Maverick Philosopher

Philip Larkin on Death

David Rieff, son of Susan Sontag, writes movingly of her mother's love of life and her refusal to accept extinction in Swimming in a Sea of Death: A Son's Memoir (Simon and Shuster, 2008). Her attitude and his is close to the one expressed by Philip Larkin in the following poem which displays Larkin's power as a poet in tandem with his weakness as a philosopher. Rieff, p. 13, quotes approvingly from the stanza which I have bolded.

In my humble opinion, the "specious stuff" in Larkin's phrase below is not the wisdom of Epicurus to which allusion is made, but the boozy self-indulgence Larkin serves up. What annoys me, I suppose, is the poetic passing-off of substantive claims with nary an attempt at justification. Am I again criticizing poetry for not being philosophy as I did once before with reference to Wallace Stevens? Perhaps. Or perhaps I am objecting to the nihilism of much of the 'art' of the 20th century.

Larkin's poetry illustrates how life must appear to those for whom God is dead. Read some more of it here. It is skillfully symptomatic of the age.

Getting back to Rieff and Sontag, I find curious their unquestioning conviction that physical death just has to be utter extinction. How can they be so cocksure about that? Socrates, Plato, Moses Mendelsohn and a hundred other luminaries were just deluded fools? And then there is this thought: if physical death extinguishes us utterly, then the game is not worth the candle, and Sontag's stubborn refusal to accept her mortality even after 71 years worth of this ephemeral life is just ridiculous, and the opposite of anything that could be called wisdom.

Birth and Death

At birth the curtain lifts.  Or does it fall?  At death the curtain falls.  Or does it lift?

Do You Really Believe in an Afterlife?

A correspondent poses this question:  

If you believe in an afterlife, one in which things are presumably a lot better than here, why not be eager to "move on"?  I can understand the wicked fearing judgment, but why are the righteous not eager to shuffle off?

To put the challenge in a sharper form: "You say you believe you will survive your bodily death, and that death will be a liberation from the woes of this world.  And yet you behave like everyone else: you  fret over threats large and small  and do all in your power to prolong your bodily life.  I have to wonder whether you really believe what you profess to believe."

 

I'll try to give an honest answer.

 

1.   Belief in an afterlife  is not like the belief that I am sitting in a chair.  The latter belief is either knowledge or very close to it.  The will does not come into the formation or maintenance of this belief.    With respect to massive perceptual beliefs we are all doxastic involuntarists.  But no one this side of the Great Divide knows whether we survive our bodily deaths.  The considerations, both empirical and dialectical,  in favor of survival are not conclusive, but neither are the considerations against it.  (Which is not to deny that the world is filled with dogmatists who think they know what they do not know.) One must therefore decide what one will believe in this matter all the while knowing that one could be 'dead' wrong.  In this predicament, it is perfectly understandable why one would not be eager to hurry off  into what  is presently unknown. 

 

To this I would add that, unless one is in the grip of childish conceptions, of the sort rampant among militant atheists, the encounter with the Lord of the universe can be expected to be terrifying. Fear and trembling,  Timor domini initium sapientiae, etc.  The exact opposite of a comforting illusion.  You might get more than you bargained for.  It is easily understandable that the believer, though at one level wanting to enter the divine presence, may prefer to put it off a while, especially if things are going well here below.  Do babies want to leave the womb?

 

2. Another aspect of the above challenge is the veiled accusation that one is professing what one does not really believe.  People on opposite sides of ideological divides are wont to taunt one another with You can't really believe that!  or You don't really believe what you ar saying! Well, how do we know whether or not a person really believes something?  From behavior.  Applied to the case before us:  does he pursue the afterlife question, think about it, research it, talk about it, write about it?  If he does, then it is a Jamesian live option for him.  Does he live in any way differently than those who do not hold the belief? Does his belief that he will be judged for his actions and omissions (a belief that Wittgenstein apparently could not shake) hold him back from any morally reprehensible actions? If the answers to these questions are in the affirmative, then the person does really believe what he professes to believe. 

