Chapter 11

Why human beings find death repugnant

698. This also explains the repugnance that we feel to death, that is, the repugnance the intellective soul experiences in feeling the loss of the animal feeling which it apprehends naturally.
Death in the animal takes place through the disorganisation of the body or through extreme pain. The act with which the soul vivifies the organic body is that through which the life instinct produces stimulation, organisation and the individual feeling; at the same time, this instinct has a natural tendency to posit itself in this fashion. Granted these things, animal repugnance to death must be proportioned to the force of the life instinct. Death, therefore, is the extreme evil for an animal, whose repugnance to it must be proportionate to the act by which the animal exists.

699. But the rational principle perceives feeling as the entity which it is. In other words, the rational principle is either content or suffering when it perceives feeling. Everything the animal suffers at death is therefore perceived by the rational principle, to which death must be as repugnant as it is to the animal principle. There is a difference, however. The rational principle, in addition to the activity by which it perceives the animal feeling, has another, more noble activity, which endures and with which it can console itself for what it loses. The rational principle suffers loss, but it does not perish; the animal loses everything and perishes.

700. Moreover, perception of the body is the first act of the rational principle, the first act of reason, the act in which the rational principle is given the reality it knows naturally. But the perfection of every being consists in its act: 'A thing is, in so far as it is in act.' But every ens has some force through which it is. This force, through which it is, is that which makes the cessation of being repugnant; it is an instinct for being, and therefore for self-preservation. The rational principle, if impeded from carrying out the first natural act which makes it what it is and contains virtually all other acts, must experience extreme repugnance in seeing itself so impeded. This repugnance to seeing the body subtracted from the rational principle must be as strong in that principle as the force which naturally impels it to the act with which it perceives the animal feeling and posits itself as rational. The rational principle, therefore, must feel extreme repugnance at having to separate itself from animality, although this separation does not entirely remove its first act. There still remains the act with which it intuits being in general, the act through which it is intellectual and moreover apprehends pure space (cf. 554).