Death: the beginning of philosophy
The ritualisation of death is the beginning of humanity ... or possibly elephantinity. https://news.nationalgeographic.com/2016/08/elephants-mourning-video-animal-grief/
When your parents die, there is a hole in your life, that you are always walking away from. When your spouse or your sibling dies, there is a hole in your life that is always next to you. When your child dies, there is a hole in your life that you are always walking into.
But to be a philosopher is to be already dead. The image of death is already dead; thought is not life. The dispassionate view is the view of the dead, who famously complain "life is wasted on the living." Douglas Adams.
And they should know...
Or perhaps the dead talk bollocks; death is the limit of the known, and whatever is said of what lies beyond that limit is fantasy, whether it is declared 'nothing', 'heaven', 'reincarnation', or something else.
You might have something to say on the subject, though, as something to look forward to with terror at the ending of the known, which is the self, or with resignation, or hope - feel free; its your funeral.
When your parents die, there is a hole in your life, that you are always walking away from. When your spouse or your sibling dies, there is a hole in your life that is always next to you. When your child dies, there is a hole in your life that you are always walking into.
But to be a philosopher is to be already dead. The image of death is already dead; thought is not life. The dispassionate view is the view of the dead, who famously complain "life is wasted on the living." Douglas Adams.
And they should know...
Or perhaps the dead talk bollocks; death is the limit of the known, and whatever is said of what lies beyond that limit is fantasy, whether it is declared 'nothing', 'heaven', 'reincarnation', or something else.
You might have something to say on the subject, though, as something to look forward to with terror at the ending of the known, which is the self, or with resignation, or hope - feel free; its your funeral.
Comments (39)
Quoting unenlightened
Yes.
So it slows down after your dead? I'm not sure about that. Seems like the first 13.7 billion years flew by. But maybe not existing is different than being dead.
Quoting Marchesk
What would that difference be?
How fast 13.7 billion years flies by?
Yes but we (I believe you and I were on the same topic) came to the conclusion years ago that death is best described as the ceasing to exist.
How do I square the circle that "to be a philosopher is to already be dead"? When an image of death can portray the ceasing of living? I am not so sure that is possible but I am open to options...
Well perhaps philosophy is impossible, but if the unexamined life is not worth living, and the examination of life is philosophy, then it seems that philosophy can only be the view from death; one might say that life can examine itself in the mirror (of language), but still the view one has of life on reflection is external. And what is external to life is death.
Quoting ArguingWAristotleTiff
Quoting aporiap
I don't really want to go there, because that discussion is already going on in another thread. So I will simply dogmatically claim that whatever reports you may receive, whatever evidence you may collect is from the living, not the dead. In effect I define death as the end of the known for current purposes, and any who came back never quite arrived. Thus even to say that it is ceasing to exist, or ceasing to experience, is to claim to know too much.
Quoting Marchesk
What does it say when it gets there?
(Answer in a while.) :chin:
Philosophizing, I think, is always a kind of rejection, and turning away. Indeed to contemplate is to look at the past, and attempt to project the future. To attempt to derive the living from the dead. Perhaps just living yields all of the answers, with time. We hear about much more than we experience, and we come to analytical and emotional conclusions about many many things before we've ever actually encountered them. We have no basis in facts or experience to favor one authority over another, so that it comes down to other factors. Their reputation, associations and affiliates, recommendations, their appearance, smell? Perhaps anything at all, as the only thing that matters, and qualifies them for authoritative purposes is precisely what you'd require to assess their genuine authority in the first place.
How did authorities come about? The failure of parents? The failure of the village? What killed us all inside? What made us stop listening? Stop listening to the living, and begin looking to the dead?
Sounds... lonely
It’s when the ten thousand days you’ve lived, and the ten thousand days you thought you had left are whittled down to three days, or three hours left to live...
:sweat: Ha! Busted!
actually seen it?
and how it progresses?
death *is* an otherness, But dying isnt. it involves others.
I dont like this OP. its [absolute otherness] for the person who reflects on it. its the rarest oriental toy for the resident orientalist.
My only real aspiration is to experience ego death before I die.
Not by definition, but you do have to be alive to think.
