

My experiences were more varied, biggy.
I did actually survived a major conflict -WW2 , in Hungary. ( as a baby) Then a revolution, then illegally crossing a border, then capture and imprisonment, into a 'lager' for what seemed like eternity, then almost death and a revival from LSD ingestion, then nearly dying on an almost crashing air force jet.

So , death and dying has always been a process by which I was always surrounded and involved in, the current pandemic notwithstanding.

We all have our battles, and my current ones appear the most radically profound, and enigmatic, lead ing me to the search for and.through gnosis.

The fear has.caused me to search : and to try to arrive at some logos , through which a catapault may enable a jump , a transcending jump into self realizing methods by which to access the intent that the supposed higher realm can re position the conflicting venues between background, and foreground, that may become the focus , rather then the object.

In some manner, the jump becomes the ultimate contrast between the inception and the extinction it's self.

The more impersonal such sensation becomes , does not imply a corresponding caveat that the less personal situation necessarily should loose significance.

On the contrary, or even without using opposing forces as if the will has.to obey , in likeness to field mechanical , pre-transitional Newtonian laws. (Integrating them, rather then disqualifying them).

The battles within overwhelmingly overbear those that are without, in both sense.of the word.

[Fixed Cross]

I did actually survived a major conflict -WW2 , in Hungary. ( as a baby) Then a revolution, then illegally crossing a border, then capture and imprisonment, into a 'lager' for what seemed like eternity, then almost death and a revival from LSD ingestion, then nearly dying on an almost crashing air force jet.

Holy cow.

Speaking of which, what do you all think of belief in reincarnation as an ethics, which prepares the believer for death in a natural way?
It doesn't even have to be true to be useful in that sense.

[iambiguous]

Sooner or later we all face death. Will a sense of meaning help us?
Warren Ward from AEON website

Most Eastern philosophical traditions appreciate the importance of death-awareness for a well-lived life. The Tibetan Book of the Dead, for example, is a central text of Tibetan culture. The Tibetans spend a lot of time living with death, if that isn’t an oxymoron.

But grappling with the importance of death-awareness merely becomes another manifestation of how as a proponent of Eastern philosophical and religious traditions, it is juxtaposed to how one construes the "spiritual" contours of life-awareness. How does that really get us any closer to connecting the dots between life and death insofar as how we actually choose to live that life and experience that death.

The East’s greatest philosopher, Siddhartha Gautama, also known as the Buddha, realised the importance of keeping the end in sight. He saw desire as the cause of all suffering, and counselled us not to get too attached to worldly pleasures but, rather, to focus on more important things such as loving others, developing equanimity of mind, and staying in the present.

Still, the manner in which one comes to approach his or her own death appears to be no less the embodiment of dasein. Instead, we simply have any number of conflicting religious/spiritual denominations providing the faithful with endless assumptions about how one is expected to love others, develop equanimity of mind and stay the present.

When? where? how? why? In what actual set of circumstances? Let's not go there, okay?

In other words, spiritually. As a way of thinking of human interactions in a world where the reality of conflicting goods is simply subsumed in general description intellectual contraptions like this.

As for detaching oneself from worldly pleasures that become considerably more attainable if you are able to think yourself into believing that, to the extent you focus instead on spiritual growth, you will be rewarded on the other side. And, of greatest importance of all, that there is existence beyond the grave. And, thus, that connecting the dots between morality/enlightenment here and now and immortality/salvation there and done becomes by far your greatest concern.

On the other hand, if one is actually able to believe this sort of thing...

The last thing the Buddha said to his followers was: ‘Decay is inherent in all component things! Work out your salvation with diligence!’

...how exactly is that to be made applicable to the behaviors you choose? Behaviors predicated on the moral and political values [prejudices] one comes to embody existentially as the personification of dasein out in a particular world historically, culturally and circumstantially.

I know: let's not go there either.

Or, for the objectivists among us, sure, go there, but wholly in sync with their own trajectories.

[iambiguous]

The Meaning of Death
Laszlo Makay, George Marosan Jr. and David Vatai consider whether death destroys meaning or creates it.

Unsurprisingly, people are obsessed with the meaning of their lives. Many also think that death is the antithesis of meaning – the single greatest obstacle to a meaningful life. However, what if this is a misunderstanding? Moreover, if we discovered the meaning of death (if any exists), would it cast light on the meaning of life?

A misunderstanding? Doesn't this suggest there is in a way in which to think about death that reflects the most reasonable understanding. Or at least a selection of options such that if your idea isn't among them then you are in fact misunderstanding death?

