Philos Stud
DOI 10.1007/s11098-012-0081-7
The expectation of nothingness
James Baillie
Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2012
Abstract While all psychologically competent persons know that they will one
day die, this knowledge is typically held at a distance, not fully assimilated. That is,
while we do not doubt that we will die, there is another sense in which we cannot
fully believe it either. However, on some rare occasions, we can grasp the reality of
our mortal nature in a way that is seemingly revelatory, as if the fact is appreciated
in a new way. Thomas Nagel calls this experience ‘the expectation of nothingness’.
But how can I be shocked by what I already know? After illustrating this phenomenon via examples including Tolstoy’s The Death of Ivan Ilyich, I draw on the
work of Thomas Nagel, Tamar Szabo Gendler, Mark Johnston and others to
articulate and explain our typical state of believing-yet-not-believing in our inevitable death, and offer a hypothesis as to how this condition is occasionally overcome, so that we grasp our mortality in a more psychologically integrated manner.
Keywords
Death Alief Indexical thought Self
1 The shock of the known
It might seem that there could be no form of thought about your own death
except either an external view, in which the world is pictured as continuing
after your life stops, or an internal view that sees only this side of death – that
includes only the finitude of your expected future consciousness. But this is
not true. There is also something that can be called the expectation of
nothingness, and though the mind tends to veer away from it, it is an
unmistakable experience, always startling, often frightening, and very
J. Baillie (&)
Department of Philosophy, University of Portland, 5000 N. Willamette Blvd., Portland,
OR 97203-5798, USA
e-mail: [email protected]
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different from the familiar recognition that your life will go on for only a
limited time. (Nagel 1986, pp. 225–226)
It has long been recognized that while there is a clear sense in which each of us
knows that he or she will one day die, this knowledge is somehow kept at a distance,
so that it is not fully grasped. We typically go about our lives as though we had all
the time in the world. However, as Nagel describes above, we can be occasionally
roused from this slumber in a way that is uniquely alarming and revelatory. We are
brought face to face with what we already know, namely the inevitability of our
death, so that this is recognized as if for the first time. But how can I be startled by
what I already know? That is the primary topic of this paper. In what follows, I will
call it ‘the central question’.
One philosopher who has written recently about this issue is Mark Johnston: ‘‘By
all ordinary standards of knowledge, we know that we are mortal, we know that we
are just one of the others, all of whom go down to their deaths, but we can’t really
believe it’’ (2010, p. 138). But if we know that we are mortal, it follows by standard
accounts of knowledge that we also believe it. As Shelly Kagan says, ‘‘it’s puzzling
how we can so much as understand what’s going on in cases like this. How can
anyone believe and not believe in their own mortality?’’ (2012, p. 193). So the
challenge is to articulate the senses in which we do and do not believe that we will
die, in a way that avoids attributing a logically impossible combination of states to
the subject. I will propose that the key is to recognize that we are all, nearly all of
the time, subject to a kind of mental dissociation that prevents us from
wholeheartedly accepting our mortal nature. Rather, on some level, we take
ourselves to be exempt from this condition.
The most famous literary depiction of these issues is found in Tolstoy’s The
Death of Ivan Ilyich. This novella was based on Tolstoy’s own experiences of the
expectation of nothingness, as described in his unfinished and posthumously
published story ‘‘The Memoirs of a Madman’’ (in Tolstoy 2008). Tolstoy presents
Ivan as someone who had never seriously attended to the fact of his own mortality,
but who is suddenly forced to confront it on becoming terminally ill. In what is
possibly the most famous passage in the book, he writes that
The syllogism he had learned from Kiesewetter’s Logic – ‘Caius is a man,
men are mortal, therefore Caius is mortal’ - had always seemed to him correct
as applied to Caius, but by no means to himself. That man Caius represented
man in the abstract, and so the reasoning was perfectly sound; but he was not
Caius, not an abstract man; he had always been a creature quite, quite distinct
from all the others.’’ (Tolstoy 1981, p. 79)
However, there is surely a commonplace sense in which Ivan always knew that
he would one day die. If that were not so, he would be a psychological anomaly,
whereas the book’s ability to chill us to the bone depends on our seeing ourselves in
him. It is more accurate to say, with Kagan, that Ivan paid lip service to the fact of
his mortality: that the implications of this fact were never thought through, and so
the knowledge remained inert.
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In saying that Ivan is shocked by the realization that he will die, it is important to
be clear on precisely what he discovered. On the one hand, he learned that he had a
fatal illness. Now that was certainly news to him. But the revelation at the heart of
his trauma is not that he will die of this disease, but rather that he will die. The
puzzle is how this can come as a shock.
While Ivan’s situation displays some aspects of the central question, it does not
show its full depth, focusing as it does on an unreflective man who kept his attention
diverted from his mortal nature by absorption in his daily routines and duties. One
might say that this is the ‘easy’ problem of how our mortality can come as a shock.
For a taste of what might be called the ‘hard’ problem, consider, by contrast, the
case of novelist Julian Barnes, as described in the following pair of passages from a
recent memoir:
For me, death is the one appalling fact which defines life; unless you are
constantly aware of it, you cannot begin to understand what life is about;
unless you know and feel that the days of wine and roses are limited, that the
wine will madeirize and the roses turn brown in their stinking water before all
are thrown out for ever – including the jug – there is no context to such
pleasures and interests as come your way on the road to the grave’’ (Barnes
2008, p. 125)
Only a couple of nights ago there came again that alarmed and alarming
moment, of being pitchforked back into consciousness, awake, alone, utterly
alone, beating pillow with fist and shouting ‘‘Oh no Oh No OH NO’’ in an
endless wail, the horror of the moment – the minutes – overwhelming what
might, to an objective witness, appear a shocking display of exhibitionist selfpity. An inarticulate one too: for what sometimes shames me is the
extraordinary lack of descriptive, or responsive words that come out of my
mouth. … We know that extreme physical pain drives out language; it is
dispiriting to learn that mental pain does the same. (op.cit, pp. 124–125)
These two passages, I believe, powerfully illustrate Nagel’s distinction between
the ordinary awareness of mortality admitted by all reflective persons, and the
utterly different state that he calls the expectation of nothingness. The hard problem
at the heart of my central question is to give an informative theoretical account of
the difference between these forms of awareness. The second passage depicts
someone struck by the dreadful realization that he will die. However, unlike Ivan,
Barnes had given a great deal of thought to his mortality. Indeed, the first passage
shows that he has what Heideggerians call an authentic response to it, in that he
lives in the light of his finitude and regards this attitude as a precondition of a
meaningful life, and, a fortiori, compatible with competent functioning in the world.
