Being-Towards-Life

Of Existentialia and Immortality

November 2003, Melbourne Australia

[When I told my Existentialism professor in Singpore the proposed topic of my paper, he told me that the refutation of immortality was far too important to Existentialism - he strongly advised against it.  This, of course, made me feel as though I had no "choice" but to proceed...]

We’re in a room without a door

And I am sure without a doubt

They’re going to want to know how we got in here

And they’re going to want to know how we plan to get out.

-A. Difranco

If asked, I would be among the first to say that the existential analysis of Being is quite brilliant.  To throw out traditional philosophy and begin anew, starting with the conditions of existence for the individual subject, was doubtless one of the most productive experiments of the 20^th century.  It is curious though, in looking at the initial passionate bursts of rhetoric by Nietzsche and Kierkegaard, why Existentialism should have in its later years developed a reputation for morbidity and pessimism.  Most likely there are several reasons for this development, not the least of which is a high degree of misunderstanding regarding existentialist doctrines.  However, even the well informed reader may still find a certain darkness clinging to the major works by Sartre and Heidegger – a preoccupation with “nothingness” and “non-being” – and what’s more, an uncompromising and fairly dogmatic ontological accounting for death.  Specifically, it would seem that the search for the true ontological conditions of existence has somehow yielded the conclusion that human death is nothing more than the complete cessation of life – the total obliteration of an individuals being.  So assured is Heidegger in this proclamation, in fact, that he relegates any opposing beliefs about death to the status of vague denial – a dangerous and inauthentic approach to life.  One would come to hold such beliefs, it would seem, in order to escape from the anxiety that fear of obliteration brings.

I find this an odd position to cling to with such assurance – but even more so, I must object that this sort of heavy handed interpretation of death belongs within the existential analysis.  If the project of existentialism is to discover the conditions of existence for the human being, then certainly we must prevent any ontological assumptions from entering that analysis under the guise of fact.  I am unconvinced that this notion of death-as-obliteration belongs in the category of fact, rather than realm of assumption.  And although I find great value in much of the existential analysis of the meaning of impending death – the inevitability of ending – I do feel the need to question some of the basic existentialist assumptions about what death is.  My argument is fairly simple:  one simply cannot conclude that death is the cessation of being by an existential analysis.  The whole notion of “death” can in fact come in one of two forms.  In the first place, it can come as third party information about death, given to the individual by the others.  In the second place, death can be experienced subjectively by the individual.  In the case of the former, the actual existential conditions of death and dying can only be discussed in the abstract, and even then, only by those who have not yet had the experience of dying.  In the case of the latter, the subject may finally be in a position to understand what death is – at which point he necessarily becomes excluded from the realm of the living, one way or the other.

It seems quite clear to me that death is a deeply mysterious phenomenon, one which gets dressed up all too often in hopes that we may fit it into this or that particular system of understandings.  In fact, the only experts on the subjective experience of death are those who have already died.  So, if we are to take Heidegger’s claim that death is the cessation of existence, we must do so with the understanding that the only possible source of absolute confirmation of this claim is a source that, by definition, does not and will never exist.  And although this may work well in realms of religion or personal belief,  in philosophy it is obviously problematic.  What follows is a short existential probing of this problem, demonstrating, I hope, that death-as-obliteration is actually quite inappropriate to the existential analysis.  If nothing else, death is a creature of indeterminacy – and the existentialists, above all, must honor her as such.

            I will postulate a man who has never been given any information about death – what it is, what it entails, how it affects others, how it affects the subjective self, and what might be the possible aftermath.  For cultural, lingual, or purely accidental reasons, this fellow has had no exposure to human death whatsoever, and thus has no pre-conceived notions about it.  Let as suppose this fellow comes to live and travel with a group of human beings who, for linguistic reasons, do not know how to communicate their death concepts to him.

