Death - a Philosophical Perspective

1 Thomas Nagel, Mortal Questions, Cambridge University Press, 2000, p.1. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/cbo9781107341050

2 We encounter such a view in Tibetan Buddhism. In its doctrine of the three states of consciousness: Birth-consciousness, the Bardo or intermediate state, and Death-consciousness. See The Tibetan Book of the Dead (ed. W.Y. Evans-Wentz), Oxford University Press, 1960, pp. lxvi, 89-196. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780195133110.002.0010

3 See Epicurus' Epistle to Menoeceus.

4 I am of course referring to the Christian view of man as consisting of a body and a soul that remains after the body has perished, a tradition that owes much to Plato, was philosophically elaborated by St.Thomas Aquinas and others, and was still prominent in Descartes' and Leibniz's systems.

5 E.g. Spinoza had his doubts about it, as in more recent times have Husserl, Scheler, Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty and other members of the phenomenological movement

6 W. James, Human Immortality. Two supposed Objections to the Doctrine, 6th ed., Archibald Constable, 1906. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1037/10997-001

7 The point is not that these claims are unproven (for the laws of our empirical scientific theories are not proven either) or that there could be no evidence at all for them, but that the evidence would hardly be of an intersubjectively, universally acceptable kind.

8 Alexander Herzen tells in his memoirs of a dying Russian doctor who exclaimed: "I know too much anatomy to believe in a life beyond the grave". (Childhood, Youth and Exile, Oxford University Press, 1980, p. 35.) The doctor would hardly have agreed with my approach, according to which no knowledge of anatomy is sufficient to settle the question of immortality one way or the other. I suppose he believed that once the body, which is the subject matter of anatomy, has perished, the life of the individual concerned has come to an irrevocable end; but this is a metaphysical thesis and does not belong into the science of anatomy.

9 See above all M. Heidegger, Being and Time (trans. J. Macquarrie and E. Robinson), Basil Blackwell, 1962, Division Two, Sections 46-53, 62; and J.P. Sartre, Being and Nothingness (trans. H. Barnes), Methuen, 1957, Part Four, Chapter 1, II E: 'My Death'.

10 Thus, W. Dilthey, German historian and philosopher, speaks of "that relationship which most deeply and universally determines the feeling of our Dasein - the relationship of life to death, for the bounding of our existence by death is always decisive for our understanding and assessment of life" (quoted from M. Heidegger, op.cit., p. 494).

11 Heinrich v. Kleist, letters of 12 and 21 November 1811 to Marie v. Kleist and his sister Ulrike v. Kleist.

12 This does not quite agree with Jaspers' own, in my view slightly incoherent definitions of the term 'boundary situation'. Compare K. Jaspers, Philosophy (trans. E.B. Ashton), University of Chicago Press, 1970, vol 2, Part III, Chapter 7, and K. Jaspers, Psychologie der Weltanschauungen (3rd ed.), Julius Springer, 1925, Chapter III, Einleitung , Section 2. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-36360-7

13 M. Heidegger, op.cit., Division Two, Sections 53, 60, 62. K. Jaspers, Philosophy, vol.2, Part III, Chapter 7, Section 2: 'Death'.

14 Such probing work was done by Hegel at the beginning of the 19th century in his Phenomenology of Mind under the title 'Unhappy Consciousness'; it was continued by Feuerbach and Marx, and later in the century Nietzsche added his voice.

15 La Rochefoucauld, Reflexions ou sentences et maximes morales, no. 26.