APPLIED POTENTIAL OF PHENOMENOLOGICAL UNDERSTANDING OF DEATH AND MORTALITY

Abstract

The presented article attempts to structure the phenomenological interpretation of death and mortality through the study of their relationship with other significant phenomenological themes, in particular corporeality, intersubjectivity, and temporality. The author determined that the phenomenological understanding of corporeality as a combination of the physical body (German: der Körper) and the living body (German: der Leib) is capable of helping to overcome the natural-scientific reduction of the body to physical and functional aspects. The article also highlights the intersubjective rootedness of a person's understanding of his own transience and defines the role of experiencing the deaths of others in the formation of an attitude towards one's own death. The author expresses the idea of the inaccessibility of experiencing death as an actual, immediate reality. In the context of temporality, death is defined by the author as a moment in which no continuity is established, as time that no longer unfolds. In the concluding remarks, the understanding of death as the loss of a unique contribution to intersubjective experience is substantiated, and the role of awareness of mortality in the emergence of culture is determined. Overall, it was concluded that phenomenology can become not only a theoretical tool for the interpretation of death but also an applied basis for the development of bioethics.