DEATH: A PHILOSOPHICAL REASONING
By Ubong Sampson
Human death is a unitary phenomenon that physicians can determine in two ways, namely: (i) showing the irreversible cessation of all brain clinical functions; (ii) showing the permanent cessation of circulatory and respiratory functions.
The criterion best fulfilling this definition is the irreversible cessation of all clinical functions of the brain. Competing definitions, such as those within the higher brain, brain stem, and circulation formulations, all have deficiencies in theory or practice. Among physicians, the area of greatest controversy in death determination now is the use of circulatory-respiratory tests, particularly as applied to organ donation after circulatory death. Circulatory-respiratory tests, I learnt, are valid only because they produce destruction of the whole brain, the criterion for death.
At what point does a person actually die? That depends on who you ask. To one person, it’s the moment the heart stops beating. To another, it’s when the brain enters a “vegetative” state. But a heart can be forced to keep beating; and how dead is a person, really, if she can continue to grow, develop, and even give birth after experiencing “brain death”?
Most brain-dead patients do not come back to life, but a rigorous scientist would say that these cases speak loudly about the flaws in our criteria for death. And yes– death to a cardiologist means that your heart has stopped, and he feels, nay believes, he can never get it restarted. But to a neurologist, it might mean something else. In 1968, a committee at Harvard Medical School put forth an article stating that there is a second kind of death: brain death. Even though your heart is still pumping, and you’re still able to breathe on a ventilator, if your brain stem is down, you’re dead.
Death therefore has been defined by many as the ‘extinct or cessation of life’ or ‘ceasing to be’. As life is notoriously difficult to define, and as everyone tends to think of things in terms of what they know, the problem of defining death are immediately apparent. The most useful definitions of life are those that stress functions, whether at the level of physiology, of molecular biology and biochemistry or of genetic potential. Death should be thought of as an irreversible loss of such functions.
More secularly inclined philosophers have, meanwhile, pondered on what it was that was so essential to the nature of man that its loss should be called death. The American physicians and writer Oliver Wendell Holmes said, “to live is a function” and “that is all there is in living”.
However, in nearly all circumstances, human death is a process rather than an event. Unless caught up in a nuclear explosion. People do not die suddenly like the bursting of a bubble. A quiet, ‘classical’ death provides, perhaps, the best illustration of death as a process. Several minutes after the heart has stopped beating, a mini electrocardiogram may be recorded. If one probes for signals from within the cardial cavity, three hours later, the pupils still respond to pilocarpine drops by contracting; and the muscles, if repeatedly tapped, may still mechanically shorten.
In a similar vein, when the brain is dead, but the heart (and other organs) are kept going artificially; under such circumstance, it can be argued, the organism as a whole may be deemed dead, though the majority of its cells are still alive. And to claim that death is a process does not imply that its process unfolds at an even rate. The challenge is to identify such point with greater precision of various biological systems. At a clinical level, the irreversible cessation of auricular has, for centuries, been considered a point of no return. It has provided (and still provides) a practical and valid criterion of irreversible loss of function of the organization as a whole.
Furthermore, the views of existentialists like Jean Paul Satre and Martin Heidgger somehow differ on the issue of death. For instance, Heidegger believes that death is a meaningful part of human life, and that death converses on human existence, its uniqueness and meaning. But Satre on the contrary, opines that death is a meaningless absurdity which removes all meaning from man and his existence.
Truth, however, is, since death is inevitable as claimed, then man cannot evade it, and man be rightly described as a being-towards-death.
Religiously (especially in the Christianity) context, man is a being destined to live every moment of his life towards his death. Infact, man’s whole life is a progressive journey to death, for man begins to die from the day he is born. Though it is widely believed (mostly by religious people) that death is not something which man meets at the end of his life, rather, it is a way of life for man, a quantum jump to eternity. For from being a meaningful part of human life, death is on the contrary, a meaningless absurdity which robs human life of all meaning. How then can that which destroys be said to be in any way meaningful and useful in relation to that which is destroyable?
This therefore necessitates the questions on man and his existence.
WHAT IS MAN?
WHY DOES MAN EXIST?
These simple but profound interrogatives, in all cultures and places, are the most perennial questions that motivated sages to philosophize, and the subject of EXISTENTIALISM was consequently birthed. Socrates is said to have counseled man to know himself. Centuries gone after Socrates, HAS MAN KNOWN HIMSELF? AS WHAT?
As a creature living for fun, and to exit the earth when the fun ends?
Or
As an actor acting on a stage, and his chapter closes once his role is done and he’s taken out of the stage?
Who or what is the creature who lives just because its function is to live shortly and die eternally? If man is to come to existence, struggle for everything he needs, but takes nothing away with him when he dies… WHAT THEN IS MAN’S REWARD FOR LIVING?
Can we say that one good thing about death which further explains it as a unitary phenomenon is that, everybody dies their own death?.. because truly, everyone has their own death to die. You die your own death and I die mine. No one does it for another. A husband cannot die for his wife and neither the wife for her husband. Can we also take that another good thing about death is in Koestenbaum’s opinion that the most vitalizing fact of life is the inevitability of death, given that the awareness of the future and inevitability of death gives vitality to life by prompting us to urgency of action so that we would be able to accomplish our plans before death comes?
If Koestenbaum’s opinion is convincing enough, then it is a matter of fact that the awareness of an impending death therefore does some good effects on the way we should live our own lives. And if man is to strives to cause these good effects to better the world and then die, who then is he bettering the world for?
Well, this awareness of death thus reminds every person that, at least one day, we shall leave this earth to an unknown place, and it is therefore incumbent on us to live a morally sound and sinless life. For there is the belief within the christianity fold that, it is appointed unto man once to die, and after that, judgment.
Ubong Sampson (08021419939) Writes From Mbierebe cemetery, Akwa Ibom state.