The raw existential situation seems obvious then:  without being convinced by a third person account beforehand, I have no reason to think I am going to die.  Even watching others die does not lead to the conclusion that I will die.  In order to reach that conclusion, I would need to assume that I am just like the others whom I see dying, and there is no a priori reason to think this, as my life is filled with experiences and truths which are strictly my own.  I have climbed the mountain and my friend has not – so I have an understanding of the local topography that he lacks – likewise, my friend falls into the river and drowns – he has an experience of drowning which I lack.  These are private experiences, and as such, his drowning does not indicate my mortality any more than my view from the mountain indicates his understanding of the local topography.  Even in a situation where I am among a great group of humans who are dying – this may give me reason to suspect that a similar fate will befall my own body – but it would remain suspicion until I myself began to die.  Nor does watching the deaths of others necessarily give me any idea of what the experience of death is.  From my perspective, it is a change in my friends, certainly, and a change in my relationship with my friends.  But what I actually see when I see my friend die is merely that his body has stopped functioning.  This would be a confusing situation, one which would require some kind of interpretation – but there are many possible interpretations of the event, and no single reason to conclude that the complete obliteration of my friend has occurred.  In fact, complete obliteration would be an unlikely option indeed, as it would be quite possible and perhaps probable that my dead friend would continue to appear to me in my dreams, or possibly even during my waking life as “daydream” or “hallucination[1].”  And even lacking an embodied vision, I might nevertheless have an experience of my friends “presence” or “essence” within my psyche or perceived field of reality.  This would no doubt be criticizes by modern psychiatrists as being somehow “unreal”, but such a criticism (regardless of the many arguments could be made against it), is nevertheless and absolutely irrelevant to the existential experience of the fellow in question.  Without bringing the absolute object truth of “psychiatry” under scrutiny, our subject has only his own rich and varied experiences to draw from[2].  What I am aware of, then, when I don the mantle of this existential seeker, is merely that my friend’s physical body is no longer active.  The consequence of this event is that he now has a physical absence from my life.  Outside of the realm of the physical, however, there is no necessary absence; in fact, I may have good experiential evidence to think that my friend continues to exist as some sort of disembodied spirit – if he appears in my dreams, let alone my waking life, then this would seem an obvious conclusion.  And this should be no surprise, as prior to the authoritarian dogmas of religion and psychiatry, cultures the world over have had deep ontological roots in a conception of “the spirit world.”

            Thus, the knowledge that I will die is not an a priori existential certainty as Heidegger would claim – but rather an adopted and applied belief, based on what the others have told me.  Of course, as time goes on and I see that it is indeed true that all of my fellow humans undergo physical death at some point, I will have plenty of evidence to believe what the others have told me.  Even so, the initial concept, or at the very least, the certainly of it, must have come from the others – it is third person information – a conceptual paradigm into which my subjective experience is applied and filtered.  The most reasonable thing to do, in lieu of this situation, is to agree with the others that in all likelihood, my body will cease to function as well.  But, even conceding this point, I still find no reason to think that the cessation of my body functions would necessarily mean the obliteration of my consciousness.  Total obliteration is certainly is an imaginative idea – and perhaps to some a very appealing one – but it need not have any more existential reality for me than any other story I might come up with – transference to another realm, rebirth in another body, awakening in a different kind of reality.  All of these stories are attempts to address the question mark that death poses.

             It has been argued -- there should be a fundamental assumption that, because the dead have ceased to function as bodies, that they must have ceased to function in every other way.  But why would I assume this?  The varied possibilities of a spirit-body dualism are not merely prescribed religious constructs or philosophical postulations – they are also derived from existential experiences.  In the first place, we all have the ability to imagine – to speak to others who are not there, to generate possibilities not immediately present in the physical environment, indeed, to close our eyes and have visions of times and places as far from our physical location as can be conceived.  In this activity, our consciousness is certainly still situated inextricably in our bodies – we are doubtless still in-the-world by the existential analysis – but at once we have some odd ability to push beyond this initial situation in myriad ways, as a cup overflowing, or tree grown to reach far beyond the situated seed from which it is manifest.  And even so, this sort of lucid expandability of consciousness pales in comparison to the phenomenon of dreaming.  For when we dream, our bodies cease their activity, and our conscious selves traverse an existential realm that is anything but physical.  It must be enumerated again that outside the biases of modern religion and psychiatry, the existential experience of sleep and dreaming posits a kind of existence which seems to have no connection to the physical body whatsoever.  And it is to this state that we return upon losing consciousness, this state which arises from the void between waking and dreaming – and it is to this state that we return every single night.  And so, for the true existentialist, in examining the conditions of his existence, still free of dogmatic bias – he must conclude that a rather large portion of his life is devoted to active existence in a world that does not appear to be physical, or in any way connected with his physical body.

