near to death episodes (Endings)

by whitecraw, Thursday, March 06, 2008, 20:57 (6104 days ago) @ John Clinch

'I myself have no difficulty imagining death as nothingness. Think of a dreamless sleep that lasts forever.' - That doesn't work. Both the condition of being asleep (dreamless or otherwise) and the condition of being in time ('forever') imply a subject; someone who is asleep and not dreaming and who never awakes. The whole point of death is that it is not 'like' anything we can imagine or conceive. It is nothing, no condition of which one can be subject precisely because one is dead. It is literally inconceivable; which is why (as I once argued) we have to deal with the prospect of one's own death non-conceptually, or 'expressively', as we do in religion and art. Imagining one's own death as 'a dreamless sleep that lasts forever' is as self-deluding as the notion that it is endless feasting in the halls of Valhalla or endless suffering in the fires of Hell.