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Hail and welcome.
This episode marks a bit of a departure from where I was planning to go with the ecumenical phenomenology series. Unfortunately my partner and I have been faced with a major loss and this episode is one of my ways of processing what happened. And yes, this is going to be a deeply sad episode about the death of a beloved pet so if you’re not down for that right now, I totally understand, hope you’ll check out one of my other episodes instead. I do think it is one of my best episodes, though, so I hope you’ll come back to it.
On Saturday, October 15th, one of our cats, Astrid, began experiencing breathing difficulties. She had had respiratory problems for her entire life and once we got her into the hospital and got her x-rayed it became clear that those problems had taken their toll. Her lungs were failing. We waited a while to see if things might improve, but once it became clear that she was suffering and not likely to get better over the long term, we opted to euthanize her. The procedure went well and she died peacefully in the early morning of October 17th, with my partner and I by her side to the end. It was her ninth birthday.
The loss has been dreadfully painful for both of us. Astrid was my partner’s cat for two years before I met them and has always been a part of our relationship until now. She loved people, immediately seeking to ingratiate herself to anyone new who came through our door. She had had a litter when she was very young and it had stunted her growth. As a result, she was only about eight pounds at her heaviest and was often mistaken for a kitten.
While my partner and I were waiting for the euthanasia procedure to begin—a duration of incredible anguish for both of us—I thought about Nietzsche’s theory of eternal return, and this passage from The Gay Science titled “The Greatest Weight,” which I’ll read in full:
What, if some day or night a demon were to steal after you into your loneliest loneliness and say to you: “This life as you now live it and have lived it, you will have to live once more and innumerable times more; and there will be nothing new in it, but every pain and every joy and every thought and sigh and everything unutterably small or great in your life will have to return to you, all in the same succession and sequence—even this spider and this moonlight between the trees, and even this moment and I myself. The eternal hourglass of existence is turned upside down again and again, and you with it, speck of dust.”
Would you not throw yourself down and gnash your teeth and curse the demon who spoke thus? Or have you once experienced a tremendous moment when you would have answered him: “You are a god and never have I heard anything more divine.” If this thought gained possession of you, it would change you as you are or perhaps crush you. The question in each and every thing, “Do you desire this once more and innumerable times more?” would lie upon your actions as the greatest weight. Or how well disposed would you have to become to yourself and to life to crave nothing more fervently than this ultimate eternal confirmation and seal?
I thought about this while the moments passed and after some time came to state of radical acceptance. I fully accepted the reality of my suffering and not only my total inability to escape from it but also my lack of desire to. For me to try to reject that suffering or push it away would be to push away part of the total experience of our dear companion. The thought became a meditation, which repeated in my mind as a mantra: “I accept this.” And I decided that if I were to live another life, even an infinite number of them, and be joined again for some part of each of them by another Astrid, I would accept that as well, including the final days and final moments of her life. I found a great deal of strength in that thought, and even a kind of joy.
Trying to get to sleep when we got home on the night of her death, I thought about loss and mourning in terms of the ecumenicon and came to a new realization about its structure and dynamics. In a way, this feels like Astrid’s last gift to me, and so I’ll share it with you in this episode. In doing so, I’ll have to introduce some concepts that I haven’t had time to fully develop yet, so there are things that might change later on and there are some things I might simply be mistaken about, but I believe that the fundamental idea I’ll be exploring in this episode—hypoptosis—is sound and reveals something deeply meaningful about the human condition and how we relate to death and loss.
