What is death like?
Death as the extinction all vital functions is a natural, and immutable fact. As our end, it acts on us humans highly threatening. This requires a lot of ways to deal with the fact of death by denial or face the fear in our lives on rational way to neutralize them mentally by the search for answers. Reply opportunities for philosophical, religious and medical assumptions. In ancient Greece, for example, was the death of the "beautiful genius, the brother of sleep, immortalized in monuments over the graves."
According to the French humanist Michel de Montaigne (1533-1592) we fear, but more the trappings of death than death itself: "gruesomely mourning faces and institutions, and a totally different environment, the cries of mothers, women and children, the visits of astounded and quite runaway people, the presence of an amount pale and pitiful weeping servant, a room without daylight (...) In short. all around us, causing horror and dismay, we are already as good as buried, and buried. "
Review: puberty
When I was 15 years old, for me were dying and death a matter of old people. As a teenager, the death appeared in the morning in view the local daily newspaper and occasionally on my mother knew the persons or families who were there called, "Oh, the sister of so and so I've played as a child ...". Nevertheless, death is a matter appeared in the distant past, because at a young age brings a death is not, in any case extremely rare.
If you are young, then carry the maximum number of peers or their young idols from time to time actively into the next world, or they achieve this by leading a high-risk joyful life. I myself was not a risk taker, but one of the unfortunate group of young people who secretly play it more than once with the thought of killing himself. Since death had something redeeming.
The terrible time of puberty, I was keeping it well. Looking back I find that I was in puberty, death once much closer than my grandma died. She died of lung cancer. As they puff away, however, had a lifetime like a chimney, seemed ineffective hospital treatment and they hasten death almost as a logical consequence of their previous daily addiction.
death of a friend
After puberty, as a young adult, I came through the Red Cross for emergency services. An infirm person almost always successful rescue operations were conducted. In the few Red Cross operations, which are actually matter of life and death, only a few were not "brought back", the former expression.
The rare deaths that I saw, played an important role for me that I had never experienced as living people. Very occasionally we even met in person on rigor mortis, as in the old single gentleman who had died unexpectedly at the kitchen table. When we put him on the floor, his body remained in the same bent position as he had previously fallen at the table together. This had little human, some doll-like, which contained not even the spark of a remnant of life. So there was my relationship with death and dead distant.
At this time I had also no fear of death. But I was shocked then by the unexpected suicide of Arno L. . I was deeply touched emotionally. And some thought, I wondered to this day. When I was on the day of his funeral, the cemetery went and I saw the spring-like, sunny morning, was incomprehensible to me: the friend would (did) not live to see. And the many events and changes in the years that I experienced since the death of Arnold, he "missed". I often thought about what I do not "allowed". In many ways I now had a full life and I could not understand that these opportunities Arno missed and had to experience all could not (want to).
Death as a challenge to the question: What is life worth?
Death away again from my consciousness, and came back only by means of social issue euthanasia. On the subject of euthanasia, the death was theoretical and abstract in supposed future - as end of the path of death and end of the aging process:
result: I did not want to vegetate on machines and then renounce the dignity of one's own personality. By the year 2035, when I am old, but just could determine about myself, I wanted "final" make. Life support measures were only acceptable for me: If I could in the future no longer be productive (such as typing on PC), then it should at least give me a realistic chance of a passive experience of the sea ("I feel, therefore I am") what I've always enjoyed. Otherwise, I just wanted to be pain free, at least be soothing medical care to the occurrence of the biological death.
But I also remember that change the answers to what we (I) bound by it as worth living, according to one's own life-changing situation. Wen you before, more often, are of a "late night" said then - the older you get - not the next 30 years in sight, but the next three or four, even at an age to where one can assume the next 40 years experience safely.
fear of extinction - Aging
With the visible aging at midlife was clear that the still life next time would probably be a shorter period than the already living section. I was also in reflection with others like Sascha E. clear: life is just now no longer simply a matter of course was more like it used to go on. It was what had to come and men - also due to job - take the harder: the Midlife Crisis and with it the summarizing question: What comes ?
first I was indeed looking back to the met to date Live grateful. But that was ages from now on as the near-physical degradation unobtrusive entertaining. And so came - out of the blue - the thought of me shudder: the idea that at some point not to be "there". So it would be like before birth?
