Confronting Finality: Cognitive and Cultural Perspectives on Death Pro Life ()
1. Preamble
Death pro life refers to the huge impact that dying has on man’s whole existence. Its idea, even if a-thematic, shapes his givenness, apprehension of his essence, interior and exterior organization, history, life and being. These are realities that point him in the direction of finality. The mention of finality automatically evokes the idea of an end. When applied to a human, it evokes images of man’s end in death. The final simply describes the last which is the termination point of a process. Thus, the last or the final or the end mean or refer to one and the same thing in general though with some nuances, they could differ in different contexts. Finality, therefore, is “the condition or quality of being final or settled; conclusiveness, the finality of death, a final or conclusive act” or a topic in metaphysics (Collinsdictionary.com, 2023) . It is the bringing of something to a close in a definitive manner such that the matter is not to be repeated, reversed or revisited. But the immediate perceptible endpoint of the active process of living in man is what is described as death. It is a reality that almost everyone intuitively and instinctively understands though no one really experiences it subjectively in an objectively communicable manner. So, when one sees the title, “facing finality,” his or her mind races immediately towards man’s confrontation with his personal death and probably, its aftermath.
But the title is not exhausted on man’s end. It also opens windows as to the points of view for the examination of man’s end. The first window widely opened in the title is the cognitive window. This will have to do with how the human mind perceives and interprets reality. In this case, it will be casting light on how human knowledge, man’s capacity to recognize and his ability to re-present to itself affects his life in view of what may be understood about his death.
Similarly, every human person is born within a definite culture. This affects how the individual in question perceives life. It equally influences his actions and reactions, his dreams and goals, his hopes and the organization of the means for their achievement and finally, his vision about the world and relationships. The end of man has always constituted a subject of interest to thinkers of different climes and persuasions. Al-Meshhedany, considers the question of the cognitive and cultural aspects of death and dying as modes of facing finality for instance (Al-Meshhedany & Al-Sammerai, 2010) . The words applied here in reasoning and reflecting on the theme may be similar or even the same when done by diverse persons but the presentation will surely be different. It will neither be examining the Arabic culture nor the Western culture nor even the African culture particularly. However, the reflection will hover over the impact of culture in general in the perception and articulation of reality especially death as finality pro life.
The main purpose of conducting the study and reflection is to highlight the value of considering man’s finality in death affirmatively in terms of its value to his life. Many Pro-lifers believe that a culture of death is sweeping across contemporary society. This seems to have several causes which are neither very explicitly clear nor rationally justifiable. The presumably simplistic explanation would be that people do not appear to know how to confront finality. So, life is faced with levity. Death appears to be something casual, only too natural, superficial and probably utterly useless and meaningless. So, examining death pro life becomes then imperative. This would be approached through a consideration of the Aristotelian-Thomistic tradition on finality, an examination of the implication of the concept cognitive, and a restricted miniature examination of some cultural points of view in considering finality, a critical analysis of the deeper implications of the cultural practices in confronting finality, and then the conclusion.
2. Finality in Classical Authors—Aquinas’ Instance
Although finality suggests “the fact or the impression of being final and irreversible,” or “an action or event that ends something,” “the quality of being finished and not able to be changed,” (Finality Meaning, 2023) in authors like Thomas Aquinas, the subject is treated under the theme of the last end of man. According to him, basing on Aristotle’s Physics, the end is the principle in human operations (Aquinas, 1946/1947) . This means that man acts for an end. Only acts that are proper to man as man and differentiate him from other creatures can be said to be human acts. These actions have to flow from the will (Aquinas, 1946/1947) . But death is not one of these. According to the presentation of Thomas Aquinas by Thomas Glenn, the section that deals with this material is entitled “Man’s Last End” (Glenn, 1978) . The examination of this issue in the author takes a turn into ethics. It focuses on the question of man’s ultimate subjective end and man’s ultimate objective end (Glenn, 1978) . These quite go beyond death. According to Glenn, the last end of man is expressed in terms of fulfillment. This means that the last end of man is to be fulfilled or to be satisfied. This fulfillment or satisfaction is what is otherwise translated as happiness. In Aquinas’ own words, “all agree in desiring the last end: since all desire the fulfillment of their perfection and it is precisely this fulfillment in which the last end consists” (Aquinas, 1946/1947) . This leads into the distinction of the last end of man in terms of the last subjective end and the last objective end. The former will mean that human fulfillment or satisfaction which is otherwise called beatitude or happiness inheres in man as in a subject. The objective last end is that object which when possessed will give him, happiness (Glenn, 1978) .
