Maverick Philosopher

On Her Deathbed

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"I fear that there is nothing on the other side."

Strange Anti-Epicurean Bedfellows

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Platonism and Christianity: Josef Pieper on Phaedrus 246c

At the center of the confrontation between Platonism and Christianity on the question of the survival of death lies the tension: immortality of the soul or resurrection of the body? More fully:  immortality of the disembodied soul or resurrection of the en-souled body? Connected with this is the question of whether and to what extent Christianity has been illegitimately Hellenized, in particular, Platonized. Platonism holds that the soul is the true self and that death is liberation of the soul from its entrapment by the body. This puts Platonism at odds with Christianity which teaches the resurrection of the body and which comports better with the Aristotelian-Thomistic (A-T) view of the human person as a soul-body composite, and thus as essentially embodied. For Platonism, I am (identical to) my soul, and my body is an accidental adjunct. On the A-T view, however, I am not my soul, but a soul-body composite, both components of which are essential to me and to each other. But Platonism is one thing, Plato another. It is not clear that Plato was a Platonist.

Josef Pieper takes it a step further and roundly asserts that "Plato himself, however, is no Platonist." He refers us to the late dialogue, Phaedrus, and to the passage at 246c. The passage is concerned with the question "how it is that a living being is called mortal and immortal." Pieper takes Plato to be suggesting:

If ever immortality is conferred upon us, not just the soul but the entire physical human being will in some inconceivable manner participate in the life of the gods; for in them alone is it made real in its original perfection. . . . Plato himself, therefore, here concedes that it is a catachrestic, inadequate, use of language to call the soul immortal. (Death and Immortality, Herder and Herder, 1969, p. 116.)

Unfortunately, Pieper's interpretation, which attempts to assimilate Platonism to Christianity, is not borne out by the text:

This composite structure of body and soul joined together is called a living being and is further designated as mortal. Immortal it is not on any reasonable supposition: in fact, it is our imagination, not our vision, not our adequate comprehension, that presents us with the notion of a god as an immortal living being equipped both with soul and with body, and with these, moreoever, joined together for all time. (trs. Helmbold and Rabinowitz, emphasis added)

Pieper's mistake is a surprising one for a philosopher of his stature to make. But it is a mistake that does not detract much from the high quality of Death and Immortality, which I strongly recommend, and to which I regularly return.

A Philosopher's Last Words

What I haven't been able to learn by living, I now hope to learn by dying.

Ash Wednesday

"Remember, man, thou art dust and unto dust thou shalt return." Memento, homo, quia pulvis es et in pulverem reverteris. This warning, from the Catholic liturgy for Ash Wednesday, is based on Genesis 3, 19: In sudore vultus tui vesceris pane, donec revertaris in terram de qua sumptus es: quia pulvis es et in pulverem reverteris.

How real can we and this world be if in a little while we all will be nothing but dust and ashes?

 

The typical secularist is a reality denier who hides from the unalterable facts of death and impermanence.  This is shown by his self-deceptive behavior: he lives as if he will live forever and as if his projects are ultimately meaningful even though he knows that he won't and that they aren't.  If he were to face reality he would have to be a nihilist.  That he isn't shows that he is fooling himself.

More here.

Christopher Hitchens has been dead for over eleven years now.  In Platonic-Augustinian-Christian perspective, what no longer exists never truly existed.  So here we have a man who never truly existed but who denied the existence of the Source of his own ephemeral quasi-existence. Curious.

Death as a Boon to the Spiritual

I read the Sufi mystic Rūmī  (1207-1273) when I lived in Turkey, 1995-1996. Here is an entry from my Turkish journal written on Christmas Eve morning, 1995. The following quotation is from The Masnavi.

Death is in reality a boon to the spiritual, and it is only fools who cry, "Would that this world might endure forever, and that there were no such thing as death."

Sufism is the mystical branch of Islam. Our Sufi is making two claims. One is that death is the door to eternal life. The other is that only the fool fails to perceive the profoundly unsatisfactory character of this life. You are not a fool if you deny the first, though you may be wrong; you are a fool if you deny the second. To want to live on indefinitely in this world as it is is a clear indicator of spiritual blindness.

So I say, "Up or out!" What do I mean?

Academic tenure is sometimes described as 'up or out.' You either gain tenure, within a limited probationary period, or you must leave. I tend to think of life like that: either up or out, either promotion to a Higher Life or annihilation. I wouldn't want an indefinitely prolonged stay in this vale of probation.

In plain English: I wouldn't want to live forever in this world. Thus for metaphysical reasons alone I have no interest in cryogenic or cryonic life extension. Up or out!

It would be interesting to delve into some of the issues surrounding cryonics and the trans-humanist fantasies that subserve this hare-brained scheme. The possibilities of fraud and foul play seem endless.  Some controversies reported here.   But for now I will merely note that Alcor is located in Scottsdale, Arizona. The infernal Valle del Sol would not be my first choice for such an operation. One hopes that they have good backup in case of a power outage.

Death, Consolation, and 'Life Goes On'

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Transhumanist fantasies aside, we will all die.  Faced with the inevitable, one naturally looks for consolation.  Some console themselves with the thought that 'life goes on.'  In the words of the great Laura Nyro song, And When I Die:

And when I die
And when I'm gone
There'll be one child born in this world
To carry on, carry on.

The singer consoles herself with the thought that life goes on.  But is the thought that 'life goes on' a legitimate and reasonable source of consolation? Or is it an "escapist self-deception" as Robert Spaemann asserts? (Persons, Oxford UP, 2017, 115. Orig. publ. in German in 1996; first publ. in English in 2006)

I attempt in this entry to show that Spaemann is right.

 

Body, Soul, Self

  Tony Flood writes:

Hard to imagine Hitchens at almost 73, had he lived. Great post, but I have a question.

Briefly, why do you refer to the soul as one's "true self"? Genesis 2:7 reports that from the dust of the ground (ha-adamah) God created ha-adam, i.e., "the man." The man became a living soul (le-nephesh hayyah) when God breathed the breath of life (nishmat hayyim) into him. The pre-animated ha-adamah was neither dead nor a "less-than-true" or incomplete human being; the animating nephesh is not the man's self or ego. When God withdraws the breath of life from a soul, that soul dies. I think know your non-Genesis source, but I want to hear it from you. Your passing comment reminded me that I had written quite a bit about this earlier this year.

 

Also interested in knowing whether there's anything you want to share from your retreat.

 

Tony is referring to this sentence of mine: "Those of us who champion  free speech miss him [Hitchens] and what he would have had to say about the current state of the world had he taken care of himself, or rather his body, his true self being his soul." What I wrote suggests that there is a difference between body and soul in a person, and that the soul is the person's self.  But why true self?  Well, if I can exist without a body, but I cannot exist without (being identical to) a soul, then 'my' soul, or rather me qua soul is 'my' true self. There are a number of different questions here, all very difficult.

 

To begin, we need to clarify our terminology. 'Soul' (psyche, anima, Seele) is ambiguous.  It could refer to the life-principle in living things.  'Soul' could also be used to refer to the subject or possessor of a person's mental states. For the Christian philosopher Richard Swinburne, "Each actual human being is essentially  a pure mental substance . . . " and ". . . a person has mental properties because their [sic] soul has mental properties." (Are We Bodies or Souls? Oxford UP, 2019, p. 80)  

 

Now ask yourself which of the following is true:

 

(A) I am (identical to) a substance the form of which is my soul and the matter of which is my body.  Anima forma corporis: the soul is the form of the body.

 

(P) I am (identical to) a purely mental substance that contingently possesses a living human body.

 

A substance may be defined as any individual entity metaphysically capable of independent existence, where 'individual' implies unrepeatability and impredicability.

 

(A) is the Aristotelian-Thomistic view. A person is one substance, the individual human being, the soul of which is not a substance. 

 

(P) is the Platonic-Cartesian view. It is substance-dualist. In the book mentioned, Swinburne defends substance dualism according to which "each human consists of two parts -- a soul (a pure mental substance) and a body (a physical substance)." (p. 141)

 

So, when I wrote in my Substack entry about Hitchens taking care of himself, or rather his body, I signaled my inclination to accept the Platonic-Cartesian view. You can destroy your body with hooch and weed, but not your soul.  

 

Now which of the two views above is more biblical? This, I take it, is the question that exercises Tony, and I suspect that his view is either (A) or neither. I suspect that Tony's view is that the Platonic-Cartesian view is wholly unbiblical and thus that Christianity has little or nothing to do with Platonism.  

 

Serendipitously, Tony's question ties in nicely with a discussion I had with a man at the monastery about Mark 12: 18-27 and Christ's argument against the Sadducees re: bodily resurrection. Don't we need Platonic souls during the time between hora mortis nostrae and general resurrection?

 

Combox open.

A Reason to Live Long

There is work to be done, and it may be that it can only be done here. It may be that at death soul-making stops and one is stuck at the moral, intellectual, and spiritual level one has attained in the precincts of the sublunary. This could prove problematic if one survives one's bodily death.  Are you sure that you don't? 

Ratzinger on the Resurrection of the Body

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You will note that in my writings I use the gender-neutral 'man' and 'he.'  It is important to stand in defense of the mother tongue. She is under vicious assault these days. You owe a lot to your mother; show her some respect. On Easter Sunday and on every day. Anyone who takes offense at standard English takes offense inappropriately.

Dust and Ashes

"Remember, man, thou art dust and unto dust thou shalt return." Memento, homo, quia pulvis es et in pulverem reverteris. This warning, from the Catholic liturgy for Ash Wednesday, is based on Genesis 3, 19: In sudore vultus tui vesceris pane, donec revertaris in terram de qua sumptus es: quia pulvis es et in pulverem reverteris.

Luther's German:  Im Schweiße deines Angesichts sollst du dein Brot essen, bis daß du wieder zu Erde werdest, davon du genommen bist. Denn du bist Erde und sollst zu Erde werden.

Douay-Rheims: "In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread till thou return to the earth out of which thou wast taken: for dust thou art, and into dust thou shalt return."

How real can we and this world be if in a little while we all will be nothing but dust and ashes?

The typical secularist is a reality denier who hides from the unalterable facts of death and impermanence.  This is shown by his self-deceptive behavior: he lives as if he will live forever and as if his projects are meaningful even though he knows, at a level deeper than his self-deception,  that he won't and that they aren't.  If he were to face reality he would have to be a nihilist.  That he isn't shows that he is fooling himself.

More here.

You Are Going to Die.

Christopher Hitchens has been dead for over ten years now.  In Platonic perspective, what no longer exists never truly existed.  So here we have a man who never truly existed but who denied the existence of the self-existent Source of his own ephemeral quasi-existence. Curious.

On the still life: A meatless skull in the gathering darkness, the candle having just gone out, life's flame having gone to smoke, unable to read, with no need for food. The globe perhaps signifies the universality of the skull owner's predicament and fate.

Death as the Muse of Morality Limits our Immorality

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On the Eternal in Man

Theodor Haecker, Journal in the Night (tr. Alexander Dru, Pantheon Books, 1950, p. 67, #263, written 1940):

The man who explicitly does not believe and does not will to believe (for the will to believe belongs to believing) in an eternal life, that is to say in a personal life after death, will become an animal, an animal being which among other things, man is. Man is 'planned as spirit,' as Kierkegaard puts it, but that includes the immortality of the soul. Whoever relinquishes that also gives up the spirit of man.

Man alone among the animals raises the question whether he is more than an animal.  His raising of this question does not prove  that he is more than an animal; perhaps it proves only that he is the most pretentious of all animals, a crazy animal, an evolutionary fluke who merely fancies himself more than  an animal. Such a fanciful conceit might even be accorded survival value within a naturalist scheme. Thinking himself the crown of creation, a child of God, with divine sanction to lord it over, but also cherish and protect the critters beneath him, this lofty self-conception, even if false, might enhance his chances of survival. It could be like that, or at least I cannot see a way definitively to exclude this epistemic possibility.

