Is there life before death? : pursuit of eternal existence through the examination of a being's ambivalent and contradictory nature : an examination of the hypothesis that for understanding death, firstly a being's real essence, which is hidden under the ego, should be discovered

Abstract

The anxiety provoked by acknowledgement of the imminent end of existence or death is probably the one which agitates a human being most deeply. The attempt of this paper is not to give an answer as to how to reach immortality, but to explore the author's assumption that for acknowledgement of the mystery of death it is necessary first to discover a being's authentic identity. That is to discover her/his real essence which is hidden under the 'artificial' identity, where this identity is considered the being's ego, an identity formed upon the relative truth of life. The truths of life are relative because they are established by the people, thus they are based upon the changeable and contradictory nature of human beings. The focus of the paper is on researching the establishment of a being's identity, which is formed through she/he having two contradictory relationships with other human beings. The first one is negation and the other one is of acknowledgement of the identity of the other. The examination deals with art works of several contemporary artists, where most of them have experienced war. The philosophical framework of this examination uses the texts of French philosopher Emmanual Levinas, amongst others

Date of Award	1998
Original language	English