SINCE THERE IS PHILOSOPHY, MORE EXACTLY THAN SOCRATES ON THERE, THERE IS WHAT IS CALLED THE "IDEAL OF PHILOSOPHICAL DEATH", WHICH CICERO WILL BEST SUMMARIZE IN THE OFTEN-LISTED SENTENCE: To illustrate the range of a FILOZOFIJE Seen in this key, the English philosopher Simon screams in 2009 wrote an interesting book entitled The Book of the Dead philosophy, in which he gave a chronological overview of how the dying philosopher Pythagoras and Heraclitus to Derrida and Baudrillard - a hundred destiny in TWO AND A HALF YEARS - AS WELL AS A POSSIBLE CONNECTION BETWEEN THE WAYS OF DEATH AND THEIR LEARNING. THIS BOOK, A KIND OF ENCYCLOPEDIA OF WESTERN THOUGHT, SPIRITUALLY AND ERUDITICALLY WRITTEN, PUBLISHED BY "GRADAC" AND TRANSLATED BY ALEKSANDAR V. STEFANOVIĆ, JUST APPEARED IN FRONT OF LOCAL READERS. RECOMMENDING IT, ON THIS OCCASION, WITH THE PERMIT OF THE PUBLISHER, WE PUBLISH THE EXCERPT FROM ITS INTRODUCTION
The Book of the Dead Philosophers is not any "book of the dead," such as the Egyptian or Tibetan. These remarkable ancient, written monuments carefully describe the rituals necessary as preparation for the certainty of the afterlife. The Egyptian Book of the Dead contains 189 magical sayings that ensure the transition of the soul to a stellar or sunny afterlife. The Tibetan Book of the Dead describes the funeral rituals necessary to break the illusory cycles of existence and attain Enlightenment (the great P) when it is supposedly attained through nirvana.
The influence of such approaches is wide, from the "secret doctrine" of Mrs. Blavacki and her "Theosophical Society" in the late 19th century, through the psychedelic version of the Tibetan Book of the Dead by Timothy Leary, achieved with the help of LSD from 1960, to today's obsession with "death near" or "out - of - body" experiences encouraged by Raymond Moody, by publishing his Life After Life in 1976.
This is also the attitude that Nietzsche called "European Buddhism", although American Buddhism is also quite widespread. The important point is that in both books, Tibetan and Egyptian, as well as their modern epigones, death is an illusion. Existence is a cycle of rebirth that is only interrupted by the final transition to Enlightenment. In this way, it is a question of access to true Knowledge (the great Z, and on this occasion) which will reveal what Schopenhauer considered the veil of the illusion of Maya (mayā) and enable the soul to liberate itself. This approach is summarized in the words of the influential Bengali poet Rabindranath Tagore: "Death is not turning off the light; it is turning off the lamp because the dawn has broken." The influence of such approaches to death and dying can be discovered in the still widely read books of Elizabeth Kibler-Ross. With patients whose death was certain, the writer applied a psychological approach based on five stages of dying (denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance) which had a tremendous impact on palliative care. In her book On Death and Dying (1969), each chapter begins with a quotation from Tagore, while in the second, under a rather revealing title, Death: The Last Stage of Growth (1974), Kibler-Ross gives an exaggerated tribute to the Tibetan Book of the Dead.
I do not want to deny the undoubtedly beneficial consequences of such approaches. I only express my fear that they cultivate the opinion that death is an illusion that needs to be overcome with proper mental preparations. However, it is not an illusion, but a reality that needs to be accepted. I would go further than that, claiming that to the reality of death, the very existence of an individual should be conceived. Perhaps the most destructive feature of modern life is the refusal to accept this reality, as well as the desire to escape the real fact of death.
The book of dead philosophers is actually a reminder of death or memento mori. It is not the trumpet call of a new exoteric dogma; it is a book of 190 question marks that may allow us to face the reality of our death.
