You should read Jean Paul’s Selina to see how a mind of the first order tries to deal with what he comes to think nonsensical in a false concept which he does not want to relinquish because he has set his heart upon it, although he is continually troubled by absurdities he cannot stomach.* The concept in question is that of the continued individual existence of our entire personal consciousness after death. This struggling and wrestling on the part of Jean Paul shows that ideas of this kind, compounded of true and false concepts, are not, as is generally thought, fruitful errors but rather decidedly harmful ones: for the false antithesis between soul and body and the elevation of the total personality to a thing in itself which must endure for ever makes it impossible to arrive at a true knowledge, deriving from the antithesis between appearance and thing in itself, of the indestructibility of our intrinsic being as something unaffected by time, causality and change; moreover, this false concept cannot even be held on to as a surrogate of truth, because reason continually rebels at the absurdity contained in it and is then obliged also to relinquish the truth amalgamated with it. For truth can in the long run endure only in a pure state: tempered with error, it partakes of the frailty of error.
If, in everyday life, you are asked about continued existence after death by one of those people who would like to know everything but refuse to learn anything, the most appropriate and approximately correct reply is: ‘After your death you will be what you were before your birth.’ For this answer implies that it is preposterous to demand that a species of existence which had a beginning should not have an end; in addition, however, it contains a hint that there may be two kinds of existence and, correspondingly, two kinds of nothingness. You might, however, also reply: ‘Whatever you will be after your death – even though it were nothing – will then be just as natural and suitable to you as your individual organic existence is now: thus the most you have to fear is the moment of transition. Indeed, since mature consideration of the matter leads to the conclusion that total non-being would be preferable to such an existence as ours is, the idea of the cessation of our existence, or of a time in which we no longer are, can from a rational point of view trouble us as little as the idea that we had never been. Now since this existence is essentially a personal one, the ending of the personality cannot be regarded as a loss.’
If we imagine a creature which surveys, knows and understands everything, then the question whether we exist after death would for that creature probably have no meaning, because outside of our present temporal, individual state of being, existence and cessation would no longer signify anything, but would be concepts indistinguishable from one another; so that neither the concept of destruction nor that of continued existence could be applied to our intrinsic and essential being, the thing in itself, of which we are the phenomenal appearance, since these concepts are borrowed from the realm of time, which is merely the form of phenomena. On the other hand, we can imagine the indestructibility of this kernel of our phenomenal appearance only as its continued existence, and indeed intrinsically only according to the scheme of the material world, as which it remains, with all its changes of form, firmly lodged in time. If, now, this kernel is denied its continued existence, we regard our temporal end as an annihilation, according to the scheme of the form, which disappears when the material which bears it is withdrawn. Both ideas are, however, a transference of the forms of the phenomenal world on to the thing in itself. But of an indestructibility which is not a continued existence we can hardly construct even an abstract conception, because we lack every intuition for doing so.
In truth, however, the continual coming into existence of new beings and the annihilation of already existing ones is to be regarded as an illusion produced by a contrivance of two lenses (brain-functions) through which alone we can see anything at all: they are called space and time, and in their interpenetration causality. For everything we perceive under these conditions is merely phenomenon; we do not know what things are like in themselves, i.e. independently of our perception of them. This is the actual kernel of the Kantian philosophy.
How can one believe that when a human being dies a thing in itself has come to nothing? Mankind knows, directly and intuitively, that when this happens it is only a phenomenon coming to an end in time, the form of all phenomena, without the thing in itself being affected thereby. We all feel that we are something other than a being which someone once created out of nothing: from this arises the confidence that, while death may be able to end our life, it cannot end our existence.
The more clearly you become conscious of the frailty, vanity and dream-like quality of all things, the more clearly will you also become conscious of the eternity of your own inner being; because it is only in contrast to this that the aforesaid quality of things becomes evident, just as you perceive the speed at which a ship is going only when looking at the motionless shore, not when looking into the ship itself.
