The first group includes deep-seated trends in social development, which are gaining increasing popularity at the present stage of human existence. We call this group of causes, immanently inherent in the formation of society, actualizing the concept of death as a social phenomenon, explicit. This group includes, firstly, the improvement of medical technologies, leading to the inevitable deformation of not only the biological, but also the social content of death. It is the progress of medical technologies that leads to the destruction of traditional institutions of socialization of death, to the destruction of the cult way of its perception. The lack of access to medical care, on the one hand, and the possibilities of the healthcare industry, on the other, form a new idea in the public mind about the possibility of avoiding death, and eventually life as a subject of bargaining becomes a stereotype and forms a new ideology of the relationship between the concepts of “life” and “death” in society. The second group of explicit reasons for the actualization of the study of the phenomenon of death is related to the biological understanding of human nature. In this context, the idea that death is the natural end of the existence of every living organism, including humans, is of particular importance. This essentially biological, positivist understanding of death excludes it as a phenomenon from the social and spiritual-individual existence of man, translating the finiteness of the existence of an individual into the infinity of the existence of society. The above indicates that mortality has been and remains the most important condition for the functioning of any social system. In the context of biological theories about man, a third side of the explicit reasons for the relevance of considering death as a social phenomenon arises: humanity is aware of the fact of its finiteness not only as the finiteness of the existence of an individual, but also as the finiteness of a certain integrity. The idea of saving humanity as a whole on the eve of a global catastrophe inevitably fails, which leads to ideological bipolarity, on the one hand, the salvation of an individual (by any means involving a radical increase in life expectancy), and on the other – the inevitable death of humanity as a whole. The key point of all the explicit reasons for actualizing the study of death as a social phenomenon is the fear of accepting death as a limb, i.e. as a biological fact, and the desire to avoid death. It is from the internal reserves of the development of social consciousness that a whole range of problems are born as an adaptation mechanism to one’s own extremity. The fear of death plays a key role in the genesis and evolution of society, culture, philosophy, and social institutions. Attitudes towards death determine the forms of all religious cults and beliefs, and underlie many philosophical constructions and scientific research in the fields of psychology, anthropology, and demography. The most striking example of avoiding the understanding of death as a limb, in the literal sense of the word, is religious and philosophical knowledge. However, in our opinion, natural science is also one of the forms of overcoming the fear of the fact of finiteness. It is no coincidence that the outstanding natural scientists W. Garvey, J. Buffon, C. Bernard and others involve philosophical concepts in their concepts, in fact, combining natural science and ethics. Death as a phenomenon has a certain ambivalence. On the one hand, death is undoubtedly a natural, biological phenomenon, and in this sense it is an extracultural phenomenon. The presence or absence of culture as a way of human survival as a species cannot affect the existence of death. But the fact of death has a very significant impact on the ways of being and the development of culture. Therefore, on the other hand, death is a part of the social and cultural dimension of man. However, death as a phenomenon of human existence has another exceptional property – a person does not have a lifetime personal experience of death and in fact can perceive it only through universal, supra-individual experience. If death as a biological phenomenon is not defined by culture, then as a phenomenon of human social existence it manifests itself in specific cultural forms. And as such, death is experienced by a person who represents a particular culture. In this context, we can talk about the images of death peculiar to individual societies. In the early stages of social development, death was not perceived by man as an independent phenomenon. Life was interrupted as a result of illness, violation of the rules of worship, or a hunting accident. A smart and cunning person could live forever avoiding these traps. Later, death became recognized as the finiteness of being an individual, a member of the Family. But it was not experienced as a personal tragedy, because as long as the Genus existed, it was a guarantee of a person’s return to this world. The attitude towards death was determined by the cult of ancestors, the guarantors of human well-being during life and in posthumous existence. Later, due to the weakening of tribal ties and the formation of inequality relations, and further state structures, a new, personal attitude towards death as an inevitable tragedy of an individual arises. It was at this stage of social development that monotheistic religions were formed, the object of which was man in his attitude to his own existence in the world (Buddhism, Zoroastrianism, Judaism and later Christianity and Islam). Historically, personal