Death is ineluctable and irrevocable, but still equivocal this side of the divide. It presents itself, by turns, as the worst of calamities and as a welcome release from an untenable predicament.
Death and Immortality
Thursday, September 06, 2018
Saturday, July 21, 2018
Sunday, February 18, 2018
Wednesday, February 14, 2018
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?
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.
Benatar on the Lucretian Symmetry Argument
This is the ninth installment in a series on David Benatar's The Human Predicament (Oxford UP, 2017).
We now take up the Lucretian symmetry argument insofar as it bears upon the question whether being dead is bad. That is what Benatar maintains. Being dead is bad for the one who is dead even though to be dead is to be nonexistent. Our predicament is not Silenian. Death does not liberate us from our predicament; it is part of our predicament. Our predicament is an existential vise: we are squeezed between life which is objectively bad for all, no matter how fortunate they are, and death which is also objectively bad for all.
The symmetry argument, roughly, is that if it wasn't bad for us before we were born, then it won't be bad for us after we are dead. But we need to be a bit more precise since it is obvious that we existed before we were born. Each of us had a pre-natal existence, but none of us on naturalist assumptions had a pre-vital existence. So "the argument claims that because our pre-vital nonexistence was not bad, neither is our post-mortem nonexistence." (118) The crucial assumption is that the two periods of nonexistence, the pre-vital and the post-mortem, are axiologically or evaluatively symmetrical.
One way to reject the argument is highly implausible. One accepts the symmetry but claims that because our pre-vital nonexistence was bad for us, so is our post-mortem nonexistence. The other way to reject the argument is by rejecting the symmetry thesis. This is the tack Benatar takes.
His view is that a person's pre-vital nonexistence and post-mortem nonexistence are axiologically asymmetrical, and that only the latter is bad. One might think, however, that if the deprivation argument works for one's post-mortem nonexistence, then it should also work for one's pre-vital nonexistence. According to the deprivation argument, being dead is bad for a dead person because it deprives him of goods he would otherwise have had. Why then doesn't one's pre-vital nonexistence deprive one of goods one would have had had one been alive earlier?
The following example is mine, not Benatar's. Plato knew Socrates. Some of Plato's disciples, however, were too young to have known Socrates. They missed out on the experience of a lifetime. Was it bad for those disciples, in the pre-vital period of their nonexistence, not to have known Socrates?
Benatar makes a plausible case that the answer is in the negative. One argument makes use of Frederik Kaufman's distinction beyween 'thin' and 'thick' persons. I won't discuss this argument. The second argument is that death is bad for the one who dies not merely because it deprives but because it annihilates. Pre-vital nonexistence, however, cannot possibly be the product of annihilation. Correspondingly, while one who exists has an interest in continuing to exist, one who has not yet come into existence has no interest in coming into existence. Therefore, pre-vital and post-mortem nonexistence are axiologically asymmetrical. One who has died and has been annihilated is in a bad way because of his annihilation. But one who has not yet come into existence is not and cannot be a subject of the bad of annihilation.
The Lucretian symmetry argument therefore fails. So while it wasn't bad for us during the pre-vital phase of our nonexistence, this fact has no tendency to show that it will not be bad for us during the post-mortem phase of our nonexistence.
Tuesday, February 13, 2018
The Uselessness of Stoicism in the Face of Death
Josef Pieper, Death and Immortality (Herder and Herder, 1969), p.101:
But the profound discord and hidden infirmity, with which the Stoic doctrine was already infected at its root in classical times, is nowhere revealed so baldly as in its attitude toward death. There is nothing surprising about this. The maxim not to let our hearts be affected and shaken by anything may on occasion be quite worthy of respect; but it must become absurd in the face of an event whose whole importance consists in shaking to the very depths not only the energies of our soul, but our existence itself.
The Stoics teach that there are things that are in our power, and things that are not. The flood that sweeps away my house is not in my power; but my response to the flood is. I can make myself miserable by blaming other people, from the president on down; or I can limit my suffering by taking control of my own mind. Your insulting me is not in my power; but whether or not I let it affect me is in my power.
The Stoics had a very important insight into the mind's power to regulate itself. When you really understand their point it can come as a revelation. I was once thinking of a dead relative and how he had wronged me. I began to succumb to negative thoughts, but caught myself and suddenly realized that I am doing it. In other words, I am allowing these negative thoughts to arise and I have the power to blot them out. The incident was years in the past, and the malefactor was long dead. So the present mental perturbation was entirely my own creation. My sudden realization of this — aided no doubt by my reading of Stoic and other wisdom literature — caused the disturbance to vanish.
In short, the Stoics discerned the mind's god-like power to regulate itself and master, rather than be mastered by, its thoughts. They saw that, within certain limits, we create the quality of our lives. Within limits, we can make ourselves miserable and we can make ourselves blessed. There is an inner citadel into which one can retreat, and where a very real peace can be enjoyed -- assuming that one is willing to practice, rather than merely read about, the Stoic precepts.
The fundamental Stoic project, in the words of Pierre Hadot, is "the delimitation of our own sphere of liberty as an impregnable islet of autonomy, in the midst of the vast river of events and of Destiny." (The Inner Citadel, p. 83) We can beat a retreat to the inner citadel, the autonomous true self, the soul, the ruling principle (hegemonikon).
As useful as Stoic therapeutics is for everyday life, it is useless as soteriology. It can calm the soul, but not save it. For while the ruling principle has a god-like power to control its attitudes toward the blows of fate, it is not a god. It has no control over its own nature and existence. The Stoics leave us in the lurch in the face of death.
Pieper, then, is right. Death is not an external event that can be kept at mental arm's length and calmly contemplated from an inner 'safe space.' For no human space is safe from death.
I can to a certain extent identify with the hegemonikon or guiding element within me which stands above the fray, observing it. I am that ruling element, that transcendental witness. But I am also this indigent body, this wholly exposed mass of frailties. And try as I might, I cannot dissociate myself from it. The ideal of the Sage who negotiates with perfect equanimity fortune and misfortune alike is unattainable by us. In the end, the precepts and practices of Stoicism are unavailing.
