A Philosophical Reflection on the Relevance of Death in the Medical and Technological Frame

My argument in this article is that death as a basic human fact is a condition for life"s meaningfulness, but this very fact is today managed by medical technologies, particularly the technologies used to prolong or end life at whichever stage of its development, leading to the loss of its ontological significance. Through medical technologies, we are busy chasing these two realities (life and death), separating one from the other, thereby undermining the role death plays in man"s existential structure. In the mind-set of modern subjects, death is no longer recognised as an internal process that provides intelligibility and unity to all other aspects and modes of our human existence, but it is conceived of as something external to oneself. In our everyday unreflective attempts to run away from death into the arms of aesthetic and longevity technologies to give us what they regard life to be, we not only lose an internal awareness of what death really is, but also we completely lose the aptitude to experience life as a whole.