The Meaning of Death

The medical community is yet again perplexed by the meaning of death. Since ultimately death is not something tangible (it is the separation of the immaterial soul from the body), medical ethicists look for tangible signs to define life and death. The prevailing medical opinion for some time now has been that brain function equates to life. This is in part based upon the supposition that thinking and determining one's own actions are fundamentally what life consists in, and the further reduction of these functions to their material principle, viz., the brain. Thus, when the brain stops functioning, the man stops living or at least stops really being a man (n.b. the use of the term vegetable for one who still is capable of some signs of life without tangible evidence of higher brain functioning). Without going into why the medical community has accepted this definition of life and death, we will consider some of its consequences.

From time to time, individuals have returned to consciousness after being declared dead. The most recent occurrence to catch my attention looks like it may have occurred last weekend. The news story can be found here or here, but for convenience I will summarize it for you. An elderly woman suffered a pair of heart attacks. Her heart stopped for two prolonged periods, and for 17 hours she showed no discernible brain activity. The doctors declared her to be dead, and removed all life support equipment except a ventilator (because they were hoping that the family would consent to donate her organs). Rigor mortis had already begun, but 10 minutes after the life support equipment had been removed, the woman regained consciousness.

A similar event took place a few months ago. A man was declared brain dead, and four months later, when his families were saying their last good-byes, the man responded to pressure on a finger nail and a pocket knife scraped across his foot.

Without further complicating these events by saying that they are singular acts of divine intervention, which they could in fact be, it is worth considering the simpler case first. In the end, it is easy enough to say that men are alive when we see them moving around under their own power or doing some other activity associated with life, but putting our finger on when a man is dead can be pretty challenging.

The difficulty arises because death results from the removal of the first act from the composite, while we notice life because of the second act of the composite. What do I mean by this, you say? Aristotle in the De Anima defines the soul as the "first act of the natural organized body having life potentially." Thus, a body is living when it has some sort of soul joined to it. This is true of men, animals, and plants. A living thing is more than just a material principle. Nevertheless, the body with a soul joined to it is still in potency to other acts. Among these other acts are growth, local motion, and reasoning. These second acts are what other men can see and then judge the composite to be living. Nevertheless, the lack of these acts does not necessarily mean that there is no composite, and thus that the man is dead. The dead man is not capable of any of these second acts, but the living man is at least in potency to them. The observer is only able to see that the potency was there by seeing the act that the potency was ordered to. However, the potency must be prior to the act in at least one of the four senses of prior. Therefore, it is possible for a man to be alive without showing any outward signs of life (2nd acts).