🪟 Transcript 43 - Life Without Death
Transcript #43 (Part 5): On life without death, the life-death tussle, and home security.
Table of contents
PART 1: NATURE
PART 2: COURT OF JUSTICE
PART 3: HOUSE OF MIRRORS
PART 4: EXISTENTIAL LETTERS
PART 5: IDEALS
Life without death
🪟 43 - Life Without Death
The trauma of death’s anticipation is formative to the human spirit. To then think of death (or references to death) as a cancer to be uprooted or as a hurdle to perfection, like the Bryan Johnsons and David Sinclairs of our time—is a profound misconception of our time and traditions past. This is the misconception shared between both the techno-utopians and the religious conservatives. How ironic it seems that these two seemingly polar opposites should share a similar misconception on death! Ah—but they have more in the common than they think (or than they like to think). The zealotry is one and the same, the only real difference is the latter is conscious about being a zealot, while the other is not; the technologist prefers to call himself a god instead, he calls himself free from ideology and open to all change, not knowing that it is not he himself but something other which he is calling god; what he calls god is really something else disguising itself as him. What is called “technology” and his so-called openness to change is really is its own zealotry, its own worldview, its own primordial spirit1. The misconception they both share is this, to put simply: death bad. Death or references to death are a cancer to be uprooted, for the religious conservatives, or a hurdle to perfection, for the techno-utopians.
But death is not so simple as that. I don’t know whether it’s something to be happy or to despair about, the fact that death is such a complex thing! Now—I will not venture so far as to praise death, or bow symbolically at the feet of death. Death is a curse, a thief, certainly, death does not warrant praise, certainly it does not warrant affection or admiration, though it does warrant resignation, since it is a fact of life that life comes with death. Regardless, as it is, the trauma of death’s anticipation is formative to the human spirit. There is a productive death-relationship to be had, it is not to be shunned or swept underneath the carpet. I besiege the conservative and techno-utopian (which each of us are representative in various degrees). What is a human being without mortality? What is a human being without the possibility of death? What is life without death? Something wholly other—something unimaginable. I think there is one thing that seems particularly certain—life without death is a matter of indifference. If life is endlessness, if time was not scarce, is it heaven? It is heaven insofar as certain unthinking believers posit it, but is that really heaven? You and I shall live not for eighty years, not for three hundred years, not two thousand years, but forever! If life is endlessness, even if I am to be granted unlimited wishes from a genie, and if I am to be given everything to my heart’s desire, so long as the days are to stretch out into years, into centuries, into thousands of years, my imagination of this tells me that this more closely resembles hell—for who wants to live a life that does not end, what is the value intrinsic to life itself, what should prevent one from ending it, from going berserk and mad, as Dostoevsky would say, in order to simply feel something? Ah! The truth of the world—the bizarre, morbid truth of the world—has it as such: as human beings, we would rather be free in a finite world than unfree in an endless one! Now here, both the religious conservative and the technologist would stand impatient to correct me! They might say, perhaps it merely appears to you that a life without death is hellish, because neither you nor anyone else has ever had the opportunity to be convinced otherwise, because no one has transcended it wholly, or because no one has seen or realised heaven with a human eye! How do you know an endlessness of time will not be bliss, because no one has seen heaven, heaven in its entirety (or for the technologist, “built” the equivalence of heaven)? How can you be so certain in your speculation, then? Perhaps it is because all our present human constructions—cultures, moralities, rituals—have all been built around the central thought of mortality—and thus you are prevented from seeing the truth, that life without death is truly heaven!
Ah—but here we stumble upon a lucid idea! And it is a lucid idea, because it is usually not seen, no, it hides instead in under the surfaces, and yet still underneath that. It is an ocean within an ocean, the under-ocean—the realm of unknowns beneath first unknowns, the deep-sea beneath the deep seabed—that which creeps out in the darkness below the oceanic darkness. What is this seemingly lucid idea? I want to offer an analogy of a house. As mentioned, death is a thief, the thief of life that lurks as a constant possibility of the end of all possibilities. Life understands the existence of this thief very well, thus it remains prominent in the unconscious as a horror, as a phantasmagoria; at a young age, death begins in incomprehension and gradually suppressed by its inordinately heavy weight, and it opens the subject’s consciousness up to it over time—a blooming flower of death. But if death is a thief, then life is a house that orders itself against it. Now, speaking of houses, think about our brick and mortar homes for a second. What appears in the imagination? One thinks about sentimental rooms; one thinks about a loving family within those rooms; one thinks about broken relationships; one think about inviting friends over for a good time; one thinks about a quiet cave in which to dwell; one thinks about warmth or cool—comfort in perfectly controlled temperature; one thinks about the overall interior of the house, how to lay out furniture and houseplants in the most picturesque manner. Yes, houses and homes are indeed all this and more. But truthfully! What is the order of a house? One forgets, the chief reason for a house, why it is constructed the way it is constructed, first and foremost, is security. The order of a house, or if I may say, the central idea of a house, is primarily this: the separation of your personal space from my personal space, your personal space from your neighbour’s space, your space from a stranger’s space, and equally, your space from nature. The house, first and foremost, is constructed for security from others, from nature, ultimately, from intruders and thieves. It is constructed for security.
