[Excerpt from Sobre el hombre (On Man), Xavier Zubiri, Madrid, 1986. Chapter 10, Death, pp. 669-671]


Chapter 10
The Vital Course of Life

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{669}
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3. 3. The real and physical death.

The answer to the question “what is to die” can only be given after considering the answer to the question “what is to live.”

I mentioned in the first part of this study that man is something alive and constitutively animated. He does not perform any of his acts unless it is through an internal animation, which emerges from the most vegetative structure of his reality and expands into a multitude of {670} tendencies and sensitive characteristics until reaching the level of being in reality. The psyche, therefore, is corporeal from itself. It would not be psyche, but spirit if it were not an animated psyche from itself that cannot exist in the beginning of life unless it has a body. In this sense, corporeity has a primarily psychic and animistic sense; a corporeity that is an animistic corporeity without which there would not be human structures in the world. On the other hand, man has something we call body, constituted by a series of structured substances in a certain way that we call configuration, which is what provides to it the characteristic of organism.

Consequently, the problem of the radical structures of man is not the problem of spirit-matter, but the problem of body-psyche in the sense of organism. The psyche and the organism converge into that which on the one hand, is the organic configuration of the substance of the organism, and on the other, constitutes the “definitive” moment that entitatively defines the characteristic of animistic corporeity. In order to unitarily express this double dimension I used the expression form of corporeity not in the sense of Scotus, but in the sense of something that structurally configures the molecules of the organism and definitely constitutes the animation-in-act of a psyche that is corporeal from itself. This unity with the body makes that there be animation in the psyche, but without psyche whatever may be in the body would not be animation. All things present in man’s constitutive order constitute, in the form of corporeity, only one human substantivity. In the structural unity under the form of corporeity there is only one substantivity, although there may be many substances, and in that single substantivity is where the unity of man resides. It is a structural type of unity.

Given all of the above, we might then ask “what is to die.” First, it is obvious that death entails a {671} physical dimension since it is the destruction of the physical configuration of the molecules of the organism. This may happen accidentally. It may happen due to sickness since the structures of man are such that man is unable to avoid illnesses. On the other hand, we have no experience of what death may be for the highest vertebrate by the pure internal weakening of its cells. Nevertheless, the breaking down of the structure in which the somatic aspect of death consists has to be a breaking down of the structure that may affect the essential configuration of the corporeity and not merely its functional characteristic. There are functional deaths from which one could return to life; here it is the case of a structural death and not a merely functional one where the psychophysical structures disappear without which the organism cannot return to function with biological characteristics. If this is so, to die is primarily a psychophysical phenomenon and not a metaphysical one. When we die the one that leaves is the body, organic life; to die does not consist in the psychism saying good bye to the body, but rather in the body saying good bye to the psychism, in the fact that one is left without the life that goes away. When this happens, the human substantivity ceases to exist [1].

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[1] Editors’ note: In the 1953-1954 seminar, from which this text is taken, Zubiri maintained that when death occurred the organism disappears and the psyche is retained. He was trying to develop this classical idea in a new format. It has been eliminated here because it is not in conformity with his later definitive thought. In "El hombre y su cuerpo" (Man and His Body), Asclepio, 1973, p. 12, Zubiri writes: “Because of this I maintain that we cannot talk about a psyche without an organism. Let us say, by the way, that when Christianity, for example, talks about survival and immortality, what survives and is immortal is not the soul, but man, in other words, the entire human substantivity. Anything else is not of faith.” And this, Zubiri thought, would have to take place through a re-creative, resurrectional action.