So what was responsible for his incapacitating panic? What reduced him to the same
inarticulate scream as filled Ivan’s last days?
The belief that we will one day die usually has a dispositional status, in that we
rarely attend to it in an occurrent manner, but we would immediately and
unequivocally affirm it if prompted. Despite the first passage, Barnes would surely
concur with this. To actively think about one’s death all the time would be a morbid
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obsession incompatible with a full and active life. Barnes’ difference to Ivan is that
while Ivan rarely attended to his mortality at all, and successfully utilized
mechanisms for dismissing such thoughts when they arose, Barnes took them
seriously, and actively pursued their implications. But if that is the case, how can he
still be subject to the ordeal described in the second passage? Unlike with Ivan, this
cannot be explained by saying that he is only now, for the first time, fully focusing
on his mortality.
I will argue that there are two different levels of ‘screening’ (to use Tolstoy’s
metaphor) from the full appreciation of our mortality. The first, as previously
employed by Ivan, is the screen whereby one rarely considers this fact at all, and,
when one does, it is immediately dismissed and one’s attention diverted to an
immediate concern, such as (in Ivan’s case) a card game with friends, a work-related
duty, or a marital quarrel. Tolstoy describes this process in Ivan’s friend Pyotr
Ivanovich as he reflected on Ivan’s end.
‘Three days of terrible suffering and death. Why, the same thing could happen
to me at any time now’, he thought and for a moment felt panic-stricken. But
at once, he himself did not know how, he was rescued by the customary
reflection that all this had happened to Ivan Ilyich, not to him, that it could not
and should not happen to him…. With this line of reasoning Pyotr Ivanovich
set his mind at rest and began to press for details about Ivan Ilyich’s death, as
though death were a chance experience that could happen only to Ivan Ilyich,
never to himself. (op.cit., p. 39)
The second more subtle and mysterious screen, marking Nagel’s distinction
between objectively acknowledging one’s own mortality and the expectation of
nothingness, comes into view when we compare the two passages from Barnes.
Even when the initial screen is lifted (as in the attitude described in the first
passage), something keeps the full reality of death at bay, so that it can be a subject
of philosophizing. However, when the second screen is raised, these rational
capacities are immobilized and one is engulfed in inarticulate terror.
I face a major obstacle in explaining the nature of this second screen, since its
‘raising’ is rare, and many intelligent reflective persons have not undergone it. Not
only is the resulting experience uncommon, but it is unlike any other kind of
experience. No process of expanding or subtracting from other kinds of experience
will yield a clear view of what it is like to bear the expectation of nothingness. I
cannot argue for the irreducible character of this experience in a way that would
convince anyone who has not had it. I merely state that it accords with my own
encounters with such experiences. Corroboration of my claim could only consist in
the consensus of those who have undergone similar experiences. In calling this
condition ‘It’, Tolstoy brings out its inimitable and sui generis nature, in all its
intensity and sheer otherness:
And then It would come back and stand there and stare at him, and he would
be petrified, the light would go out of his eyes, and again he would begin
asking himself: ‘Can It alone be true?’ …. And to escape from this situation
Ivan Ilyich sought relief - other screens - and other screens turned up and for a
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while seemed to offer some escape; but then they immediately collapsed or
rather became transparent, as though It penetrated everything and nothing
could obscure It. (op.cit., p. 81)
My obstacle may have a second source. Bernard Williams made the following
provocative remarks in his review of The View From Nowhere:
What one finds naturally perplexing, however, is not just a matter of whether
one has a philosophically disposed nature. It is also a matter of what sort of
philosophy one’s nature is disposed to, and there are some other cases in
which a reader, open enough to being perplexed, may wonder whether some
problem, which Nagel powerfully feels and has vividly expressed, is quite as
deeply intractable as he suggests. (1986, p. 6)
I too have found that many philosophers seem temperamentally unable to see
what the problem is, or why I am making such a fuss over it. I imagine them
impatiently saying, in the style of Samuel Johnson, ‘‘Sir, we know that we will die,
and there’s an end on it.’’ However, while acknowledging these problems in
communicating the central question, I have no option but to describe this special
state of really knowing that I will die, of having the expectation of nothingness, as
clearly and in as much detail as I can. With this aim, I will give one more example
of the phenomenon, one that I endured in 1984. I do so with some reservations, as it
involves a degree of self-disclosure uncommon in philosophy journals. The
following passage is adapted from a diary entry written soon after the event.
Last night I entered into a state of mind unlike anything I had experienced
before. I realized that I will die. It may be tomorrow, it may be in fifty years
time, but one way or another it is inevitable and utterly non-negotiable. I no
longer just knew this theoretically, but knew it in my bones. The knowledge of
my death was real to me, as if for the first time (in a way that it no longer is as
I write these words). It was as if I had been given a glimpse of an aspect of
reality that had previously been closed to me. It was as if the blinders had been
removed, and I was the only person to have woken up from a collective dream
to grasp the terror of the situation. It was to be defenseless against this fact,
and without the possibility of defense. This new awareness was completely out
of my control. I have no idea how it came about. All attempts to turn my
attention to other matters failed completely. I could only wait, traumatized, in
the hope that it would pass. I was in this state for the longest ten minutes of my
life.