Continuing down this path, is it not likely that a child might think: why, it is natural that a house should be constructed in this way, is it not? A house must have a roof, a house must have four walls, a house must be organised into rooms, a house must have a room for play, for dining, for sleeping, and so on. Otherwise, it would not be called a house! It seems not arguable, not up for debate, that is how it is, that is how houses are meant to be! How can it be any other way? Sure, a room can be painted a different colour, or a room can be partitioned into two, or expanded, or perhaps some fixtures can be torn down, but a house is really as it is—a very natural building of four walls and a roof, built on a designated plot of land! But is this really the case? We tend to speak of life in this same way. Life is ordered in this way, out of unquestionable necessity, you tend not to question the order. You seek education, you seek knowledge, you seek power, you seek significance, you seek self-realisation, you seek truth, and then you will die! This is what we are, this is who we are, unquestionably, this is nature—potent, bleak order of nature! But is the digging of thought which arrives and stops at the ocean, it is not yet the under-ocean. The central idea of a house, or I could say, the ontology of a house, is not simply and purely about this, it is not about “quiet enjoyment” as it is normally written on tenancy contracts—it is not essentially about a space to rest, or having a playhouse, or curating a microcosm of personal tastes. These are all secondary. The ontology of a house is ordered, first and foremost, for security—security from intrusion and thieves—security from bothersome people, even unbothersome people, and even more, security from the erratics of nature which intrudes into our couple square metres of safety, comfort, constance! Yes! Here is the lucid idea: within the seemingly unquestionable necessity of life’s order, there are immanent structures that emerge out of the condition of its nature, and these structures realise and compound itself throughout all present human constructions—cultures, moralities, rituals, and so on.
So to speak of life! It can be said that for a newborn, personality begins as empty plot of land. By, “empty plot of land” I may come across as a proponent of the blank slate theory (that all newborns begin as pure unadulterated beings), but I do not wish to be mistaken as such. An empty plot of land is not a pure, absolute emptiness. Insofar as a plot of land exists in order it to be filled, there is a form of something-ness immanent to it. And personality begins as this empty designated plot of land from which being—the house of the identity of the self, with all its rooms, inclusions and seclusions, exteriors and interiors—designs and constructs itself over time and circumstance, through assimilation with others, through the course of the development of mental (architectural) capacities. On its empty plot of land, personality constructs itself with a blueprint akin to the order of a house, out of the empty land, in order to secure itself, first and foremost. It seeks to prop itself up with strong foundations, secure itself with solid footing into the earth, and clothe its nakedness in walls, gardens and gates; it seeks to immortalise itself against malicious and natural intruders. Then and then only, it seeks nice-looking objects to fill its space, it seeks little changes and major renovations, it seeks to contain affection and precious memories within it. Now, it is true that no sane person really refers to this sort of idea on a normal basis, no, what sane people say is more so: we work for a living, we do this or that for money—money, money, money!—or we work to gain a better life, on another level, or to gain the approval of another or others, on another level, or we work to gain self-respect, on another level. But, truly! What is at the root of all these activities? Why do we move towards anything at all? Why we don’t stay rooted in our spot, sitting, standing, or lying, indefinitely? Why is stillness—pure, glorious, triumphant stillness—not only unachievable but unimaginable? The structures we participate in are indeed not out of some unquestionable necessity. It is not even merely a cultural or technological artefact, for it has consistency across all cultures, across all generations from the beginning of history. At core, we do all this of a certain necessity—the condition of being in seeking to secure itself: to secure existence in existence, from its negation. In other words, all our movements, everything we desire and will to act upon, can traced to this one central impulse: to secure our own selves.