Or it could be like this:  Man's having a world (Welt) and not merely an environment (Umwelt) like the animals points to a higher origin, a spiritual origin,  and a higher destiny.  Elsewhere I catalog twelve meanings of 'world'; here I am using the term in my twelfth sense, the transcendental-phenomenological sense.  It remains an open question whether the world in this sense has an ontic anchor in God, whether the light of the transcendental-phenomenological Lichtung (clearing) has an onto-theological Source. We cannot know it to be the case, but we can reasonably believe it to be the case. That is as good as it gets here below.  And so I am brought around, once again, to the fact that, in the end, one must decide what to believe and how to live.

Haecker is right to point out that "the will to believe belongs to believing." Not all belief is voluntary, but religious and anti-religious belief is.  The will comes into it, as it does not in the case of some such mundane belief as that the Sun has risen. You are free to believe that you are a complex physical system slated for utter annihilation in a few years, months, days, minutes, and you are free to believe that you are "planned as spirit."  Either way reasons can be adduced, reasons that are not obviously bad reasons.

Boethius and the Second Death of Oblivion: Ubi nunc fidelis ossa Fabricii manent?

We die twice. We pass out of life, and then we pass out of memory, the encairnment in oblivion more final than the encairnment in rocks. Boethius puts the following words into the mouth of Philosophia near the end of Book Two of the Consolations of Philosophy.

Where are Fabricius's bones, that honourable man? What now is Brutus or unbending Cato? Their fame survives in this: it has no more than a few slight letters shewing forth an empty name. We see their noble names engraved, and only know thereby that they are brought to naught. Ye lie then all unknown, and fame can give no knowledge of you. But if you think that life can be prolonged by the breath of mortal fame, yet when the slow time robs you of this too, then there awaits you but a second death.

And why are these engraved names empty? Not just because their referents have ceased to exist, and not just because a time will come when no one remembers them, but because no so-called proper name is proper. All are common in that no name can capture the haecceity of its referent. So not only will we pass out of life and out of memory; even in life and in memory our much vaunted individuality is ineffable, and, some will conclude, nothing at all.

"We are such stuff / As dreams are made on, and our little life / Is rounded with a sleep." (Shakespeare, The Tempest.) 

Death

Death is a journey to a destination the existence of which cannot be known prior to arrival.

Preparing to Die

Some want to die; some wait to die; some fear to die; some don't care whether they live or die. The philosopher prepares to die.

Contemplating Suicide?

Are you quite sure that there is a way out? It may be that there is no exit.  You can of course destroy your body, and that might do the trick. But then again it might not. Or is it perfectly obvious that you are either identical to your body or necessarily dependent for your existence on its existence?  You might want to think about this before making the leap of faith in ultimate nonentity.  

It would be fairly easy to give strong arguments why TO BE is not the same as TO BE PHYSICAL. Think of so-called 'abstract objects.' It is much more difficult to argue persuasively that the identity fails in the case of persons. And yet persons are rather remarkable. The ones we are regularly acquainted with are also animals. Sunk in animality as we are, it is easy to think that we are are just highly evolved animals.  It is easy to miss the wonder of personhood. But the abyss that separates man from the animal should give one pause. 

Bishop James A. Pike's son Jim committed suicide. He supposedly communicated the following message to his father from the Other Side:

I thought there was a way out; I wanted out; I've found there is no way out. I wish I had stayed to work out my problems in more familiar surroundings.  (James A. Pike, The Other Side: An Account of My Experiences with Psychic Phenomena, Doubleday, 1968, p. 118.)

 

If you were around in the '60s and hip to what was happening you will recall Bishop Pike. He was a theological liberal who made quite a splash the ripples of which have long since subsided. The book I have cited  is worth reading but best consumed with a mind both open and critical.

Do You Value This Life? How Much?

It is the hour of death.  You are informed by an utterly reliable source that you have exactly two options.  You can either accept death and with it utter annihilation of the self, or you can repeat your life with every last detail the same.  But if every last detail is to be the same, and you decide to sign up for another round on the wheel of becoming, you realize that you are signing up for an infinity of rounds.

So which will it be?  Has your life been so valuable that you would be willing to repeat it, and indeed repeat it endlessly? Noch einmal? If you say yes, you are at the upper limit of life affirmation. For me, once is enough. Up or out! This life has point only as prelude. The wheel of samsara is  the wheel of Ixion, and an eternity of re-turning is a shabby and indeed horrifying substitute for true eternity.

Nietzsche was a genuine instance of homo religiosus, but possessing as he did the bladed intellect of the skeptic, he could not bring himself to believe.

Are the Dead Subject to Harm?

Suppose the executrix of my will fails to disburse the funds I have earmarked for the local food bank after my death and instead heads for Las Vegas with the loot. Has she harmed me? Stolen my money? Violated my wishes?

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I can't eat a no-longer-existent sandwich or kick a no-longer-existent ball. How then can she harm a no-longer-existent man?  

On Death: Objective and Subjective Views

Death viewed objectively seems normal, natural, and 'acceptable.' And not evil. Is it evil that the leaves of deciduous trees fall off and die in the autumn? There are more where they came from. It is nature's way.  Everything in nature goes the way of the leaves of autumn. If this is not evil, why is it evil when we fall from the Arbor Vitae?  Are we not just bits of nature's fauna? Very special bits, no doubt, but wholly natural nonetheless.

Viewed subjectively, however, the matter looks decidedly different. Gaze at someone you love at a moment when your 'reasons' for loving the person are most in evidence. Then give unblinkered thought to the proposition that the dearly beloved child or spouse will die and become nothing, that the marvellous depth of interiority that has revealed  itself as unique to your love will be annihilated, utterly blotted out forever, and soon. 

Now turn your thought back on yourself  and try to confront in all honesty and without evasion your upcoming annihilation as a subject of experience and not as just another object among objects. Focus on yourself as a subject for whom there is a world, and not as an object in the world.  Entertain with existential clarity the thought that you will not play the transcendental spectator at your demise and cremation.

The horror of nonexistence from which Epicurus wanted to free us comes into view only when we view death subjectively:  I as subject, not me as object, or as 'one.'  No doubt one dies. But it is not possible that one die unless it is is possible that I die or you die, where 'you' is singular.  Viewing myself objectively, I am at a distance from myself and thus in evasion of the fact I as subject  will become nothing. 

That the self as subject should be annihilated ought to strike one as the exact opposite of normal, natural, and acceptable. It should strike one as a calamity beyond compare. For there are no more where the dearly beloved came from.  The dearly beloved, whether self or other, is unique, and not just in the 0ne-of-kind sense. For there is no kind whose instantiation is the dearly beloved.  

Which view is true? Can either be dismissed? Can they be 'mediated' by some dialectical hocus-pocus?  These are further questions. 

But now it is time for a hard ride as Sol peeps his ancient head over the Superstition ridge line.

On the Fear of Death

Heute roth, morgen todt.

I woke up from a dream an hour ago. I was staying with Philip Roth in his New York City apartment where I noticed that my beard had been shaved off. I said to myself, "You look good even without it." The vanity was cover for the fear that I am losing my power.  I made coffee to wake up and to read the final pages of Everyman, Roth's 2006 meditation on mortality. At novel's end, Everyman's lamentations and self-excoriations give way to a certain buoyancy of spirit. Conferring with the bones of his parents at the Jewish cemetery bucked him up. That and a conversation with a black grave digger. Everyman was starting to feel indestructible again.  We are, after all, born to live, not to die.

On the last page, the 71 year old Everyman, a sort of post-modern Adam, though never named, accepts a general anaesthetic for surgery on his right carotid artery.  And here Everyman and the eponymous novel come to their end:

He went under feeling far from felled, anything but doomed, eager yet again to be fulfilled, but nonetheless, he never woke up. Cardiac arrest. He was no more, freed from being, entering into nowhere without even knowing it. Just as he'd feared from the start.

...................................................

This morning, at a monkish hour, I penned the following on the fear of death.

What it reveals, perhaps, is that it is an illusion to suppose that one will be a detached spectator of one's demise. The spectator himself will cease to exist! The fear reveals the inevitability of a catastrophic loss. The  fear, whose visitation is rare and typically nocturnal, is hard to recapture for analysis in the light of day because the transcendental spectator re-asserts himself. He would view death as an event in one's life, not as the end of one's life.  

But it may be that such viewership is no illusion. It may be that the fear of death is not revelatory but a groundless fear and that the sense of spectatorship is revelatory. Fearing death, I fear a ghost: I am at my core immortal, and as an individual, not as the universal Atman or the like.  The questions arise: Who am I finally? Who dies? What is death? Can you tell me what consciousness is? You can't. Might it then be presumptuous to suppose that you understand its absolute cessation?

 

To Know for Sure; To Be Forever

Objective certainty is to knowledge what absolute immutability is to being. We want to know for sure; we want to be forever. The spiritually awake cannot be content to stumble along in the twilight and then just fall off a cliff.  

This message will not get through to the sleepwalkers of the sublunary.

Perhaps a better man than I can reach them?

The Uselessness of Stoicism in the Face of Death

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Letter of Note

Into Eternity

On the 'Inconceivability' of Death

Or is death just a natural event like any other? Merton the monk triggers a Maverick meditatio mori. 

Ashes to Ashes; Dust to Dust

"Remember, man, thou art dust and unto dust thou shalt return." Memento, homo, quia pulvis es et in pulverem reverteris. This warning, from the Catholic liturgy for Ash Wednesday, is based on Genesis 3, 19: In sudore vultus tui vesceris pane, donec revertaris in terram de qua sumptus es: quia pulvis es et in pulverem reverteris.

How real can we and this world be if in a little while we all will be nothing but dust and ashes?

Genesis 3, 19 is true whether or not God exists and whether or not man is spirit.  

The typical secularist is a reality denier who hides from the unalterable facts of death and impermanence.  This is shown by his self-deceptive behavior: he lives as if he will live forever and as if his projects are meaningful even though he knows that he won't and that they aren't.  If he were to face reality he would have to be a nihilist.  That he isn't shows that he is fooling himself.  If our secularist is a leftist utopian, then he pins his hopes on developments no reasonable person could believe in, and that he won't be around to enjoy in any case.  His erasure of the historical record allows him to persist in his self-deception. The Left is at war with memory and its lessons.  

I will be coming back to this theme in connection with Ryszard Legutko, The Demon in Democracy: Totalitarian Temptations in Free Societies (Encounter Books, 2018). A quotation to tantalize: "Communism, as a system that started history anew, had to be, in essence, and in practice, against memory." (9)  We saw that play out in our cities last summer, as the Left stood idly by, and in many instances encouraged, the destruction of statues and other monuments for reasons that are no reasons at all but nihilistic ventings from the pit.

Our plesance here is all vain glory,
This fals world is but transitory,
The flesche is brukle, the Feynd is slee;
Timor mortis conturbat me.

No stait in Erd here standis sicker;
As with the wynd wavis the wicker,
Wavis this wardlis vanitie;
Timor mortis conturbat me.

(William Dunbar c. 1460 -- c. 1520, from "Lament for the Makers.")

Here lie I by the chancel door;
They put me here because I was poor.
The further in, the more you pay,
But here lie I as snug as they.

(Devon tombstone.)

Here lies Piron, a complete nullibiety,
Not even a Fellow of a Learned Society.

Alexis Piron, 1689-1773, "My Epitaph"

Why hoard your maidenhead? There'll not be found
A lad to love you, girl, under the ground.
Love's joys are for the quick; but when we're dead
It's dust and ashes, girl, will go to bed.

(Asclepiades, fl. 290 B.C., tr. R. A. Furness)

The world, perhaps, does not see that those who rightly engage in
philosophy study only death and dying. And, if this be true, it
would surely be strange for a man all through his life to desire
only death, and then, when death comes to him, to be vexed at it,
when it has been his study and his desire for so long.

Plato, Phaedo, St. 64, tr. F. J. Church

A Vocation, not a Job

Heading out the door for a walk, the wife invited me along. I told her I had too much to do, that the clock was running, the format sudden death, the time-control unknown. 

"But you're retired."

I reminded her that philosophy is my vocation.  One can be retired from the largely meaningless job of teaching the unteachable, but one can never be retired from one's vocation in the proper sense of that term.

I hope to have my boots on when the flag falls.

In what state will death find you when the Reaper's scythe cuts you down?  Will it matter? Is that a question that needs to be investigated?

