by Ana Bazac
This short paper highlights the importance of the contents of life as “antidote” to death. Certainly, they are relative, since death is a natural phenomenon, but if the consciousness of death means sorrow just because its stake is life/the highest value is life, it results that in order to “oppose” death one needs a life full of the values (the good, the truth, the beautiful) worth to be fulfilled. The meanings of life are arrived at when people judge the contents of life they face.
Since humans are both unique and very similar, the attitude towards death depends on the ways they consider this situation. Thus, we must not forget the dialectic of the human as individual and as a member of society: according to first aspect, people feel sorrow when the individual dies, focusing only on the existence of the individual in the frame of methodological individualism; but, when exceeding this methodological individualism, they think that death is only a relay race since the human community the individual belongs to does not die. However, and certainly because of historical and social causes, the methodological individualism is stronger than the methodological collectivism (see for the critique of methodological individualism in the evaluation of culture, Valković 2023), and people distinguish between their appurtenance to a particular cultural community, as individuals, and their appurtenance to the human species. The paper proposes just the necessity of the consciousness of the appurtenance to the human species, and the factor of social ideal as construct of this consciousness.
***
Hm, Truth. The capital letter suggests that Truth is here a metaphor.
For what? If truth is substantiated knowledge, a result of proofs and demonstrations, depending on the input – for a question and the endeavour to answer it – or, in other words, for the information and patterns of logical inferences able to derive from this information/premises a new cognisance that judges/interprets (confirms or disproves) them, and if the new cognisance attests, and verifies the subject putting this whole process of questioning and answering, of ordering the premises, their importance, urgency and amplitude, then Truth is a metaphor for the values assumed by the subject and directing his/her quest for substantiated knowledge of ways and aims of life. Briefer, Truth is here a metaphor of the ways and aims of life.
The substantiated knowledge depends, obviously, on the above-mentioned input. If the cognisance is true, we assume that it is the result of processing true information, thus “approved information” (Levi 2011), in other words, statements having empirical adequacy, and not only formal/logical consistency. And, again obviously, this true information – depending on the subject’s access to information – may be part of a set of probabilities/probable situations, as well as both information and the subject’s access are always contextual.
But this fact doesn’t annul the truthfulness of information as such, nor the possibility to arrive at a coherent picture of true information and true conclusions. The ontic situations and the ontological images change, and we always correct our picture of true conclusions according to this moving input, but in a given moment and on the basis of the newest information that is – because knowledge and truth are “intersubjective”, social, collective phenomena based on knowledge debate and sharing and mutual critique and thus, on cooperation – the best, the more complete, true knowledge about a specific problem is possible. (Just intersubjectivity assures the objective feature of truth, it being the “‘weak’ sense of objectivity”, Agazzi 2014 and 2016[1]). The relativity of truth conditions doesn’t stop “the infallible” character of a precise cognisance in a precise space-time-problem frame. For this reason, this cognisance is really true knowledge, it is not a “belief” as a confidence or assumption (a simple “performance”, Levi 1991), but a conviction (an “active acceptance”, Cohen 1992), see also (Bazac 2024).
And knowledge as truth does not depend only on factual (concrete and abstract) information, but also on the moral paradigm – the concrete meta view that covers in moral guise/interhuman guise the original animalic curiosity and reactivity, emphasising direct and indirect “optimal consequences of reasons” (Portmore 2016), not only of actions but also of inquiries – and that is, in fact, the background and trigger of the knowledge investigation. The moral paradigm is not a condition of truth (that is the result of a harsh logical examination and processing of information): on the contrary, the moral paradigm is always proved/disproved and strengthened/weakened by the scrutiny of all the elements of information and their relations. The moral paradigm is the frame of values challenging both the input and output of knowledge or truth. Concretely, the moral paradigm has, obviously, ideal highs but it is deeply involved in the analysis of the n variants/steps of the constitution of knowledge/truth. Opposed to the formal philosophy where “credal probability judgments cannot be truth-valued” (Levi 2011, note 5), the consideration of the value contents of knowledge quest and production allows the understanding of the real processes, which at least the most plausible if not all probabilities in the set related to the problem are examined and truth-valued. And finally, both the concrete knowledge as truth and its underlying moral paradigm have an “ontological creativity” (somehow opposed to Agazzi 2011) that, however, is confronted, sooner or later, with the empirical situations.
