Death as Thought: A Dialectic on the Real and the Ideal

What is death? While human words cannot explain what humans have not experienced, science claims that death is the end of life, and religion maintains that it is the door to the next life. But people still wonder, and death still inspires fear, outrage, and sometimes hope.

Beyond science and religion, there is still philosophy. For the philosopher, death is more than a single moment in time, it is also a thought to be thought at any time. Actually, this is misleading. Death is more than a thought, on close inspection it cannot be categorized as one among other thoughts; death is actually a part of thought and consciousness. Death is not a thought, or an object of consciousness ,so much as it is the non-object, the object-negating object. It is an action; it is the action that deletes objects of thought and frees consciousness for new objects. This means it is vital to change and imagination.

Trying to imagine one’s own death means performing the thought-event that deletes all known objects of consciousness, all memories, all beliefs and—and ultimately everything is a memory in relation to death. The death-though is a performative thought, a thought action that does something more than tell us about the future, it negates everything we know or remember in the present. And yet, this is still the death implied by science, for science foresees nothing for the individual consciousness after death.

If death represent the negation or deletion – in theory – of all objects of consciousness, death is integral to consciousness, for consciousness cannot exists as anything but a negation-production process. Simply put, without the ability to negate one thought we could never produce another; without leaving one thought we could never move on to the next. And so, even the smallest or most trivial thought process involves a small negation or a small death. What makes death so difficult for consciousness is that it demands we negate all thought-objects, which is arguably impossible and certainly unsustainable. Eliminating objects from consciousness by reducing mental activity and going into a vegetative state entirely eliminates the challenge posed by thinking about death, for death-as-though is a challenge which, to the highest degree, demands mental activity in active negating.

The benefit of treating death as the active negation of objects is that the mind grows strong in exercising itself with death-as-absolute-negation. In learning to negate any object of consciousness, the mind gains the only self-mastery it can ever have. It frees itself from the power exerted by objects of consciousness, eliminates all clinging and buries the idols. Of course, it also frees us from all that is good, but that is also good, for in freeing us it teaches us to value and love the good.

Negation, or the death-though, is intrinsic to all imaginative thinking, both in science and the arts. No new cause-and-effect relationship could even be imagined without the ability to negate the old; no new experiment could ever be attempted without the ability to imagine the new. The arts themselves would be an endless mimicking of natural phenomena and tradition if the mind were not able to negate, destroy, and make room for the new. Even someone who can speak a human language and chooses to shriek like an ape must have used their imagination first, however little, and in doing so they have performed a negation, though a small one that required no more than the negation of the thought of human language coming out of a human mouth.

Willie Smits

“Willie Smits: A 20 year tale of hope: How we re-grew a rainforest” will move many viewers to optimism about mankind’s ability to help revive nature — even from abuses made in the name of biofuel. Smits shows us how thousands of hectares once reduced to a wasteland — within a decade — can be restored, albeit not to their original state, but to a state more suitable to human life and good enough for orangutans.

Maybe I am an incurable pessimist, but I fear Willie Smits and the BOS project — while noble in their own right — are doomed to  failure. While the project is incredibly wel-planned and most carefully executed, the project lacks the “total” or “global” perspective. Agriculture, housing, our relationship to animals and culture (religion, the arts, etc.) must be conceived together, as a unity. One cannot introduce a tribal culture to post-tribal and even post-industrial agricultural practices and expect long-term success unless the tribal culture also receives a make-over. I am simply saying what is already a commonplace principle: we must think of the whole.

What this implies is that, like most people, the tribes of Borneo cannot expect to manage their affairs better than any other people on  earth simply because they now possess an ideal garden of plenty. Unless the promised land is accompanied with the promised culture, the land is doomed. This is, according to anthropologists, what happened to countless cultures, including those that once inhabited East Island, whose tribe is now extinct. The vast majority of the world’s people are uncultured and highly susceptible to the primitive forces exerted by charismatic men, greed, irrational fear and the longing for immortality. Eventually, people will not be content with mere peace and full stomachs, and all Hell breaks lose, and Eden lies destroyed again.

Ironically, Smits’ primary goal was to save “the thinkers of the jungle,” the orangutans. Before we can hope to succeed at that, we need a species that understands what thinking is and nourishes its thinking organ as carefully as it nourishes its stomachs.

