Aftoktonía as a strategy for getting rid of suffering: an ontological change

Abstract

Can aftoktonia be an exit strategy from a situation of suffering? Autoktonia is understood as a voluntary action of the subject aimed at his or her own nothingness. The article proposes a series of historical and philosophical plots, which are used to demonstrate the possibility or impossibility of realising autoktonia as a way out of suffering within a particular ontology. In the case of ontological pluralism, this strategy is relevant because the death of the subject leads the latter to non-existence or to another, good, ontological order in which there is no suffering (Plato, Job, Paul). In opposition to this, the Christian concept of Incrise Mather stands out, according to which autoktonia can lead to even greater suffering, since it is a pathway to the fourth dimension of "hell". Also, autoktonia is irrelevant in the philosophy of Eduard Hartmann, since individual or collective autoktonia is not capable of destroying the substance of the universe - the unconscious. For Schopenhauer, autoktonia realises deliverance from suffering only under one condition: the ascetic freed from desire dies a starvation death and thus negates the will to live. In the ontologies of the new materialism, the subject's material body becomes the suffering substance. The body does not change dimension-habitat after death - unlike ontologies that include the soul as a special type of being - the attributes of the living body are retained in the dead body, since it continues to be active. Therefore, after death, the subject body is capable of suffering, which makes autarky an irrelevant strategy in the ontologies of new materialism. All this allows us to point out that autoktonia as a strategy of getting rid of suffering is relevant in a narrow spectrum of ontological concepts.