I know I haven’t even explained entirely what the ecumenicon itself is at this point, beyond it’s just being a ground of abstract reality, the ontological structure of the human life-world of meaning and values. I can’t go into all the details in this episode but for now understand that the ecumenicon is what I believe to be the data structure of the human mind as it exists intersubjectively—meaning existing between conscious minds. It’s a structured network of connections which we, to a substantial degree, share as a species, and to a greater degree as civilizations and societies and to an even greater degree as smaller social systems. As a bit of a demonstration, consider the concept of beauty. That’s a word that I’m sure calls particular associations to your mind, associations that are substantially personal and private, and you are also aware that this word conjures up associations for me as well, and for everyone else listening to this episode. But while our specific associations might be quite different, both in terms of their specific content and their general characteristics, we don’t imagine that beauty itself means something entirely different for each of us, completely absent any sort of shared understanding. Were we to pool our various associations and review them together, we would likely say things to each other along the lines of, “Yes, that is beautiful,” and “I don’t find that beautiful but I see why you would find that beautiful.” We might even express shock or outrage at someone’s sense of beauty, which wouldn’t be possible if the meaning of beauty were purely subjective, if beauty truly were exclusively in the eyes of the beholder.
The ecumenicon is an intersubjective reality but at the same time it is instantiated individually in human minds. Consider that your perception of my voice (or my written words) is constituted entirely within your mind. While it seems to you as though my voice is out here in the “real world” where your speakers are or computer monitor is, that experience is in fact occurring entirely in your mind. And this isn’t to say that your experience of listening to my podcast episode right now isn’t really happening; rather that what is “really happening” and in fact the “real” itself are purely mental.
“Okay, granted,” you might say, “But there is still a real world out there that we’re experiencing, something that is being represented in our mental experience.” For reference—and I’ll be using this terminology throughout the ecumenical phenomenology project—let’s refer to that world—the “real” world that we’re talking about here, the one that exists objectively out there and that we experience in our mental reality—as the ontic world. The intersubjective mental reality that we actually experience, by contrast, is the eiditic world.
Those familiar with the work of the great philosopher Immanuel Kant will note a similarity here to his concepts of the noumenal and the phenomenal. This is going to be a painful oversimplification of a complex philosophical system, but: Kant, in responding to the earlier philosopher David Hume, wanted to provide a ground for knowledge beyond relations between ideas, propositions such as “all bachelors are unmarried,” and matters of fact, propositions that can be empirically verified by looking at the world to see if what the proposition claims is in fact the case. Hume had argued quite convincingly that no knowledge beyond these two categories is possible, but Kant, in a remarkable turn which he referred to as his Copernican revolution, argued that we can know things beyond these two categories because the mind itself structures our experience of reality.
The famous Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek claimed that Kant’s Copernican revolution was the true beginning of philosophy and that everything prior could only be understood as philosophy in terms of its being an antecedent to Kant. I’m coming to agree with Žižek on this, but Kant’s revolution came at a cost. While we can, it seems, know certain things about our experience of reality, we are barred from knowing anything about reality in itself, as it exists objectively, apart from our experience. No matter how hard we try, we can never get outside of or behind our own experience in order to see what things are “really like” apart from that experience.
The problem here is that our assertion that there is a real world out there in the first place that we can’t know anything about is itself something we are claiming to know about the real world. This challenge was famously taken up by Kant’s intellectual successors: Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel, but we won’t be going into the details of that progression here beyond mentioning Fichte’s response of jettisoning the positing of the real world entirely. This would seem to turn us in the direction of solipsism, the claim that one’s own experience of reality is in fact the only reality and that we can’t know whether other people really exist beyond just being, effectively, figments of our imagination. This was not actually Fichte’s position, but rather than getting into the details of that, let’s return to what I referred to earlier as the ontic and eiditic worlds.
Let’s put aside for the moment the matter of whether there really is a “real world” out there that we are experiencing representationally in some way and consider just the phenomenal experience of what it is that we are calling reality. Suppose you’re listening to this in your car along with a few other passengers, whom you’ve just picked up from a medical experiment which did not affect their perceptions in any way but which has the curious side effect that the subjects will randomly state basic empirical facts about their experience for a few hours afterwards. One of the subjects says, “We are riding in a car listening to a podcast episode about the death of a cat.” Another subject says, “I agree with this.” And you find that all of this conforms to your own experience as well. Now, if there is in fact an ontic world “out there” that you are experiencing representationally, it remains the case that your experience of that world, including your experience of other people’s reporting of their own experience, is constituted entirely within your mind. Nevertheless, if other people actually exist, it seems very much to be the case that this ontic world is something that can be referred to and manipulated in various ways in order to bridge the private realities of our minds. You can confirm various things that we might normally call empirical facts, and you can blow air through the various holes in your face (all part of the ontic world) in order to create sonic vibrations in patterns that others will recognize, conveying meaning, or use colored liquid or carbon crystals to make marks on paper to do something quite similar.
