Realist and idealist philosophies conceive death differently as non-human limit or humanized ending

Evidence

The scheme of things is so deeply ingrained that virtually everything we think, feel, and do is shaped by it. It not only provides each of us with our knowledge and explanations of the world, it also supplies the fundamental structure of our conscious experience. Right now, your current author and professor of psychology is writing this important book on Friday, October 10, 2014, at 1:55 P.M. sitting in his office in the United States of America. What could be more meaningful than that? But if he peers in from outside his cultural worldview and the meanings it provides, he sees just a warm-blooded animal pecking at a piece of plastic in the midst of an undifferentiated flow of experiences that will, sooner or later, inevitably be interrupted by a heart attack, cancer, car accident, or the ravages of old age. What time is it now for you, the reader? What does it mean that it’s some day of the week, some month, some year? Isn’t that all an illusory structuring of your conscious experiences provided for you by your culture to help you impose order and permanence on something chaotic and fleeting? If this is a Thursday, how comforting an illusion it is that there will be another Thursday, and another one after that. — Sheldon Solomon, Jeff Greenberg, Tom Pyszczynski, The Worm at the Core, 184 (#complicates, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Cultural worldviews structure conscious experience to mask death’s inevitability — Sheldon Solomon, Jeff Greenberg, Tom Pyszczynski, The Worm at the Core: On the Role of…, 184; Belief in spirits is Idealism’s degradation, the literal death of mind — Theodor W. Adorno, Minima Moralia: Reflections from…, 266; Plato’s otherworldly identity framework was engineered to cancel death — Val Plumwood, Feminism and the Mastery of Nature, 376

Broader Connections

• Cultural worldviews structure conscious experience to mask death’s inevitability #complicates (0.72) — Sheldon Solomon, Jeff Greenberg, Tom Pyszczynski, The Worm at the Core, 184