The fear of 'death-itself' arises out of the fear of void-experience; it's the fear of perceiving and being aware of the nothingness after dying. It's not that we fear that there will be nothing; rationality is lost with fear. Peter Watts puts it best when he writes in his book Blindsight, "'People aren't rational. You aren't rational. We're not thinking machines[...] we're feeling machines that happen to think.'" Many-a-philosopher argue that death is the 'same as before you were born (phenomenologically),' so why should one be afraid of death-itself?(^1) This misses the picture of how people understand death-itself, and what they actually fear: death-consciousness.
If only we were rational--death, nothingness, contradiction, and consciousness itself all would not make sense to us, and we would dismiss their discussion as quickly as we do the logic of a schizophrenic. It was Kant who based morality (categorical imperative) off of rationality--it was Kant (to be fair, following Plato's law of noncontradiction) who held rationality above contradiction, and thus, the fear of death-consciousness began. Death Consciousness comes out of the condemnation of contradiction.
Death-consciousness itself is contradictory. One can't experience 'nothing.' During death, temporality loses its grip on all meaning (along with the consistency of meaning itself onto things and non-things) and infinity flashes through our non-sight in the span of a non-instance. But it's not our anything; its not our (non)perception anymore, as nothing is 'perceiving' once you die. Certainly, that doesn't relinquish the primal awareness of DC. You can feel its breath on your neck. As you drift to sleep, you know it’s staring, just inches away. It leaks into your perceptible sense experience, and the room behind your mental capacity starts to shrink around you.
You shoot up from your bed--look around. Your attention is frantically grasping for this nothing. Eyes bouncing back and fourth across the all-too-normal bedroom; if you did see a monster, perhaps your fears would be relieved... at least, a little bit.
Then, you die. Gone. Black. Void. Silence. Nothing. Infinity. And you get to experience it all.
This is your death-consciousness. We didn't fear it until our skulls became our prisons (Kant); prior to that, we were our bodies, and consciousness decayed with our bodies--our souls achieved afterlife through traditions of death(i.e. cremating and spreading someone's ashes to rejoin the earth, Tibetan sky burials, Norse funerals and ship burials). Not to say that pre-death-consciousness ideologies posit a dualism (dualism between mind and body specifically; keep this in mind); if anything, it's almost the opposite: there is no death-consciousness after death for these ideologies. Instead, our body and consciousness die with each other. It's not that death allowed our consciousness to transcend reality and perceive 'heaven,' for example, but that when our consciousness dies with our body, it's our soul that goes to heaven. This is the imperceptible state that stops our eternity in the afterlife from becoming boring (the classic question for Christians: "will we get bored in heaven while spending an eternity there?" Catholics like to say it comes from being in God's presence, and it's impossible to get 'bored' with God). Consciousness was just as mortal as the body, and, retrospectively, we might (incorrectly(?)) say this was a good thing.
Consciousness was not one's soul until Kant killed the opportunity for us to have any experience beyond our minds; after Kant, we could no longer understand Aristotle's appetitive and rational soul [as a part of us]. After that, we could only perceive and understand a soul through conscious 'activity' (how does any activity other than that which comes out of mental capacity make any sense? Perhaps it's also worth mentioning Kant's idea of the will being (essentially) practical reason (and acting or not acting within that reason)). Instead of the souls being something beyond us, outside of our bodies and influencing our behavior from a distance (that is, within pre-DC-simbologia), it seems only 'right' to say these theories of soul were just 'scientific observations,' grasping at 'truth' prior to neuroscience establishing a groundworks for Aristotle to operate under. This is like saying Democritus 'predicted' atoms--without a doubt, he would consider his theory of atoms to be the building blocks of science's 'contemporary' and 'observable' atoms.
This symbolic understanding of the flesh was our only path to heaven. Now, the headshot, for example, effectively eliminates any target. It's an instant and painless (more often than not) death, as is the justification for the cattle stunning gun and 'humane slaughter.' Through the contemporary understanding of the body through sign value, death itself becomes a commodity(along with everyone else(^2)). Death is attached to the brain and mental capacity, and consciousness dies with the elimination of brain function (^3).