In this medieval classical presentation, therefore, the question of the finality of man is not final enough with death. Finality, in this case goes well beyond how man breathes his last and falls into silence. It rather opens a wide vista on how human life transcends death through its rational and transcendental dimension. This is because the question of man’s last end here turns to what that last end would mean in its various ways of profound explication. Thus, happiness, identified to be man’s ultimate last end is analyzed in different ways. Among the avenues for identifying this last end, where it is to be found is one of them, what it is and requisites for happiness are among the issues and finally the effects of the attainment of happiness. This is the consideration of finality.
In the consideration of where man’s full happiness lies as his last end and of his finality, Aquinas does a lot of eliminations. He removes wealth as a possible source of the happiness a man may have. This is because, wealth itself, whether natural—as something which serves man’s normal needs—or artificial as that which can provide the items of natural wealth, is something which serves. It is a means for acquiring something else (Aquinas, 1946/1947) . As such, it does not fulfill and so cannot be the true end of man, as it cannot constitute the source of his enduring happiness. A similar argument will be valid for honors, fame and glory. This is because the excellence found in man is there because of some prior goodness in him. Honors, fame and glory come to him or her because of this happiness or goodness. So, there is no way these can be the source of man’s ultimate happiness (Glenn, 1978) .
Other factors eliminated by Thomas Aquinas as possible ultimate ends of man are the possession of power and the goods of the body. In the case of the first, power is only a means and its value is dependent on the achievement it intends. That means that it cannot be the ultimate last end of man since it looks to something else than itself.
According to Glenn, Thomas further eliminates the soul or its essence or properties, faculties, acts, habits and perfections as the ultimate ends of man. Aquinas states that happiness is for the soul. Consequently, objective ultimate happiness is something outside the soul. The soul rather desires it. That implies that it is neither the soul nor any of its properties (Glenn, 1978) .
From these arguments, Thomas (Aquinas, 1946/1947) concludes that no created good can give man perfect happiness. He thus postulates man’s finality on a reality that is essential, universal and boundless. Only such can be the ultimate end of man and it has to be an uncreated reality. From all these, one can only say that finality, in mediaeval and classical—since Aquinas captures many previous positions—considerations, is a reality deeper than the physical phenomenon called death. It has to do with the ultimate destiny of man. But this does not mean that one has to be indifferent to how he lives and to how he dies. This is why Glenn (Glenn, 1978) highlights Aquinas’ logical move from the consideration of the last end of man to an examination of the concept of human acts. What this implies is that, however speculatively the finality of man is considered, his choices, actions, omissions, commissions, reactions, fears, doubts, and relationships with others are significant on a practical level in the consideration of human finality. This does not mean that every moment of life is filled with death. (Nevertheless, every such moment is impelled by an implicit, indistinct, antecedent, quasi unconscious attention to its possibility). It rather means that death acquires its full meaning in total consideration of the history of life and not in isolation from it; though the moment called death could just start in an instant.
3. Cognitive Aspects of Finality
Cognitive which is an adjective, calls one’s mind immediately to the more common noun, cognition. This (according to Learning Theories, Cognitive Learning, 2023 ) has to do with “the ability of the brain’s mental processes to absorb and retain information through experience, senses and thought.” Cognition deals with human perception and learning but cognitive (Collinsdictionary.com, 2023) means, of, relating to or concerning the mental process involved in knowing, learning and understanding things; it also means something that involves conscious intellectual activity such as thinking, reasoning or remembering. Others (https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/cognitive, 2023) see it as what is based on or is capable of being reduced to empirical factual knowledge.
