Ouroboros

When you die, is there another beginning?

Even purely materialist considerations can tempt us toward this conclusion. After all, what has actually occurred? One form of energy has turned into another. There’s never really creation or destruction, just transformation and rearrangement. 

Life ceases, but somehow only in a way similar to the pause between movements. An interesting parallel is that sort of that silent, ‘neither’ breath, when the body neither breathing nor not breathing, but something else entirely. At this point the breath becomes the entirety of everything else but breathing. The Greeks were onto this: they called ‘breath’ [i]spiritus[/i]. When breathing ceases forever, the spirit has left us.

The non-existence of death as an absolute seems then to be capable of being grounded on a purely materialist basis. From the standpoint of a similarly minded materialist psychology, we could say death is the central fixation of life, but in what sense? In the sense that lives revolves around death. 

Life is always consuming, excreting, growing, decaying; that is to say, changing in a binary predefined pattern which allows for nothing other than the process continue. Life is defined by avoiding death, or an unrecoverable break in the homeostatic life-process. 

So ‘life’ is effectively defined by a being capable of maintaining ‘its’ organization by autonomously rearranging its structure. 

The important fact about death is that it represents the Other, that is, what life stands against. Thus death is also the absolute unknown, and so-- in a sense, the absolute truth.

Yep. What are you? A pattern in the matter. If you have some kids and preserve your pattern, you live on through them.

Thanks for responding, man!

Sure, fecundity’s almost all-important here.

But we should remember these sort of materialist-immortality considerations are also about the way we approach events.

For example, decisions are not always or even most profoundly related to the future of the lineage–but often our perspective must be shifted even further than from animal to domestic, shifted to the state, to the cosmos, even to the future of multiplicity itself, pushed infinitely to where it pierces pure difference itself. And it is in this that we retrieve the ultimate and eternal return of a sort of becoming-animal, the pseudo-impulse or pure striving of life to survive and to multiply.

So fecundity does emerge here on the very surface of the question of immortality. But as there’s an immortality of bearing children, there is also an equally important immortality of the modes of instrumentalization, and in truth this is the more primary event than fecundity. The encounter with the different, that is, with the absolutely different precedes fecundity but most importantly it presents a direct and traumatic encounter with what is, psychoanalytically speaking, the ‘truth’ of our reality.

But of course this traumatic reality is always too painful, and we seek to distance ourselves from it. This is the birth of narrative: to repose again in the eternal realm of fantsay… but then of course the story itself only represents the delirious unconscious striving for (or rather against) the same nightmarish truth, the dream drifts towards a monstrous reality: we are confronted on either side with the same deadlock from which we believe we are escaping.

That means we’re always playing this game: jumping in and out of the virtual. In fact, it’s not an infinite game, but a fractal one: our real systems are always made up of virtual micro-systems, and vice versa and so forth… This repetition of alternative modes of escape can in fact be seen as the same continuous movement.

This function can be psychoanalytically interpreted as the clinic, a construction of a sort of ‘magic’ screen by means of which the transference process is interrupted-- but in fact we can also identify this same movement as the very reconstitution of subjectivity, and more precisely, as that primordial return of consciousness to itself which coordinates the magical recovery of a mysterious and eternal identity… :slight_smile:

I think how one answers this question depends on how you view the self. Are we a bunch of femto-second slices that are combined over time as a matter of circumstance, or is there something that provides continuity to the whole mess?

After all, I am clearly not the same person I was ten years ago. I don’t look the same, I don’t talk the same, I don’t think the same, the cells in my body have all pretty much turned over so I don’t even have the same body in a very literal sense, and the list goes on.

If one takes a very staunch ‘new second, new me’ stance death shouldn’t be a source of anxiety, because it is fundamentally not different from any other transition that we are constantly going through at any given time.

But I think very few people can take that stance. Instead, we generally take for granted that there is some particular thing that makes ‘us’ a meaningful concept. If this thing that makes us ‘us’ is some metaphysical entity, than it isn’t too much of a stretch to think it might persist after we end. But if this thing is rooted in our physicality, the argument that it persists afterwards becomes more difficult unless you take the genetic immortality approach that TheZeus argues for (and I have a soft-spot for m’self).

Xunzian

Great to hear your opinion on this idea! I feel we are very close on some things… though perhaps farther away on others! Despite this, I always appreciate your often quite profound insight.

Onto the discussion. I apologize in advance for the excessive length of the response! Enjoy :wink:

This is a somewhat Bergsonian question and I’d probably approach it somewhat similarly (see especially ‘Creative Evolution’ which is fascinating on this point.)

Are we (metaphysically) no different than a film strip? That is to say, static images to which an abstract quality of duration has been applied. The apparent continuity in this case results in a false movement, and thus not even a distortion of duration, but its annihilation-- its energy being encased, as it were, within an abstract machines.

But we are not abstract machines. We are perhaps, abstracting machines, but this is somewhat different question.

The right position, in my opinion, is to rather assert that we are real machines, that is, ones which really move, and which therefore result in a concrete, phenomenologically validated duration. Distortions are possible, but annihilation is unthinkable, as it were, beyond the horizon. But whether through pure transmission, distortion or annihilation, time still owns us as completely as it is possible to be owned.

So in the glance lasting less than an instant, or face to face with eternity, ‘faith’ implies that we must still affirm the materialist view of time, where real movements are transformed into concrete durations.