We cannot save ourselves via the path of political activism as many 20th century Communists learned the hard way. But a wholly self-reliant quietism is also a dead-end whether Stoic or Buddhist. We cannot be lamps unto ourselves. If salvation is to be had, it must come from Elsewhere. Nur ein Gott kann uns retten, "Only a God can save us," as Heidegger said in his Spiegel-interview near the end of his life.
Monday, February 05, 2018
Strange Anti-Epicurean Bedfellows: Josef Pieper, Thomist and David Benatar, Anti-Natalist
Many find the Epicurean reasoning about death sophistical. Among those who do, we encounter some strange bedfellows. To compress the famous reasoning into a trio of sentences:
When we are, death is not. When death is, we are not. Therefore, death is nothing to us, and nothing to fear.
The distinguished German Thomist, Josef Pieper, in his Death and Immortality (Herder and Herder, 1969, orig. publ. in 1968 under the title Tod und Unsterblichkeit) speaks of
. . . a deception which men have long employed, particularly in classical antiquity, in the attempt to overcome the fear of death. I refer to the sophism of not encountering death, which Epicurus seems to have been the first to formulate; "Death is nothing to us; for as long as we are, death is not here; and when death is here, we no longer are. Therefore it is nothing to the living or the dead." [In footnote 13, p. 134, Pieper reports, "Ernst Bloch, too, has recently repeated the old sophism. Das Prinzip der Hoffnung, Frankfurt a. M., 1969, p. 1391] The same argument, or variations of it, has been repeated many times since, from Lucretius and Cicero to Montaigne and Ernst Bloch; but the idea has not thereby become more credible. (p. 29)
Why does Pieper consider the Epicurean philosopheme to be a sophism?
What Epicurus attempts to do is to quarantine death, restricting it to the future period when when we will be dead and presumably nonexistent. Or perhaps we can say that Epicurus is engaged in an illicit compartmentalization: there is being alive and there is being dead and the two compartments are insulated from each other. Thus when we are alive we are wholly alive and death is nothing to us. And when we are dead, death is also nothing to us because we no longer exist.
I read Pieper as maintaining that this is a false separation: death is not wholly other than life; it is a part of life. We are not wholly alive when we are alive. Rather, we are dying at every moment. Compare Benatar for whom death is part of life in that "death [being dead] is an evil and thus part of the human predicament." (The Human Predicament, p. 110) Part of what makes the human predicament bad is that death awaits us all as a matter of nomological necessity. Now Pieper would never say that the human condition is bad or evil, believing as he does that the world is the creation of an all-good God; but the two thinkers seem agreed on the following precise point: death cannot be assigned to the future in such a way that it is nothing to us here and now.
For Pieper, the image of death as Grim Reaper, although apt in one way, is misleading in another, suggesting as it does that death is wholly external to us, attacking us from without and cutting us down. Of course it is true that our lives are threatened from without by diseases, natural disasters, wild animals, and other humans. To this extent death is like a scythe wielded from without that cuts us down. But it is not as if we would continue to live indefinitely if not attacked from without. Death does not kill a man the way his murderer kills him. What images such as that of the Grim Reaper hide, according to Pieper, is the fact
. . . that we ourselves, in living our life away, are on the way to death; that death ripens like a fruit within us; that we begin to die as soon as we are born; that this mortal life moves towards its end from within, and that death is the foregone conclusion of our life here. (28)
If so, then death cannot be pushed off into the future where it will be nothing to us. It is something to us now in that we are now, all of us, dying. While alive we are yet mortal: subject to death. But not in the sense that it is possible that we die, or probable, but in the sense that it is necessary. To be mortal is to be potentially dead, and living is the gradual actualization of this potentiality. Death would be nothing to us while we are alive if we were non-mortal until death overtakes us. But this is not the case: we are mortal while we are alive. We don't go from being wholly alive to wholly dead; we go from being potentially dead to actually dead.
The Epicurean therapeutics is supposed to allay our fear of being dead, and to some extent it does, on the assumption that we are wholly mortal. But it does nothing to allay our anxiety over being mortal. Being mortal, and knowing that I am, I know what is coming, my personal obliteration.
Wednesday, January 31, 2018
Saturday, January 27, 2018
Benatar on Annihilation and the Existence Requirement
Herewith, the eighth installment in a series on David Benatar's The Human Predicament (Oxford UP, 2017). We are still in the juicy and technically rich Chapter 5 entitled "Death." This entry covers pp. 102-118. People who dismiss this book unread are missing out on a lot of good philosophy. You are no philosopher if you refuse to examine arguments the conclusions of which adversely affect your doxastic complacency.
Epicurus, you will recall, is the presiding shade. His core idea, presented very simply, is that death can be nothing to us since when we are, it is not, and when it is, we are not. How then can death be bad for the person who dies? But for Benatar, being dead is bad, objectively bad, and for all. So our man faces an Epicurean challenge. I concluded a few entries back that he met the challenge in its Hedonist Variant.
If the only intrinsic goods and bads are conscious or experiential states, then being dead can't be bad since the dead don't experience anything. But there are intrinsic goods and bads that are not experiential. If so, then being dead can be bad in virtue of depriving the decedent of goods that would otherwise have accrued to him. A good or a bad can accrue to one even if it cannot be experienced by the one to whom it accrues.* That, roughly, is the Deprivation Response to the Epicurean challenge.
Benatar supplements it with the Annihilation Response: death is bad for the person who dies because it annihilates or obliterates him, whether or not it deprives him of future goods that he would otherwise have had. (102-103) One has an interest not only in future goods, but also an "independent interest" in continued existence.