Cognitive science then deals with human perception, thinking and learning. Cognitive learning (Cognitive learning at https://springer.com, 2023) on its part is “a change in knowledge attributable in experience.” In whatever way it is put, cognition involving mental processes of acquiring knowledge and understanding through thought, experience and the senses and affecting how people behave (https://cambridgecognition.com) would have implications for the examination of the cognitive aspect of death and finality. The cognitive aspect of looking at finality and in this case, at both subjective and objective finality would necessarily do with culture and religion. As regards the background of this reflection, the culture in question as global as it might be cannot but have a massive Sub-Saharan African substratum.
If a distinction is made between problems, the unknowable and mystery, as Marcel does (Marcel, 1962) , finality viewed as death pro life, will not just be a problem to be resolved. It will involve like being does, mystery. It will also manifest grey areas of both the known, unknown but guessable and the unknowable in a relatively absolute sense. That is where the cognitive aspect of death will belong though as finality, it will spread across a very wide range of viewpoints.
4. Some Cultural Perspectives on Finality
Before the encounter with revelation or revealed religion, people still lived and organized their lives in such a way that it made sense and was rationally explicable to them the much they could grasp. Even today after the encounter with revelation, the advent of Christianity and still with its dominance, people still live and organize their lives, heavily influenced by certain fundamental ideas, beliefs, thought patterns, and repercussions consciousness hugely laden with filtrates of previous cultures under sedimentation in the subconscious. This was and is such that the attitudes which people exhibited as regards so many operations really affected and for those who hold these categories, still affect their lives, survival, eventual death and general existential hopefulness.
Let us see for instance the fundamental philosophy behind the greatest celebration, festivity and occasions of primal display on many traditional sub-Saharan African territories. The issue at stake and under discussion is death. This comes along with the necessarily consequent funeral ceremonies associated with it through burials which signify to some extent, the end of the already begun end.
The burial in question here is that of an accomplished man. Being realized in its turn here is something whose understanding has developed radically. Initially, in the pre-colonial and pre-Christian days, in several sub-Saharan African cultures, to have married and bred children, had lands and built one’s compound, and to have become very old, were considered the best and highest accomplishments and blessings. Such meant that the one who died on these conditions was in good rapport with whatever other beings or spirits as the case may be, that were in charge of human life. The persons’ exit was to be celebrated with pump and gallantry as befitted his status.
So, in the midst of this entertainment fair and fiesta which have come to be described as the celebration of life, a capital event that necessarily happened and still happens is that some animals must be slaughtered. Originally, there were some rituals involved in this slaughtering, though to a very large extent, this is no longer the widespread practice today. Yet, the slaughtering of an animal or animals embracing also what some have called the eshu ritual (Ossai, 2016) and if possible, of the largest size or number possible, to the person or family according to its income and capacity, is not a mere show of wealth. It is rather a cognitive affirmation of an existential intricate setting. Theophilus (Okere, 2015) holds that “life and death are so intertwined that where there is not the possibility of death, neither is there the possibility of life.”
Behind this practice lay the belief that if one did not do it—honour the deceased through accompanying him or her with some form of life1—he had disrespected the deceased who now belongs to a spiritual realm. To this disrespect is attached some severe mental and real afflictions as punishments. Consequently, in order to avoid these negative consequences, operating athematically on the dictum that “prevention is better than cure,” people try to even sometimes go beyond their means in order to assuage and pacify the conditions of their own survival. This is a cognitive dimension to finality. People do not want to be precipitated to lose their lives. They want to avoid an abrupt and unforeseen death as much as possible and while it is clear that the end must come one day, no one advertently heads for it.
