Death, nothingness, and subjectivity
While I don’t know that they’re calling for it in mass numbers, Thomas Clark suspects that atheists and agnostics secretly dread the nothingness of death and his essay on death, nothingness, and subjectivity is designed to bring some measure of comfort to their tortured psyches. In attempting to do so, Clark proposes that nothingness is impossible to experience since nothingness does not exist. To Clark (1) “there is no eternal absence of experience.” Clark does believe our personality, the me, of the self, a set of traits, memories, characteristics, etc., does disappear or cease at birth but he does not believe our subjectivity goes into nothingness.
Instead, Clark theorizes that there is no gap in subjectivity that occurs between the passing of the me and our eternal context. He believes that we are so attached to our present conscious personality that atheists and agnostics dread oblivion at death. However, while the personality or collective group of traits may cease, he believes our subjectivity jumps the gap but experiences in a new context. As he states “Why are we so attached to this context of consciousness. Why, if experience continues anyway, is it so terribly important that it continue within this set of personal characteristics, memories, and body? If we are no longer haunted by nothingness, then dying may seem more like the radical refreshment of subjectivity than its extinction” (Clark 8).
Though he denies it is his primary intention, Clark does admit that he is very close to arguing that we have an eternal subjectivity that exists in all contexts of experience. He cites Shakespeare among those who like the author Anthony Burgess have made the mistake of dreading the nothingness of death. However, he is making a leap of faith regarding a subjectivity that jumps the gap between life and death as surely as Kierkegaard makes one regarding the
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