Her own death is not, but the death of Socrates was an event in Plato's life. As you can see, raging against the dying of the light can be an event. The mortality of all men is a cliche of logic.
Quoting csalisbury
So there is something we can talk about and relate to, but only as the end of the known. My parents are dead, my sister's son died, and my sister died. I have also witnessed the death of a stranger - more or less - and had the excitement of performing my first aid training for real. It's not much talked about in polite society, but the responses here, of rage, terror, disgust, humour, diversion, are interesting to me at least.
But back to the elephants. Burial, in archeology is the first indication of self-consciousness, and what I am looking towards is the idea that awareness of mortality, and possibly the denial or repression thereof, is self-consciousness. I see myself as an other like a parent or sibling, without whom the world continues. Thus before Descartes, we have already, I die therefore I am, or perhaps I am therefore I die.
The social, empathetic connectedness to the dead leads to the Fall. The fruit of the tree of knowledge is this separation of self and world, such that the world without me becomes conceivable. The entrance of death into the world, psychologically, is the entrance to self-consciousness and thus to philosophy. The first act of civilisation is to hide the dead, The elephants seem to me to be on the cusp of the fall; they know there is something significant about the bones of the ancestors, but haven't quite grasped the implication for themselves - they have picked Eve's apple, but not yet taken a bite.
To bring death itself to relevance suggests a proximity. This is also why, we ask how people died when they die, so as to ensure our distance from the cause, and keep dying itself as irrelevant. The hole one leaves in your life is one of absence. And would be the same if they were just gone forever but still alive, the only difference between them (and perhaps a difference we'd wish to forget) is that in the former case, we have relative certainty that they're gone forever, which requires a mourning process, or detachment. Whereas we may forgo this process, if we believe that we shall meet again. I think that an infant mourns you every time you become absent, until they learn it not to be permanent -- and then they make the opposite mistake, of not mourning you, if still too young to apprehend that your absence is indeed, permanent this time around.
So that, I think that death being some ever looming thing in the foreground is unrecognizable to me. I think of it in the relevant senses to the proximity of my concerns, but miss the literal sense. I'm not sick, or old, nor are people dying around me.
I have.
.Quoting csalisbury
I have.
Quoting csalisbury
I have.
If you're curious, the death I saw take place came slowly, at the end of a long illness. He was not conscious by then, as far as I know. No last words, no farewell. We watched them carry him out of the house in a bag.
"'Throughout the whole history of philosophy,' writes Arendt, 'persists the truly singular idea of an affinity between philosophy and death. 'Philosophers from Plato to Heidegger (and beyond) proclaim this emphatically. The common people, for their part, figure this out rather quickly - and have fun ridiculingthem. The activity of thought consists in fact always and everywhere in a solitary experience, which temporarily abandons the world of appearances - or, rather, the world of life and plurality that we inhabit together with our peers. Since, for human beings, 'the most radical experience of disappearance is death, and the retreat from appearances which is equal to death, ' the analogy between death and thinking has an obvious foundation.
Making thought into his favorite activity - indeed, into his very profession - and qualifying this activity as 'a living for death,' the philosopher simply registers the way that things are. His ingenuity consists in the emphatic tone with which he announces this rather common experience to the profane. He pretends to smuggle as a discovery and a privilege something that is, instead, actually obvious" (Cavarero, Relating Narratives).
Really, though, one merely dies, just as one merely lives, just as things merely are. That may not be philosophy, but that's wisdom, I'd say--ancient wisdom, in fact. I don't think we've found a better way to sum things up. "I am not Eternity, but a human being—a part of the whole, as an hour is part of the day. I must come like the hour, and like the hour must pass." (Epictetus)
Sounds like an oxymoron
Quoting StreetlightX
I can't work out which is supposed to be so obviously the beginning of philosophy, natality or death. I wonder if it would be more acceptable if I were to say instead that death awareness is the condition of the birth of the psyche? And then propose both philosophy and religion as attempts to resolve the paradoxes that arise from the separation of inner and outer, or self and world.
