Existential Nightmare
Last night I had an existential nightmare. I dreamt that I was drowning in solitude, with the last words of my inner voice asking: “Do you really want to drown? This is the only life you will ever have. If you decide to drown, there will never be an after. And there was never a before. There will not be a you, and there was never.”
I woke up to the anxious realization I once had as a child: Life is temporary. Death is eternal. A butterfly lives for two weeks. It is dead forever. Forever implies forever, i.e. no before and no after. The moment you die, you were never alive. You may have been alive for those who are alive, but for you, you were never alive. In death, there is no you. There is only nothingness.
This nothingness is not the lack of somethingness. It is nothingness in itself, where there is no somethingness to be lacking. While the former denotes worldly nothingness, and stands in direct relation to somethingness, the latter constitutes pure nothingness, and only stands in relation to itself.
In life there is no absolute truth; there is not one way, there is every possible way. While one particular way may reveal to us as unhidden, which may in turn frame our existence (e.g. Christianity), this simultaneously entails that other possible ways and modes of existence are hidden. In life there is not one thing that is everything; there is no truth. Instead, life as somethingness is subject to perception, to a human-world relation, to an interplay between subject and object, to categories of space and time. Life is relative.
Death–as pure nothingness–is not subject or relative to anything; it is the only thing that truly is in itself. In death nothingness is everything. In death there is no hiddenness. There is only the unhiddenness of nothingness. There is only truth. Death is truth.
A similar distinction can be made with regard to thereness. On the one hand there is worldly thereness, which constitutes life. There is a certain untruth about this thereness, because it's only there in so far as it is there. Conversely, the non-thereness which constitutes death is there in itself. This is pure thereness. That is to say, the thereness of nothingness is unconditional and absolute. While worldly thereness is relative to the condition of being-there, there are no conditions for the pure thereness of nothingness. There is only nothing, and therefore there is no thereness. The thereness of nothingness is much more absolute than any other form of thereness.
Ever since Parmenides proclaimed that “out of nothing, nothing can come” we do not seriously consider the thereness of nothingness. But in death nothingness is there. And while the thereness of our being is temporary, the thereness of our non-being is eternal.
Life as somethingness is the embodiment of artificiality, unessence, untruth, temporality. Death as nothingness is the embodiment of purity, essence, truth, the eternal. This is not to condemn life, and to worship death. On the contrary, it is to understand the dark nature of purity, essence, truth, the eternal; notions that have been praised throughout the history of philosophy. They are not the source of light through which somethingness reveals; they are the source of darkness in which nothingness exceeds any possibility of revealing.
We live as if one day we will live again; we will not. Every decision we do and do not take encounters a point of no return. They are defined by their moment and will not ever occur again. The only thing that will occur forever is death as pure nothingness.
