We're cursed with knowing we die and we therefore come up with various stories of how we can prevent truly dying. In many cultures this involves serving a creation or construction that will judge us righteous in the end. But what if instead of providing calming answers to existential dread, we’re actually producing ideologies that disavow life? And in order to uphold their legitimacy and truth, we have to start excluding or killing people with rival claims to life and death. The suffering is real and yet entirely imaginary.
Every monument, every flag, every sacred text is a part of the same project: cheating death through meaning. Since we cannot live forever as biological entities, we create stories that allow parts of us to survive our bodily ending. We build nations that will outlast us. We serve causes greater than ourselves. We follow leaders who promise that our truth, our people, our way of life will achieve a kind of immortality that our flesh cannot.
This is what the psychiatrist Robert Jay Lifton called symbolic immortality—the human need to feel connected to something that transcends individual mortality.1 It's a profound insight into the human condition, but it comes with a devastating catch: these systems of meaning, designed to help us cope with death, almost invariably require actual death to maintain their coherence.
Is there a way through? Can we live a life that embraces death without excess suffering? Or do we need some kind of symbolic immortality? Lifton calls this terror management.2
The nation needs enemies to define itself against. The religion needs heretics to purify itself through. The revolution needs counterrevolutionaries to justify its violence. The ideology needs those who threaten it to prove its necessity. What begins as a defense against the terror of mortality becomes a machine that generates the very suffering it claims to solve.
We have created a form of thanatological capitalism—a system that profits from our fear of death by selling us various forms of denial. And in this marketplace of immortality projects, the most successful products are often the most violent. The ideologies that promise the most complete escape from mortality are precisely those that require the most systematic elimination of alternatives.
When meaning depends on permanence, anything that threatens that permanence becomes an existential enemy. When truth claims require eternity for their validation, temporary existence becomes intolerable. The very thing that makes us human—our awareness of mortality—becomes the engine of inhuman cruelty.
Friedrich Nietzsche foresaw this problem. When he proclaimed that »God is dead«, he wasn't celebrating but warning.3 He understood that the collapse of traditional meaning-making systems would create a void that could be filled by something far worse than the old certainties. Nihilism, for Nietzsche, was not the destination but a necessary passage, what he called »the uncanniest of all guests«.4 The question was whether we would remain trapped in this passage or use it as the clearing for something unprecedented. I want to build a new case for nihilism as self-overcoming instead of the life-denying meaninglessness it's often taken to be nowadays.
Nietzsche anticipated this dynamic in his analysis of ressentiment—the reactive formation that turns life-affirmation into life-denial.5 When we cannot bear the anxiety of mortality, we create systems of meaning that require the demonization of whatever reminds us of our finite condition. The strong become threats to be eliminated. The different become pollutants to be purified.
In the early 20th century, a group of Japanese philosophers began developing a radically different approach to the problem of mortality and meaning. The Kyoto School, led by thinkers like Kitaro Nishida and Keiji Nishitani, offered something unprecedented: a way of embracing nothingness without falling into despair.
They called it absolute nothingness—zettai mu. It wasn't the nihilistic void that Western philosophy feared. This was nothingness as the field of pure experience itself, the clearing away of false meanings that prevent authentic existence. Where Western thought sees nothingness and meaning as opposites locked in eternal struggle, the Kyoto School revealed them as interdependent aspects of a more fundamental reality.
Nishitani wrote: »The standpoint of emptiness is the only standpoint from which the being of beings can manifest itself as it truly is.«6 This isn't philosophical abstraction, it's a lived practice of what Zen calls great death, dying before you die, which paradoxically creates the conditions for an authentic life.
Meaning doesn't emerge despite nothingness, it emerges through a conscious relationship with nothingness. When we stop grasping for permanence, temporary existence reveals its own intrinsic value. When we let go of the need for eternal justification, finite actions become meaningful in themselves.
