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Nomenclature of Amphiboles; Report of the Subcommittee on Amphiboles of the International Mineralogical Association Commission on New Minerals and Mineral Names
- Bernard E. Leake, Alan R. Woolley, C. E. S. Arps, W. D. Birch, M. C. Gilbert, J. D. Grice, F. C. Hawthorne, A. Kato, H. J. Kisch, V. G. Krivovichev, K. Linthout, J. Laird, J. Mandarino, W. V. Maresch, E. H. Nickel, N. M. S. Rock, J. C. Schumacher, D. C. Smith, N. C. N. Stephenson, L. Ungaretti, E. J. W. Whittaker, G. Youzhi
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- Mineralogical Magazine / Volume 61 / Issue 405 / April 1997
- Published online by Cambridge University Press:
- 05 July 2018, pp. 295-310
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The International Mineralogical Association's approved amphibole nomenclature has been revised in order to simplify it, make it more consistent with divisions generally at 50%, define prefixes and modifiers more precisely and include new amphibole species discovered and named since 1978, when the previous scheme was approved. The same reference axes form the basis of the new scheme and most names are little changed but compound species names like tremolitic hornblende (now magnesiohornblende) are abolished and also crossite (now glaucophane or ferroglaucophane or magnesioriebeckite or riebeckite), tirodite (now manganocummingtonite) and dannemorite (now manganogrunerite). The 50% rule has been broken only to retain tremolite and actinolite as in the 1978 scheme so the sodic calcic amphibole range has therefore been expanded. Alkali amphiboles are now sodic amphiboles. The use of hyphens is defined. New amphibole names approved since 1978 include nyböite, leakeite, kornite, ungarettiite, sadanagaite and cannilloite. All abandoned names are listed. The formulae and source of the amphibole end member names are listed and procedures outlined to calculate Fe3+ and Fe2+ when not determined by analysis.
Death and Mortality in Contemporary Philosophy
- Bernard N. Schumacher
- Translated by Michael J. Miller
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- 05 June 2012
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- 30 September 2010
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This book contributes to current bioethical debates by providing a critical analysis of the philosophy of human death. Bernard N. Schumacher discusses contemporary philosophical perspectives on death, creating a dialogue between phenomenology, existentialism and analytic philosophy. He also examines the ancient philosophies that have shaped our current ideas about death. His analysis focuses on three fundamental problems: (1) the definition of human death, (2) the knowledge of mortality and of human death as such, and (3) the question of whether death is 'nothing' to us or, on the contrary, whether it can be regarded as an absolute or relative evil. Drawing on scholarship published in four languages and from three distinct currents of thought, this volume represents a comprehensive and systematic study of the philosophy of death, one that provides a provocative basis for discussions of the bioethics of human mortality.
8 - The “Nothingness of Death”
- Bernard N. Schumacher, Université de Fribourg, Switzerland
- Translated by Michael J. Miller
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- Death and Mortality in Contemporary Philosophy
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- 05 June 2012
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- 30 September 2010, pp 151-167
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Summary
Presuppositions of the Epicurean thesis of the “nothingness of death”: materialism, hedonism, and experientialism
In order to mitigate the fear of death, or even nip it in the bud, Epicurus demonstrates that it must not matter to the individual: it “is nothing to us”, because the subject does not find himself in the state of death during his existence, nor in existence once he is deceased. “Death […] is nothing to us, since so long as we exist, death is not with us; but when death comes, then we do not exist”. This thesis of the “nothingness of death” corresponds to two features of Epicurean thought: on the one hand, a hedonistic ethos of pleasure and happiness, which is itself based on his theory of sense knowledge (or “experientialism”), and, on the other hand, an atomistic and materialistic view of the world. The latter prompts the philosopher of the Garden to say that death signifies the nonexistence of the subject, despite the temporary presence of the corpse. The separation of the soul from the body at decease does not mean, for Epicurus, that the soul continues to exist in itself, as Plato and (according to some interpretations) Aristotle maintain. Being corporeal, since it is composed of atoms, and hence mortal, the soul dissolves at the moment of the subject’s death. Its atoms are dispersed in all directions. Thus it is impossible for the ‘dead’ soul to be the subject of sensations: “death is deprivation of sensation”. Human death means the irreversible end of the individual and of all experience.
