Errant Affirmations by David J. Kangas

Author:David J. Kangas [Kangas, David J.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781350020061
Publisher: Bloomsbury UK
Published: 2017-10-12T00:00:00+00:00

Thinking death/death’s decision

Thinking oneself together with death, drawing it into proximity with life, coincides with “becoming serious.” Seriousness (Alvor) is a modality of human existence that arises only in thinking death: “The seriousness is that it is death that you are thinking; and that you are thinking it as your lot. You thereby do what death is not capable of doing: that you are and that death also is.”2 Kierkegaard’s discourse here makes obvious and critical reference to Epicurus’ famous dictum: “when we are, death is not; and when death is, we are not.”3 This is to effect a caesura between death and existence: death cannot in principle be made present; death is therefore “nothing to us,” we whose very existence is constituted as presence. Death and life can in no wise be conjoined or integrated. They do not even oppose each other; rather, they simply exclude one another. Life in itself has no relation with death just as death in itself has no relation with life. Another way to put this is: death is the non-representable par excellence. But for Epicurus this means: death should not be taken seriously. Owing to its simple falling-outside-of-life, death has no relevance for life whatsoever.

Kierkegaard’s discourse assumes, as in principle possible, what Epicurus denies: that death can be made present to life—thought—without transmuting it into the pseudo-reality of representation. Death can be thought, that is, made proximate to life, without thereby losing its essence. Such thinking, as will be seen, does not involve the positive elaboration of the content of death—and in this sense Kierkegaard, just as much as Epicurus, denounces all representations of death. To think death is rather to clarify the modalities of a non-meaning that, precisely as such, impinges on human life absolutely. The thought of death does not integrate death into life; it places human existence before this non-meaning, prohibiting its evasion. Death is indeed nothing, but it cannot be heroically conjured away as “nothing for us.” Human life gains “seriousness”4—that is, finally realizes that something is at stake for it—in facing up to death.

To think death, rather than to interpret it or represent it, is to bring to mind what Kierkegaard calls “death’s decision” (Dødens Afgjørelsen). The latter phrase must be taken in two senses: on the one hand the reality of death signifies that the fundamental character of human life has always already been decided upon; to exist is, from the beginning, always to exist in terms of this decision. On the other hand, this decision itself—as something constitutive of the condition of the human—must itself be decided upon as an explicit act taken up by the living being. Death decides about me and I decide about death. Kierkegaard elaborates the inner content of death’s decision in a threefold manner: death’s decision is 1) decisive, 2) indeterminate and 3) inexplicable. Thinking death is thus to make oneself proximate to that which is irreducibly decisive, indeterminate and inexplicable—it is the realization that there is something that cannot be made meaningful.

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