Mortalism

According to Peter Heinegg, mortalism is "the belief that the soul -- or spark of life, or animating principle, or whatever -- dies with the body. . . ." (Mortalism: Readings on the Meaning of Life,  Prometheus, 2003, p. 9). Heinegg was raised Catholic and indeed was a member of the Jesuit order for seven years. In an essay prefatory to his anthology, he explains why he is a mortalist. Suppose we examine some of his statements.

That anyone should be a mortalist does not surprise me, but it does surprise me that anyone should consider it an "obvious fact" that death is the "irrevocable end" of a person. But this is what Heinegg holds: "Everybody knows that the soul dies with the body, but nobody likes to admit it." (11) Priests and metaphysicians may prate about immortality, but deep down in the bowels of the body we all know that we are mortal to the core:

     As surely as the body knows pain or delight, the onset of orgasm or
     vomiting, it knows that it (we) will die and disappear. We have a
     foretaste of this every time we fall asleep or suffer any
     diminution of consciousness from drugs, fatigue, sickness,
     accidents, aging, and so forth. The extrapolation from the fading
     of awareness to its total extinction is (ha) dead certain. (13, emphasis added)

This is as close as Heinegg comes to an argument in his personal statement, "Why I am a Mortalist." (11-14) The argument has but one premise:

   1. We experience the increase and diminution of our embodied
   consciousness in a variety of ways.

   Therefore

   2. Consciousness cannot exist disembodied.

But surely (2) does not follow from (1). If (2) followed from (1), then it would be impossible for (1) to be true and (2) false. But it is easy to conceive of (1) being true and (2) false. It might be like  this: as long as the soul is attached to the body, its experiences are deeply affected by bodily states, but after death the soul continues  to exist and have some experiences albeit experiences of a different sort than it had while embodied.  Variations in the quality of consciousness would be exactly what one would expect given the soul's embodiment.

Consider near-death experiences. A man has a massive heart attack and has a profoundly blissful experience of a white light at the end of a tunnel. Would any committed mortalist take such an experience as proving that there is life after bodily death? Of course not. The mortalist would point out that the man was not fully dead, and would use this fact to argue that the experience was not veridical. The mortalist  would point out that no conclusions about what happens after death can be drawn from experiences one has while still alive. By the same token, however, a consistent mortalist should realize that this same principle applies to his experiences of the waxing and waning of his consciousness: he cannot validily infer from these experiences that consciousness cannot exist disembodied.  For his experiences of the augmentation and diminution of of consciousness are enjoyed while the person's body is alive.

What puzzles me about Heinegg is not that he is a mortalist, but that he is so cocksure about it.  One can of course extrapolate from the fading of consciousness to its total extinction, and not unreasonably; but that the extrapolation is "dead certain" is simply a leap of faith -- or unfaith.

Related post: Near-Death Experiences:  Do They Prove Anything?

Can the Existence of God be Proven?

A reader inquires,

I was wondering whether you had any direction you could offer for rational arguments for God's existence?

If you are looking for arguments that are not merely rational, but rationally compelling, I don't believe that there are any.  I also believe that there aren't any such arguments for the nonexistence of God.  A rationally compelling argument for a proposition is a proof; a rationally compelling argument for its logical contradictory is a disproof.  When it comes to God, and not just God, there are no proofs or disproofs. There are arguments, some better than others. That's as good as it gets.

Note that my claim that this is so is not a proposition that I claim to be able to prove.  I claim merely that it is reasonable to believe.  I do believe it and will continue to believe until someone gives me a compelling reason not to believe it. If I am right, however,  that cannot happen. For my meta-philosophical thesis is substantive, and if I am right, said thesis can neither be proven nor disproven. So the the best you could do would be counter me with the contradictory of my meta-thesis. But then we would be in a stand-off.

What is it for an argument to be rationally compelling?

Philosophers make reasoned cases for all manner of propositions, but their colleagues typically do not find these arguments to be compelling.  So a reasoned case need not be a compelling case.  But it depends on what exactly is meant by 'compelling.'  I suggest that a (rationally) compelling argument is one which forces the 'consumer' of the argument to accept the argument's conclusion on pain of being irrational.  (What is it to be irrational? That's a long story I cannot now go into, but the worst form of irrationality would be the acceptance of a logical contradiction.) I will assume that the 'consumer' is intelligent, sincere, open to having his mind changed, and well-versed in the subject matter of the argument.  Now it may be that there are a few arguments that are rationally compelling in this sense, but there are precious few, and surely no arguments for or against the existence of God.

 

To appreciate this, note first that arguments have premises and that no argument can prove its own premises. (An argument of the form p therefore p is an argument valid in point of logical form in which premise and conclusion are identical, but no one will take an argument of this form as proving that p.)  Now given that no argument can prove its own premises, what reason could one give for accepting the premises of a given argument?  Suppose  deductive argument A has P1 and P2 as premises and that conclusion C follows logically from the premises.  Why accept P1 and P2?  One could adduce further arguments B and C for P1 and P2 respectively.  But then the problem arises all over again.  For arguments B and C themselves have premises.  If P3 is a premise of B, what reason could one give for the acceptance of P3? One could adduce argument D.  But D too has premises, and if you think this through you soon realize that you have brought down upon your head an infinite regress which is vicious.  The regress is vicious because the task of justifying by argument all the premises involved cannot be completed.

 

To avoid argumentative regress we need premises that are self-justifying in the sense that they are justified, but not justified by anything external to themselves.  Such propositions could be said to be self-evident.  But what is self-evident to one person is often not self-evident to another.  This plain fact forces a distinction between subjective and objective self-evidence.  Clearly, subjective self-evidence is not good enough.  If it merely seems to subject S that p is self-evident, that does not suffice to establish that p is objectively self-evident.  Trouble is, when someone announces that such-and-such is objectively self-evident that too is a claim about how it seems to that person, so that it is not clear that what is being claimed as objectively self-evident is not in the end itself merely subjectively self-evident.

 

Example.  Suppose an argument for the existence of God employs the premise, 'Every event has a cause.'  Is this premise self-evident?  No.  Why can't there be an uncaused event?  So how does one know that that premise is true?  It is a plausible premise, no doubt, but plausibility is not the same as truth.  And if you do not know that the premises of your argument are true, then your argument, even if logically impeccable in every other way, does not amount to a proof, strictly speaking.  Knowledge entails certainty, objective certainty.

 

My point is that there are hardly any rationally compelling arguments for substantive theses.  But one can make reasoned cases for theses.  Therefore, a reasoned case is not the same as a compelling argument.

 

Because people are naturally dogmatic and crave doxastic security, they are unwilling to accept my meta-philosophical thesis that there are hardly any compelling arguments for substantive theses.  They want to believe that their pet beliefs are compellingly provable and that people who do not accept their 'proofs' are either irrational or morally defective.  Their tendency is to accept as sound any old argument for the conclusions they antecedently accept, no matter how shoddy the argument,  and to reject as unsound arguments that issue in conclusions they do not accept.  Their craving for doxastic security swamps and suborns their critical faculties.

 

One way to refute what I am saying would be by providing a compelling argument for the existence of God, or a compelling argument for the nonexistence of God.  You won't be able to do it. 

In the absence of compelling arguments, what should one do?

I don't believe that there can be talk of proof when it comes to God, the soul, and other big topics, assuming you use 'proof' strictly.  After considering all the evidence for and against, you will have to decide what you will believe and how you will live.  The will comes into it. One freedom comes into it. I thus espouse a limited doxastic voluntarism. In the shadowlands of this life there is light enough and darkness enough to lend support to either answer, that of the theist and that of his opposite number.  So it is up to you to decide what you will believe and how you will live.

For me the following consideration clinches the matter.  Bring the theoretical question back down to your lived life, your Existenz in the existentialist sense.  How will you live, starting right now and for the rest of your days?  Will you live as if you will be utterly extinguished in a few years or will you live as if what you do and leave undone right now matters, really matters? Will you live as if life is serious, or will you live as if it is some sort of cosmic joke?  Will you live as if something is at stake in this life, however dimly descried, or will you live as if nothing is ultimately at stake?  Will you live life as if it has an Absolute Meaning that transcends the petty particular relative meanings of the quotidian round?  Will you take the norms that conscience reveals as so many pointers to an Unseen Order to which this paltry and transient sublunary order is but prelude?

It is your life.  You decide.  You can drift and not decide, but your drifting in the currents of social suggestion and according to the idols of the age is a deficient  mode of decision. Not to decide is to decide.

Now suppose that when Drs. Mary Neal and Eben Alexander die the body's death, they become nothing.  Suppose that their phenomenologically vivid paranormal after-death experiences were revelatory of nothing real, that their experiences were just the imaginings of malfunctioning brains at the outer limits of biological life.  What will they have lost by believing as they did?

Nothing! Nothing at all.  You could of course say that they were wrong and were living in illusion and giving themselves and others false hope.  But no one will ever know one way or the other.  And if the body's death is the last word, then nothing ultimately matters, and so it can't matter that they were wrong if turns out that they were.

If they were right, however, then the moral transformation that their taking seriously of their experiences has wrought in them can be expected to redound to their benefit when they pass from this sphere. 

Can a Dead Animal be Buried?

Arguably not. Here is an argument:

1) A dead animal can be buried if and only if it is identical to its corpse.

2) A dead animal is not identical to its corpse.

Therefore

3) It is not the case that a dead animal can be buried.

Argument for (2):

4) If a dead animal is identical to its corpse, then it survives its death as a corpse.

5) No animal survives its death as a corpse.

Therefore

2) A dead animal is not identical to its corpse.

Suppose you hear that I was involved in a terrible auto accident. You ask whether I survived. You get the response, "Yes, here he is in the morgue. The good news is that he survived; the bad news is that he is dead." If you find that response absurd, then you will accept (5) and with it (3), and you will understand that a dead animal cannot be buried. You will agree that you cannot bury me, "on the lone prarie" or anywhere; you can only bury my corpse which is not me. Even if I am only a living human body, I am not identical to 'my' corpse either before death or after it.

 

When an animal dies, it ceases to exist, and you cannot bury what does not exist.

But intuitions differ. Suppose that a 200 lb. man dies in his bed, and that a man is just a living material thing.  If the man ceased to exist at death, but the 200 lb. mass in the bed did not, then something new came into existence in the bed, a corpse. If that sounds absurd, you may be tempted to say that one and the same thing that was alive is now dead, and that that one thing  will be buried. So you did bury old Uncle Joe after all and not merely his remains.  And the old cowboy's request not to be buried on the lone prarie, where the coyotes howl and wind blows free, makes sense.

Welcome to the aporetics of death and burial.

Personal Immortality

If you wait until you have proven that there is personal immortality before you live as if there is, then you will never live as if there is. But if you live as if there is, then it will not matter whether you ever prove that there is.

Troubles

There are the troubles that come to us and there are those we bring upon ourselves. But death doesn't care to distinguish them. It will end both equally.

"Are you quite sure? Mightn't there be post-mortem troubles consequent upon bad behavior here below?  Can you confidently rule out that possibility?"

Praeparatio Mortis

Living long is a kind of low-grade preparation for death: the longer one lives, the more obvious the vanity of life becomes. An old soul can discern it at a young age, but even he will see it more clearly as his body ages. Paradoxically, vanity will be better appreciated if one in younger days fancies life full and rich and equal to its promises. For then the disillusionment  will be all the greater.  Or as one of my aphorisms has it:

Live life to the full to perceive that it is empty.

Death, Consolation, and 'Life Goes On'

Transhumanist fantasies aside, we will all die.  Faced with the inevitable, one naturally looks for consolation.  Some console themselves with the thought that 'life goes on.'  In the words of the great Laura Nyro song, And When I Die:

And when I die
And when I'm gone
There'll be one child born in this world
To carry on, carry on.

The singer consoles herself with the thought that life goes on.  But is the thought that 'life goes on' a legitimate and reasonable source of consolation? Or is it an "escapist self-deception" as Robert Spaemann asserts? (Persons, Oxford UP, 2017, 115. Orig. publ. in German in 1996; first publ. in English in 2006)

I agree with Spaemann.  But it is not easy to bring the matter into clear focus, and for two reasons. One is that Spaemann writes in a somewhat loose and 'Continental' way.  The other reason is that the subject matter is elusive and intrinsically difficult. But I'll try my best; to do so, however, I will have to put things in my own way.

