Kuten useimmat tuttavani tietävätkin jo, olen hieman ajattelevaa tyyppiä. Rakastan fiilistellä maailman hyviä ja huonoja tunteita. Tämän takia julkaisen välillä vanhoja koulutekstejäni, jotai aika ajoin lueskelen ja fiilistelen, pätevätkö samat ajatuksen nykyääkin.
As many of who know me knows that I am a thinker. I love to feel and think about all the good and the bad in our world and that's why I sometimes posts my old school text so I re-feel my thoughts and can measure if they match still.
Christine Wollmann
Introduction to Philosophy
October, 2012
“Only the death have seen the end of war” -Plato
Death is the most fascinating thing there is in life. It brings alone sorrow and mourning and as a phenomenon its definitive in earthly life. Of course the emergence of something new is a unutterable situation for individual but not as powerful as death. One cannot feel the unending and possessing grief of death before first experiencing the love towards or caring for somebody. One can bypass death and its harrowing shades of affliction by not creating anything new – in the end still, death collects you away leaving that affliction for the others (loved ones) to experience.
Death is all around us, it is part of our everyday life but still it is the biggest taboo. People fear death because it is seen as final or unknown.
Death is also a cultural thing; in Western parts of the world we picture death as a scary, powerful and sad phenomenon, and although we have the Bible telling us not to be afraid of entering the divine life beside God, we still fear losing our life. This might be a sign that most of us lack the true belief that there is indeed afterlife and heavenly resting place in Gods kingdom. Many other cultures present death very differently and embrace death in everyday life. People live their life more carefully to confirm their divine and better afterlife and as a topic, death can be openly discussed without any sad or fearful tone. “The fear of death is more to be dreaded than death itself”, like Publilius Syrus has put it, capturing the basic idea of this massive fear of losing our earthly life.
Not a single individual that we could recognize and see with our own eyes (for human, seeing things literary usually proves that it is real – another never ending subject; how can we truly know that what we may see is thou the real and present?) has died and came back to tell us what is like to be dead, what happens after your corporeal body stops living or where does your ethereal soul go. Most convenient questions are; is there an afterlife or only nothingness? What about forgiveness or an eternity of suffering?
Because we lack the information what is the afterlife like or is there only nothingness, we don't go around killing ourselves just to get to experience death sooner that planned by Mother Nature or some other karma in our lives. To speak for living too, for most of us , life is precious and we want to experience as much amazing things there are while we are still passing our earthly life. Marcus Aurelius Antoninus embraces life and values all the things world has to offer while we are still here; “It is not death that a man should fear, but he should fear never beginning to live”.
“Death is nothing to us, since when we are, death has not come, and when death has come, we are not.” Epicurus stands behind nothingness after death. To justify nothingness or non-being after death, we can study Spinoza's statements; for any complete being, there is another, stronger being that can destroy him.
We acknowledge that everyone is mortal and the universe stronger than us. Nothingness is easier to understand, because we can experience it. Most certainly we all have experienced or will face someones death – we recognize the two elements; body and soul as a whole. After ones death we can only see the body without ethereal soul.
As Plato was a dualist, who believed that humans are composed of two elements, corporeal body and ethereal soul (death is only a release from the body), totally opposite thinker was Seneca who represented stoicism (death is final, but brought to one via fate and fortuna).
Personally I do not fear death. During few of my latest years living and enjoying life, I have started thinking about death more and more every day. I believe there is a some sort of afterlife, divine and pain-free space for soul to rest and maybe that is the ultimate reason I sit here now and cross my heart when saying that death can collect me any time it wants, I will face it without fear but with curiosity and relief. I also acknowledge that by convincing myself that there truly is another life after death, I might only comfort myself and trick my mind out of the fact that maybe, there is only the nothingness along death. I value life and all the experiences it has to offer for me, but seeing death as more divine than life, it takes me beyond all attachments and makes me in some way immortal. For others, preferring death over life is absurd and scary, but for some of us it is the only way not to go insane and understand universe with a wider view. I want the death for me to come when it is the time, but sometimes I think is the real question of life that does one want to find a way to live or find a way to die.
Sources:
A. Comte-Sponville, The Little Book of Philosophy, 2000
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