***
Some philosophers have considered that the Truth of man would be found in his death[2]. Obviously, this is zany, since every living being dies. Perhaps they have arrived to this conclusion because only the human has consciousness and is conscious about his own death. However, even though the Truth as such –once more, with capital letter – would consist in the consciousness of the meanings of life, just these meanings give, in the last instance, the Truth of man. The meanings are ideas arrived at by man, in other words, they are constructed within the mind, from multiple experiences and conclusions lying within. In this sense, the meanings are subjective. But, when all is said, the experiences and conclusions are related to real facts and phenomena and people do not ignore these real facts and phenomena. They may imagine inexistent worlds of phenomena and meanings and they may relate only to these worlds, they may die thinking that the meanings of their lives – the “Truth” of their lives – would be only those resulting from the imagined values related to imagined worlds ignoring the real facts, but in fact these real facts remain and, ultimately, deny the phantasm meanings. But, as we know, just the delay of confrontation between the real facts and the imagined views has tragic consequences on the individuals who assume these imagined views.
If the human life has as its “Truth” – “Truth” as the reason of life, the meaning of meanings of life – the death, in the last instance not life is important but its end, the non-life. And since the death is not even something special belonging only to the human being, once more to have death as criterion of life is absurd. Obviously, to have a criterion means to be aware, to judge, to have consciousness. But once more, to think that the meanings of the only terrestrial life you have are related to the inevitable death is to despise both the richness of life and the power of the human mind.
***
When looking at the photos of an already dead person, the photo of youth, that of maturity and that of old age, we are perturbed by the question of the Truth of that person. When I look at the photos of my mother:
– the naïve round cheek at her sixteens, with the attentive eyes and may be not as full of expectations as one would suppose, since she was already aware of the pre-war atmosphere,
– the beautiful mature woman, without wrinkles but with already tired eyes, full of experiences too hard for her but which she has done well with,
– and the old woman whose wrinkled image signalled that she gave up and, however desperate I was in front of this appearance, I knew that only death will be the denouement,
I question, what was the Truth of my mother? If she would have died at her sixteen years, her Truth would have been the unrealized destiny of efforts, joys and sadness; if she would have died when she was mature but not yet old, she would have missed the following new experiences, including the last years of sorrow and mix of percussive cleverness and defenceless dependency. So, what was the Truth of my mother? Her spirited mind, her deep love, her spirit of sacrifice, her altruism: I summarise now the values she internalised her entire life, but I know that what I formulates is poor towards the unique and, unfortunately, transient experiences and colours of my mother’s existence, of the human existence.
Dryly, theoretically, the Truth of life is, on the one hand, the metaphor given by the observer of life, because from this standpoint there is no Truth but only thoughts, facts and events; on the other hand, the Truth of life can be but the whole life of a person, because Truth is only the wholeness (Hegel).
***
The human beings are unique and at the same time very similar: they born, they grow up, they learn, they expect and struggle, they love, they marry, they have children, they get old… The Truth of life is the significance of the human life: as if so many facts and ideas about them could be condensed into one feature. But, letting aside the theoretical tentative to abbreviate everything in concepts which then are conceived of as explaining the origins of so many lives, the Truth of life cannot be in singular, but only in plural: the Truth of life is the amount of experiences forming a certain life, thus, the amount of experiences forming all of lives.
There is one Truth only when we contrast life and non-life/ death: from this standpoint, yes, the Truth of life is life defying death. But – especially forasmuch at the individual level, this power of life to defy death is temporary – this simple singing of life is not enough in order to account what a certain life was/is for a certain unique individual. And since the concept of (human) experience is too abstract or too vague so as to better explain the meanings of life, it results that the concreteness of experiences is that which gives our real understanding of the meanings of life. Nevertheless, as a concept, the concreteness of experiences is only that of the form of what is needed in order to approach to the real support of the meanings of life. Or, in other words, the concreteness is an epistemological condition: that requires its “object of work”, the ontological basis giving colours to the human experience, the contents of life.
