In this book, Ferdinand Ulrich offers a startlingly profound reflection on death, approaching this great human mystery from an utterly unique perspective, namely a "meta-anthropology" developed in the light of faith. In contrast to the various strategies for either repressing death or wallowing in its destructiveness, Ulrich presents the gratuitous act of love, in which life and death reveal their unity within the self-transcendence of an ever greater life. This superabundant act of life in turn sheds a new light on many traditional philosophical problems: for example, the meaning of hope, the nature of language, and the relation between reason and the senses, between essence and appearance, between body and soul. In Ulrich, meditating on the mystery of death thus opens to an expansive philosophical vision that bears on all of the basic elements of human existence.
Living in the Unity of Life and Death began as a reflection Ulrich offered to people in the medical profession in 1969, which he then developed into a more ample philosophical exploration published in 1973. The editor of the German edition of this volume, Martin Bieler, combined this book with three other previously unpublished works, each of which develops some aspect of the relation between life and death. In "Death in Knowledge and Love: A Fragment," written in 1979, Ulrich presents a dramatic epistemology that counts as one of his most innovative ideas. The essay "The Dialectic of Life and Death in the Phenomenon of Culture" (1969) offers an extended engagement with Freud, which reveals the fruitfulness of Ulrich’s distinctive interpretation of life-giving love as a unity of life and death. And the brief text "Generation and Causality: Making and the Creative Poverty of Love’s Searching Power on Dschuang Dsi’s ‘The Master Woodcarver,’" from 1975, reflects on the unity of life and death in the production of the work of art. Humanum Academic Press are pleased to offer in this volume translations of all four texts along with Bieler’s original introduction.