Federico Campagna | Consolatio ad viventes (this is not the end)
Manuela Vasco Welcome to our podcast with Castello di Rivoli Philosopher-in-Residence Federico Campagna for the year 2022. Focusing on the rare books in the library of Francesco Federico Cerruti’s Collection and immersed in the Villa Cerruti with its extraordinary paintings and furnishings, Campagna is investigating—at the intersection between philosophy and visual art—the idea of ‘Creative Mediterranean imagination’ from the late antiquity to the beginnings of modernity. I’m your host Manuela Vasco from Castello di Rivoli – Cerruti Collection Communications Office. I welcome Federico Campagna, who today is going to expand on the notion of death.
Federico Campagna Hello and buongiorno. Welcome to a new episode of the podcast that is being produced in the Cerruti Collection in Rivoli on behalf of the Castello Di Rivoli. I’m Federico Campagna and I’m talking to you from a room in the Cerruti Collection that you’ll find at the end of your visit. Up high in the tower. This is the room where Mr. Cerutti was planning to abandon his earthly existence. It’s the place where I’m working at the moment. It’s a beautiful place, and it’s replete with medieval paintings, mostly crucifixions, scenes, and images of the death of Jesus Christ.
I’d like to use this room as a starting point to discuss something that’s not immediately attached to what I’m researching in terms of the history of Mediterranean imagination, but it is quite connected to our experience of the world today. These days, these times, are times of fragility. After a couple of slow decades, historical transformations seem to have picked up a frantic pace. We can see that the old world is dying and that what’s coming to the light seems even more terrifying than what we’re leaving behind. In the news and culture, in the atmosphere of our daily exchanges, a feeling of fragility and a sense of an incoming end have become almost palpable. And in this sense, the works that you can find in the Tower Room, in the Cerruti Collection here in Rivoli, talk to us of a fragility that we’re learning to know, and of an end that we’re beginning to experience. So to equip ourselves for the challenges of the present, as well as to introduce the works of the last room in the collection, it might be useful to observe an event that we spend most of our lives trying to ignore, but which shows most clearly the essence of fragility and of the end: the event of death. The anxiety that accompanies a sense of fragility is ultimately the fear of breaking down completely. It’s the fear of death. And the feeling of an incoming end, fundamentally, is the realization that something can always fade away into nothingness. Again, it’s the sense of death. Now I know that this might be an odd way to celebrate masterpieces of art, but I hope that we’ll see together how death is not only a field of darkness. Indeed, in the next few minutes, I’ll try to shed some light on death, and I’ll try to make much of its darkness disappear.
Let’s begin by observing how death is a reality, not only for those who suffer it, or for those who witness the death of others, but also—perhaps especially—for those who claim to be able to dispense it, to give it: the givers of death. In the hands of the powerful, death counts as the ultimate threat and the ultimate power. If you think about it, in its essence, power is always the power to do harm. Inside every injunction to obey always lies hidden a subtle threat of death. Death is the “else” in the injunction “or else!” What is generally called the power of life and death should be understood, I believe, more precisely as the power of death alone. No one can claim the power of life, since life is an event or a gift or a curse that has an agency of its own. Hence our human habit of structuring social hierarchies around the power of dispensing death. The powerful are those who can give death, and those who can give death are the powerful. The fear of death can leave us totally paralyzed. It might make us—and often does—obey any order. Or it might make us withdraw completely in a stupefied catatonia. Or it might make us want to become the masters, at least, of our own death through suicide. And conversely, the power of death can lead the powerful to a delirium of omnipotence, to the belief of truly having the cosmic power to dispense justice, blessings, and punishments. This belief is also the basis of horrific inventions such as the prison, where a caricature of death is prolonged indefinitely in the form of a suspended life.
So death is the horizon of much of our experience of society and of ourselves. And for many philosophers—for example, Heidegger—death is also the horizon of our thought. Death is a universal, inescapable, and especially undisputable event. Death is a fact. Perhaps it is the fact par excellence. But are we so sure that this is truly the case? Are we perfectly sure that this supposed elephant in every room at every moment is in fact as large as an elephant, or that it is in the room at all? It’s worth thinking twice about the reality of death. And to start, it would be important to define it. And the first thing that we notice if we try to define death is that the experience of death is never reported by those who undergo it. It’s the living who certify someone’s death, not the dead. So the very idea of death, it’s plain to see, is an invention of the living, who look at it from a distance. Who knows what the dead could say of death if they could speak of it? Certainly, they would say something different from what the living tell each other. So, to start, our very idea of death is an invention of those who don’t have any direct experience of it.
