CW: Discussion of death, potential existential dread, potential sophistry by a weirdo
So, okay, the former sentence is something that always fascinated me, because I think it’s actually even more complicated. To make it easier to parse and write, consider all of the following with an added “I think” or “I believe” or smth. attached to each sentence:
There is no “you” any more that could know or not know, the very core of subjectivity has vanished. “I will be dead”, for example, only exists as a meaningful sentence within language, and the logic of language in reality - there is no “I” that can be dead. I think that foundational contradiction is also at the core of why in psychoanalysis, the idea is, that the unconscious is incapable of forming a reference to your own death. (Related this, the Lacanian thesis, that the unconscious has the structure of language).
The result is: Death does not mean a transition into “nothing”, as “nothing” is still “something” - at least as something like a semantic unit. Instead, it is the transition into “Less than Nothing”, where the logic of language which is at the core of our ability to fathom reality ceases to exist. The “you” referenced is only existent within references made by others, but any subjectivity that could “not know”, “not suffer”, “not exist” is gone.
CW: Discussion of death, potential existential dread, potential sophistry by a weirdo
So, okay, the former sentence is something that always fascinated me, because I think it’s actually even more complicated. To make it easier to parse and write, consider all of the following with an added “I think” or “I believe” or smth. attached to each sentence:
There is no “you” any more that could know or not know, the very core of subjectivity has vanished. “I will be dead”, for example, only exists as a meaningful sentence within language, and the logic of language in reality - there is no “I” that can be dead. I think that foundational contradiction is also at the core of why in psychoanalysis, the idea is, that the unconscious is incapable of forming a reference to your own death. (Related this, the Lacanian thesis, that the unconscious has the structure of language).
The result is: Death does not mean a transition into “nothing”, as “nothing” is still “something” - at least as something like a semantic unit. Instead, it is the transition into “Less than Nothing”, where the logic of language which is at the core of our ability to fathom reality ceases to exist. The “you” referenced is only existent within references made by others, but any subjectivity that could “not know”, “not suffer”, “not exist” is gone.