For the Kyoto School, what we call nihilism is actually the necessary prerequisite for authentic meaning. You have to pass through the void to reach the other side. This is precisely what Nietzsche meant by self-overcoming, not the triumph of the will over nothingness, but the transmutation of nihilism into a creative force.7
What if the conscious acknowledgment that nothing lasts forever, that all our projects will turn to dust, that we ourselves are temporary arrangements of matter and energy, what if this acknowledgment actually amplifies an authentic life rather than endangering it?
Here we must be careful not to misunderstand what this practice involves. When people speak of losing their faith or having their worldview challenged, they often describe it like walking onto a balcony without railings—the absence of familiar boundaries creates vertigo and terror. Beliefs, especially religious beliefs, provide a frame that regulates emotions and organizes experience. Without this frame, many people feel they would simply fall into chaos.
But this metaphor reveals something crucial about how we've been thinking about meaning and security. We imagine ourselves on a balcony where the railings (our beliefs) are all that prevent us from falling into an abyss. From this perspective, anyone who questions the railings appears to threaten our very survival.
The shift happens when we recognize that we're not actually on a balcony at all. We're on a much larger platform where falling is possible but not fatal, where the spaces between potential falls contain their own possibilities, and their own potential prisons. The comfort of false certainties can become as confining as the terror of uncertainty. When we organize our entire existence around avoiding the possibility of falling, we may find ourselves trapped in narrow corridors of instant gratification and unexamined assumptions.
Therefore, understood in this form, nihilism isn't the removal of railings but the recognition of this larger platform. This would be nihilism reframed not as meaninglessness but as sacred meaninglessness, a practice of letting go that doesn't collapse into resignation but opens up space for action that doesn't require eternal justification. The railings that were supposed to protect us become transparent, revealing the broader terrain that was always already there.
The artist paints knowing the canvas will fade. The lover loves knowing the relationship will end. The teacher teaches knowing the student will surpass them. This isn't tragic, this is what makes the painting, the love, the teaching possible in the first place. They have learned to find security not in permanent railings but in their capacity to respond creatively to whatever arises, including the inevitability of falling and getting back up.
When we stop trying to cheat death through ideology, something unexpected happens. We discover that temporary existence is not lesser, it's the only game in town, and it's magnificent. The wave doesn't mourn its return to the ocean. It participates fully in being a wave while it is a wave, even though its waveness is a temporary expression of something larger and more mysterious than itself.
This shift in perspective requires mortal courage—the willingness to act meaningfully without guarantees of permanence. It's harder than immortal courage because it can't rely on external validation from eternal authorities. But it's also more honest because it doesn't require the systematic denial of tangible experiences and the nature of existence.
This is what Nietzsche called the eternal recurrence, not a metaphysical doctrine about cosmic repetition, but an existential test: would you be willing to live this exact life, with all its suffering and joy, infinite times?8 The question forces us to find value in existence as it is, rather than in some imagined escape from existence. It's the ultimate affirmation of temporality as the condition rather than the enemy of meaning.
From a cybernetic perspective, consciousness is a system that observes itself observing. But what happens when the observer knows they will cease to exist? How does this knowledge modulate the observation?
All systems exist in relationship. The observer and the observed are not separate entities but parts of a larger pattern that includes them. When consciousness recognizes its own temporality, it also recognizes its embeddedness in processes that preceded it and will survive it. The question shifts »How can I live forever?« to »How can I participate most fully in the processes of which I am temporarily a part?«
This is where the Kyoto School's logic of absolutely contradictory self-identity becomes relevant. We are simultaneously individual and universal, temporary and eternal, something and nothing. But these aren't logical contradictions to be resolved, they're lived paradoxes to be inhabited. The observer who knows their own mortality can observe more clearly because they’re no longer defending themselves against the truth of impermanence.