The question of how this practice – of ensuring that some form of life is taken on occasion of funerals through the slaughter of animals—is kept alive could be raised. It happens through tales of undesirable consequences deeply imbued in the collective subconscious within cultures and folklores. Take for instance, in many Southern parts of Nigeria, ranging from parts of Igboland through Efik to Ogoni land, it is believed that one who has not organized the funeral obsequies of his or her late parents, dares not participate in that of others in the sense of eating or receiving entertainment on those occasions. Even if the person does, provided he or she never slaughtered a domestic animal in order to mourn the parents, he or she cannot eat any meat slaughtered for purposes of funeral obsequies elsewhere. Ossai (Ossai, 2016) states that “findings revealed that, the cow ritual is an expression of family bond which goes beyond the physical but extended to the dead parents and also it is an effort to ensure harmonious relationship with the supramundane.”
Buying enough meat or fish, or getting already prepared meals with these ingredients do not solve this problem. Going to the restaurants for the purpose of feeding the guests as happens in the Western world, would be a bizarre idea in this clime. The slaughtering of live animals, what some people call cow ritual,2 appears to be a deeply ingrained cultural cognitive element that leads people to maintain it. As a young Catholic priest, I tried to reason with a parishioner of mine who had lived in the United States of America for several years to see how to stop this practice. He told me, Fr. please, you do not need to stop the practice. I think I have trained my children enough for them to be able to fulfill this aspect of our tradition. Let them do it. When I am dead and gone, if you like, you may change it.
Sometimes, even among eminent Christians, when it has been discovered that deceased parents never “properly” buried their loved ones, people have had to go to their maternal homes or the maternal homes of their parents to offer livestock, cow, cattle or goat as a substitution for the would have been done traditional burial ceremonies.3 This is usually done antecedently to the carrying on of the funeral arrangements and consequent burial rites of the newly deceased one. These underlie the belief in the sacredness of life and the fact that life has its own rules that are wider than logic. It is strongly believed that the flouting of these traditional cultural practices have grave consequences not excluding the wiping out of a whole family stock or at least of the defaulters.
This singular belief is the reason one finds a poor family which tries to sell its precious landed property in order to cater for funeral ceremonies. Many borrow beyond reasonable bounds for the same purposes while some leave and postpone the funeral or burial rites beyond imaginable time frames. They wait to make ends meet and come up with some minimal satisfying conditions in order to carry out these activities and obviate disaster. Where they fail to do it in the final analysis, they make sure they keep the tale alive to their loved ones so that at any time in future when a member of the subsequent generations is able, the requirements would be fulfilled. In this case, death does not constitute an absolute finality since it leaves some liabilities and assets for the living and affects life in a significant manner.
These do not happen with funerals alone. Such practices are also found in instances where young maidens are to enter into marriage. If it happens that a parent was or both parents were deceased at an age when this young lady could not participate in the funeral rites, sometimes, they try to provide some livestock and local drinks under the aegis of this requirement in order to prepare and make sure they owe nothing to their departed ones before they start their own families in earnest. Dowries are paid even in consideration of the dead. Otherwise, they sometimes turn up to be living dead.
Another aspect of this subconscious regard for life is that it evokes a sort of unspoken karma in the minds of the people. It is believed that if one takes life, he or she precipitates another to the world beyond, if some rituals are not performed to expiate it, the one must perish likewise, violently. An instance would be that even in the case of wars, whoever is known to have killed, whether enemy combatants or non combatants, undergoes some traditional ritual of hand purification to avoid adverse consequences from this.
Similarly, those who kill children, those who abort, those who do ritual killing are believed to suffer the consequences of these evils against life, not only in the beyond but primarily already here in this world. Many of these offenders die young and their progeny also perish in a similar manner; some of them confess before they die to their atrocities, leading to a shameful end of life; some become mad; while others slowly but unfailingly gradually get wiped out the face of the earth. Finality for the family becomes tragic in that case.