Talk of life's going on is a way of evading the reality of death, which is the death of a person and not merely the death of an animal. It is true that we are animals. It is also true that, to put it in the form of an understatement, we are very unlike other animals. Genesis has it that man alone is made in the image and likeness of God. I take that to mean that man alone is a spiritual animal, a personal animal.  Man alone has a higher origin and higher destiny, a destiny that Eastern Orthodox Christianity describes as theosis or deification.  Even Martin Heidegger, despite his distance from Christianity and the metaphysics that underpins it, speaks of an abyss (Abgrund) that separates man from animal. Max Scheler says that while the animal has an environment (Umwelt), man has a world (Welt). Aristotle tried to accommodate both our likeness and our unlikeness to animals when he distinguished us from all other animals by the capacity to reason and speak.  Man, he taught, is a rational animal, zoon logikon, with animal the genus, man the species, and rationality the specific difference.  To think of oneself in this way, however, as primarily a member of a zoological species and only secondarily as different from the other animals, is to think of oneself from an external point of view. "This is the 'view from nowhere' . . . ." (115)

Personhood cannot be understood in this, or in any, objective or objectifying way.  For a person  is different from a specimen of a species or an instance of a multiply instantiable nature.  Each person is unique in a way in which tokens of a type, as such, are not unique. To make this clear is not easy. But here we go.

Suppose I have a box of ten 100 watt, 120 volt incandescent light bulbs  from the same manufacturer.  They are alike in all relevant respects: size, shape, chemical composition of filament, date of manufacture, etc.  We have ten tokens of the same type. These tokens are numerically different from one another, but qualitatively identical.  The tokens are interchangeable. If I need to screw a bulb into a lamp, any one of the ten will do.  Persons, by contrast, are not interchangeable.  If you complain that a light has burned out, I say, "Replace it with another of the same type!"  But if your beloved wife dies, I don't say, "Replace her with a wife of the same type!" or "Replace Mary with her identical twin Sherry: they share all the same lovable attributes!"  Why not? Because your love of Mary is directed at a person who in her haecceity and ipseity is unrepeatable and irreplaceable.

The point is subtle.  It is perhaps more clearly made using the example of self-love.  Suppose Phil is my indiscernible twin.  Now it is a fact that I love myself.  But if I love myself in virtue of my instantiation of a set of multiply-instantiable properties, then I should love Phil equally.  For he instantiates exactly the same properties as I do.  But if one of us has to be annihilated, then I prefer that it be Phil.  Suppose God decides that one of us is more than enough, and that one of us has to go.  I say, 'Let it be Phil!' and Phil says, 'Let it be Bill!' So I don't love Phil equally even though he has all the same properties that I have.  I prefer myself and love myself  just because I am myself.  I am unique. I am not an instance of a type.  And because I am not an instance of a type, I ought not be consoled by the thought that other instances of h. sapiens will come along after I am gone.

This little thought-experiment suggests that there is more to self-love than love of the being-instantiated of an ensemble of properties.  For Phil and I have the same properties, and yet each is willing to sacrifice the other.  This would make no sense if the being of each of us were exhausted by our being instances of sets of properties.  In other words, I do not love myself solely as an instance of properties but also as a unique existent individual who cannot be reduced to a mere instance of properties. I love myself as a unique individual, as a person.  And the same goes for Phil: he loves himself as a unique individual, as a person.  Each of us loves himself as a unique individual numerically distinct from his indiscernible twin.

We can take it a step further.   If love is blind as folk wisdom has it, self-love is blind in excelsis.  In some cases self-love is present even when the lover/beloved lacks any and all lovable attributes.  If there are cases like this then there is love of self as a pure individual. I love me just because I am me and not because I instantiate lovable attributes.  I love myself, not as an instance of attributes, but as a case of existence.  Instances are interchangeable; cases of existence are not.   I love myself in that I am in a sense of 'am' that cannot be identified with the being-instantiated of a set of properties. I love my very existing.   If so, and if my love is a 'correct emotion' (Brentano), then my sheer existing must be good. 

I take this to show that self-love cannot be identified with, or reduced to, love of an instance of lovable attributes qua instance of those attributes.  It cannot, because love of self is love of a person, and a person is not a token of a type, or an instance of properties.

Other Love

Now it is a point of phenomenology that love intends to reach the very haecceity and ipseity of the beloved: in loving someone we mean to  make contact with his or her unique thisness and selfhood. It is not a mere instance of lovable properties that love intends, but the very  being of the beloved. It is also true that this intending or meaning is in some cases fulfilled: we actually do sometimes make conscious contact with the haecceity and ipseity of the beloved. In the case of self love we not only intend, but arrive at, the very being of the beloved, not merely at the co-instantiation of a set of multiply instantiable lovable properties.  In the case of other love, there is the intention to reach the haecceity and ipseity of the beloved, but it is not clear how arriving at it is possible. 

In the case of self love, my love 'reaches' the beloved because I am the beloved.  In the case of other-love, my love intends the beloved, but it is not clear that it 'reaches' her.

The question underlying all of this is quite fundamental: Are there any genuine individuals? X is a genuine individual if and only if X is essentially unique. (Josiah Royce) The Bill and Phil example suggests that selves or persons are genuine individuals and not mere bundles of multiply instantiable properties.  For each of the twins is acutely aware that he is not the other despite complete agreement in respect of  pure properties. 

Does life go on after one dies?

It does indeed. The point however, is that one is not, in one's innermost inwardness, just a bit of life, a specimen of the species, h. sapiens.  Qua person, I am not replaceable in the way an old animal is replaceable by a young one of the same species.  One cannot reasonably find consolation in the fact that 'life goes on.'  If one does, then one is alienated from one's own personhood. Spaemann is right: the thought that 'life goes on' is "escapist self-deception."

 

Time and the Existing Dead

Another round with David Brightly.  My responses are in blue.

Bill says,

We don't want to say that a dead man becomes nothing after death since he remains a particular, completely determinate, dead man distinct from others. If the dead become nothing after death then all the dead would be the same. If your dead father and your dead mother are both nothing, then there is nothing to distinguish them.

It's difficult to know what to make of this.  My guess is that Bill is conflating a thing with the idea of a thing. 

BV: I plead innocent. I hope David doesn't think that when a person dies, that person becomes an idea.  My veridical memories of my dead mother are memories of a woman not an idea.

First, 'particular' and 'completely determinate' do not denote properties of  concrete objects like men.  One can contrast 'I have in mind a particular man' with 'I have in mind a man' but 'particular' here qualifies not 'man' but rather the way of having in mind.  'Completely determinate' functions in a similar way.  What would 'partially determinate man' denote?  A partially determinate idea of a man makes sense, however; we know some of his properties but not others. 

BV: I beg to differ. Granted, my idea of David is incomplete: I know some of his properties but not others. But David is not the same as my idea of him, and that's a good thing for both of us. I say that David himself is complete (completely determinate), just like everything else that exists mind-independently.  It makes sense to say both that my idea of David is incomplete, and that David himself is complete.  The fact that there cannot be an incomplete man cannot be used to show that 'complete' cannot be a predicate of concrete items.  So why does David think that?

David may be relying on a Contrast Argument one form of which is as follows:

1) If a term T is meaningful, then there are items to which T does not apply.
2) There are no items to which T does not apply.
Ergo
3) T is not meaningful.

In the present case:

4) If 'complete' is a meaningful term, then there are concrete items to which 'complete' does not apply.
5) There are no concrete items to which 'complete' does not apply.
Ergo
6) 'Complete' is not a meaningful term.

Well, I reject Contrast Arguments. Bang on the link.  Similarly with 'particular.'  David appears to believe, pace Meinong, that there are no incomplete items in reality, and that all incompleteness is epistemic.  I think so too. But that is not the issue.  The issue is whether 'particular' and 'complete' can be predicated meaningfully of items like David and his dogs, or whether they qualify merely the way one has these things in mind.  He hasn't given me a good reason to change my view. 

Second, 'dead' is an alienating adjective.  If a man is a living thing and 'dead' means non-living, then a 'dead man' is a somewhat contradictory conception.  Better to think of 'is dead' as 'has died'.  A dead man is one who has passed through that final event that all living things inevitably come to, and has ceased to be. 

BV: Very tricky!  No doubt there are alienans adjectives (bang on the link), but is 'dead' (juxtaposed with 'man') one of them?  Clearly, a decoy duck is not a duck. But it is not clear that a dead duck is not a duck.  Now the corpse of a duck is not a duck.  But if your pet duck Donald dies you can still utter truths about him and have veridical memories of him. Those truths and memories are about a duck that has died, a particular duck, not a rabbit. And not about nothing. Try this triad on for size:

a) Tom Petty is a man.
b) Tom Petty is dead. (Tom Petty has died.)
c) Nothing dead is a man. (Nothing that has died is a man.)

Clearly, the singer is a man, not a duck or a valve-lifter in a '57 Chevy.  And clearly, Petty is dead. It seems to follow that Petty is a dead man.  So it seems we ought to reject (c) above.  Is (c) not more reasonably rejected than the other two limbs of the triad? I would say so.

Granted, Petty is not the man he used to be.  He no longer breathes, for example.  He has lost much of the typical functionality of a man. So there is rational pressure to deny (a).  There does not appear to be a clean solution to the (a)-(c) puzzle.  The propositions cannot all be true. But it is not obvious which of them to reject.

David tells us that a dead man has ceased to be. (I will assume that to be = to exist.)  But it is not at all clear that a dead man such as Tom Petty has ceased to exist.  On one way of looking at it, Petty exists just as robustly (or as anemically) as I do. We both tenselessly exist.  It is just that every moment of his existence is earlier than the present moment, whereas this is not the case for me.  Petty is wholly past whereas I exist at present, and presumably also in future.  But we both exist (tenselessly)!  This is a possible view, and distinguished thinkers have subscribed to it, Albert Einstein to mention one. So it is not obvious, pace David, that when a man or a dog or any living thing dies, it ceases to exist.  David may be assuming that only what exists (present tense), exists.  But this is a miserable tautology unless David can supply a non-presentist reading of the second occurrence of 'exists.'

Third, to speak of 'becoming nothing' on death is misleading.  Death is the end of all becoming.  One has finally begone, as it were. [?] It's not that the dead lack something to distinguish them. Rather, they are not there to be distinguished one from another.  But this is not to say that my parents were indistinguishable as objects.  Nor is it to say that my thoughts about my parents are now indistinguishable.  Surely I can say, My mother was short and my father was tall. 

BV: David can say these things, but these past-tensed truths are (i) logically contingent and (ii) true at present.  So they need truthmakers that exist at present.  What might these be if only what exists at present exists?  This, in nuce, is the grounding objection to presentism. I don't see that David has a good answer to it. If, however, existence is tenseless, then the truthmakers are easily supplied. 

DB quoting BV: Nor do we want to say that a person who dies goes from being actual to being merely possible. There is clearly a distinction between an actual past individual and a merely possible past individual.  Schopenhauer is an actual past individual; his only son Willy is a merely possible past individual

Once again I'm afraid I can't regard 'being actual' and 'being merely possible' as denoting properties of individuals. How these predications are to be understood is not an easy question.  Suffice it to say that there is clearly a problem with  'Schopenhauer's only son Willy' when the philosopher's only child was a daughter.

BV: I don't get the daughter bit.  But surely David is an actual individual, not a merely possible individual.  I have no idea why he balks at this.  He is actual, not merely possible, or necessary, or impossible.  What's more, he is contingent: although he actually exists, he is possibly such that he does not exist.  There is no necessity that he exist at any time at which he exists.  And note that if 'actual' is true of everything, it does not follow that 'actual' is not a meaningful term.

DB quoting BV: On the 'growing block' theory, dead Petty exists. (This is obviously not a present-tensed use of 'exists.') He does not exist at present, but he exists in the sense that he belongs to the actual world.  Once actual, always actual. Is this wholly clear? No, but it is tolerably clear and plausible. After all, we are making singular reference to Petty, a concrete actual individual, as we speak, and this is a good reason to hold that he exists, not at present of course, but simpliciter.