Epicurus disagrees with Plato and Aristotle not only on the question of death and afterlife, but also on the question of happiness. More specifically, Epicurus differs from them in that he does not connect the idea of good with the notion of the perfection of human nature. Distancing himself from a theory of happiness based on the virtues, he proposes the thesis that happiness is found in pleasure, which is “the beginning and end of the blessed life”. Cicero records in his treatise De finibus that the philosopher of the Garden based his ethics on the statement that “every animal, as soon as it is born, seeks for pleasure, and delights in it as the Chief Good, while it recoils from pain as the Chief Evil, and so far as possible avoids it”. Determining whether a state of affairs or an event is good or evil depends, for Epicurus, on the sensation that the subject may have of it. Underlying Epicurean hedonism we find the experientialism that plays a major role in the argument about the “nothingness of death”. In order for a state of affairs or an event to be described as good or evil, the subject must be capable of experiencing it, which presupposes temporal and spatial parameters. Epicurus maintains that a person can be happy or unhappy only insofar as he has experiences (in which he is subject to pleasures or pains). One classifies a state of affairs as good or evil according to the experience that it occasions. An event that could not be experienced would be indifferent.
Conclusion
- Bernard N. Schumacher, Université de Fribourg, Switzerland
- Translated by Michael J. Miller
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- Death and Mortality in Contemporary Philosophy
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- 30 September 2010, pp 213-220
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A good way of testing the calibre of a philosophy is to ask what it thinks of death.
Death is not a topic that the philosopher should treat in passing or on which we should not waste our time. On the contrary, it is one of the most important philosophical questions. Raising a whole series of inquiries, it stimulates philosophical speculation; for some it is at the very origin of the philosophical act. This consists, in part, of discovering what prevents a human being from knowing himself as he is in reality, that is, as Heidegger has rightly emphasized, a Being-towards-death, and (subsequently) of bringing him to live in authenticity. The confrontation with death leads to a meditation on life and human nature.
A philosophical reflection on death requires above all that one clarify the term, which implies an anthropological definition of the person, a definition that will have ethical repercussions on problems concerning the end of life. The definition of so-called personal death, which is based on Lockean anthropology, involves several important problems, and proponents of this position do not always apply it consistently, either on the anthropological, theoretical level or with regard to its ethical implications. Furthermore, the notion of person underlying the definition of so-called personal death and the ethics of interests are both based on the presuppositions of the Epicurean thesis of “the nothingness of death”, which are very problematic. I have opted for a definition of personal death that is at variance with the anthropological dualism of Lockean origin that has been adopted by many philosophers in the bioethical debate, who would define person by the empirically verifiable exercise of self-consciousness and by activity as a moral subject. Personal human death occurs, rather, when the organism is irreversibly incapable of functioning as a whole, a condition that itself implies the person’s departure from this world.
Preface
- Bernard N. Schumacher, Université de Fribourg, Switzerland
- Translated by Michael J. Miller
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- Death and Mortality in Contemporary Philosophy
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- 30 September 2010, pp ix-xii
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Preface
In order to safeguard his happiness, contemporary Western man has contrived to stop thinking at all about death and, more particularly, about his own death, to deny it in a way by maintaining a stony silence with regard to it. Some philosophers end up taking part in this masquerade by considering the subject taboo or by declaring that it is not philosophical. Whereas the act of philosophizing was understood in the philosophical tradition as a preparation for death, as a rumination on life and death, many contemporary philosophers set aside the very question of man’s relation to “his own death”. Does this habit of averting their eyes originate in a fear of death? Is it due to a shift of attention away from radical questions concerning the meaning and ultimate foundation of human life, in both its personal and its social dimension, so as to focus on particular and local problems? Whatever the reason, it seems that philosophy would have everything to gain if it once again centered its theoretical and practical reflections on such fundamental themes, for they are at the heart of human existence.