 

3.  On many religious conceptions, this world is, in the words of John Keats, a vale of soul-making.   That is "the use of the world" as Keats says.  As  one of my aphorisms has it,  we are not here to improve the world, but to be improved by it.  It is by our sojourn through it, by our experience of its trials and tribulations, agonies and ecstasies, that we develop an identity, actualize ourselves, become full-fledged persons.  Identity is not a given but a  task.  Nicht gegeben sondern aufgegeben.  We are all sparks of the divine  intelligence, but only some of us becomes souls because only some of us acquire an identity.  The rest fall back into the divine fire. Embodiment, on this scheme, is thus a necessary condition of coming to acquire an identity, an haecceity and ipseity.  We come from God and we return to God.  But the trick is to return to God as individuals capable of enjoying the Beatific Vision.  If we merely return to God by a sort of Hindu reabsorption of the  soul into the ocean of Brahman, then we will not be able to enjoy God.  As Ramanuja puts it contra the Advaitins, "I Iwant to taste sugar, not become sugar!"  If the use of the world is to be a vale of soul-making, then the return to God is not a loss of identity in God but a fellowship with God.

 

Now if the use of this world is to be a vale of soul-making, then one would have a good reason to not want to "shuffle off" (in the words of my correspondent) too soon.  The reason is that there is work to be done in the development of one's personhood, and this work needs to be done in a place and predicament such as the one we are in.

 

Souls and Murder

 A guest post by Peter Lupu.  Comments in blue by BV.

If there are immortal souls, would murder be a grave moral breach?

1) Theists, like their atheist adversaries, consider murder a severe breach of morality. Unlike causing a minor physical injury to another or damaging or even completely destroying their home, car, or other belongings, murder is considered to be an altogether different matter. The emphasis upon the moral gravity of murder compared to these other moral infractions is, of course, justified and the justification rests in large part upon the finality and irreversible nature of the consequences for the victim. We can perhaps put these consequences as follows: once dead, always dead! Compared to those other infractions where we can perhaps assess the damage and convert such assessment into some sort of tangible remedy, we have no clue how to even begin such appraisal of harm when it comes to a matter such as ceasing to exist forever. If death would have been a temporary state, such as a long sleep for instance, from which one returns into being once again, I am certain we would have found a way to assess the damage done and assign suitable remedy. But, of course, death is not a temporary state such as sleep. Or is it?

A Death Poem for Year's End

As another year slips away, a year that saw the passing of John Updike, here is a fine poem of his to celebrate or mourn the waning days of ought-nine:

Perfection Wasted

And another regrettable thing about death
is the ceasing of your own brand of magic,
which took a whole life to develop and market ——
the quips, the witticisms, the slant
adjusted to a few, those loved ones nearest
the lip of the stage, their soft faces blanched
in the footlight glow, their laughter close to tears,
their tears confused with their diamond earrings,
their warm pooled breath in and out with your heartbeat,
their response and your performance twinned.
The jokes over the phone. The memories packed
in the rapid-access file. The whole act.
Who will do it again? That's it: no one;
imitators and descendants aren't the same.

Commentary

Viewed from a third-person point of view, death seems entirely natural, not evil or tragic.  Deciduous trees give up their leaves in the fall, but new ones arrive in the spring.  Where's the evil in that? We too are parts of nature; we hang for a time from des Lebens goldener Baum, and then we drop off.  So far there has never been a lack of new specimens to take our places in a universe that can get on quite well without any of us.   But "imitators and descendants aren't the same."  No indeed, for what dies when we die is not merely an animal, not merely a bit of biology, not merely a specimen of a species, a replaceable token of a type, but a subject of experience, a self, an irreplaceable  conscious individual, a being capable of saying and meaning 'I.'  "Who will do it again?"  No one!  I am unique and it took me a lifetime to get to this level of haecceity and ipseity.  This interiority wasn't there at first; I had to make it.  I became who I am by my loving and striving and willing and knowing: I actualized myself as a self.  It was a long apprenticeship that led to this mastery.  If I did a good job of it I perfected, completed, mastered, myself: I achieved my own incommunicable  perfection, which cannot be understood objectively, but only subjectively by a being who loves.  In the first instance that is me:  I love myself and as loving myself I know myself.  In the second instance, it is you if you love me; loving me you know me as an individual, not as a specimen of a species, a token of a type, an instance of a universal, an object among objects.  There were all those outside influences, of course, but they would have been nothing to me had I not appropriated them, making them my own.  As a somewhat greater poet once wrote, Was du ererbt von Deinen Vätern hast, erwirb es, um es zu besitzen.

