“He who has a why to live for can bear almost anyhow.” Nietzsche.
“One day death will die” I remember very well I heard this phrase I was watching a philosophy conference and suddenly these words froze me. I frowned with great amazement and only these words over and over again like an endless melody in my mind. That phrase changed the way I see death forever. – Estefani Serna
BLESSED PHILOSOPHY
Philosophy has been one of my passions since I was a very young girl. The love of knowledge has led me to analyze life from various points of view, and some (or most) have not been very “pleasant.”
If you still don’t know the path of philosophy, but you’re one of those who think in philosophy you can get answers and some comfort to your pain, let me pat you on the back. (Nothing further from reality) I like the expression that philosophy only serves to break your balls because, in a way, it is.
Philosophy takes us down from our golden cloud, makes us step on the ground, and sometimes kisses hell. That is the price we have to pay for knowledge, but I assure you that there is no way and greater satisfaction than walking along this path.
Once you make up your mind, you turn on your lamp and start to get out of the labyrinth, and there is no turning back. Philosophy would be Ariadne’s thread that helps us escape the maze of the minotaur.
When we question the society where we live and leave our comfort zone, we begin to doubt whether the things presented to us as “natural” really are.
One of the most studied topics of philosophy is death. I do not think there is any philosopher who has forgotten to write or even dedicate a little text to such a controversial subject.
In philosophical terms, it seemed that death is irretrievable. And some existentialist philosophers mostly thought that death should be embraced with peace of mind because it is the end of all human suffering. But, is it like that today?
“I hope you don’t hate me Schopenhauer, I love you.”
Anthropology confirms that the most important characteristic of human beings is their fear of death. And precisely this fear pushed us to gain the advances in medicine and technology that we have today.
Some of the new philosophers have changed their perspectives on death, and the reason why we have new points of view about the world is that science has progressed a lot. Many problems and diseases from previous centuries became a page of history.
Even in the Christian story of Jesus, when he was on the cross, he said with pain: “father, why have you abandoned me?” Jesus of Nazareth didn’t even want to die.
The truth is that nobody wants to die. We are not ready to do it. Our survival instinct holds on to life.
TIMELESS PLATO
Something about Plato’s cave myth is exciting; besides being timeless, it explains how the one that comes out of the cave stops seeing the shadows reflected on the wall by the sunlight changes and can see everything completely different. But they do it little by little as their eyes get used to the light.
Einstein said people were crazy if they kept doing things the same way expecting different results. Do you want to be as ignorant as those prisoners who live in the cave thinking that their realities are those shadows that shake on the wall?
We have the duty of observing life and society from new points of view. Stop being afraid and use philosophy. Unlearn the concepts we have been taught as natural and analyze them closely.
Most people have spent their whole lives ignoring things, locking themselves in their cavern of superficiality, drowning out of work, spending the entire day watching TV. They are being very indifferent to the world where we live because only in this way we get rid of taking our share of responsibility and having a quieter life without making great efforts to think or question. As one sage once said, “ignorance makes happiness”.
Yes, I know you will think this all sounds cliche, but people are still not aware of their power in this world. We complain and hope that a magical change will fall from the sky, and one day we will wake up, and everything will be different, doing nothing for it.
Wake up! This isn’t going to happen; if you want a real change, walk and look in the mirror, start with yourself.
As Kant explained in Critique of Pure Reason “We see things, not as they are, but as we are.”
He ironically changed philosophy entirely without leaving the small town where he was born.
AGING
We accept aging as natural, and we must resign and accept it as a normal thing, right? Why did we want to change it if it has always existed?
Aging is one of the main gates to death, and for centuries we have accepted it as a natural thing, so I give a glimpse of history and think: Before it was believed that the earth was spinning around the sun, in the Middle Ages it was a sin to be left-handed and poor of that woman who was born red-haired, she would go directly to the bonfire for “being” a witch.
Just because it looks natural in society does not mean it is okay or that it cannot be changed. Many concepts, activities, and diseases that were normal or natural in the past today are no longer usual.
New perspectives came to us with the advances in Science that were leaving the ages, especially using logic to analyze “normality.”
Of course, at first, an idea of someone who has come out of the cave sounds crazy, and the others will laugh because they are still inside the cave. The darkness blinds their rationing, but we do not fight with them when we leave the cave. We must find a way to tell them that there is a different world, and by doing other things, they will notice the change.
DEATH IS A GREAT TRAGEDY
Fear is a natural response from our minds, it is not having knowledge about something, not knowing what is going to happen. It is normal to be afraid of new things above all, but how can we defeat it? Informing ourselves, reading, gaining knowledge.
Can you imagine what the world would be like now if Einstein had not continued investigating when his theory about special relativity was rejected due to laziness or boredom?
Many ideas that changed the way we saw the world were rejected; great inventors, thinkers, and
scientists were burned at the stake, persecuted, or even spent their entire lives in prison for ideas that are now openly accepted.
The story of Copernicus and Joan of Arc is just a small example of the many that happened.
We believe in many things to survive in this rare world; religion is one of the main reasons that feeds us to continue believing that we can live after death. The success of Christianity is because they know how to control our greatest fear, they could find a great response to end with a perfect life in the afterlife.
Then we must die peacefully because God will welcome us with open arms and a beer in paradise where we will be eternally happy. However, our reason and experience dictate that death is not what comes next. It is our endpoint history. BOOM! it’s over.
We must understand that death and aging are severe problems and can be reversed. The knowledge we have today of how the universe works and how to live our lives is very different from what thinkers had centuries ago, but we still have the same questions that we have not been able to answer. If we put our focus on them, we can answer them.
Today, more than ever, we need philosophy to redefine the right questions in problems; Philosophy must be focused on making logical and right questions without looking for answers, this is the goal of science.
If there are incorrect questions, we will have the wrong solutions. Philosophy and science working together will find answers and destroy old paradigms.
Evolving would be the future of all species, including ours; if not, we would be still playing with sticks in the Stone Age. But today, we build skyscrapers, travel to space, and can defeat aging. The success of our evolution is in our
hands.