self-awareness has led to a sense of the tragedy and irreparability of the death of an individual in these religions, introduced and consolidated death as a socio-psychological phenomenon that now manifests itself for humans only in the cultural space in the image of human destiny. In world religions, the theme of human responsibility for actions performed in earthly life is being shaped. It can be said that the fear of death functions in the religious worldview as a social regulator. Using the principle of posthumous retribution, no matter how specifically it was realized in a particular culture, world religions laid the foundations of a value-normative system of human behavior in society, which is universal. The ethical nature of a person’s attitude to death further determines the social evolution of death as an existential phenomenon. In the early ethical systems of Hinduism and Buddhism, death is seen as the result of a moral assessment of the deceased’s personality, his relationship with people and higher powers. The ancient Chinese philosopher Yang Zhu emphasized that death is a symbol of social justice, as it equalizes all people. This assessment of death fully coincides with the Christian, much later tradition of viewing death as a manifestation of the highest justice and social equality: death draws young and old, rich and poor, noble and commoners into its dance (Dance macambre). Belief in a posthumous existence to a certain extent frees a person from the fear of death. In the Eastern religious tradition, in particular in Buddhism, death is perceived as an undoubted evil as long as it is only a stage towards the transition to a new life – the source of suffering (the idea of reincarnation). When a person has exhausted his destiny – karma and the cycle of rebirth is completed for him, death becomes desirable, opening the way to nirvana. The idea of the immortality of the soul in Christianity is expressed in the idea of posthumous retribution. The fear of death in society is replaced by the fear of posthumous retribution, which inevitably leads to moral assessments of lifetime actions, the need to distinguish between good and evil. Thus, the very awareness of the finiteness of human existence makes his lifetime existence morally meaningful. Like other world religions, Islam asserts that physical death is not the result of human existence. Death only transforms the soul and body into other hypostases, the quality of which is again determined by a person’s lifetime activity. However, for modern Western society, death is more evil than good. In developed countries, a significant increase in the comfort of earthly existence leads to the fact that people strive for an active life until their last breath. The invention of methods for treating previously fatal diseases, the active struggle for prolonging life in old age, and the highly effective development of gerontological research lead to people taking the side of the earthly in the struggle between earthly and otherworldly existence. This inevitably leads to the fact that death is perceived by modern Westerners as an absolute and inevitable evil. In this context, life is only a resistance to death. This worldview reinforces the fear of death, forcing us to look for new ways to overcome it. Z. Freud introduced the concepts of “attraction to life” and “attraction to death” into psychology. The death drive is an individual’s inherent unconscious tendencies to self–destruct and return to an inorganic state. The death instinct (thanatos) is dialectically opposed to the instinct of life (eros), the desire for life is balanced by the desire for death. The fear of death and the attraction to it are innate, instinctive forms of human experience, and in this sense, the instinct of life and the instinct of death are absolutely equivalent emotionally [7]. L. Watson, on the contrary, believes that the fear of death is not an innate, but an acquired property of the psyche. In his opinion, the psychological reaction to death occurs only in adults as a result of their social existence [1]. Currently, there is an increasing interest in the experience of postmortem experiences of people who find themselves in borderline states of clinical death. As mentioned above, death as a phenomenon is perceived by a person indirectly, since he does not have a personal experience of dying. During life, a person becomes involved in death only through certain cultural experiences, through the perception of universal, supra-individual experience. The desire to overcome this non–predisposition to death led to the formation of a completely independent science – thanatology, within the framework of which the personal experience of dying (clinical death) is studied. In our opinion, it would be more accurate to say that the near-death experience is being studied, expressed in the experiences and visions of a person in a state of clinical death. The desire of modern man to overcome the fear of death makes him turn to scientific theories. Evidence of posthumous existence for our contemporaries acquires respectability, the illusion of authenticity, if they are the result of scientific research, confirmed by serious scientific theories. It is not surprising, therefore, that the book by the American physician R. Moody “Life after Death” [5] has gained absolutely fantastic popularity. In this sense, modern people are not much different from their unscientific ancestors. For them, science is only a way to overcome the fear of death inherent in man, while science itself, which still only deals with the biological aspect of dying, has