Death might not be in deadly embrace with life. Well, yes if one renders it absolute. Thinking with Sartre would simply break down everything into complete absurdity. It means that absolutising life, however positive the language and the images, brings the same implacable consequence. Heidegger, in spite of that, brings difference. Death is part of life, of being human. It is what makes us human in the fullest sense of the word. It does not stop us for being who we are, for it always offers moments to adjudicate. Our last minute dauntlessness recovers all the fragments of our being human and opens up the ‘alter-native’ of the self. A rebirth of the self, not in random and numberless events, but in a single and unparalleled transformation. Embracing the pitch-black part of our mind is probably not the end of our being exist. It is subsisting.

We may find truth in things that appear not true. In not resisting death and not absolutising life, we subsist. Thinking is both, hence Melintas continues to converse the dynamic relationship of philosophy and theology. The first article in this edition sees the ontological awareness of the existence of Dasein towards death as an authentic mode of existence. In health care idle talk or gossipping can cause Dasein to forget its authentic being, but narration provides assistance to the patient to affirm that illness is a mode of being as well. The second article attempts to reread Nietzsche’s ‘truth’ in the light of his unpublished essay (1872). It offers an interpretation that Nietzsche does not make a new theory of truth in the essay, but rather examines and constates truths that hold true. The third writing interprets the different layers of meaning in some parts of Samel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot by using Ricoeur’s hermeneutics. This absurd drama not only portrays life in boredom, but also gives rise to fresh insights whenever one is engaged in its eventful discourse. The fourth writing reflects on the idea of God in the contexts of modernism, postmodernism, and John Henry Newman’s thought of illative sense. Newman might be considered as a constructive postmodern in offering a power owned by every believer to make sense God’s existence epistemologically. The fifth article sees how today the fragmented views of food have turned into a threat to humanity, but also a great opportunity to highlight the missing aspects of food in the midst of contemporary culture. This opportunity might help people experience the holistic, relational, and ‘sacramental’ aspects of food and eating.

Subsisting, now we may sense, is not simply existing. It is like an event of moving from one layer to another in our being human here and now, and not of departing to a completely different and unheard-of world. By not allowing the tendency to absolutise life or death, we might see things ‘other-wise’. Just move and subsist.

Editor.

Diterbitkan: 2015-11-23