In fact there are any number of narratives [religious by and large] which position death in the only possible way in which the faithful are expected to embody it. By the Book, as it were.

As for the relationship between a possible meaning of death and a possible meaning of life, few things can possibly be more existential. After all, when push comes to shove, it's your life and your death. And all of us are in the same boat here: able to communicate them to others only up to a point. Even identical twins will not live exactly the same lives.

Here, as Sartre suggested, "existence is prior to essence". At least until some philosopher comes along and demonstrates that his or her own assessment of life and death is essentially true. And not in the manner in which the objectivists here do it: by confining this demonstration to what they believe is true "in their head".

All of us have heard things like “Everyone dies, so life is meaningless.” Or taking this logic to a higher level, someone may say: “The unavoidable destruction of the universe – via heat death, the big crunch, or the big rip, you name it – makes the existence of the entire human race meaningless.” These simple reasonings seem correct. Our own deepest fears only serve to help them appear realistic.

This perspective only makes sense to me if "meaning" in our lives revolved entirely around the existence of one or another teleology or intellectual contraption. As though we spent the preponderance of our actual lived lives thinking about the meaning of it itself.

Which is simply not the case. Instead, we have a mind and a body programmed biologically to afford us any number of pleasurable experiences. The food we eat, the drinks we down, the orgasms we feel, the love we share, the friendships we sustain, the music we hear, the films we enjoy, the arts we explore, the endless gratifications available to us through the use of drugs.

How does a lack of overall meaning in our lives make these things less fulfilling, less absorbing, less enthralling?

[iambiguous]

The Meaning of Death
Laszlo Makay, George Marosan Jr. and David Vatai consider whether death destroys meaning or creates it.

Things have meaning because they are meaningful to somebody. Once that person dies then nothing matters to them any more, so surely the things in their life that had meaning no longer do?

Ever and always, how can this not be but a point of view? Assuming that oblivion is in fact the fate of "I" at death nothing can matter to a corpse. And one's death will have meaning [or no meaning] to someone as the embodiment of dasein. The point here being that there does appear to be an argument able to encompass what one's death ought to mean to others.

And then suppose next week or next month or next year or the next century the really Big One comes hurtling down from space, smashes into Earth and literally wipes out the entire human species. No minds are around for the life and the death of anyone to have meaning.

So this part...

Hasty conclusions are usually misleading, and in this case, the conclusions are incorrect. Some meanings or their bearers can survive our own individual deaths – such as our own children or our contribution to society. Many external goals and achievements may continue to exist after our death. And in some special cases – for example, sacrificing oneself for a noble cause – death may even be necessary to fully realise a meaningful individual life.

...is no less embedded in that part. Sure, as long as minds are around that remember you, minds that engage in behaviors that precipitate consequences derived precisely from the fact of knowing you, you can take some sort of comfort "here and now" that even beyond death "you" stick around. "You" matter.

If this takes a bit of the sting out of oblivion for you, all the better. It just doesn't for me.

What about the meaninglessness of humanity on a cosmic scale? It doesn’t hurt to know that science tells us that the longer the forecasting period, the less reliable the prediction. Any prognosis in the range of billions of years is uncertain at best. If we do not know what comprises 95% of the universe, we cannot be confident of our predictions about it. We cannot even be certain that the universe will ever be destroyed. Consequently, it would be a long shot to find our existence meaningless just because of some uncertain end-of-the-cosmos scenarios set untold billions of years in the future.

Come on, only to the extent that "I" itself is able to participate in one or another measure of existence on a "cosmic scale", does it make sense [to me] to even bring it up. Instead, the sheer mind-boggling mystery of existence is something we can cling to as one or another measure of hope. Maybe in that 95% we know little or nothing of at all there is a place for "I". And in a way that we can't even begin to imagine.

It's just that when the body disintegrates in the grave or comes down to a pile of ashes in an urn, the part about "I" then becomes reconfigured into a "soul". And that can be pinned down...how exactly? In faith?

Maybe to you all of this makes finding our existence meaningless a long shot. If so, that's all that matters. I just wish I could come up with a way to convince myself of the same.

[Meno_]

The Meaning of Death
Laszlo Makay, George Marosan Jr. and David Vatai consider whether death destroys meaning or creates it.

Things have meaning because they are meaningful to somebody. Once that person dies then nothing matters to them any more, so surely the things in their life that had meaning no longer do?