The Existence Requirement
One fairly intuitive objection to the Deprivation Response, even when supplemented by the Annihilation Response, runs as follows. How can a person be deprived of anything, whether positive feelings or non-experiential goods, if he does not exist at the time the deprivation occurs? The Existence Requirement, then, is this:
ER. In order for something to be bad or good for somebody, that being must actually exist at the time at which the bad occurs. (111, 115)
It is not enough for the person to exist; the person must exist at the time at which the bad occurs. But when a person is dead, he is no more, so when is the badness of death upon him? Not when he is dead, given the truth of (ER). Recoiling from "Subsequentism," some have adopted "Priorism," the view that death is bad before the person dies. But how can being dead be bad for me if I am alive and kicking? Benatar goes on to consider three other unlikely views. But brevity is the soul of blog, and so I will ignore this discussion and jump to what I consider the heart of the matter.
The Aporetics of Being Dead
I lay it down that a philosophical problem is in canonical form when it is expressed as an aporetic polyad. When the problem before us is poured into the mold of an inconsistent triad, it fairly jumps out at us:
1) Mortalism: Death ends a person's existence.
2) Existence Requirement: For something to be bad for somebody, he must exist at the time it is bad for him.
3) Badness of Death: Being dead is bad for the one who dies.
The limbs of the triad are collectively inconsistent: they cannot (logically) all be true. Any two of the above propositions, taken together, entail the negation of the remaining one. For example, the conjunction of (1) and (2) entails the negation of (3). And yet each of the propositions makes a strong claim on our acceptance.
How do we solve this bad boy? Given that logically inconsistent propositions cannot all be true. we need to reject one of the propositions. Which one?
The Epicurean denies (3) and accepts (1) and (2). Benatar denies (2) and accepts (1) and (3). Benatar
. . . see[s] no reason why we should treat the existence requirement as a requirement. To insist that the badness of death must be analyzed in exactly the same way as other bad things that do not have the distinctive feature of death is to be insensitive to a complexity in the way the world is. (115)
Now is there any way to decide rationally between the two positions? I don't see a way.
I was initially inclined to hold that the Existence Requirement holds across the board, even for the 'state' of being dead. To put it rhetorically, how can it be bad for me to be dead when there is no 'me' at the times I am dead? It seems self-evident! Epicurus vindicatus est. But what is the source of the self-evidence?
The source seems to be the assumption that the 'state' of being dead and the state of having a broken leg are states in exactly the same sense of the term. If they are, then (ER) follows. But Benatar has brought me to see that it is not obvious that being dead is a state like any other.
The bad of a broken leg is had by me only at times at which I exist. This makes it natural to think that the bad of being dead, if a bad it is, is had by me only when I exist, which implies that being dead is not bad. But death is very different from other bad things. (115) Perhaps we can say that the bad of death is sui generis. If so, then we ought not expect it to satisfy the Existence Requirement.
We seem to be at an impasse. On the one hand we have the strong intuition that death is bad for the one who dies in that it (a) deprives the person of the goods he would otherwise have enjoyed or had non-experientially, and (b) annihilates the person. This is part of the explanation why Epicurean reasoning smacks of sophistry to so many. On he other hand, The Existence Requirement obtrudes itself upon the mind with no little force and vivacity. Our Czech colleague Vlastimil V finds it self-evident.
Benatar, however, thinks it merely "clever" to adopt the Existence Requirement, but "wise" to recognize that death is different from other bad things. (115-116) The wise course is to "respond to difference with difference and to complexity with nuance." (116)
Given my aporetic bent, I am inclined to say that the triad is rationally insoluble. I see no compelling reason to take either the side of Benatar or that of Epicurus.
What say you, Vlastimil?
________________
*The following example, mine, not Benatar's, might show this to be the case. A philosopher is holed up, totally incommunicado, in a hermitage at a remote monastery in the high desert of New Mexico. While there, the Schopenhauer Gesellschaft awards him its coveted Pessimist of the Year Award which brings with it a subtantial emolument. Unfortunately, our philosopher dies at the very instant the award is made. Not only does he not become aware of the award; he cannot become aware of it. And yet something good happened to him. Therefore, not everything good that happens to one need be something of which one is aware or even can be aware. And the same goes for the the bad.
Wednesday, January 24, 2018
Death, Deprivation, and Property-Possession
Vlastimil asks, "In which sense exactly IS it bad FOR the young person to BE deprived AT the time he NO longer exists? It's a nice sentence to say but I just don't know what it is supposed to mean."
We are assuming mortalism, the view that the body's death is the death of the person in toto. When physical death supervenes, the person will cease to exist even if his body continues to exist for a while as a corpse.
The question is: Is it bad to be dead for the person who is dead? (Typically, it will be bad for others, but that is not the question.) And let's be clear that we are speaking of the 'state' of being dead, and not the process of dying, or the hora mortis, the time of transition from dying to being dead. I grant that the process is bad, and that the hora mortis is as well. (The hora mortis is where the true horror mortis resides.)
How then can being dead be bad? If death is the utter annihilation of the subject of experience, then, after death, there will be nothing left of me to experience anything and indeed nothing to be in a state whether I experience it or not. Clearly, a state is a state of a thing in that state. No thing, no state.
It seems reasonable to conclude that being dead cannot be bad. Of course it is not good either. It is axiologically indeterminate, to coin a phrase.
But now consider a person, call him Morty, well-situated, full of promise, who dies young. Dying young, he is deprived of all the goods he would have had had he not died young. Suppose these goods outweigh the future bads of which he will also be deprived. Don't we think that, on balance, it is bad for such a person to be dead?
Now when is it bad for him to dead? Not before he dies, obviously, and not at the time of transition, but after he dies. So, when he no longer exists, he is in the 'state' of being dead, a state made bad by his being in a 'state' of deprivation. Does this makes sense? Vlastimil says No.
Vlastimil is assuming that
(V) Nothing can have a property unless it exists at the time it has the property.
So Morty can't be deprived unless he exists at the time he is deprived. But Morty does not exist at the time at which he is said to be deprived; hence Morty is not deprived.
