Death

DEATH, THAT GREAT ATHENA


Death rid us but also makes us both individually and socially and historically . How many have erected monuments in order to exorcise or priate least mitigating the devastating psychosocial effects ? . Are not the cathedrals of the West, as any temple of any positive religion or cult , a majestic way to commemorate the death ? .

Every culture , every civilization has paid tribute to this extreme experience of life , the ultimate limit, which in turn enables the initial limit, the origin of life , as well as pointed out the Greeks, who were the first in our tradition Western affirm that Life and Death are dialectically related and not understand one without the other . And that reality is as Heraclitus thought , a harmony of opposite tensions . . Thereby Generation Without Corruption ( Aristotle , " De Generatione et corruptione ") can not understand In his day , the divine Plato, father of philosophy , to synthesize the universal dynamism Heraclitean the Eleatic fixism , we found the formula Western thought generic formula that is to say that every being contains within itself not being ( Identity and Difference ) and thus can develop , change ; grow and shrink to annihilate and return to the land that gave it birth. In the 19th century another formula Hegel coined to describe this synthesis between Being and Non- being, Nothing : The Becoming , which is just the medium that allows our existence in the world ( essendi ) and our representation of the world ( cognoscendi ordo ) . Our life experiences are then marked by the development, which is that of which we have direct experience , not of Being or Nothingness , which are pure limit our ideas of living.

Therefore, Western Philosophy has stood up to death trying to understand and interpret the meaning of life . Because this is the only one we have experienced . Death , indeed, puts us in the realm of the ineffable , what Wittgenstein called "The Mystic " (Wittgenstein : Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus "). And The Mystic escapes representation . Maybe this causes so much fear (Timor mortis ) . This fear is paradigmatic authors entirely Christian roots as Pascal or Unamuno , who have tried to overcome it by going to faith in an irrational desire for immortality , all lights contradictory to reason as themselves recognized . Furthermore, both Pascal and Unamuno are examples of the tendency of religious thought to see in death the manifestation of an unfathomable mystery of sacredness that only makes sense when you think even without a guarantor reason god of immortality of the soul longed .
We are well located in one of the major aspects in the sacredness of Death. And this is no other than that sanctification comes from thoughts and religious beliefs. As these beliefs can substantiate such a limit experience of life to the point of giving rise to a mortuary cult .

This is where we emphasize again that Death makes us or makes us precisely where fear becomes numinous or divinizing . In a way we could say with Estacio : Timor fecit deos " , although its etiology is multiple and actually depend on socio-economic and political factoraes as the social division of labor, power and class struggle that both generate . But it is true that fear , which is an ally of pain, has been used by all religions , especially the positive , which have generated an institutionalized metaphysics ( Gustavo Bueno , "The Divine Animal " ) to redirect the direction of the individual life tormented by the existence , as well saw Nietzsche ( Genealogy of Morals ) : the priest is the one who guides the pain in a creative direction of moral , social and political improvement. According to a Nietzschean priest famous as Freud would sublimating the pain transmundo creating a beyond death. 'And this why?

The answer is not simple but the truth is that the man needs to survive deceit without being obliged to deal with your Freedom and your destiny or life without meaning , as showed Fromm , Heidegger and Sartre. And what is the root of this deception : Neither more nor less than the structure of Reason. Every man, in that he needs to be metaphysics , although simple or pedestrian , mundane and ultimately not academic. Kant expressed it this triple question : What is my home What can I do What can I expect ? ? . This is the formulation of the triple Kantian metaphysics agony of man , represented from ancient burial tombs (six thousand years ) to the great temples of the positive religions .

DEATH: ESE BIG BUSINESS

We have seen that is inherent to man made ​​three great metaphysical approaches closely linked. This is what all religions advantage for business. From this point of view , death , the great Athena becomes the supreme cultural, social and political business. We would say that around it has developed large forces that have contributed to the great civilizations . Seen this way, all without exception are products of religions and economy of death when it is faced with the desire for life and the desire to exist beyond the phenomenal becomes a source of fear of God the beginning and end of existence.

