'We are All Dying'

In an interview a while back Christopher Hitchens said, "We are all dying."  The saying is not uncommon.  A friend over Sunday breakfast invoked it. The irony of it is that the friend in question in younger days was decisively influenced by the Ordinary Language philosophers.

Taken literally, the sentence is false: only some of us are dying.  What must the sentence be taken to mean to be true?  This: the life process in each human being issues eventually in death.  But then why don't people say what they mean rather than something literally false?

The short answer is that man is a metaphysical animal with an ineradicable urge to gain perspective so as to be able to reconnoitre the terrain of the human predicament.  The gaining of perspective requires the stretching of ordinary language.

When we say 'We are all dying' we forsake the lowlands of ordinary language and ascend to a higher point of view, a philosophical point of view. It is like someone who says, 'All is impermanent.' That too is literally false.  Some addresses are permanent and some are temporary.  To maintain that all is impermanent one must ascend to a higher point of view  relative to which what is permanent 'here below' is, from that point of view, impermanent.  And so one can say, without talking nonsense, that even a permanent address is impermanent. 

As for 'We are all dying,' it too, though literally false, is not nonsense.  When I look at my life as a whole, I see that it is temporally bounded, and that it must issue in death.  And so even the most robust among us are dying in the sense that we are launched on a trajectory the culmination of which  is death.

I once played chess master Jude Acers a series of games at his sidewalk hangout in New Orlean's French Quarter.  During one endame he pointed to one of his pawns and said, 'This pawn has already queened.'  But it hadn't; it was still several moves away from the queening square.  So why did Acers say something literally false?  His meaning was that I could not stop the pawn, and so, in that sense, it had already queened.  It's the same pattern as before.  I am not dying, but since I will inevitably die, I am now dying.  The pawn has not yet queened, but since it will inevitably queen, it has 'already' queened.  What is not yet the case, but will be the case, is in a higher sense, the case.

Or consider this Platonizing remark a variant of which one can find in St. Augustine:  'What once existed, but does not now exist, and what does exist but will in future not exist, never existed.'  Taken literally as a piece of ordinary English, this is nonsense.  If something did exist, then ex vi terminorum it is false that it never existed; and likewise if the thing now exists.

But only a philosophistine (a 'philosopher' who is a philistine) such as Carnap or David Stove could fail to appreciate that the Augustinian saying is meaningful, despite the stretching of ordinary language.  A theory of how this 'stretching' works is necessary if we are to have a full understanding of what we are doing when we do metaphysics.

There is no doubt that in metaphysics we violate ordinary usage.  But unless one is a benighted philosophistine chained and held fast in some dark corner of Plato's Cave, one will not dismiss metaphysics for this reason, but strive to work out a theory of how  the linguistic  stretching works.