ABSTRACT

Death, according to long-standing tradition, is an educator. Death, of course, is not the only teacher. Life also teaches the ordinary course of experience in so far as it becomes an object of reflection. An honest contemplation of death trims excess if anything will and teaches appreciation, humility, acceptance, resoluteness and also hope. Death calls for thinking, and while a good part of people thinking begins as a quest for metaphysical knowledge its constant tendency is to end up in the vicinity of speculation and, quite often, ethics. Banishing speculation from the field of thought, or serious thought as some like to say, seems to me not so much rational as myopic, a recipe for blandness if not exactly error. Philosophy can still constitute a preparation for death in the sense of fashioning a way of thinking that is life-affirming and mindful of the mystery that is human mortality. A human death is more than a physiological fact.