But isn't it true that Morty is dead? I should think so. So Morty has the property of being dead at times at which he does not exist. If so, it is false that nothing can have a property unless it exists at the time it has the property. But then Morty can be deprived and be in a bad way at times at which he does not exist.
It seems that what is true is not (V) but
(V*) Nothing can have a property unless it exists at the times it has it, or existed at earlier times.
(V*) preserves our anti-Meinongian intuition that a thing cannot have properties unless it exists. It is just that a thing that did exist can have properties at times at which it no longer exists.
Above I said that a state is a state of a thing in that state: no thing, no state. But now it appears that, while this is true, we should add the codicil: a thing can be in a state when it does not exist provided there were earlier times at which it did exist.
I don't deny that this way of looking at the matter raises problems of its own. Before Morty came to be he was, arguably, nothing at all, not even a possibility. (There was, before he came to be, the possibility that someone having his properties come to be, but no possibility that he, that very individual, come to be. He did not pre-exist his coming to be as a merely possible individual.) After he passed away, however, he did not revert to being nothing at all. After all, he was, and his name, so to speak, remains inscribed on the Roster of the Actual.
There is singular reference to wholly past individuals in the way there is no singular reference to wholly future individuals. Pace Meinong, however, there is no reference to the nonexistent. So past individuals, though not present, in some sense are. This seems to show that presentism cannot be true. I mean the view that only what exists in the temporal present exists, full stop. When a man dies he does not go from actual to merely possible; he remains actual, though no longer present.
Compare a merely possible past individual such as Schopenhauer's only son Will Schopenhauer with Schopenhauer. The latter has a rather higher ontological status than the former. The latter, though no longer present, once was present and remains actual. The former never was present and never was actual.
Tuesday, January 23, 2018
Monday, January 22, 2018
Thursday, January 11, 2018
David Benatar on Death and the Challenge of the Epicurean Argument in its Hedonist Form
This is the sixth in a series on David Benatar's The Human Predicament (Oxford UP, 2017). We are now in Chapter 5. I will need to proceed slowly through this rich and detailed chapter. There is a lot to learn from it. The entry covers pp. 92-101.
Does Death Release Us From the Human Predicament?
Logically prior questions: Is the human condition a predicament? And what does this mean?
Benatar holds that the human condition is a predicament. I agree. But it depends on what exactly a predicament is. I would define a predicament as an unsatisfactory state of affairs that calls for some sort of solution or amelioration or redemption or salvation or escape. I would add, however, that the solution cannot be easy or trivial, but also not impossible. Thus I do not build insolubility into my definition of 'predicament.' Call mine the weak sense of 'predicament.' This seems at first to accord with Benatar's understanding of the term. He tells us that "Real predicaments . . . are those in which there is no easy solution." (94, emphasis added.) 'No easy solution' conversationally implies that there might be a hard solution.
But he also speaks of 'the intractability of real predicaments, of which the human predicament may well be the paradigmatic example." (94) If our predicament is intractable, then it is insoluble. I suspect that this is what Benatar really holds. Call this the strong sense of 'predicament.' Accordingly, he holds, not that our predicament is difficult of solution, but that it is insoluble, and thus that a solution is impossible.
If so, then death, which he takes to be total annihilation of the person, is no solution and "only deepens the predicament." (94) This is a curiously counter-intuitive claim. If life is as objectively bad as Benatar says it is, then one might naturally see death not as a Grim Reaper, but as a Benign Releaser. One might think that if life is bad, then death must be at least instrumentally good insofar as it puts an end to suffering. Benatar's view, however, is that "death is no deliverance from the human predicament, but a further feature of it." (96)
How is that for a deeply pessimistic view? We are caught in an existential vise, squeezed between life which is bad and death which is also bad. Everyone alive will die. While alive we are in a bad way. When dead we are also in a bad way. There is no escape for those who have had the misfortune of being born. So being born is bad twice over: because life is bad and being dead is as well.
Benatar versus Silenus
Some confuse Benatar's attitude toward death with that of Silenus.
Silenus holds that death is not an evil. Death is not an evil because it removes us from a condition which on balance is not good, a condition which on balance is worse than nonexistence. This, the wisdom of Silenus, if wisdom it is, is reported by Sophocles (Oedipus at Colonus, ll. 1244 ff.) and quoted by Nietzsche in The Birth of Tragedy, section 3:
There is an ancient story that King Midas hunted in the forest a long time for the wise Silenus, the companion of Dionysus, without capturing him. When Silenus at last fell into his hands, the king asked what was the best and most desirable of all things for man. Fixed and immovable, the demigod said not a word, till at last, urged by the king, he gave a shrill laugh and broke out into these words: "O wretched ephemeral race, children of chance and misery, why do you compel me to tell you what it would be most expedient for you not to hear? What is best of all is utterly beyond your reach: not to be born, not to be, to be nothing. But the second best for you is -- to die soon."
Benatar agrees with the first sentence, but not the second. For if dying and being dead are bad, then there is nothing good about dying sooner rather than later.
But Is Death Bad?
To be precise, the question is whether death is bad for the person who dies. If your child dies, then that is bad for you; the question, however, is whether it is bad for the child. And note that by 'death' we mean the 'state' of being dead, not the process of dying. There is no question but that dying, with its miseries and indignities, is bad for many. The real question, however, is whether you are in a bad way after you have finished dying. And to reiterate the obvious, Benatar is a mortalist who assumes that physical death is the annihilation of the person.
The Epicurean Challenge in its Hedonistic Form
Benatar maintains that death does not release us from the objectively bad human predicament because "death is an evil [a bad thing] and thus part of the human predicament." (110) Death is no escape, but part of the problem. But then he faces the arguments of Epicurus and his followers according to which death is not bad. If Epicurus and Co. are right, then, even if life is objectively bad for all, there is a Way Out, there is a solution to our predicament. The first Epicureasn argument to consider invokes a hedonistic premise.
