Sidepoint, but to me it sucks that our culture embraces pointlessly drawn-out and painful deaths for no reason that I find valid anyway. Obviously I wouldn't want death forced on other who felt the need to cling, but I do wish I could set up some auto-destruct feature for myself in case I'm unlucky enough to be trapped in some ugly state. For instance, maybe a stroke destroys my autonomy, or I'm paralyzed by an accident and physically can't choose to leave this world on my own terms (just having the choice would make post-accident life more endurable, I think.) — Zugzwang

Suffering is painful, but it is also a part of life. It must be a difficult situation for anyone going through that stage in life. However, I still feel all life is precious, and better than death even if going through the suffering. I oppose to ending life by artificial means, or giving up hope for possible recovery from the ill health no matter how terminal it is.

I think you've answered my question. If so, there's no point.

However...

Every word we utter is inflected, every gesture or expression we share characterizes what is said such that the lexical sense and syntactic structure of the entire language is revised in that character. When we get lost we look for a map and for some landmark to reference it. Without that reference all signs are inscrutable. But the map doesn't tell you where you are, it tells you how to leave. You are more present where you are lost than navigating that departure. Any sign convinced you you know where you are actually leads away. So with language. When you think you know where you are in it you are lost, and as a matter of deliberation. If you cannot recognize how inscrutable we are to each other you can never know where you are in the drama of life. But note the sudden transformation of all signs once you become convinced that you do. The completed loss death is is an inscrutable absence we cannot navigate ourselves away from. But we only learn what language really is and means in that loss. There is no final term to the departure from being real. Only loss is presence. For, in loss, all that remains is responsibility that the worth of the lost be recognized. Deny this and we really are lost, and the drama of language is, in reality, not even begun. Finality is not loss, it is the beginning and the act of being undeparted. But conviction in the terms of navigating our departure from the inscrutable realness of life assures only that what we think we mean is never really even a beginnig. Time is neither beginning nor end, and certainly not a duration between such "ends". It is the moment of our participation in the recognizableness of the worth of the lost, and of being lost.

Sorry, it's a little over my head. Do any of our fellow posters wish to take a crack at it?

Well, even if we have a right to say pretty much whatever is on our mind, that doesn't mean we have a right to be understood as we believe we mean it. But it does seem a little lopsided to me to establish in legal and social norms a right to speak freely, more or less unregulated, and yet to regulate what we listen to in response. I suspect some balance should be struck there.

I do seem to better understand your meaning, as in a shopping mall map, you are here. Somewhere however you need I think, to leave language behind as a guide, and rely upon a basic understanding that death is the end of all experience. Consciousness continues, its all around us and ever renews itself. It ever lives in a self induced apparent reality, and as a an individual dies, so to dies a world.

I really just have no predisposition to the notion that it's nonexistence. It kind of irritates me when people act like that's the common sense approach. Here we are, alive, but how can we live. It's happened once, and maybe it only has to happen once.

Death is best understood if watching people die and listen to what they have to say.

I know I'm dying but I feel no pain except regret.

Death itself is not painful, but rather the regret that I left no legacy that would keep me remembered for something, for not doing more in my life, for not enough love with those who are most close to me like family.

Rather more tangible. It is precisely that consciousness does not continue that death is so dreadful for the living. If there really is nothing left of us how much more of a burden is it to think we knew the departed but now realize we were not there for them at all! That is, the dead are only gone insofar as they were not there at all in life. What does it mean to have someone in your life if not currently present? What is the difference? And yet, though loneliness and "missing" others when absent is distressing, it is not grief. What is the difference? If another is real in life, is that realness suddenly gone in death when not gone by mere distance? And doesn't it take the complete loss of that realness to make us recognize what we missed when alive and present?

What is tangible in what we share is the terms by which we recognize what such differences mean. Life is the language of the articulation of the worth of time. And we are perhaps the most articulate term in that language. But it is fatuous to suppose that we are endowed with that role by some external power or system. We create all the terms of that articulation. And it is impossible that we are perfectly synchronized in all its terms. But what we do do, and very much as our own creation, is to spur each other to greater rigor in presenting our own terms. This always fails, in some small nuance at the very least. But the more perfectly we achieve constancy in our terms the more overwhelming to that constancy is even the most nuanced failure of it. But if others then respond with even greater rigor of their own, and in recognition of the worth of the effort, each speech act and response in recognition of the worth of even greater rigor in thought and utterance, each act and response, together, a nuance overwhelming our commitment to constancy, then moment to moment, though we may never awaken to the changes, grows the language always overwhelmed by nuanced failures to be articulate, though just as always committed to eliminate such failures. We recognize ourselves and each other more in our own failure to be that articulation and in the response to it of greater rigor others bring in recognition to our effort to prevent it, than we do in the flat reading of the utterances we exchange we are pressured into in the academic world, or, for that matter, in the abandoned rigor of aesthetic and religious hermenuetics.

