I. Aging, Death of Others, and Death of Self

Death is the end of an individuated life's presence. Some parts of an organism can live or be maintained even though the individual is or will no longer be living. This end does not entail the destruction of what lived, which is still something as a body, as a memory, or as an author of residual traces in the physical universe. Rather, it denotes the absence without return of what lived.

What ends with death is not a life, but this life's presence. The being which was living and which is no longer living is absent from the world; the world comprehends it and it is not in the world. What dies stops being present.

However, all that lives does not die. Only individuated lives die. My hand will never die. One can certainly cut it off, in which case I will be missing a hand; it will cease to function, waste away, rot, and decompose, but one cannot say that it will be dead.

Death is therefore not the opposite or the end of life, but only the end of the presence of some organisational mode of a living thing: its individuation.

Two positions emerge from the incomprehension of this definition. The materialist or naturalist makes death the end of life. Death is thus easily reducible to a function. Death is inscribed in living things as a regulatory mechanism of the species' evolution, an internal clock, the organism's programming, the condition of possibility of a renewal, the very sign of the triumph of the logic of species-life over the logic of individual-life. Here, death is attributed to humans, other animals, and all living things, including cells.

Unlike the materialist or naturalist, the idealist makes death the end of being. Death no longer has anything to do with living things, but everything to do with the Idea.