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Article: Death, nothingness, and subjectivity.
- Article from:
- The Humanist
- Article date:
- November 1, 1994
- Author:
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 1994 American Humanist Association. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
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For only death annihilates all
sense, all becoming, to replace
them with non-sense and absolute cessation.
-- F. Gonzalez-Cruzzi, "Days of the Dead," in the New Yorker, November 1993
The words quoted above distill the common secular conception of death. If we decline the traditional religious assurances of an afterlife, or their fuzzy New Age equivalents, and instead take the hard-boiled and thoroughly modern materialist view of death, then we likely end up with Gonzalez-Cruzzi. Rejecting visions of reunions with loved ones or of crossing over into the light, we anticipate the opposite: darkness, silence, an engulfing emptiness. But we ...