It is precisely that we are committed to reducing misstatements to the most trivial nuances, and can never quite succeed, that language is born at all. That is, long before we know what words mean there must be that recognition between us that there is rigor we are trying to bring to and spur each other in. And the terms of that recognition is the nuanced failure of that articulation. But every such nuance is overwhelming our commitment not to. Every moment in the drama of that failure in the commitment to articulate flat meaning is the completest event of language, in any language. And any recurrence of anything so complete as that moment grows more completely what language is between us than any fixed lexicon and grammar can ever be. But only in death is that completeness as recognizable as our commitment to meaning what we say and/or saying what we mean is feeble. It is not enough to cease talking or to become inaccessible for dialogue, Only the completion death is can be the most articulate term in the completion the growing moment intimated the worth of our failed articulation and response in recognition of the rigor brought to it. That is, because our constant commitment to facile and impersonal speech hides the nuances of terms overwhelmingly personal and intimate each moment of failure in that commitment is, only death can prove to us how completely that moment is what language really is. Ceasing to be altogether is the most articulate term we can bring to life. Speculation of an afterlife or conscious being of some sort after death is merely more of our fatuous commitment to constancy. And nuance by nuance of failed articulation enjoins us in the terms of that articulation in ways that no fantasy of a soul or eternal consciousness can be more than a distraction from or sop to our commitment to elude the real cost of sharing meaning. We can convince ourselves there is no need to push rigor so far that only others can spur us to the brink, or that we are so clever we can avoid even the least nuance of failed articulation, but either way the real cost of meaning is unpaid, and language dies.

The nature of life itself does not lend a reason that an individual should echo through time, as a present manifestation, one is cause, something others react to. If the care of others is involved, then there is reaction to the lack of presence, perhaps sorrow. Most people think of their identity as the totality of their life experience to that point, but all life stories are somewhat meaningless and as Shakespear said, our small lives are rounded by sleep. In this life, all we have is each other.

All words are qualifications and/or limitations.

why (in the West at least) are we scared of ghosts and zombies etc. I.e. we are scared of both life turning into death and inversely death turning into life.

Maybe it's because we're scared of death that makes us scared of the dead coming back to life...

The concept of Death is the most beautiful gift humans have.

note: NO explanation forthcoming just take it as a serious and sincere statement.

The essence of death is both ugly and beautiful, an eternal source of grief and joyousness.

Fairy tales of heroes who died beautifully bring us joy whilst our family who died in the way bring us sorrow; the essence of death is a double-edged sword.

The reality of death is similar, a need to die for release from life may change your view that death is horrific.

I assume when I die my spirit will become dishevelled, like an animal's body when it becomes a carcass. I assert my identity is still active when I'm dead. I'm still selectable as a character.

Is there life after? Only for those who deserve it.

There is no downside to death — boagie

“Now we have the right to give this being the well-known name that always designates what no power of imagination, no flight of the boldest fantasy, no intently devout heart, no abstract thinking however profound, no enraptured and transported spirit has ever attained: God. But this basic unity is of the past; it no longer is. It has, by changing its being, totally and completely shattered itself. God has died and his death was the life of the world.

In this same life after death, you would think those who have endured unkindness would be kinder as a result, intent on sparing others the awful suffering they abhorred firsthand; indeed, entropy is not only the rule of the physical, but of the metaphysical: - Death IS, and only it can in turn, give life.”

- The Philosophy of Redemption, Philipp Mainlander.

Well put. :up:

You've miss quoted me, I did not say that death was the most beautiful concept humans have.

When I stated that there was no downside to death, I was referring to one's individual death, it is quite impossible to have regret in death.

Thanks Manuel!!!

This isn't a theology site, but a philosophy site. Vengence is mine says boagie!!

:heart: :heart: :heart:

His translation is coming out next year. There's one made by a an enthusiast in Mainlander's subreddit, which is pretty decent.

But if you already know German, that's very cool.

He's a bit of a downer, but his arguments in metaphysics are extremely interesting.

Can you substantiate this beliefs in any way?

Personally, I am not afraid of ghosts and zombies they belong to the realm of supernatural fiction, along with witches, warlocks and angles.

There is no life without death. Eternal life is the same as eternal death. Hence there is life before and after. Death before and after.And in between they are both.

Like there is no day without night and no evil without good. Like sleep divides the rythm of night and day, death divides the cosmic rythm of the singular and the infinite. Infinity and singularity mean nothing without the god-given life and death. Like life divides the same daily rytm, so does it divide the cosmos. Unified at the border between infinity and singularity, life and death play eternal divine rythms in their middle.