            As such, if my friend has drowned and his body appears to be in a state of unending sleep – it must certainly be the less biased assumption that he is doing what all sleepers do – he is dreaming.  And, as such, it seems the most natural postulation to make, in trying to apprehend what will happen to my own consciousness when my body ceases to function, is that I will do precisely what I always do when I fall unconscious – that is, I will simply return to the dream world which I know so well.  Where then comes this odd assurance of obliteration?  How, from existential experience, does one come to value that bland state of void between waking and dreaming – the least defined and least existentially important of all conscious phenomena?  How has that barely apprehended moment of darkness been elevated to hold the ultimate state of death, the final state of temporal being – the last cry of total annihilation?  We must ask – where could this outrageous idea have come from?  But the answer is disappointingly simple:  it comes from the others.

            The notion of death-as-obliteration might have originated in any of a number of different ways, and in fact has most likely been derived at different times in different places for numerous and varied reasons.  All I wish to point out here is that such reasons need not have originated in the course of subjective experience nor as the result of an existential analysis.  To look at the broadest and most general perspective of history, it is easy to see how death-as-obliteration has served specifically as an anti-religious rhetoric In political terms, this rhetoric has certainly been aimed at disarming the Christian church of its self-proclaimed authority over the “immortal soul.”  On a personal level as well, death-as-obliteration has no doubt been an immensely relieving prospect to countless individuals who were tormented from childhood onward by Christian stories of eternal damnation and hellfire.  But even lacking the extremity of Christian condemnation, the prospect of death-as-obliteration still appeals to the free-minded individual who feels that he should be able to choose his own ontological beliefs, and resents the church for making any dogmatic metaphysical prescriptions whatever.  In all of these cases, we see that death-as-obliteration serves the purpose of liberation from authority and anxiety, and for this reason may have a massive appeal to great many people, regardless of existential validity.  It would seem, then, that this belief has often come into being specifically as reaction to established social institutions.  Death-as-obliteration, as such, speaks directly of a desire to escape from the paradigms of religious dogma – a motivation which, although certainly understandable, would seem to remove this conception from the realm of unbiased philosophical inquiry, and place it instead rather firmly in the spheres of psychology, sociology and politics.  I do not claim that this anti-religious scenario is the sole cause for the widespread existence of the death-as-obliteration conception – but certainly the attack on religion would seem to be one of the primary forces driving its proliferation.  For some, this may be reason enough to accept the concept – but for the philosopher, and for the existentialist in particular, we cannot stop at political allegiances.

            More words are in order, then, about the relationship between Heidegger’s notions of death and Authenticity.  As mentioned above, the only route Heidegger provides for a life lived authentically is through the total acceptance of death as the cessation of being.  To do otherwise, he claims, marks the total loss of Authenticity – for one has denied the existential reality of death in favor delusional fantasies of an afterlife.  Specifically, it would seem that subscription to such fantasies have their appeal primarily because they alleviate the natural anxiety that death-as-obliteration brings about.  And of course, we will find the latter part of this argument compelling, for certainly the notion of complete personal obliteration at some point in the future is a somewhat disconcerting prospect.  But is belief in an afterlife necessarily an inauthentic stance?  And more importantly, can we safely assume that subscription to death-as-obliteration is the more authentic alternative?  Obviously, I think the answer to both questions is clearly no.  What causes anxiety in the individual is as much an issue of personal ontological background as anything else.  While the Christian may alleviate his death-anxiety through belief in an afterlife, so too does the anti-Christian alleviate his condemnation-anxiety (and perhaps other anxieties) through belief in death-as-obliteration.  In both cases the acceptance of one ontological stance over the other has more to do with personal preference and psychological constitution than it does with the raw ontological conditions of existence.  In fact it could be equally argued that subscription to death-as-obliteration marks the true total loss of authenticity – the adoption of one arbitrary position over the other speaks only of the philosophers personal biases prior to beginning his existential analysis.  Actually, it seems to me that the only authentic stance for the true existentialist to take is the acceptance of indeterminacy – the nature of death is unknown to me because I have not yet died.  To do otherwise denies the fundamental epistemic mystery of the subjective experience of death – which, like it or not, remains outside the realm of third-party objective science.  The existential treatment of death should then be an examination of how to deal with an indeterminate end to the human experience, and as such should make no pretense at determinacy[3]. 