The 'growing block' theory sounds like a kind of four-dimensionalism deriving from the physicist's notion of spacetime as a four-dimensional manifold.  We trace the world-lines of the particles that were ever part of Petty and we find that they form a densely packed blob within a certain spacetime region.  We are tempted to identify the contents of this region with Petty himself.  If we think of the ensemble of worldlines of all material particles as the actual world itself, then yes, the Petty blob seems indeed to belong to the actual world.  But this is a mistake.  The worldline of a particle represents not so much the particle itself but rather its history.  Likewise the blob we take to be Petty represents his biography, in mind-numbing detail.  We are confusing a thing with the life it lived.  Of course Petty belonged to the world---I don't see quite what 'actual' adds here---it's just that he does not belong to it any more.  Perhaps Bill is emphasising that Petty was a real man, not, say, a character in a fiction like Spinal Tap.  There is more than a hint here that Bill is appealing to a theory of direct reference.  Petty has to exist in order that we may refer to him.

BV: There are several gnarly issues that need disentangling. I'll leave that for later. David tells us that Petty was actual but is not now actual.  That is true, but trivial.   It may be that what David is advocating is that we simply use tensed language and not make any trouble for ourselves by asking such as questions as: what makes it true that Petty was a musician?  It may be that he is a tautological presentist who maintains that whatever exists, exists, where 'exists' in both occurrences is present-tensed.  It may be that he is refusing to stray from ordinary English and credit such high-flying metaphysical questions as: Is the whole of reality restricted to the present moment or not?

The Idolatry of the Transient

It is because we want more than the transient that we cling to it, as if it could substitute for the More that eludes us. And so in some we find an inordinate love of life, a mad clinging to what cannot last and which, from the point of view of eternity, ought not last. I have Susan Sontag and Elias Canetti in mind.

The mature man, at the end of a long life, having drunk to the lees the chalice  of mortal existence, ought to be prepared bravely to shed the mortal coil like a worn-out coat and sally forth into the bosom of nonbeing, or into regions of reality glimpsed but not known from the vista points of the sublunary trail the end of which is in sight.  

A 97-Year-Old Philosopher Faces Death

Herbert Fingarette finds that that the Epicurean reasoning that he once endorsed, fails him at the end, offering him no consolation. HT: Vito Caiati.

After Enough Time Passes . . .

. . . de mortuis nil nisi bonum lapses.

(In justification of  some negative remarks about  Senator John McCain (R-AZ) posted on my Facebook page. I pointed out that while McCain served with great distinction in the Vietnam war, he failed to translate military valor into civil courage, while Donald J. Trump, who did not serve, has it in spades.)

Death as the Muse of Morality Limits Our Immorality

How much more immoral we would be if we didn't have to die! Two thoughts.

1. Death sobers us and conduces to reflection on how we are living and how we ought to live.  We fear the judgment that may come, and not primarily judgment of history or that of our circle of acquaintances. We sense that life is a serious  'business' and that all the seriousness would be drained from it were there no final reckoning, no Last Judgment.  Some of us, like Wittgenstein, strive to make amends and put things to right before it is too late.  (Do not scruple over his scrupulosity but take the message of his example.)  We apply ourselves to the task of finally becoming morally 'decent' (anstaendig).  The end approaches swiftly, and it will make a difference in the end how we comport ourselves here and now.  One will especially feel this to be  so when the here and now becomes the hora mortis.

DRURY:  I had been reading Origen before.  Origen taught that at the end of time here would be a final restitution of all things.  That even Satan and the fallen angels would be restored to their former glory.  This was a conception that appealed to me -- but it was at once condemned as heretical.

WITTGENSTEIN:  Of course it was rejected.  It would make nonsense of everything else.  If what we do now is to make no difference in the end, then all the seriousness of life is done away with.  Your religious ideas have always seemed to me more Greek than biblical.  Whereas my thoughts are one hundred per cent Hebraic.

(Recollections of Wittgenstein, ed. Rhees, Oxford,  1984, p. 161.)

Death has been recognized from the beginning as the muse of philosophy.  I supplement, or perhaps merely unpack, the Platonic thought by writing that death is the muse of morality.

2. Lives without limit here below would afford more time for more crime.  Death spells a welcome end to homo homini lupus, at least in individual cases.

Do You Disappear When You Die? Comments on Yourgrau

Here, by Palle Yourgrau. Comments by BV in blue.  HT: Vlastimil Vohanka.

Many philosophers seem to think you simply 'disappear' when you die, 'erased' from the framework of reality as one would rub out a drawing on the blackboard. I think it would be a serious mistake to think this way. Time maga­zine had it right when it represented the death of bin Laden, hence his 'nonexistence,' with a picture of him on the cover, crossed out with a big X. If you’re lecturing on the capture and killing of bin Laden, you might draw a picture of him on the blackboard, and then conclude your lecture by drawing, as Time did, a big X across that drawing. That would be the right thing to do. The wrong thing to do would be to simply erase the drawing, to rub it out. A blank blackboard does not represent the death of bin Laden. On the contrary, it represents nothing. Bin Laden, on dying, did not become nothing, just as he did not come from nothing. (Ex nihilo, nihil fit.)

Let us assume that a (human) person is just an animated human body and that there is no Platonic soul or Cartesian res cogitans or anything relevantly similar of an immaterial nature that continues to exist after bodily death.  Let us assume that at death all of a person's mental and spiritual functions cease. The issue is whether a person, upon dying, becomes nothing. To make the question totally clear, assume that the person's corpse has been fully cremated. Is a person after death and cremation nothing at all? I am with Yourgrau part of the way: Bin Laden is not now nothing. One simple consideration is this: bin Laden is an object of veridical memories and the subject of many true propositions.  So he can't be nothing.  The wholly past is actual, not merely possible; factual, not fictional; real, not imaginary. Those are datanic claims, it seems to me, or very near datanic. They lay claim to being Moorean facts beyond reasonable dispute.

If presentism in the philosophy of time is the claim that all and only temporally present items exist, then presentism is false. The dead rise up to mock those who would restrict the ontological inventory to what exists at present.  At Halloween and at every season.

What about Yourgrau's claim that bin Laden did not come from nothing?  That is true if all it means is that prior to his conception there were two gametes that had to join to produce his zygotic self. In simpler terms, bin Laden did not come from nothing because he had material causes and they were not nothing. (Nor was the copulation of his parents nothing.)  But it is false if it means that, prior to bin Laden's conception, that very individual, bin Laden, was something real, and not nothing. 

The following temporal asymmetry strongly recommends itself: what no longer exists is not nothing; but what does not yet exist is nothing. It seems quite clear that we do refer successfully to wholly past individuals and events such as bin Laden and his being killed.  It is rather less clear how anyone, including God, could refer to bin Laden, that very individual qua individual, before his conception.  See A Most Remarkable Prophecy for some reasons.

But let's not worry at the moment about future individuals, if any; let's focus on past individuals, and, in particular, the human dead, about whom we all  have a lively interest.

Just this, however, seems to have escaped many, if not most philosophers who’ve written about the metaphysics of death. Shelly Kagan, for example, writes in his popular study Death that “nonexistence is nonexistence. It’s no kind of con­dition or state that I am in at all [after I’ve died]." Kagan seems to believe that when you’ve died and ceased to exist, there’s “no one left” to be in any sort of state or con­dition. There’s no one left even to be in the state of nonex­istence, to have the property of nonexistence. He seems to subscribe to W.V. Quine’s doctrine that “in our common- sense usage of ‘exist’, that [bin Laden] doesn’t exist, means simply that there is no such entity at all.” If there’s no such entity, ob­viously, there’s no such entity to occupy the state of nonexist­ence, to have the property of nonexistence.

As I said, this is a widely held view among philosophers of death. To choose another prominent example, consider what Francis Kamm writes in Morality, Mortality: “Life can sometimes be worse for a person than the alternative of nonexistence, even though nonexistence is not a better state of being.” For Kamm, nonexistence is never a better state of being than is exist­ence because for her, apparently, nonexistence is not a state of being at all.

Kamm and Kagan, however, are mistaken. What they say is true not of Socrates but of the tooth fairy. The tooth fairy is indeed not in a state of nonexistence for the simple reason that there is no such person as the tooth fairy. By con­trast, there is such a person as Socrates. Nathan Salmon, in “What Is Existence?” puts the matter succinctly: “‘Kripke exists’ is true whereas ‘Napoleon exists’ is false. Kripke has existence. Napoleon has nonexistence.”

When you die and cease to exist, you aren’t 'erased', you aren’t 'rubbed out', nor do you turn into a different kind of being. You forfeit your existence, not your essence. Death affects that you are, not what you are. Thus, assuming, for the sake of argument, that persons are concrete objects and that that is part of their essence, when Socrates died he didn’t cease being concrete. He went from being an existent concrete object to being a nonexistent concrete object. And the same is true, analogously, of an inorganic concrete ob­ject like a rock. This will no doubt sound paradoxical (not to say, downright crazy) to many people. Surely, what’s not there can’t be concrete! After all, if something’s concrete, you can trip over it in the dark, whereas there’s no need to worry about tripping over the nonexistent. True enough, if we’re speaking about an actual, an existent concrete object. But here we’re speaking of concrete objects that have ceased to exist— i.e. that have lost their existence, but not their es­sence. (Indeed, what would it mean for something to lose its essence? What would make it that very thing that had lost it?

The moral, then, is this: Concreteness should not be con­fused with actuality.

What Yourgrau is proposing is a Meinongian or quasi-Meinongian theory of wholly past individuals such as Socrates.  Socrates, unlike the Tooth Fairy, is real, not imaginary or fictional or mythical. But Socrates does not exist.  His present nonexistence, though, does not entail his being nothing at all. He is something: a nonexistent essence. Yourgrau, by contrast is an existent essence. But Yourgrau too will die, and when he does, he will become a nonexistent essence and join the company of Socrates and all the other concrete nonexistent individual essences.  To get a sense of what is meant by 'individual essence' here, consider any concrete thing that exists such as the table in front of you and 'peel away' (in thought) its existence.  'Peel away' the thing's Dasein.  What's left over is the thing's quiddity or whatness or Sosein or individual essence.  But don't confuse this individual essence with an abstract property such as a Plantingian haecceity. It is not a property of the thing, but the thing itself 'minus' its existence. And it is not abstract, but concrete.  The distinction between (individual) essence and existence, while made by the mind, has a foundation in things, a basis in reality.  We are in the vicinity of the distinctio realis of the Thomists.  But as I read Yourgrau, he is pushing further in a Meinongian direction.  If I understand Thomas, an essence cannot be without existence; what Yourgrau is envisaging, however, are individual essences that are without existence. This is tantamount to Meinong's Independence of Sosein from Sein.

So you've got your existent essences and your nonexistent essences.  When you die, you don't disappear or cease to be; you remain as a nonexistent essence.  You don't remain in existence as a nonexistent essence; that would be contradictory. So what Yourgrau might be saying is that you remain in being as a nonexistent essence.  Accordingly, essences ARE but only some of them EXIST. Indications are that Yourgrau holds that existent essences are all and only the temporally present ones. That would make him a kind of presentist.  He would avoid my anti-presentist objection above by saying that, while the dead do not exist, they are.  Or he could go full Meinongian and say that a dead person is an essence or Sosein that has no Sein whatsoever.  This is Meinong's famous doctrine of Aussersein according to which nonexistent objects are jenseits von Sein und Nichtsein. Accordingly, when I remember my dead mother and say things about her, she is the beingless object of my veridical memories and the beingless subject of my statements. 

Here is one place where I would insert the blade of critique. It is difficult to understand how there could be items that have no being whatsoever but are yet mind-independent.  My dead mother is irremovably resident in the past no matter what anyone says or thinks about her, and whether anyone thinks about her at all.Her fate, and yours too, dear reader, will be to enter oblivion, and sooner than you think. But to be forever and wholly forgotten is not to be nothing. She will forever be something. But how can anything be something if it has no being at all?

But Yourgrau needn't go all the way with Meinong. He could say that the dead, while they they do not exist, yet ARE.

A difference between me and Yourgrau is that I would say that the dead (and all wholly past items) are actual, not merely possible. Yourgrau does not say this since for him, to exist is to be actual.  But then what is the modal status of the dead? Here the critical blade comes out again. 