The present has two halves: an objective and a subjective. The objective half alone has the intuition of time as its form and thus streams irresistibly away; the subjective half stands firm and thus is always the same. It is from this that there originates our lively recollection of what is long past and, despite our knowledge of the fleetingness of our existence, the consciousness of our immortality.
Whenever we may live we always stand, with our consciousness, at the central point of time, never at its termini, and we may deduce from that that each of us bears within him the unmoving mid-point of the whole of endless time. It is fundamentally this which gives us the confidence to live without being in continual dread of death.
He who, by virtue of the strength of his memory and imagination, can most clearly call up what is long past in his own life will be more conscious than others of the identity of all present moments throughout the whole of time. Through this consciousness of the identity of all present moments one apprehends that which is most fleeting of all, the moment, as that alone which persists. And he who, in such intuitive fashion, becomes aware that the present, which is in the strictest sense the sole form of reality, has its source in us, and thus arises from within and not from without, cannot doubt the indestructibility of his own being. He will understand, rather, that although when he dies the objective world, with the medium through which it presents itself, the intellect, will be lost to him, his existence will not be affected by it; for there has been as much reality within him as without.
Whoever does not acknowledge all this will be obliged to assert the opposite and say: ‘Time is something completely objective and real which exists quite independently of me. I was only thrown into it by chance, have taken possession of a little of it and thereby attained to an ephemeral reality, as thousands of others who are now nothing have done before me, and I too shall very soon be nothing. Time, on the other hand, is what is real: it will then go on without me.’ I think the fundamental perversity, indeed absurdity, of this view has only to be clearly stated to become obvious.
All this means, to be sure, that life can be regarded as a dream and death as the awakening from it: but it must be remembered that the personality, the individual, belongs to the dreaming and not to the awakened consciousness, which is why death appears to the individual as annihilation. In any event, death is not, from this point of view, to be considered a transition to a state completely new and foreign to us, but rather a return to one originally our own from which life has been only a brief absence.
Consciousness is destroyed in death, to be sure; but that which has been producing it is by no means destroyed. For consciousness depends first of all on the intellect, but the intellect depends on a physiological process: it is obviously the function of the brain and is thus conditioned by the collaboration of the nervous and vascular systems; more precisely, by the brain nourished, animated and constantly stimulated by the heart; the brain through whose ingenious and mysterious structure, which anatomy can describe but physiology cannot understand, there come about the phenomena of the objective world and the workings of our thoughts. An individual consciousness, that is to say a consciousness of any kind, cannot be thought of apart from a corporeal being, because cognition, which is the precondition of all consciousness, is necessarily a function of the brain – properly speaking because brain is the objective form of intellect. Now since intellect appears physiologically, and consequently in empirical reality, i.e. in the realm of phenomenon, as something secondary, as a result of the life-process, it is also secondary psychologically, in antithesis to will, which alone is primary and everywhere the original element. And since, therefore, consciousness does not adhere directly to will but is conditioned by intellect, and this last is conditioned by the organism, there can be no doubt that consciousness is extinguished by death – as it is by sleep or by any form of fainting or swoon. But cheer up! – for what kind of a consciousness is it? A cerebral, an animal, a somewhat more highly charged bestial consciousness, in as far as we have it in all essentials in common with the whole animal world, even if it does reach its peak in us. This consciousness is, in its origin and aim, merely an expedient for helping the animal to get what it needs. The state to which death restores us, on the other hand, is our original state, i.e. is the being’s intrinsic state, the moving principle of which appears in the production and maintenance of the life which is now coming to an end: it is the state of the thing in itself, in antithesis to the world of appearance. And in this primal state such a makeshift as cerebral, highly mediate cognition, which precisely because it is so is cognition only of phenomena, is altogether superfluous; which is precisely why we lose it. For us its abolition is one with the cessation of the world of phenomena whose mere medium it was and in which capacity alone it is of any use. Even if in this primal state we were offered the retention of this animal consciousness we should reject it, as the cured cripple rejects his crutch. Whoever therefore regrets the impending loss of this cerebral consciousness, which is adapted to and capable of producing only phenomena, is to be compared with the converts from Greenland who refused to go to Heaven when they learned there would be no seals there.