Later on in this series, I’m going to start referring to the ontic world by a term that I think more closely reflects what it actually is to us: the liminal surface of the ontic void, or just the liminal surface for short. Now, why the ontic world is actually void is not a matter I’ll be getting into here. What’s important is that the liminal surface is a foundational structure of the ecumenicon. Like the ecumenicon itself, it is instantiated within each individual human mind. More precisely, it is itself part of the ecumenicon. Our intersubjective experience of reality is—and I’m being somewhat poetic here—built on top of it, like an immense, enormously-complex scaffold built over a stretch of rock. We can both manipulate the liminal surface for the purposes of communication and refer to it via that communication, as well as use it to refer to other parts of our otherwise-private experience. It is that which allows our private experience of reality to be intersubjective and public.
It’s not important that this be entirely clear at this point, and, again, I apologize for having to present these ideas in a somewhat disorganized fashion. What is important is one of the central implications of this structure, which is—and I’m being quite literal here—that we integrate the world into ourselves in a profound way. The clothes I’m wearing, the laptop I wrote this on, the microphone I used to record this episode, all of this exists for me as part of the base mental substance of my reality and is properly part of my mind, part of me. You yourself are likewise part of me in this way, perhaps as just a number shown to me when I look up my audience statistics, perhaps as someone for whom I have a name and a face, perhaps as a fellow being with whom I’ve shared physical presence. And I exist for you in exactly the same way. The Break between our minds is spanned by the liminal surface of the ontic void.
But the liminal surface is unstable, always in flux, and thus these foundations upon which our self-structures are constructed are prone to, and indeed must inevitably succumb to, hypoptosis, which, if you’ll be a bit generous with my etymology, is Ancient Greek for “falling out from under.” Now, Astrid’s death is an example of hypoptosis but the term is much broader than just “death.” If you lose a pair of scissors, one that you didn’t even really care about, that too is hypoptosis. If you lose touch with someone, maybe someone very dear to you, even if they don’t actually die, that’s also hypoptosis. When hypoptosis occurs, a part of the liminal surface falls out from under the scaffold of the ecumenicon, and as a result, part of the ecumenicon collapses. These collapses can be very small and not very important to us. They happen constantly; I doubt an hour goes by without some hypoptotic process starting or finishing or continuing. Or they can be structural disintegrations of the fundamental structure of reality as devastating as a nuclear war. For each of us, there is a final hypoptosis which will destroy reality itself. Even if you believe in any sort of afterlife, I think we’re safe in saying that it will be an entirely new reality, which leads one to question how such an afterlife can truly be ours, but that’s a matter for another time.
Death is a species for which hypoptosis is a genus, and what is lost with each hypoptosis is a part of ourselves. Again, I’m not just being poetic here. I’m saying that each loss we experience of something we normally think of as being beyond ourselves is in fact a loss within ourselves. Sometimes we reach out into the space left behind, as when you’re cooking and look around for your scissors before noticing or remembering you’ve lost them and then shrugging it off and using a knife; or when you start opening a can of cat food before remembering that your cat is no longer around to eat it and never will be again. Those possibilities for action, those affordances, those ways of doing, ways of being, ways of thinking… they’re gone to us, and those things comprise the structure of who we are.
For example, because of Astrid’s small size, she could just sneak onto my lap and I wouldn’t notice for quite a while. Then I’d look down and say, “Where did this cat come from?” I’d say this, of course, hoping to get a smile or a laugh out of my partner, and usually it would do the trick. That possibility for action is gone to me. If I say that now, there are two possibilities: one, there’s no cat in my lap. That would probably just be a cruel reminder of Astrid’s death. Two, our other cat, Neshama, is in my lap. The problem there is that it’s impossible to not know that Neshama is getting into your lap. Prior to Astrid’s death she represented half of the number of cats but over two-thirds of the total cat mass in the house. So, again, cruel reminder. If I want to get a laugh, I’ll have to figure out something else to do now.