Ever and always, how can this not be but a point of view? Assuming that oblivion is in fact the fate of "I" at death nothing can matter to a corpse. And one's death will have meaning [or no meaning] to someone as the embodiment of dasein. The point here being that there does appear to be an argument able to encompass what one's death ought to mean to others.

And then suppose next week or next month or next year or the next century the really Big One comes hurtling down from space, smashes into Earth and literally wipes out the entire human species. No minds are around for the life and the death of anyone to have meaning.

So this part...

Hasty conclusions are usually misleading, and in this case, the conclusions are incorrect. Some meanings or their bearers can survive our own individual deaths – such as our own children or our contribution to society. Many external goals and achievements may continue to exist after our death. And in some special cases – for example, sacrificing oneself for a noble cause – death may even be necessary to fully realise a meaningful individual life.

...is no less embedded in that part. Sure, as long as minds are around that remember you, minds that engage in behaviors that precipitate consequences derived precisely from the fact of knowing you, you can take some sort of comfort "here and now" that even beyond death "you" stick around. "You" matter.

If this takes a bit of the sting out of oblivion for you, all the better. It just doesn't for me.

What about the meaninglessness of humanity on a cosmic scale? It doesn’t hurt to know that science tells us that the longer the forecasting period, the less reliable the prediction. Any prognosis in the range of billions of years is uncertain at best. If we do not know what comprises 95% of the universe, we cannot be confident of our predictions about it. We cannot even be certain that the universe will ever be destroyed. Consequently, it would be a long shot to find our existence meaningless just because of some uncertain end-of-the-cosmos scenarios set untold billions of years in the future.

Come on, only to the extent that "I" itself is able to participate in one or another measure of existence on a "cosmic scale", does it make sense [to me] to even bring it up. Instead, the sheer mind-boggling mystery of existence is something we can cling to as one or another measure of hope. Maybe in that 95% we know little or nothing of at all there is a place for "I". And in a way that we can't even begin to imagine.

It's just that when the body disintegrates in the grave or comes down to a pile of ashes in an urn, the part about "I" then becomes reconfigured into a "soul". And that can be pinned down...how exactly? In faith?

Maybe to you all of this makes finding our existence meaningless a long shot. If so, that's all that matters. I just wish I could come up with a way to convince myself of the same.

Not at all. The death of the gods , then followed by the death of the higher culture, then the abstraction of art, finally the reduction of the foundemental distinctive features ,where contrast disperses, without universal emphatic and universal effects. The identity, that personal attribute, has been reduced into various machinery, by Deuleuze and Attari, and prognosed by Huxley.

We have become what we always were, , animals, who tried to place ourselves in a scheme, where accountability meant something.

Started with the Copernican revolution, where the East meant an initial , nameless, faceless mass, with little more function then working ant colony. The will to overcome the power of ego death has lost pretty much all it's significance.

Good thing and a saving grace, is, that thanatos has overcome the life force, by negating it's significance, and death is pretty much a formless transition of masses and energies.

Man , as an experiment , has failed to measure up to its potential, but individual death is passe, and it is this feer, that has propelled the species man, albeit with a nagative motive, to achieve this.

Knowledge, and the fear of it's absence has reduced mankind to an absolute dependency on replacing a qualified position of certainty, back into the abyss .

A reversal toward the negative eternal return. Maybe a quantum break will qualify as the primordial return of a Christ as Superman.

[iambiguous]

The Meaning of Death
Laszlo Makay, George Marosan Jr. and David Vatai consider whether death destroys meaning or creates it.

Life and Death Issues

If we want to be correct about the meaning of life in the face of death, we should first understand some basics about death.

‘Life’ has different definitions depending on the perspective and approach. Someone may say that the basic criteria for life are the utilization of free energy, reproduction, and the capacity for metabolism; but there is no single correct definition. Philosophy, biology, even astronomy, have divergent descriptions.

And these definitions are pertinent by and large to human interactions in the either/or world. The hard sciences are bursting at the seams with facts about life that we here rarely get into debates about. Let alone heated debates. And even the soft sciences have accumulated a large number of psychological, social and political facts about our relationships which are widely accepted. Definitions sustaining rational thinking here make a lot of sense if our communication is going to be intelligible at all.

And, in turn, biologically, physically, phenomenologically, there are any number of apparently objective truths about death. How we die. What we can die from. What keeps death at bay. And we are able to acquire more precise knowledge over time.

Thus:

Until recently, people who did not breathe were considered dead. This criterion was so unreliable that being buried alive occurred so often that fear of it was common enough to get its own name: taphophobia. The methods to establish death slowly became more trustworthy: a lack of pulse or heartbeat, then observing the non-functioning of the brain.