Everything said here rests, further, on the presupposition that we can imagine a state which is not unconscious only as one which is cognisant and moreover bears the stamp of the basic form of all cognition, the division into subject and object, into that which knows and that which is known: but we have to consider that this whole form of knowing and being known is conditioned merely by our animal nature, which is moreover very secondary and derivative, and is thus by no means the primal state of all essential being and existence, which may therefore be quite differently constituted and yet not unconscious. Our intrinsic actual being is, so far as we are able to penetrate it, nothing but will, and this is in itself without cognition. If, then, death deprives us of intellect we are thereby only transported to our cognitionless primal state, which is not however simply an unconscious state but rather one elevated above that form, a state in which the antithesis of subject and object falls away, because that which is to be known would here be actually and undividedly one with that which knows and the basic condition of all cognition (which is precisely this antithesis) would be lacking.
If now, instead of looking inwards, we again look outwards and take an objective view of the world which presents itself to us, then death will certainly appear to us as a transition into nothingness; on the other hand, however, birth will appear as a coming forth out of nothingness. But neither the one nor the other can be unconditionally true, for they possess the reality only of the phenomenal world. And that we should in some sense or other survive death is no greater miracle than that of procreation, which we have before our eyes every day. What dies goes to where all life originates, its own included. From this point of view our life is to be regarded as a loan received from death, with sleep as the daily interest on this loan. Death announces itself frankly as the end of the individual, but in this individual there lies the germ of a new being. Thus nothing that dies dies for ever; but nothing that is born receives a fundamentally new existence. That which dies is destroyed; but a germ remains over out of which there proceeds a new being, which then enters into existence without knowing whence it has come nor why it is as it is. This is the mystery of palingenesis; it reveals to us that all those beings living at the present moment contain within them the actual germ of all which will live in the future, and that these therefore in a certain sense exist already. So that every animal in the full prime of life seems to call to us: ‘Why do you lament the transitoriness of living things? How could I exist if all those of my species which came before me had not died?’ However much the plays and the masks on the world’s stage may change it is always the same actors who appear. We sit together and talk and grow excited, and our eyes glitter and our voices grow shriller: just so did others sit and talk a thousand years ago: it was the same thing, and it was the same people: and it will be just so a thousand years hence. The contrivance which prevents us from perceiving this is time.
One would do well to make a clear distinction between metempsychosis, which is the transference of the entire so-called soul into another body, and palingenesis, which is the decomposition and reconstruction of the individual in which will alone persists and, assuming the shape of a new being, receives a new intellect.
Throughout all time it is the male sex which stores up the will of the human species and the female which stores up the intellect. Thus each of us has a paternal and a maternal constituent; and as these are united through procreation, so they are sundered again through death, which is thus the end of the individual. It is this individual whose death we grieve so much for, in the feeling that it is really lost to us, that it was no more than a compound which has now been irretrievably broken up. Yet in all this we must not forget that the hereditariness of intellect from the mother is not so firm and unconditional as that of will from the father, the reason being the secondary and merely physical nature of intellect and its total dependence on the organism.
One can thus regard every human being from two opposed viewpoints. From the one he is the fleeting individual, burdened with error and sorrow and with a beginning and an end in time; from the other he is the indestructible primal being which is objectified in everything that exists.
THRASYMACHUS*: To sum up, what shall I be after my death? Be clear and precise!
PHILALETHES†: Everything and nothing.
THRASYMACHUS: As I expected! For the solution to a problem – a contradiction. That trick is very worn-out.
PHILALETHES: To answer transcendent questions in language made for immanent knowledge is bound to lead to contradictions.