The big business of death is therefore not only has psychological connotations , as Kant would divest questions. The individual not only asks for their order and even lives burdened by this ignorance and fear of an incomprehensible future and apparently meaningless , but you pay for dying. Insurance companies and funeral earn vast profits from this imaginative projection of the unknown future . The mystic is a social business as root and transcendental psychological representation , but it is not just a matter of individual fear. Create therefore a superabundant economy in contemporary Western society makes sense in the context of the social division of labor and power. Thus, the funerals of the leaders possess inconceivable for a citizen called foot pump . There are also classes before death . We reach all but differently. Similarly, the ecclesiastical and political hierarchies , intimately linked handle fear , pleasure , pain , good and evil and all kinds of feelings and human values ​​as they see fit in each case. The political lie , as religious are bound to each other , although the latter is much more powerful because it affects how we saw the roots of humanity . Therefore, the policy tries to imitate the religious rites without actually getting hold of the severity of sacred religious ceremonies. The policy determines life or death of citizens - subjects , but who decides the ultimate fate of the political masters ? . Especially if they believe they have a soul worth saving , that is, if they aspire to immortality. Some will be immortal in fact, factually ( since antiquity been erected statues and monuments to them ) . For the mob a leader can be a demigod , but for political demigod : Where is the guarantee of true divinity ? .
At the end of the day the leaders are like us, as Deleuze ( Anti-Oedipus ) told us desiring machines and we want mainly for pleasure and avoid pain. So we are willing to enrich the first guru who crosses our path with code recipes postmortem salvation . There is no doubt. All the gurus live Soteriology , giving as Nietzsche thought , a sense of pain , explaining it by creating a transmundo invented to soften the evils of this nonsense , the only real.

THE TAMING OF DEATH

We have to say first, that conceptions about death and different ways of dealing with it depend on psychosocial , religious, historical conceptions and ultimately anthropological, of the various companies we historically given . In the tradition of Western thought there are two irreconcilable trends sharply . One, the religious and the other secular or atheist will call . The first considers and uses philosophy as a handmaid of theology and subordinates Reason to Faith Illustrious representative of this mindset and one of its initiators was St. Augustine. According to Augustine , God created the world from nothing . This is an innovation over the Greek thought , which was largely followed . Recall that , according to the ancient Greeks : "Ex Nihilo Nihil Fit " . The notion of a creation from nothing would be outrageous for the Greek thinkers . Let us therefore , to St. Augustine, who sought to rationalize the creator God of Christianity from the image of the Platonic Demiurge. According to Augustine , God created the World, following a pattern existing in the divine mind ideas . This of course , smells Platonism. No wonder we are talking about a heterodox Platonist, because the demiurge of Plato is not a creator god, but represents the production , artisanal aspect of Greek Polis, never an act of creation ex nihilo , incomprehensible in Greek as Plato. Also say that St. Augustine is one of the initiators of the Philosophy of History . In "City of God and the Devil Town " distinguishes two city models : A divine and another human , that of the fallen angels. Naturally both act as thesis and antithesis . One is the holy men destined for salvation and another of those who suffer eternal punishment . The World of St. Augustine 's representation of God but with the presence of evil. So the two cities fighting eternally to the point omega of human history : the day of the Last Judgment . The guy in Augustine, as happens in Christian thought to be a citizen as in classical muindo to be a person, to paraphrase Boethius : rational substance of a spiritual nature . The person has a totally opposite to soul and body whose mission is purified of sin and prepare for eternal life. Christianity , as we see, physical death adds another metaphysical cut that degrades the personal nature of human beings: Sin . The man can go from being the Son of God to sinners , this significant decrease in essence largely explains human history as Christianity and in particular authors as Augustine and in general all medieval .

