Death  consciousness as the effect of the Original Sin (3° Part)

Alexander the Great

With the original sin we intend as the passing from the ape to homo sapiens, human DNA genes which are dominant on the DNA of all the other living species, apparently got immortality for themselves; all this didn’t occur to their survival machine, that is man himself. The latter, on the contrary, acquires a full conscioueness of his death with the Original Sin.

With the knowledge acquired by eating the forbidden fruit, man gets a terrible consciousness: he has no doubt that sooner or later he’ll die. The Hebrew words in the  Genesis “מות תמות (mohth tamuth)” are translated in different ways; literally it should mean “while dying you’ll die”, but we have personally decided to make use of the translation “undoubtedly you’ll die, certainly you’ll die”[1]. This way the Hebrew words in the Genesis mean man, the only one among all the animals, mammals included, knows he must die. The knowledge of this terrible truth is, in our opinion, the most dramatic consequence of the consciousness acquired with the passing from the ape to man. But man illusory attempts of denying this truth to himself result even more ruinous.

If we think of all the great men of the past who entered history, Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar, Napoleon etc…, according to common thought it’s as if all those men had got to a sort of immortality.

Actually we are, above all, the ones who can perceive the immortality of these men because we can’t know how they themselves could have perceived the fact they should  forever be remembered. Maybe the idea of historical immortality is more ours  rather than theirs, especially if we think of the last moments of their lives. Alexander the Great died when he was young after a painful agony.

Julius Caesar was murdered by the one he had adopted.

Julius Caesar

Napoleon died of a stomach cancer on a remote island of the Atlantic Ocean.

Napoleon

But supposing that these men can have perceived, while living, their historical immortality, all this happened at the cost of terrible sufferings from a lot of other men.

Nevertheless the ones of the great men of the past are anyway “positive” examples, at least as far as civilization[2] is concerned.

Some other illusory attempts of exorcizing death are much more dramatic. Fellows whose aggressiveness genes are particularly evident, for example the bosses of the Mafia, in killing with indifference in a certain sense take possession  and make use of death as much as they want.

The Godfather

Genetic tendency to aggressiveness which is expressed in homicide enters, anyway, the mechanism at genetic feedback at negative retroaction aiming at the reduction of the abnormal growing of human population. We don’t know how great may be the pleasure an aggressive fellow feels in killing or if he is powerful in committing one or more homocides, but we can’t deny such pleasure can make him forget the terrible truth, that is he also will die sooner or later.

Another illusory way to appropriate of death and manage it “according to his own liking” is the suicide’s one.

People with a lot of depression and suicide genes prefer being able to decide when it’s time to go out rather than wait passively for death to decide. Deciding when and how to die may be another way to exorcize the terror of death. Since a suicide tries to remove the suffering le mal de vivre causes him, death is, to him, a sort of medicine he decides to take willingly.[3]

Socrates’s suicide

[1] But as for the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you mustn’t eat of it,as when you eat of it, certainly you’ll die.( Genesis 2:15-17)

[2] It’s enough thinking of the diffusion of Greek civilization, most of the oriental world from Alexander the Great, the Romanization of Gaul from Julius Caesar, the Napoleonic Code.

[3] Before dying Socrates considers his suicide a recovery from le mal de vivre and as such he asks his friends to make a sacrifice to Aesculapius (Asclepius for the Greeks) the God of medicine. And already the lower part of his stomach was cooling when [Sorates] uncovered his face which had already been uncovered and still said these words (the last ones he uttered):” Oh Critone, we owe a cock to Asclepius; give it to him, and try not to forget it. Plato Phaedo LXVI.

Translated from “Il Virus Intelligente” by Enrica Narducci

To be continued in:

4. Death  consciousness as the effect of the Origina Sin (4th Part)

See also:

1.The Original Sin (1st par)

2.The Original Sin (2nd part)