For the video, visit –  http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/willie_smits_restores_a_rainforest.html

Adam and Eve, Equality and Nochlin’s Voice

Linda Nochlin speaks on behalf of women and muses with admirable restraint on the absence of great female artists in the history of art. Obviously, plenty of social and political factors worked in favor of providing men with the necessary freedom to create and epitomize artistic movements. But a biological factor is likely part of the answer, and I can suggest this without flattery. Psychologists know that men are less balanced, more likely to develop into either dullards or “geniuses” — this last word I hesitate to use, for what passes for genius is really the spark of madness, a demonic energy one sees in Hamlet (the genius?) and Romeo (the idiot?) — an energy that does not hesitate to sacrifice everything: family, aristocracy, security and life itself in the quest for new, more electric forms of expression.

But art movements are a historical, evolutionary phenomenon, and when their trajectory is complete, the world will have little use for that spark of madness, for then madness will have been normalized, incorporated, digested. The arts will hardly be recognizable, as they will have become integral to society, synonymous with balance, and understood by all as a necessary means to maintaining a healthy, nearly effortless social and psychological balance.

Until that time, one might perhaps say to the feminist academic: Why do you speak so calmly and reasonably? Who enslaved your pen to the boring, dispassionate voice of male-dominated academia and financial security? Who gave you the amazing sense of irresponsible contentment to speak about the absence of great women artists instead of heeding the call to become a great artist? We all have that responsibility, and humility absolves no one.

And this I also believe to be true: A few brave men sacrificed their comfort and their lives for half an inch of intellectual and aesthetic progress and evolution — but we who follow after them, with relative ease we reap the reward and harvest the fruit of the garden they fought to create. And when that garden is complete, then all our” insane” and  seemingly insatiable yearning for more stimulating forms of expression will be sated by the crowning movement, and we shall have no more need of sacrificial lambs and lions.

The Cockroach Boy

Late one evening Cooter and his father, while in the same house, secretly spoke together on a chat line. All night they talked about their plans for the future. It was midnight when Cooter said to his father, “Being a student can be so boring. Sometimes I wish I were a cockroach.”

“Coot! Are you insane?” cried his father. “Don’t ever have such silly thoughts, because Doctor Demented might overhear you and grant your wish. Goodnight, son, and sswe-e-e-e-e-t dreams.”

But Cooter couldn’t stop dreaming of being a cockroach. He imagined how people would jump and scream as he crawled up their legs. His dreams did not go unnoticed by his archenemy.

The following morning, he woke up on his back, with six legs kicking in the air. They were skinny and black like those of a cockroach. He should have felt horrified, instead, he realized he couldn’t go to school and imagined a great adventure.

His mother opened the door and screamed. “Cooter! It’s 6:22 AM! You’ll be late for school again!”

He scurried out of the room, crawled up the wall and jumped onto the sink. There he was, in the mirror, a perfect cockroach. So why didn’t his mother notice?

“Take a shower. You stink!” she said as went downstairs.

But he always smelled and looked terrible on Thursday mornings. He opened a bottle of his mother’s perfume and put it all over his body. Then he plopped his father’s wig on his head and combed it.

Suddenly his sister opened the door and quickly shut it. “DAD! Or, uhm, MOM! I mean—whoever! Just lock the door when you’re naked! Oh, I’m gonna be sick. Ugh!”

The naked boy opened the door and begged, “I’m sorry, but I think I’m losing my mind. Sis, look at me once more. What do I look like?”

But she had covered her face with her hands and run away, laughing and saying, “Take a look outside!”

He returned to his room and peeked through the window. There, to his amazement, Doctor Demented was having a séance on their front lawn, and he appeared to be peeling something, possibly large beetles.

Coot couldn’t understand it, so he just laughed and got dressed. He struggled to put on a shirt and not one but three pairs of pants. The shirt hung around his neck and each pair of pants fell to his feet.

“COME DOWN AND HAVE YOUR BREAKFAST,” shouted his mother from the kitchen downstairs.

Driven by hunger, his six skinny legs ran to the kitchen, under the chairs and table, where he lustily ate every crumb from the floor.

“Good bug,” said his mother. “Now, wipe your feet and climb up on the table. There now, here’s some jam on my knife.”

“Don’t touch my apple!” said his father. “You can lick my empty cup. I’ll leave some coffee stains on it.”

After the bug finished his meal he crawled to the living room. His sister was sitting on the couch reading a book. She tried to smash him with the newspaper. Her father caught her arm before it completed its deadly blow.

“Alexis! Have you no love for the little creatures of this world?”

“LITTLE? Dad, look! It’s huge and it gets bigger every day!”

“Be nice to your brother. He won’t hurt you.”

“Mom!”

Cooter’s mother came with a great meat tenderizer.

“We can’t afford to keep feeding that cockroach. I warned you!”

Without waiting for his reply, she crushed the giant cockroach and dragged it into the kitchen. That evening Cooter was cooked with herbs and rice and served in steaming bowls. It was the most exciting day of his life, and he had no one to thank but Doctor Demented.