And so therein lies death's sting: not in the passing of a bit of biology, but in the wasting of that unique and incommunicable perfection, the instant evaporation of that ocean of interiority.  But is the perfection wasted?  Does the magic just cease?  The animal ceases no doubt, but the magic of interiority?  These questions remain open.

A More Profitable Question

Do not ask whether there is immortality unless you are prepared to ask whether you are worthy of it.

Soul, Conceivability, and Possibility: An Aporetic Exercise

I am puzzling over the inferential move from X is conceivable to X is (metaphysically) possible. It would be very nice if this move were valid. But I am having trouble seeing how it could be valid.

I exist, and I have a body. But it is conceivable that I exist without a body. 'Conceivable' in this context means thinkable without broadly logical contradiction.   I distinguish between narrowly and broadly logical contradiction.  'Some cats are not cats' is NL-contradictory: it cannot be true in virtue of its very logical form.  (It is necessarily false, and its being necessarily false is grounded solely  in its logical form.) 'Some colors are sounds' is not NL-contradictory: the logical form of this sentence is such that some sentences of this form are true.  And yet 'Some colors are sounds' is contradictory in a broad sense of the term since it is necessarily the case that no color is a sound, where the necessity in question does not have a merely formal-logical ground but a 'material' one.

Fake Halloween Tombstones and the Brevity of Life

A neighbor's fake halloween tombstone bore the inscription:

Ashes to ashes
Dust to dust
Life is short
So party we must.

But why not:

Ashes to ashes
Dust to dust
Life is short
So work out your salvation with diligence!

John Gay's Epitaph

Life is a jest; and all things show it.
I thought so once; but now I know it.

John Gay (1685-1732), "My Own Epitaph" from The Oxford Book of Death, ed. D. J. Enright, 1983, p. 322.

Exercise for the reader: Explain the connection between John Gay and Bobby Darin.  Answer below the fold.

Hartshorne and Immortality Subjective and Objective

The following is excerpted from a letter from an uncommonly astute correspondent, Brodie Bortignon:

. . . some time ago I read a series of your posts on immortality. You covered what are the orthodox views on immortality, including the various materialist denials. What you didn't address was one of the views of some process theologians, one that has a claim to being the 'orthodox' process view. Immortality, for them, is the eternal, unblemished remembrance of the individual in the divine mind: 'objective immortality'. This, they say, is all the immortality worth wanting. In the words of Hartshorne, to desire 'a career after death' is, in a sense, blasphemous: it is the vaunted wish to attain the everlasting existence distinctive of God, and only God. In Dombrowski's words, 'To think that we should live forever in subjective immortality is hubris. What makes God distinctive is necessary existence and other perfections' (Rethinking the Ontological Argument, p.134).

For my own part, this is deeply inadequate. Take the example of a child who was born into an abusive family; she was beaten, sexually assaulted, emotionally abused. She finally dies from neglect. That God will eternally remember her abuse, or that he will somehow 'redeem the memories' he has of her life, seems wholly inadequate--perhaps not to God, but certainly to the girl. Such a view of immortality would then, to my mind, reflect negatively on the love and justice of God, which process theologians of this stripe do not wish to deny. 'God will remember your horrible life' is hardly recompense for that horrible life; there is no redemption there, or justice.