If, when a thing ceases to exist, it ceases to be actual, what modal status does it acquire? 'Actual' is a modal word; it is a member of the (alethic) modal family including 'possible,' 'merely possible,' 'impossible,' 'necessary,' 'contingent,' and 'noncontingent.'  So when Socrates ceased to exist,  did he become merely possible? No. Past individuals are not merely possible individuals. They actually were. 

Since Yourgrau accepts concrete individual essences, he might say the following. Before Socrates was conceived, he WAS as a merely possible individual, an essence without existence.  When he came into existence, he became actual: his essence was actualized. When he ceased to exist, he ceased to be actual and became -- what? An impossible individual essence? (If nothing can have two beginnings of existence, and our man has had one, then it is impossible that he exist and be actual again.)  There are nasty questions here.  For example, how can the modal status of an item change over time?  More later. It's Saturday night. Time to punch the clock, pour myself a drink, and tune in Judge Jeannine.

This difficulty of speaking coherently of the dead is by no means confined to philosophers of death, nor, indeed, to philosophers of any stripe. It’s especially noticeable in book dedications, where authors simply cannot bring themselves to refer to the dead, themselves, substituting instead refer­ence to the memory of the dead. When you think about it, however, this is absurd. Unlike the dead, our memories of the dead are alive and well, and in any case, are a poor substitute for the loved ones being honored in the dedications. It’s your mother who taught you to love music, not your memories of your mother, your father who first took you to a poetry reading, not your memories of your father, and so on. What could be more different from a dead parent than a living memory? The nonexistence of the dead should make us more attuned to what’s real, not less. For the dead relative is every bit as real as, though less existent than, the living memory. “Never . . . think of a thing or being we love but have not actually before our eyes,” Simone Weil wrote in Gravity and Grace, “without reflecting that perhaps this thing has been destroyed, or this person is dead. May our sense of reality not be dissolved by this thought but made more intense. . . . Love needs reality”

This is an extract from the book 'Death and Nonexistence' by Palle Yourgrau (Oxford University Press, August 2019).

Yourgrau makes some excellent and true points here.  The dead are real.  When I remember my dead mother I remember her, not my memory of her.  But his Meinongian or quasi-Meinongian theory raises some difficult questions.  

Six Types of Death Fear

1. There is the fear of nonbeing, of annihilation.  The best expression of this fear that I am aware of is contained in Philip Larkin's great poem "Aubade" which I reproduce and comment upon in Philip Larkin on Death.  Susan Sontag is another who was gripped by a terrible fear of annihilation.

There is the fear of becoming nothing, but there is also, by my count, five types of fear predicated on not becoming nothing.

2. There is the fear of surviving one's bodily death as a ghost, unable to cut earthly attachments and enter nonbeing and oblivion.  This fear is expressed in the third stanza of D. H. Lawrence's poem "All Souls' Day" which I give together with the fourth and fifth (The Oxford Book of Death, ed. D. J. Enright, Oxford UP, 1987, pp. 48-49).

They linger in the shadow of the earth.
The earth's long conical shadow is full of souls
that cannot find the way across the sea of change.

Be kind, Oh be kind to your dead
and give them a little encouragement
and help them to build their little ship of death.

For the soul has a long, long journey after death
to the sweet home of  pure oblivion.
Each needs a little ship, a little ship
and the proper store of meal for the longest journey.

3. There is the fear of post-mortem horrors.  For this the Epicurean cure was concocted.  In a sentence: When death is, I am not; when I am, death is not. Here too the fear is not of extinction, but of surviving.

4. There is the fear of the unknown.  This is not a fear with a definite object, but an indefinite fear of one-knows-not-what.

5. There is the fear of the Lord and his judgment.  Timor domini initium sapientiae.   "The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom."  (Proverbs 9:10, Psalms 111:10)  A certain fear is ingredient in religious faith.  Ludwig Wittgenstein was one who  believed and feared that he would be judged by God.  He took the notion of the Last Judgment with the utmost seriousness as both Paul Engelmann and Norman Malcolm relate in their respective memoirs.  In 1951, near the end of his life, Wittgenstein wrote,

God may say to me: I am judging you out of your own mouth.  Your own actions have
made you shudder with disgust when you have seen other people do them." (Culture and Value, p. 87)

Wittgenstein had trouble with the notion of God as cosmic cause, but had a lively sense of God as final Judge and source of an absolute moral demand.

6. Fear of one's own judgment or the judgment of posterity.

The Dead

Where they are, we will be.  And soon enough.  But people think they have plenty of time.  They fool themselves. Don't put off until the eleventh hour your preparation for death.  You may die at 10:30.

Jack Kerouac Went Home in October

Jack Kerouac quit the mortal coil 50 years ago today, October 21st, securing his release from the samsaric wheel of the quivering meat conception, and the granting of his wish:

The wheel of the quivering meat conception . . . . . . I wish I was free of that slaving meat wheel and safe in heaven dead.  (Mexico City Blues, 1959, 211th Chorus).

The Last Interview, 12 October 1969.  "I'm not a beatnik. I'm a Catholic."  "I just sneak into church now, at dusk, at vespers. But yeah, as you get older you get more . . . genealogical."

As much of a screw-up and sinner as he was, as irresponsible, self-indulgent, and self-destructive, Kerouac was a deeply religious man.  He went through a Buddhist phase, but at the end he came home to Catholicism.  

"Everybody goes home in October." (On the Road, Part I, Ch. 14, Para 1) Here's the whole paragraph:

At dawn my bus was zooming across the Arizona desert -- Indio, Blythe, Salome (where she danced); the great dry stretches leading to Mexican mountains in the south. Then we swung north to the Arizona mountains, Flagstaff, clifftowns. I had a book with me I stole from a Hollywood stall, "Le Grand Meaulnes" by Alain-Fournier, but I preferred reading the American landscape as we went along. Every bump, rise, and stretch in it mystified my longing. In inky night we crossed New Mexico; at gray dawn it was Dalhart, Texas; in the bleak Sunday afternoon we rode through one Oklahoma flat-town after another; at nightfall it was Kansas. The bus roared on. I was going home in October. Everybody goes home in October.

 "Pretty girls make graves." (Dharma Bums) 

 Jack Kerouac, Desolation Angels (G. P. Putnam 1965), p. 48:

Outside it's October night in Manhattan and on the waterfront wholesale markets there are barrels with fires left burning in them by the longshoremen where I stop and warm my hands and take a nip two nips from the bottle and hear the bvoom of ships in the channel and I look up and there, the same stars as over Lowell, October, old melancholy October, tender and loving and sad, and it will all tie up eventually into a perfect posy of love I think and I shall present it to Tathagata, my Lord, to God, saying "Lord Thou didst exult -- and praise be You for showing me how You did it -- Lord now I'm ready for more -- And this time I won't whine -- This time I'll keep my mind clear on the fact that it is Thy Empty Forms."

. . . This world, the palpable thought of God . . . [ellipsis in original]

Alela Diane, We Are Nothing  

Jack Kerouac, Tristessa (written 1955-56, first published in 1960), p. 59:

Since beginningless time and into the never-ending future, men have loved women without telling them, and the Lord has loved them without telling, and the void is not the void because there's nothing to be empty of.

Henry Mancini, Moon River.  Video with shots of Rita Hayworth. YouTuber comment: indimenticabile Rita, stupenda Rita, vivi nei nostri ricordi, vivi nei nostri cuori. This was Jack Kerouac's favorite song.  Ellis Amburn, Subterranean Kerouac (St. Martin's 1998), p. 324:

One night he [Kerouac, during a 1962 visit to Lowell, Mass.] left a bar called Chuck's with Huck Finneral, a reedy, behatted eccentric who carried a business card that read: "Professional killer . . . virgins fixed . . . orgies organized, dinosaurs neutered, contracts & leases broken."  Huck's philosophy of life was: "Better a wise madness than a foolish sanity."  They drove to a friend's house in Merrimack, New Hampshire, and on the way, Jack sang "Moon River," calling it his favorite song.  Composed by Henry Mancini and Johnny Mercer, "Moon River" was the theme song of the popular Audrey Hepburn movie Breakfast at Tiffany's.  Sobbed by a harmonica, later swelling with strings and chorus, the plaintive tune's gentle but epic-like lyrics describe a dreamer and roamer not unlike Kerouac.

Indeed they do.  A restless dreamer, a lonesome traveller, a dharma seeker, a desolation angel passing through this vale of mist, a drifter on the river of samsara hoping one day to cross to the Far Shore.  

Jay Farrar and Ben Gibbard, California Zephyr

10,000 Maniacs, Hey Jack Kerouac

Tom Waits, Jack Kerouac on the Road

Aztec Two-Step, The Persecution and Restoration of Dean Moriarty

Some readings:

Jack Kerouac, Mexico City Blues, 228th Chorus

Jack Kerouac, The Wheel of the Quivering Meat Conception.  "I wish I was free of that slaving meat wheel, safe in heaven, dead." Steve Allen on piano.

Jack Kerouac, Charlie Parker.  "Charlie, Parker, lay the bane off me, and everybody."

Roger Kimball on Elias Canetti on Death

An excerpt from Roger Kimball, Becoming Elias Canetti:

. . . . Canetti’s response to the fact of death—“the only fact,” as he sometimes puts it—is a tragic stance of rebellion against an ineluctable fate. The overriding question for every individual, he writes in The Torch in My Ear, is “whether he should put up with the fact that a death is imminent for him.”

Canetti has never worked out his thoughts on death in any systematic fashion. His basic message would seem to be the unexceptionable admonition not to go gentle into that good night. Yet he also uses the rejection of death as the starting point for other, often more questionable, sorts of statements. At one point, for example, his insistence that the individual take a stand against death leads him to the pious declaration that “I care about the life of every human being and not just that of my neighbor.” And in one of his essays, he goes beyond the posture of stoically resisting death to tell us that “So long as death exists, no beauty is beautiful, no goodness is good.” We must of course be grateful that Canetti cares about the lives of all of us, even if the word “cares” is rendered practically empty in this context. But as for the relation between death and beauty and death and goodness—well, here I think we must question Canetti’s dictum. For it seems at least equally plausible that beauty and goodness can emerge as compelling forces in our lives only against the background of mortality; in this sense, death, as Wallace Stevens put it, is the mother of beauty. Things matter to us precisely because neither we nor they last forever. Now, I do not doubt that Canetti’s meditations on death betray a core of genuine pathos. But in the end I’m afraid that they amount to little more than a collection of sentimental exhortations; their chief function would seem to be to perpetuate the atmosphere of intellectual melodrama within which Canetti prefers to operate. Indeed, they would hardly be worth scrutiny, except that Canetti insists on placing them at the very center of his thought.

Canetti quoted: “So long as death exists, no beauty is beautiful, no goodness is good.” Canetti paraphrased:  To those who live free of illusions, nothing ultimately matters if neither we nor they last forever. Kimball quoted:  "Things matter to us precisely because neither we nor they last forever."

Praeparatio Mortis

We cannot prepare for the journey at the time of departure; the time of departure must find us prepared.

The Christian View of Death and Immortality

Thanatology presupposes philosophical anthropology: what death is taken to be depends on what the human being is taken to be. Although Christianity certainly has affinities with Platonism, so much so that Nietzsche could with some justice speak of Christianity as Platonism for the people, the Christian view of man is in an important respect un-Platonic. In terms of Aquinas' Latin, Platonism holds that homo est anima utens corpore, man is a soul using a body. On this view the person is essentially the soul, and the body is a temporary and accidental housing or vehicle. There are Platonic passages in which the soul is described as "imprisoned" in the body. The body is the prison house of the soul. The soul is in the body like an oyster in its shell. These and other metaphors can be found in the Platonic dialogues.  If one thinks in this way, then death is not a calamity but something good. Death is liberation, release, the separation of one thing, the soul, from another, the body, to which it should not have been attached in the first place. The fall into time is a fall into the flesh.  For Platonism, death undoes the fall into time. Death is to that extent good, and the philosopher welcomes it. Indeed, the philosophical life is a preparation for death. (Plato, Phaedo, 67e)

Christianity, however, in terms of Aquinas' Latin, maintains that (a) homo non est anima tantum, man is not the soul alone, and (b) anima forma corporis, the soul is the form of the body. The human person, then is essentially a form-matter composite, and not essentially a soul. On the Platonic view soul can exist without body, though not conversely, while on the Christian view as understood by Aquinas, neither soul nor body can exist without the other.* The two need each other: the body needs the soul to animate it and 'personalize' it, to make it a person's body as opposed to a corpse. And the soul needs the body to achieve its proper unfolding. Despite the difference between soul and body, man is a unitary being in a way in which he is not unitary on the Platonic conception.

