Andrew McIntosh â On the Drive Towards Death and the Drive Away From Death (Ineffectual Whinging)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zopXfokmJVw[đĄ]
Just throwing a hodge podge of ideas Iâve read about and find interesting together in the hopes of coming up with a synthesis that doesnât mean much in the end anyway. Itâs not like I believe there are such things as âDeath Drivesâ and âthe Willâ and all that, theyâre more metaphorical for what is probably more mundane, neurobiological stuff going on in our stupid brains.
Now we all know what Freudâs Death Drive is. It was his way of trying to understand why people did things that he thought were not only counter-productive, but went against his idea of the Pleasure Principle. He was confused by things like his grandson playing a game over and over that seemed to involved sustaining the tension of looking for an object he kept throwing away, and also war veterans who were shell shocked and seem to keep re-living over and over the very experiences that traumatised him.
So Freud came up with the hunch that since evolution involves evolving from what he called âinorganic matterâ to âorganic matterâ, that there was some kind of drive in Life that compelled it back to the inorganic state. He wrote, â(i)f we are to take it as a truth that knows no exception that everything dies for internal reasons â becomes inorganic once again â then we shall be compelled to say that âthe aim of all Life is Deathâ and, looking backwards, that âinanimate things existed before living onesâ.â So hereâs Freud making the suggestion that the aim of all Life is Death. All Life keeps wanting to go back to its original, non-Life state.
Whatâs interesting about that, among other things, is that there was another German thinker, Philipp MainlĂ€nder, who had a similar concept some forty-four years earlier in his book The Philosophy of Redemption. Taking up the concept of âthe Willâ from Schopenhauer, who he was extremely influenced by, MainlĂ€nder theorised that rather than there being one singular âWillâ behind everything, every individual living thing had itâs own âWillâ, but that this âWillâ was a âWill to Deathâ, since according to him, âthe Willâ was once a singularity, but it actually expanded throughout the universe to atomise in individual lives but still with the desire to reach a singularity which is expressed in total extinction. He even referred to this original singularity as god. He wrote, «[b]ut this basic unity is of the past; it no longer is. It has, by changing its being, totally and completely shattered itself. God has died and his death was the life of the world.» So his idea was that this original, primal singular Will sought to disintegrate itself and in doing so, created everything living which ends up having this âWill to Deathâ somehow intrinsically in their very existence.
Of course, none of this is confirmed by biology. Biologists, with a few exceptions, tend to say that there is no actual teleological end towards which Life is trying to get. Life just is, a result of the right elements in the right time and place and just evolving on from there to fill whatever niches present themselves. But the funny thing about that is, these elements and niches must be pretty exceptional in an otherwise unexceptionally lifeless universe. Although this planet is of course crawling with Life, there doesnât seem to be much else of it about. In fact, it could be said that in a universe in which matter is a minority substance â as opposed to so-called âdark energyâ and âdark matterâ, which are just place names for stuff humans canât actually detect and measure, scientists just go by what they think are the effects of this stuff on observable matter â the matter that makes up organic Life is such a metrical minority that it hardly matters from a cosmic level. Youâd think even a godâs eye view of the universe would miss Life it if blinked. Compared to stuff like cosmic radiation, Life hardly exists at all.
In fact, the concept of Life could well be a simple mistake. Thereâs this idea called abioism thatâs a philosophical idea that Life doesnât exist. Itâs based on the concept that since to have something you could say is alive, you have to have a bunch of disparate things like chemicals and atoms and stuff that, on their own, youâd hardly say are alive, but when theyâre all put together in certain ways the level of alive-ness gets more and more apparent. But thatâs only really a matter of degree, of saying well, this is a living organism as opposed to the bits its made of, which arenât. Seen in that way, abioism suggests that thereâs nothing really alive to speak of, itâs all just bits of smaller, non-living stuff thatâs happened to have come together due to circumstances on this planet and, it seems so far, no other, as far as we know. Even if it happened on other cosmic bodies, though, itâd still be in a scant minority, numerically speaking, and itâd still be just a sum of parts that otherwise are just normal inorganic bits and pieces of normally evolving matter.
Abioism is a bit like what they call mereological nihilism, which is another philosophical idea that says that nothing exists apart from sub-atomic particles. When you look at everything that can be looked at or at least detected somehow, from energy to elephants, what youâre really looking at are not things in themselves, but things made up of sub-atomic particles which are so far the smallest things we know. If there was anything smaller that made up sub-atomic particles, the principle would still apply. So from this view, the only things that really exists in and of themselves are sub-atomic particles, and the rest is just those things put together in various ways, so, once again, through the universal laws of Nature.