When they heard that I was writing a book on death, most of my colleagues smiled ironically; they just couldn’t understand how a young philosopher could “waste” several years of his life meditating on death, given that the subject eludes all philosophical investigation and there is no hope whatsoever of arriving at definitive answers. But isn’t philosophy, in some sense, a waste of time? Like true leisure and love, philosophy cannot be evaluated in terms of profitability, and I am glad that I devoted time to contemplating a philosophical subject that of course continues to elude me but that nonetheless is evident under the aspects of the incomprehensible and the frontier.
1 - Definitions of Death and What We Mean by Person
- Bernard N. Schumacher, Université de Fribourg, Switzerland
- Translated by Michael J. Miller
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- Death and Mortality in Contemporary Philosophy
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- 30 September 2010, pp 13-48
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Introduction
The recent technological discoveries that make it possible to transplant human organs and to keep a human being alive artificially with the help of machines, as well as the controversy surrounding euthanasia, have given rise to a heated debate revolving around the question of knowing when a human subject is really dead. This inquiry is nothing new. What is new are the motives driving people to look for particular criteria and signs of death that are truly reliable. Whereas people in times past were moved by the fear of being buried alive, our contemporaries are afraid that their organs might be taken from them while they are still alive – that they might undergo a “vivisection”, to use Jonas’s expression – or that they might be killed unawares by euthanasia. In order to be sure that one is not killing a human being while removing his organs, it is crucial to define the nature of human death and then to develop tests for certifying the demise. If a patient is in a so-called permanent vegetative state and is being kept alive artificially by means of mechanical support, is that human being dead? Can the same be said of Terri Schiavo, who continued to live only because of artificial feeding and hydration? Should we assume that she had passed away the moment when she was “irreversibly” plunged into that state? An anencephalic newborn has no cortex, and a human being suffering from “locked-in syndrome”, for example, Bauby as described in his book The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, is conscious but imprisoned, so to speak, in what is said to be a so-called permanent vegetative state: can they or should they be considered dead?
The answer to these questions is not situated primarily at the level of establishing useful functional criteria, together with tests (procedures to be followed, medical techniques) with a view to determining when a particular human individual has died and the fact that he is dead. Certainly the choice of functional criteria has important ethical repercussions in specifying the moment after which, for example, (a) the death of “N.” should be deemed a murder, (b) the transplantation of “N.’s” organs is permissible without the risk of performing a vivisection, and (c) one can bury “N.” and settle his estate. Although the criteria are subject to change and certain ones can be abandoned in favor of others as scientific and technological discoveries advance, I disagree with Feldman’s claim that the choice of criteria is random and relative, that it is a “contingent truth” to be gauged according to the wishes of the majority and according to the success obtained in applying them to practical cases. Although the criteria depend on scientific findings that are subject to refinement and corroboration, or may be called into question again by a theory better suited to deal with problematic aspects, they are based first of all on a certain objective knowledge. It is not a question of determining, according to standards of profitability or practical utility, which criteria would be more convenient in such and such a society, group of individuals, or situation, but rather a matter of discovering objective, universal criteria for noting when death “breaks into” the life of a human being.
Part Three - Does Death Mean Nothing To Us?
- Bernard N. Schumacher, Université de Fribourg, Switzerland
- Translated by Michael J. Miller
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- Death and Mortality in Contemporary Philosophy
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- 30 September 2010, pp 149-150
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4 - Is Mortality the Object of Foreknowledge?