The feedback loops become cleaner when they're not distorted by immortalist delusions. The system can process information more accurately when it's not filtering out data that threatens its eternal self-image. Mortality awareness, properly integrated, enhances rather than diminishes the capacity for observation and response.
What would culture look like if it didn't require symbolic immortality projects? What forms of life become possible when we stop trying to cheat death through ideology? A kind of mortal culture, ways of being together that acknowledge impermanence without falling into nihilistic despair or immortalist delusion. Culture that celebrates rather than denies our condition as temporary arrangements capable of love, knowledge, and beauty.
This doesn't mean abandoning all projects that extend beyond individual lifespans. It means undertaking them for different reasons, not to achieve symbolic immortality but to participate in the ongoing creativity of existence itself. We plant trees not because we need forests to validate our eternal significance, but because planting trees is part of nurturing soil, enhancing oxygen in the air and regulating climate, all life-giving ecosystems. This is what humans do when they're responding authentically to their environment.
Mortal culture would be characterized by finite responsibility: care for outcomes we won't live to see, not because caring grants us immortality, but because caring is intrinsic to the kind of temporary beings we are. The parent loves the child not to achieve genetic immortality but because love is what happens when consciousness recognizes itself in another form.
This form of culture would be inherently less violent because it wouldn't need enemies to maintain its coherence. When meaning doesn't depend on permanence, alternatives become more interesting rather than threatening. When truth doesn't require eternity for validation, difference becomes enriching rather than dangerous.
The postmodern condition taught us to suspend belief, to question all grand narratives, to recognize the constructed nature of meaning. This was necessary critical work, but it often stopped at the negative moment—the deconstruction—without moving through to reconstruction. The result has been a cynical antihumanism that mistakes the absence of ready-made meaning for the impossibility of meaning itself.
The goal here is not to destabilize and relativize everything in the way most postmodern theorists have been interpreted and utilized. That approach often leaves people stranded on the balcony without railings, terrified of falling, unable to move in any direction. The goal is to recognize that there is a larger platform, one that includes the possibility of falling but isn't defined by it.
This is where the Kyoto School's concept of absolute negation diverges radically from postmodern skepticism. Postmodern critique suspends belief but remains trapped in the subject-object dualism that created the problem in the first place. It questions everything except the primacy of the questioner’s subjectivity, leaving consciousness stranded in a void of its own making.
Absolute negation goes deeper. It's not just the suspension of belief but the negation of the believer—the recognition that the self who seeks immortality is itself a temporary construction that doesn't need to be preserved or defended. This isn't antihumanism but a kind of transhumanism in the original sense: not the technological enhancement of human capacities but the moving through and beyond the defensive postures that we mistake for human nature.
The practice becomes one of learning to distinguish, in daily experience and reason, between genuine organizing principles and defensive constructions. It's about living a more examined life, one that can see the beauty in simply being conscious, in the mere fact of experience itself, without requiring that experience to be validated by eternal authorities or protected by ideological barriers.
This is where negative dialectics becomes crucial as a tool for self-overcoming.9 Unlike positive dialectics that seeks synthesis and resolution, negative dialectics works through immanent contradictions without rushing to closure. It's a way of carefully peeling away the ideological layers that mask our immediate experience of being conscious in each moment.
We identify the assumptions and inherited beliefs that shape our responses. We examine these beliefs not from the outside—as if we could step outside our own conditioning—but from within, by paying attention to how they actually function in lived experience. We notice where they create tension, where they require us to deny aspects of reality, where they generate the very suffering they claim to resolve.
This isn't archaeological work in the Heideggerian sense. We're not trying to dig down to some authentic foundation that exists prior to culture and language.10 There is no pure subjectivity waiting to be uncovered beneath the layers of socialization. Subjectivity is precisely what emerges in the process of questioning, in the space opened up by working through contradictions.
