Study about dying and living, at times

Literall aspect of death

Which poet didnt dream about his death? Which poet didn’t paint death in his immagination?
O, if death is to happen I wish it will be with you, my love, in flames that became glow, glow...
You think that such a small thing as accidental dance of phantasy, was making Jaromil
immagining his own death in flames? No; well, death is a mission; death speaks; the act of death
has it’s own semantics and it’s important how one man dies, in which element.
Life of Jan Masaryk ended ’48 when he fell in courtyard of castle in Prague, after he saw his
destiny distinctly becoming ashes. Three years after, poet Konstantin Biebl, while being
persecuted from those he considered close friends, jumps down from 5th floor on a cold, old
stone sidewalk of the same city (that city of defenestrations) so that he can, just like Ikarus, die
in element of earth, becoming one with earthy strength, and with his own death shows tragical
conflict between space and heaviness, dream and awakening.
Jan Hus and Giordano Bruno couldn’t die on gallows nor from the sword, but only with
burning. Their lives so became signals of fire, light of a lighthouse, became a torch that glowes
into the distances of time. Because body is temorary, and thought is eternal, while blinking
flame is representation of thoughts. Jan Palach, twenty years after Jaromil’s death, killed himself
on square in Prague by taking a bath in petrol and getting himself inflamed. If he would have
drowned himself, we couldn’t excpect that act to wake up conscience among the people.
That’s also the main reason why we are incapable of immagining Ophelia dying in flames – she
needed to end her life in water, because depths of water are the same thing as depths of man;
water is the element that kills those who are lost in themselves, in their own love, in their own
feelings, in their own madness, in their mirrors and whirlpools.

In ancient Greece, for example phenomena of death was mostly subordinated to Plato’s ideal of
immortality of a soul – death is not the main preocupattion of man’s thoghts, it’s just a finality to
which he serves. That servitude is not a burden for a man, but his goal is to serve as best as he
can and to get to final peace in Heaven of God. To a man that lives in 21st century this might,
mostly, sound ridiculous, but considering absence of purpose we encounter nowdays, even this
„primitive“ reasoning seems more worthy sacrificing for. Immortal soul is not the soul that
didn’t do any sins, but the one that’s familiar with sin, understands it and it’s prepared to focus
all its power to remove sin from its being. For Greek people of that era, death was something
sublime and people that choose death over some unclean deeds of the living are considered
sacred and special. That’s excacly what makes Antigona so important figure in literature and
philosophy of that era; For love, not for hatred, I was born.

After phylosophical wave of a soul as an immortal phenomena, and ancient greeks that weren’t
indiferent towards death, comes totally different undearstanding of ending of life. It varies
depending on area where it’s been developed or depending on different psychological profiles
of people actually doing studies or writing papers/novels/books on death. William Falkner in
his book „As I Lay Dying“ describes death of a mother, backbone of a family in afterwar
surroundings. It’s a solid presentation of people’s preparedness to certanity of death; scene of
son working on mother’s ark and whistleing while doing it, which makes mother very proud of
her son and peacefull while she’s dying, makes us wonder where fear of death, or even
excitement while waiting for it, has dissapeared. Theese strong motives and „positive“
melancholy which is building an atmosphere of leechers who are living their life or „just staying
alive“, makes this book perfectly good example for understanding of modern concept of death
– modern man lives for accepting his end in most miserable way.
If we take a look and try to analise suffering and dealing with suffering presented from other
authors, like Danilo Kiš, we’ll see he’s adressing death in its worse shape as „Miss Death“, and
in some psychologicall work done by Alexander Nill, british scientist, we’ll see this relathionship
toward death adressed as „inabillity of some people to be born for anything else other than
learning how to deal with death without pain.“

We’ve been discussing feelings that overwhelm man when it comes to natural death, but it
could be usefull to discuss people that are convicted to death and their feelings about the
unfortunate events that are ahead of them at that point of their living. That power of justice
implementation should be allowed only for Gods according to some religious laws, but in
society and law as we know it today, capital punishment is something mostly common. And we
want to postulate two questions here:

1. How do actuall convicts react to sentences they need to accept?

2. How rest of the societies react to people being convicted to death as a product of will of
few man?

People that actually need to accept capital punishment for themselves usually don’t think about
greater good, good for community and the ones that will be sentenced to same after them. In
many cases, they go for culpability even when they didn’t do anything. It’s strange philosophy of
understanding and accepting the fact that person is living his last moments as being alive, being
able to breath and decide, even though they decline any kind of deciding for themselves in the
last moments – they feel like the power has been established among them and that deciding
about their own feelings it’s useless in those moments. But those feelings are what determines
them as a individual being, those feelings make them different from other animals without
consciousness and what makes them beings able to love.

When it comes to other people reacting to someone’s capital punishment, it’s been proven that
most commonly people find that as „show“ for manifesting worse of their fears and frustrations.
Suddenly, when someone has commited a crime or it’s believed so, communities tend to
disapprove their behaviour without considering that those instincts and feelings has every
person of earth and that those „boundary situations“ are not something controlled by man
himself but with society in total. Considering morality and approval that stands by capital
punishment is usually done by people who were close to it, or had someone close that was
victim of that system od judging people. Yes, we are using word „victim“ because any punishemt
established on wrong moral principles is highly judged by philosophy through centuries.