5. Deeper Implications of the Apparently Superficial Behaviors
The few indications of how people confront finality, especially its manifest form in others is pregnant with meanings. First of all, it underlies the fact that no one wants to die. Or at least, no one wants to die due to causes that he or she can forestall or prevent. When the discourse is being made of dangerous consequences that may follow the negligence of the performance of some rites that concern the burial of a dead person, the ultimate intention of the performers of these rites is to avoid death. It is true that some people do argue about the communion with loved ones in the ancestral African weltanschauung, yet, an elimination of the horrible punitive aspect would put a lie to that. What this implies primarily is that the experience of death, its being suffered by the subject is undesirable. If people were really indifferent and careless about it, many of the practices that have survived today, following magic, superstition, religion and some cultural practices would not exist. Elaborate funeral and burial practices would have as well been a thing of the past especially among the South Easterners of Nigeria with particular emphasis on the Igbos, Efiks, Ogonis, etc. It is true that some people boast of their spendthrift attitudes at funerals as a question of following existent practice that has nothing to do with fear or rituals, yet, the ultimate stratum from which the apparently innocuous practice started was fear and attention to preserve life. It was an unconscious consideration of finality.
In this direction, Okere (Okere, 2015) states that while we talk of the living dead, we forget that we ourselves are dying living. So, he calls all alive, the living dying. Thus, he states that man lives to die. In spite of this, all or nearly all men fear death. He attributes this to the fact that no one has ever successfully resisted it. Death is the reason for the fear of diseases, of suffering, of pain and of many other things which people dread. This is because these other secondary factors may inadvertently open the way to that ineluctable universal reality called death. On the positive dimension, though death and therefore finality appears to be negative, yet it generates positive energy. This is because, it is the motor behind the establishment of hospitals, healthcare, welfare, luxury, light, etc.
One may say that those who live have not really experienced death and those who have experienced it are not able to recount it in a realistic manner from their memory to the living. This is because of the inherent contradiction of the concept and meaning of death and its realistic and practical manifestation. Death is the cessation of vital functions in a permanent way such that reportability and response to stimulus are totally made impossible in an irreversible manner. It is not just the temporary shutting down of consciousness. It involves the permanent stop to all those capacities for movement inherent in a living thing, and necessary for interior self-presence manifestation on the part of the organism. This is why it becomes a contradiction in terms for one to desire to know an experience of death in some way. Non living things do not experience, nor sense nor feel consciousness in any way. These are characteristics of living things. But to die is precisely, to give up these characteristics and have those of non living things. It is to “not be” alive any longer in the regular sense. But one cannot “be” and “not be at the same time.” This will go against the classical principle of the excluded middle. So, human finality therefore shows itself as a reality intrinsically beyond biology, physics and the ordinary nature. It is open ended to the transcendental.
Another implication of the cultural practices associated with death is that cognitively, there is more ignorance of death than scientifically sustainable facts about it. From a typically rational point of view, humanity appears more to be under a veil of ignorance about death than to bask under the sunlight of knowledge of it. Otherwise, there would have been a more uniform attitude towards death than is really obtainable universally and historically. One of the most widespread feelings about death is that it is mysterious, creates sorrow and is undesirable in the fully healthy who can posit an act of will.
Therefore, an antithesis is created in that the highest instinct in man is that of self-preservation. The effort to preserve oneself and one’s loved ones is an unstated motivation and drive for most of the achievements of man. From the advancement of modern science, through the developments in the field of technology and medicine, to the continued research in the field of psychology, technology and ultra science, these are all meant to improve human life. So, the more man faces death, the more he develops himself against it. The more he confronts his finality, the more human he becomes and the more transcendental he tends.
The idea of the conservation and prolongation of life by so many different means both scientific and unorthodox is a reality that has been investigated widely upon in the field of bio-ethics and socio-moral theology. A Nigerian (Nwachukwu, 2022) in diaspora has gathered a lot of these pieces of information and done a very wide comparative study between the West and Africa with Igbo land as a case study to present all these cases where people adopt and invent means to delay death and prolong life.
What this further portends is that rationally speaking, life is so sacred that it is a value beyond any other. If other values are to be seen beyond life as are found in religions, this would be because of the good already perceived in life in the present age which is punctuated, abbreviated and tainted by death. Thus, every dream on how to prolong and reassure life turns towards seeing how to overcome death or delay it. Even such theories as reincarnation serve and function as cognitive pressures on the mind to overcome death.