THRASYMACHUS: What do you call transcendent and what immanent knowledge? – I too am familiar with these expressions; I learned them from my professor, but only as predicates of the good Lord God, with whom his philosophy was exclusively preoccupied, as was quite right and proper. If God is somewhere in the world he is immanent; but if he sits somewhere outside it, he is transcendent. – Well, that is clear, that’s something you can get hold of! You know where you are with that. But no one can any longer understand your old-fashioned Kantian jargon. What is it supposed to mean?
PHILALETHES: Transcendent knowledge is that which, passing beyond all possible experience, strives to determine the nature of things as they are in themselves; immanent knowledge, on the other hand, is that which confines itself within the bounds of possible experience and can therefore speak only of phenomena. – You, as an individual, will come to an end with your death. But your individuality is not your essential and ultimate being, only a manifestation of it: your individuality is not the thing in itself but only the phenomenal form of it which appears under the aspect of time and consequently has a beginning and an end. Your being in itself, on the other hand, knows neither time nor beginning nor end, nor the bounds of a given individuality; thus no individuality can exclude it – it exists in everyone everywhere. In the former sense, therefore, you will when you die become nothing, in the latter everything. That is why I said that after your death you will be everything and nothing. Your question hardly permits of a better short answer than this, even though it does contain a contradiction; and it does so precisely because your life is in time but your immortality is in eternity. – Thus your immortality can also be termed an indestructibility without continued existence – which again amounts to a contradiction.
THRASYMACHUS: Well, I wouldn’t give twopence for your immortality if it doesn’t include the continued existence of my individuality.
PHILALETHES: But perhaps you would be willing to bargain a little. Suppose I guarantee you the continued existence of your individuality, but on condition it is preceded by a completely unconscious death-sleep of three months.
THRASYMACHUS: I would agree to that.
PHILALETHES: But since when we are completely unconscious we have no notion of the passage of time, it is all one to us whether, while we are lying in that death-sleep, three months or ten thousand years pass in the conscious world. For in either case, when we awake we have to take on trust how long we have been sleeping. So that it will be all the same to you whether your individuality is restored to you after three months or ten thousand years.
THRASYMACHUS: That cannot very well be denied.
PHILALETHES: But now, if after these ten thousand years have passed it was forgotten to wake you up, this would not, I think, be a very great misfortune, since your period of non-being would have been so long compared with your brief period of being you would have got quite used to it. What is certain, however, is that you would not have the least idea you had failed to be woken up. And you would be completely content with the whole thing if you knew that the mysterious mechanism which moves your present phenomenal form had not ceased for one moment throughout those ten thousand years to produce and move other phenomena of the same sort.
THRASYMACHUS: No, you can’t cheat me out of my individuality in that way. I have stipulated that my individuality should continue to exist, and I cannot be reconciled to its loss by mechanisms and phenomena. I, I, I want to exist! that is what I want, and not an existence I first have to be argued into believing I possess.
PHILALETHES: But just look around you! That which cries ‘I, I, I want to exist’ is not you alone; it is everything, absolutely everything that has the slightest trace of consciousness. So that this desire in you is precisely that which is not individual but common to everything without exception: it arises not from the individuality but from existence as such, is intrinsic to everything that exists and indeed the reason why it exists, and it is consequently satisfied by existence as such: it is this alone to which this desire applies, and not exclusively to some particular individual existence. That which desires existence so impetuously is only indirectly the individual! directly and intrinsically it is will to live as such, which is one and the same in all things. Since, then, existence itself is the free work, indeed the mere reflection of the will, the will cannot be deprived of it: the will is, however, temporarily satisfied by it, in so far, that is, as what is eternally unsatisfied can be satisfied at all. Individualities are a matter of indifference to the will; it is not concerned with them, although it seems to be so, because the individual has no direct knowledge of it except in himself. The effect of this is to make the individual expend more care on preserving his existence than he otherwise would, and thereby ensure the preservation of his species. From this it follows that individuality is not a form of perfection but a limitation: thus to be free of it is not a loss but rather a gain. So cease worrying about it: truly, if you knew your own being to its very depths as the universal will to live which you are – such worries would then seem to you childish and altogether ludicrous.