Secondly, to what extent does death affect its victims? When we say that something dies, what is it, this “something” to which we refer? When we witness an organism die, for example, which parts of that organism are affected—at least as far as the living can see—by the event of dying? When a person dies, we notice a transformation in the form and in the activities of their body to the extent that we can see and measure them within the limits of our cognitive abilities. Now, the problem is, can we say that death affects the totality of what we see dying? Can we say that the bodily form and the activities of a person— their mortal parts—are the same as that person in their totality? If we trust our own experience, we can say that there’s a huge gulf between what we can see and measure of the person and what they see and experience within themselves. What I can see of you, your bodily form, and your activities as I can measure them, is far from being the same as what you actually are, what you experience of yourself. You know well how much more there is in you beyond what I can see or measure. And there’s more: if we think of it, we realize that each of us is invisible even to ourselves, let alone to others.
Let’s remain on this point for a moment. What is it that’s hidden even to ourselves and even more so to others? What is this blind spot within us? This blind spot within ourselves—let’s give a couple of disclaimers—isn’t the realm of our feelings, desires, and emotions. Even though they might be invisible to others, our own consciousness can perceive them. The second disclaimer is that the blind spot is also not our unconscious, which might be invisible to our consciousness, but is very clear to our awareness. So what is it? When we think of that blind spot inside every creature that’s totally invisible to all, and yet whose presence is undeniable, we’re thinking, first of all, about their awareness. When we look around, we, like every other creature, do so from the hidden point of our internal awareness. It’s the eye that looks through our eyes. And when we look at ourselves, our own awareness is able to observe everything within us—our perceptions, emotions, even our dreams—except our own awareness itself. The eye can see everything, but it is invisible to itself. Similarly, our awareness is never aware of itself. So something inside us feels our feelings, experiences our emotions, is swept by our desires, is engaged in observing and measuring the world. And yet it is irreducible to any feeling, any emotion, and any object in the world. Inside our mind, something thinks our thoughts while being none of its own thoughts. Inside us, somebody speaks and says our own name. It says “Me,” yet it is not me. Our awareness invents for itself the idea of having an ego, while in fact it remains behind our ego. So even if I spend my entire life with you and I subject you to all forms of tests and measures, there’s something in you that will always remain invisible to me. What’s more, you will also always remain invisible to you, even though—and here’s the point—that thing is precisely what you actually are.
I’m calling this invisible but crucial thing “awareness,” to use a term that’s immediately understandable, but I could also describe it with the many names that have been assigned to it by many traditions throughout the world. For example, in Hinduism, this invisible remainder that remains after you’ve taken away everything visible and measurable from the person is called “Atman.” In animist cosmologies that you find from the Amazon Forest to the north of Canada to Siberia and Southeast Asia, it’s identified with terms translatable as “spirit” or “soul.” In the Sufism of Ibn Arabi, it is described as something ineffable that can be approximated only by the term “Wujud,” which literally means “that which finds and is found.” In the Neo-Platonism of late antiquity, it was called “the one.” In Egyptian hermitism, it was called “the mind,” at the same time invisible and all seeing. In Manichaeism, it was called “the sparkle of light.” And in European metaphysics today it is still generally called “existence.” In all these cases, this blind spot, invisible to everyone while being the essence of everything, constitutes what each creature fundamentally is.
Hold on, isn’t this strange? That thing within a person which is not affected by the transformations of death turns out to be what a person fundamentally is. It is the awareness within us that operates all our thoughts, perceptions, and actions, but it is also our pure being, the very fact that we exist. So it appears that what is affected by death is everything except what each of us fundamentally is. And more: it seems that our very existence—the fact that we are—is not among the things that have ever been witnessed by anyone to ever have died.
