Keeping in mind that the word “health” leads us, etymologically [sscr.Sarvas, a.pers. Harvas, gr. Olos, ang.sass Hal, etc. = integrity, safe, whole, undivided, unharmed etc.] to the idea of “salvation”, to place Death within the dynamics of the “wise life” is the practical and intellectual incentive that can lead us to “save ourselves” from fearing it in an irrational way.
The human being can’t solve the problem of facing the precariousness of life until he abandons the “myopic sight” and the “short memory” typical when dealing with this theme.
Repudiated the Heteronomous Strategy for coping with the Fear of Death, extinguished the evocative power of the symbols on which the Heteronomous-Autonomous Strategy flourished, and established – in Europe – the supremacy of reason over metaphysics, the contemporary malaise seems to derive mainly from an oppressive, unescapable, anxiety-inducing dimension, which we are unable to cope with.
Non-specific by its nature, this dimension assumed as a fundamental existential problem seems to have no possible solutions, exacerbated by the sort of “info-demic” media context, in which each of the “professional actors” appears as claiming to own the miracle cure.
Anxiety harbours especially in those who feel that Death assumes for them the features of an inconvenience at the personal level, a threat breathing down their necks, or a defeat, or a sin, a guilt to be expiated.
But an acute anguish takes over the mind in those who are fighting a desperate and lonely battle against Death (or against its “partial” manifestations, represented in the course of life by all degrees of more or less “permanent disabilities”); and a diffuse malaise insists in those who obliterate Death from their conscious mind, and who scorn it until the unavoidable moment in which they will have to face it.
Anxiety is the distinctive mode of the mind in those who are buried alive under some form of orthodoxy and traditions, rituals and social conventions, and with that they are unable to bear the burden of the thought of Death without seeking constantly for some authoritative intervention;
In those who – anyway, – deny the fact of the precariousness of the existence, choosing instead a feeble but convenient solipsism, or an unjustified Grandiose Delusion, which nevertheless does not amount for them to an authentic “autonomy”, in all of them a deep and unexamined feeling of incumbent unease with themselves, to be kept hidden, become the secret prime mover of their whole mode of existence.
Finally it seems that the whole dimension of anxiety at the level of modern societies has become at the same time a field for the marketing and propagandistic manipulative operations of major forces at play in competition with each other, and a valuable resource for the planning of their moves, always counted in as a given, to be exploited and appropriated with ad hoc discourses and narratives.
Our diffuse fears oriented towards the horizon of Death, our denials, detours, our numbing and emotional shut down, our attempts to reassure ourselves and comfort our minds with all kind of fetishistic relations to material things, substances and even activities, behaviours and ultimately even with other people, our capacity to reduce anything to the object we desperately need to have, in order to feel superficially at ease, and only for a short time: our generalised and multiform anxiety is the biggest and insuperable asset we make available to those forces that want to exploit us in this world.
So what I am proposing here is to search for an ethical and ecological approach to the fear of dying.
What is at stake is not only our sense of freedom but a real self-ruling, an autonomy, acquired by practicing Impermanence.
I am aware that pursuing this goal can be the source of several problems, but I am certain that it can generate also of great intellectual, ethical and ecological empowerment and be a source of delights and realisations.
The thesis proposed in this study is that, often, human belief and behaviour show a lack of integration of Death itself with the concepts of Life and Ecology.
It seems fair to say that nobody ever found a feasible, appropriate, universal way to promote a “normal way” of confronting the Concern for Impermanence.
Nevertheless some “good practices” can be outlined as they offer many useful notions that can be elaborated towards an Ethical and Ecological Approach to the Fear of Death.
This study aims to overcome some ambiguities, using a transparent methodology to treat, investigate and represent all the material found and collected in the study, which (within the limits of the printed form) aims at following a “multimedia” pattern of organisation.
This is also a way to test the usefulness of a critic and “evidence based” approach, that takes nothing for granted. In a sense this editorial project tries to measure the level of efficacy, efficiency and equanimity of what is explicitly asserted, documented and analysed or implicitly planned.