Therefore, the meanings of life are arrived at when people judge the contents of life they face.
***
Nevertheless, the human beings consider and judge the meanings of life according to the dominant ideas received from the dominant interests/leading strata of their times and societies. For example, they consider that not life, but death would be the stake of their passing through the terrestrial adventures: namely, the importance of death and its promise of something better, righter and more beautiful that would follow /absolutely beautiful than the terrestrial life and socially determined suffering. This is the “argument” of the entire attitude of acceptation and submission towards not the inevitable death, but towards the socially determined suffering and injustice within the terrestrial life. And this is the “argument” of the “equality” they put between the inevitability of death and the inevitability of the socially determined suffering and injustice, including the inevitable occurrences of untimely death (Bazac 2020).
And this is the argument of the understanding of the meanings of life by judging and considering them only at the end of life and as if people would judge not the human wills and relations but the “given” nature and in a fragmented manner. From an epistemological standpoint, just the fragmentariness and isolated manner of tackling the problems of life are the causes of this approach of the meanings of life. But although within nature, life is not nature, it is culture/society: so, it cannot be treated as if its forces would be only natural.
***
As it is known, the consciousness of death and the meanings of life are creations of humans, are specific to humans, to their cultural/social feature. And, if the awareness of death is common to all humans, and although the cultural features of humans represent the basis of potentiality of the understanding and creation of meanings of life, actually these meanings are thought of/created in an articulated/discursive manner only when humans have a little time to do this: to interpret the facts, speeches, events, turnings of their “destiny”. Briefly, the richer is the content of life – with events created by the human individual, but also with the interpretation of these events – the more precise are the meanings of life conceived of by him/her.
However, we must not forget that these meanings are not pure individual constructs, but ideas created with the ideologically coloured concepts of society. Consequently, the meanings of life may oppose or, on the contrary, most often impulse humans to accept their “destiny” and to equate it with the meanings of life. Inside this framework, their meanings were and are to grow up, to work, to love, to raise children, to “struggle with life”, to get old and pass (away). Certainly, ordinary people and philosophers have learnt and arrived at ethical concepts: to do all of these aiming at the good, the truth and the beautiful. These concepts were stakes for their judgements, but they did not always help them to achieve the good, the truth and the beautiful in their life: values which they could have realised from their own potentiality, if alien powers would not have opposed.
***
And they died with this irreversible waste of their own life and after socially induced sufferings. Certainly, all of these phenomena and turns of life had historical and social causes, viz. ontological and epistemological factors; the original rarity and the historical low level of productive means, the domination-submission/power relations as solution found against the former factors, the mixture of commons, altruism and solidarity within the domination-submission systems, are important ontological factors, while the fragmentary thinking and the difficulty (and habit) to not analyse all the way were epistemological conditions; together with (paraphrasing Agazzi 1993: 14) a double duplication/splitting in two: the consciousness of “inherent” differentiation of the knowledge of what would be essential from the knowledge of the phenomena.
At the same time, there is a dialectics that has to be taken into account: although member of society, the homo humanus is an individual too and as such it feels sorrow/regret because he/she, the unique and unrepeatable, will die; and he/she was taught that only this aspect of his/her death is important, and it may be “countered” by his/her submission to a transmundane entity that will allow a permanent life that will absolutely correct his/her terrestrial sufferings; he/she was taught to forget and ignore that he/she is a member of the human community and as such – and here letting aside the cultural seal of the prevalence of community or of the individual – he/she will not fully die, he/she will live forever with/through the human community.
The wisdom of common people has contained this dialectics: the death of an individual – mother, lover, wife/husband – was wept, but at the same time, and especially when the dead left behind children, grandchildren and the whole memory of his/her positive deeds, this death was a normal transition and transmission of relay because the human community did/does not die.
