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Outer Head Registered: 12/06/13 Posts: 9,819 |
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There are two forms, in humans, of the fear of death. There is the instinctual one, which all animals have. There is also an existential fear of one's own extinction, peculiar to humans -- possibly civilized humans only. The two work synergetically to generate some whopping death anxiety. Which, naturally, is a primary driving force in all human affairs.
What are some insights you'd like to share on your understanding of DA? How does it play a role in your life, and to what degree have you come to grips with it? -------------------- Vi Veri Universum Vivus Vici
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Humble Student Registered: 11/30/11 Posts: 26,088 Loc: Deep in the syst |
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I'm too exhausted to respond in any intelligible sense right now, but it's nice to see someone keeping Icey's tradition alive. Good call DQ, I look forward to what comes up!
-------------------- Let it be seen that you are nothing. And in knowing that you are nothing... there is nothing to lose, there is nothing to gain. What can happen to you? Something can happen to the body, but it will either heal or it won't. What's the big deal? Let life knock you to bits. Let life take you apart. Let life destroy you. It will only destroy what you are not. --Jac O'keeffe
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Wanderer Registered: 12/16/06 Posts: 17,856 Last seen: 5 minutes, 8 seconds |
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Quote: No insights. The role it plays varies. Mostly it has been sidelined at this point. I am less engaged with the topic. Not in the sense of experiencing but in the sense of analyzing. I do meditate on DA when I find life becoming too serious. Which of course begs the question of what "too serious" means. And for me, roughly, when I no longer enjoy the little novelties in a day because I am focused on all the mental chatter. Mostly chatter about interpersonal relationships, work, or time. And each can pretty easily be linked to my personal DA. But again at this point it isnt analytical. These meditations iLate about awareness, not conquering or outwitting. And in this way I would say my trip on DA has loosened. I'm not trying to discover anything particular out. I'm just meditating on its appearance when life starts to feel too serious. -------------------- Why shouldn't the truth be stranger than fiction? Fiction, after all, has to make sense. -- Mark Twain
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Outer Head Registered: 12/06/13 Posts: 9,819 |
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Yeah, that's pretty much where I'm at, too. I like to be aware of it, and recognize it when I can, especially when my anxiety enters the picture, which I have historically had some problems with. I like to think I've made a kind of peace with it, but sometimes it still gets the better of me. I think overall, though, I've made a lot of progress. I'm much more comfortable now with the idea of my end than I was in the past, and I'm quite pleased about that. I just marvel when I think about how big a driver DA is in all human activities, really keeping civilization going. Sex and death, as it were.
-------------------- Vi Veri Universum Vivus Vici
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ChasingTail Registered: 09/12/09 Posts: 2,039 |
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Even Becker backed down the path he had trotten.
DA is something I think that deserves to be analyzed and meditated on but the clarity that comes in those answers doesn't bring along any solace. The machinery beneath the cover of my defenses is entrancing and while it's good to see the source at the end of the day it doesn't bring much benefit to stare. As Kickle said I sort of sideline it, while also that the awareness is helpful to clear mental chatter not waste what is already fleeting and precious time. After that though, unless in a situation closer to the end of the race, the benefits of regular attention plateau and in some cases cause more anxiety. I want to understand my defenses but I don't want to negate their purpose. Many can't handle looking under the cover and probably should stay with their defenses in tact. There are two forms, in humans, of the fear of death. There is the instinctual one, which all animals have. There is also an existential fear of one's own extinction, peculiar to humans -- possibly civilized humans only. The two work synergetically to generate some whopping death anxiety. Which, naturally, is a primary driving force in all human affairs. I don't think personally that these are two seperate forms of DA. Seems like two different forms of perception: emotional and cognitive. The cognitive mind as we know it cannot grasp it's own end, the panic that ensues results in a twisted multitude of expressions. This magnitude of behaviors is a manifestation of that same instinctual DA we feel on the emotional level. The emotional has no rational mind to get twisted up, only impulsive fear and dread. I don't know, I could be splitting hairs I suppose. I just feel those are two sides of the same coin. I wonder if another species were at a communicable sentience, how would they symbolize death and would they experience DA. In other words I wonder how much the latter in your OP is dependent on human experience or is more of any conceptual mind that has to contemplate the non-concept of being dead. Edited by Tropism (06/04/15 12:24 PM)
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Outer Head Registered: 12/06/13 Posts: 9,819 |
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Very interesting insights, Trop.
