VAN/tAS
Undeniably, defining life became a great challenge since the time of Aristotle and for the modern scientists and philosophers on the grounds of life being “a process and not a substance” (Jabr 2014).
Therefore, despite the fact that human managed to predict nature or tame wild beasts, even intervene evolution or creating behemothic machines, the only thing he was unable of doing was to control death, to be infinite. That stems from the vanity of human existence and the gluttonous lust of an eternal life. To put it in other words, humans could not take control over time and space (Saunders 1891). According to Schopenhauer (Saunders 1891) “Every moment of our life belongs to the present only for a moment; then it belongs forever to the past…We begin in the madness of carnal desire and the transport of voluptuousness, we end in the dissolution of all of our parts and the musty stench of our corpses”.
On the other hand, it might be easier to define death. Death is the termination of all biological functions that sustain a living organism. The bodies of living organisms begin to decompose shortly after death. However, what happens after that? Does the inanimate flesh cease to be alive?
Socrates, in Plato’s Phaedo (Rowe 1993), posed an interesting opinion a little before taking the poison. He quoted that he was not afraid of dying, since what really mattered is not human’s mortal body but the inner core, the soul. The only thing the body desires is pleasure of all kinds and thus after death, soul is being released of its carnal prison. Subsequently, Aristotle (Harris 2002, p. 103) believed that the soul (the form) and body (the matter) are inseparable and for the one to exist the other must be present while Democritus proposed that the essential feature of life is having a psyche (Berryman 2010).
