Desiring Death
The Great Revealer of Life
To Freud, the creatureliness of the human individual is rooted in their desire for pleasure, predominantly sexual pleasure (the life impulse). This framework was expanded to address the pesky problem of death by including the individual’s desire for death (the death impulse). Therefore, the fundamental driver of the human condition to the psychoanalytical project was seen as instinctual desires (towards life or death) in the face of repression (particularly, societal repression).
This was opposed by certain existentialists, such as Becker, (and more recently by Terror Management Theory), who saw fear of death as the fundamental human drive. (To put this contrast in another way, existentialists proposed a rejection of the human condition as the fundamental cause for anxiety, rather than a societal repression of the desire for the human condition proposed by psychoanalysis). To existentialists more generally, it is not specifically the fear of death that most compels us but rather the distress in the face of absurdity — the incompatibility of the desire for life and the reality of death.
Given that life is existentially absurd — having both an overwhelming unfathomability and a distressing incompleteness — life is that in the face of which one desires death. To Camus in particularly, this desire for death in the face of life becomes the fundamental question that must be addressed: for the individual, it is one of suicide, for a (political) member of society, it is one of murder. Suicide is what is expected, but not so for Camus’ Rebel who chooses to revolt against the absurdity of life, of the human condition; who refuses suicide; who does not go gentle but instead rages against the dying of the light.
At the intersection of psychoanalysis and existentialism, suicide and murder are related in other ways. To paraphrase Rank, the self’s fear of death is lessened by the murder or sacrificing of the other. In the same way that killing the other pacifies the self, the sacrificing of the self alleviates the bloodthirst in the other, for death is the sacrifice that frees the other from the fear of death. Terror — both in the face of death and in the face of life — generates this bloodthirst. We are angry; angry that we are conscious; angry that we exist, and that we exist under such an unbearable, existential weight; and so we want to take this out on others. We are hurt, and so we want to hurt others. We are guilty, insecure, and so we want to be hurt by others. We are afraid, so we want to become evil, because then fear wouldn’t scare us as much. If we could, we would tear the whole world apart.
We do not want to be made conscious of this bloodthirst (knowing this might really tear us apart), so we seek either a scapegoat, to project it onto the other, or to repress it. But even here, as everywhere, we are being inescapably driven towards self-awareness. The sacrifice that we demand in order to continue in unconsciousness has the effect of pointing us back towards self-awareness. Our efforts as well at repression — what we ignobly call society — inevitably fall short, and through the cracks of our Vital Lie the seeds of our unconsciousness grow.
The problem of death evokes both desire and fear. We are drawn towards death even as we are repelled by it (and either in the manner of suicide or murder, for the self desires and fears both its own death and that of the other). The question is why. The fear of death seems self-evident, something we naturally intuit; it is natural to not want to die. But the desire for death presents more of a conundrum. Why does it seem there a deeply rooted desire for death within the human condition? Is it because as Freud suggests, we are ‘pressured’ by nature towards death, as a complement to the survival instinct? Is it because, as the existentialists say, we desire existential annihilation because we fear a fate worse than death? Is it because the unfathomable terror of life and death fills us with a bloodthirst that seeks out death and destruction?
Or is there something else at play? Rather than simply being driven by instinctual desires (the death instinct), existential avoidance (seeking death as an escape from life), or an unconscious bloodthirst, it seems we are enthralled by death because we are drawn to its transcendental properties (death as holding the secret of life). Death terrifies us — it underpins our inconsolable melancholy, our dissatisfaction with life — yet something is hidden behind this terror. There is a part of us that looks longingly towards death — not only because we are tired of being afraid, but because in the moments we stop running from it, something flickers. Death is but a friend wearing a mask.
Death is the Great Revealer of life. We have awoken from our unconscious drives to be confronted by anxiety (the beginning of wisdom) in the face of life, which requires of us a ‘leap to faith’. This journey to freedom and authentic existenz is a necessary road, for man cannot find his way back to Eden by ‘renouncing self-consciousness’ but only through transcendence. The road ahead is plagued by risks that threaten to plunge us into the abyss, but to become what we are meant to be, to become fully human, we must walk on. In transcendence, the compulsion towards physical death gives way to a surrendering to an ontological confrontation (a metaphysical death) from which we are reborn into the mystery of life.
Bibliography
Becker, Ernest. The Denial of Death. 1973
Camus, Albert. The Myth of Sisyphus. 1942
Camus, Albert. The Rebel. 1951
Freud, Sigmund. Beyond the Pleasure Principle. 1920
Greenberg, Jeff, Solomon, Pyszczynski. The Worm at the Core: On the Role of Death in Life. 2015
Jaspers, Karl. “Philosophy of Existence.” [In The Continental Philosophy Reader by Kearney, Richard, and Mara Rainwater: 55–61. 1996.]
Kierkegaard, Soren. Concluding Unscientific Postscript. [Hong translation, 1941]
Nietzsche, Friedrich W. The Complete Works of Friedrich Nietzsche. [Trans by H. B. Samuel in Peoples and Countries, 1910]
Rank, Otto. Will Therapy & Truth and Reality. 1936