Another philosopher who has noticed this unique disturbance at the prospect of
death is J.J. Valberg, who calls it ‘being struck by the meaning of death’. Like
Barnes, Valberg notices a strange phenomenon that brings out another aspect of the
obstacle in theorizing about these issues: ‘‘in philosophizing about death, about the
meaning of my death, I am completely undisturbed. Were I actually disturbed,… I
would not be able to philosophize about death. … I would be, you might say,
philosophically disabled’’ (2007, p. 155). So the theorist faces a Catch-22: either he
is having the experience, in which case he is incapable of philosophizing; or his
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intellectual capacities are operative but at some distance from the experience, which
cannot be recreated in the imagination by an act of will.
We now have three cases displaying the phenomenon that raises the central
question, from Tolstoy/Ivan Ilyich, Julian Barnes, and me. To take my own case, we
can contrast my familiar belief regarding my own inevitable death with the extreme
experience described above. Both seem to center on the same intentional state,
namely the belief that I will die. However, the latter was experienced as disclosing
something new to me. But how can I discover what I already know? How can I be
startled by the realization of something that I consciously affirmed on innumerable
occasions?
I will call the usual awareness of one’s mortality ‘N’, or ‘N-states’, where ‘N’
indicates that this is the normal way of actively thinking of these issues.1 I contrast
this with ‘E’, or ‘E-states’, the extraordinary states of the kind described above, that
Nagel calls the expectation of nothingness. The first passage from Barnes describes
N, and the second depicts E. In making the distinction between N and E, I am
thinking of cases like Barnes and myself, persons accustomed to N-thinking about
their mortality. I will return to Ivan Ilyich later.
Before going on I will make three technical points for the sake of clarity. First,
N-states are occurrent rather than dispositional. That is, to be in N is to be actually
thinking about one’s mortality. (Later I will contrast these with ‘A-states’ of being
absorbed in the stream of life, so that this knowledge of one’s mortality is merely
dispositional.) Second, while I will sometimes discuss the intentional contents of
these states, ‘N’ and ‘E’ refer primarily to the experiences themselves rather than to
propositions. Third, I will be deliberately loose concerning the token/type
distinction for simplicity of expression. In some cases I will refer to particular
experiences, such as using ‘E’ to talk about my experience in 1984. At other times, I
will use the terms to stand for standard cases of the relevant kind of experiences. For
example, ‘N’ could refer to any instance of attending to one’s mortality in the usual
manner.
We can set out the central question by juxtaposing two highly plausible factors.
First, it seems that both N and E involve the same belief. Second, E seems to convey
information beyond that in N. The challenge is to either specify what the new
information consists in, or to explain away the appearance of having learned
something. Looking at the first factor, it seems obvious that both N and E center on
the belief that I will die. Furthermore, this belief is not held with greater assurance in
E than in N. In both cases, were you to ask me I would unhesitatingly say that the
likelihood of my death is 100 %. However, it certainly seems that I learned
something in E. Indeed, this experience had the force of a revelation. Looking back
on this event many years later, I see that it was a pivotal moment in my life, with a
significant influence on my future attitudes and actions. But what exactly was
revealed?
1
Due to the proliferation of neologisms and other terms of art in this paper, a referee recommended
adding a Glossary at the end. I have acted on this good advice.
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2 The Central Question: some elaborations and failed proposals
The difference between N and E cannot be explicated in terms of different kinds of
knowledge. For example, it cannot be drawn by saying that N involves merely
propositional knowledge regarding my mortal nature whereas E involves additional
knowledge by acquaintance and/or know-how. First, the notion of knowledge by
acquaintance is most at home when applied to some quale such as a patch of red in
one’s visual field, the taste of coffee, a sore neck, rather than to the intense
recognition of the truth of a proposition, particularly one concerning a permanent
feature of one’s existence, such as mortality.
Turning to the attempt to explain E in terms of abilities not utilized in N, it is
important to understand that E does not involve the use of imagination. For
example, I was not imagining my dying, or some precise way that my death might
come about, nor some consequence such as people gathering grief-stricken around
my corpse. The use of imagination always involves a degree of specific detail,
whereas E involved no particulars regarding the circumstance of my death or dying.
No, E consisted in being face to face with the fact that I will die, at some as-yetunknown time, place, and manner. I have no idea how I will die, but I know for
certain that I will die. This fact was the content of my experience, unadorned by
detail.
Clearly, since E was a life-changing experience, it must significantly differ from
the commonplace N in some way. This follows from a truism about causation, that
a difference in effects must be traced to some difference in causes. At this point,
the reader might think that the solution is obvious, namely that E consisted in the
addition of an emotion—terror—to N, and that E’s greater impact on my life was
in response to this extreme disturbance. However, this proposal will not work,
since it merely defers the point that different effects require different causes. That
is, if N and E centered on tokens of the same belief, how did the feeling of terror
emerge in E, but never in N? It would seem that there has to be some difference in
the mental states centrally involved in N and E for there to be such radically
divergent effects.
Valberg would say that the difference between N and E is that in the latter, the
belief that I will die has ‘sunk in’. However, for this to bring some understanding to
our question, the metaphor must be translated into a literal claim that can be
integrated into a plausible theory of belief acquisition. So what is it for a belief to
sink in? One key factor is assimilation into one’s belief-system, with a process of
adjustment and re-stabilization of the ‘web of belief’ to accommodate the new
information. An example should make this clear. I recall a colleague who had been
awarded tenure the previous week telling me that it hadn’t sunk in yet. Clearly, the
subsequent ‘sinking in’ would not consist in her belief that she has been granted
tenure being held with greater certitude. Rather it would involve registering the
important implications of the tenure decision, such as ‘‘I’m tenured, so I have job
security’’; ‘‘I’m tenured, so I’ll be living in this town for the foreseeable future’’;
‘‘I’m tenured, so it’s not a disaster if my paper gets rejected’’; ‘‘I’m tenured, so my
relationship to my departmental colleagues has undergone a major shift’’, etc. These
consequents would generate other inferences, such as ‘‘Since I’ll be here for a while
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with job security, I should think about buying a house.’’ So grasping the ‘meaning’
of getting tenure, or this fact sinking in, consists in appreciating its wider
implications for one’s life.
This account goes some way to explaining certain aspects of my central question.