So much for the good news, and this is not all. Because the history of the death of a philosopher is also a story about strange destinies, madness, suicides, crimes, accidents, pathos, the transition from the sublime to the ridiculous, and to some extent about black humor. You will die laughing, I promise you that. Here are some examples that will be discussed in more detail below:
Pythagoras preferred to be killed than to cross the bean field;
Heraclitus drowned in beef dung;
Plato allegedly died of being infected by yours;
Aristotle is said to have killed himself with a single poison;
Empedocles fell to Mount Etna hoping to become a god, but one of his pair of metal sandals was spewed back by volcanic fire, confirming his mortality;
Diogenes died holding his breath;
The same thing happened with Zeno of Kition;
Zeno of Elea died a heroic death by biting the tyrant's ear until he was stabbed to death;
Lucretius allegedly committed suicide after taking a love potion since he went insane;
Hypatia was killed by a mob of angry Christians, and her skin was skinned with oyster shells;
Boethius was cruelly tortured until he fell dead in blood, by order of the Ostrogothic king Theodoric;
John Scott Origen, the great Irish philosopher, was allegedly stabbed to death by English students;
Avicenna died from an overdose of opium after too much sexual activity;
Thomas Aquinas died forty-five miles from home after hitting his head on a tree branch;
Mirandola was poisoned by his secretary; Siger of Brabant was stabbed by his secretary;
William of Okama died of the plague;
Thomas More was beheaded and impaled on a stake on London Bridge;
Jordan Bruno's mouth was plugged and the Inquisition burned him alive;
Galileo barely escaped the same fate, but was sentenced to eternal imprisonment;
Bacon died by filling the streets of London with snow to check the effects of freezing;
Descartes died of pneumonia as a result of giving lessons, in the early winter hours of Stockholm, to the strange Queen Christina of Sweden, who was a transvestite;
Spinoza died in The Hague in his rented rooms, while everyone else was in the church;
Leibniz, discredited as an atheist and forgotten as a public figure, died alone and was buried at night, in the presence of only one friend;
The beautiful and brilliant John Toland died in such terrible poverty that no mark was placed on the place where he was buried;
Berkeley, a fierce critic of Tolandov and other so-called "free thinkers," died one Sunday evening during a visit to Oxford while his wife was reading him a sermon;
Montesquieu died in the embrace of his mistress, leaving unfinished one test of taste;
The atheist, materialist Lametri died of indigestion after eating truffle pate;
Rousseau died of a brain hemorrhage, probably caused by a collision with a Great Dane on the streets of Paris two years earlier;
Diderot choked to death with one apricot, almost certainly to prove how enjoyment is possible to the last breath;
Condorcet was killed by the Jacobins during the bloodiest years of the French Revolution;
Hume died peacefully in his bed refuting Boswell's questions about an atheist's thoughts on death;
Kant's last spoken word was Sufficit, "enough is enough";
Hegel died during the cholera epidemic and his last words were: "Only one man understood me ... and did not understand me" (he probably had in mind himself);
Bentham mummified and sat exposed to the eyes of the audience in a display case at University College London to make the most of his personality;
Max Stirner was bitten on the neck by a flying insect and he died of fever;
Kierkegaard's tombstone rests on his father's stone;
After kissing a horse in Turin, Nietzsche went into a long and gradual mental numbness;
Monica Šlika was killed by a deranged student who then joined the Nazi party;
Wittgenstein died the day after his birthday, for which Mrs. Bevan gave him an electric blanket, wishing him: "Long live the summer"; Wittgenstein replied, staring at her: "There will be no many summers";
In World War II, Simone Way starved herself to death out of solidarity with France;
Edith Stein died in Auschwitz;
Giovanni Gentile was killed by Italian anti-fascist partisans;
Sartre said, "Death? I don't think about it. It has no place in my life"; his funeral was attended by 50,000 people;
Merleau-Ponty was reportedly found dead in his study with a face on a Cartesian book;
Roland Barthes was hit by a van of a dry cleaner's as he was returning from a meeting with the future Minister of Culture;
Freddie (Alfred) Eyer, having previously had a salmon bone stuck in his throat, suffered an apparent death, after which he said that he had met the lords of the universe;
Jules Deleuze jumped out of his Paris apartment through the window to avoid the torment of emphysema;
Derrida died of pancreatic cancer at the same age as his father, who suffered from the same disease;
My teacher Dominique Janico died alone on the beach, in August 2002, where the le Chemin de Nietzsche near Nice, France, began, after suffering a heart attack after swimming.
Death is near and it is getting closer all the time. Funny, isn't it?
My personal view of death is close to that of Epicurus and what is known as "fourfold healing": do not fear God; don't worry about death; what is good is readily available; and what is terrible is not difficult to resist. In the last of the four letters attributed to him, Epicurus writes: "Get used to the thought that death does not concern us at all. For all good and evil are based on perception, and death is the loss of perception. Therefore, the true knowledge that death nothing concerns the enjoyment of what is mortal in life, because it does not give us unlimited time, but takes away our longing for immortality. "
Epicurus' view of death was of great influence in the ancient world, as can be seen in Lucretius, as Pierre Gassendi rediscovered it in the seventeenth century. It represents a pronounced and strong sub-tradition in Western thought, to which not enough attention has been paid: when death is present, then I am gone; when I am present, then there is no death. Therefore, it is pointless to worry about death, and the only way to gain peace of mind is to eliminate the disturbing longing for the afterlife.
No matter how attractive this attitude may be, it is fraught with the obvious problem that it is not in itself able to provide a cure for the type of death that is most difficult to bear: not our own, but the death of those we love. The death of those to whom we are bound by our love is the one who dissolves us, who tears the woven web of our self, who destroys every meaning we have attached to something. In this opinion, no matter how strange it may sound, we only through pain become what we really are. That is to say, to be what you do not consist, therefore, in any illusion we have of ourselves, but in the realization of that part of ourselves which we have irretrievably lost. The whole difficulty consists of figuring out what kind of pleasure or serenity is possible in facing the death of those dear to us. I am not able to promise how I will solve this question, but the reader will face it, dissected, in the various records that follow.
Well done for the article.