There is another important difference. For Platonism, the fall into time — see Phaedrus — is a fall into an evil condition. But for Christianity, everything is and is good because it comes from God who is all-good. So our embodiment cannot be evil. For Christianity there is of course a Fall, but it is not a Fall into embodiment. It is a fall from a perfect form of embodiment to an imperfect form.

For Christianity, then, we are not immortal souls accidentally housed in mortal bodies, and death cannot be understood as affecting only our bodies. Death is not release of one part of the self from another, but the destruction of the entire unitary self. Being, bestowed as it is by God, is good, and so, if we are essentially embodied, death is a total calamity.

On the Christian view, then,  we are not naturally immortal: we are mortal body and soul. Any immortality that we come to acquire requires a supernatural agent operating in a supernatural way. But weren't humans naturally immortal before the Fall? Didn't death enter the picture only when sin did?

It is true that on the Christian scheme death first enters the picture as punishment for sin. But it does not follow that we are naturally immortal in our prelapsarian state. The doctor angelicus discusses this question in the Summa Theologica, Q 97, art. 1. If prelapsarian, paradisiacal man were immortal by nature, then he could not have lost his immortality, which is precisely what happened when he sinned. Some of the angels sinned but did not lose their immortality because they are naturally immortal. But man is not: his prelapsarian immortality was a divine gift. By nature he is mortal, i.e., subject to death, able to die. Aquinas speaks of a "supernatural force given by God to the soul, whereby it was enabled to preserve the body from all corruption so long as it itself remained subject to God."

In sum, man in his own nature is mortal, body and soul, in both his prelapsarian and postlapsarian states. But owing to a supernatural gift, man in his prelapsarian state was given the power to preserve himself as long as he willed to so so. Prelapsarian man could die, but not against his will. We, however, are condemned to death nolens volens by Adam's sin.

______________________

*On Aristotelian hylomorphic metaphysics, the form and the matter of a primary sublunary substance are not themselves substances: they cannot exist on their own apart from the substance of which they are 'principles' or ontological factors.  In particular, the soul, as form of an animal body, cannot exist disembodied. But then what accounts for the continuity of the human person from the time of death to the resurrection of the body?  As I understand Aquinas, he simply makes an exception in the case of the deceased human animal: in this case the soul as form can exist apart from a material substratum.  This exception goes along with the exception in the case of God himself, the forma formarum, form of all forms. God is self-subsistent pure form, form without matter and the human soul between death and resurrection is pure form as well, although not self-subsistent pure form.

The first exception strikes this philosopher as and ad hoc move  that does not fit within Aristotelian hylomorphism.  If the forms of sublunary substances are not themselves substances, then this should hold across the board and allow of no exceptions. It has been said that Aquinas is a Aristotelian on earth, but a Platonist in heaven.  Is this a problem? I should think it is, but others will disagree.

Conceiving the Afterlife: Life 2.0 or Beatific Vision?

This weekend I had the pleasure of a visit from Dale Tuggy, noted philosopher of religion.  We discussed a number of topics at table and on trail including imago dei, the nature of forgiveness, the role of Platonism in Christianity, and death and afterlife.  His position on the latter topic I would characterize as 'Life 2.0,' the essentials of which I set forth below in a slightly revised version of an entry from 2013.  I see Dale as a sort of spiritual materialist whereas he probably sees me as a kind of gnostic or Platonizer whose conception of the afterlife is so hopelessly abstract as to be devoid of  any human meaning. I recently wrote in Soteriology for Brutes?

. . . the Beatific Vision will so entrance those of us who get to enjoy it that we will give no thought to our sublunary animal companions. But this is consistent both with their survival and with their non-survival of their bodily deaths. Perhaps my cats will go to cat heaven where they will be compensated for their suffering here below, but I will be so swept up into the Visio Beata as to give them no thought at all, any more than I will give any thought to that Gibson ES 335 that I never should have sold.

On our long ramble over desert trails on Saturday morning, Dale eloquently defended his view, one I respect   while respectfully rejecting. I have no illusions about dissuading him from it any more than I expect ever to get him to see that God cannot be a being among beings, a topic we have vigorously discussed on several occasions, see here, for example.   Agreement here as elsewhere is out of reach, and perhaps not even reasonably pursued; mutual clarification of differences, however, is well within reach, and worth pursuing.   That is my aim below.

 

.................................................

As far as I can tell, the popular Islamic conception of the afterlife is unbelievably crass, a form of what might be called 'spiritual materialism.' Muslims get to do there, in a quasi-physical hinterworld, what they are forbidden to do here, for example, disport with virgins, in quantity and at length. And presumably they are not wrapped up, head-to-foot, like the nuns of the 1950s. You can play the satyr with their nubility for all eternity without ever being sated. But first you have to pilot some jumbo jets into some skyscrapers for the greater glory of Allah the Merciful.

That the afterlife is a garden of sensuous delights, a world of goodies with none of the bad stuff endemic to our sublunary sphere, strikes me as a puerile conception. It is a conception entertained not only by Muslims but also by many Christians. And even if many do not think of it in crassly hedonistic terms, as I am sure Dale Tuggy does not, they think of it as a prolongation of the concerns of this life including the petty ones.   They think of it, in other words, as Life 2.0, an improved version of life here below.  This, however, is not what it is on a sophisticated conception:

 . . . the eternal life promised by Christianity is a new life into which the Christian is reborn by a direct contact between his own personality and the divine Spirit, not a prolongation of the 'natural' life, with all its interests, into an indefinitely  extended future. There must always be something 'unworldly' in the Christian's hopes for his destiny after death, as there must be  something unworldly in his present attitude to the life that now  is. (A. E. Taylor, The Christian Hope for Immortality, Macmillan 1947, p. 64, emphasis in original)

A. E. Taylor is no longer much read, but he is 'old school' in the depth of his erudition, unlike most contemporary academics, and is thus well-worth reading. In the passage quoted he makes a penetrating observation: the true Christian is not only unworldly in this world, but also unworldly in his expectations of the next.  This by contrast with one who is worldly in this world and desires his worldliness prolonged into the next.

 

The epitaph on Frank Sinatra's tombstone reads, "The best is yet to come." That may well be, but it won't be booze and broads, glitz and glamour, and the satisfaction of worldly ambitions that were frustrated this side of the grave. So the believer must sincerely ask himself: would I really want eternal life?

At funerals one sometimes hears pious claptrap about the dearly departed going off to be with the Lord. In many cases, this provokes a smile. Why should one who has spent his whole life on the make be eager to meet his Maker? Why the sudden interest in the Lord when, in the bloom of life, one gave him no thought? If you have loved the things of this world as if they were ultimate realities, then perhaps you ought to hope that death is annihilation.  Do you really desire direct contact with the divine Spirit? Why would you suddenly love there what you don't love here?

In any case, it is the puerile conception with which some mortalists and atheists want to saddle sophisticated theists. (A mortalist is not the same as an atheist, but most of the one are the other.) But is there a non-puerile, a sophisticated conception of the afterlife that a thinking man could embrace? The whole trick, of   course, is to work out a conception that is sophisticated but not unto utter vacuity. This is a hard task, and I am not quite up to it. But it is worth a try.

Our opponents want to saddle us with puerile conceptions: things on the order of irate lunar unicorns, celestial teapots, flying spaghetti monsters, God as cosmic candy man, and so on; but when we protest that that is not what we believe in, then they accuse us of believing in something vacuous. They would saddle us with a dilemma: you either embrace some unbelievable because crassly materialistic conception of God and the afterlife or you embrace nothing at all. I  explore this at length in Dennett on the Deformation of the God Concept.

Self-professed mortalist and former Jesuit Peter Heinegg writes, "It was and is impossible to conceive of an afterlife except as an improved version of this life (harps, houris, etc.), which doesn't  get one very far." (Mortalism, Prometheus 2003, p. 11) Granted, the harps-and-houris conception is a nonstarter. But is it really impossible to conceive, at least schematically, of an afterlife except as an improved version of this life?

Suppose that a bunch of young adolescents were to claim that it is  impossible to conceive of adulthood except as an improved version of adolescence. These boys and girls imagine adulthood to be adolescence but with the negative removed: no pimples, no powerlessness, no pestering parents, no pecuniary problems, no paucity of facial hair or mammary deficiency, etc. They simply cannot conceive of anything beyond the adolescent level. If you were to try to convince them that  their horizon is limited and that there is more to life than  adolescent concerns, you would not get through to them. For what they  need are not words and arguments; they need to grow up. The notion of growing up, though it entails persisting in time, is distinct from it:  it involves the further notion of maturation. They need to shed false beliefs and values and acquire true ones.

In this life, we adults are like adolescents: confused, unsure of what we really want, easily led astray. We have put away many childish  things only to lust after adult things, for example, so-called 'adult entertainment.' We don't read comic books; we read trashy novels. We don't watch cartoons; we watch The Sopranos and Sex in the City. We  are obviously in a bad state. In religious terms, our condition is  'fallen.' We are not the way we ought to be, and we know it. It is also clear that we lack the ability to help ourselves. We can make  minor improvements here and there, but our basic fallen condition  cannot be ameliorated by human effort whether individual or  collective.

These, I claim, are just facts. If you won't admit them,  then I suggest you lack moral discernment. (I am not however claiming  that eternal life is a fact: it is a matter of belief that goes beyond  what we can claim to know. It is not rationally provable, but I think  it can be shown to be rationally acceptable.)

Contrary to what Heinegg says is impossible, I am able, employing analogies such as  the foregoing, to conceive of a radical change that transforms us from  the wretched beings that we presently are into beings who are  genuinely and wholly good. (I concede, though, that conceivability is  no sure guide to real possibility; but the issue at the moment is  conceivability.) What is difficult and perhaps impossible is to conceive the details of how exactly this might come about. As I said,  it can't be achieved by our own effort alone. It requires a divine  initiative and our cooperation with it.

It won't occur in this life: I must pass beyond the portal of death, and I must somehow retain my personal identity through the passage.  Much will have to be sloughed off, perhaps most of what I now consider  integral to my selfhood. As noted, the transition is a transformation  and purification, not a mere prolongation. Will anything be left after this sloughing off? I suggest that unless one is a materialist, one  has reason to hope that the core of the self survives.

And this brings us back to what Schopenhauer called the 'world-knot,'  the mind-body problem. If materialism could be demonstrated, then the  foregoing speculations would be mere fancies. But materialism, though  it can be assumed, cannot be demonstrated: it faces insuperable  difficulties. The existence of these difficulties makes it reasonable  to entertain the hope of eternal life.

But if the afterlife is not Life 2.0  and is something like the visio beata  of Thomas Aquinas, wouldn't it be boring 'as hell'?  Well, it might well be hell for something who was looking forward to black-eyed virgins and a carnal paradise.  But suppose you are beyond the puerility of that view.  You want not sex but love, not power but knowledge, not fame but community, not excitement but peace and beatitude.  You want, finally, to be happy.

Would the happy vision be boring?  Well, when you were in love, was it boring?  When your love was requited, was it boring?  Was it not bliss?  Imagine that bliss ramped up to the maximum and made endless.  We tire of the finite, but the divine life is infinite.  Why then should participation in it be boring?  Or consider the self-sufficient bliss tasted from time to time here below by those of us capable of what Aristotle calls the bios theoretikos.  Were you bored in those moments?  Quite the opposite.    You were consumed with delight, happy and self-sufficient in the moment. Now imagine an endless process of intellectual discovery and contemplation.

What I am suggesting is that an afterlife worth wanting would be one, not of personal prolongation, but one of personal transformation and purification along lines barely conceivable to us here below.  God is just barely conceivable to us, and the same goes for our own souls.  So we ought to expect that the afterlife will be the same.  If we descry it at all from our present perspective, it is "through a glass darkly."