Fortunately, new possibilities present themselves right away. And this is the key: we can rebuild into the space left behind. I had started working on a new song maybe about a week before Astrid’s death, and while it was going well, I wasn’t quite sure where it fit within the constellation of my various musical projects, and if it turned out to be the start of a new project, I wasn’t sure what the scope of it would be beyond just that one song. After Astrid’s death, the lyrics I had down seemed eerily prescient and I decide to use it to memorialize her, along with this episode. When I made that decision, the possibilities for the song and what other music might lay beyond it bloomed like a field of flowers and I felt as though I was standing on the verge of a new way of musical being. Music is something I’ve done for a very long time now and for a while I’ve felt very locked in to certain ideas and approaches, but that’s now shifted quite radically and I’ve noticed that in several other areas of my life I feel a similar sense of openness and possibility. At this point I’m probably going well beyond the bounds of what I can reasonably claim with any certainty, but since Astrid’s death I’ve felt a remarkable possibility for personal transformation and I’m trying to take advantage of it as best I can. It seems a fitting way to honor a life that has contributed so deeply to mine for so many years.
That concludes my main discussion of hypoptosis but in the process of writing this I also wrote a few paragraphs that don’t quite fit with that specific focus but which I think are too meaningful and valuable to leave out, and I’ll present those to you here.
In terms of the bare experience of loss, examining my grief from a phenomenological perspective has been both informative and therapeutic. The amorphous “feeling” of loss can be separated into a collection of propositional and interrogative thoughts, memory-images from Astrid’s life and her final moments which play back like short films, physical reactions, behavioral tendencies, and bodily sensations which can be quite intense but which are not exactly unpleasant when isolated from the broader context of grief. There is additionally something which I might refer to as propositional awareness. I am often not thinking the propositional thought that Astrid has died but, rather, I exist in a non-discursive state of knowing that that is the case. It seems possible that that state of propositional awareness is itself essentially a kind of bodily sensation or semiconscious memory recall.
Oddly, when I try to pin down which of these experiences contains the pain of grief, I am unable to locate it. My propositional thoughts include, for example, “My cat has died,” but this is a bare statement of fact and does not itself contain pain. The bodily sensations are closest to something I could call pain but, as I already alluded to, they are not innately unpleasant, just very intense. One would think that the memory-images would be painful, but when detached from the other processes, they are only raw, neutral information. Only when I start pairing these modalities of experience together do they begin to seem aptly describable as “pain.” This typically occurs in chain reactions. A memory appears in my field of consciousness: Astrid’s body lying on the table after her death. A propositional thought follows: “My cat has died.” Physical sensations emerge: a kind of glowing radiance in my chest and a pressure behind my face. My eyes water and I began to weep and sniffle. Further thoughts follow, perhaps interrogative thoughts like “Is there something we could have done to save her?” From this follow further memories, further sensations, and further reactions. One proposition in particular seems key to the entire experience: “I want my cat to not have died.” Trying to locate the want itself puts me in a similar predicament: like the pain of grief, it seems to be more an emergent property of a system of experiences than anything that exists simply in itself.
Noticing this, I begin to wonder whether even physical pain might be like this, but that’s an investigation for another time.
The state of exploding out the various phenomenological components of grief requires concentration and isn’t something that I can maintain indefinitely. Whenever they amalgamate back into a unity, the pain emerges in full force. It’s quite potent and undeniable, which is strange given its clearly-ephemeral nature. That raises further questions about other aspects of phenomenological experience, questions which are especially interesting within the context of ecumenical phenomenology, and I’ll be continuing to explore those in the coming essays.
Thank you for joining me in this episode to memorialize a beautiful life.
Ave lux. Ave Astrid. Ave Satana.