-------------------- Vi Veri Universum Vivus Vici
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Thinker, blinker, writer, typer. Registered: 11/26/14 Posts: 1,688 |
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Well this post is real long, but it amounts to a few bases of critique, through a few edits.
I'd say anxiety is maybe good "content" for meditation, in a way, but I think it begs the question, of what that means. Formally it's not so good basis for sociological theories or philosophical dialogue, due to its ungrounded impressionistic (or projectional) "basis". For instance, an argument, what do you say, "You fear as much and as I do"? This has a kind of degenerative regress). I think people have social anxiety and similar things like that, and its kind of a gesture that maybe works for some to impress a dialogue like "what's the big problem?" Then again if you have death on your mind and you are in your 20's, you may one day get real problems, the point where you don't need to make them up. Hooray. And if you have finally come to the point of sincerely wishing you were dead...you may have realized its sort of a complicated thing, and not just one-dimensionally (as op says in a way), about the fear and pushing and pulling about the "final act" you come up against. Its an insinuation of a fear based concept of fear. It is bullshit, I'd say. Opposed to this, I would say physis, the nature of life, is growth and becoming, as the presocratics and the stoic philosopher knew it. Physis doesn't look back it only looks forward. It is the causa sui - the actual "drive" to look to. A good hypothetical question to put to death anxiety theorists would be of where the basis of the idea or theory of death anxiety is? (And like in regards to some questions, to ask, I'm not saying I believe there is one). A drive. Is that completely impressionistic assumption. I would admit it is interesting to notice rich and very well off people have the same sort of stress level that I do, the same tightrope walk and tests of relationships, health, and life. I assume I have the same level of pressure on me, the same general temperment as a guy in Africa with flies over his face. But the same basis of value. This is naive, getting lost in insightfulness. I don't imagine that human temperments can be appealed to in any unconditional sense, to be able to definitively broach and delve into the temperment of my fellow humans, and describe the human condition. Maybe there is something to say about that. A generality of psychology. There are boundaries and expansions of consciousness, and plainly these temperments we share, and then you may realize the suffering referred to is an ocean, dukkha, and we are all the same, and yet it is absurd that we talk about waves in it as if it can distinguish it or ideally encpsulate it at all. There is only insight of meditations. The stoics described tranquility of mind, and the yoga sutras describe cessation of its fluctuations, but they had a practical, methodological approach and not just a posited theory of a human condition. Granted that is a difference that is characterized as naivety in certain (ostensibly) stricter theoretical or "logical" frameworks, but more and more people are calling bull on that, and contemporary epistemology itself is being found more in pragmatism. It may be a commentary less about death anxiety, and more broadly about western materialistic culture to say so. But in either case its clear that just because a theory is subordinate to pragmatic concerns doesn't mean a theory is wrong. Even more thinking practically will inevitably mean thinking positively, and this doesn't mean something is incorrect. What makes anyone suppose that? This is a good question to look to. You can see how epistemology assumes a certain role (means and ends basis) in both Patanjali's Sutras to characterize many experiential component states of meditation. According to stoic thinking as well, (and buddhism) I would argue for the conditional basis of means and ends based thinking. I have argued elsewhere for the general theoretical grounds of the concept of physis being the nature of reality, but that is saying what people already know, and is mostly deconstructive, ie. nature, is something to find a way to let be. In short these systems of meditation by their argued "nature" are not primarily just explaining anything. They are not "theories" so much, in the speculative conspiratorial sense, and their means and ends which are theoretical, are practical. Generally, they describe a meditation, practice, and experience of life, rather than rational progress of dialectic, as their priority. Death anxiety takes a different position in its basic suggestion as an overall explanation of the world, which I would say ultimately is not practical or convincing, but more the rationale of one's thinking spilling over. It is not insightful as it seems, and you can find insights into the basis of suggestion, (which again I'd say DA theory lacks in its arguments.) It really the same as what it makes criticisms of, as very speculative and broad (supposedly universal) theorizing. That would be