生寄死歸 1

雖然當老師已有13年, 但從今年1月到8月 (安息年假), 我沒有正式授課. 所以, 對於明天的課總有點緊張和興奮. 這份心情反映出我仍可以繼續當老師. 這不是我第一次授這門課, 而是第三次了. 認識我的人都知道我絕不會翻抄, 而今次的特色就是從身體角度探討死亡. 從閱讀中, 我暫時還未接觸到這觀點. 或許, 我應考慮將這課變為書.

Death and Dying 生寄死歸

Lecture 1 Death and body

1. Death and body
A. Basic movements, such as, breathing and blood circulation, come to a stop.
B. A complete disintegration between body and soul (or material and immaterial) if one
believes there is soul.
C. A separation of social relationship, that is, no response.
D. A deteriorating process is undergone.
E. Paradoxically, the experience of that ‘I am my body’ is experienced in death and dying.

2. The implications of the death of body
A. Embodiment’s theory
- The place of the human body as the medium in and through which various kinds of experiences are acquired and come to be ‘known’.
- Existence is known through body. And this body relates to the social and cultural world, not just a material matter. The world we perceive is a world pregnant with meanings. Therefore, humans are body, mind and society. In M.Merleau-Ponty’s words, ‘the body expresses total existence, not because it is an external accompaniment to that existence, but because existence comes into its own in the body.’ (Phenomenology of Perception, p.166)
- The body is both existential and cultural

B. Peter Berger, Sacred Canopy (New York: Anchor, 1967).
- Since humans are embodiment, we construct meanings through our bodies. Hence, death is a threat to human activity and meaning of being humans.
- Death is ambiguous. On the one hand, it belongs to human experience. On the other hand, it denies human experience. The ambiguity of death challenges everyday life of human experience.
- Body is pointing to the future, and it let humans realize their potentialities. Ironically, death implies that humans are not able to integrate the future and the present. Death is the unfulfillment of life.

C. Anthony Giddens, Modernity and Self-Identity (Cambridge: Polity, 1991).
- Modernity makes humans hard to face death, for modernity has broken up tradition in which tradition is supposed to give us identity.
- Humans are more inclined to the attention of personal lifestyle, for this gives one’s identity. Lifestyle is established through the management of the body. Finally, body becomes the last protection of self. Thus, death becomes threatening.
- There is a shift of the understanding of body from a natural sphere to cultural sphere.

D. Norbert Elias, The Loneliness of the Dying (Oxford: Blackwell, 1985).
- Modernity commercializes the body, and at the same time, self-identity is more closely bounded to body.
- But this is a socialization of body that fails to notice the natural side of body, a rationalization of body that emphasizes under control (medical research), and an individualization of body that separates us from the wider community.
- Thus, we lose the means to integrate death into our experience of life.

E. Stanley Hauerwas, Suffering Presence (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1989)
- Under the Enlightenment’s influence, under control and explainable become the myth of our understanding of the surrounding world.
- This affects the development of medicine deeply, that is to say, cure is more central than care.
- Death is about the relief of pain more than a matter of meaning.

F. Due to the importance of body, we are more difficult to accept death as part of life. Although the contemporary death education intends to demytheologize death, it goes to another extreme, that is, to ignore the anxiety and ex’ception of death.

3. Cemetery: an example of the presence of death in the living world
A. Heterotopia (異域) in Michael Foucault’s understanding
- Emplacement is about the relationship among places and their relationships.
- However, there are places whose relationship with other places is not in harmony, and even contradictory with the existing emplacement. It is counter-emplacement. In Foucault’s word, this is heterotopia.
- When society attempts to construct any identity and culture, it has to create heterotopia simultaneously. It is built by society, but a threat to society. Heterotopia is the other spaces of society.

B. Cemetery is a heterotopia (it is cultural more than a must), for it is a space taken place after death, but it is situated in the living world. It challenges existing human activity and value.

4. Religion and death:
A. A response to the survivors’ enquiry of the meanings of death.
B. A spiritual support to the dying.
C. A critical challenge to a kind of body’s ideology without ‘window’.
D. An attempt to articulate the meanings of the embodiment of ‘life after death’