The key insight is that consciousness is not a thing to be preserved but an activity to engage in. When we stop defending consciousness against mortality and start exploring what consciousness actually is—this capacity for experience, for recognition, for difference, for response—we discover that it doesn't require permanence to be valuable. In fact, its value emerges precisely from its temporal, relational, contingent nature.
This practice requires what Nietzsche called intellectual probity: the courage to follow our thinking wherever it leads, even when it undermines our most cherished assumptions about ourselves.11 It's the willingness to let our fixed ideas die so that more adequate ones can emerge.
This practice of negative dialectics can be understood as a form of self-observation that doesn't reinforce the boundaries of the self. Traditional self-observation often strengthens the observer-observed distinction, creating a meta-self that watches the self and tries to control or improve it.
But when self-observation is informed by absolute negation, something different happens. The observer begins to recognize its own constructed nature, its dependence on what it observes, its embeddedness in larger processes. The boundaries between observer and observed start to dissolve, not through mystical transcendence but through careful attention to how these boundaries are maintained moment by moment.
Instead of trying to find a true self beneath the false selves, we begin to see that selfhood itself is a process rather than a thing. Instead of seeking authentic experience beneath inauthentic culture, we discover that authenticity is precisely this willingness to engage with our condition as cultural beings without defending against its implications.
The result is not the recovery of some pre-given human essence but the ongoing creation of human possibilities that weren't available when consciousness was organized around self-preservation. When we stop trying to make meaning permanent, we can participate more fully in meaning as it emerges and dissolves and emerges again in new forms, like a manifold.
What emerges is a capacity to distinguish between different types of suffering: the inevitable pain that comes with being conscious and mortal, and the additional suffering we create through our resistance to that condition. When suffering inevitably appears, we learn not to interpret it as some kind of historical telos or personal divine punishment, but as part of the texture of conscious existence.
This doesn't eliminate suffering, but rather transforms our relationship to it. We can experience loss without needing to explain it in terms of cosmic justice. We can feel pain without immediately constructing elaborate narratives about what it means or who is to blame. We can encounter uncertainty without immediately reaching for ideological security blankets that require the demonization of alternatives.
Death is life's acoustics. The awareness of mortality that makes us human is also what makes meaning possible. Everything matters precisely because it ends. Every moment becomes precious not despite its transience but because of it. Every relationship becomes sacred not by transcending time but by existing fully within the experience.
This is the acoustics of life properly heard: not the desperate noise of terror management, but the sublime music of beings who know they are temporary and find in that knowledge the deepest possible engagement with the mystery of being conscious at all.
Robert Jay Lifton, The Broken Connection: On Death and the Continuity of Life (American Psychiatric Press, Inc, 1996).
Ibid.
Friedrich Nietzsche, Die fröhliche Wissenschaft, 1. Aufl, Insel-Taschenbuch 2678 (Insel-Verlag, 2000).
Friedrich Nietzsche, Also sprach Zarathustra (Nikol Verlag, 2013).
Friedrich Nietzsche, Zur Genealogie der Moral (Nikol Verlag, 2017).
Kitarō Nishida, An Inquiry into the Good (Yale Univ. Press, 1992).; Keiji Nishitani, Religion and Nothingness, 1st paperback print, Nanzan Studies in Religion and Culture 2 (Univ. of Calif. Press, 1983).
Keiji Nishitani, Religion and Nothingness, 1st paperback print, Nanzan Studies in Religion and Culture 2 (Univ. of Calif. Press, 1983).
Friedrich Nietzsche, Also sprach Zarathustra (Nikol Verlag, 2013).
Theodor W. Adorno, Negative Dialektik, 9. Auflage, Gesammelte Schriften / Theodor W. Adorno, Band 6 (Suhrkamp, 2020).
Martin Heidegger, Sein und Zeit, 19. Aufl., unveränd. Nachdr. d. 15. Aufl (Niemeyer, 2006).
Friedrich Nietzsche, Jenseits von Gut und Böse (Nikol Verlag, 2017).