When I am dead I won't be conscious of anything: I won't sense or feel anything. I won't feel pleasure or pain or be aware of being dead. So how can being dead be bad? This assumes that conscious states alone, or what Benatar calls "feelings," are intrinsically good or bad. The argument, which is close to what the historical Epicurus maintains, is this:
Hedonism: Only conscious states are intrinsically either good or bad states.
Mortalism: No dead person is in a conscious state.
Therefore
No dead person is in an intrinsically bad state.
The soundness of the argument may be doubted since the hedonistic premise is not self-evident. It implies that nothing is bad for a person of which he is not aware. Suppose your spouse cheats on you but you never find out. Intuitively, you have been wronged even if you remain forever in the dark about it and thus never have any negative feelings about it. Benatar:
It seems that your spouse's dalliances are bad for you even though they do not lead to any bad feelings in you. If that is so, then perhaps death can be bad for the person who dies even though it leads to no bad feelings. (99)
The hedonist might respond by saying that one could become aware of one's spouse's infidelity and come to feel negatively about it but one could not come to feel negatively about being dead. Or the hedonist might just insist on his premise. But suppose you do become aware of your spouse's infidelity and come to feel negatively about it. Do you have negative feelings because it is bad to be betrayed? Or is it bad to be betrayed because of the negative feelings?
Intuitively, what makes the betrayal bad is not the negative feeling elicited when and if the betrayal is discovered. The betrayal is intrinsically bad in and of itself. What justified the bad feelings is the underlying fact of the betrayal which is bad in itself whether or not it causes bad feeling when discovered.
If this is right, then hedonism is not the correct account of good/bad. If so, "negative feelings are not the the only things that are intrinsically bad." (100) And if this is right, then the Epicurean argument in its hedonist form is no refutation of Benatar. I think we should agree that the argument in its hedonist form is not compelling.
But there are other arguments!
Saturday, December 30, 2017
Wednesday, November 29, 2017
Friday, November 24, 2017
The Horror of Death and Its Cure
This entry is a companion to On the 'Inconceivability' of Death.
.......................
There is dying, there is being dead, and there is the momentary transition from the one to the other.
While we rightly fear the suffering and indignity of dying, especially if the process is drawn out over weeks or months, it is the anticipation of the moment of death that some of us find horrifying. This horror is something like Heideggerian Angst which, unlike fear (Furcht), has no definite object. Fear has a definite object; in this case the dying process. Anxiety is directed -- but at the unknown, at nothing in particular.
For what horrifies some of us is the prospect of sliding into the state of non-being, both the sliding and the state. Can Epicurus help?
If the Epicurean reasoning works for the state of being dead, it cannot work for the transition from dying to being dead. Epicurus reasoned: When I am, death is not; when death is; I am not. So what is there to fear? If death is the utter annihilation of the subject of experience, then, after death, there will be nothing left of me to experience anything and indeed nothing to be in a state whether I experience it or not. Clearly, a state is a state of a thing in that state. No thing, no state.
This reasoning strikes me as cogent. On the assumption that physical death is the annihilation of the person or self, then surely it is irrational to fear the state one will be in when one no longer exists. Again, no thing, no state; hence no state of fear or horror or bliss or anything. Of course, coming to see rationally that one's fear is irrational may do little or nothing to alleviate the fear. But it may help if one is committed to living rationally. I'm a believer in the limited value of 'logotherapy' or self-help via the application of reason to one's life.
I suffer from a touch of acrophobia, but it hasn't kept me away from high places and precipitous drop-offs on backpacking trips. On one trip into the Grand Canyon I had to take myself in hand to get up the courage to cross the Colorado River on a high, narrow, and swaying suspension bridge. I simply reasoned the thing out and marched briskly across staring straight ahead and not looking down. But then I am a philosopher, one who works at incorporating rationality into his daily life.
Why then do so many find the Epicurean reasoning sophistical? To Philip Larkin in "Aubade" it is "specious stuff":
This is a special way of being afraid
No trick dispels. Religion used to try,
That vast moth-eaten musical brocade
Created to pretend we never die,
And specious stuff that says No rational being
Can fear a thing it will not feel, not seeing
That this is what we fear — no sight, no sound,
No touch or taste or smell, nothing to think with,
Nothing to love or link with,
The anaesthetic from which none come round.
It seems clear that our boozy poet has failed to grasp the Epicurean reasoning.
Still, there is the moment of death, the moment in which the self helplessly dissolves, knowing that it is dissolving. My claim is that it is this loss of control, this ego loss, that horrifies us. Ever since the sense of 'I' developed in us we have been keeping it together, maintaining our self-identity in and through the crap storm of experience. But at the moment of dying, we can no longer hold on and keep it together. We will want to cling to the familiar, and not let go. This I suggest is what horrifies us about dying. And for this horror the reasoning of Epicurus is no anodyne.
So I grant that there is something quick and specious about the Epicurean cure. If one is rational, it has the power to assuage the fear of being dead, but not the fear of dying, the fear of ego loss.
I consider it salutary to cultivate this fear of dying. It is the sovereign cure to the illusions and idolatries of worldliness. But the cultivation is hard to accomplish, and I confess to rarely feeling the horror of dying. It is hard to feel because our natural tendency is to view everything without exception objectively, as an object. The flow of intentionality is ever outward toward objects, so much so that thinkers such as John-Paul Sartre have denied that there is any subject of experience, any source of the stream of intentionality. (See his The Transcendence of the Ego.)
Everyone knows that one will die; the trick, however is not just to think, but to appreciate, the thought that I will die, this unique subjective unity of consciousness and self-consciousness. This is a thought that is not at home in the Discursive Framework, but straddles the boundary between the Sayable and the Unsayable. My irreducible ipseity and haecceity of which I am somehow aware resists conceptualization. Metaphysics, just as much as physics, misses the true source of the horror of death. For if metaphysics transforms the I or ego into a soul substance, then it transforms it into an object. (Cf. the Boethian objectifying view of the person as an individual substance of a rational nature.) An immaterial object is still an object. As long as I think of myself from the outside, objectively, from a third-person point of view, it is difficult to appreciate that it is I, the first person, this subjective center and source of acts who will slide into nonbeing.