Before the birth was not you in life, yet not a word was spoken, communicated, perhaps just the first few months in the body of the mother's nonverbal, but certainly never reflected nowhere acts, not built or destroyed. But after that? Would it be like in the time before his own birth, where there was not one? At this time you could "remember" and yet it was not clearly exist. But after birth, it had - differently than before - where a private life, in which one is reflected (Descartes: "I think therefore I am"), to set goals in life, trying as much as possible, to give his existence meaning.
The death of meaning for the "meaning of life"
After I became a teacher, my pupil, Thomas E. asked in one of the thoughtful classes: "But tell me, what is then the meaning of life? "The answer I came to fishtail. The question is in itself in every birth room. For atheists seem
recent scientific research may bring to light amazing. So there is the argument that to be given to the genes not only physical genetic information from generation to generation, but perhaps even information that has the nature of the lifestyle of the descendants of influence. Will be affected at second glance the existential question of meaning of the individual. What then remains of people like me who pass on their genes are not biologically? Perhaps the answer is that this "problem" is solved by an influence on his acting contemporaries (such as teaching, education, art). As the "meaning" concludes the Roman poet Horace (65 - 8 BC)., Carpe diem "- seize the day The man should use his remaining time. Including Camus writes in "The Myth of Sisyphus" that man should strive to lead a long and full life, regardless of futility (absurdity).
What comes after that: If the death is now final or transition to the next life?
Historically, the humanity in relation to the long geological history, only a fraction of the universe. However, people already started in the early days of worrying about death as a safe and final point of thought in modern humans in this context is the desire for time travel (see: Hawking ). Because people are self-conscious, time-being to be. And this time is limited by death. But does it follow some of their own life? What?
Socrates (469-399 BC) can apply equally to both attitude-what is after death. That death can only mean two things: , either he is a nothing-being, so that the dead man has no perception more from any cause, or he is, as the tradition says, a transition and relocation of the soul of this place to another. "
religion as consolation
60,000 years ago, the knowledge was at our end anchored in the human imagination. This was a frequent consequence of this religious thought thought Conflict:
"As always in the nature of every evil a remedy, or at least one spare is added to" as Schopenhauer, helps "the same reflection, which brought about the realization of death, even the metaphysical views, the comfort on and that the animal is neither need nor capable. "
Today's world religions promise of spiritual satisfaction of human self-preservation a "immortality" and speak differently, for example, of rebirth, transition to the afterlife or eternal life in paradise - not in the same body, but in terms of our soul.
critics of religion Freud (1856 -1939) is in contrast to the religions of the view that all life ultimately is a life to death and that the destructive material of the people are in a special close relationship to the real life drive stand. Accordingly, there is no life without death, no love without hate, no pleasure without pain. This also underpins the philosophical principle of dualism. It states that nothing exists without opposition: "Who knows what is painless, has to know what pain is, or he can not understand pain."
is no winter, no spring awakening is, without night no morning mood - "symbolic dualism ":
(film excerpt above: "Soilent Green" with the music: "Morning Mood" from Edward Grieg's "Peer Gynt" Suite No. 1, Op 46) .
The life and death are interdependent so. Without the death and no life is possible. Death is permanent as biologically necessary (for example, the death of cells) to maintain life in the body.
For Socrates, it is also certain: The death had nothing terrible in itself. Whether he is a nothing-being, a dreamless sleep, a rest from this life and so pleasurable or they move the soul to another place: in both cases is the death of Socrates therefore desirable and well - and gives meaning to life.
Summary: Thinking about the unthinkable?
one addiction among scholars in different centuries for answers such a shudder seems the thought of a return to a time before the birth unfounded. is "After the death it still birth There is nothing, nothing against which we must fear us ". This quote from my blog title is attributed to Mark Twain and it helps just as Epicurus (342-271 BC) statement after the preoccupation with one's own death is paradoxical is
"As long as we exist death is not there, and when death is there, we no longer exist. " What follows from this? Kierkegaard (1813-1855) suggested that we should ask ourselves outside to avoid the pain that would cause the death of us. The only thing we "do" against the death could be a life cause, for which we do not embarrass us in front of us yourself. The thought of death leg hold but the chance that it will allow us the shortness of life, to recognize and optimize them to a large extent:
"lengthy and extravagant thoughts of death are ultimately counterproductive, as the uncertainty exists in every moment, the Ungewisssein when the blow falls - and the Tree. If he is dropped, it is decided whether the tree brought good fruit and bad fruit "
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