In particular, it explains the difference between Ivan’s habitual condition prior to his
revelation, and that of Barnes as described in the first passage from his memoir. In
other words, it marks the distinction between those for whom the first screen is
typically down, and those for whom it is often raised. It separates those who run
from N, and those who live with it. However, this sort of ‘sinking in’ has no clear
analogue in E. It was not that my belief in N was ‘‘I will die’’ and E involved
additional inferences of the form ‘‘I will die, therefore p,’’ in the way that someone
already aware of her terminal illness might suddenly realize that she will never
finish the book she is working on, or never see any grandchildren she might have.
Rather, the traumatizing realization was simply that I will die. If this was not
integrated with my present belief-system—as it seemingly was not, given its
powerful impact—then the central mystery remains intact.
It is tempting to say that some kind of self-deception is involved in N that is
absent in E. But, as before, it is not easy to specify what this might be. After all, the
most common form of self-deception involves believing p while possessing clear
evidence that not-p. However, as I keep emphasizing, it is true that I will die, and I
believe this in both N and E. So it is not that I deliberately turn away from evidence
that would support an unwelcome belief, or refuse to consider it closely, like my
practice during the 2008 economic crisis of not reading the monthly statements of
my financial investments. That sort of avoidance is akin to what I call the ‘first
screen’, and was mastered by Ivan Ilyich. On the contrary, to be in N is to attend to
the fact of one’s mortality.
Valberg describes the most basic form of self-deception regarding our mortality
as the ‘not-me’ phenomenon, where ‘‘we live knowing that we will die but
‘somehow’ believing that it will not happen (to others yes, but not to me) and thus
without being struck by the meaning of death’’ (op.cit., p. 160). He proposes that
this phenomenon occurs because the psyche is dissociated so that I both do and do
not believe that I will die. ‘‘In the usual case of self-deception we profess that p,
even to ourselves, but know that not-p. In the case of death, we profess that p and in
fact to know that p (that I will die); we profess this even to ourselves. And we do
know it. But a little part of us (as we say) believes that not-p; or at any rate does not
openly face what we know and profess to know’’ (op.cit., p. 159).
I agree with Valberg that Tolstoy is pointing towards the ‘not me’ phenomenon
in the passage about Kiezewetter’s Logic. On the one hand, prior to his revelation,
Ivan would undoubtedly affirm his mortality if questioned at any time, and would do
so in first-personal terms. He would affirm ‘‘I will die.’’ On the other hand, he does
not fully and wholeheartedly accept this. However, I am proposing that there is a
subtler sense in which the same can be said of Barnes, even when he is thinking
about his mortality, as in the first quotation from his memoir. That is, persons in N
are also subject to the ‘not me’ phenomenon, in a way that those in E are not. E
exemplifies what we might call the ‘not-not-me’ phenomenon, where the negations
cancel each other out and I recognize that ‘it’s about me!’ My task in the following
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sections of this paper is to give a philosophically illuminating account of what is
going on in these cases.
Before moving on to my positive thesis, let me recap some inadequate
explanations of the difference between N and E. (i) It does not consist in the
presence or absence of attention to the fact of one’s mortality; (ii) Nor does it lie in
different degrees of confidence in this belief. (iii) It is not explicable in terms of
different kinds of knowledge, such as knowing-that versus acquaintance or knowhow; (iv) Nor does it consist in different degrees of imagination regarding scenarios
involving my death; (v) nor in different sets of inferences either to or from the states
in question; (vi) nor in the presence or absence of any emotion caused by the belief
that I will die.
3 Belief and alief
So far, my way of framing the central question has assumed that the mental state at
the center of both N and E is the belief that I will die. One radical way to reject this
assumption employs Tamar Szabó Gendler’s distinction between belief and alief.
She describes alief as follows: ‘‘A paradigmatic alief is a mental state with
associatively linked content that is representative, affective and behavioral and that
is activated—consciously or unconsciously—by features of the subject’s internal or
ambient environment. Aliefs may be either occurrent or dispositional’’ (2008a,
p. 642).
She illustrates alief by considering a joke product where fudge is molded to
resemble dog feces. When presented with this absurd item, and given all the
relevant information about it, people unreservedly affirm that it is fudge. However,
they show some reluctance to eat it, compared to fudge of conventional aspect.
Gendler hypothesizes that the best explanation of this incongruity is while they
believe that the item is fudge, they are simultaneously in the grip of a contrary alief,
representing it as feces. While we can speak loosely of aliefs having content of the
kind we may also ascribe to beliefs, they are more accurately described as involving
a four-place relation between a subject and representational-affective-behavioral
content. In the present case, the three components would be along the lines of the
representational content That’s feces!, The affective response Dirty! Disgusting!,
and the behavioral response Avoid!
Gendler also considers the Skywalk, a glass walkway that extends into the Grand
Canyon, giving the illusion of standing in midair without any support. Clearly
anyone on the walkway believes that it will support them, otherwise they wouldn’t
choose to stand on it. They are not flirting with a low probability of real danger, like
bungee jumpers do. They take it to be as safe as a comparable structure of normal
visibility. However, those on the Skywalk often report struggling with involuntary
surges of panic, as if they were in immediate peril. As before, Gendler attributes this
response to the presence of an alief, one with the representational-affectivebehavioral content High up! No support!—Dangerous!—Get off! These components occur simultaneously, and are automatically generated by the visual
impression as of being unsupported.
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In the above examples, the alief is at odds with the agent’s consciously affirmed
beliefs. That is, they are belief-discordant (or norm-discordant) aliefs. Gendler
(2011) also analyzes unconscious prejudice along these lines. She notes that selfidentified liberal persons will explicitly decry any form of racism, for example
rejecting stereotypes that underlie the attitude that black men have a tendency
towards violence. However, experimental conditions can reveal their having aliefs
with this kind of content. Being constantly exposed to the stereotype in various
ways, both salient and subtle, can implant the alief even in those who consciously
reject beliefs with a similar content to it.