Still, the bottom line is that one way or another we will die and there will be a way in which to establish it. Where the definitions give way to debate, however, is when life and death are intertwined or pitted against each other in one or another ontological and/or teleological assessment which all others are meant to share.

The purpose of life, the meaning of death. You tell me: how close have philosophers come to establishing this? Link me to what you consider to be the best arguments.

Instead, these questions and answers are still largely reserved for the hard guys:

While biology and the medical sciences have their various definitions of life and death, we should dig even deeper, to account for the viewpoint of physics. After all, biology is essentially based on chemistry, and chemistry is based on physics. At the most fundamental level of physics, we find the law of conservation of energy and matter. This law does not allow annihilation in the literal sense, only the transformation of matter and energy. Matter/energy cannot be destroyed and it cannot disappear; it can only change.

On the other hand, in grappling with an understanding of your own life and death, is this the place that you would start? Or would you concede that biologically, chemically, physically, "I" is ever and always embedded in the parameters of the either/or world. In nature. But what of nurture? What of the social, political and economic parameters of "I" in the is/ought world of conflicting goods.

How might "I" here be profoundly more problematic?

[Meno_]

Iamgious says,

"On the other hand, in grappling with an understanding of your own life and death, is this the place that you would start? Or would you concede that biologically, chemically, physically, "I" is ever and always embedded in the parameters of the either/or world. In nature. But what of nurture? What of the social, political and economic parameters of "I" in the is/ought world of conflicting goods.

How might "I" here be profoundly more problematic?"


I can not begin by a literal descriptive difference between the sift and the hard sources.

Tangentionally a critique could be leveled to a particularly Western tradition, since such as an either/ or starting point is not really emphasized in the East.

So this possible critique aside, which can be generalized by a/ the critique of pure reason, a flung out tangency relates emphatically to moralistic sources, and that You may confirm.

The basic difference in the personality of the phenomenology of Christ is subsumed under and not over that of the ontology of the Yahweh, as the Father subsumes the Son

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This is important the concern with the "i", as a transposutional object/subject.

Are this point I concur with Your description of the insufficiency of the above quoted references, for they are closed categorically in the usual Kantian method to inquire about the substantiallly that was likewise categorically foreclosed.

However, like all great thinkers, what they thought privately , may not have coincided with their descriptions, and what they have symptomologically guarded, was a hidden intentionality, which , may have upset real-politic6 in dime immeasurable manner.

That goes for Jesus, for Kang, Nietzsche Darwin ....

The basic tribalism does rule, at least in the heyday of philosophical investigations, and it is no irony or coincidence that the intuitive progression of variables was realized as measurable only by a probabilistic route of a reduction which may have missed coils of extra traveled routed-through mazes of least resistant simplest, most readily accessibly channels.

So here, the art of philosophical venue. was made to conform to the basic mirrored stage of tribal apotheosis, gained by superintelligent. dominance over the supra intelligent transpersonal objective.

This hidden intention took time to mature, as do fruit, and the timeliness of the forbidden one, fell far from it's source.

The metaphor, which grew out of what has essentially been reduced to myth, suffers the same fate, it has to find it's least dimensional representation through the either/ or, mot coincidental Wittgenstein sourced: philosophical investigations: with reliance on mass literacy on the most phenomenal level.

But Russell/Wittgenstein had their optimistic days in the sun, overshadowed by returns which have diminished considerably.

So I totally agree, with Your patent description, and it is with apprehension that such uncovering may bring to light that represents a coiling snake consuming it's own tale, which is extremely concerning

[iambiguous]

The Meaning of Death
Laszlo Makay, George Marosan Jr. and David Vatai consider whether death destroys meaning or creates it.

Life and Death Reconsidered

So what is death’s meaning? The meaning is its contribution to the success, survival, adaptation, and development of life. The fact that life is present almost everywhere on our planet in such a great diversity today is only made possible by death. By the same token, death has also contributed to the emergence of humanity.

On the other hand, given your own inevitable existential death, how comforting is that? On par with, say, seeing it as but one more manifestation of being "at one with the universe". Yet there are some who are in fact able to take some measure of comfort in it. I've bumped into them on and offline now for years. Unfortunately, it's not like this consolation is able to be reconfigured into a pill. Swallow it, and that's how you can feel too.

Instead, most are likely to suckle on one or another religious or spiritual path in order to not have nothing to suckle on at all. Also, those who are able to blot it all other through distractions, or actual drugs that are around to provide the sort of "high" that nothing will bother you at all.

