The Consciousness of Death and the Death of Consciousness

The Magical Mystery Tour is dying…

Traditionally, political theories and ideologies have given primacy to the mass as a social entity, whose motives and actions are determined by economic considerations, to the detriment of the analysis of drivers of individual behaviour (eg, love, lust, and fear). And yet beyond immediate personal economic concerns (eg, can I pay my rent this month?), many people’s most intense moments of lived experience derive from such ‘irrational urges’. It is partly in this spirit that the following discursive musings examine the question of death.

The phenomenon of the world’s indifference

Buddhist philosophy tends not to fear death, but to welcome its opportunity to be free of worldly attachments and return to the void whence we came. In an attenuated form, the desire for ego self-annihilation through orgasm or the use of mind-stimulants represents the same impulse. It also suggests that our objective individual existence is an irrelevance, and so sweetens the pill of the world washing over us and continuing its course in our absence once we have died.

However, we live on in the minds of the living, not only as text, paintings, or songs, but also as memories, and retain our status as essentially social beings. It is noteworthy that in some small-scale societies, the most severe form of sanction is expulsion from the community, which not only increases the objective risk of death (eg, from predators), but is also a form of social death.

The Impossibility of conceptualising death in the mind of someone living7

There is a fundamental ontological problem with an individual confronting the fact of their own demise, namely that our consciousness (often reduced to a psychological phenomenon, but which also encompasses our corporeal selves, as anyone who has suffered physical pain will attest) uses its intellectual dimension to plan, imagine, and predict its own future course. But how can we conceptualise the total and final disappearance of the phenomenon that we use to measure it?

Arguably, this is impossible without reaching a point of sublime, ‘mystical’ acceptance, and is also likely to explain Christian and other religious models of an afterlife. However, for secularists, who do not rely on such consolations, it is arguably a form of intellectual laziness not to fear death, an ultimate transition whose outcome is not only outside our control, but unknown.