This being the case the ambition of this study is not only to provide tools for a multidisciplinary approach towards a specific knowledge, but also a practical orientation, aiming at providing the individual (and through its social relations ultimately the society at large) some Mental Maps to be used in our attempt to reach an ethical and ecological goal: that of a know-how that orient us as we move towards a kind of Treatment for the Fear of Death.
This study wants to offer methods and evaluation criteria.
There’s no such a thing as a cut-and-dried solution in the construction of our personal Epistemology and Elaboration Strategy of the Fear of Death.
A strong Autonomous Strategy, for instance, has no leg to stand on if it is not mitigated by a kind of equilibrium carried out at a bio-psycho-social and environmental level.
The belief I want to transmit is that, with diligence, or perhaps with discipline also, you can aim to a form of Wisdom that stands on,but wants to take over the ones of the past, and propose accordingly an elaboration of practice.
All of this revolves around and is plunged in a subterranean and analogical Logos whose visible appearance is, often, just the “tip of the iceberg”. What comes to light is the substance of those processes that Intersubjectivity and Co-evolutionary Interdependence of the World dictates.
This is so incorporated in so many Existential Experiences or, conversely, is so intellectualised by so many Physical and Metaphysical Teachings that it seems to be non existent, unworthy to be taught, avoidable, irrelevant to the sense of Individual Presence, while it is, in fact, the very structure of it.
All this is quite clear if you follow, among other things, the threads that lead to Philosophy, to the concept of Sacred, of Relation, of Death; to Spirituality, Science, Medicine and Politics.
The above mentioned Logos in this study, is expanded upon: drawing the profile of the Stone Guest, introducing characters with a story “to tell”, mixing traces, clues, theories and possible homologies coming from different contexts, notably, from the Hellenistic tradition, certain Oriental Philosophies, from Cognitive Sciences, with a special attention to the contributions by Gregory Bateson and to the insights of authors such as Giordano Bruno and Giacomo Leopardi.
There is an agonising twist in the “Existential melodrama” and an explanation springs out only when premises, contexts, ontologies, thought and language, operant conditionings, responsibilities, mitigating circumstances, injunctions, justifications, complex models of intersubjectivity and interdependence are given close attention and allowed to come to light.
This study aspires to outline a framework whose significance concerns the whole mankind and that could evolve, through further researches, in modelling a social and individual Healthy Life that includes – without traumas and within the dynamics of the complex system to which humanity belongs – the arising of the “silence”, of the end of the cycle, of the possible (metaphysical, ultra-philosophical or quantum) Rebirth.
The melodrama we are referring to in fact it actually sings the “fear of death” and, in a sense, its ending is not at all a tragic one, on the contrary: paraphrasing Peter Berger, from the point of view of Life, Death is the most absurd incongruity and, as such, it contributes to the emergence of the comic and the religious.
Seen in an ecological and evolutive scenario, Death has no meaning but the one of leaving place for the new generations.
The same situation one finds in a social and individual context, but for the fact that it follows a path that is more intimate, emotionally and symbolically endorsed through mourning and the behaviours expressing grief.
Under this angle Death amounts to an agonising process and at the same time it lends itself to an easy irony that comes from the lumbering and distressing presence of the Stone Guest: the result of this persisting and constant recurrence is that it becomes more familiar and “human”.
Ultimately what I want to prove is the existence of many all-ready found harmonies, some well-traveled paths, some less attended and almost forgotten, a net of melodic lines running into each other in orchestral equilibria, which – as much as dizzying, heart-wrenching or daring they can be – they convincingly show us how it is in our power to reach the catharsis of nullity, and that there is no reason to cry for vengeance or build on resentment.
Instead they show us vividly and firmly in a light that is visible even in our dark times, that the way is open and viable, as it always was and has been so it is for us belonging to our contemporary liquid society.
Valerio Di Vincenzo
Practicing Impermanence as a key to acquire freedom
The search for an ethical and ecological approach to the fear of death
Publishing house: 2021 Casa Editrice Il Filo di Arianna