What is Death - Essay Example

The very same also stands to be true for the phenomena of death. It is the very nature of human mind and propensities to theorize and analyze the unknown aspects of existence, by bringing in the beliefs, values and aspirations affiliated to the known into one’s conceptualization of the unknown issues or riddles like death. It is a fact that, barring a few exceptions and rare occasions, nobody wants to die, or in other words nobody wants the life to cease or end. Hence, most of the philosophical and scientific beliefs and theories of death are in a way the manifestation of the human yearning to respect life and the human desire for a continuation of life in an albeit different format, when the human body proceeds to disintegrate in response to natural or accidental factors that go contrary to the sustenance of life.

To put it in simple words, in a general context, the human attempts to understand and grasp the truth and nature of death have largely been manifestations of the human need to live and the human fear of death, which in no way factually and scientifically explain the unexplainable and unknown reality of death. For instance, take the most ancient of the philosophies pertaining to death, the Hindu belief system, which holds that organic existence happens to be an unceasing cycle of “birth, death, rebirth, and, then again death (Kastenbaum 38)”. . For example, the Dayak of Borneo hold that the human soul returns back to earth after death and gets reborn by invading the body of a woman (Kastenbaum 38).

Philosophers like Samuel Alexander and Llyod Morgan have even tried to package the human need to go on living into a somewhat scientifically valid theory, at least seemingly, by basing it on Darwin’s Theory of Evolution (Kastenbaum 49). Besides the urge to go on living, the other fact that attends the reality of death is the fear of death. At a very basic level, people fear death owing to many reasons, like fearing the eventual separation from one’s loved ones, the pain of an ending of one’s social existence, or the anxiety regarding passing into a form after death, which may be somewhat subhuman or completely elemental (Kastenbaum 61, 55, 49).

Varied beliefs and tendencies accompanying the nature of death could to a large extent be explained and interpreted in the light of the quintessential human fear of death. Take the shapes and figures that have been considered to represent or resemble death since times immemorial like the sirens of the Greeks or the skeletons in many ancient cultures like Pompeii (Kastenbaum 52). Objectifying death into objects and entities that happened to be intimidating is nothing but a manifestation of the human fear of death.

The other concept that extends insight into the human fear of death is the personification of death, which certainly is a bit more sophisticated development. Individuals and cultures personified death into the mould of anxieties and levels of pessimism or optimism that accompanied and attended their understanding or say a lack of understanding of death (Kastenbaum 54). One thing that largely contributes to the pervasive fear of