something to look at. But also why do we all look to its "burden" which people make a big deal about, and toss about and say its so heavy. But what about the burden of having a basis for what is claimed? It is purely projectional. What it has to do with meditative practice, or authenticity seems apparently to be how a gauntlet of dialogical juxtapositions, leading to "confessions", may actually get to a point of actually being able to meditate on something (pointed meditiation), maybe through that be able to relax. That is the way it plays out if you can get beyond the idea of its speculation. People appeal to the burdens of death anxiety in other words, not as a burden of argument but going down this path, finally to say "in the better part of delusions we shed, some we must keep". That is its end. That is a certain mode of meditation on authenticity, unique to to decadence, in its form. It is confession, in the prejudiced form that such dialogue occurs in. It can be a half sincere " process", especially if you can't think of any better approach. But it can be a pretension, formality, (not to mention cultishly hypocritical). Confessions are kind of bullshit in their basis especially when people let themselves lose their shit and think something with such a psychological basis is so easily and theoretically projected. These burdens you carry, we carry... right. Maybe this theme could start to be interpreted with a bit of perspective? As we carry this burden we see empty smiles, drones, and superficiality. It is something we all see sometimes, but emptiness itself may itself be empty. What says this emptiness has to mean anything, to have content? My opinion would be that the thing to be most skeptical of in the psychology of humans, as "drives", is projected resentment. Psychological theories of drives don't just generally describe human social values, so I'm not saying anything unconditionally, but I would say in this territory it seems a ripe possibility that resentment is offering this new, tidy overall explanation of things over the old ones. Maybe death anxiety as a theory, is itself a mechanism, seeking an overall explanation for conditional social anxieties, which actually really are based in this world? I think this is pretty likely, so much as it is assumed this translation is taking something on, and the way it is paraded around like. Maybe it is just a way of voiding the meaning of conditional experiences, of a social sphere, in which a trauma occured in one's past to say it is something else? Is it just because something is bigger, or someone bigger said it, that this translation seems to work, to find ones anxieties in a sphere of encompassing nonexistence, rather than this world? Well it does not have to exactly be the point to insinuate a drive or motivaton or mechanism, but clearly anyone can impress them. For example, Nietzsche's suggestion of considering ressentiment, is not his overall point, but upon an insight that is taken for what it is (elsewhere he speaks of "the genius of his nostrils"). Nietzsche argues in a positive sense, the case that nobility - or the "master morality" - exists, as much as the reactive "slave morality" that tends so often to assert itself. That could be an important subject to look to in all the despairing. There are many issues that make nobility and excellence a difficult thing to aspire to, but I think its a good and grounded aspiration. Respectively anxiety is definitely something people sweat, it seeps over and through, but between the common experience of anxiety and ascribing meaning behind or under a person's temperment, actually lies a lot. Yeah, "sniffing around" the trails of drives can lead a way, as an old shaman I knew put it, but this is not wholly guided by anything too significant. At a certain point it is seeped garbage, or "dirty laundry", and who is into that, or steeping pathologically based psychologism in generality? And who is into confessions? Neither drives, nor their scent or trails are what things are really about in my opinion. Their outward path and struggle through the gauntlet of dialogue can lead to certain insights, I'd say sometimes you just have to have a bit of perspective and understand when you are on the wrong track, and lost that balance. This balance has to be held in spite of being drawn by these kind of things, or anyway, the apparent utility of a really winning explanation where you dug some shit up on someone. It is good not to lose sight of one's affirmative spirit, a natural yes saying disposition to life, as great as you might be at "no saying". Who really holds up? Maybe not many people. Yet with regards to death anxiety per se as a theoretical subject, I would say that to consider it, it doesn't necessarily imply or insinuate anything. Again the general naivety of epistemologists, in guidance to a subject, can be as much an issue as anything. People may think they know something, on the basis of certain conditional insights and impressions. I say its pretty easy to see through this, because death anxiety theory is transparently anxiety itself. It is making a big deal, and its a grand theory. You may go through