A materialist approach to death

All historical peoples have come up with a myth that allowed them to understand their surroundings, specially to explain the ultimate uncertainty of all humans: death. Some cultures, feeling dissatisfied with this easy solution, constructed a philosophy to reach an answer that was sustained in something more than tradition. In our times, we replaced the abundance of philosophical systems for science. A belief system that is based on the certainty that nothing is certain and that what we believe may be proved wrong in the future. The problem is that science, as opposed to religion and philosophy, sacrificed peace of mind for truth. We can be more assured that what we believe about our world is accurate, but this comes with the price of realizing that all the previous answers to death, whether religious or philosophical, are false as they cannot be subjected to our scientific method. Despite this, we humans cannot accept the void that science suggests as the end of our life, we need to find an answer or at least suspend our judgement and become agnostic. Even then, some of us are not satisfied with accepting an irrational faith adapted to science or becoming religiously sceptics. The same way the Greeks rejected their myths for rational discourse, we need to find a rational way to accept our finitude. I believe a materialist consolation is possible as I will try to present in this essay.

Žižek said that it is not possible to become a real atheist without having been a Christian first, reading the “Eli Eli lama sabachthani?" ("My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?") and the death of Christ as a form of atheism, one that is more radical than the usual as it doesn’t replace the void left by god’s death with another “big other” such as natural necessity, extrapolations of evolutionism, etc. Without going deep into this claim, I believe that Christianism offers the model for a materialist acceptance of death. In a broad sense, Christianism tells us that we must be selfless, to love our enemies as much as our friends and to be in solidarity with the whole of humanity. On the contrary, if we are to be egoists and hedonists what awaits is hell, endless suffering as a punishment for our actions on earth. The reason why I believe this basic outline will still be of use when we reject all non-material entities such as the soul is because “hell” exists. Of course, there is no such immaterial place where bad souls go, but there is indeed a deep suffering that awaits those who have been egoists in their lives. The death bed of these people is, when it is not numbed by religion or drugs, the ultimate suffering we can imagine. If in your life you have valued only your pleasure or whatever other egoist satisfaction, we can see how death becomes the ultimate fear, as all that is considered valuable is soon going to disappear into nothing. Others, however, have lived their time valuing things that they see as bigger and more important than them. The only consolation possible for our fading out of existence is the awareness that what we value is not going to fade with us. This is not the situation of the faithful Christians: paradoxically, this religion that assigns to egoism in its various forms the place of the ultimate evil, resorts to an extrapolation of the concept of identity, namely, the soul, as the bait to spread this “Platonism for the masses”. Rejecting Nietzsche’s radical hate for this religion and appreciating the fact that it indeed spread love and solidarity, considering that all the atrocities that were done in Christ’s name were in contradiction with Christian values, I believe Christianity more or less has an accurate concept of what’s ethical. That is, only if we consider the core of Jesus’ teachings and not the non-sensical naturalistic prohibitions regarding sexuality, etc. The problem is that it enforces this behavior using an individualistic metaphysics, where our identity is said to be immortal and destined to live in eternal bliss in paradise. This way Christians behave ethically only as a consequence of fear and cling to their religion as the last lifeguard to the end of their identity. In what follows, I’ll provide an optimistic, yet materialist, perspective on death.

As a young boy in a catholic school I faced the question of death from an early age. I was told that when people die, they go to heaven. Reflecting on this claim, I could only be of the opinion that it was absurd. How populated would the place be? Also, what version of ourselves goes up there? The old us or the young adult version of ourselves? It seemed that it would suck to be an eternal baby or die as a really old guy, when we are not physically nor mentally as well. Growing up I was able to refine this primitive intuition of why the idea of heaven is totally unacceptable. The fact that we are never the same, the “I” of a year before is not the same as the “me” of now. Identity and numbers, as I learned after reading the Critique of Pure Reason, are inherently human. There are no equal things unless we strip them of their differences and call them so. There are no numbers in reality, only when Man first appears in earth is that things start getting counted. Only thousands upon thousands of years later, a wise man had the idea of modelling movement with numbers that we now realize are doomed to be just an approximation to a thing that is essentially not a number. From this perspective, the idea of a Soul is just an extrapolation of the concept of identity. The ever changing I is given the status of an immaterial and therefore incorruptible entity. Now we know that this is no more than a fiction. This has very deep consequences. We are just dust, made from the very same material of the stars and the rest of the material objects that surround us. Somehow, this complexly organized dust gave birth to consciousness and then the history of thought. We are now at a point when we must accept all the consequences of the materiality of the soul. Namely, there is no difference between us and the rest. Two humans are the same and in a deeper sense than sharing the genre Homo Sapiens. It’s just an accident of chance that a consciousness was born in this body and not in another as there is no divine delivery of immaterial souls. Your illusion of being a self is sustained by complex matter and as such it is subjected to constant movement, corruption, modification, etc.  Furthermore, our two consciousness are not independent: they were born in a human society and as such they share essential characteristics that are a consequence of exposure to similar phenomena. It’s hard to suspend our being ourselves for a moment and realize the non-essentiality of being ourselves. We are born and live under the very strict boundaries of the self but we must realize that this self is the consequence of complexly organized dust: its ontological status is the same as that of a universal. The same way we can call a multitude of different phenomena “horses” by making abstraction of its differences, we can call a “self” the multitude of internal phenomena that occur in us.

Accepting the materiality of the soul, now we must find it’s value. What’s the value of complexly organized dust? It’s value resides in that it’s the very condition of possibility of all values. The mind is the only criterion regarding everything. Now let’s turn to one of its inventions: ethics. What is the right course of action for this mind and its biologically subordinated body? Whatever the differences may be in the various ethical systems that have been invented, none accept killing as a “good” action. This is, I believe, because what is in play when we talk about killing and valuing humanity by itself is the condition of possibility of ethical judgements. Using Kantian terminology, humanity is transcendentally good.

So, what does this have to do with accepting death? When you are an altruistic individual, not because of the coercive and seductive characteristics of a religion but as a consequence of a true love for humanity, death is nothing more than the end of one of the cases that constitute the transcendentally valuable humanity. We must ask ourselves what is of value and do our best to achieve it. If we fail or die before achieving it, then others will come (hopefully ad infinitum) to continue to increase the patrimony of beauty, goodness and truth that humanity has gathered since its very beginning. This the most glorious cause we can follow, simply because only humanity itself is glory.