The concept of death and philosophy is reminiscent of the "hanging man" concept observed not just in ancient or occult philosophy but reflected in various crucifixion/hanging stories in the world's religions (Christ, Odin, Quetzacoatl, Prometheius, Mithraism, etc.) where the individual is effectively suspended from reality in such a manner that the individual not only sees its totality and unity from a separate perspective, but the old individual (embodied under perspective) effectively dies in the process and a new individual is formed through a synthesis, so to speak, with "the all" and the divine mind "I am".
Death, effectively as nothingness, is a point of inversion where one degree of life effectively as a linear progression in itself through time as a measurement of the Divine Mind (which is premised as measurement through the application of limits premised in the point, line and circle) folds into another form.
We can observe that all spiritually is linked to fundamentally directive qualities in the basic "down to up" paradigm often associated with "transcending, rising above, ascension, etc" or the basic "up to down" associated with "The fall, descent, etc.) where the basic tenets of these spiritual qualities are premised in a form of movement as a limit in itself.
This movement of the spirit, or emotion and intuition, can be further observed at the base practical level under a swing of emotion where one emotion is effectively directed from one to another and is observed not just as moving but a mover in itself as it is encapsulated further under thought or physical action which in turn directs back to an emotion of some form or function.
This capacity of spirituality, as a degree of movement relative to other boundaries of movement as though/mind or body/action, reflects a form of limit in itself and gives not just a defining property to the human condition but is a mean through which further emotions, thoughts or actions exist.
Now this change, as a form of unity to another unity as multiplicity through locality, observe a metaphorical or even literal point of inversion which is conducive effectively to 0 dimensionality or void where a unified structure inverts through non-being into further being with this "being" effectively connected to itself through its quality.
We can see this aspect of death as inversion giving premise to heaven, hell, purgatory/reincarnation and even the void of atheism as merely dimensions in themselves where the consciousness, through life, as a directed movement effectively changes.
With the concept of
1) Heaven it can be observed as a fuller awareness not limited to time or any direction except all direction as a form of unity. This can be elaborated on as a 1d point of light, observed in near death experiemces.
2) Hell can be observed as a form of continual inversion as a degree of change where nothing is constant and gives premise to a qualitative burning as a form of chaos which effectively projects strictly to void itself where the divine image, as a measuring capacity, effectively consexperiences. This can be elaborated on as a 0d point of nothingness giving premise to high degree of relativistic change as fire or the bottomless pit as void. "Nothing" after death can be viewed as synonymous.
3) Purgatory/Reincarnation can be viewed as a form of cycling through linear time where the individual is maintained in a neutral position between unity and void and effectively continually cycles. A lower degree of reincarnation can be observed in reproduction as a cycling of qualities. The transitional aspects of personality as going from one person to another can be observed as a form of cycling or repetitive thought/emotion.
In simpler spatial terms
1. Heaven can be observed as a self directed unity premised in a 1d point self-directed and self maintain as pure limit through no limit as absolute.
2. Hell can be observed as nothing, void or absence of structure through the 0d point, which is the foundation of relativity.
3. Purgatory/Reincarnation can be observed as a continual linear progression through time as time, with the alternation of the "I", through multiple forms embodying a cycling of qualities, as a dual form of circularity.
In these respects, from a perspective of limit as the foundation of being, death effectively is nothingness encapsulated through reason.
I agree but is all passion good?
This reminds me of some things said by Freud in Totem and Taboo. He spoke of the taboo of the dead in this book. There are lots of taboos about the dead, and many different psychological mechanisms are in play in this, especially depending on the specifics of the person that died.
Anyway, I disagree with the idea that the be a philosopher is to be dead. This is very Socrates-Apology like. I don't agree. The death of my significant other has enflamed my desire to explore and love of trying to know, in order to have some glimpse at if there will ever be a reconciliation with this terrible loss.
Furthermore, the passions of life are the best forces of philosophy.
That you did exist, as opposed to never having existed. If you did exist, you left a mark, an effect, on the world. You left the world in a different state than it would have been in if you hadn't been there. Not existing, or never having existed, is very different from being dead.
How does one define a human?
Homo sapiens = wise man i.e. thinking man
How then do we make sense of ''thought is not life''?
Humans are not life