life dealing with things, being subjected to things, to the point that when you are old, dying will maybe seem to be a relief. I am only just starting to feel old, and I think I have been through enough sometimes. But I still haven't found my place and don't want to die. But in general like in regards to a subject of DA, I'd say you may not ever have significant death anxiety, but be busy with life through life. As Seneca wrote, "its not that we have a short time in life, we just tend to waste it." When I was younger I definitely had anxieties that I couldn't place. Because I was in certain philosophical circles people suggested that was grounded in something, "whatever I least liked to think about" seemed to be the best way to balance out speculation. If I found this insightful, I also found that philosophers can be insightful, speculative, and naive swamp dwelling frogs of psychologists. Total bullshit. Hiding the burden of argument. Through life I could see there were other conditional things that bothered me, especially when I look back, after growing a bit. Not to mention a westerners repressed sex drive? There are less speculative explanations, a lot of pressure society just puts on you to deal with it, and under that you may not be so messed up and broken. Marxists say going to the grocery store for exchange is some kind of hell, which I feel like I can see sometimes. Other times, I feel like things are not so bad though. Most of all it makes me think, if we put all these projected theories together it is not that they would add up to something realistic at all, just obsessions in thinking. There is surely someone who made up a theory about the madness and compulsevness of theory making, and if not I will. I'd even say that death anxiety was maybe even an attempt at that, but which tried like all it describes to be too all encompassing, rather than admitting the conditionality of theoretical rationale. To such generalities and this ostensible one in particular, I'd say its arguable in a lot of ways that life and suffering is worse than death. I know, why haven't I killed myself then, right? That would be the rational thing to do. But actually I would say there are some things that not just courageous but average humans would die for. It is not that hard to imagine what life itself takes from you, and how much this is, and how you value life, as life. And you can only value life as life, so you have to say yes to life. Imagine being disfigured, and losing the grace of your nature you once thought was your own. That is something as difficult to imagine as death, and yet, you may easily think you wish you were dead, rather than someone who would live a life disfigured. Granted you don't know what you even mean, other than some idea of voidness of consciousness, and ultimately (say you actually were) you may well not do it, In my opinion it is so much that you are afraid of such a final act, or do not stand by your value of life. I think the truth is in any circumstance, life and a world of its experience never presents the oppurtunity to act out certain rationale. Life unfolds as the experience of life, not a theory and that is what you end up dealing with. It is physis, becoming, and growth, as the stoics put it. I think some people have maybe had experience like this of life, of suffering. I think many of us could draw these two points in life span, one where they are, and one if knowing where they would be in this day, at an earlier time they would wish they were dead (from the past perspective), instead of coming to this point. Yet I think this is not insincerity in which we live life. We do positively vest in our rationale, and yet in spite of knowing this, many of us are still here, because life is indifferent, and does not present these options, to theoretical rationale. It just unfolds as it is. I would say this is how we think of being and non-being, (on a slant of becoming and dying) and are not overcome by some idea, but let life draw itself out, itself. In any case I think its pretty clear it is possible that we value things beyond life, in life in such ways. It is not so hard to find these things, even in a positive sense, and I would argue this value in life is something that should be looked at as noble, rather than something resented. If someone is disfigured, just because he doesn't assume further violence on himself of the suicidal act, further doing what is done, doesn't mean he doesn't stand by this value of your physis. I say see it as human, and maybe stoic or noble. The stoics say look as best you can to be like nature, like physis as growth and becoming at every point of the journey, because this is how life is drawn to the end. It is possible to see the rationale behind statement life is suffering, the Buddhist pessimism, because that is what life proves itself in experience as often enough. Positively interpreting that suggestion, could be considered important. But we westerners have beautiful statements too. Greek tragedy. Shakespeare. Hamlets question, "to be or not to be" is maybe not as desultory or ignoble as he was described by the court of Denmark, and we can maybe