Now we come to "that vast moth-eaten musical brocade," religion, "created to pretend we never die." Although this is poetic exuberance and drunken braggadocio, there is a bit of truth that can be squeezed out of Larkin's effusion. The religious belief in immortality can hide from us the horror and the reality of death. It depends on how 'platonizing' the religion is.
Christianity, however, despite its undeniable affinities with Platonism (as well appreciated by Joseph Ratzinger, the pope 'emeritus,' in Introduction to Christianity), resolutely denies our natural immortality as against what is standardly taken to be the Platonic view. On Christianity we die utterly, and if there is any hope for our continuance, that hope is hope in the grace of God.
Is there then any cure for the horror of death? In my healthy present, my horror is that of anticipation of the horror to come. The real horror, the horror mortis, will be upon us at the hora mortis, the hour of death, when we feel ourselves sliding into the abyss.
In extremis, there is only one cure left, that of the trust of the little child mentioned at Matthew 18:3. One must let oneself go hoping and trusting that one will get oneself back. Absent that, you are stuck with the horror.
Nothing would be more foolish and futile than to take the advice of a different drunken poet, and "Rage, rage against the dying of the light." The dim light of the ego must die to rise again as spirit. In fact, it is the ego in us that 'proves' in a back-handed sort of way that we are spiritual beings. Only a spiritual being can say 'I' and saying it and thinking it isolate himself, distancing himself from his Source and from other finite selves even unto the ultimate Luciferian conceit that one is self-sufficient.
Wednesday, November 22, 2017
On the 'Inconceivability' of Death
Thomas Merton poses the problem in his Journals, vol. 6, pp. 260-261, entry of 8 July 1967:
Victor Hammer is critically ill . . . . Death is shocking in anyone, but most shocking in the case of someone of real genius and quality and someone you know and love well. The blunt fact is that it is just not conceivable that Victor Hammer should cease to exist. This is a basic absurdity which [Albert] Camus confronted, and which religious explanations may perhaps help us only to evade. [. . .] Yet what is man that his life instinct should translate itself into a conviction that he cannot really altogether die? Where is it illusory and where not? To my mind this is a great and pertinent question and one worthwhile exploring metaphysically -- not by abstractions but by contemplative discipline and by a kind of mystical "pragmatism" if you like . . . . (italics added)
I agree with Merton that the problem needs to be attacked via "contemplative discipline," i.e., in a non-discursive way by meditation. But I disagree with the "not by abstractions" bit whereby Merton advertises his poetic and literary and anti-philosophical bias. The problem has to be addressed both discursively via the discursive intellect and also by meditative Versenkung. (A great German word that suggests sinking below the storm-tossed surface of ordinary mind into its quiet depths.)
But what exactly is the problem?
Some will say that there is no problem at all. Death is perfectly natural and easily conceivable. We know that we are animals and we know that animals die. (And stay dead!) A loved one's death may be shocking, especially if it is sudden, but it is certainly not inconceivable. It is no more inconceivable than the death of a cat or a dog or a flea or a flower.
Yet when we think concretely and personally about death, our own death, and the deaths of those we love, we find ourselves agreeing with Merton and with Schopenhauer: "The heart rebels against this, and feels that it cannot be true." ("The Vanity of Existence" in The Will to Live, ed. R. Taylor, p. 229) Let us assume that you love and cherish your wife. Your loving her has conferred upon her uniqueness, at least relative to you. (Josiah Royce) Now imagine her lovable and loving unique personality blotted out of existence forever. Or consider your own case. You have devoted a lifetime to becoming who you are. You have worked steadily at the task of self-individuation. Only to become nothing? Could things be arranged so badly for us? But then the whole thing would be a bad joke.
Of course, what I have written does not show that it is not a bad joke. Maybe it is! (That's an epistemic use of 'maybe.') But then are you prepared to appropriate existentially this putative truth? In plain English: Are you prepared to live as if your life is a bad joke, "a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing?" Or will you live in denial of what you take to be true?
The problem in its sharpest formulation is that it is both conceivable and inconceivable that one should cease to exist. Assuming that no contradiction is true, the task is to remove it. The task, in other words, is to show that the apparent contradiction is merely apparent. Expressed as an aporetic dyad:
A. It is conceivable that one cease to exist utterly.
B. It is not conceivable that one cease to exist utterly.
The problem arises in the collision of two points of view, one objective and external, the other subjective and internal. Objectively viewed, we cease to exist utterly. Subjectively viewed, we don't. The problem is genuine and worth pondering because it is not easy to see how either point of view could displace the other in a fair and rational accounting. For this reason it is not plausible simply to deny one of the limbs of the contradiction. The facile answers of the naive religionist -- one has an immortal soul -- and the naturalist -- one is just a clever land mammal -- won't cut it. There is evasion of the problem on both sides. I will now try to argue this out. One needs to 'marinate' oneself in the problem and not reach for a quick 'solution.' That is the way of philosophy. The other is the way of ideology.
An Objectivist Way Out via Naturalism?
Consider naturalism, which is the dominant form of objectivism. Naturalism, for present purposes, is the metaphysical view according to which causal reality is exhausted by the space-time system and its contents. (On this latitudinarian understanding of the term one can be a naturalist while admitting so-called 'abstract objects.') A naturalist in this sense maintains that (1) all causes are natural causes involving only natural entities; (2) "the distribution of minds in the universe is late and local" in a sense that implies that minds are necessarily tied to highly evolved organisms; (3) "there is nothing that is divine, or sacred, or worthy of worship." (Quotations from the Graham Oppy essay in Christianity and Philosophy, pp. 29-30) In other words: there is nothing concrete apart from the causal nexus of nature as understood by current physics; there is no God; there are minds (minded organisms) but they enjoy no higher (divine) origin but are merely products of evolution.
