HUMAN BEING (original) (raw)

The representation of death in modern society

Funes. Journal of Narratives and Social Sciences, 2018

Death represents one of those few experiences that every society throughout history faces. It has been defined as the marginal situation par excellence (Berger, 1969). Since it cannot be known concretely, it exists at the margins of every symbolic system, of any solid structure of meaning that a society can possess. Conceiving one’s own mortality and coping with the death of loved ones bears a threat to the typical way of understanding and defining the social world. The awareness of death is difficult to handle, since it sheds light on the whole existence of those who must cope with it. Therefore, every group as well as every individual, faced with the end of human life, the loss and the mourning process, must also ask oneself about the sense and the meaning of death in order to face its scope.

The Person: Readings in Human Nature - Preface with overview

The Person: Readings in Human Nature, 2006

What is a person? The history of this concept (πρόσωπον = prosōpon in Greek, persona in Latin, Person in German, personne in French) is intertwined with the histories of such concepts as human being, individual, soul, subject, self, ego, and mind. But while these comprise a constellation of interconnected and sometimes overlapping ideas, each has its own conceptual history, its own distinct evolution. Consequently, person does not admit of a clumsy, ham-handed semantic reduction to more basic concepts. This selection of readings is an attempt to trace in outline one trajectory in the philosophical history of the idea of the person. It is of course not intended even to approach a comprehensive study. While not disguising preferences, I tried to avoid indulging in idiosyncrasy. My goal is to offer a group of stimulating readings that revolve around a single rich, widely debated, and seemingly indefeasible concept. My hope is that this book will prove useful to students and teachers of philosophy in a variety of courses in which the concept of the person figures, including courses on the Philosophy of Mind, Philosophical Anthropology, and Personal Identity. The reader will judge the extent to which I have succeeded in weaving together these diverse selections with continuous thematic threads. If the net result is closer to a coherent whole than a hodgepodge, I will be satisfied. To allow flexibility in course design, two tables of contents are provided-one chronological, one topical. Topics are grouped under seven headings: A) conceptual history, B) personology (account of the person), C) identity of persons, D) divine persons in the Christian tradition, E) nonhuman persons and human non-persons, and F) persons viewed from outside Christian, Euro-American culture. Some readings appear under more than one heading. Instructors are encouraged to experiment with grouping the readings to serve their particular needs. For ease of reference, the readings are arranged chronologically. They begin with the prehistory of the concept in Plato and Aristotle. The inception of the concept in ancient Stoicism (Cicero and Epictetus) is followed by the development of the concept through medieval discussions of the divine persons of the Trinity. Key texts on the concept in the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, and 19 th century European philosophy show an increasing emphasis on theories of personal identity. Selections from 20 th century Anglo-American males are balanced with contributions by women philosophers (Weil, Warren, Rorty, Midgley). Some religious pluralism is gained with the perspectives of Taoism (Smullyan), Buddhism (R. Taylor, Parfit), and Islam (Legenhausen) alongside the texts in Christian theology.

Coming to Terms with Death - Final Paper - Lauren Yarnell

2019

Coming to Terms with Death We will die one day, sooner or later. Traditionally, we approach death from a stoic perspective (Gawande, 2014, p.170). Dead bodies are covered up and quickly whisked away as if there is a shameful connotation affiliated with viewing them. The bereaved, who hide their grief to the point that no one would guess anything had happened, receive social praise. Philippe Ariès delivered a series of lectures at Johns Hopkins in 1973. He pointed out that at the start of the 1930s, there had been a cultural shift regarding how Western societies viewed death. "Death," he wrote, "would become shameful and forbidden." (Didion, 2006, p.45) We can attribute this dismissal of grieving in public based on contemporary trends. This epicurean philosophy dictates

FACING DEATH: A SARTREAN PERSPECTIVE ON THE CONTEMPORARY TENDENCY TO OVER-HUMANIZE DEATH

Death within the Text: Social, Philosophical and Aesthetic Approaches to Literature, 2019

The contemporary Western society manifests a strong tendency to humanize death and to endow it with meaning. It does this in various ways, for instance through an overemphasis on the natural side of death, which has roots in an evolutionistic perception of life, or by casting a positive light upon death, which stems from the secular use of cultural elements belonging to traditional religions. The exaggerated humanization of death can be observed in literature, popular culture, and in many theories and research directions within the field of death studies/thanatology. This chapter discusses the main occurrences of the over-humanised death and exposes its ideological construction and the significant social, cultural and anthropological negative implications. The study uses the Sartrean philosophical perspective on death and dying as a theoretical framework. The French existentialist writer and philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre engages in a negative relationship with death. According to Sartre, death is the ultimate embodiment of the inhuman, which accounts for its lack of relevance on the level of ontology, on the level of knowledge, and on the level of meaning. If death is a denial of human beings, the only thing left for them to do is to deny death in their turn. The Sartrean human being is always a being-against-death. This study strives to illustrate that there is a Sartrean lesson on death and dying that we could benefit from in terms of critical thinking in relation to certain contemporary approaches to death.

The Language of Speaking about, and Reflecting on Death:

This paper is an attempt to interpret the phenomenon of death, not least in terms of its relevance for our understanding of life, using L. Tolstoy’s story The Death of Ivan Ilyich as a congenial starting point. It is an important attribute of death that it fundamentally defies analysis, and, with human consciousness blocking our access to anything that does so, we find ourselves unable to “admit” death into ourselves or identify ourselves with it. Hence our efforts to come to terms with the phenomenon of death by reducing it to a kind of semiotic form expressed in the accepted practices of mourning and burial. The inevitable clash between the phenomenon of death and that of Dasein, whose topos of opposition is being itself, results in an antinomy which can only be resolved by addressing the phenomenal essence of both as a means of looking beyond their mere contents, clearing thereby a space for thought that is normally occupied by consciousness. L. Tolstoy’s treatment of his character’s dying reveals the fundamental solitude of a human being in the face of the most crucial experiences of human existence, such as pain and death. The indefinite nature of such phenomena reveals the power of the impersonal, making one turn to oneself, to one’s very presence in the world (cf. the notion of Dasein), the most authentic way of doing which is turning to one’s childhood. Compared with conversation concerning the situations of habitual life, the event of death gives a new direction to thinking, leaving no room for dialogue (with no common ground for communication) and creating a kind of conversation with oneself, which is thoroughly complete in itself. Death introduces a position of reflection that establishes a formal limit to the development of life and can properly be defined as a position of thinking. The event of death enables one to conceive life in its integrity. The topoi of life can be “cleared” of their contents and correlated to each other in their formal respect (i.e. that proper to life itself). Such a correlation is made possible by time, the time of the present, the time of life itself, which defies measurement and has no duration, and, for that reason, is perceived as fictitious, from the point of view of life’s ‘contents’. Thus, the event of death reveals itself as a ‘utopian’ and, at the same time, a theoretical point (topos), from which thinking unfolds itself. Such a position, which is, in fact, a metaphysical point of observation, enables one to consider what occurs in one’s life from a new perspective and to coin language forms that are connected with thinking, rather than with consciousness. This perspective also enables one to think of time irrespective of the specific contents of life, for it lies beyond their boundaries.