love his soliloquoys, but it is not anything really engenius or some kind of special unconditional knowledge about life he discovers through those circumstances. There are lots of great insights into life in that tragedy, but maybe through it all, all the ungroundedness, it has something less somber but laughable about it even, like everything. It is a flirtation with death, maybe its even about Ophelia, (as the daft old Polonius suggested.) But aside from a play, a play on the drives of life, I would say that suffering in the broad ocean of dukkha is worse than death, and so buddhists have rightly said that cessation is something that can be sought, and not necessarily just a flirtation. How do we even imagine that? Practically to begin with. Westerners have it hard, with all the stuff about eternal concepts of truth, and a dead god plaguing their unconsciousness, but I would say, less than being some contradiction and nullity to life a westerner can become stoical. You become "like nature". So you go through the whole kafkaesque metamorphosis of life, if that's what it is (again imagine being disfigured, it is just as impressionable and horrifying as death) and I am not saying is explicable, but sticking to living through life, as the experience of life, is as I see it the only way to go. So again my suggestion is any kind of anxiety is unstillness and practically speaking good "content" for meditation, but begs the question about what formalities (the theoretical obsession) are covertly being suggested. Mainly the problem with DA theory is in spite of the confessional form, you can't go beyond what it must describe and explain (however based) in a certain impression of its content. So it becomes a flirtation, testing of safety nets where you always just go one down. You can't go within its insinuations to seek "cessation". As applying a mode of explanation to a mode of explanation, it seems to me death anxiety theory could be read (and not only something that reads society) as thr intent to bring human values to a common level. That is my theory, behind the formal theory making. And as a response, and response to death anxiety subscribers on their own terms, I would say that there are such things as excellence and nobility in life. It is best to go with it, and be the master of it... Personal philosophical note that I hope I am not betraying too much: however good your nose is, its best to give people and their temperments a bit of room, and give things like grace, nobility, and stoicism a chance in general. To speak of human drives, always be skeptical of possible bases of ressentiment first of all. Maybe if life is becoming, as Plato says love of wisdom is learning to die. Maybe you can get a little additional impetus, to somehow impress this positively but I doubt it. I have always thought it was best to just do philosophy and meditate on impermanence in a general way, and found that flirtation (or sniffing around) doesn't work in itself. Maybe its marginal or just humorous but Jean Baudrillard once remarked "Philosophy is death - sociology is suicide." Edited by Kurt (06/08/15 05:32 PM)
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Thinker, blinker, writer, typer. Registered: 11/26/14 Posts: 1,688 |
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Quote: Turin, September 30, 1888, on the day when the first book of the Revaluation of All Values was completed. -Friedrich Nietzsche
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Maybe so. Maybe not. Registered: 01/06/09 Posts: 1,327 Loc: Chicago |
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Quote: When I first read about DA, I felt that I had to "overcome it" or "come to grips" with it. But now, in a Kierkegaardian sense, it's less about overcoming DA and more about letting DA overcome me. The more I tried to control and not be afraid of death, the more I found myself to be more afraid of death hah. I now tend to think like, "Yeah I'm afraid of death... but so what if I'm afraid? I'm scared, and that's totally fine." I guess I don't see a problem being afraid anymore, when before hand when I first read about it, I thought it was a problem. That's not really an insight though, more of a personal thing that I discovered about myself. DA did force me to really look and analyze what it is I was afraid of though. My concept of what death is has shifted, that's for sure. I used to think that death was something "outside" that was threatening and attacking my life. But now I see it more as life just happens and death just happens. They're both just part of this mixed bag of what happens in this universe. I hope that didn't sound too hippie trippy. ![]() EDIT: Reflecting, I guess I can think of one insight. I've found that if someone is trying to sell someone something that claims that you will no longer be afraid of death... it's full of shit. Be it a belief system or otherwise. lol That's just through my experience though. Edited by r72rock (06/06/15 07:25 PM)
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ChasingTail Registered: 09/12/09 Posts: 2,039 |
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Good post, rock.
