Death and Existence:
Fremantle, Anne
DEATH AND EXISTENCE A CONCEPTUAL HISTORY OF HUMAN MORALITY, By James P. Carse, John Wiley, $23.95, 473 pp.
Professor Carse originally gave the lectures upon which he has based his systematic survey...
...the Freudian discovery of causally discontinuous space in human existence...
...the fact that they act in this way is their organization...
...as inevitable (the Judaic view) as transformation (the Christian view...
...For that ' 'death is a subject about which nothing can be learned" is itself exceedingly valuable to learn...
...So, within the sciences, "persons neither live nor die...
...He quotes a student telling him that he signed up for th.s course "because I knew there was absolutely nothing I could learn from it...
...Carse begins his critical study of "ten major conceptions of death" with Plato and Aristotle, but it is when he compares the atomic theory of Epicurus with Schrondinger and Monod that he really becomes luminous...
...This is a most nourishing book...
...Carse goes on to consider life as separation (the mystical view...
...And he cites slime mold, whose individual spores' 'do not act because they are organized...
...Death is no problem for Monod since "it brings nothing to an end" For, as Epicurus taught "nothing comes from nothing...
...then death as illusion (Hinduism...
...So just what is this book...
...With what Carse calls "astonishing similarity to Epicurus" Monod argues that all phenomena, living and unliving, "are subject simultaneously to chance and necessity...
...A remark that now seems "prophetically apt...
...He inquires into "the capacity of scientific theory to embrace the randomness or spontaneity that seems to make life distinct from other natural phenomena...
...Professor Carse originally gave the lectures upon which he has based his systematic survey of ten distinct conceptions of death, some ten years ago...
...death as, fiction (Buddhism...
...ANNE FREMANTLENTLE...
...in fact, thy are not even persons, only continuous entities...
...Thus, the scientific response, as the Epicurean, to life and death, is disregard...
...Finally, he considers various individual attitudes to death from Jung and Kierkegaard to Sartre...
Vol. 108 • February 1981 • No. 3