- Bernard N. Schumacher, Université de Fribourg, Switzerland
- Translated by Michael J. Miller
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- Death and Mortality in Contemporary Philosophy
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- 30 September 2010, pp 85-90
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We have discussed the thesis that there is an intuitive knowledge of death, as well as the ontological approach that posits a priori an intrinsic end to the straining forward of Dasein. Let us consider for a moment the philosophers who propose a “constitutive knowledge” or a “foreknowledge” of mortality. In his book entitled Death and Thought, Conche emphasizes that the statement “I shall die” contains an absolute certainty, a “deep-seated conviction” (“conviction foncière”) that is not based on certain knowledge and is not something proved by deductive reasoning but depends on the “general or widely held opinions” of the average human being, on “accepted ideas (endoxa)”. It constitutes a “primary truth” that is “bound up with a feeling of insurmountable [and irremediable] helplessness”, which is in turn connected with “the sense of being a part of nature and of sharing a common lot”. The knowledge of my mortality – that universal and “all-powerful” law of nature – lies especially in what Conche calls a “consciousness of materiality”, meaning that I, as a material being, am profoundly affected by the principle of dissolution. The origin of the fact that I know that I am mortal cannot be found in knowledge that is understood in the sense of objective knowledge that has been acquired. At issue here is a knowledge that Conche calls “constitutive”, that is, “which has always been there, that is one with [one]self”. I could not conceive of myself not knowing that. For Conche the fact of being conscious of oneself implies the fact of thinking about oneself as mortal. ‘I think of myself, therefore I am mortal,’ one could say; or rather, to be more precise, ‘I think of myself’ is identical to ‘I think of myself as being mortal’. “From the moment that I am conscious – and this is what distinguishes me from an animal or an infant that cannot yet speak –, for example, from the moment that I wake up in the morning, I think myself, and that means: I think myself mortal. I cannot think without being conscious of it, and I cannot be conscious without thinking of myself. Now to think of myself and to think of myself as mortal are one and the same thing. Consequently every thought develops against the background of a knowledge of death. Death, as such, is the horizon of thought. We return to a sort of cogito, but such that the body, instead of being excluded from knowledge, is included in it. There is no such thing as a thought about myself that is not at the same time a thought about myself as mortal”.
Part Two - Theory of Knowledge About Death
- Bernard N. Schumacher, Université de Fribourg, Switzerland
- Translated by Michael J. Miller
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- Death and Mortality in Contemporary Philosophy
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- 05 June 2012
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- 30 September 2010, pp 49-50
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5 - Inductive Knowledge of Death and Jean-Paul Sartre
- Bernard N. Schumacher, Université de Fribourg, Switzerland
- Translated by Michael J. Miller
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- Death and Mortality in Contemporary Philosophy
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- 05 June 2012
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- 30 September 2010, pp 91-111
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After the critiques of Heidegger’s solution (“Being-towards-death”) formulated by Sternberger and Landsberg in the 1930s, and before those developed in recent years by Levinas, Derrida, and Macho, to cite only a few, Sartre is the first well-known philosopher who, while proposing an ontology different from Heidegger’s, elaborates his own concept of death in contrast to Being-towards-death – which he describes in Being and Nothingness as a “sleight of hand”. His principal aim is not to conduct an “exhaustive” and “detailed” investigation of death but to clarify Being-in-situation. He constructs his thanatology on the foundation of his ontology of freedom and his anthropology of Being-for-others, in which one for-itself (pour-soi) stands in a relation of conflict with another for-itself: the goal of Being-for-others is to reduce the other to an in-itself (en-soi). According to Sartre, I am not capable of expecting “my death”; death is not a conspicuous (insigne) possibility that is intrinsic to the for-itself, and it does not give meaning to the existence of the free for-itself. Death is extrinsic to life. It annihilates the meaning of the free projection of the possibilities of the for-itself, which, once it is dead, is definitively reduced to an in-itself, and the meaning of its past actions is henceforth conferred by the surviving for-itself. Other people, moreover, are indispensable if I am to arrive at a consciousness of my mortality. Recognizing, of course, with Heidegger along the lines of Epicurus’s argument that there is, strictly speaking, no such thing as an experience of death (understood as the state of death), Sartre maintains, contrary to Heidegger and Scheler, that only a detour by way of the experience of another’s death and by way of mourning leads to a recognition of one’s own mortality. Sartre’s reflection is a cornerstone in the debate on death and the meaning of life that left its mark the first part of the twentieth century; it seems to herald the present discussion, within the analytic tradition, of the meaning of life and the status of death as an evil (inasmuch as it deprives the subject of possibilities, interrupting the projection of his free plans for the future). Sartre’s position is one of the most original contributions to thanatology in the twentieth century, but it has not received the credit that it deserves, and it has too often been presented in outline form. In this chapter I will analyze step by step the train of thought developed by Sartre in Being and Nothingness, while questioning in particular the accuracy of his interpretation of Heidegger’s Being-towards-death. In this way I will discuss, first, the realist and idealist concepts of death; second, the possibility of expecting “my death”; third, death in relation to Sartre’s theory of meaning; and finally the concept of death as a victory of the other and as a situation limit.
Bibliography
- Bernard N. Schumacher, Université de Fribourg, Switzerland
- Translated by Michael J. Miller
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- Death and Mortality in Contemporary Philosophy
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- 05 June 2012
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- 30 September 2010, pp 221-248
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Introduction
- Bernard N. Schumacher, Université de Fribourg, Switzerland
- Translated by Michael J. Miller
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- Death and Mortality in Contemporary Philosophy
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- 30 September 2010, pp 1-10
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Although it is widely discussed within the framework of bio- and medical ethics, sociology, history, and literature, at the dawn of the third millennium death is the subject of a taboo that has been epitomized by the expression “the pornography of death”. Public practices and discourse pertaining to death are no longer connected to the “private” experiences and feelings of those who die or are in mourning. After holding a prominent place for thousands of years at the very heart of human culture, death has vanished from everyday communications, and contemporary Western society even tends to suppress anything that calls it to mind. It has become rare to see someone die. People no longer die at home, but rather at the hospital; the dead are, in a way, excluded from the community of the living. As for burial, it has been disguised so as not to recall too explicitly the victory of death that awaits everyone, as though the important thing were to camouflage or mask that victory. Meditation on death is avoided like the plague, because we prefer to occupy ourselves with things that are less lugubrious and, one might add, less obscene. Death causes those who speak about it to shiver and to experience an uneasiness mingled with a fear of their own death or of the death of a loved one; it is mentioned only in cloaked terms; Montaigne noted that people “take fright at the mere mention of death, and […] cross themselves […] as at the name of the devil”. Pascal emphasizes that “as men are not able to fight against death, misery, ignorance, they have taken it into their heads in order to be happy not to think of them at all”. Freud notes that “we [contemporary men and women] [have] showed an unmistakable tendency to put death to one side, to eliminate it from life. We have tried to hush it up”.
Thus the human being is deprived of his death. We constantly lie to ourselves, saying that it is always someone else who dies, but never myself. The individual is content to live day by day in what Heidegger calls inauthenticity [Uneigentlichkeit], in a recognition that “one dies” that is never taken personally but is invariably perceived as someone else’s business. This notion that “one dies” dominates everyday life and expresses “an indefinite something which, above all, must duly arrive from somewhere or other, but which is proximally not yet present- at-hand for oneself, and is therefore no threat”. Such an attitude does not acknowledge death but tries to neutralize it by denying it. The death of a loved one, in particular, is seen – through a reaction of fear – as a mere happenstance, an accident, and is no longer viewed from the positive perspective as an existential shock that enables the survivor to transcend his everyday attitude of activity for activity’s sake and to open himself to reflecting upon the meaning of his existence, personally and communally. Contemporary philosophy on the subject of death, or “thanatology”, aims to awaken the human being from the drowsiness resulting from this negation or this rejection of death; it tries to bring the human being to face his own mortality. It also seeks to tame death somewhat by confronting it directly, by seeking to understand the typically human attitude toward it, and by questioning the rationality of the fears that it arouses.
