Modern thought upended Plato’s ideas and identified the physical world with intelligibility and the soul with unintelligible nonsense. For instance, David Hume described the difficulty of getting a handle on the slippery notion of a core self. Hume said,
When I enter most intimately into what I call myself, I always stumble on some particular perception or other, of heat or cold, light or shade, love or hatred, pain or pleasure. (I never can catch myself at any time without a perception, and never can observe any thing but the perception….)92
Today’s neuroscientists have no better luck pinpointing the elusive notion of a core self. In other words, the idea seems obvious at first, but it dissolves into unintelligible nonsense when we try to put it into a clear formulation. The problem of a life after death cannot be solved without a corresponding solution to the problem of personal identity.
The idea of the self seems necessary to functioning in daily life. Even so, the nature of the self seems indeterminable—a form of placeholder nonsense. In sum, the idea of the self is necessary nonsense, an idea we are forced to entertain until something clearer comes along.
Perimortal Nonsense
Nonsense occurs in enigmatic language dying people speak while apparently transitioning into the afterlife. Some people talk cryptic nonsense during their last days, hours, and minutes of life, and when they do, it often leaves a lasting impression on witnesses. For instance, a professor of religious studies told me that her husband, a philosophy professor, talked nonsense during his final days. Even then, she said, she knew that it was nonsense, yet somewhere in the back of her mind, she felt that she somehow understood what he was saying.
Subsequently, others whose loved ones have died reported that same kind of experience to me. Furthermore, medical doctors and nurses are aware of how frequently terminally ill patients talk nonsense. Such perimortal nonsense is usually mixed in with unusual figures of speech, such as travel metaphors. Typically, medical professionals regard the enigmatic language of the dying as a manifestation of the patient’s illness or the drugs administered to treat it.
Others—including doctors, nurses, and family members—have a different perspective, though, for it seems to them that the nonsensical and figurative utterances reflect transcendent experiences. Indeed, some people do seem to be on the threshold of another world as they die. They undergo a transfiguration in which their eyes brighten and their personality shines through. Witnesses sometimes remark that it seemed as though the dying person “already had one foot on the other side.”
Is perimortal nonsense an involuntary response to the physiological processes of the dying brain? Or does perimortal nonsense represent deliberate attempts to verbalize ineffable transcendent experiences of transition into an afterlife realm? The theory of nonsense opens new avenues for rational investigation of these important clinical, scientific, and spiritual questions.
Dying people’s final words are a topic of enduring interest and even constitute a literary genre, for numerous volumes of people’s last words have been published. Such compilations tend to focus on the dying words of famous people. Furthermore, they tend to quote articulate, even eloquent, statements that are somehow representative of the dying individual’s life and personality.
The process of selecting quotations for literary compilations generally winnows out nonsense. The literary compilations only include nonsense that is particularly striking or memorable. For instance, Hegel’s last words were supposedly, “Only one man ever really understood me, and he didn’t understand me.”
Clinical experience with terminally ill patients establishes that they frequently talk nonsense. This phenomenon has not been investigated, but the theory of nonsense now provides rational means of doing so. Perimortal nonsense can be recorded, analyzed, and identified by types. Determining which rules people’s nonsensical final words follow, and which rules they break, could yield insights into mental processes associated with dying.
Is perimortal nonsense a window into transcendent states of consciousness? Or, in other words, are the meaningless, unintelligible utterances of dying people sometimes instances of cross-dimensional nonsense? Earlier, we saw that the mind produces cross-dimensional nonsense when it switches between different frameworks of experience. If we can isolate definitive markers of cross-dimensional nonsense, we might be able to track the minds of the dying into the next life.
Linguist Lisa Smartt is looking at perimortal nonsense with fresh eyes. Her Final Words Project is the first systematic investigation of the phenomenon. She is collecting, analyzing, and categorizing nonsensical utterances of the dying. Her book Words at the Threshold (New World Library, 2017) is an important contribution to the study of death and dying. The conversation about language and the trajectory of consciousness beyond the threshold has begun.
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86. Broad, Lectures on Psychical Research, 302.
87. Price, Philosophical Interactions with Parapsychology, 263.
88. Hume, Essays and Treatises on Various Subjects, 226, 229.
89. Michael McDowell, Warren Skaaren, and Larry Wilson, Beetlejuice (1988).
90. For example, see Edward Hastings, Michael Hutton, William Braud, et. al., “Psychomanteum Research: Experiences and Effects on Bereavement,” Omega Journal of Death and Dying (1 November 2002), https://doi.org/10.2190/LV5G-E3JV-6CVT-FKN5.
91. Plato, “Phaedo,” 49.
92. Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, 252.
Conclusion
I hope you have enjoyed this critical look at the tired misconceptions and erroneous assumptions about meaningless and unintelligible language, or nonsense. You’ve now discovered some general rational principles for guiding sound and logical thinking about nonsense. You may now even see rational principles of nonsense as a logical bridge between the questions of science and religion. An understanding of nonsense is beneficial in a plethora of ways, such as being a better writer, perceptive reader, and critical thinker. My hope is that a sort of logic of nonsense has taken shape for you, offering new perspective, and that nonsense has emerged as a delightful, thought-provoking, and useful propensity of the mind and spirit.
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Bibliography
Abbott, Edwin. Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions. Boston: Roberts Brothers, 1885.
Ayer, A. J. “God-Talk Is Evidently Nonsense.” Philosophy of Religion: A Guide and Anthology, edited by Brian Davies, 143–146. Oxford University Press, 2000.