A naturalist would presumably just deny (B). The problem with this objectifying 'solution' is that it leaves out the first-person point of view and with it subjectivity. Or rather it either leaves it out, or, attempting to understand it in objective terms, fails to understand it adequately.
True, I am an object in the natural world. But I am also a subject for whom there is a natural world. I am a measly bit of the yeast of life, but I am also a "spectator of all time and existence." Subjectivity or mind in the broadest sense includes all of the following: consciousness in the sense of sentience; consciousness in the sense of intentionality; self-consciousness as evidenced in the thoughtful deployment of the first-person singular pronoun; conscience or moral sense; the sense of being a free agent; sensitivity to reasons as opposed to causes, and to the difference between good and bad reasons, in a word, rationality; sensitivity to norms in ethics and in axiology; concern for objective truth and for subjective-existential truthfulness.
Can each of the items on this (incomplete) list be adequately understood in an objectifying, naturalistic way? No, not even the first rather paltry item. It is widely recognized that it is a very hard problem indeed to fit so-called qualia into the naturalist picture. It is so hard that it is 'popularly' known among the learned as -- wait for it -- the Hard Problem. We've been over this many times before, so I won't go over it again. See the categories Qualia and Consciousness and Qualia.
For present purposes, suffice it to say that a blisteringly strong case can be made against the conceit that everything can be adequately and exhaustively understood in naturalistic terms.
Naturalism is involved in a vicious abstraction: it abstracts away from the necessary conditions of anything's being cognized or thought about in the first place. In trying to understand the whole of concrete Being, the naturalist must of course try to understand minds as well. But what does he have to work with? Only more objects. For example, the functioning brain of a particular animal. Could a brain be in an intentional state? No, it makes no sense. No physical state is an intentional state. No such state has semantic properties. No physical state can be either true or false. And so on. See the categories Intentionality and Mind.
Long story short, subjectivity or mind in the broad sense sketched above is not just real, but irreducibly real. It can't be eliminated and it can't be reduced. Obviously, an adequate case for this cannot be made in a single blog post. Besides, as my metaphilosophy teaches, no substantive philosophical thesis can be proven strictly speaking. (And if you are not speaking strictly in philosophy, then you are just fooling around.) But the irreducible reality of mind and truth are reasonably believed.
This goes some way towards showing that our aporetic dyad cannot be easily solved. No doubt we are animals in nature. If that is all we are, then our ceasing to exist utterly at death is easily conceivable. But that is not all we are. We are also subjects with all that that entails: sentience, intentionality, self-awareness, moral sense, reason, etc. We are not merely animals in a physical environment (Umwelt); we are also subjects for whom there is a meaningful world (Welt). (I am using 'world in the transcendental-phenomenological sense one finds in Husserl and Heidegger and their spiritual descendants.) A mere animal has an environment, but no animal has a world. (This is not self-evident: perhaps in some low-level sense my cat inhabits a world of meanings meager and mousy as it must be: the dude is, after all, sentient, pace Renatus Cartesius, and it seems we share a sort of emotional bond.)
We can sum this up by saying that man is a spiritual animal. Neither angel nor beast, he is a riddle to himself. He asks himself: Could I be just a monstrous fluke of evolution? But in asking this question he is spiritually outside of and above the horror chamber of nature red in tooth and claw.
But do I have any positive reason to think that my nonexistence as a subject or spirit is inconceivable? Well, everything objective about myself can be conceived not to exist include my body and its brain. But the I in its ultimate inwardness as pure subject is not objectifiable. The ultimate condition of all objectification cannot itself be objectified. As transcendentally other than every object it is not itself an actual or possible object. Only what I can think of as an object can I think of as nonexistent. But I cannot think of the transcendental I as an object among objects. Therefore, I cannot conceive of it as nonexistent. I cannot think my own nonexistence as thinker.
In short, there is something non-objective and non-objectifiable about me and it is inconceivable that it not exist.
But I hear an objection coming.
"Granted, you cannot doubt the existence of thinking while it is occurring. But surely you and your thinking might never have existed! After all you have written about modal fallacies, I hope you are not confusing the necessity of the consequence with the necessity of the consequent! Surely you can't infer from 'Necessarily, if I think, then I exist' that 'Necessarily I exist.'"
I plead innocent of that particular fallacy. Both valid and fallacious inferences presuppose what I have called the Discursive Framework. The point I am trying to make lies deeper than the framework in question. The non-objectifiable is transcendentally prior to the Discursive Framework.
My claim is not that I necessarily exist as an object among objects, but that I -- in my inmost egoity if you will -- cannot be conceived by me not to exist. For to do that, I would have to think of myself as an object, either physical or meta-physical -- when that is precisely what I am not, but the transcendental I for whom there are objects.
So there is some sense in which there is something necessary about me that cannot be conceived not to exist.
An Objectivist Way Out Via Metaphysics?
We are in the conceptual vicinity of the Cartesian cogito. Does it follow that I am a res cogitans, a thinking thing, a soul substance? Not that either. For wouldn't that just be another object whose existence I could doubt? Not a physical object, of course, but a meta-physical object. Husserl grapples with this problem but fails to solve it.
One cannot think without objectifying. If I try to think the I behind my thoughts I objectify it and make of it a meta-physical object, a thinking substance. This is what Descartes does. But then it seems I can conceive its nonexistence. Buddhists and Humeans have no trouble conceiving the nonexistence of a substantial self behind thoughts.
I cannot be identical to the (live) animal sitting in my chair and wearing my clothes. Let 'A' denote the animal in my chair wearing my clothes. 'I = A' is not a formal identity statement of the form 'x = x.' The latter is a truth of logic. 'I = A' is not a truth of logic. It is in some sense contingent, although not in a sense explicable by ordinary modal means within the Discursive Framework. The thought is not that there are possible worlds in which I exist, but A does not exist, or possible worlds in which A exists but I do not exist. On the other hand, the thought is of course not that in every world in which A exists, I = A. The logic of objects breaks down at the transcendental boundary of the logical.
