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.