Furthermore, immortality would not itself absolve life of apparent meaninglessness. In fact, a lack of death would make life unbearable in the long run, as well as unsustainable. Immortality would likely lead to an overcrowded Earth with societies full of inequalities and social tensions in a collapsing ecosystem.

Yes, if we were able to live forever in a No God world it would seem reasonable to me to argue that life could still be construed as meaningless. But so what? Think about all of the pleasure that you are able to derive from your body such that not having any meaning behind it is, well, irrelevant.

The food we eat. The music we love. The art that enchants us. The athletes we admire. The love that we feel. The sex that we crave. And on and on and on. Who needs meaning then? I certainly don't.

The problem of course is this: that along with the pleasure, comes all of the pain too. So, sure, if I was unable not to live forever and the pain began to overwhelm the pleasure, that would be terrible. That's the beauty of suicide even given the 70 odd years we have now. It's comforting to know that it is an option if the suffering does become unbearable.

[iambiguous]

https://www.ilovephilosophy.com/viewtop ... 1&t=174888

[surreptitious75]

Death is a transition from consciousness to non consciousness
But it is also a transition from one atomic state [ your live body ] to another atomic state [ your dead body ]
Atoms and sub atomic particles [ protons / neutrons / electrons ] have the longest known lifespan of anything at all in the observable Universe
The elements you are made from [ carbon / oxygen / hydrogen ] came from dead stars that existed billions of years before you were conceived
The atoms that those elements are made from will carry on existing for billions of years after you have died

And so your existence is merely of a very temporal insignificance in the total lifespan of all of the atoms / sub atomic particles that you are made from
In that sense the physical you does not die for a very long time indeed but merely gets re arranged into other types of matter [ what ever they may be ]
You are also mass which is energy and energy cannot be wasted so in that very specific sense you are eternal as well [ as is everything else that is mass ]

And while this is a very scientific way of looking at death it can also be a very philosophical one too
Knowing that you survive in some form billions of years after you die can be an excellent coping mechanism for dealing with ones own mortality
Also accepting it as a universal feature of all life not just our own or our species rather than refusing to acknowledge it till absolutely necessary

[MagsJ]

And while this is a very scientific way of looking at death it can also be a very philosophical one too
Knowing that you survive in some form billions of years after you die can be an excellent coping mechanism for dealing with ones own mortality
Also accepting it as a universal feature of all life not just our own or our species rather than refusing to acknowledge it till absolutely necessary

Agree.. exactly how our departure is to me, too.

From dust, back to dust. Is that an objective fact? Iam!

[iambiguous]

Dying At The Right Time
Morgan Rempel wonders whether there is a good time to die.

Not long ago, while waiting for a haircut at the barber shop, I found myself thumbing through a well-worn copy of Time magazine from March 12, 2007. The magazine’s closing piece, ‘The Fine Art of Dying Well’ by Pulitzer-Prize-winning columnist Charles Krauthammer got me thinking, not only about the examples of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ deaths he mentions, but about something I had read only days before by Friedrich Nietzsche on that very topic.

Focusing on several famous deaths from the relatively recent past, Krauthammer’s article points to a handful of factors that come into play in determining whether a particular exit from the stage of life deserves to be characterized as a ‘good death’. After quickly applauding the ‘good death’ of American writer Art Buchwald (who died of kidney failure in 2007, mocking his looming death to the very end), Krauthammer moves swiftly to his central hypotheses: that ‘dying well’ is very often simply “a matter of luck.”

One way luck can play a significant role in the attainment or undermining of a ‘good death’ has to do with timing. It turns out that when one dies can sometimes be as important as how.

As most of you would no doubt point out, my immediate reaction to this is the only reaction I have ever had here to things of this sort: that both a "good death" and a "bad death" in a No God world -- a world in which value judgments of this sort are subjective -- is but another in a long line of existential contraptions rooted in dasein.

And, therefore, "I" can only wait for the serious philosophers among us to come up with an assessment of the "good death" that may well be construed by all rational people as the bottom line in discussions of death itself.

Now, the science of dying or the philosophy of dying must sooner or later get down to the death of any particular one of us. How as a scientist or a philosopher might one differentiate a good from a bad death? If that is even thought possible at all. On the other hand, in focusing in on the "art of dying", this lends itself far more to subjective/subjunctive reactions. But, in that case, "dying at the right time here" can amount to practically anything. Thus to suggest that Art Buchwald died a "good death" in that he mocked it all the way to the end, might certainly strike some as a fine example of it. But not others.

