Nothingness and the Practice of Death as Birth
Birth and death are my problem right here and right now
Insofar as death is a kind of passing into non-being, it would seem to be the ultimate signal of man’s absolute finitude and ultimate nothingness. Death is so fearful because it reminds us of this terrible fact, that we ourselves and all our conscious life will come to an end. We think so much — and avoid thinking so much — about our own ending, because it is too much for us to bear: it tells us that we are grounded in nothingness — we are absolutely ungrounded.
And yet, what is less often remembered by philosophers is that the very same truth of our utter contingency is also and equally represented by birth. By birth man proceeds from nothingness, ex nihilo, just as by death he returns into nothingness, ad nihilum. Life is bookended at its extremities by the same nothingness of non-being. Coming-to-be is as much a sign of man’s unknowable origins as ceasing-to-be is a sign of his unknowable destiny. To the degree that man exists at all, he exists only as an interruption, so to speak, of non-being: he is like an accident, a pure contingency. He might as well not be. His default position within the world seems to be that of non-being. But it is equally true that by being born, he approaches being, while by dying he proceeds from being. Birth and death are themselves bookended — by non-being and being, and by being and non-being, respectively. Caught between being and non-being, man approaches the mode of a coincidentia oppositorum.
But merely to be somehow between being and non-being is not quite to be a coincidence of opposites, a true contradictory identity — it is not quite to be the negation of that negation which separates being and non-being as opposites. This is evident from the fact that, thus far, we have only seen birth and death as penned in on either side by non-being and being or by being and non-being, respectively. That is, birth is still opposed to death in that it comes after non-being and before being; whereas death comes after being and before non-being. There is a seemingly irreversible temporal order that still separates birth and death into an exclusive pair of opposites. Can this exclusive opposition be overcome by any form of dialectical synthesis, any negation of negation, or any transformation of consciousness?
To the unborn infant in his mother’s womb, what lies beyond the womb is nothing but an unknown, a kind of nothingness, a void into which he must disappear: the prospect of birth is to him like a death, an annihilation of his known and familiar self and way of life. Yet it is also life — life of a completely different sort, to be sure; yet the very distinction between life (or birth) and death is called into question by the nature of the process itself. Passing away into non-being is, from a deeper or higher perspective, the same thing as coming into being. This can only be because an Absolute Negativity beneath or above them sustains them both in such a manner that their very opposition melts away, or at any rate becomes reconciled in a new “contradictory identity” or “coincidence of opposites,” which is the moment of birth/death itself.
Importantly, however, it is only in that moment of death/birth that the exclusive opposition of birth and death seems to melt into a contradictory unity. As long as, from the perspective of the unborn child, the moment of birth is seen only as the horizon of his foreseeable future, it can only be seen as death; whereas one who has already been born looks back at that moment in the furthest reaches of his past as nothing more than his birth. But in the moment itself, it is simultaneously a birth and a death, a coming-to-be and a ceasing-to-be. That is, only in the moment of birth/death is the negativity of Absolute Nothingness in evidence, for only in that moment can death be understood also as birth, and birth be understood also as death. The negation that differentiates birth and death is itself negated only in the moment of birth/death itself. In fact, if one pays attention, one can see that this is true of every moment: every moment is both a birth and a death, sustained in both being and non-being, coming-to-be and ceasing-to-be, by the Absolute which transcends and inheres in every moment.
The practice of dying to self that is required of a Christian is also a practice of being born again, since both dying and being born begin and end in the Nothingness that negates the very difference between birth and death. To be clear, it is not that the Christian, because he believes in resurrection, can therefore practice death with the comfort and assurance of being reborn “after” death — in the future, as it were. This would not be to penetrate into the present moment in which alone birth and death melt into one. Rather, the true and authentic practice of death is the practice of (re)birth. Consequently, the practice of paying attention to the present moment must also be characterized as that of bringing to mind in the present, not only as an imminent possibility but as a present actuality, the reality of one’s death (and (re)birth). It is to “step back,” in Heidegger’s language, from those structures of societal and personal consciousness that lay a blindfold over the “everyday” consciousness, leading it to “forget” death and birth by relegating them to some place and some time other than the here and now.
Moreover, as Ratzinger notes in Eschatology: Death and Eternal Life, societal structures lay such a blindfold by removing death and birth from the immediate and visible context of the home, the family, the community, the church, etc., and placing them behind the closed doors of the industrial hospital or the nursing home, as the sole provenance of a specialized class of experts. Death and birth are to be managed by procedures, manufactured by technology, in a sphere of production and waste-disposal that is removed from sight — out of sight, out of mind. (One might further see this in light of Marx’s observation that capitalism alienates man from his “species being” by forcing him to concern himself with merely animal existence, biological self-preservation, physical survival.) Structures such as ideology or even religious belief (e.g., a kind of fetishistic belief in the afterlife) lay the same blindfold (often as an effect of societal structures themselves), by allowing one the luxury of forgetting about death and birth and relegating them to an indefinite future or past, or making them into “someone else’s problem.”
In so many ways, the present reality of death and birth at all moments is systemically precluded from vision — which means that, however much a religious person might protest, the possibility of a confrontation with the God who is the Absolute Nothingness that sustains all life and death in contradictory unity is also foreclosed.
Consequently, it is not only the personal practice of attending to the present moment that is necessary for emancipation from the blindfold of “everydayness,” but also systemic and public action that is capable of changing the world, such that the societal structures which impose such blindfolds upon the mind may themselves be transformed into new structures that directly enable and facilitate a renewed consciousness of death and birth. Bringing death and birth, and indeed the whole spectrum of human life as such, back into the immediate sphere of consciousness, without relegating them to the merely technical sphere of alienated production, will require a social revolution — whose agents, to be sure, can only be those who have at least tasted the unity of birth and death, while also being able to act with a view to the realization of this unity in the collective consciousness as well as their own individual consciousness. Such a revolution is also a religious revolution in its very essence, since its objective is to reopen the channels of man’s radical encounter with his own absolute and infinitesimal finitude, wherein alone he may cast himself into the infinite abyss of the divine Nothingness.
It is in this way that consciousness of one’s finitude — which according to Hegel and Kojève constitutes the true essence of absolute knowledge or wisdom — is inseparable from the existential and mystical confrontation with God. I do not say that absolute knowledge itself depends upon knowledge of God, for if God is Absolute Nothingness then he cannot be known. Rather, I say that absolute knowledge itself depends upon the absolutely unconditioned unknowing of that which grounds or “un-grounds” all that can be known. To know one’s finitude is to know that one both comes to be and ceases to be — one is born and one dies; which is the same thing as to say that not only does one come from and disappear into non-being, and not only does one comes into and departs from being, but one comes from and disappears into the Absolute Nothingness that negates the very difference between being and non-being. The confrontation with God comes with the confrontation with the absolute extremities of life, which are birth and death — extremities which, remember, are present at every moment of life itself.