And amidst those divine unification, all we can do enjoy life in an infinite divine way, or suffer from it. We can experience life in an animal-like way, trying to cling to life instinctively, without a knowledge of the infinities we are embedded in. Without a knowledge the miraculous wonders we are immersed in. But with an instinctive drive to stick.

Or experience life in a modern suffering-baseed mode, leading to contemplated death, an immature escape. One can escape death by the futile and naively childish attempts to become genetically or meme-based immortal.

But one can also rest assure that death is just death, a necessary condition for the divine gift that life actually is. Rest assure that death is just an intermediary of whatever form of life.

People and animals on all planets of the universe are understandably clinging to life to stay away from death. But death is not to fear. Death gives life. Once death, how else can it be that life will not be instantaneously after?

Eternal death is as mad to assume as eternal life. Death can be a welcome way out in modern society, as detached from reality as the worldview it presents. There is even money to be made from suicide. Death can be the easy way out. At the same time it gives meaning to life and

We can rest assure that no one shall ever understand the damned and blessed gift of live. We can only try to unfearingly cling to the bittersweet heavenly derived juice of life. Accepting and understanding that death is nothing to fear and the fear of it just the result of an unhealthy growth. Again, realizing that death is not eternal by its very nature.

You are into Theology my friend, and it is not a legitimate topic/subject. When nonsense is made sacred, the world is in trouble.

You are into Theology my friend, and it is not a legitimate topic/subject. When nonsense is made sacred, the world is in trouble. — boagie

I'm not aware of any fucking theological knowledge my friend. And truly don't give a damn for it. Thoughts on death were asked, I gave them. I could put my thoughts in a "legitimate" scientific frame, but who, for fucking God sakes, says science is right? You are just a human vessel, trying to make your empty meemes immortal. An irrational and vacuous attempt, detached from life. :smile:

Excellent, when negativity or negative truth is realized, as apparently you believe. You are in complete agreement with Arthur Schopenhauer, " Life is something which should never have been." I am not at all sure I disagree.

It certainly sounded theological to me, if I am mistaken I apologize. I'll reread your post to see if I get the same impression. Just reread it, and withdraw my apology.

His translation is coming out next year. There's one made by a an enthusiast in Mainlander's subreddit, which is pretty decent. — Manuel

Indeed, the translation is an amateur effort to be recognized. That it also serves, as a motivational example, for the extensive research of minimally renowned authors, but who present a perception and a philosophical argument that is very interesting.

He's a bit of a downer — Manuel

I would say that Mainlander's vision is one of accepting the futility of the struggle for life, because - in his philosophy - everything that becomes life is just prolonging "suffering", that which is completely non-existent and impotent if the concept of "death" is applied.

His argument does not defend "death" per se, but rather the cessation of all that potentially brings about "pain" or, in terms more metaphysical, "entropy".

but his arguments in metaphysics are extremely interesting. — Manuel

It is no accident that I had to revise some parts of my egoistic philosophy through a pessimistic reading, as many of the arguments presented by Mainlander directly relate to the concept of "individual purpose", something that is intrinsic to Egoism and the "Self".

Nietzsche, Stirner, and others, all applied his - Mainlander's - concept of "Wille zum Tode" - aka, "Will to Death" - in some way or capacity.

I would say that Mainlander's vision is one of accepting the futility of the struggle for life, because - in his philosophy - everything that becomes life is just prolonging "suffering", that which is completely non-existent and impotent if the concept of "death" is applied.

His argument does not defend "death" per se, but rather the cessation of all that potentially brings about "pain" or, in terms more metaphysical, "entropy" — Gus Lamarch

Sure. I read the Spanish translation, which is just a small portion of what he wrote, so I cannot opine too strongly on his larger ethical views. As it looks to me currently with my limited understanding, his argument about cessation of suffering is interesting. There's obviously some truth to it, but I think it is an exaggeration too, though I have to read more.

It is no accident that I had to revise some parts of my egoistic philosophy through a pessimistic reading, as many of the arguments presented by Mainlander directly relate to the concept of "individual purpose", something that is intrinsic to Egoism and the "Self".

Nietzsche, Stirner, and others, all applied his - Mainlander's - concept of "Wille zum Tode" - aka, "Will to Death" - in some way or capacity. — Gus Lamarch

I'm particularly drawn to his very interesting and considered critique of Kant and Schopenhauer. I think he makes quite good points, but would love to wrestle with them more.

There's lots of stuff in his work that lends itself to all kinds of modes of thought.

And yeah, it does appear as if Nietzsche was reacting against him, but he only referred to him once or so.

and angles. — boagie

How dare you?