The Death of the Living Self and its Remains

an Understanding of Death through Henri Bergson.s Philosophy of Life

Abstract

This paper is an essay in understanding death using the philosophy of Henri Bergson. It contains three parts. The first part is a reading of the critique of the idea of nothingness in L'Evolution créatrice. By interpreting Bergson's denial of nothingness as a denial of the nothingness of death, I argue that the philosophical investigation of the death of the living self must not be thought of as an ‘intuition of nothing’ or ‘annihilation of the existing self’. This argument implies that, to understand death, we must begin not with the ‘existing self’ but with the ‘living self = becoming self’, and the death of such a self must be thought of as ‘a halt in the process of becoming’, not as anything like a ‘falling into non-existence’. In the second part, I try to distill the state of the ‘living self = becoming self’ from the theory of body and pure memory in Matière et mémoire. In this way, the becoming self is understood as the node of an acting body and an evolving memory, and this implies that the joining of these is carried out according to Bergson's idea of ‘attention to life’. Based on the concepts above, in the final part, I demonstrate that the death of the living self is a halt in ‘attention to life’. Bergson's paper, “Le Souvenir du présent et la fausse reconnaissance“, is referred to in support of this conclusion.
In brief, what Bergson's philosophy of life reveals is that the living self is ‘the becoming self that is acting in the world by/in the body’, and its death is ‘a halt in becoming due to the disintegration of the body’. From this conclusion and the theory of Matière et mémoire, which argues that memory exists independently of the material world, it is strongly suggested that pure memory, as a trace of life, must remain after the death of the becoming self, as is also the case in the material world.