Happiness02
Death As Metaphor
Oh when I was young and easy under the apple boughs ... Time held me green and dying, though I sang in my chains like the sea. --D. Thomas Think. I think we are in rats‘ alley, where the dead men lost their bones. --T.S. Eliot
I What remains to be said about the question and problem of death that has not been repeated a thousand times in the history of human thought and culture? Philosophers in the Western tradition have seemingly argued every nuance of the name, nature, causes, and consequences of death since Plato first took up the death of Socrates as the funding occasion of his philosophical life and thinking. Epicurean and Stoic philosophers subsequently framed the basic arguments that are still with us, directed to three basic questions concerning death: What is it? Is it good or bad? Should we fear it? To the first question, arguments differ with respect to whether death is referenced as a state, a process, or an event—which is to say that the concept itself is ambiguous, so any discursive analysis must first settle the question of reference. But it may be philosophically important to raise an additional and prior question about the meaning, hence nature of death just here: since the meaning of death is not limited to the domain of reference, inquiry into its nature and meaning remains open to the full range of its contextual use in the shared language and life of human beings.
1
We are inclined to preference the referentially obvious: death does occur, and we are likely to experience anxiety when our own lives are threatened with the prospect of becoming the subject of its reference. There is an obvious and objective reference to the state of death as well—the dead in the morgue, soldiers brought home in the body bags of war—and, ceteris paribus, we are thankful not to be among them. However, it is a case in point to note the contextual extension of referential meaning of death and dead, for example, in the Irish ballad, ‗The
Oh when I was young and easy under the apple boughs ... Time held me green and dying, though I sang in my chains like the sea. --D. Thomas Think. I think we are in rats‘ alley, where the dead men lost their bones. --T.S. Eliot
I What remains to be said about the question and problem of death that has not been repeated a thousand times in the history of human thought and culture? Philosophers in the Western tradition have seemingly argued every nuance of the name, nature, causes, and consequences of death since Plato first took up the death of Socrates as the funding occasion of his philosophical life and thinking. Epicurean and Stoic philosophers subsequently framed the basic arguments that are still with us, directed to three basic questions concerning death: What is it? Is it good or bad? Should we fear it? To the first question, arguments differ with respect to whether death is referenced as a state, a process, or an event—which is to say that the concept itself is ambiguous, so any discursive analysis must first settle the question of reference. But it may be philosophically important to raise an additional and prior question about the meaning, hence nature of death just here: since the meaning of death is not limited to the domain of reference, inquiry into its nature and meaning remains open to the full range of its contextual use in the shared language and life of human beings.
1
We are inclined to preference the referentially obvious: death does occur, and we are likely to experience anxiety when our own lives are threatened with the prospect of becoming the subject of its reference. There is an obvious and objective reference to the state of death as well—the dead in the morgue, soldiers brought home in the body bags of war—and, ceteris paribus, we are thankful not to be among them. However, it is a case in point to note the contextual extension of referential meaning of death and dead, for example, in the Irish ballad, ‗The