DA lead me to acceptance and it sounds like it may have for you as well. I guess I don't see a problem being afraid anymore, when before hand when I first read about it, I thought it was a problem. At some point there's no arguing with what is and you just have to enjoy what you can.
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some kinda love Registered: 01/02/10 Posts: 6,799 |
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wtf was neitzche on about
-------------------- dripping with fantasy
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some kinda love Registered: 01/02/10 Posts: 6,799 |
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i try not to think about it..
i dont like thinking about death really and i dont think it's useful to think about what you dont have control over.. like self reflection and 'lifting the hood' and speculating about the origins and folly and ugliness of my intentions is a kind of self indulgence, it makes me feel comfortably miserable and its not useful or even necessarily accurate ime except maybe to ground me when im getting hung up on trivial things or when my thoughts are getting away from me.... -------------------- dripping with fantasy
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Registered: 07/02/14 Posts: 2,290 Loc: Hell Last seen: 6 years, 8 months |
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My fear of death stems from the uncertainty of it all. The great mystery of what comes next.
Btw where has Ice been? Miss that crotchety old man. -------------------- Did you not know that the royal hunting grounds are always forbidden?
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Thinker, blinker, writer, typer. Registered: 11/26/14 Posts: 1,688 |
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Quote: That quote is from "The twilight of the idols or how to philosophize with a hammer" A revaluation of all values? Staying cheerful in light of gloominess...at all costs? Sickness (convalescence)? Nietzsche can be pretty impressionistic but he is pretty good at what he does. Apparently (and to impress in all frankness) he hits the idols, and not reverently; but whacking them with a hammer they sound out, because they sing best that way. "The only strength is excess of strength." You would maybe have to associate all of this on a psychological level, but when he is talking about doing this, he means gaining insight into social values in general. It is an interrogative which Nietzsche was not being so subtle or politic about. The "idle psychologist". In a less limited formally "correct" scope, it's getting the idols themselves to confess for a change, for a breath of fresh air. But remember the confessions are always bullshit, right? Most of all, they are bullshit when they seem not to be, especially when there are no outward idols left and you are only doing this to yourself. Philosophy as a mode of "confessing" can be a posture, all puffed up and its generally kind of suspect to bullshit I'd say he was in part going on about the form of philosophizing as "confessional" of authenticity, and how you can't just tap the idols like with a tuning fork when you do that. So it becomes a destruction of the very form of thing appealed to. What is "the hollow sound of bloated entrails?" Is Nietzsche a Zen master? When its whacked, it rings out, but a chunk falls off and it crumbles, and you see something unsavory and stinking inside. My teacher? In a sick way, this is what is the best and most lovely about appealing to the idols we have. I think he is in intimately related ways, both positive and negative, destroying the form of appealation he makes in each gesture, which is the same. It seems relavent to death anxiety, because as I understand according to some idle (or idol?) psychologist, DA attempts to be an assertive mode of dialogue, when the "theory" and its assumed dialogue can only betray its own projected basis. The simple and blunt, I'd say as it possibly relates to all this: Confessional is a form of sickness in its own terms. He's saying you can look directly to that. Make it sing! Quote: Edited by Kurt (06/08/15 06:39 PM)
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CS actual Registered: 12/11/07 Posts: 29,591 |
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I have a fear of death, not existing is scary. I'm even more afraid of dying, I hope it's quick and I don't see it coming. Some people here are going to suffer a violent agonizing death, I hope it's not me
-------------------- L'enfer est plein de bonnes volontés et désirs
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Outer Head Registered: 12/06/13 Posts: 9,819 |
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I wanted to resurrect this thread in order to explore a different approach. In the OP, I suggested that there are two mechanisms associated with death anxiety: instinctual and existential. I've been thinking about this some, and thought I'd suggest an alternative perspective:
It seems to me that death anxiety is, in and of itself, more fundamentally an instinctual phenomenon than existential or conceptual. It is really at the root of our entire fear mechanism, which is shared by all animals. Civilized man tends to fixate on it to an exaggerated degree, due in part to certain ego pathologies. Tribal peoples surely had some death anxiety, but their natural anxieties were triggered less because they did not obsess over the subject, instead accepting it as part of the fundamental order of things. The fear mechanism is the same, at least for primates, but civilized man, in his constant, irrational focus on it, suffers it all the more because he triggers it excessively in his sedentism, and in his obsession on an intellectual level. This suggests, naturally, that what we refer to as DA is not natural to humans, but rather has some pathology to it. It is well documented that tribal peoples do not suffer from it nearly to the degree that civilized ones do. Not to mention certain studies in which terminal patients, when administered psychedelics, had markedly attenuated fear of death -- and in many recorded cases suffered none at all. -------------------- Vi Veri Universum Vivus Vici
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Formless One Registered: 05/04/09 Posts: 2,217 Last seen: 6 months, 2 days |
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I think the influence of DA depends nearly entirely on how well we can deceive ourselves. Which I think most of us are exceptionally good at.
