Death, nothingness, and subjectivity

Humanist, Nov-Dec, 1994 by Thomas W. Clark

For only death annihilates all

sense, all becoming, to replace

them with non-sense and absolute cessation.

-- F. Gonzalez-Cruzzi, "Days of the Dead," in the New Yorker, November 1993

The words quoted above distill the common secular conception of death. If we decline the traditional religious assurances of an afterlife, or their fuzzy New Age equivalents, and instead take the hard-boiled and thoroughly modern materialist view of death, then we likely end up with Gonzalez-Cruzzi. Rejecting visions of reunions with loved ones or of crossing over into the light, we anticipate the opposite: darkness, silence, an engulfing emptiness. But we would be wrong.

The topic of our fate after death is a touchy subject, but nevertheless the error of anticipating nothingness needs rectifying. This misconception is so widespread and so psychoogically debilitating for those facing death (all of us, sooner or later) it is worth a careful look at the faulty, rather subliminal logic which persuades us that dying leads us into "the void."

Here, again, is the view at issue: when we die, what's next is nothing; death is an abyss, a black hole, the end of experience; it is eternal nothingness, the permanent extinction of being. And here, in a nutshell, is the error contained in that view: it is to reify nothingness--make it a positive condition or quality (for example, of "blackness")--and then to place the individual in it after death, so that we somehow fall into nothingness, to remain there eternally. It is to illicitly project the subject that died into a situation following death, a situation of no experiences, of what might be called "positive nothingness." Epicurus deftly refuted this mistake millennia ago, saying, "When I am, death is not, and when death is, I am not," but regrettably his pearl of wisdom has been largely over, looked or forgotten.

Not that there haven't been more recent attempts to counter the myth of nothingness, notably by philosopher Paul Edwards in his classic 1969 paper "Existentialism and Death: A Survey of Some Confusions and Absurdities." Edwards provides a "who's who" of thinkers who have fallen into this particular conceptual trap, quoting Shakespeare, Heine, Seneca, Swinburne, Houseman, Mencken, Bertrand Russell, Clarence Darrow, James Baldwin, and others, all to the effect that, as Swinburne put it, death is "eternal night" Those who anticipate nothingness at death are at least in some pretty exalted company.

But if, as I will argue, nothingness cannot be anything positively existent--that is, if it truly (as the term would indicate) doesn't exist--then the situation at death cannot involve falling into it. Those skeptical of the soul and an afterlife need not fear (or cannot look forward to, if such is their preference) blackness and emptiness. There is no eternal absence of experience, no black hole which swallows up the unfortunate victims of death. If we conscientiously eliminate the tendency to project ourselves into a situation following death, and if we drop the notion of positive nothingness, then this picture loses plausibility and a rather different one emerges.

Do people still really believe, as I claim they do, in a kind of positive nothingness? I will present enough examples to show that, beyond Edwards' celebrities, many do harbor such a misconception. In developing a plausible alternative, my operating assumptions and guiding philosophy will be resolutely naturalistic, materialist, and nondualist. I assume only a single universe of interconnected phenomena--a universe devoid of souls, spirits, mental essences, and the like. In particular, persons, on this account, are not possessed of any essential core identity (an indivisible self or soul) but consist only of relatively stable constellations of dispositions and traits, both physical and psychological. Although some conclusions I reach may end up sounding counterintuitive to those inclined toward naturalism, it won't be because the argument departs from naturalistic assumptions. And for readers who are skeptical about naturalism, these conclusions may not be so unpalatable as my starting point might lead them to suppose.

Anticipating Nothingness

The late Isaac Asimov, interviewed on Bill Moyers' series "A World of Ideas," questioned the traditional religious picture of our fate after death: "When I die, I won't go to heaven or hell. There will just be nothingness." Asimov's naturalistically based skepticism about heaven or hell is common among secularists, but he commits an equally common fallacy in his blithe statement about nothingness--namely, that it could "be" By substituting nothingness for heaven and hell, Asimov implies that it awaits us after death. Indeed, the word itself, with the suffix ness, conjures up the strange notion of "that stuff which does not exist' " In using it, we may start to think, in a rather casual, unreflective way, that there exists something that doesn't exist; but, of course, this is not a little contradictory. We must simply see that nothingness doesn't exist, period.