Ino Nothingness

»Review«

To think about life, one must think about death — for neither can be conceived without the other. And only in the complementarity of these two concepts can we begin to grasp what life truly means to the individual.
The person who fears death will, whenever possible, avoid thinking about it. Beyond that, he constructs comforting fictions — an immortal soul, an afterlife — to put his own mind at ease. And yet he is (once again) deceiving himself. Here I follow Sartre and adopt his terminology: death does not open new paths; it is the complete annihilation of all possibility. It is a néantisation — a “noughting,” a nullification — that lies entirely outside of human freedom. With death comes a radical alienation: the person becomes a thing. A double alienation, in fact, for he persists only in the memory of others — if at all, and for how long?

What remains, if not nothingness?

“Inevitable nature of nothingness” is the expression of my thoughts on death.