Aries – Physical – Knees: PERISHING

The theme of death constitutes the touchstone of philosophical anthropology, inasmuch as an interpretation of man and human life that ignores the problem of death is trivial and does not deserve to be taken seriously. Death, like the earth, is the quintessence of the human condition, that is, of the set of factual conditions under which it is given to us to live.

Just as human life is an earthly life-which in fact takes place on planet earth-it is a mortal life. Mortality is undoubtedly one of the modes of being of human existence, one of the Heideggerian existential. Already the Greeks, in order to contrast man with other beings, spoke of «we mortals». In a certain sense, dying is an exclusively human attribute. Death provides a privileged point of view in anthropological reflection because it allows the totalization of human life and, to that extent, it is possible to confront the totality of one’s own life by questioning its meaning. Death is the fundamental enigma of life, to use Dilthey’s expression, and, therefore, it turns us into a problem for ourselves. Seen from the point of view of death, life itself is extraordinarily problematic. «Factus eram ipse mihi magna quaestio,» writes St. Augustine. writes St. Augustine.

Schopenhauer’s thesis, recalling Plato, that without death man would never have begun to philosophize, is well understood. Death, the knowledge of one’s own death, brings man out of lethargy and drowsiness, placing him before himself and forcing him to question himself. In this way, death becomes the birth of anthropological reflection. However, as Carlos Llano has pointed out, it is not the function of philosophy to solve the enigma of death. «Philosophy does not solve the problem of death; on the contrary, it increases it by offering it to us in all its magnitude. Indeed, the problem of death is best understood to the extent that it is understood to be a real problem.»

At this point, the function of philosophy is not to solve the problem, but to dissolve its apparent solutions, keeping our gaze fixed on its problematic. It is a matter of preventing flight from the problem of death by unveiling its sting, by posing the «scandal of death» in the most lucid way possible. Death is not a hieroglyphic solvable by the human mind, but rather a limit of thought, that which cannot be thought or understood because it is what puts an end to our thinking and our capacity for understanding. Death constitutes the frontier of thought because it would be a matter of thinking the non-existence of thought itself. In the face of death itself, thought crashes as if before an opaque and impenetrable limit. That death itself is inconceivable to us is perhaps the only valid consequence of Epicurus’ thesis. Death is something that does not affect us, because while we live there is no death; and when death is there, we are not there».

I invite everyone to read Matias’ post with the topic of the day.

Perecimiento

Finally, I encourage everyone to reflect on the concept of the day. No one else but us can re-signify our own being