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Is it always this fun when Haus and the bioethereal DM dance the rhetorical dance? If I had posted a couple of days ago (on just the fear of death like) I might have missed a metaphysical debate about the nature and existence of pain and DM’s revolutionary understanding of Haus as the:
posterboy for what is bad with the barbe-seniors.
I reckon DM has that poster on his wall. What else could explain the unspoken erotic charge behind the ballet of words? What’s it like being a hot, sexy barbe-bad-boy Haus?
Anyway, the thread:
My personal feeling is that were I to feel a fear of death it would indicate unhealthiness / irrationality in my approach to life. The idea that there’s nothing after death or, from Nina:
I dread death because I have a very strong suspicion … that there is absolutely nothing but the consciousness built by our bodies. I don't believe in mind body separation, which means that consciousness can't be separated, which means there is no soul and thus your afterlife is the deterioration or disposal of your body.
actually serves as a foundation for why I don’t see anything to be afraid of, and I can never quite understand the sort of attachment to what we know is a temporal existence that results in a dread of its dissolution, or any feelings whatsoever to those remains we leave behind. But that’s my problem. And otherwise I’d never be able to go to sleep!
I’m with Matt, it’s not so much the death as the intense physical pain that I’m shit-scared of. To diverge slightly, the different types of pain that we’re scared of might be interesting in relation to this (though possibly deserving a thread to themselves): I think someone mentioned fear of scarring, I know people who are scared of their own blood, personally I have what I think of as quite a rational fear of severe, invasive trauma. Cuts or fractures don’t seem to provoke a reaction, but even the thought of broken bones sticking out my leg or having my chest cracked open is really hard to contemplate. Thinking about it, it’s the idea of physical wholeness that I find important and that I’m really scared of losing, which, hmmm, is probably tied to some vestigial religious notion of the sanctity of the body. Anyway, Illmatic’s point:
I don't think there's anything wrong with a fear of one's cessation. It’s entirely understandable. It's the one big event that we can't get our minds around.
doesn’t work for me so much, the abstract thought of my non-existence or my potential existence in an unknowable future state isn’t something I’m scared of, as I can’t do anything about it (I mean, I’m averse to it, but that’s more about desire for the state I'm in now, such as it is), however much I can’t imagine it. The argument that by definition we’re in denial about our own mortality doesn’t seem to lead anywhere, and while we might be hardwired never to fully comprehend it I don’t think that leads to needing to fear it.
So: to try and drag these points together, it’s actually the kind of pain I talked about that I can’t “get my mind around”; having at least an empirical awareness of myself as a body and nervous system, I’m aware that extended pain on the level which seriously disrupts my nervous system as the foundation of my consciousness (and for me is tied to, well, bodily brokenness) is something I really can’t think about other than abstractly.
Underpinning all this is likely my cranky reading of Nietzsche’s idea of the eternal recurrence. So, briefly: the idea that, hypothetically, if you were given the choice you would affirm or will everything that happened to you in your life, including your death, and would be prepared to repeat it. All the good and the bad experiences would be affirmed without an external reference, that is, without the need of an afterlife, and on my understanding of it, Nietzsche would neither affirm or deny the existence of such, just see it as irrelevant, as something we could never have knowledge about. Of course, there might be people willing to argue that we can, but that’s another point.
The point that I’m hopefully laboriously getting to is that while I feel I can in the abstract affirm my own eventual non-existence-in-this-state (death), and relatedly, I can affirm even the most emotionally horrible, heartbreaking or boring hours of my own present existence, I come up against certain limits when attempting to imagine severe pain in the present, and while in the abstract I can include them as a potential event in my own future life, my consciousness, as an entity based on physical processes, can’t for that reason realistically extend to traumatic rupture to those processes: which would seem like a good explanation for a fear of them. Admittedly as I can’t visualise complete non-existence it might be more argued I should be more scared of that, but on present thinking that’s a (non)experience so outside or opposed to my consciousness that it feels irrelevant. Right. Whew! Thoughts? |
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