I think without self deception life and the ensuing train wreck would be to horrific. “This is the great lesson the depressive learns: Nothing in the world is inherently compelling. Whatever may be really “out there” cannot project itself as an affective experience. It is all a vacuous affair with only a chemical prestige. Nothing is either good or bad, desirable or undesirable, or anything else except that it is made so by laboratories inside us producing the emotions on which we live. And to live on our emotions is to live arbitrarily, inaccurately—imparting meaning to what has none of its own. Yet what other way is there to live? Without the ever-clanking machinery of emotion, everything would come to a standstill. There would be nothing to do, nowhere to go, nothing to be, and no one to know. The alternatives are clear: to live falsely as pawns of affect, or to live factually as depressives, or as individuals who know what is known to the depressive. How advantageous that we are not coerced into choosing one or the other, neither choice being excellent. One look at human existence is proof enough that our species will not be released from the stranglehold of emotionalism that anchors it to hallucinations. That may be no way to live, but to opt for depression would be to opt out of existence as we consciously know it.” ― Thomas Ligotti, The Conspiracy Against the Human Race Edited by Jaegar (08/18/15 05:34 PM)
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ChasingTail Registered: 09/12/09 Posts: 2,039 |
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Quote: I'd say you are on to something but that might just be me, or rather this is closer to him I see it. The word anxiety tends to give the wrong impression imo, conjurs negative association that send it in the wrong light yet it is technically accurate. DA is almost synonymous with living in observation, or vice versa as it seems a dog chasing it's own tail. The pursuit of all observed life is to survive, florist, and ultimately avoid death. The pursuit of the living sits with death anxiety as the root of impulse, and for myself in honest reflection this is whats left after occams razor. To be alive is to fear death and being dead requires being alive, DA seems like the biological mechanism fundamental to all behavior. Edited by Tropism (08/18/15 05:41 PM)
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Outer Head Registered: 12/06/13 Posts: 9,819 |
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Excellent point, Jaegar. I very much appreciated that quotation.
-------------------- Vi Veri Universum Vivus Vici
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Outer Head Registered: 12/06/13 Posts: 9,819 |
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Quote: Yes, I see nothing here that is false. OTOH, I think we fuel DA by getting into a mindset that focuses on it. Animals don't fear death, they simply fear what is harmful, automatically -- and not all the time. (Of course, animals do not understand that they will die). Hunter-gatherers had a completely, I mean completely different way of seeing and interacting with the world, and it is anthropological record that they (e.g., the Hadza) feared death virtually not at all compared with civilized man. For me, that throws a monkey wrench into the notion that this is all part of the human condition. So perhaps it is more of a psychological fact that a bare existential one. I do quite agree that the biological mechanism of avoidance of harm/death, and the sexual side of the coin as well I would add, fuel virtually everything we see in human and animal societies. -------------------- Vi Veri Universum Vivus Vici
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