„ Think! If there were torture, for instance, there would be suffering and wounds, bodily agony,
and so all that would distract the mind from spiritual suffering, so that one would only be
tortured by wounds till one died. But the chief and worst pain may not be in the bodily suffering
but in one’s knowing for certain that in an hour, and then in ten minutes, and then in half a
minute, and then now, at the very moment, the soul will leave the body and that one will cease
to be a man and that that’s bound to happen; the worst part of it is that it’s CERTAIN. When
you lay your head down under the knife and hear the knife slide over your head, that quarter of
a second is the most terrible of all. You know this is not only my fancy, many people have said
the same. I believe that so thoroughly that I’ll tell you what I think. To kill for murder is a
punishment incomparably worse than the crime itself. Murder by legal sentence is
immeasurably more terrible than murder by brigands. Anyone murdered by brigands, whose
throat is cut at night in a wood, or something of that sort, must surely hope to escape till the
very last minute. There have been instances when a man has still hoped for escape, running or
begging for mercy after his throat was cut. But in the other case all that last hope, which makes
dying ten times as easy, is taken away FOR CERTAIN. There is the sentence, and the whole
awful torture lies in the fact that there is certainly no escape, and there is no torture in the world
more terrible. You may lead a soldier out and set him facing the cannon in battle and fire at
him and he’ll still hope; but read a sentence of certain death over the same soldier, and he will
go out of his mind or burst into tears. Who can tell whether human nature is able to bear this
without madness? Why this hideous, useless, unnecessary outrage? Perhaps there is some man
who has been sentenced to death, been exposed to this torture and has been told ‘you can go,
you are pardoned.’ Perhaps such a man could tell us. It was of this torture and of this agony that
Christ spoke, too. No, you can’t treat a man like that!” (Dostoevsky, „Idiot“, book1, chapter2,
dialog- discussion on capital punishment)

Divided from this literal understanding of death, philosophy according to Fink, discusses death
in terms of life.

Death and being as eternal pressence

Philosophy starts with understanding death by questioning its finality and certainty. Here we
won’t be dividing common from individual, or, individual from common – we’ll try to make
connection between those two ideas. Final answer about death we already know, it will always
happen, but what we don’t know is how inner feelings of man living in some time frame can be
related to death and his less painful understanding of it. Before we analise it more, we need to
discuss term of appearence which is nothing else but existence in certain time. Something once
appeared, must be, independently of its dissaperance in some other time. This is why we, while
doing researches always separate philosophy and world that surrounds us.
Hegel teached us that the only reason why philosophy can exsist through centuries is that this
science is self-sustaining which means that her main goal is coming to absolute (ideal) truth.
While analising world that surrounds us, material world, things tend to be different; material
things are not permanent, they are not keeping the same form, meaning and use through time,
so when we are discussing death in terms of philosophy, we are not solving problems of physical
interpretation of death; medical perspective nor religious understanding of what happens after
death.

When people start questioning death without philosophycal backrounds, just thinking of it as
necessity of life, that often leads to feelings like sorrow, fear, unpleasantness, non-acceptance,
denial etc. Theese side effects are never more active but when people come to close contact
with death, if they are active before we usually associate that with mental dissorders like
depression or anxiety, or in modern society, with philosophy. But, in philosophy we understand
thoughts on death as thoughts of life because death is part of life considering it’s the only way
life can be finished, and understanding like this usually brings to suicidal thoughts or phenomea
of suicide. And, while we in 21st century have many scientist that are keeping track of how
many suicides some country has over one year, and make ambitious remarks on „how many
unhappy people some country had during that year“, just century ago we had Kami’s
understanding of suicide as personal problem, and not problem of society. He explained
phenomea of suicide by three premise:

- World is absurd
- I’m a stranger to that world
- Living isn’t worthly

Most efficient way to explain this existentialistic view of suicide is subdue it to question – Does
absurd always leads to suicide?

When we first encounter with this question we might think it’s obvious that it doesn’t, not every
time we see something as absurd want to commit suicide, but if we look at the question more
carefully, we’ll see that in 90% of the cases we try to vindicate suicide with that absurdity as a
reason. Why we do that? Someone would because it seems like the easiest way to go, but others
will because it’s really the first step of thinking as a philosopher, or someone that enjoys
reasoning. If we want go deeper into this topic it’s perfect time to explain difference between
ontics and ontology.
Ontics questions objects like: house, floor, computer, glass; objects that we encounter every day
in our surroundings and that don’t have philosphical backrounds until we start to see them from
that perspective. Ontology is trying to explain ideas of time, space, world, terms that are
permanent and not dependeable of man himself.

If we would classify beings as ideas of ontics, and exsistance as idea of ontology, than we would
be one step closser to Heidegger and his understanding death; whole life is survival. Death
wouldn’t be the main goal here, but that „not yet“ that we are enjoying every day before death
officialy comes. He understands life as hard work in order to avoid death, life as: every day of
life is one life for itself. According to this, if someone is 75 years old, he is not closer to the end
of his life than he’s to its beggining, because beggining lasts as long as something that began lasts.
He is not going to live forever, but the fact that he is still living is enough to prove that death is
not there until it actually starts happening. How strong needs to be the force that tell us that we
lived enough? How weak we need to be in order to decide we don’t wanna live anymore? Is
death really that tricky that we can surrender to it without questioning it?

This is also one of the most beautiful and most positive understandings of death in whole
history of philosophy and it’s said by one of the most hated philosophers (funfact).

Out of fear from death, man forgets himself. (Montaigne)