The notion of death, with all its complex ambiguities, has pervaded the human mind for centuries, infiltrating the spheres of philosophy, religion and contemplation from the age of antiquity. Deathーthat elusive realm which lies beyond the grave. Deathーthat notion murmured about in euphemisms, he passed away, she’s no longer with us. There is such weight, such leaden heaviness, to the word death that it seems as though we are reluctant to even utter this single syllable. And yet we fail to pin down a concrete understanding of what exactly it is that we are so afraid of, what exactly it is that death entails.
Death is perhaps one of the most universal fears of the human mind and soul. But first, we must clarify this. For death exists in two forms: Death as a concept and Death as an actuality. Tell me, which one is it that we are afraid of? Is it both? Is it one more than the other?
To the individual, death is only real as an abstraction, a concept, an elusive notion so terrifying in its presence yet paradoxically beyond our reach. To the individual, death is illusory. It is not an experience, but rather a dim shadow of one, a negative state which only ever manifests in our thoughts, fears and perceptions of the death of others around us. Death is only real when it descends upon another; death remains unreal to the conscious self. It is as Sartre said: “Death is a reality outside of existence because it is others who know my death when I am dead — thus, it is absurd to say that my Death is my own.”
Death should not be feared, not death as an individual entity. We only fear it in terms of life — in terms of what we may lose in losing life, how death as an embodiment of the unknown counters all that we are unfamiliar with in life. Death is constantly perceived as an end, when it is only by thinking of life that one would reach that conclusion. The phraseology of Afterlife only demonstrates this.
Perhaps it is not Death that we truly fear, but rather, the Unknown. It is indisputable that there is no way for us to know what happens beyond the threshold which greets us upon the end of life. In this living world, death only ever exists as an abstraction, something intangible, infinitely out of reach. We see it happen to others, we experience this as loss, but Death and Loss are not to be conflated. Perhaps it is true that we stop existing, that all knowledge disintegrates to ashes, but here, in this life, we are caged in, restricted from knowing what death truly is. And this is perhaps for the best. As valuable as knowledge is, perhaps an inability to glean a full and comprehensive understanding of everything that the world entails is all that is keeping us from descending into that torturous madness of lucidity.
It is the prospect of our own mortality which appears to be a source of fear for a great many of us. The finite, when perceived against the notion of the infinite, appears meagre, insignificant. Many seem to long for a life of immortality, one free from the interminable march of time or, to clarify, our eventual demise. We dream up concoctions of afterlife, of a stretch of time beyond this mortal coil, one in which we face judgement, resurrection, or transition. But, for me, eternity is a prospect far more terrifying than that of my inevitable death. After all, it is our very mortality which offers richness to life…without temporality, we would be drifting in slumber, no purpose, no ambition, no constraint of time to urge us to embrace this life with every morsel of our being. Though the physicality of death destroys us, the idea of death may save us.
But perhaps we can view this another way. What if the life of an individual truly is infinite, not theoretically, not speculatively, but truly, in all actuality. We see death as evidence of our temporality, but this is only when witnessed in others; to the individual, life is all we experience. “Life is a spark between two voids; the one before birth and the one after death.” But if a void is a plane of nonbeing, a negative state, and life is all we tangibly know, is that not infinite to us? Perhaps prospects of infinity and temporality require the consciousness gifted to us by life, and hence infinity can only be truly experienced by conscious beings (thus, not those unborn nor deceased). We cannot know death, but it persists in an intangible form, an abstraction in which our impermanence is manifested in the process of ageing. But death itself, an end of life itself, will only ever be an idea, just out of reach. As Wittgenstein theorised, “Death is not an event in life; we do not live to experience death. If we take eternity to mean not infinite temporal duration but timelessness, then eternal life belongs to those who live in the present. Our life has no end in the way in which our visual field has no limits.”
And yet we still appear to view Death as a directly oppositionary force against Life — we apply concepts to it in the same way that we muse about life, as though death were an experience in itself and not a non-experience, a negative state. We see death as a state of being, just as we think of the state of living, and we situate ourselves within this plane just as we do with life. Musers, thinkers, great philosophers such as Cioran may ask themselves: “Is it possible that existence is our exile and nothingness is our home?” And, in doing so, they establish these concepts as tangible, spatial, a state to be physically occupied and experienced. But, from the shrunken lens of life, we can only know death abstractly, and thus do these speculations disintegrate to the meagre thoughts of a mortal soul.
Death is not a state separate to life. As Heidegger puts it, “Death is just a fellow Existence. Death does not lie at the end of life; it pervades the entire life.” Hence, what we must do is shed the idea of death as a physicality, an experience, an opposition to lifeーwe must instead accept that, for the individual, we can only know it in its abstract form; it emerges as a physicality, perhaps, when applied to the Other, but never to oneself.
Life is not, and death is a dream. Suffering has invented them both as self-justification. Man alone is torn between an unreality and an illusion.
-Cioran
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Death. The certain prospect of death could sweeten every life with a precious and fragrant drop of levityーand now you strange apothecary souls have turned it into an ill-tasting drop of poison that makes the whole of life repulsive.
-Nietzsche
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’Tis a consummation
Devoutly to be wished. To die, to sleep,
To sleep, perchance to Dream
-Shakespeare
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Death twitches my ear; “Live,” he says… “I’m coming.”
-Virgil
