If we may accept as an observation without exception that every living being dies for internal reasons, returning to the inorganic, then we can only say that the goal of all life is death, and, looking backwards, that the nonliving existed before the living.8
All life tends back toward the death from which it came.
From a Freudian perspective, then, death is primary. Life represents a brief interruption in the inorganic—death—but it inevitably returns to its original, inanimate state. This, we must admit, is not only a philosophically defensible position but represents the philosophical position on the origin of life, the one to which those who wish to remain within the confines of philosophy must adhere. Indeed, at the very foundation of philosophy, just prior to the death of Socrates, we find it being argued in the most empathic of terms that “what comes from being dead … is being alive” (Phaedo 71d) and all subsequent philosophies have taken death—corruption, degeneration, falling away (think of the Plotinian katastrophē)—as their starting point. According to Freud, life arises out of nonliving matter “through the influence of a completely inconceivable force.”9 And whether you call that force “the Good,” “the One,” or “the Unmoved Mover” matters little, the point remains the same: life comes from death and longs to return to it.
It is for this reason, I suspect, that Freud neglects the Adamic myth. For, while the Greek and Hindu understandings of the cosmos give credence to this assumption—in Greek mythology Chaos, the primordial void, precedes the existence of the world; in Hindu Vedic cosmology, time is cyclical, existence arises out of nothingness and fades back to it in a constant ebb and flow—the Genesis narrative stands in stark opposition to it. Contrary to the philosophical perspective, Genesis asserts that the world was created by a personal, loving Godhead with a definite plan and purpose and, what is more, that it was created good. (Though, of course, we could say that because God created the world ex nihilo, nonexistence is in a very real sense the deepest reality of the created world, that ours is a world “bordering on nothingness.”)10 Thus while the Freudian assumption is that death is primary—that existence moves from death to life back to death—the Abrahamic tradition posits that life is primary—that existence moves from the fullness of life in God to created life which is subsequently interrupted by death back to the fullness of life, the redemption of creation by its Creator. One view is purely philosophical. The other is theological. The first is attained through reason, the second through revelation.
From the first pages of this work, we have made it clear that, though we speak as philosophers, we will not shy away from theological speculation. Indeed, as Nietzsche often reminds us, we must “guard against the snares of such contradictory concepts as ‘pure reason,’ ‘absolute spirituality,’ ‘knowledge in itself.’”11 Rather, it is better to admit with Freud...