2 - Scheler’s Intuitive Knowledge of Mortality
- Bernard N. Schumacher, Université de Fribourg, Switzerland
- Translated by Michael J. Miller
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- Death and Mortality in Contemporary Philosophy
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- 05 June 2012
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- 30 September 2010, pp 51-60
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Introduction
There is something paradoxical about the human being. On the one hand, he is not content merely with simply being “carried along by [life’s] impetus”, to borrow Bergson’s expression, but rather seems to have a consciousness of his mortality and of the fact that he must and can die, that he “knows that it must die”, the fact that his death could occur at any moment – “Mors certa, hora incerta” (Death is a sure thing; the hour – uncertain). But on the other hand, to use one of Kierkegaard’s expressions, he lives by a deception, “a false flatterer” (he flatters himself in his thoughts by complacently preferring the security of the moment, procrastination, and postponement), and in the conscious or unconscious refusal to face death, a confrontation that is, according to Kierkegaard, the result of serious thought. I do not want to dwell on the reasons for this repression of death, but rather to discuss the way in which a human being arrives at the consciousness of his death. How does a human being arrive at the certitude that he must die, and what arguments form the basis for the statement that “death is the only certainty”? Heidegger goes so far as to describe death as the foundation for all certitudes. Contemporary philosophy proposes several answers: the intuitive, ontological, or innate knowledge of my death; knowledge obtained by inductive reasoning or interpersonal contact. In the following chapters I will examine these proposed explanations and give a detailed analysis of their supporting arguments.
Scheler is one of those “philosophers of life” who rejected certain currents in scientific thinking that took mechanism and finalism to the extreme of considering death as a more or less catastrophic event external to the individual and comparable to a mechanical, artificial accident. In the first section of his posthumous work entitled Death and Afterlife, written between 1914 and 1919, he defends the notion of natural death (I will return to this concept) and thus distances himself also from German idealism, which maintains that death does not affect a human being. According to Scheler, every living being is essentially characterized by “the internal exhaustion of the vital agents that guide the development of the species”. Death is a phenomenon “that is connected with the essence of the living thing”; it is part of “the form and structure” of all life. Life is inconceivable without death. Scheler, along with Simmel, prepares the way for Heidegger’s thought: death does not occur as an accident or a catastrophe, as Sartre and Levinas maintain, but rather as a natural event, since human life is directed toward death. In order to prove his thesis, Scheler does not use the experimental method that is dear to classical empiricism but adopts an innovative approach by referring to an intuitive knowledge of mortality.
Index of Names
- Bernard N. Schumacher, Université de Fribourg, Switzerland
- Translated by Michael J. Miller
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- Death and Mortality in Contemporary Philosophy
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- 30 September 2010, pp 249-254
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9 - Discussion of Experientialism and the Need for a Subject
- Bernard N. Schumacher, Université de Fribourg, Switzerland
- Translated by Michael J. Miller
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- Death and Mortality in Contemporary Philosophy
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- 30 September 2010, pp 168-181
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The a priori character of the Epicurean assertion that death is nothing to us
The Epicurean thesis of the “nothingness of death” has not always met with great interest among philosophers. Many of them consider it as “preposterous and stupid”, “the most absurd thing”, a “vacuity”, “fine sayings,” and “nonsense devised for the young [i.e., babblings]”, a “jest”, “extremely implausible,” and “an ancient sophism that purports to justify indifference to death”. According to Mothersill, the Greek philosopher’s point of view on the subject of death “will hardly bear looking into, but may have been intended as little more than an eristic flourish”. Such a rejection of the Epicurean “nothingness of death”, which is dismissed out of hand by describing it as a sophism, shows, in my opinion, that the gauntlet thrown down by the philosopher of the Garden is not taken seriously: this important challenge is opposed to the commonsense notion that death is an evil, perhaps even the worst of evils. Surprisingly, terms similar to those cited (against the Epicurean thesis) are sometimes used to describe the thesis that death is an evil. This thesis betrays insufficient reflection, in Rosenberg’s opinion, or “naïveté”, according to Fagot-Largeault; Rosenbaum calls it a “myth”. Is it really without any rational basis whatsoever? Are we dealing with the transformation of a peculiar psychological phenomenon into a disputed theoretical point, as Mothersill asserts? Should we not rather maintain, like Feldman, that “there is nothing incoherent about the naïve view that death can be an evil for the deceased”?