nothing to do with the mystery of death. The role of science in solving this problem is reduced to the development of new ways, improved methods of increasing human vitality, increasing physical resistance to death. In connection with the above, it can be argued that in the concept of death at the present stage of the development of socio-philosophical thought, the social and biological concepts of man are organically intertwined, forming a two-level structure of this phenomenon, consisting of the organizational-individual level and the level of social relations. We assume that the absolutization of one of these levels inevitably leads to the exclusion of the dialectic of social and biological from discussions, but the understanding that death is primarily a socio-historical fact based on biological prerequisites opens a new path to understanding its essence. Traditional strategies for adapting humans and society as a whole to the finiteness of their existence are undergoing changes due to the lack of a competent approach to the study of death as a sociocultural phenomenon. The theory of global evolutionism, which is actively gaining points, does not find a worthy embodiment in understanding the phenomenon of death [2]. Society prefers to follow the already well–trodden paths of understanding the counterbalance of death – immortality as a moral improvement, i.e., in essence, the religious worldview continues to be taken as the basis. But one cannot help but notice that at the present stage, tension is increasing more and more at the organizational and individual level of understanding death. In addition to moral improvement, the cult of physical health is actively developing, and the victory over old age, which is losing its status of “deservedness,” is understood not as a natural stage in the development of a living organism, but as a negative phenomenon that must be actively combated with the help of the achievements of modern medicine. The prolongation of physical health in people’s minds becomes the main reason for a successful existence and the achievement of “immortality.” In this race for eternal youth, the moral component naturally loses its meaning, i.e. the dialectic of the social – biological is overlooked. When death is understood as a process of aging, decrepitude of the body, resistance to it manifests itself in several forms at once. In order to preserve and strengthen individual health, physical and mental, the Institute of public health is developing in social terms, and national programs for the general improvement of the population are being created. Physical culture and sports are actively developing. Special attention is paid to ecological culture. In a relatively peaceful environment, increasing the value of an individual’s life is reflected in numerous and diverse public and private health programs. The promotion of a healthy lifestyle based on the personal experience of centenarians is actively developing. There are many programs to improve health and prolong an active, socially significant life time through the application of special personal efforts of the individual. Based on the above, we identify several main socio-anthropological factors of death alienation and resistance to it. First, it is to increase the efficiency of the health care system and the development of medical science. Secondly, the formation of viable generations by improving adaptive functions in a rapidly changing human social environment. Ensuring peace between peoples within individual countries and in the international arena is also one of the basic factors of resistance to death. These three groups of factors have one generalizing indicator as a universal indicator of their effectiveness – human life expectancy. So, when death is understood as an act of irrevocable, final disappearance of a person, resistance to it manifests itself in mythological and religious ideas about the transmigration of souls, the immortality of the soul, the multiplicity of forms of human existence; ideas and values of secular culture about the value of human life, the development of meaningful strategies: spiritual, moral, socio-altruistic, socio-creative, socio-demographic, gaming, prestigious, conformist (according to V. G. Nemirovsky’s classification [6]). In accordance with the humanistic principles of the development of society in the modern world, the value of a separate, individual life as a unique phenomenon is growing. However, such an attitude towards a person’s life does not change much in the attitude of society towards his death. There is no doubt that the individualization of human life generates a lot of serious problems, in solving which only a sociological approach is ineffective. The mortality of an individual is not mitigated by the immortality of society, since the very thesis of the infinity of the existence of society now looks very doubtful. The life principle of “after us, at least the flood” is by no means an invention of the modern world. The desire to dissolve the fear of death in the game is also inherent in humanity. However, it is the modern world that provides people with more and more opportunities to spend their lives in accordance with these dubious maxims. Death is a taboo topic for a modern person. It disappears from our daily lives, remaining on the periphery of consciousness, losing its moral and semantic potential. These are very disturbing symptoms of modernity and a very serious reason for in-depth sociological, anthropological and philosophical research. Author: Andreeva A.V. Source: www.gramota.net Photo: livejournal.com