So from all that, hereâs an odd idea â weâre already dead, because we were never really alive to speak of in the first place. All this striving towards non-existence that some of these German thinkers have speculated is just matter striving to get towards a more authentic state of things, that is, rather than clumped up together in weird shapes like stars and planets and people, merely regressing to a means which is a state of all the elements that make up matter just by themselves, seperate and in and of themselves. Which, of course, would lead to total annihilation of everything, at least everything material. Which, of course, is what the universe is doing anyway, or seems to be, according to the science, which says that everything in the universe is moving away from everything else at an accelerating pace, and the theory is itâll all eventually fall apart in a few trillion years and thatâll be it.
But, on the other hand â thereâs also the theories of Ernest Becker, an American, this time. A psychoanalyst who was of course influenced by Freud; he had the idea that whatâs really going on in the human subconscious is not some striving towards non-existence but a very fearful striving away from the very thought of it. He believed that people have an unconscious fear of Death that is so strong it motivates pretty much everything we do, from having sex to establishing religions. We do this, he said, mainly through our cultures and societies. He said we individually establish what he called a âhero projectâ, which is where we see ourselves almost like playing out a role in Life, no matter how small that role may be. We invest that role with meaning and purpose, which helps us get through Life without going «Hang on, Iâm going to die anyway, what the hellâs the point of all this bullshit?» Instead we go «Aw yea, thatâs right, all this bullshit is very very important and itâs very very important I keep doing it.» That way, we donât actually feel like weâre going to die at all, but are taking part in some eternal cosplay called Life which weâve given all this meaning and purpose to.
Funnily, the Norwegian philosopher Peter Zapffe had a similar idea, in that he wrote that because humans evolved consciousness, we worked out that there is no meaning and purpose to Life and promptly panicked ourselves into coming up with ways of coping with that, like just not thinking about it, distracting ourselves, focussing energy towards more positive ways of dealing with it, and what he called anchoring, which is pretty similar to Beckerâs âhero projectâ in that the idea is to focus the consciousness on something thatâs supposed to be important like God, and the state, and humanity and all that piffle. He also thought itâd be a good idea for humanity to just stop reproducing so we could get on with it and go extinct and just not have to put up with this bullshit any more, which is similar in intention at least to MainlĂ€nder who thought the better way to go was through suicide. Both philosophers, it should be noted, walked their talk.
The idea of a humanity that doesnât want to deal with Death seems a bit more believable, especially lately, the way the world-for-us, the human world, has been going. What with the acceleration of technology, including medical technology, in the past few decades, weâre all living much longer than at any other time in our history and pre-history. Itâs getting to the point where there are people seriously talking about not dying at all â you can even pay a lot of money to have your body frozen, or for a bit of a discount, just your head, to be woken up at some time when technology is just like magic and you can be inoculated from all diseases and accidents and never have to die. Itâs certainly gotten to the point where even the words die, dying, Death, dead and so on are not even spoken, but instead euphemisms are used like âpassed overâ, âpassed awayâ, âgone to Godâ and other fluffy stuff. Religion, so far, has been the main way weâve bullshitted ourselves into believing thereâs no such thing as Death. Now, itâs what they call scientism, this ideology that reckons science is basically magic and can, or will do, anything.
So hereâs another odd idea. Humanity is a species which has two distinct, unconscious psychological urges compelling us: one towards finitude, and one away from it. We have, within us, a war of urges below the level of reasoning, rationality, comprehension and any way of controlling it, a species that is consciously trying to do everything it can to stay alive because unconsciously weâre scared stiff of dying, but at the same time, unconsciously urging ourselves towards the very extinction weâre trying to avoid.
Does that seem rational? Not at all. Except, of course, if you look at how weâve been going lately, what with our huge spike in population recently alongside our huge spike in consuming every resource available, our extending of our lives as long as possible at the same time as inventing more and better weapons to kill as many people as possible, our complete inability to come up with societies optimal enough to just sustain us materially and with cultures to just sustain us psychologically, instead oscillating from every extreme, left and right, until the centre canât hold any more. Could it be said that we are a bipolar species that loves and hates ourselves at the same time, without finding any rational and psychological base ground to simply be without any great effort?