***
Once again, or rather in the European tradition, one aspect of the above dialectics was exaggerated until the erasing of the other one. From Plato’s theory of the immortality of the individual soul – reflecting the individual sadness about the irreversible fadeaway of the individual – common people and philosophers have focused on the time-space of the individual, its power to last and the imagination of the individual’s eternal life. The fact that they were at the same time members of the human society was distorted and reduced to local, national, religious, closed communities. Obviously, this reduction was historically determined, but the result was that people forgot both their appurtenance to the human species and the above-mentioned dialectics. Moreover, their individuality was related only to local, national, religious, closed communities.
Nowadays, we continue to face this reduction and, according to the affordability of means, the exacerbated preoccupation for the individual’s prolongation of a triumphant life. Both the happy beneficiaries of this preoccupation and the many – of whom millions are sent to an early grave because of the irrational and unjust repartition of decision power worldwide, but at the same time are constrained to think within the dominant egotistic ideology – seem to forget that they are also “species-beings” (Kant, Marx, in Bazac 2025). They may consider sometimes that the appurtenance to the particular cultural community (state, nation, religion etc.) would constitute the meaning of their life – therefore, better than the individual aspirations and realisations –. However, they think as if the appurtenance to the particular cultural community would oppose to the appurtenance to the concrete human species. And, even mixing the individual aspirations and the appurtenance to a particular community, they act many times as if they would not belong to the human species.
What meaning of life, which contents of life could counteract this contradiction? Knowing that the counteracting is only relative – since it is about an irreversible natural phenomenon, death – one may suggest that a factor emphasising the appurtenance to the human species (beyond the belonging to particular communities) is the social ideal.
It is about a larger goal than to imagine a better future for one’s own community and to ignore the price paid by its exterior natural and human milieu. Having a social ideal, the individual feels responsible for the species, behaves as the species (and not only as parts of it). When the individual thinks and acts only as an individual, eventually in a particular community, and not at the same time as a species-being, it brings out the human koinonia/community from its universe of thoughts, and is narrowing its contents of life, as well as its struggle with the irreversibility of the individual death: as well as the actuality of the trans-individual, eternal life of the human species.
Finally, in order to have rich contents of life – and thus, to arrive to beautiful meanings of life – the individual-species dialectic involves mutuality: the individual must behave in such a way as to respect the humanity of the species and to assure its development; but society must respect the uniqueness of every human individual. In this sense, there is a mutual mirroring: as the individual cares for the species, so society has to treat the individual as a unique being, respecting the uniqueness of every human individual.
REFERENCES
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Agazzi, Evandro. 2011. “Consistency, Truth and Ontology”, Studia Logica, 97: 7–29.
Agazzi, Evandro. 2014. Scientific objectivity and its contexts. Berlin: Springer.
Agazzi, Evandro. 2016. “Scientific Realism Within Perspectivism and Perspectivism Within Scientific Realism”, Axiomathes, Volume 26: 349–365.
Bazac, Ana. 2020. Death is natural, the premature death is not: the ethics of untimely death”, Biocosmology – neo-Aristotelism, Vol. 10, No. 1 & 2, Winter-Spring: 184-204.
Bazac, Ana. 2024. “Knowledge, Opinion, Belief: The Dialectical Challenging”, Studia UBB. Philosophia, Vol. 69, 1 : 7-30.
Bazac, Ana. 2025. “Kant’s relevance for revolutionary politics”, Revolutionary Marxism, Türkiye, Special annual English edition: 103-131, https://www.devrimcimarksizm.net/sites/default/files/revolutionary_marxism_2025.pdf.
Cohen, Laurence Jonathan. 1992. An Essay on Belief and Acceptance, New York: Clarendon Press.
Levi, Isaac. 1991. The Fixation of Belief and its Undoing: Changing Beliefs Through Inquiry, New York: Cambridge University Press.
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Valković, Martina. 2023. “Ontological and Methodological Limitations of Certain Cultural Evolution Approaches”, Philosophy of Social Sciences, Volume 54, Issue 4.
# Notes
[1] According to this realist view, perspectivism is “an appreciation of the cognitive attitude that consists in considering reality only from a certain ‘point of view’, in a way that can avoid subjectivism”.
[2] One of the most famous philosophers who considered death as the stake, Truth and criterion of the meanings of life is, as it is known, Heidegger.