            Of course, we mustn’t lose sight of Heidegger’s larger argument about the importance of death, as it relates to time.  Time is of course of the utmost importance to Heidegger – and his fondness for obliteration is wrapped up in the notion that death is the perfect and necessary end to a temporal experience.  In fact, Being finds its meaning in the inevitability of its own demise, and as such, being-towards-death is a cornerstone of Dasein’s existence.  In all of this, the only part that I would object to on existential grounds is that, in the course of this inevitable death, Dasein should necessarily undergo complete cessation.  Certainly, it is an existential fact that any and all life incarnated in a physical form will eventually see the death of that form – a fairly totalizing change, to say the least! However, even as the physical Dasein finds the inevitability of his own physical demise to be of the utmost importance, I see no reason why this all important, crowning temporal event must necessarily be the total eradication of Dasein.  Why should it be impossible to retain Heidegger’s relationship between Being and Time – the meaningfulness of being-towards-death – and at once to interpret death as a more inclusive transformation, what might be called a totalizing change?  To draw a parallel in the natural world – that the teleological purpose of the caterpillar is to undergo metamorphosis into a butterfly does not degrade the being of the caterpillar nor the being of the butterfly – it merely links the two together.  That physical Dasein must complete his temporal project of physical existence does not preclude a further metaphysical existence, nor is the purposeful existence of the one degraded by the other.  Death does not lose its value as an ending simply because we posit a new beginning after the end.  I really think we lose nothing essential of Heidegger’s treatment of Being and Time by positing death as a total change rather than a cessation – a loss of the particulars of Being, not its ground.  The value of death as a conclusion, as the moment when forward motion ceases, need not be lost – but the value of a new beginning, a transmigration toward an altered paradigm, might yet be gained.

Like most great minds before them, the Existentialists apprehended the tip of the iceberg, and then went on to attempt to describe a depth of which they had insufficient understanding.   An expanded self and an expanded world need not eliminate the fundamentals of the existential condition – in fact they may illuminate it.  The postulation that there is a “higher plane” or “dream world” does not deny being-in-the-world – it merely implies a more dynamic total world.  Likewise, belief in Dasein’s immortality need not imply that some new inhering essence has appeared to precede Dasein’s existence – rather, it simply extends that fundamental existence, and all ensuing essences and projects, beyond our present horizons of understanding.  In searching for the basic ontological tenants of existence, we must not forget that our apprehension of existence has only just begun – we mustn’t try to fill the gaps too quickly – lest we inadvertently  shut ourselves in.

Of course if my argument is defendable at all, then it must include an admission that Heidegger may in fact be completely accurate in his account of Death as the complete and total cessation of being.  For true or not true alike, how would I know without dying myself?  Simply because death-as-obliteration does not seem like a natural result in the existential analysis does exclude it as a contender for the position of “one true reality.”  If this were not a possibility, then the situation could not properly be called indeterminate.  Doubtless the reader will have certain inclinations in regard to the “deep truth” surrounding this issue, and I assure you, I have a few of my own as well.  But even these varied inclinations are made possible by an existentialia of plural ontological possibilities.  To accept an indeterminate element in the fundamental ontological fabric is to allow the individual to make of that fabric what he will.  To prescribe an Ontology, one way or the other, is to give way to dogma, to remove the right of the individual subject to an ontological creativity toward his own existence.  Even in Life and Death, and regardless of the final “truth” beyond the veil, our freedom lives in our ability to choose.

Back to the Ivory Tower!