What is supposed to be the philosophical basis for this 'divine memory' view of immortality seems to me obviously unsound. It is based, I think, on a false equivocation between everlastingness and immortality. When people, such as you, speak of personal immortality, they are not speaking of everlastingness in the sense of being wholly uncreated, that is, of having existed at all times necessarily (I assume most people don't believe in the pre-existence of individual souls). There was a time when I came into existence; if human immortality is true, there will never be a time when I go out of existence. But this sort of immortality isn't the same as divine everlastingness. To put it differently, all everlasting persons are immortal, but not all immortal persons are everlasting. This conflation of two clearly distinct types of immortality--created and uncreated--renders the charge of 'hubris' against believers in an unending afterlife philosophically unjustified. Or so it seems to me.

There is one more objection leveled against the believer in subjective immortality by the orthodox process theologian: the claim that such a belief leads to an immoral and socially dangerous renunciation of material existence. But this objection is not unique to process theology, so I won't go into it. Needless to say I don't find it very convincing.

Do you have any opinion on the 'objective immortality' view of process theology?

If I understand it, then, the 'orthodox process view' of Charles Hartshorne and some of his students is that (i) we are objectively immortal in that our lives, in every last detail, continue to exist as objects of divine memory, and that (ii) subjective immortality -- immortality as a continuing subject of experience -- is neither available to us in the nature of things nor worth wanting.  My reaction to this is that it is a rather sorry substitute for the Genuine Article.

Dunmovin and a Blogger's Final Post

Dunmovin is a California ghost town, now little more than a wide spot in the road on U. S. 395, one of my favorite highways.  I have driven past it many a time, but never stopped to explore, not that there is much there to explore.  But I thought of it today, did a search and found an interesting post, dated 15 September 2008, The Ghost Town of Dunmovin, California.

After reading the post, I brought up the current page of the Harry Helms Blog and was both surprised and saddened to find that the relatively young Mr. Helms is losing his battle with cancer.  Here is his farewell post. May we all accept our deaths with as much peace and equanimity.

Saturday Night at the Oldies: Peter and Gordon

The Grim Reaper, the ultimate Repo Man, is certainly no slacker.  In recent days he has paid a visit to  Karl Malden, Ed McMahon, Farah Fawcett, Michael Jackson, Billy Mays (America's Pitchman), Walter Cronkite, and today I heard of the passing of Gordon Waller, 64,  of Peter and Gordon fame.  P & G were major players in the 1964 'British Invasion.'  Here is a hit to remember Gordon by.  From 1965.

And here's another.  And another. 

Death is near my friends, right around the corner.  It doesn't take much to send you packing into Kingdom Come: a little food gone down the wrong way, a texting moron of a motorist, a bit of errant plaque lodged in a cerebral artery. . . . So work out your salvation with diligence while the sun shines.  You're burning daylight while hanging by a thread.

Meaning and Immortality

Some feel that if the fact of bodily death spells the extinction of the person, then this fact, if it is a fact, consigns human life to meaninglessness. This is a very strong intuition among those who have it, and I have it. But there are certain arguments from the naturalist camp that need to be addressed. I will now examine some of these arguments.

One can imagine a naturalist conceding arguendo that our lives do not end with bodily death, but then proceeding to question the bearing this could have on the meaning of life. For how could an extension of life beyond the grave give meaning to life this side of the grave? Wouldn't the same problems about existential meaning that arise on this side also arise on the far side? If this is so, then the postulation of an afterlife would accomplish nothing towards giving life a meaning.

Closer to the Grave, Further from Birth

With every passing day we are closer to becoming grave meat and worm fodder. Or dust and ashes.  That’s the bad news. The good news is that, with every passing day, one more day has been taken up into the ersatz eternity of the Past & Unalterable.

The medievals spoke of a modality they dubbed necessitas per accidens. Socrates drank the hemlock, but he might* not have: He might* have allowed his friends to arrange his escape from prison. So the drinking was logically contingent. But he did drink the poison, and once the drinking  occurred, that fact became forevermore unalterable, and in this sense accidentally necessary.

There is a certain consolation in the unalterability of the past. The old look back upon a sizeable quantity of past and see that nothing and no one can take away what has happened to them and what they have made happen. All of it is preserved forever, whether remembered or not. The terrain of the present may shift and buckle underfoot as one looks to a future for which there is no guarantee. But the past and its accomplishments are in one's sure possession, proof against every threat. It is curious that the mere passage of time should transmute the base coinage of temporal flux into the gold of an ersatz eternity.

