Abstract
I describe a distinctive kind of fear that is generated by a vivid recognition of one’s mortal nature. I name it ‘existential shock’. This special fear does not take our future annihilation as any kind of harm, whether intrinsic or extrinsic. One puzzling feature of existential shock is that it is experienced as disclosing an important truth, yet attempts to specify this revelatory content bring us back to familiar facts about one’s inevitable death. But how can I discover something that I already knew? I argue that in our everyday lives, we are in the grip of deeply entrenched patterns of thought and feeling that prevent the knowledge of our mortality from being fully assimilated. Rather, we merely ‘pay lip service’ to the facts of our mortality. I propose that existential shock involves a distinctive mode of presentation of oneself as a mortal being, in a way that cuts through subtle layers of denial that govern our lives. I develop this thesis by utilizing and synthesizing ideas from several traditions, including the work of Samuel Scheffler, Mark Johnston, Martin Heidegger, and Jay L. Garfield.
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Notes
I owe this formulation to the analysis of self-deception in Jeske (2018), chap. 6.
I take this expression from Kagan (2012).
Some of these ideas were rediscovered by David Hume, and some feature prominently in contemporary philosophy, most notably in Parfit (1984).
For a discussion of the rationality of attitudes to death, see Draper (2013).
That is, I do not commit myself to the entire Buddhist worldview. For example, I remain agnostic over the question of reincarnation, and its compatibility with no-self.
While a Buddhist reductionism is the simplest and most natural fit with existential shock, the relationship falls far short of logical entailment. Existential shock is, it seems to me, compatible with a variety of metaphysical takes on the self. The only views that it would seem to rule out are those that allege a substantive personal self that is accessible by normal means of perception or introspection. By contrast, a Vedantic theory, which asserts a transcendental self behind the phenomenal flux, which in turn is identified with the impersonal Absolute, would seem to be compatible with the disillusioning nature of existential shock, which reveals that I am not identical with anything that is available to me through ordinary perception and introspection. For similar reasons, a Kantian noumenal self could be rendered compatible with the experience. A proper treatment of these matters would obviously require a separate paper.
I am reminded of the joke about the fish asking “Water? What’s water?”
For a systematic study of these risks, see the Website of Brown University’s Britton Lab, in References.
This, incidentally, is the key to understanding the surprising results of experiments by Nichols et al. (2018) in which Buddhist monks exhibited noticeably greater fear of death than other participants. I hope to address their study in a future paper.
Johnston denies that determinate conditions of identity through time can be given for an arena.
For ease of exposition, I will talk of existential shock in terms of the thoughts involved, even though the mental processes are better considered as sensations or perceptions.
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Acknowledgements
My oldest debt is to Lajos Brons, whose paper (2016) showed me the strong parallels between my thinking about death and Buddhist thought. My colleagues Andrew Eshleman, Sruthi Rothenfluch and Alejandro Santana devoted a session of our Summer Research Group to a draft of the paper. John Fischer gave useful responses to my work in progress, as did Kathy Behrendt, who generously showed me her forthcoming work. Finally, I thank an anonymous referee for a superb set of comments.
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Baillie, J. The recognition of nothingness. Philos Stud 177, 2585–2603 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-019-01329-6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-019-01329-6