But we can't understand non-perception; this is what Sartre [doesn't realize he] means when he says in Being and Nothingness that it's "impossible to die." He says one can't 'be dead' in that 'being' necessitates life (the external world (being-in-itself) exists within the subject (being-for-itself) and the being-for-itself is defined only by what it isn't (being-in-itself)). What he means is that we can't have a consistent phenomenology of death-experience without breaking logical rules (the ability to perceive nothing with nothing). Logic dismisses the fear of death in a clean and simple fashion: it is impossible to die. 'Dying' is like a mathematical point in space--a parabolic limit that 'never quite gets there,' so to speak.
But I'd be surprised to find one person who believes this, or, perhaps a better word, trusts, this idea. What are the implications of this Sartrean death phenomenon? Perhaps, in our moment of dying, time slows to an instant; a moment virtually-frozen and dancing for perceptual (more literal than any other!) eternity on the line of life and death. Perceiving our final perceptive moment, all of our perceptions (all pains and pleasures; imagine time moving slower than the speed of thought--faster even than the speed of electric moving through our body, spurred by our brainstem to convince us of 'I') during that 'time.'
All of this aside, we still fear death regardless. "Of course!" You might say, "rationality fits with 'the herd' like a computer fits with monkeys! The people are scared of death because they fall upon their animal and primal instincts and natures; maybe even, some people are just dumb." As if there is something that can't be logical-- as if any living and acting creature isn't rational; this argument posits that our ration is an appeal to 'reality' and something outside of ourselves (an attempt to escape the fear of death consciousness!). This appeal to the 'logically sound' over the 'logically valid' is the same issue that Foucault and Derrida violently wrote at one another with Cogito and the History of Madness: "follow the madman down his road of exile," or, as Deleuze and Guattari mention in Anti-Oedipus, the schizophrenic who believes the Jews stole his stomach. The system that exists only within another system-- that is, non-logic: the basis for death-consciousness (that which only exists in our contemporary world (the age of technology and science!)).
Foucault was onto something when he outlines the condemnation and control of the soul, rather than the body (sovereign societies), in disciplinary societies. It's rather tempting to rework this idea to fit the today, the condemnation of consciousness--I no longer own even my body or mind (let alone the soul, which is no longer in the picture); my consciousness is something that someone can alter and manipulate. And once I'm dead and gone, I'm cursed to make acquaintance with an eternity of (not) my nothingness; worst of all, there is little I could say to express this, even while a fraction of my consciousness is expressible now. My language, body, consciousness, soul, and post-self are all reducible to meat--I am no different from the animals we kill and eat(^4).
Perhaps here, within this fear and post-reason, lies our liberation. Here lies our namelessness.
Footnotes
^1. If death-experience really is the same as a pre-birth-consciousness, perhaps
^2. When I was in Boyscouts, there was this one adult leader, about 70 or so years old, who I remember telling me that when he died he wanted to be cremated so his family could afford a family plot of land in a cemetery (so they could all be buried there or something) and his justification was that it was cheaper since cremation took up less room (the process, I believe, might also be cheaper than a standard burial). Was this a dream? Is the past truly a hallucinations? I think about two or three years later he developed Alzheimer's incredibly quickly and died in the span of 2-3 months; my dad told me (I guess the guy's family told him) the he couldn't recognize anyone or form coherent sentences during that time.
^3. Last night I watched Evil Dead Rise (inc. spoilers) and, at the end of the movie, when the aunt was pushing the monster into the woodchipper with a chainsaw, the creature was only defeated after the head was thrown into the woodchipper as well (interestingly enough, the fact that the demon comes back to life after a 'fatal' wound to the brain is not an example of art going 'beyond' death-consciousness, but the opposite, in that consciousness is only linked to the brain. During the final scene of the movie, my first thought as to how the demon was alive was that an eyeball or something would still be functioning (and because it wasn't, we see 'the supernatural,' otherwise it all seems 'plausible' to us). The paranormal elements come from the ability for the demon to break this rule; pre-DC societies perhaps would've taken this as a given).
^4. https://www.grandin.com + /humane/cap.bolt.tips.html if want some seriously fucked up shit. Updated in 2020 LOL fuck temple grandin. I'll probably talk about this in a future post.
General Note: I've never listened to the album Deathconsciousness by Have a Nice Life (frankly, I don't think I care enough to), but I am aware of it and its themes-- from what I have read about regarding their concept, I think they're generally saying something different (being conscious about death rather than the phenomenology of death itself).
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