Unfortunately, the treasures of the past are preserved in a region both inaccessible and nonexistent -- or should I say next to nonenexistent?  You will thus be forgiven for valuing  the gold in question no higher than iron pyrite.

And herein, in this hesitation, lies the riddle of the reality of the past. On the one hand, the present alone is real, and what is no longer is not. On the other hand, the past is not nothing. Surely it has some sort of reality, and a reality ‘greater’ than that of the merely possible. Kierkegaard existed and so did Regine Olsen. Their engagement existed and so did its breaking off. But their marriage did not exist: it remains a mere possiblity, unactualized and indeed forever unactualizable. Now what is the difference in ontological status between the mere possibility of their marriage and the past actuality of their break-up?  The latter is more real than the former, though both, in another sense, are modes of unreality.

_______________

*These are nonepistemic uses of  'might.'

 

Near-Death Experiences: Do They Prove Anything?

Richard Neuhaus, who recently died,  reports a near-death experience in his essay Born Toward Dying:

It was a couple of days after leaving intensive care, and it was night. I could hear patients in adjoining rooms moaning and mumbling and occasionally calling out; the surrounding medical machines were pumping and sucking and bleeping as usual. Then, all of a sudden, I was jerked into an utterly lucid state of awareness. I was sitting up in the bed staring intently into the darkness, although in fact I knew my body was lying flat. What I was staring at was a color like blue and purple, and vaguely in the form of hanging drapery. By the drapery were two “presences.” I saw them and yet did not see them, and I cannot explain that. But they were there, and I knew that I was not tied to the bed. I was able and prepared to get up and go somewhere. And then the presences—one or both of them, I do not know—spoke. This I heard clearly. Not in an ordinary way, for I cannot remember anything about the voice. But the message was beyond mistaking: “Everything is ready now.”

That was it. They waited for a while, maybe for a minute. Whether they were waiting for a response or just waiting to see whether I had received the message, I don’t know. “Everything is ready now.” It was not in the form of a command, nor was it an invitation to do anything. They were just letting me know. Then they were gone, and I was again flat on my back with my mind racing wildly. I had an iron resolve to determine right then and there what had happened. Had I been dreaming? In no way. I was then and was now as lucid and wide awake as I had ever been in my life.

Tell me that I was dreaming and you might as well tell me that I was dreaming that I wrote the sentence before this one. Testing my awareness, I pinched myself hard, and ran through the multiplication tables, and recalled the birth dates of my seven brothers and sisters, and my wits were vibrantly about me. The whole thing had lasted three or four minutes, maybe less. I resolved at that moment that I would never, never let anything dissuade me from the reality of what had happened. Knowing myself, I expected I would later be inclined to doubt it. It was an experience as real, as powerfully confirmed by the senses, as anything I have ever known. That was some seven years ago. Since then I have not had a moment in which I was seriously tempted to think it did not happen. It happened—as surely, as simply, as undeniably as it happened that I tied my shoelaces this morning. I could as well deny the one as deny the other, and were I to deny either I would surely be mad.

“Everything is ready now.” I would be thinking about that incessantly during the months of convalescence. My theological mind would immediately go to work on it. They were angels, of course. Angelos simply means “messenger.” There were no white robes or wings or anything of that sort. As I said, I did not see them in any ordinary sense. But there was a message; therefore there were messengers. Clearly, the message was that I could go somewhere with them. Not that I must go or should go, but simply that they were ready if I was. Go where? To God, or so it seemed. I understood that they were ready to get me ready to see God. It was obvious enough to me that I was not prepared, in my present physical and spiritual condition, for the beatific vision, for seeing God face to face. They were ready to get me ready. This comports with the doctrine of purgatory, that there is a process of purging and preparation to get us ready to meet God. I should say that their presence was entirely friendly. There was nothing sweet or cloying, and there was no urgency about it. It was as though they just wanted to let me know. The decision was mine as to when or whether I would take them up on the offer.