Relation to oneself· Existence
Preparing for the passage
Axis: Death — What attitude should we take toward death?
Death is not a wall but a threshold: the right attitude is to prepare for it by the way one lives, and to approach it with trust. This is the ars moriendi of the traditions: learning to die well is part of learning to live well, and the serenity of the final passage is cultivated starting now.
Movements 3
Platonismexplicit
Platonism affirms the immortality of the soul, argued in the from its kinship with the Forms and its simple, indissoluble nature. Death is but the separation of soul and body, and the philosopher rehearses it throughout his life.
Plato, Phaedo, 64a, 78b-80b, death as practice · Plato, Republic, 608d-611a, the immortality of the soul
Show inferred positions (2)
Vedānta (Advaita)inferable
For Vedanta, the Self (atman) is eternal and does not die: death reaches only the body and the empirical person, while the atman transmigrates from life to life according to karma. It is therefore first an immortalism (the Self survives, indestructible), coupled with a passage (death is but a stage) and a preparation (dying well orients what follows), until the liberation (moksha) that dissolves transmigration itself.
Bhagavad Gita, II · Katha Upanishad
Buddhisminferable
For Buddhism, death is neither the annihilation of a self nor the survival of a soul, but a passage within the cycle of rebirths governed by karma: a mere stage, yet one to be carefully prepared, since the dying person's state of mind orients the rebirth, and something continues without any permanent soul remaining. A balanced position, until the liberation that alone halts the cycle.
Bardo Thödol (Tibetan Book of the Dead) · Suttas on rebirth
Philosophers 10
Thomas Aquinasexplicit
Death separates the soul from the body, but the intellective soul, because it subsists in itself, does not perish: it survives awaiting the resurrection of bodies, where the human being will once again be complete. Death is therefore neither sheer nothingness nor the ultimate horizon, but a passage toward eternal life and, for the just, toward the vision of God. This is a properly Christian immortalism, joining the immortality of the soul to the resurrection of the flesh.
Summa Theologiae, Ia, q. 75, a. 6; Suppl., q. 75
Platoexplicit
The does not posit survival, it argues for it, through four linked proofs: the generation of opposites, which presupposes knowledge prior to birth, the soul's affinity with the simple and indestructible intelligible, and finally the essence argument, the soul that carries life within it being unable to admit its contrary. The reasoning rests on the of soul and body: what is simple does not decompose, hence does not perish. Death then ceases to be annihilation and becomes the soul's passage toward the intelligible, and philosophy itself, as detachment from the body, is its anticipated rehearsal.
Phaedo, 64a, 102a-107b · Republic, X, 614a-621d (myth of Er)
Plotinusexplicit
The soul being a simple substance, immaterial and akin to the intelligible, it does not decompose and survives the body's dissolution: Plotinus takes up and develops the of 's . Death is only a stripping away, the liberation of the soul from its bodily envelope, and so nothing to be feared by one who has already learned to live turned upward. The sage rehearses it in this life, by detaching his true self from the body.
Enneads, IV, 7 (On the Immortality of the Soul) · Enneads, I, 9 (On Leaving the Body)
Descartesexplicit
Cartesian dualism really separates the soul, a thinking substance, from the body, an extended substance: nothing in the nature of the mind depends on the body, whose death therefore cannot reach it. Descartes presents it as an explicit aim of the Meditations to demonstrate, against the libertines, the immortality of the soul. Death is but the breakdown of a machine, the soul surviving it.
Meditations on First Philosophy, Dedicatory Letter and VI
Śaṅkaraexplicit
The self () is never born and never dies: death touches only the body-mind compound, not the consciousness that witnesses it. In this respect Śaṅkara belongs to immortalism, the present life being a passage toward liberation. But the encoding calls for a nuance: what is immortal is not the individual soul, which unravels with its rebirths, but the impersonal self identical in all. For the one who has realized this identity, death is no longer even an event to fear, which adds a coloring close to "death is nothing": it can subtract nothing from what, in essence, was never in time.
Commentary on the Bhagavad Gītā, II.11-30 · Commentary on the Kaṭha Upaniṣad
Kantexplicit
Theoretical reason cannot prove that the soul survives the body, but practical reason postulates it: the moral law commands a perfection that no finite life completes, which requires an indefinite progress, hence the immortality of the soul. An immortality not demonstrated but postulated, a rational belief resting on morality.
Critique of Practical Reason, Dialectic, II
Show inferred positions (4)
Leibnizinferable
For Leibniz, no substance truly perishes: the monad is indestructible, and what we call death is only an enfolding and a diminution, not an annihilation. The rational soul moreover keeps its individuality, its memory and its moral identity, the pledge of a personal immortality required by divine justice.
Monadology, §§ 73-77 · Discourse on Metaphysics, § 34
Lockeinferable
A Christian, Locke looks for a future life, but grounds it on the promised resurrection rather than on a natural immortality of the soul, which he doubts (he even entertains a matter capable of thinking). It is God who raises and rewards, the hereafter being a gift, not an intrinsic property of the mind.
The Reasonableness of Christianity · Essay concerning Human Understanding, IV, 3
The Buddhainferable
For the Buddha, death is neither the annihilation of a self (there is no permanent self, ) nor the survival of a soul, but a passage within the cycle of rebirths governed by karma: a mere stage, yet one to be carefully prepared, since the dying person's state of mind orients the rebirth, and something continues without any soul remaining. A balanced position, until the liberation that alone halts the cycle.
Suttas on karma and rebirth · Bardo Thödol (Tibetan tradition)
Nāgārjunainferable
Nagarjuna takes up the Buddhist view of death as a passage within the cycle of rebirths, but reads it in the light of emptiness: birth and death are themselves empty of inherent nature. Death is therefore neither an absolute terminus nor the survival of a soul, but a conditioned transition, one stage among others, until wisdom undoes the cycle. A balanced position, without the pole of refusal.
Fundamental Verses on the Middle Way (Mūlamadhyamakakārikā), XXV
Characters 1
Antigoneexplicit
Prologue · Second episode (ll. 460-464)
- PrescriptiveExistential Thought experimentIs finitude a good?
Would a life with no term end up drained of its savor, passions dulled, everything already lived? If so, it is not in spite of death but thanks to it that our days count.
a whole life - PrescriptiveExistentialThe death of others
Death reaches us first in the death of those we love: is this grief "nothing", or does it teach us, better than any theory, what dying means?
the death of a loved one - PrescriptiveMoralChoosing one's death
Faced with a life become unbearable, is ending one's days the ultimate freedom, the Stoics' "open door", or a wrong against oneself and others?
ending one's life - DescriptiveDoes anything survive?
Does the soul, or something of us, escape the dissolution of the body, or does consciousness go out with it: and if a part survived, would it still really be us?
the soul