"At funerals, people are not wearing sunglasses to hide his pain but his absence." That thought crossed my mind for a few weeks ago, when I was in the middle of a funeral. Surrounded by often unknown dressed in black, masked in a solemn face that hid a deep disgust that caused the summer heat. There was something of a snob in the situation, some blind ritual. He looked like a dancing puppet, with the vacuum generating death man clings to a systematic protocol. Seeing us standing there, it became apparent that really do not know how to deal with death. "I guess it is not for less than I thought, until a comment from an assistant led me to reflect. The wizard
, evidently believing person affected aspet air "we regret .... He is now in a better place. " One can not hear this phrase without thinking of the Nietzschean critique of Christianity. According to that, Christianity is a cult of death, since this is the passage to the heavenly, where God reigns and truth. Thus life becomes a dream, something transitory and relative value. Seen well, for the true Christian life begins with death.
That's what you can unite the Marxist critique of this idea. According to Marxism, this description of reality hides an ideological use, it is designed to perpetuate the miserable situation of the disadvantaged and maintain the privileges of the rulers.
In both cases (Marxism and Nietzsche) criticizes the ontological subordination of life to a story. There is a strange stunt whereby the space of our experience becomes false and the truth is only a story, this is religion. There is then a denial of life. Nietzsche calls this denial "nihilism."
be interesting to see that nihilism is not something unique to Christianity but the essence of every religion (or speech about the inner structure of reality) to consider life as a mere transition to a higher state which is beyond death . In our current westernized cities and allegedly rampant hyper-rationalized cancerísticamente something I call "new-age wisdom" whose main characteristic oriental uncritical jumble with pseudo-scientific.
According to this discourse we need not fear death, because this does not go away nothing. When someone dies, all that happens is a redistribution of atoms. The individual atoms disintegrates but continuing part of being single (or god). Let's say that death is only change the furniture in the room.
These concepts of death understood as atomic transition and reunification could add a third nominee will born with anti-metaphysical. This is the existentialist understanding of death as anything radical. According to him death is the total disappearance of the individual, standing against the above mentioned positions. From this fact arises as primary existential existentialism fundamental moral imperative: the need for an authentic life. In front of the nothingness of death, the individual assumes the contingency and annulment of its existence and decides to give life meaning through the heroic pursuit of a project. An authentic life is one that manages to make something so meaningful to be remembered after the individual died.
Without many difficulties can be seen that in this position smuggles the utility requirement of life. Again the productivity drag constrains the notion of life.
now would like to note that these three concepts of death (such as transition, and no atomic unification radical) have one thing in common: the dead man condemned to oblivion.
Indeed, when we comfort ourselves with the loss of a loved one saying that we'll find it in the next life what you are doing is relieving us, denying the nature of loss that the death total. Something similar happens with atomic unification, the individual as a matter of supreme being has not disappeared, it has simply mutated configuration. In both evades the tragic death of his character. Existentialism maintains this tear, but despises the individuals who succumb at the end of life without a project. In other words, how many existentialist heroes know who have not won a nobel or non-literary?
In the three concepts of death introduces a systematic neglect of the individual. All metaphysical made a sacrifice of the ephemeral for the eternal. For her, people are small contingent hazards and death, the only invariable and permanent. This articulates a discourse that assumes the divine look weak and despising all human. In nihilism, the real victims are the dead. Then think of death as a transit space prevents the pain of their loss and encourages his forgetfulness.
Perhaps, if we want to be accomplices of forgetting the dead, we should avoid thinking about them as a concept of death and proceed in reverse, ie, thinking about death from the dead. That may come a notion of death related to our everyday experience: death is the irreversible pain to an absence.
We would like here think that if you want to be faithful to this pain, the best way to treat the dead is not forgotten but making this: a dialogue with them, rebuilding their idiosyncratic elements or recalling shared experiences. At bottom, this is turning into fantsamas.
Ghosts, in this sense, live and act consistently in our lives. A reminder, at a certain point, can be much more than a mere mental image can become an active intervention of the past in the present. A good visual expression of it could find in the story Joyce's The Dead. In this, the player feels less than a machine to confuse love with lust and drunkenness. This sense of annulment is enhanced to discover that the strong rule of his wife's melancholy is caused by the sudden memory of his great love of youth. A boy in a fit of passion died. The protagonist, Gabriel, becomes aware that he can never cause this effect on his wife and certainly can never love her as did one young miserable. In the revelation end of story, is a radical reversal, a change of state between living and dead.
If we want life to be a mere wilderness of this transition, if we do justice to the emotion of love clotting in grief at the death, missing turn into ghosts may be the best solution to avoid killing the dead and not condemn them to eternal life on the island of forgetfulness.