With belief-discordant aliefs, then, ‘‘our reflective desires and beliefs suggest one
type of response or course of action, while our implicit associations and habitual
patterns of response render occurrent another sort of response routine’’ (Gendler
2011, p. 42). The Skywalk environment is atypical, generating the illusion of
walking into thin air. As a result, a set of cognitive, affective, and behavioral
associations are triggered, which clash with the belief that this is a safe structure,
intentionally designed to be almost invisible. This illusion generates panic, together
with physical tension, and a desire to run back to ‘land’. At the same time, the
person believes—knows—that she has given money for the safe thrill of having her
senses deceived.
Another significant difference between aliefs and beliefs is that we can often
change our beliefs fairly quickly in response to evidence, whereas alief involves the
triggering of an associative chain that is virtually immune to immediate revision in
the light of new information. So, seeing or hearing a crack suddenly appear in the
Skywalk would make me believe that I was no longer safe. This helps explain why
the mere fact that one actively believes something contrary to the alief doesn’t
diminish the force of the alief.
However, Gendler does not restrict the presence of aliefs to rare and anomalous
cases, such as those involving perceptual illusion. Aliefs are always with us, but,
like beliefs, typically have dispositional status. Second, even our occurrent aliefs
will largely escape our notice through being in accord with our beliefs. For example,
under normal circumstances, a person’s visual and other sensory inputs align with
her stable beliefs about her environment. ‘‘When a subject’s environment is stable,
typical, and desirable, and the subject is attentive to the relevant features, her salient
occurrent aliefs will be largely in accord with her occurrent reality-reflective
attitudes’’ (2008b, p. 554). Gendler describes these aliefs as belief-concordant (or
norm-concordant).
So how might the alief/belief distinction shed light on the difference between N
and E? The most obvious suggestion would be that in N I have the occurrent belief
that I will die, whereas in E this is joined by an occurrent alief with similar
representational content. In other words, E emerges when this belief-concordant
alief changes its status from dispositional to occurrent. So let us consider its
components. The representational content is ‘‘I will die’’, and the affective state is
anxiety. The third component, the readying of a motor routine, may seem harder to
place, since part of E’s horror lies in realizing that there is nothing you can do about
your mortality. Any behavior will be as much a response to this recognition as to the
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representational content itself. Barnes’ ‘‘oh no, Oh No, OH NO!’’ is all too
appropriate.
An alief-based account can explain how my awareness of my mortality in E
could be so alarming and incapacitating, compared to the calm acceptance of the
fact when considered in N. Since an affective response is a component of an alief,
the anxiety in E is not caused by the alief—rather, it is part of that alief. This
difference, the respective presence and absence of extreme affective response, also
helps to explain why E had such a profound effect on me, something that a purely
belief-based account failed to do.
From my discussion so far, it may seem that there is one way in which the
concept of alief does not easily apply to E. Gendler states that an alief is a
propensity to respond to some stimulus. In particular, the above examples present
aliefs triggered by environmental stimuli of very specific kinds, information whose
representational content is mirrored in the alief itself. My visual input presents me
as being very high up with no support, and the alief’s content echoes this. I am
presented with what looks like feces, and generate the corresponding alief about
feces. However, there need be no immediate and distinctive ‘trigger’ for E. E, like
death itself, can strike at any moment, regardless of what is going on one’s vicinity.
However, Gendler has the resources to deal with this concern. While her most
prominent examples involve an external stimulus, she allows that the triggering
stimulus can be internal, such as from imagination or memory. As quoted above, she
holds that aliefs can be activated ‘‘by features of the subject’s internal or ambient
environment’’ (2008a, p. 642). In her most recent discussion of these issues, she
concedes that she has ‘‘been insufficiently candid about the complex interplay
between internal and external environment in determining which R–A–B structure
is activated by (what we naturally describe as) the salient stimulus’’ (Gendler 2012,
p. 804). So, given that mortality is a permanent feature of one’s existence, it is likely
that any number of mental associations might trigger an occurrent alief about it.
I can only see one small point of dissimilarity between E and Gendler’s cases.
She explains the ‘associative’ aspect of aliefs by their being responses to particular
mental images. However, the representational content of the alief in E does not
include any specific detail about the time or nature of one’s death. Nor is it about
any present or imminent situation. Rather, it concerns a standing condition, noticed
in a new and distinctive manner. In this way, the alief in E is different from the
belief-concordant alief that would be activated, for example, in a passenger in a
plummeting plane, or in a convict being prepared for lethal injection. In cases like
these, the alief’s representational content will include awareness of impending
death, and of the particular situation—respectively, Plane about to crash! I’m about
to die!, and Lethal stuff! I’m about to die! The other two components of the alief, the
affective response and the behavioral impulses, will reflect these details. Still, as the
previous paragraph suggests, someone surviving such an ordeal would have
memories that could trigger awareness of one’s mortality per se, as in E.
Despite this minor concern, the proposal to explain the difference between N and
E in terms of the presence of an occurrent alief in the latter strikes me as highly
promising. Its success will depend on the extent to which the concept of alief
develops, and is integrated into a theoretical understanding of mind. This, in turn,
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will depend on whether it can provide a unified explanation of phenomena that resist
analysis on the standard belief-desire model, or that this model would regard as
unrelated, and requiring separate explanations. On the other hand, if an alief-based
account provides an economical and coherent explanation of my central question,
then this would make a small contribution towards consolidating the place of alief in
psychology and philosophy.
4 The subjective–objective spectrum
The next ingredient for my solution to the central question comes from Thomas
Nagel’s account of the attempt to form an objective view of the world, of the limits
of this enterprise, and of the illusions to which it is prone. In this section of the paper
I will step back from E-states and use Nagel’s work to articulate the nature of
N-states, contrasting them with the unreflective absorption in everyday tasks that I
call ‘A-states’.
While Nagel often talks of ‘the’ objective or subjective standpoint on the world,
he is clear that this is no binary opposition, but marks a range of levels of
objectivity. I call this range the ‘subjective–objective spectrum’. Standpoint x is
more objective than standpoint y when it includes y within its scope, so that the fact
that the world, or some feature of it, can be understood from y is itself explained
within x. That is, we consider from x how the world must be in order to be
comprehended as it is from y. This process can be reiterated and, at the limit, leads
to an utterly impersonal conception of the world, the ‘view from nowhere.’