The Epicurean thesis of the “nothingness of death” implies basic assumptions, explained in the preceding chapter, that are worth examining critically. An initial premise – that of experientialism – states that every evil and every good lies in sensation, in other words, in the experience of pleasure (in the case of good) or of pain (in the case of evil). In order for a state of affairs to be described as a good or an evil for a subject, he must be capable of experiencing it (of being the subject of pleasures or pains), which presupposes parameters in time and space. A state of affairs that remained detached from experience – such as death – would be indifferent. A second premise – the need for a subject – states that the death of “N.” cannot constitute an evil for him, because he no longer exists. Indeed, in order for a state of affairs “A” to be described as an evil for “N.”, the “existential” presence of the latter is required. This thesis is equivalent to the third point that I emphasized in the preceding chapter, within the framework of my analysis of the Epicurean “nothingness of death”: “N.” would not be capable of experiencing a state of affairs “A” in T-1 and P-1 unless “A” took place during the life of “N.”, and therefore before “his” death. In other words, “N.” cannot be affected by “A” after he has died, given that he no longer is; he can be affected only insofar as he is alive. Hence death cannot be an evil for the dead “N.”, since when the death of “N.” is present, “N.” is no more. Lucretius could not be more explicit on this subject: “For if by chance anyone is to have misery and pain in the future, he must needs himself also exist then in that time to be miserable. Since death takes away this possibility and forbids him to exist for whom these inconveniences may be gathered together, we may be sure that there is nothing to be feared after death, that he who is not cannot be miserable”. In his defense of the Epicurean thesis of the “nothingness of death” and his critique of the possibility of posthumous evils, Rosenbaum adopts this second principle: “It is impossible for a loss to be bad for a person at a time when that person is dead. This is because nothing can be bad for a person unless it can have some effect on the person, and nothing can have some effect on a person unless the person is not dead. Thus, if harms are losses which are bad, then posthumous harms are not possible”. Epicurus raises an axiological question by asking whether death is an evil and, more particularly, whether it is an evil for the one who is dead. It is not a question of determining whether death is an evil for the survivors – especially for those who loved the deceased – but whether is an evil for the subject himself, not when he is still living (i.e., dying), but from the moment when he is deceased, when he “finds himself” in the state of death. The question becomes even more interesting for the philosopher, from the methodological perspective, if we take the same point of departure as Epicurus and equate a priori death (the state of death, that is) with the state of nonsurvival.