The secular way of preparation for death


Greeks are the initiators of philosophical speculation in the West and also to inaugurate the secular or atheistic conception of the world , in contrast to the Christian . To the ancient Greeks the individual is primarily a soma , ie , a body having a vital principle Psikhé as material as the body itself but more subtle. It was proper Plato who , assuming Orphic ideas of a vital principle contained in the body creates the Myth of the Soul , which locked in corporeal prison must be released through knowledge by the exercise of Anamnesis to contemplate the ideas , the true Self in its best. The way of salvation regarding the illusory world of the senses brings catharsis. Purification is present in Greek thought since long before the Christian , and it is the latter that taking one . Thus , purification and catharsis are the most common way to prepare for death in Western thought .

A second pathway is initiated by Epicurus , is to deny reality and death. Thus, in the letter to try to convince Meneceo that death is nothing to us , for it makes no sense to worry about her because as we live , there is no death , and when we arrive we no longer exist . Thus death happens to be the subject of philosophical and eschatological inquiry to mere physiological fact that we have no experience and therefore should not cause us fear.
That said we have to point out a very important aspect of the Epicurean thesis on death as well as others that attempt to mitigate fears of human existence . This aspect is none other than the fact that philosophy , as had already occurred since the pre-Socratics and Plato and Aristotle, becomes an instrument of human liberation , to prepare for a good life worth living , which is considered well as the best way to predispose to a good death. This is the view of Epicurus and shall also Spinoza , who sees proper , clear and distinct Cartesian thought the most accurate deal with imaginary fears and passions in order to get the very joy of life so worth living . This and no other is the best way to overcome the fear of death : Salvation by the knowledge they had already preached the Stoics with their rational acceptance of death .

Third Way : The Oblivion of Being

Include this Heideggerian theme as another way to deal with the very own death of Western Civilization , which the German philosopher , has forgotten Being for the benefit of beings, of things in our contemporary world are artifacts . Metaphysics has been canceled in art and technology. So we forget death with our artifacts , because the self is to forget the best way to forget about life and death . We have already seen that the tradition of Western thought sought to situate the life and death reality to prepare . Today that tradition is integral to Heidegger's thought is lost, and it is not surprising that the notion of death in Heidegger calls for an authentic existence that reveals , as in the classical philosophers Being true to our author , the individual, called Dasein or Dasein is to be a core of possibilities that are imposed by its essence , which is none other than the factum of existence. However , death is not a possibility but any insider , which reveals to Dasein its power being par excellence in the world. Thus is revealed the possibility par excellence, which we anticipate our existence as being in trouble , ie , in the state of authenticity on the Self appears as what it is, an area of choice for the individual and not as a part of things, that is the way of appearing inauthentic existence itself , the conduct by the impersonal (it says ... it says ... ) . Now if trouble breaks with everyday it is because it represents a flight into the familiar face of the responsibility of being oneself means being thrown into the world and be to death ( Heidegger : " Being and Time " ) .
Certainly the Heideggerian thought, at this point we awake from that dream and Calderon in the words of Shakespeare era tale told by an idiot or just Madness erasmista . That dream everyday small pleasures that make us forget our essence is more true today than ever. It is the one present in the media and in general in all reality TV shows . The Oblivion of Being and Death results from this point of view , also a large business, the television show. In order to give up their individual responsibility and freedom rabble need idols. So cling to the tiniest and insignificant everyday to continue to maintain an illusion to redeem a miserable existence full of clichés and values ​​as false as their idols , which, of course justify and legitimize an unjust , corrupt society and degraded and a History which has always dominated the fittest . Nihilism In this is so disgusting in the eyes of good Nietzschean , on repeat ad nauseam the false values ​​that serve as an instrument of domination , in the absence of new liberating values ​​of the individual. After the death of God is not nothing, just a cult of the body and an identity that is displayed fetishized naked in the media . It is not the individual who claimed sovereign form of bourgeois Enlightenment but stupid , idiot and used in the sense of the Greek idiotes , the particular individual isolated prey fierce selfishness . No wonder the contemporary individual seeks to perpetuate exacerbating the lowest passions and pleasures. As you said Nietzsche in the Genealogy of Morals : "Man prefers Nothing will not want ." Forget death is a logical exit strategy , precisely now that the Self is so alien to our civilization and its end so near.

Ángel Fernández Méndez