Staring at the Sun: Overcoming the Terror of Death 
by 

Irvin D. Yalom

 

, epistemology-language, age-ageing 

The Possibility of the Impossible

The transition from being to non-being is one impossible to conceive. Its one word description, death, tells us nothing about it that is comprehensible. The word points to something which is the equivalent of a God of whom we can know absolutely nothing. Death is, therefore, an intellectual impossibility, a contradiction, a one-word oxymoron. Hence the inversion in my title of Yalom’s quote from Martin Heidegger: “Death is the impossibility of further possibility.” 

Heidegger is certainly correct in his brilliantly pithy definition. But like much of existentialist thinking his definition paradoxically makes death something objective, impersonal, and abstract. Heidegger refers to everyone’s death not to my death. My death is an impossibility to conceive despite the fact that it is an event that is more than possible in the relatively near future. 

Yalom recounts dozens of case histories from his practice as a psychiatrist. They all involve, according to him, the repression of the fear of death. Such repression manifests itself in a range of neurotic symptoms from depression to downright destructive behaviour. Achieving recognition by his clients that the core of their problem is a hidden fear of death is Yalom’s goal.

Yalom is an existentialist himself but his profession demands at least a nodding respect for Freudian psychoanalysis, which he duly gives. But he also notes that Freud was a bit too keen on tracing all neuroses to sex. The problem is that Yalom seems to simply substitute death for sex as the universal issue that we all must address. All his cases are examples of the Universal Case, as it were, which is something, surely, that none of us need to be reminded of.

Yalom connects the fear of death to human consciousness. Without self-consciousness, he says, we would move from existence to non-existence without the baggage of the crippling neuroses that many appear to have. But note that the squirrel, the toad, the cat fear being killed as well, and they don’t have the human capacity for consciousness. Animals fear death but don’t become neurotic about it, or not so much as anyone has noticed.

So Yalom may not have thought this out thoroughly. Animals may be subject to cruelty, loss, or deprivation in their young lives which makes them skittish, fearful, aggressive, or even murderous in later life when the general conditions of the cruelty, loss, or deprivation recur. They have learned to be afraid, hostile, or aggressive when conditions demand it. But the essential difference with the species homo sapiens is: not a second before. 

The human beings that Yalom discusses fear not that which is external to them, but what’s in their head. They don’t respond appropriately to some set of external conditions; they carry the original experience around with them more or less continuously, watching it erupt in inappropriate situations. What are they responding to?

The problem may not be the fear of death at all, but the incomprehensibility of my own death. My death is an unexplainable phenomenon. It literally has no meaning I can find - not in the history of death among my family and friends, nor in the case studies of Yalom. These all fit with the Heideggerian definition. But none of them have anything at all to do with the possibility of the impossibility of my own transition to nothingness. They make death a linguistic event, which I find somewhat distasteful as well as false and misleading, as if we could understand it if we simply talked about it enough.

Could it be that the meaningless of death is the source, not of fear, but of a justifiable breakdown of human intellect, including language, that great differential of humanity? Confusion, doubt, bewilderment, feelings of disorder (or on the other hand feelings of expectant relief), anger, fraud perhaps, even wonder are, it seems to me, equally likely responses if that is the case. And all are equally inadequate. It would seem to me that this intellectual breakdown constitutes the only breakthrough possible, namely that there is no way to put my death into words or, therefore, to contemplate it usefully.

The inevitability of death, therefore, and whatever childhood experiences may have provoked its recognition, is not the issue. Yalom’s clients seem to confirm this. Inevitability is something they know and in a way cherish as the only thing to do know and they’re generally comfortable with that. The acceptance of our utter inability to capture anything else about my death in language, for me, seems a sort of release - not from fear but from the tedious business of having to uselessly think, or talk, about it any more. Yes, very much like staring at the sun.

Postscript: By chance another GR reader sent me a paragraph by Nabokov which I find apropos to this discussion of death. It both confirms and contradicts what I have to say. But it also suggests that most of us are already dead anyhow. This may be a way to talk about death productively, namely as our temporary existence as essentially artistic artifacts: 

We are absurdly accustomed to the miracle of a few written signs being able to contain immortal imagery, involutions of thought, new worlds with live people, speaking, weeping, laughing. We take it for granted so simply that in a sense, by the very act of brutish routine acceptance, we undo the work of the ages, the history of the gradual elaboration of poetical description and construction, from the treeman to Browning, from the caveman to Keats. What if we awake one day, all of us, and find ourselves utterly unable to read? I wish you to gasp not only at what you read but at the miracle of its being readable.