A person's attitude towards death can be very ambiguous. People often experience fear and hope for a second birth at the same time. Philosophers have always tried to study the phenomenon of death in these directions and have been quite successful in this.
Even ancient philosophers often thought about the nature of death. They had no doubt that the human body is mortal. But what happens to the soul after death has always remained a mystery to the ancient philosophers.
Followers of the great Plato tried to find evidence of mortality or immortality of the soul between two main reasons. They assumed that either the soul exists forever, or consciousness is a recollection of life experience. As for the followers of Aristotle, they believed in the divine principle of the world. Interestingly, the cynics were very contemptuous of the phenomenon of death. They could even commit suicide in order not to disturb the harmony in the world.
Roman and Greek philosophers magnified death in all its forms. They assumed that the best death is the death of an emperor or a hero who himself throws himself on a sword with his chest. But Christian philosophy, on the contrary, has always tried to oppose life to death. For Christians, the fear of death was to be expressed in horror at God's judgment.
In the Middle Ages, the fear of the world of the dead was mingled with the fear of death. So the horror of the afterlife in medieval Europe was very great. But in the seventeenth century, this fear was somewhat dulled. With the help of mathematical arguments, philosophers proved that there is a God who has done a lot of good to people and is not able to harm humanity.
The philosophers of the Enlightenment did not regard death as a retribution for earthly sins. They assumed that death and hellish torment should not be feared. And only in the nineteenth century Schopenhauer was able to formulate the problem of the "truth of death". I must say that his view radically changed European ideas about death. He declared life itself to be the true embodiment of untruth. But for the philosopher F. Nietzsche, death became a real catalyst for action, which prompted a person to strain all his vital forces. L. Shestov called philosophy itself a preparation for death, quoting the famous Plato.
It is known that the philosophical schools of the twentieth century identified death with the concept of time. From the point of view of philosophers, man was mortal only for some outside observer, but not for himself. This simple idea is now confirmed by the principle of relativism, which is characteristic of modern philosophical and scientific thinking.