However, between the construction of a house and the construction of a self, there is a crucial difference. For one’s personality, the order of security is all-permeating. There is no mere ornamenting in life; there is no mere addition of one or two security cameras, no mere addition of an alarm, no mere hobbyistic addition of side accessories in order to improve our security system. The house of being does not permit side quests, it does not submit gates or locks as a side project, built once and then ignored forever or sporadically admired. The house of being is not the sum of its parts, but it is the wholeness which is the totality of all endeavours, including all those fixtures left aside, objects swept under the carpet, all those hidden pipes, wires, and sewages! Indeed, in life, even if there is something that can be called a side quest, a side project, a side mission: the fact is simply that the quest of life itself submits the possibility thereof—the main mission submits that “there is a side mission”. Thus, nothing can be swept away, since everything is retained, aggregated, and totalised under the all-seeing eye of being. With physical home security, it is also possible to overcompensate and over-prepare for thieves. One can overcatastrophise the bleak possibilities, become too anxious and neurotic about it, and outdo oneself. Since material losses can be calculated, it is possible to account for too much, so much that the cost of security is higher than the cost of everything valuable in the house. In home security, there is also the element of probabilities and risk to account for, it is not even worth spending the value of security on the value of the assets one-to-one, since the risk of thieving is not 100%. That would still be an insanity, it would be an obsession more so than a precaution. But with life, there is not a possibility of overcompensation towards death. Why? Because death is certain and infinitely affective, and life precludes and crescendos into death, yes, because life is invaluable, yes—but centrally, it is because one is already steeped in this activity; no, even more so, the truth is all human activity is already steeped in this overcompensation. Thus, one cannot possibly overcompensate against death. This act will not and cannot be unprofitable. The economic sensibility is contained more so in the object of this overcompensation, in choosing the right object “by which I am to live and die” (to quote Kierkegaard). In truth, this very act of overcompensation, immanent to the formative order of life, constitutes the productivity of the death-relationship as such!
What now is life without death? Is a life without endlessness not, as we can see, hell—when time becomes meaningless, a matter of indifference? Perhaps it is a cancer to be eradicated in the cosmic sense. But as a human being, I am inundated with life and thereby also inundated with death. I am constituted in the interior nothingness and something-ness of my personality. Thus, this shall be my starting point, and it frankly is little use to question the starting point. Ah, but in speaking of life without death, one may prefer to speak of heaven. On that, my deepest impression is that if one could see heaven—the house of the eternal—with a human eye, it would appear absolutely incomprehensible and mind-boggling. What is the real experience of eternity to the temporal being? What is the real experience of infinity to the finite mind? Nothing that we mere mortals can nearly comprehend in our spheres of understanding! Something we can only refer to as something truly divine, something truly inhuman, something truly psychedelic, like those scenes in 2001: Space Odyssey of the protagonist’s encounter with the Monolith! As for us mortal humans, as children of time, the death-relationship is essential to the house of being. We are made of time, and death is what gives meaning to time. Time is endowed meaning insofar as it ends. In this way, the life we inhabit is positively in tussle with the death-relationship at all points in time. But it does not stop here! (How despairing it would be if life was unaffirming tussle, with no rejuvenating qualities!) Earnestness thereby emerges within us, out of the land of nothingness, apprehending and appropriating this life-death tussle. It is this earnestness that moves us seriously and profoundly toward something; it is this earnestness that is behind the overcompensations for security in living, for security in the soil of being; it is this earnestness that mediates life and death, our history and futurity, bringing all undue desire and action under the teleological current of the becoming of self—even as it does not properly emerge from the land of nothingness until later in life, when the eternal is ripe and speaks personally to transform it. It is clear to me, this earnestness in us is the God-relationship in us. How then, once again, can death remain to be thought of as a cancer to be eradicated or a hurdle to perfection? If all of a sudden, the unthinking wish became true, that life would be without death and time were to become endless, we would be traumatised beyond all measures, we would become mute, for we would be entirely questionless and answerless. All present human constructions would make no sense, and it would take a thousand generations to fully come to terms with the gravity of such an event, and it would take the two thousandth generation to utter the first word. Yes! For us, it is the case that through death, in death, is life and life to the fullest. It may not be life and life to the fullest in “all possible worlds”, but it is life and life to the fullest to the human being, to the eye we perceive with, to the tongue we taste with, to the heart we impress with. It is life and life to the fullest—as we know it.
Read Heidegger’s ‘The Question Concerning Technology’ for an exposition of this point.