Although they explained cycles of life after life, some authors have shown the intellectual difficulties involved in holding on to such theory. According to Okere (Okere, 2015) , Simon Ene in his book on reincarnation shows that each version of it is “beset with internal contradictions and in direct contradiction to other known facts and principles.” Among such problems are the personal identity problem, the no-memory problem, the theory’s incompatibility with ancestor worship in African belief systems, the phenomenal world population explosion as against the static population presumption postulated by the reincarnation theory, etc.
Okere (Okere, 2015) therefore, holds that the appeal of the theory of reincarnation is neither due to its necessarily “scientific credibility nor to its inherent persuasiveness.” He attributes its sway to the fact that the doctrine is a religious belief and so operates outside the bounds of reason or the categories of true and false as such. So, Okere (Okere, 2015) considers it a rough guess at the mystery of life, a vague theory of the afterlife, a crude explanation of physical phenomena, or a clear case of the obscurum per obscurius. These reflections lead him to conclude that in the face of mysterious phenomena, more colorful and incredible fancies become more accessible than carefully and scientifically investigated results.
What all the considerations so far amount to is that a reflection on death and an examination on various perspectives on death is only a service to the deepening of the understanding of the value of life. The fact that death transforms its subject or victim makes it more than slippery to grasp. For, if the dead could and should speak and communicate ordinarily, that would end the very concept of death as it would be an act of the living and not that of the dead. But if they do not communicate as the dead ought not, then no one would know anything about death. This is why most of what is held about death comes from a purely religious perspective, whether revealed or natural. As a result of the fact that in Christianity, the Founder is believed to have risen from the dead, the Christian cultural perspective on death and her teaching on life enjoy a superior appeal from reason. So, its teaching is beneficial and the sanctity of life it promotes remains the best way of confronting finality with the best possible benefit of the doubt that life really transcends the cessation of breath and vital physico-biological and psychological functions that lead to entombment.
6. Conclusion
The discussion on how to pose oneself before the mystery of mysteries, death, from a purely rational point view is deep and interesting. In this regard, death seems to constitute finality. But when one adopts a purely intellectual cognitive approach, and joins to it a religious dimension, it becomes clear that even reason yields to the intuition, death cannot strictly constitute finality for man. This is because if it does, there would be more difficult questions for man to answer than there are when he supposes that life has a source; that death is a means, a bridge and a medium of transition. Also the metaphysical question of meaning will spring up afresh as if man has never crossed the threshold of consciousness.
When one considers death as not the final end of man but one of the stages in his journey, cognitively inspired explanations of actions that relate to death begin to make sense. Cultural practices also start to make sense as practical avenues sought to attenuate an otherwise anguishing ever present reality. Death is like a shadow that lurks around man, however he decides to stay. The brighter the light is, the more evident the shadow though the more also it appears to have disappeared. This is why, when revealed religion throws a very bright light on the mystery of death, the thickness of the shadow is attenuated but the shadow remains nevertheless. There is a most practical demand of this anthropological and existential reality of living beings. Death constitutes itself a mystery that every man must confront at one point or the other inexorably. Therefore, the rational being must posit the maximum respect possible to any and every life. He must not forcibly in any way subject any person to this dark tunnel that bursts into a blinding light through which one and all must pass without reason’s and experiences’ guarantee of what follows.
NOTES
1This was so severe and sometimes, some cultures arrived at burying those considered to be eminent with some other humans – slaves or kidnapped people. The understanding was that a prosperous man here would need servants in the beyond the now, the afterlife such that if this was not offered him, there would be extremely grave consequences for his or her posterity. So, these people were put in the same grave as the deceased, sometimes covered alive and at other times slaughtered as the coffins were lowered.
2Local names abound in various languages for this: Igbo—Itinyeaku ma obuigbuaku and Efik, Nsininyene, for instance.
3This situation has often led people to purchase three and sometimes four cows to satisfy for their parents who could not do it before them in order to be free to perform the practice in honour of their own parents.