Life and death are two strange words. Very different yet they describe the very same thing.
If you think of it, death and life are like the faces of a coin.
After all, the exclusive qualification for being able to die is to have been born… And it’s only us, languaging rational beings, who make the difference between living and dying. At the conceptual level, of course.
OK, many others are capable of making the functional distinction between a corpse and a living body. We are impressed by the mourning behavior displayed by the elephants, for example. And even more so by the chimpanzee mothers who continue to carry the bodies of their deceased babies…
But since we are the only species – known to us, humans – who uses language to relate to each-other, to think about the world and to plan ahead, I’m going to discuss here only the languaging/reasoning aspects of us making the difference between life and death.
By making this difference we actually separate the inseparable. With momentous consequences. For us – individual human beings, for the species as a whole, for the rest of the species and for the rest of the world. The world as we know it…
The origin of this difference is our conscience. Which is sophisticated enough to be able to make it and to talk/think about it. The elephants are also conscient enough to act upon the difference between a living body and a corpse. To recognize the skeleton of a deceased relative. To remember it. But, at least apparently, they are not able to speak about the whole thing. Nor to transmit over generations that those particular bones belonged to a particular individual who had been related to … As soon as all individuals who had directly known the deceased individual, all information about the identity of the corpse/skeleton are lost. For a while, the survivors remember only the fact that their ‘mothers’ used to ‘mourn’ over this particular set of bones but nothing more. Again, this is what we know, now, about the manner in which the elephants treat their dead.
Which is very different from how we treat ours. And from how we relate to matters pertaining to life and death.
We cherish life and we dread death.
We cherish our lives and we dread our death. Ours and that of our (cherished) relatives and friends.
And we are somewhat indifferent to the lives of others… To the tune of being able to dispatch animals, and plants, for food. And to kill other human beings. In war but not exclusively.