Nagel uses the term ‘the objective self’ to refer to one taking an objective view.
We should not reify this objective self, as it is not a distinct thing but a way of
understanding the world. In this sense, every point on the spectrum has its correlated
‘self’, but this is merely another way of saying that the world can be experienced or
understood at different levels of objectivity. I follow Nagel in using ‘the objective
self’ to refer to one adopting a relatively impersonal view of the world, a conception
that includes oneself qua human being, an inhabitant of that world so viewed. I will
contrast this with ‘the subjective self’, whose standpoint lies towards the subjective
end of the spectrum. The limiting case of a subjective self is one whose reality is
unreflectively equated with the world as he finds it, with himself at the center. I will
say more about this below.
An objective self is adopted to varying degrees when we theorize. When I locate
myself within this objectively viewed world, this inevitably creates dissociation
between me as the thinker and as an object of thought. When I adopt an objective
view of the world, and see myself, the human being JB, within it, this generates a
sense of detachment from JB, such that the relation between my objective self and
JB seems not to be one of strict identity, but to be accidental, as if I (my objective
self) am a separate entity who merely happens to be occupying JB. This idea of
Nagel’s is, I suggest, the key to Valberg’s ‘not-me’ phenomenon. But, Nagel insists,
this is an illusion: I am JB, and, as with all identities, this holds as a matter of
metaphysical necessity.
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Nagel argues that what I am calling the subjective self is incapable of grasping its
own inevitable non-existence. His diagnosis of this fact is best explained by
contrasting the subjective self’s condition with the objective self’s clear but
incomplete grasp of its mortality. When we view the world in a relatively objective
manner, every particular is regarded as existing contingently, in that its presence or
absence are both taken as nomologically possible. Likewise, both the occurrence
and non-occurrence of any event are taken as ways that things might have turned
out. We understand that things would be very different now, had certain antecedent
conditions been otherwise. For example, we know that JFK might not have been
assassinated, or that a nuclear war could have arisen in 1962 such that many
millions now living would never have come to be. Stepping back in time, we can see
the contingency of entire social and cultural systems. Moving up the subjective–
objective spectrum to encompass scientific knowledge, we understand that a vast
meteor could have struck the earth, changing atmospheric conditions so that human
life never evolved. My objective self sees that JB is no exception to this rule. Nagel
notes the shock on realizing that I would not exist had my parents never met. When
followed through, this line of thought shows that my existence rests on a long chain
of contingencies extending into the distant past. This recognition ‘‘produces a
sinking feeling which reveals that a powerful but unnoticed support has been
removed from my world’’ (op.cit., pp. 121–122).
The objective self views the future as open, a ‘garden of forked paths’ each
comprising a possible world, only one of which will be actualized. I see my own
future as a range of possible trajectories, each culminating in my death. In N, my
objective self conceives of anyone’s death, including my own, as a disjunction of
possibilities. I understand that I might get cancer, or a cerebral hemorrhage, or die in
an auto accident, etc. I know that there are various things I can do to decrease the
likelihood of specific ways of dying. I can have regular medical check-ups; I can
avoid dangerous situations; I can adopt a life of regular exercise and moderate
consumption over one of sloth and debauchery.
However, things are different for the subjective self. At the far subjective end of
the spectrum are unreflective states of the kind that occur when we are absorbed in
everyday activities. I will call these ‘A-states’, after Heidegger’s account of
‘average everydayness’, which makes no distinction between self and world, but
these ‘‘belong together in the single entity Dasein. Self and world are not two
beings, like subject and object … self and world are the basic determination of
Dasein in the unity of the structure of being-in-the-world’’ (1982, p. 297). Tolstoy
presents Ivan Ilyich as existing almost exclusively in average everydayness,
‘screened’ from recognition of his inevitable death by his identification with his
social role and its routines. That is, Ivan epitomizes the way of being that Heidegger
(1962) calls ‘das man’.
In these A-states I take the world, and myself, utterly for granted. In particular, I
unthinkingly assume that things will go on as before. As Nagel puts it, ‘‘The internal
awareness of my own existence carries with it a particularly strong sense of its own
future, and of its possible continuation beyond any future that may actually be
reached. It is stronger than the sense of future possibility attached to the existence of
any particular thing in the world objectively conceived—perhaps of a strength
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surpassed only by the sense of the possible continuation we have about the world
itself’’ (op.cit., p. 226). The subjective self does not think of its death, and in that
sense neither believes nor disbelieves it.
More precisely, someone in A has a standing dispositional belief that he or she
will die, but lacks occurrent beliefs to this effect. In this sense, mortality is not an
issue for the subjective self. When I am in A I do not regard myself as something
that happens to exist but would not exist had antecedent conditions been different.
To the extent that I am aware of myself at all, I take myself for granted as the
seemingly self-sufficient center of the world. Because of this, ‘‘the subjective view
does not allow for its own annihilation, for it does not conceive of its existence as
the realization of a possibility’’ (Nagel op.cit., p. 227). However, as this belief is
placed at the forefront of attention, the person ascends the spectrum, and the
subjective self is replaced by the objective self, with the transition from A- to
N-states. Only when I take a more objective stance do I read my situation in terms of
possibilities and probabilities. In N, my objective self can see that JB might die this
very day. It can see that JB is well past the halfway point of the average lifespan.
Throughout virtually all of our lives, the subjective and objective selves are
insulated from each other, and so the incompatibility of their perspectives goes
unnoticed. This dissociation explains how the same individual can be said to both
believe and not believe that she will die. The apparent contradiction is avoided since
it does not involve one subject co-experiencing two occurrent thoughts, one that
affirms her mortality, and one that denies it. The relationship between an
individual’s subjective and objective selves is analogous to a fugue state where
the two stances are typically oblivious to each other’s existence, like a pair of
workers who never share the same shift. However, the ‘screen’ between them is not
completely secure, and glimpses of a more integrated self-awareness can get
through. In such cases the objective self reveals the illusion of the subjective self: I
see that my taken-for-granted subjective point of view on the world is actually very
precarious, and will cease.