This weekend I had the pleasure of a visit from Dale Tuggy, noted philosopher of religion.  We discussed a number of topics at table and on trail including imago dei, the nature of forgiveness, the role of Platonism in Christianity, and death and afterlife.  His position on the latter topic I would characterize as 'Life 2.0,' the essentials of which I set forth below in a slightly revised version of an entry from 2013.  I see Dale as a sort of spiritual materialist whereas he probably sees me as a kind of gnostic or Platonizer whose conception of the afterlife is so hopelessly abstract as to be devoid of  any human meaning. I recently wrote in Soteriology for Brutes?

. . . the Beatific Vision will so entrance those of us who get to enjoy it that we will give no thought to our sublunary animal companions. But this is consistent both with their survival and with their non-survival of their bodily deaths. Perhaps my cats will go to cat heaven where they will be compensated for their suffering here below, but I will be so swept up into the Visio Beata as to give them no thought at all, any more than I will give any thought to that Gibson ES 335 that I never should have sold.

On our long ramble over desert trails on Saturday morning, Dale eloquently defended his view, one I respect   while respectfully rejecting. I have no illusions about dissuading him from it any more than I expect ever to get him to see that God cannot be a being among beings, a topic we have vigorously discussed on several occasions, see here, for example.   Agreement here as elsewhere is out of reach, and perhaps not even reasonably pursued; mutual clarification of differences, however, is well within reach, and worth pursuing.   That is my aim below.

 

.................................................

As far as I can tell, the popular Islamic conception of the afterlife is unbelievably crass, a form of what might be called 'spiritual materialism.' Muslims get to do there, in a quasi-physical hinterworld, what they are forbidden to do here, for example, disport with virgins, in quantity and at length. And presumably they are not wrapped up, head-to-foot, like the nuns of the 1950s. You can play the satyr with their nubility for all eternity without ever being sated. But first you have to pilot some jumbo jets into some skyscrapers for the greater glory of Allah the Merciful.

That the afterlife is a garden of sensuous delights, a world of goodies with none of the bad stuff endemic to our sublunary sphere, strikes me as a puerile conception. It is a conception entertained not only by Muslims but also by many Christians. And even if many do not think of it in crassly hedonistic terms, as I am sure Dale Tuggy does not, they think of it as a prolongation of the concerns of this life including the petty ones.   They think of it, in other words, as Life 2.0, an improved version of life here below.  This, however, is not what it is on a sophisticated conception:

 . . . the eternal life promised by Christianity is a new life into which the Christian is reborn by a direct contact between his own personality and the divine Spirit, not a prolongation of the 'natural' life, with all its interests, into an indefinitely  extended future. There must always be something 'unworldly' in the Christian's hopes for his destiny after death, as there must be  something unworldly in his present attitude to the life that now  is. (A. E. Taylor, The Christian Hope for Immortality, Macmillan 1947, p. 64, emphasis in original)

A. E. Taylor is no longer much read, but he is 'old school' in the depth of his erudition, unlike most contemporary academics, and is thus well-worth reading. In the passage quoted he makes a penetrating observation: the true Christian is not only unworldly in this world, but also unworldly in his expectations of the next.  This by contrast with one who is worldly in this world and desires his worldliness prolonged into the next.

 

The epitaph on Frank Sinatra's tombstone reads, "The best is yet to come." That may well be, but it won't be booze and broads, glitz and glamour, and the satisfaction of worldly ambitions that were frustrated this side of the grave. So the believer must sincerely ask himself: would I really want eternal life?

At funerals one sometimes hears pious claptrap about the dearly departed going off to be with the Lord. In many cases, this provokes a smile. Why should one who has spent his whole life on the make be eager to meet his Maker? Why the sudden interest in the Lord when, in the bloom of life, one gave him no thought? If you have loved the things of this world as if they were ultimate realities, then perhaps you ought to hope that death is annihilation.  Do you really desire direct contact with the divine Spirit? Why would you suddenly love there what you don't love here?

In any case, it is the puerile conception with which some mortalists and atheists want to saddle sophisticated theists. (A mortalist is not the same as an atheist, but most of the one are the other.) But is there a non-puerile, a sophisticated conception of the afterlife that a thinking man could embrace? The whole trick, of   course, is to work out a conception that is sophisticated but not unto utter vacuity. This is a hard task, and I am not quite up to it. But it is worth a try.

Our opponents want to saddle us with puerile conceptions: things on the order of irate lunar unicorns, celestial teapots, flying spaghetti monsters, God as cosmic candy man, and so on; but when we protest that that is not what we believe in, then they accuse us of believing in something vacuous. They would saddle us with a dilemma: you either embrace some unbelievable because crassly materialistic conception of God and the afterlife or you embrace nothing at all. I  explore this at length in Dennett on the Deformation of the God Concept.

Self-professed mortalist and former Jesuit Peter Heinegg writes, "It was and is impossible to conceive of an afterlife except as an improved version of this life (harps, houris, etc.), which doesn't  get one very far." (Mortalism, Prometheus 2003, p. 11) Granted, the harps-and-houris conception is a nonstarter. But is it really impossible to conceive, at least schematically, of an afterlife except as an improved version of this life?

Suppose that a bunch of young adolescents were to claim that it is  impossible to conceive of adulthood except as an improved version of adolescence. These boys and girls imagine adulthood to be adolescence but with the negative removed: no pimples, no powerlessness, no pestering parents, no pecuniary problems, no paucity of facial hair or mammary deficiency, etc. They simply cannot conceive of anything beyond the adolescent level. If you were to try to convince them that  their horizon is limited and that there is more to life than  adolescent concerns, you would not get through to them. For what they  need are not words and arguments; they need to grow up. The notion of growing up, though it entails persisting in time, is distinct from it:  it involves the further notion of maturation. They need to shed false beliefs and values and acquire true ones.

In this life, we adults are like adolescents: confused, unsure of what we really want, easily led astray. We have put away many childish  things only to lust after adult things, for example, so-called 'adult entertainment.' We don't read comic books; we read trashy novels. We don't watch cartoons; we watch The Sopranos and Sex in the City. We  are obviously in a bad state. In religious terms, our condition is  'fallen.' We are not the way we ought to be, and we know it. It is also clear that we lack the ability to help ourselves. We can make  minor improvements here and there, but our basic fallen condition  cannot be ameliorated by human effort whether individual or  collective.

These, I claim, are just facts. If you won't admit them,  then I suggest you lack moral discernment. (I am not however claiming  that eternal life is a fact: it is a matter of belief that goes beyond  what we can claim to know. It is not rationally provable, but I think  it can be shown to be rationally acceptable.)

Contrary to what Heinegg says is impossible, I am able, employing analogies such as  the foregoing, to conceive of a radical change that transforms us from  the wretched beings that we presently are into beings who are  genuinely and wholly good. (I concede, though, that conceivability is  no sure guide to real possibility; but the issue at the moment is  conceivability.) What is difficult and perhaps impossible is to conceive the details of how exactly this might come about. As I said,  it can't be achieved by our own effort alone. It requires a divine  initiative and our cooperation with it.

It won't occur in this life: I must pass beyond the portal of death, and I must somehow retain my personal identity through the passage.  Much will have to be sloughed off, perhaps most of what I now consider  integral to my selfhood. As noted, the transition is a transformation  and purification, not a mere prolongation. Will anything be left after this sloughing off? I suggest that unless one is a materialist, one  has reason to hope that the core of the self survives.

And this brings us back to what Schopenhauer called the 'world-knot,'  the mind-body problem. If materialism could be demonstrated, then the  foregoing speculations would be mere fancies. But materialism, though  it can be assumed, cannot be demonstrated: it faces insuperable  difficulties. The existence of these difficulties makes it reasonable  to entertain the hope of eternal life.

But if the afterlife is not Life 2.0  and is something like the visio beata  of Thomas Aquinas, wouldn't it be boring 'as hell'?  Well, it might well be hell for something who was looking forward to black-eyed virgins and a carnal paradise.  But suppose you are beyond the puerility of that view.  You want not sex but love, not power but knowledge, not fame but community, not excitement but peace and beatitude.  You want, finally, to be happy.

Would the happy vision be boring?  Well, when you were in love, was it boring?  When your love was requited, was it boring?  Was it not bliss?  Imagine that bliss ramped up to the maximum and made endless.  We tire of the finite, but the divine life is infinite.  Why then should participation in it be boring?  Or consider the self-sufficient bliss tasted from time to time here below by those of us capable of what Aristotle calls the bios theoretikos.  Were you bored in those moments?  Quite the opposite.    You were consumed with delight, happy and self-sufficient in the moment. Now imagine an endless process of intellectual discovery and contemplation.

What I am suggesting is that an afterlife worth wanting would be one, not of personal prolongation, but one of personal transformation and purification along lines barely conceivable to us here below.  God is just barely conceivable to us, and the same goes for our own souls.  So we ought to expect that the afterlife will be the same.  If we descry it at all from our present perspective, it is "through a glass darkly."

Immortality and Meaning

Here at Maverick Philosopher: Strictly Philosophical. Is the brevity of life an argument against its ultimate meaningfulness? Or is rather that case that brevity is necessary for meaning, and that eternal life would be an eternal drag? I draw upon a neglected and no-longer-read philosopher, A. E. Taylor.

Et in Arcadia Ego

 

Death says, "I too am in Arcadia."

The contemplation of death, one's own in particular, cures one of the conceit that this life has a meaning absolute and self-contained.  Only those who live naively in this world, hiding from themselves the fact of death, flirting with transhumanist arcadian and other utopian fantasies, can accord to this life the ultimate in reality and importance.

If you deny a life beyond the grave, I won't consider you foolish or even unreasonable.  But if you anticipate a paradise on earth, I will consider you both.  And if you work to attain such a state in defiance of morality, then I will consider you evil, as evil as the Communists of the 20th century who murdered 100 million to realize their impossible fantasies. 

Guercino – Et in Arcadia Ego – 1618-22 – Roma, Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Antica di Palazzo Barberini

Death says, "I too am in Arcadia."

The contemplation of death, one's own in particular, cures one of the conceit that this life has a meaning absolute and self-contained.  Only those who live naively in this world, hiding from themselves the fact of death, flirting with transhumanist arcadian and other utopian fantasies, can accord to this life the ultimate in reality and importance.

If you deny a life beyond the grave, I won't consider you foolish or even unreasonable.  But if you anticipate a paradise on earth, I will consider you both.  And if you work to attain such a state in defiance of morality, then I will consider you evil, as evil as the Communists of the 20th century who murdered 100 million to realize their impossible fantasies. 

Guercino – Et in Arcadia Ego – 1618-22 – Roma, Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Antica di Palazzo Barberini

Ashes to Ashes; Dust to Dust . . .

"Remember, man, thou art dust and unto dust thou shalt return." Memento, homo, quia pulvis es et in pulverem reverteris. This warning, from the Catholic liturgy for Ash Wednesday, is based on Genesis 3, 19: In sudore vultus tui vesceris pane, donec revertaris in terram de qua sumptus es: quia pulvis es et in pulverem reverteris.

How real can we and this world be if in a little while we all will be nothing but dust and ashes ?

Our plesance here is all vain glory,
This fals world is but transitory,
The flesche is brukle, the Feynd is slee;
Timor mortis conturbat me.

No stait in Erd here standis sicker;
As with the wynd wavis the wicker,
Wavis this wardlis vanitie;
Timor mortis conturbat me.

(William Dunbar c. 1460 -- c. 1520, from "Lament for the Makers.")

Here lie I by the chancel door;
They put me here because I was poor.
The further in, the more you pay,
But here lie I as snug as they.

(Devon tombstone.)

Here lies Piron, a complete nullibiety,
Not even a Fellow of a Learned Society.

Alexis Piron, 1689-1773, "My Epitaph"

Why hoard your maidenhead? There'll not be found
A lad to love you, girl, under the ground.
Love's joys are for the quick; but when we're dead
It's dust and ashes, girl, will go to bed.

(Asclepiades, fl. 290 B.C., tr. R. A. Furness)

The world, perhaps, does not see that those who rightly engage in
philosophy study only death and dying. And, if this be true, it
would surely be strange for a man all through his life to desire
only death, and then, when death comes to him, to be vexed at it,
when it has been his study and his desire for so long.

Plato, Phaedo, St. 64, tr. F. J. Church