Last time I made 2 notes in the comments I’d like to expand on.

Derrida notes we are not determined in our actions, even when we try to be. When acting, there is never enough time, information, precedence, and it may be better that we didn’t act at all. But, we make the Kierkegaardian leap and choose/decide. Derrida in his text “What is Poetry” gives the example of the hedgehog who decides to cross the highway and senses the danger of a car coming and so does what it always does when threatened: goes into a protective ball. Of course it gets squished, and so instead of its reasoned response it would have been better if the hedgehog had just kept walking. As the anxiety rises as we become more and more aware how difficult decisions become, we also come face to face with our freedom.

Derrida’s observation fits squarely inside the space opened by undecidability rather than by any simple affirmation of libertarian free will. In texts such as “Force of Law,” “The Gift of Death,” and especially “Che cos’è la poesia?” (“What Is Poetry?”), he insists that a genuine decision cannot be the pure application of a pre-existing rule, program, or calculation. If the outcome were fully determined by sufficient information, time, precedent, and causal antecedents, there would be no decision—only the unfolding of a computation. Precisely because those conditions are never fully met, something like a leap occurs.

The hedgehog vignette makes the point concrete. The animal’s “reasoned” (or at least instinctually programmed) response to threat—curling into a protective ball—is the very behavior that dooms it on the highway. Had it continued walking, or darted in another direction, it might have survived. The example is not primarily about animal cognition; it is an allegory for the poem and, more broadly, for any singular act that must expose itself. The poem, like the hedgehog, must risk the road; it cannot remain safely rolled up in pure interiority. Yet the protective gesture that seems most rational can prove fatal. The moral is that even the most “determined” or habitual response remains exposed to an outside that no program fully anticipates. In that exposure, the act is never merely the execution of a prior code.

This is where Derrida converges with Kierkegaard’s leap. For Kierkegaard the leap of faith is not irrational whim; it is the moment in which the individual must act without the security of objective certainty. Derrida secularizes and generalizes the structure: every responsible decision takes place in an aporia—there is never enough knowledge, never enough time, never a pure precedent that dictates the singular case. One must nevertheless decide. The decision therefore exceeds determination even while it remains conditioned by it. We are not floating above causality; we are inscribed in it, yet the inscription never closes into total calculation.

Anxiety intensifies exactly at this threshold. The more clearly one sees the insufficiency of time, data, and precedent, the more the situation discloses itself as underdetermined. That underdetermination is experienced as anxiety—the affective register of freedom in the existential tradition (Kierkegaard’s Angest, Heidegger’s Angst, Sartre’s nausea). Freedom here is not the cheerful liberty of unlimited options; it is the burden of having to invent a response when no response is guaranteed. The hedgehog’s curling is the failure of a closed program; the human analogue is the recognition that continuing to apply the familiar program may be the worst option, yet no alternative program is fully given either.

In relation to the earlier discussion, this does not collapse the free-will/determinism spectrum into pure indeterminism. Biological drives, social scripts, and historical precedents still exert enormous pressure—testosterone, habit, ideology, mortality itself. Derrida’s claim is more modest and more precise: those pressures never succeed in saturating the moment of decision to the point where the leap becomes unnecessary. The residue of undecidability is what keeps the poles of the spectrum from collapsing into a single deterministic line. We remain, in the end, the beings who must cross the road without knowing whether curling up or walking on will be the gesture that saves or destroys us.

Now,

Socrates’ take on the unknowability of death is interesting.

That passage comes from Plato’s Apology (40c–41c), where Socrates addresses the jury after receiving his death sentence.

The Passage

“Death is one of two things. Either it is annihilation, and the dead have no consciousness of anything; or, as we are told, it is really a change but a migration for the soul from this place to another.

Now if there is no consciousness, but a sleep like the sleep of a man who is in a dreamless state, death would be a wonderful gain… For if anyone were to choose that night in which his sleep was so undisturbed as even to have no dreams, and were to compare with that night the other days and nights of his life… I think that any man would find these days and nights few indeed in comparison. If then death is like this, I say that to die is gain; for all eternity then appears to be nothing more than a single night.

But if death is a journey to another place, and there, as men say, all who have died are, what good, O my friends and judges, can be greater than this?… What would not a man give if he might converse with Orpheus and Musaeus and Hesiod and Homer? Nay, if this be true, let me die again and again.”

The Two Possibilities

Dreamless Sleep: If death is complete oblivion, Socrates argues it is nothing to fear. It resembles a night of peaceful, uninterrupted sleep—a welcome state of total rest where eternity passes in an instant.

A Journey to the Afterlife: If the soul survives, death becomes the ultimate opportunity to meet, converse with, and question legendary heroes, poets, and thinkers of the past.

Analysis:

When it comes to the question of life after death, I am persuaded by the analogy my mom taught me that just as there is no afterlife when other living things die (viruses, bacteria, fungi, trees, insects, chickens, etc.), so too do humans have no afterlife. I am persuaded by this analogy. It “speaks to me.” But what speaks to my “mind’s ear” doesn’t guarantee truth – it’s just a report of a psychological state. We have all been certain, free from doubt about things we later changed our minds (just look at the history of our love lives!). Let’s come up with 4 analogies: two that illustrate the immortality of the soul and two that suggest its mortality:

Here are four analogies, two supporting the immortality of the soul and two supporting its mortality. They are constructed in the same spirit as the one my mother taught me: simple, intuitive comparisons drawn from everyday experience that “speak” to the imagination rather than prove anything.

Analogies suggesting immortality of the soul

1. The radio and the broadcast
   A radio set receives and plays music. If the radio is smashed, the music does not cease to exist; it continues to be transmitted by the station and can be received by other radios. The body is the radio; consciousness or the soul is the broadcast. Destruction of the receiver does not end the signal.
2. The glove and the hand
   A hand wearing a glove can move, grasp, and interact with the world through the glove. When the glove becomes worn out or is removed, the hand itself remains intact and continues to exist independently. The body is the glove; the soul is the living hand that temporarily inhabited it.

Analogies suggesting mortality of the soul

1. The candle flame
   A flame depends on the candle’s wax and wick. When the wax is exhausted or the candle is snuffed out, the flame does not migrate elsewhere or continue in some invisible form—it simply ceases. The organized process that was the flame ends with the conditions that sustained it. Consciousness may be like that flame: a temporary process that ends when the biological conditions end.
2. The ripple on the pond
   A stone dropped into a still pond creates a distinct ripple with a clear pattern and motion. When the energy dissipates, the specific ripple does not continue as a hidden entity or transfer to another pond; it merges back into the undifferentiated water and is gone as an individual pattern. A human life may be like that particular ripple: a temporary, localized pattern in the larger fabric of matter and energy that does not persist as a separate self after the conditions that formed it dissolve.

These are psychological and imaginative tools, not demonstrations. Each can feel compelling depending on one’s prior leanings, just as my mother’s analogy does for me.