How Non-being Haunts Being explores the many different modes of absence and non-being that pervade life, language, thought, and culture. A highly readable book of great interest to a wide audience, it ensures that readers will never think of life, death, or themselves, the same way again.

How Non-being Haunts Being reveals how the human world is not reducible to “what is.” Human life is an open expanse of “what was” and “what will be,” “what might be” and “what should be.” It is a world of desires, dreams, fictions, historical figures, planned events, spatial and temporal distances, in a word, absent presences and present absences.

Corey Anton draws upon and integrates thinkers such as Jean-Paul Sartre, Henri Bergson, Kenneth Burke, Terrence Deacon, Lynn Margulis, R. D. Laing, Gregory Bateson, Douglas Harding, and E. M. Cioran. He discloses the moral possibilities liberated through death acceptance by showing how living beings, who are of space not merely in it, are fundamentally on loan to themselves.

A heady multidisciplinary work, How Non-being Haunts Being explores how absence, incompleteness, and negation saturate life, language, thought, and culture. It details how meaning and moral agency depend upon forms of non-being, and it argues that death acceptance in no way inevitably slides into nihilism. Thoroughgoing death acceptance, in fact, opens opportunities for deeper levels of self-understanding and for greater compassion regarding our common fate. Sure to provoke thought and to stimulate much conversation, it offers countless insights into the human condition.

Preface

Chapter 1: Nothing at the Heart of Existence

Chapter 2: Life and Many Modes of Bodily Non-Being

Chapter 3: Language, Absence, Negation, and Context

Chapter 4: Death and the Possibilities of Human Morality

Chapter 5: A Mythological/Mathematical Postscript