Still, I'm not entirely clear regarding the part about luck here. People are usually thought to be lucky when something happens or does not happen to them in such a manner that what does in fact happen is "beyond their control". So, in regard to death, any particular one of us may "die at the right time" from our own point of view. And as a result [more or less] of luck. But the death itself and the reactions of others to it as a "good death" seems no less embedded in dasein to me. And philosophers seem no less able to establish that any particular death was in fact either a "good death" or a "bad death".

[iambiguous]

Death is a transition from consciousness to non consciousness
But it is also a transition from one atomic state [ your live body ] to another atomic state [ your dead body ]
Atoms and sub atomic particles [ protons / neutrons / electrons ] have the longest known lifespan of anything at all in the observable Universe
The elements you are made from [ carbon / oxygen / hydrogen ] came from dead stars that existed billions of years before you were conceived
The atoms that those elements are made from will carry on existing for billions of years after you have died

And so your existence is merely of a very temporal insignificance in the total lifespan of all of the atoms / sub atomic particles that you are made from
In that sense the physical you does not die for a very long time indeed but merely gets re arranged into other types of matter [ what ever they may be ]
You are also mass which is energy and energy cannot be wasted so in that very specific sense you are eternal as well [ as is everything else that is mass ]

And while this is a very scientific way of looking at death it can also be a very philosophical one too
Knowing that you survive in some form billions of years after you die can be an excellent coping mechanism for dealing with ones own mortality
Also accepting it as a universal feature of all life not just our own or our species rather than refusing to acknowledge it till absolutely necessary

Some or any or all or none of this may or may not "in fact" be true.

But in regard to death what brings out actual existential reactions from us is the part that centers around "I".

How "here and now" any particular "I" loves this or that, loves him or her. Or has accumulated any number of pleasurable experiences that brings one enormous fulfillment and satisfaction. Or has commitments and responsibilities to others that are snuffed out in tumbling over into the abyss.

Or the opposite. Loves no one or nothing. Has come to embody pain and suffering that has become unbearable. Has no commitments or responsibilities towards anyone.

And then all of the actual lives that fall somewhere in between.

That's the part deeply embedded in dasein that in my view is simply beyond the reach of either science or philosophy.

Or, rather, still seems that way to me.

My own particular "burden" here is that I have come to construe my own existence as essentially meaningless. And, in turn, that all of my own moral and political values are thought to be but existential prejudices subsumed in a fractured and fragmented "I" in my interactions with others. And that, for better or for worse, death commences the obliteration of "I" for all time to come.

So, here: Yo, Mr. Philosopher, any advice?

[surreptitious75]

How you perceive your own existence in the grand scheme of things is only something that you can do and no one else
For it is not my place to tell others how they should think in relation to that [ or indeed anything else for that matter ]

I do not give advice even if it is asked because I think that minds should think for themselves wherever possible
I am here to observe not to participate as from that comes a sense of detachment that gives me peace of mind

I am merely passing through and so am slowly letting go the older I become
I keep myself occupied but still know that this existence is only temporary

[iambiguous]

Dying At The Right Time
Morgan Rempel wonders whether there is a good time to die.

One way luck can play a significant role in the attainment or undermining of a ‘good death’ has to do with timing. It turns out that when one dies can sometimes be as important as how.

To illustrate this theory, [Charles] Krauthammer recalls the death of Mother Teresa in 1997. As is well known, for over forty years Mother Teresa devoted to herself to caring for some of Calcutta’s most desperate citizens; the poor, the orphaned, the sick, the dying. Krauthammer asks, “does anyone remember when Mother Teresa died? The greatest saint of our time died on the frenzied eve of the funeral of the greatest diva of our time, Princess Di.”

Again, "luck" here means something entirely different for me. It is no less embodied in dasein. After all, for some people, Mother Teresa's life -- however luck is factored into it -- was not good at all:

https://www.cnn.com/2016/08/31/asia/mot ... index.html
https://medium.com/@KittyWenham/mother- ... b395177572
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/mother-t ... M3V0wM9-Ij

And that's before we get to the critiques from radical left wing and Marxist factions.

You can talk about how luck plays a role in lives like hers but sooner or later that life will be judged by others based on their own moral and political and religious views. The part where, from my frame of mind, luck gets tangled up in contingency, chance and change embodied in dasein.

That Mother Teresa had the "bad luck" to die when she did, is the least of what some want to focus on.