Too often, though, it is an ‘enlightened’ slavery (to time) which is chosen. We must interpret this as meaning that, at some level, we are witnessing a profound crisis of faith…

Here we are dealing with a sort of ‘cellular instability,’ or the fundamental anxiety of wholeness. As you recognize, we are never really ‘whole’ individuals – every part of us is distinct, as imaginary unities our psychic energe is always engaged in virtual conflict with a kind of ghostly clone of ourselves. We are nothing but a partial object, fragment of the Same thing. If the truths are determined by what is the Same (as Alain Badiou supposes) and truths then are what makes Differences indifferent, aren’t we always castrated before an image at the precise moment of the event, distracted and unable to become equal to our responsibilities?

But this is obviously a misreading. I would refuse to accept some such ultimately negativist and nihilist conclusion. Not meaning that we can erase our partiality. In fact it’s almost the opposite: we must not resent our partiality, but affirm it fully and accept the full paradox of subjectivity without restraint. There is no ‘magic pill’ which will enable us to snap out of the illusion of a subjective duration, which would free us of our existential responsibility, even death does not create or destory energy.

We must not give into anxiety while retaining some kind of healthy engagement in what is fundamentally an imperfect and imbalanced world. We cannot erase the problems of reality without erasing reality; what is interesting is the peculiar structure of faith, which is an absurd transcendence down into the earth, into the mud and depths and abysses, a transcendence into a deeply problematic ‘objective reality’, not out of it.

I totally agree. This is almost the entire point.

But we don’t have to abandon continuity here. In fact, we can’t establish identity across transitions without a radically ambiguous kind of continuity.

Stasis of course is death; flux is what life is about. But incessant change is another kind of stasis. Life is about self-difference reproducing, or returning to, identity. And although this seems biological, my point is that this is ultimately social, psychological and spiritual. And all of it can be considered, in a certain important sense, as natural.

My response to Thezeus I hope addresses this, but I’ll try to clarify: I don’t think the two views (identity is fixed, immortal, unfluctuating; identity is coincidence, determined, fleeting) are really opposed. In fact, they’re the same argument over the same movement.

If we identify the construction of the subject as a return to consciousness, we’ve established identity as both fixed and moving without contradiction. The paradox of course is that a return demands departure, and further, that only events depart from causality. There is always something undetermined in identity and in events.

So identity is a sort of repeated event, but what sort? I think we can describe identity as a questioning, but in order to avoid (vicious) circles, let us say the interrogator is always an Other, a stranger, someone from without the interior-space of the subject.

Thus only a partial engagement with difference, with the other, can provide the impetus for a return which we can at last identify. Only the questioning of the same provides the self-difference which the Same requires to retroactively discover itself, but as what? Examples are numerous, perhaps too numerous: we discover ourselves as animals, or games, or laws, or genes… This infinite self-discovery is never without the discovery of a primordial self-difference, a cosmic imbalance which is refracted throughout existence as voids, the gap behind the subjects face.

Our soul doesn’t go on after we die. This isn’t the point: the point is rather, there’s no soul in the first place. Pure materialism says that whatever was in motion stays in motion. Death is a merely a deflection, energy only transformed, never really destroyed or created… Yet death is also, profoundly, this very abyss behind the gaze of the Other. From what blind spot does my lover look back at me? Behind the face there is only an infinite, timeless abyss, an emptiness blacker and more monstrous than the most terrifying nightmare. This abyss is time and also death and in a more mysterious way, this abyss is God: it is this infinity within us which is only but dimly apprehensible, and then only as a vision of the invisible. That is to say, those unconscious desires which we are too ashamed to admit even to ourselves, always express themselves incessantly as a coded transmission from beyond. Or else, the most terrifying, we are confronted in this abyss with the full castrated interval between our private space and our public face. God is the Other who sees from an absolute position of transcendence, from outside ourselves altogether; but this infinite abyss is found behind the eyes of every stranger, behind even our own faces–we are only ever seen from the alien perspective of the Other.

Maybe this is why certain thinkers suggest that death never really occurs for the subject. After all, the subject of course cannot experience its own non-existence, cannot (as it were) expect to find his existence and be disappointed. While alive, we are ourselves and cannot find ourselves except through others. Death occurs precisely for these others and not for ourselves; it is social, in the sense that Durkheim always tells us to look for sociological as well as psychological meanings in suicides and even in atrocities. There is here a coded message to heaven, or the beyond: feel our immortal symbols! They are just as endless as the endlessness of death!

But really it’s an impotent spectacle, designed to assure ourselves of our mastery over a universe which reverses and opposes our desire at every stage. What’s more, we are programmed to desire these ridiculously violent spectacles as spiritual communion… This is the crisis of faith referred to earlier. How do we look death in face and see anything but a (magical) gaze, or even more ideologically, a (mythical) face? How do we not, after all, fictionalize what we cannot experience anyway?

I wonder today if maybe millennia from now we will look back on this culture and say to ourselves. “What spurned these people to make all sorts of mythical presumptions on death? To us it’s such a trivial thing. To them it was mystical.”

Interesting, Gaiaguerilla. I am wondering about what you say…

Is there a (scientific, philosophical, political) discovery which would enable us to shed our fear of death, of the dark, of difference? It seems inevitable that life comes up against it’s Other! If those in the future are still human, still vulnerable to death, one would think they would still be as curious, still as given to wonder as we are…