It turns out that I am not the sort of thing I was unconsciously tempted to think
I was: a set of ungrounded possibilities as opposed to a set of possibilities
grounded in a contingent actuality. The subjective view projects into the future
its sense of unconditional possibilities, and the world denies them. It isn’t just
that they won’t be actualized – they will vanish. (Nagel op.cit., p. 228)
5 Two kinds of ‘I’-thoughts
The ingredients for my solution to the central question are now almost complete. So,
to recap, I have distinguished N-states from E-states, where the former involve the
‘normal’ way of occurrently believing that one will die, and the latter involve the
unusual way of confronting one’s mortality that Nagel terms the ‘expectation of
nothingness’. Both N and E are contrasted with A-states, the condition of
unselfconscious engagement with the world, in which belief in one’s mortality is
purely dispositional. Next, I employed Tamar Gendler’s distinction between belief
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and alief, where the latter mental kind has a representational-affective-behavioral
structure. I then expanded upon Thomas Nagel’s notion of an objective self with the
‘subjective–objective spectrum’, wherein each point corresponded to a degree of
objectivity with which one can consider oneself and the world.
The final set of ingredients come from Mark Johnston. Johnston frames his
account of self-awareness and of self-directed thoughts in terms of an arena of
presence and action. This term indicates the perspectival nature of conscious
experience, and denotes the most basic and direct way of thinking of oneself:
The modes of presentation of the items in my perceptual field are perspectival,
that is, they present items to a particular viewing position, or more generally to
a particular point from which someone might sense the surrounding
environment. The implied position at which those modes of presentation
seem to converge is the position of my head and body. To that same implied
position, a bodily field, as it were a three-dimensional volume of bodily
sensation, also presents. And that implied position is also one from which
certain acts, presented as willed, emanate. Furthermore, it is the position
where mental acts seem to be available for higher-order awareness. …. This
whole centered pattern, existing at a particular time, and perhaps over time, I
call an arena of presence and action. …. The extent of that arena includes all
the items that are in principle open to introspection in the broad sense. (2010,
p. 139)
This allows Johnston to distinguish two kinds of de se thought. The first,
involving what he calls the indexical use of ‘I’, is the usual one employed in social
contexts, such as when introducing oneself or talking about oneself. This is
distinguished from the subjective ‘I’, meaning the one at the center of this arena of
presence and action. Whereas the indexical ‘I’ concerns the public figure, the
human being that one is, the subjective ‘I’ refers to the self, the one HERE, at the
center of THIS arena.2
The Gestalt switch from the indexical to the subjective ‘I’ cannot be made by an
act of will. I cannot directly induce it. If I tell myself to focus on the fact that THIS
arena will one day cease, these very thoughts will be in the indexical mode, and so
do not petrify me in the visceral manner of E-states. As Johnston says, ‘‘it is only
insofar as I see Johnston’s death as my ownmost death—the end of this arena of
presence and hence of the property of being me—that Johnston’s death terrifies me’’
(op.cit., p. 159).
The perspectivity of experience generates an asymmetry between one’s arena of
presence and action (HERE) and the world as seen from its center (THERE). On
some deep level we take the HERE/THERE division to be in the world itself, so that,
as a matter of objective fact, we are the axis from which everything revolves. As we
ascend the spectrum, from A-states into N, the more we see the falsehood, the sheer
lunacy of such an egocentric attitude. However, the illusion always returns, being
built into the structure of our consciousness.
2
The subjective ‘I’ should be distinguished from the subjective self, which is contrasted with Nagel’s
notion of the objective self.
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Johnston’s idea of the arena, and his distinction between indexical and subjective
I-thoughts, brings out the difference between Ivan Ilyich on the one hand, and Julian
Barnes or me, regarding our attitudes to our own mortality. Ivan, prior to his
medical diagnosis, had always taken the world as being identical with his world, the
world as it appears from his arena of presence and action, framed around himself.
As Heidegger recognized, this unconscious identification is a central feature of
A-states, the subjective end-point of the spectrum. Ivan had no established practice
of N-states, of stepping back to view the world, and his place in it, more objectively.
Then, for the first time, he saw that he is not really the center of things, the axis
around which everything turns, and that the world (not his world, but the world) will
go on pretty much as it is without him, as it would have done had he never existed.
However, this is not the situation of a novelist or a philosopher. We have thought
about this kind of thing for years, talked about it, written about it. Yet despite our
habitual N-states, our own mortality can come as a revelation to us too—or at least
those of us with a certain type of temperament. So what is going on in these cases?
When I take a relatively objective view of the world, I experience the world
perspectivally, and recognize that I do so. I know that my world, the world as
viewed from my arena, differs from the world as you find it. I know that there are
many other arenas. But I also know that the world is intrinsically perspectiveless.
My view of my own mortality is seen in this context. I know that this intrinsically
perspectiveless world will continue after I die. But in N, all this occurrent
knowledge is held at arm’s length. It does not disturb me. In N, not only does the
objective self affirm that ‘All men are mortal, Caius is a man, so Caius is mortal’,
but it would also grant that ‘All men are mortal, I am a man, so I am mortal’. I
would now add that the objective self frames this latter argument in terms of
indexical ‘I’-thoughts. This restriction creates the ‘not me’ phenomenon, where
even the explicit avowal of the belief that I will die is kept at a distance, as about
someone in the objectified world, who is seen as accidentally related to what
Johnston calls the subjective ‘I’.
6 The central question
It is time to bring these considerations together and apply them to the central
question: how can I be startled by what I already know, namely that I will die? I will
begin with the tripartite distinction between N-states, E-states, and A-states. As you
will recall, N-states comprise our ordinary occurrent reflections on our mortal
nature, whereas E-states are the extraordinary states reported by Barnes and myself,
states of the kind that tortured Ivan Ilyich in his last days. A-states are when one is
absorbed in activities, with minimal self-awareness. In A, my belief that I will die is
dispositional. The shift from the dispositional to occurrent mode marks a shift from
the A- to the N-state. This involves moving up the subjective–objective spectrum.
