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On the non-existence of death as an objective event in the world - Magical Realist - Oct 31, 2026
Everything that really happens to us is experienced as having happened. That objectification as an unalterable completed fact instead of just our present experience of it is what makes it real. Death is the one event that happens to us that cannot be experienced as having happened. In what sense then does it really happen to us all?
Ofcourse the people who survive us perceive our death in their own way, as the state of brokenness of the machine of our bodies. But that doesn't suggest death any more than the breakdown of our TV does..The only way our death can be objectified as a state by others is as if happening to us---a sudden state of non-existence. But that is no more reliable than their objectification of us as bodies and persons and selves was. They never perceived the existence of our private subjective being, and so can never perceive the non-existence of it either. Our death hence remains as unobjectifiable as something that really happened as our being alive and conscious was. Unobjectifiability is the inherent essence of being a subject and indeed of being in any state at all.
“Anticipation [vorlaufen] discloses to existence that its uttermost possibility lies in giving itself up, and thus it shatters all one’s tenaciousness to whatever existence one has reached”---Heidegger