Krauthammer further illustrates this theory with the sad example of Russian composer Sergei Prokofiev (1891-1953). “Tormented in life by Stalin, his patron and jailer,” notes Krauthammer, “Prokofiev had the extraordinary bad luck of dying on the same day as the great man.” Because all of Moscow’s musicians and flowers were reserved for Stalin’s massive state funeral, Prokofiev’s interment was accompanied by paper flowers and tape-recorded music, and news of the composer’s passing was relegated to the margins of Soviet media, which eulogized Comrade Stalin for weeks. Prokofiev’s ill-timed departure ensconced the composer “forever in the tyrant’s shadow” notes Washington Post critic Sarah Kaufman.

Again: Who would focus on "luck" here?! And how is that related to whether others would see his demise as either a "good death" or a "bad death".

I must be missing the point here.

For me, a good or a bad death always revolves around the balance between the pleasure and pain. If the things you love in life, the things that bring you fulfilment and satisfaction amount to considerable more in your life than the parts that bring you suffering and pain, then losing all of that amounts to a bad death. Whereas if it is the other way around, and the pain and the suffering are taken away, it is a good death.

But, again, this always revolves in turn around whether you are able to believe in God and a route to Heaven or in No God but still en route to Nirvana.

[iambiguous]

Dying At The Right Time
Morgan Rempel wonders whether there is a good time to die.

...Nietzsche places great weight on the matter of timing in achieving a good death. Zarathustra emphasizes the difficult art of going at the right time:

“Many die too late and some die too early. Still the doctrine sounds strange: ‘Die at the right time.’… Die at the right time: thus Zarathustra teaches.”

This sort of thinking does make sense in that it is inevitable in matters of both life and death that mere mortals are biologically programed to make speculations about them. Our species has evolved a brain able to ponder the self out in a particular world. Why are things the way they are? Why are they not some other way? Is there a better way for things to be? Is there an optimal or most rational way that things should unfold.

Thus the human brain is the only brain able to make that leap from the either/or world to the is/ought world. In regard to both life and death.

But unlike Nietzsche [apparently] once I take God out of the picture, I come to recognize -- if only as an existential contraption -- that my own conjectures regarding both life and death come from a fractured and fragmented "self" utterly in the dark regarding the reason for existence itself. Thus while I can speculate about the meaning of both life and death, I have "here and now" thought myself into believing that such rumination is basically futile.

Thus: I will never know because as an infinitesimally tiny speck of existence in the context of all there is, I never can know.

One type of death Nietzsche’s Zarathustra explicitly recommends is “to die in battle and squander a great soul.” It is likely that Nietzsche, a well-known admirer of the classical world’s celebration of strength and struggle, associates this heroic form of death with ancient Greece and Rome. In addition to dying in battle, Zarathustra celebrates two types of death: i) The so-called voluntary death, and ii) what he terms the consummating death.

So, how are Zarathustra and his creator not basically making fools of themselves to speak of God's death, the will to power, supermen and last men as though they too don't get swallowed up in an essentially meaningless existence on the inevitable path to oblivion.

Or [perhaps] to recur over and over and over again for all the rest of eternity.

Again, I recognize why some will confront these things as they do in that they are programed through the evolution of life on Earth to [in a world where "I" have some measure of free will] to choose to. But, for me, that doesn't take away the ultimate futility of it all.

[iambiguous]

Dying At The Right Time
Morgan Rempel wonders whether there is a good time to die.

Socrates’ Death

With respect to the voluntary dimension of Socrates’ death, two things immediately come to mind:

Socrates’ most famous student, Plato, tells us in The Apology that during Socrates’ legendary trial for impiety and corrupting the youth of Athens, each side was given the opportunity to propose a punishment to the jury. Socrates’ accusers proposed death. Instead of offering a realistic proposal of his own – which may well have been countered by a compromise proposal of exile on the part of the accusers – Socrates dares to suggest that rather than punish him, Athens should reward him with ‘free maintenance’ for life. Plato tells us that Socrates’ next proposal was that of a very small fine. With these mocking and audacious proposed counter-penalties, Socrates effectively “put the hemlock to his lips” as I.F. Stone puts it in his book The Trial of Socrates, p.189.

Regardless of how all of this did in fact unfold all those years ago, as well as the extent to which we still discuss and debate it today, one thing seems unequivocal: that Socrates and Plato died, and that each of us, here and now, one by one, will die too.