Index of Concepts
- Bernard N. Schumacher, Université de Fribourg, Switzerland
- Translated by Michael J. Miller
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- Death and Mortality in Contemporary Philosophy
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- 30 September 2010, pp 255-258
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6 - Knowledge of Mortality Is Inseparable from the Relation to the Other
- Bernard N. Schumacher, Université de Fribourg, Switzerland
- Translated by Michael J. Miller
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- Death and Mortality in Contemporary Philosophy
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- 30 September 2010, pp 112-116
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Summary
Sartre is not the only contemporary philosopher in the first half of the twentieth century to insist that the experience of another’s death is necessary to arrive at a consciousness of the mortal condition of the human being. In his essay, The Experience of Death, Landsberg alludes to the axiom “The death of one’s neighbor is infinitely more than just the death of another” and speculates that the mere experience of the death of a person totally unrelated to me does not necessarily lead to experiential knowledge of the necessity of my death. The experience of the death of someone who is loved, rather, is what makes it possible for an “intuition of the necessity of death”, a certainty about our mortal condition, to arise; it also empowers me to transcend the generalizing dimension (“people die”) that submerges my death in the unconscious. “The awareness of the necessity of death is only provoked by participation, by the personal love in which the whole experience is bathed. We constituted a ‘we’ with the dying man. And it is through this ‘we’, through the very strength of this community, which constitutes as it were a new order of persons, that we are led to an experiential knowledge of our own mortality [de notre propre devoir mourir]”. The necessity of death is not yet identical in meaning to the statement that every human being must die but rather relates essentially to the persons whom I love and to myself. Landsberg explains that the general necessity of having to die that is communicated by this experience is not of a logical but of a “symbolic” nature. Our author states that “the other represents in reality all the others” and goes on to say that the other “is ‘Everyman’ and this Everyman dies each time in the death of the man we know, who dies his own death”. The experience of the death of a dear friend can lead me either to the consciousness that I must die or else to a “renewed consciousness” (“re-conscience”) of this necessity by tearing me away from the comfortable generalization “Everyone will die someday”. Landsberg explains that this experience allows the survivor to experience, thanks to the bond of love uniting two persons who make up a We (a theme that is developed quite well by Nozick), “death within his own existence” due to his loss and the interruption of the community that the survivor formed with the deceased. “The experience of death in the solitude that follows loss”, as well as the “sense of the tragic infidelity” in the departure of the deceased – Landsberg aptly describes mortality as the state of “ontological infidelity” – certainly teach the bereaved “the qualitative nature of absence and separation”, but it says nothing whatsoever about the experience of my death as a state. The experience of the death of a loved one does not enable me to experience the death in which the deceased “finds himself”, nor my own future death. The experience of death provided by the loneliness following a loss does not mean the experience of the state of death.
Contents
- Bernard N. Schumacher, Université de Fribourg, Switzerland
- Translated by Michael J. Miller
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- Book:
- Death and Mortality in Contemporary Philosophy
- Published online:
- 05 June 2012
- Print publication:
- 30 September 2010, pp vii-viii
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7 - Death as the Object of Experience
- Bernard N. Schumacher, Université de Fribourg, Switzerland
- Translated by Michael J. Miller
-
- Book:
- Death and Mortality in Contemporary Philosophy
- Published online:
- 05 June 2012
- Print publication:
- 30 September 2010, pp 117-148
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Summary
In the preceding pages we have seen that the human being’s consciousness that he can and must die has its origin in the experience of the death of another human being. One might wonder whether this consciousness is accompanied by a knowledge not only of dying, but also and especially of death as such, that is, the state of the deceased human subject. Our concern here is to determine whether a phenomenology of death is possible.
It is possible to maintain in the first place that dying (someone else’s or one’s own) can, to a certain extent, form the object of experience. A human being can “attend” the process in a way as a spectator, “share the fact of someone’s dying” as well as his own agony (insofar as he is conscious). The conscious person who is dying is able to intentionalize the world and the state in which he finds himself, to experience the successive stages thereof, and to communicate his experiences to those around him by speech or signs. Once he sinks into a state of unconsciousness, such as a coma, he is no longer capable of communicating to another person his experience of dying. If he could nevertheless still experience it, this would have to happen in some other manner than through intentionality and conscious experience.
Part One - Human Personal Death
- Bernard N. Schumacher, Université de Fribourg, Switzerland
- Translated by Michael J. Miller
-
- Book:
- Death and Mortality in Contemporary Philosophy
- Published online:
- 05 June 2012
- Print publication:
- 30 September 2010, pp 11-12
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