Death, nothingness, and subjectivity

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

Despite my naturalistic and materialist caveats at the beginning of this essay, such a conclusion may still seem to have a mystical ring. It may seem as though I give too much weight to the subjective sense of always having been present and, in claiming that subjectivity for itself always "is," I ignore the vast times and spaces in which no consciousness exists at all. Nevertheless, I believe a materialist can see that consciousness, as a strictly physical phenomenon instantiated by the brain, creates a world subjectively immune to its own disappearance. It is the very finitude of a self-reflective cognitive system that bars it from witnessing its own beginning or ending and, hence, prevents there being for it any condition other than existing. Its ending is only an event, and its nonexistence a current fact, for other perspectives. After death we won't experience non, being; we won't "fade to black." We continue as the generic subjectivity that always finds itself here, in the various con, texts of awareness that the physical universe manages to create. So when I recommend that you look forward to the (continuing) sense of always having been here, construe that you not as a particular person but as the condition of awareness, which, although manifesting itself in finite subjectivities, nevertheless always finds itself present.

To identify ourselves with generic subjectivity is perhaps as far as the naturalistic materialist can go toward accepting some sort of immortality. It isn't conventional immortality (not even as good as living in others' memory, some might think), since there is no "one" who survives, just the persistence of subjectivity for itself. It might be objected that, in countering the myth of positive nothingness, I go too far in claiming some sort of positive connection between subjectivities, albeit a connection that doesn't preserve the individual. I might be construed as saying (to borrow the language of a different tradition) that an eternal subject exists, ever-present in all contexts of experience. I wouldn't endorse such a construal since it posits an entity above and beyond specific consciousnesses for which there is no evidence; nevertheless, such language captures something of the feel for subjectivity and death which I want to convey.

It is possible that this view may make it easier to cope with the prospect of personal extinction since, if we accept it, we can no longer anticipate being hurled into oblivion to face the eternal blackness that so unsettled Burgess (and, I suspect, secretly bedevils many atheists and agnostics). We may wear our personalities more lightly, seeing ourselves as simply variations on a theme of subjectivity which is in no danger of being extinguished by our passing. Of course, we cannot completely put aside our biologically given aversion to the prospect of death, but we can ask, at its approach, why we are so attached to this context of consciousness. Why, if experience continues anyway, is it so terribly important that it continue within this set of personal characteristics, memories, and body? If we are no longer haunted by nothingness, then dying may seem more like the radical refreshment of subjectivity than its extinction.