I merely suggest that using the tools of philosophy there does not appear to be a way to establish whether any of our deaths are reflective of "a good time to die". Let alone establishing whether any of our particular demises reflects either a "good death" or a "bad death". We may as well conclude as Malcolm Forbes did that “he who dies with the most toys wins.” A truly capitalist death.

Instead, for any number of "serious philosophers", it's back up into the clouds:

Plato offers further support for the voluntary character of Socrates’ death in his Crito. There we learn that Athens, possibly reconsidering the pending execution of its most famous citizen, seems to have left open the possibility of Socrates’ escape from jail. Indeed, Plato tells us that the wealthy Crito made arrangements for his friend’s escape and exile, bribing guards etc. Crito then pleads with Socrates to flee. Socrates argues that escaping and living in exile would be wrong, despite any shortcomings of his trial, and chooses instead to stay in prison and face execution. Crito’s impassioned pleas and arguments are of no use: “Socrates is determined to stay and die.”

So, which frame of mind here reflects the optimal or the only truly rational assessment of Socrates's choice? Is Socrates's choice another rendition of Christ dying for us on the cross? A moral death that offers us "life lessons" in regard to the relationship between a citizen and "the state"?

And, again, the part where God fits into all of thus? Did Socrates have an "immortal soul" that would continue on into the "next life"? Clearly, to the extent that he believed this to be the case, was or was not his death in fact a ticket to immortality and salvation on the other side? Did not "the state" facilitate this?

Still, as with us today, there is that ubiquitous gap between what they believed about any of this and what they could demonstrate was in fact true objectively for all of us.

Here, philosophically, some things never seem to change.

[iambiguous]

Dying At The Right Time
Morgan Rempel wonders whether there is a good time to die.

Jesus’ Death

While Socrates’ name does not appear in Zarathustra, Jesus’ does. And while the ‘Of Voluntary Death’ section of Zarathustra presents the death of Jesus as decidedly voluntary (like that of Socrates), the Nazarene’s death is presented as anything but ‘good’ or ‘triumphant’. Much of the reason for his failure to achieve a good death has to do with timing. Zarathustra says:

“Truly, too early died that Hebrew whom the preachers of slow death honor: and that he died too early has since been a fatality for many. As yet he knew only tears and the melancholy of the Hebrews, together with the hatred of the good and the just - the Hebrew Jesus: then the longing for death seized him. Had he only remained in the desert and far from the good and the just! Perhaps he would have learned to live and learned to love the earth - and laughter as well!… Believe it, my brothers! He died too early; he himself would have recanted his teaching had he lived to my age! He was noble enough to recant! But he was still immature.”

Come on, the death of Jesus revolves around a very different set of circumstances. If Jesus was in fact "God in human flesh", the God of Abraham and Moses, and one assumes this God does in fact exist, then everything about His life and death is entirely scripted by God Himself. His timing, His reasons, His consequences. After all, if you were God made flesh and you knew that Heaven awaited you on "the other side" for all of eternity, what then of the pain inflicted on you at the crucifixion?

Socrates, on the other hand, could only fall back on the God that certain philosophers back then thought up in their head. The formal, a priori, realist God that existed only given particular words strung together in a particular order that basically defined Him into existence.

Clearly, if God here was predicated on the "intellectual" assumption that "universals or abstract objects exist objectively and outside of human minds", than anything goes. If you can think it up, it exists. It's only a matter then of stumbling out of the cave and naming the objects.

While one could follow these provocative remarks in any number of directions, here I merely want to note the emphasis Nietzsche places on the matter of timing in what he takes to be the ultimately disappointing death of Jesus of Nazareth. Three times Zarathustra insists that the death of Jesus came “too early.” While Zarathustra suggests there was indeed a voluntary component to the death of Jesus, its tragic pre-maturity essentially prevents the Nazarene from achieving the elusive well-timed ‘good death’.

Here, however, one can construe the "death of God" such that Jesus Christ is seen as but a character in a work of fiction...a novel called the Bible. The plot is examined by Nietzsche and found to be wanting in regard to the crucifixion. Otherwise if it is presumed that God does in fact still exist but his "death" revolves around the fact that more and more people have simply stopped believing that He does, for any mere mortal to speculate about Christ having died "too early" is ridiculous. An omniscient and omnipotent God doesn't make mistakes like that, right?

More to the point for the rest of us is this: did Nietzsche die too early?

[Dan~]

More to the point for the rest of us is this: did Nietzsche die too early?

I'd say yes, most philosophers don't live quite long enough.
And JW teach that death is unnatural for humans.
We aren't supposed to die / meant to die.
In the distant future i assume many forms of death will be reduced via super technology.