Ivan Ilyich spent virtually all of his life in A, and other attitudes emerging from
the extreme subjective viewpoint. Any time N-states about mortality began to
emerge, the ‘first screen’ would come down before he could think seriously about
them. Ivan was catapulted into E with virtually no intellectual preparation. That is,
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The expectation of nothingness
both screens were lifted at the same time. His pain was exacerbated by recognizing
that his friends and family remained immersed in the same state of self-absorbed
denial as he had lived his life. In Ronald Blythe’s words, ‘‘It is the tragedy of a man
who is a death illiterate and who has to make his way out of the world through the
ranks of other death illiterates’’ (in Tolstoy 1981, p. 24).
While the difference between A and N is a matter of their respective locations in
the spectrum, this is not true of the relationship between N and E. E does not involve
a more objective take on the world than N. Rather, the difference should be
understood in terms of the respective levels of psychological integration involved. N
is an essentially dissociated condition, and the shift to E involves a sudden and
significant increase of integration of the mind or self. This is what the raising of the
second ‘screen’ consists in, so that certain thoughts or forms of awareness become
newly co-experienced. N involves both believing that I will die, and also not
believing it, in being subject to the ‘not-me’ phenomenon.
In N, I occurrently believe that I will die. In Johnston’s terms, this belief is
framed in terms of an indexical ‘I’-thought. In Nagel’s terms, the belief is held by
my objective self, and is about the human being JB, a constituent of the objectively
viewed world. In E, all this remains. However, in addition, I have an occurrent
belief-concordant alief whose representational content is ‘‘I will die’’ and whose
affective component is extreme anxiety. Furthermore, the ‘I’ within the alief’s
representational content is subjective, in Johnston’s sense. The alief represents the
fact that THIS arena will cease to be—the world will go on, but this unique
perspective on it will vanish. The introduction of the subjective ‘I’ is what negates
the ‘not me’ attitude. That is, it adds the recognition that this is about me—or not
‘not me’. All this constitutes Nagel’s ‘expectation of nothingness’.
I introduced the central question by saying that the core component of both N and
E was the same belief, that I will die, yet E was experienced as revealing something
new to me. We now see that E also involved an alief, and that the ‘I’ in the content
of this alief was not the same as in the belief that is common to N and E. That is, the
alief and the belief involved different modes of presentation of me, the subjective
and indexical, respectively. The shared grammatical form of the sentences used to
describe the two mental states disguises a theoretically significant difference in how
I present myself to myself in thought. The ‘I’ in the belief ‘‘I will die’’, in both N
and E, is the indexical ‘I’, whereas the ‘I’ in the alief in E is the subjective ‘I’.
Finally, the anxiety experienced in E was not caused by the belief that I will die, but
was internal to the alief.
7 Is this case unique?
My paper has focused on a single issue, of how I can be shocked by something that I
already know, namely that I will die. But does one’s own mortality present a unique
case of this phenomenon? Are there other cases in which I can suddenly realize
something that I (in some sense) know, and which can be understood along similar
lines?
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When we bring together all the pieces of my account of the difference between N
and E, it seems that there are few other cases that involve them all, though some
pieces have wide application. Gendler’s examples illustrate that the alief-belief
distinction holds in a broad range of cases. A vast number of thoughts can be
entertained from different locations on the subjective–objective spectrum. However,
Johnson’s distinction between indexical and subjective I-thoughts narrows the field
considerably.
I can see two plausible contenders for cases that can be analyzed along the lines
of my solution to the central question. The first, raised by Nagel, is the recognition
that I might not have existed. Clearly, my objective self can calmly acknowledge
this. However, if I grasp the fact subjectively through an accompanying alief,
awareness of the sheer precariousness of THIS arena might induce that same
vertiginous panic as in E. That is, in addition to the anticipation of nothingness, I
can be viscerally aware of having narrowly avoided it already.
I am less sure about my second example. The following remarks are brief and
speculative, and a satisfactory treatment of the issues raised would require more
extensive discussion than the present paper allows. While we know that our nearest
and dearest will die, we are typically protected from the full force of this knowledge
in a very similar way to that regarding our own inevitable demise. I know that my
wife will one day die, in the same way that I know that I will die, in N. However,
this belief can be accompanied by a belief-concordant alief, framed in a subjective
manner, with the recognition that THAT arena of presence and action, that unique
point of view so intimately connected to THIS one, will cease. In cases like this, it is
plausible that the strength of the affective element of the alief will depend on the
degree of closeness between the two people, and that at the limit, its intensity will
match that of E.
Acknowledgments This paper has taken a very long time to write. Jason Hagen and Ted Parent both
gave extensive comments on early drafts. More recently, John Martin Fischer gave advice and
encouragement. Many discussions with Richard Askay helped me to appreciate Heidegger. Finally, I
thank this journal’s referees for their helpful comments.
Glossary
N-states
E-states
A-states
Alief (Gendler)
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The normal way to occurrently believe in one’s own
inevitable death.
The unusual way of occurrently acknowledging one’s
mortality, that Nagel calls the ‘expectation of
nothingness’.
Absorption in everyday tasks, with little reflective
consciousness, and where beliefs about one’s mortality
are merely dispositional. (See also the subjective self)
a state with representational-affective-behavioral
content activated by features of one’s internal or
external environment
The expectation of nothingness
Objective self (Nagel)
One who adopts a relatively objective view of the world
and one’s place in it.
Subjective self
One who takes an unreflective view of himself and the
world
Subjective–objective
The range of viewpoints on the world and oneself, at
spectrum:
different degrees of objectivity.
Arena of presence and
The structured set of perspectival modes of presentation
action (Johnston)
of the contents of one’s consciousness
Indexical ‘I’ (Johnston) The way of thinking about oneself as a publically
accessible person.
Subjective ‘I’ (Johnston) The one at the center of this arena of presence and
action.
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