Now, to be honest, the philosophical idea that death is impossible and ultimately is an illusion, is nothing new. To stay in the Mediterranean world, in the fifth century BCE, the Greek philosopher Parmenides explained very clearly that anything that exists can never be reduced to non-existence. Being, he said, can never become not being. Since our awareness—what each of us fundamentally is—coincides with the fact of our existence—that we are—then it’s impossible for each of us to ever be ground to nothingness, to die and to become not being. More recently, the Italian philosopher Emanuele Severino held, with just as much clarity as Parmenides, that every single thing that is, has been or ever will be, exists eternally; that what we call the death of a creature is just a movement in and out of the field of what is visible to a certain community of the living. It’s nothing more than that. That the true horizon of our lives and of our thought is not death, as Heidegger claimed, but eternal existence. Now, I’m aware that this argument for the eternity of existence is impossible to tackle without a long discussion, but unfortunately, we don’t have the time here to expand on this topic as we should. If you’re interested, I would recommend starting with Emanuele Severino’s The Essence of Nihilism, unless, of course, you want to go down other roads like Animism, Sufism, Neo-Platonism and so on. But now the good news is that there are also more simple ways to question the supposed unquestionability of death, and especially to dismantle the institutions of power that are built around the illusion of death. So let’s imagine now that all the previous arguments that I’ve tried to propose about the eternity of existence did not convince us at all, and that we’re still terrified about the prospect of dissolving into nothingness once our bodily life is over. Let’s imagine that we’re following the consensus of our contemporary Western society and we think that death leads to a state of pure nothingness, where nothing of us remains except the decomposition of our bodies into food for other creatures. That is indeed a terrifying thought. And no wonder that the powers that rule our atheistic and materialist world today use this thought in the same way that the powers of the theocratic Middle Ages used the images of the flames of hell to keep their subjects in a state of paralysis, fear, and the threat of death. But let’s imagine that beyond death, there is nothingness. Let’s embrace it. Is this nothingness something that we should fear? If we imagine our life like an island of being surrounded by the waters of non-being, then we can see how the waters on its imagined Western, occidental deathly side—the side beyond life—are the same as the waters on its Eastern, oriental life-giving pre-birth side. This means the nothingness to which death would lead us is the same as that from which each of us came before being born. And do we remember that place from where we came as a terrifying place of torment? Certainly not. On the contrary, a baby comes into the world as someone who’s just been pulled out of a place of warmth and comfort and plunged into a new situation of cold and distress. As many mystics and pessimists have long known, the true horror is not the nothingness before or after life, but life itself. If there is a hell, well, we’re in it right now. And if there is a heaven, it’s the place from which we came and to which we shall return.
So far, I’ve tried to show that the idea of death is vague and untrustworthy, that it’s based on second-hand observation, that it cannot apply to anything essential in any creature, and finally, that even if death were truly a door to nothingness, still it would be nothing that we should fear. And now to close this unexpectedly cheerful overview of death, let’s imagine that everything I’ve said so far is false. Let’s imagine, against our better judgment, that death is a real and unavoidable event that dissolves the living into the furnace of a terrifying nothingness. Let’s imagine, and let’s consider death as the worst of all horrors. And let’s observe how this horror is distributed in our world today: to whom, by whom and in whose name. In these times of war, we can see that death is typically inflicted upon living people by other living people on behalf and in the name of non-living entities such as the nation, the state, race, ethnicity, identity, religion, and profit. So we have a situation in which non-living entities wish to control life through the threat of death. In other words, the dead use death to rule the living. What kind of non-living entities are these, like the state, the nation, the race? They have become masters of death. They are abstract notions, pure creations of language. They are mere words, empty words that try to make themselves real by feeding on the blood, the suffering, and especially the obedience, of the living. These linguistic entities present themselves as the masters of death, because indeed they’re made of the same substance as death. They’re made of pure nothingness.
Even in this scenario, though, it’s still possible for us to rebel against what appears as inevitable. When a non-living entity like a nation or an identity or a balanced spreadsheet orders a blood sacrifice, we, the living, can still refuse to obey its commands. We can decide that the non-living don’t deserve the respect and the obedience of the living, let alone their blood. We can still decide to exile from our world these parasitic, non-living entities, and to keep for ourselves the living, the Commonwealth of this island surrounded by the sea of death. And then, once we’ve liberated our island from the tyranny of the dead, perhaps will come the day when we decide that it’s time to build a ship to explore the vast expanse of the sea of death, to see what truly lies beyond its waves, and if it’s really true that death is the end and that its waters touch no other shore. At that point, perhaps we might find ourselves once again at the beginning of the discussion that we’ve had today. And we might find out after all that death is not yet.
Thank you for listening to this new episode of the podcast for the Castello Di Rivoli from the villa of Cerruti. I hope to see you next time, still here, in the room at the top of the tower. Goodbye.
M.V. I thank you all for being with us. I’d also like to thank Regione Piemonte, Fondazione CRT, Città di Torino, Città di Rivoli and our partners Fondazione Compagnia di San Paolo, Intesa Sanpaolo/Gallerie d’Italia, and Fondazione CRC.Our digital programs are also made possible thanks to Fondazione Compagnia di San Paolo. We look forward to welcoming you again next month for this exciting series of podcasts with the philosopher Federico Campagna.