sein zum tod

• quid aeternis minorem
consiliis animum fatigas?
cur non sub alta vel platano vel hac
pinu jacentes

Why torment your mind, which is unequal to it,
with counsel for eternity?
Why not come and lie under this tall plane tree
or this pine ... ?

Horace, Odes II 11 [Ely Black!]
• 'no one would choose to live with the intellect of a child throughout his life, however much he were to be pleased at the things that children are pleased at....'[ARistotle, NE, BK X, Ch. 3]
• Es más: el hombre, por ser hombre, por tener conciencia, es ya, respecto al burro o a un congrejo, un animal enfermo. La conciencia es una enfermedad. [-Unamuno]
• Nuestra filosofía, esto es, nuestro modo de comprender o de no comprender el mundo y la vida, brota de nuestro sentimiento respecto a la vida misma. Y ésta, como todo lo afectivo, tiene raíces subconscientes, inconscientes tal vez. No suelen ser nuestras ideas las que nos hacen optimistas o pesimistas, sino que es nuestro optimismo o nuestro pesimismo, de origen fisiológico o patológico quizás, tanto el uno como el otro, el que hace nuestras ideas. [-Unamuno]
• "The Most Personal Question of Truth:-What am I really doing, and what do I mean by doing it?" -Nietzsche [DayBreak]
• "To what extent can truth stand to be incorporated?" [Nietzsche]
• “not to esteem what we know, and not to be allowed to esteem the lies we should like to tell ourselves" [Nietzsche WM 11/WP 10’ [3]
• "sum moribundus ['I am in dying']...I am moribundus. The MORIBUNDUS first gives the SUM its sense. -Heidegger [History of Concept of Time pg. 317]
• "Neither the sun nor death can be looked at for too long." -La Rochefoucauld [ Ely Black]
• “every poet begins (however 'unconsciously’) by rebelling more strongly against the fear of death than all other men and women do.”-Harold Bloom
• Becaus philosophy opens out onto the whole of man and onto what is highest in him, finitude must appear in philosophy in a completely radical way. [Heidegger, Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics]
• Quiere decirse que tu esencia, lector, la mía, la del hombre Spinoza, la del hombre Butler, la del hombre Kant y la de cada hombre que sea hombre, no es sino el conato, el esfuerzo que pone en seguir siendo hombre, en no morir....Es decir, que tú, yo y Spinoza queremos no morirnos nunca y que este nuestro anhelo de nunca morirnos en nuestra esencia actual. [-Unamuno]
• "Death, if that is what we want to call this non-actuality, is of all things the most dreadful, and to hold fast what is dead requires the greatest strength. Lacking strength, Beauty hates the Understanding for asking of her what it cannot do. But the life of Spirit is not the life that shrinks from death and keeps itself untouched by devastation, but rather the life that endures it and maintains itself in it. It wins its truth only when, in utter dismemberment, it finds itself. It is this power, not as something positive, which closes its eyes to the negative, as when we say of something that it is nothing or is false, and then, having done with it, turn away and pass on to something else; on the contrary, Spirit is this power only by looking the negative in the face, and tarrying with it. This tarrying with the negative is the magical power that converts it into being." -Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit
• 'the more he is possessed of virtue in its entirety and the happier he is, the more he will be pained at the thought of death; for life is best worth living for such a man, and he is knowingly losing the greatest of goods, and this is painful' [Aristotle, NE, BK III, Ch. 9]
• "Was there ever a man more blest by fortune that you Akhilleus? Can there ever be? We ranked you with immortals in your lifetime...Think then Akhilleus: you need not be so pained by death" To this he answered swiftly: "Let me hear no smooth talk of death from you, Odysseus...better I say, to break sod as a farm hand for some poor country man, on iron rations, than lord it over all the exhausted dead."
• "Ancient philosophy was philo-sophia, not philo-theoria. It is to this original
understanding of the enterprise that Schopenhauer returns when he writes that
it is the chief task of philosophy, as it is of religion, to provide a ‘consolation’ in
the face of death. This, he says, is why Socrates was right to define philosophy as
a ‘preparation for death’. To this definition of the task he adds a further
specification: since death conceived as entry into a ‘dark’ and empty ‘nothing’,as absolute annihilation, is, for human beings, the summum malum, our worst fear,
any effective consolation must satisfy the ‘metaphysical need’; the need to be
assured of ‘the indestructibility of our true nature’ by death." [Julian Young]
• Eurete moi he entole eis zoen, aute eis thanaton. [and the commandment, which was ordained to life, I found to be unto death. ] [st. Paul]
• Live or die, but don't poison everything... [-sexton]
• Clov: Do you believe in the life to come?....Hamm: Mine was always that. [Beckett’s EndGame]
• "There is nothing very remarkable about being immortal; with the exception of mankind, all creatures are immortal, for they know nothing of death. What is divine, terrible, and incomprehensible is to know oneself immortal. " [Borges, The Immortal]
• Quiero decir del único verdadero problema vital, del que más a las entrañas nos llega, del problema de nuestro destino individual y personal, de la inmortalidad del alma. [-Unamuno]
• 'we must not follow those who advise us, being men, to think of human things, and, being mortal, of mortal things, but must, so far as we can, make ourselves immortal, and strain every nerve to live in accordance with the best thing in us' [Aristotle, BK X, Ch. 7]