I get a sense of this strange contingency when I look into a mirror. It seems in some sense contingent that I should be this particular man, with these particular features, and this particular ancestry and history and so on. Again, 'I = A' is not a tautology; it seems to give some sort of information, namely, that this man in the mirror, and no other, is the man that I am. You might think to make a Fregean move: 'I' and 'A' differ in sense but agree in referent. I can show that this does not work. But not now.
So one might be tempted to make an objectifying meta-physical move: 'I' refers to my soul; 'A' refers to my body.
But if I cannot be identical to a chunk of the physical world, how could I be identical to a meta-physical soul substance? Doesn't the same problem arise again? Suppose I have such a soul, denote it by 'S.' 'I = S' is not a tautology of the form 'x = x.' It asserts an identity between me and a metaphysical object, an identity that is 'contingent' in the boundary sense above alluded to. But then my subjectivity is reduced to an object, and in being reduced, eliminated! This object, in addition, could cease to exist or be annihilated by God. So we cannot secure the inconceivability of death by identifying the ego with the soul substance.
A Dialectic Tapering Off into Mystery
Following out the dialectic we arrive at a Grenzbegiff, a boundary notion of transcendental subjectivity that cannot be objectively articulated in a manner to satisfy the discursive intellect.
So is death inconceivable or not? Objectively, whether physically or meta-physically, death as utter annihilation is conceivable. But I cannot be reduced to anything objective. So there remains an element of inconceivability in the death of any person qua person.
But this cannot be made clear in the objectifying terms of the Discursive Framework. One cannot have a 'theory' about it. Our aporetic dyad above is insoluble. It is a sort of marker, this side of the Boundary, of the mystery of death and of spirit. We cannot speak of it, and so we must enter into silence, or, like, a positivist, deny the reality of the Transcendent entirely.
Any further understanding will not be discursive in nature. And so Merton is in one sense right: "contemplative discipline" is needed. All philosophy can do is show the way to the Boundary. Crossing it is not in her power. And to make up objectifying theories about the Far Side is arguably profanation.
Tuesday, November 07, 2017
Wednesday, October 04, 2017
Monday, October 02, 2017
Thursday, August 24, 2017
Friday, August 04, 2017
Tuesday, June 27, 2017
Saturday, June 17, 2017
Monday, May 29, 2017
Tuesday, May 09, 2017
Sunday, March 19, 2017
Seriousness as Camouflage of Nullity
Eric Hoffer, The Passionate State of Mind, Harper, 1955, p. 61, #93:
The fact of death and nothingness at the end is a certitude unsurpassed by any absolute truth ever discovered. Yet knowing this, people can be deadly serious about their prospects, grievances, duties and trespassings. The only explanation which suggests itself is that seriousness is a means of camouflage: we conceal the triviality and nullity of our lives by taking things seriously. No opiate and no pleasure chase can so effectively mask the terrible truth about man’s life as does seriousness.
Summary
It is certain that we become nothing at death. We all know this. Yet we take life with utmost seriousness. We are aggrieved at the wrongs that have been done to us, and guilty at the wrongs we have done. We care deeply about our future, our legacy, and many other things.
What explains our intense seriousness and deep concern given (i) the known fact that death is annihilation of the person and (ii) the fact that this unavoidable annihilation renders our lives insignificant and not an appropriate object of seriousness?
There is only one explanation. The truth (the conjunction of (i) and (ii)) is terrible and we are loathe to face it. So we hide the triviality and nullity of our lives behind a cloak of seriousness. We deceive ourselves. What we know deep down we will not admit into the full light of consciousness.
Evaluation
There is an element of bluster in Hoffer's argument. It is not certainly known that death is annihilation, although it is reasonably conjectured. But even if death were known to spell the end of the person, why should this render our lives insignificant? One could argue, contra Hoffer, that our lives are significant in the only way they could be significant, namely, in the first-personal, situated, and perspectival way, and that there is no call to view our lives sub specie aeternitatis. It might be urged that the appearance of nullity and insignificance is merely an artifact of viewing our lives from outside.
So one rejoinder to Hoffer would be: yes, death is annihilation, but no, this fact does not render life insignificant. Therefore, there is no tension among:
1) Death is annihilation of the person.
2) Annihilation implies nullity and insignificance.
3) People are serious about their lives.
We don't have to explain why (3) is true given (1) and (2) since (2) is not true.
A second type of rejoinder would be that we don't need to explain why (3) is true given (1) and (2) because (1) is not known to be true. This is the line I take. I would argue as follows
A. We take our lives seriously.
B. That we take them seriously is prima facie evidence that they are appropriately and truly so taken.
C. Our lives would not be serious if death were annihilation. Therefore:
D. Death is not annihilation.
This argument is obviously not rationally compelling, but it suffices to neutralize Hoffer's argument. The argument is not compelling because once could reasonably reject both (B) and (C). Here is Hoffer's argument:
A. We take our lives seriously.
C. Our lives would not be serious if death were annihilation.
~D. Death is annihilation. Therefore:
~B. That we take our lives seriously is not evidence of their seriousness, but a means of hiding from ourselves the terrible truth.
Hoffer and I agree about (C). Our difference is as follows. I am now and always have been deeply convinced that something is at stake in this life, that it matters deeply how we live and comport ourselves, and that it matters far beyond the petty bounds of the individual's spatiotemporal existence. Can I prove it? No. Can anyone prove the opposite? No.
Hoffer, on the other hand, is deeply convinced that in the end our lives signify nothing despite all the sound and fury. In the end death consigns to meaninglessness a life that is indeed played out entirely within its paltry spatiotemporal limits. In the end, our care comes to naught and seriousness is but camoflage of our nullity.
I can't budge the old steveodore and he can't budge me. Belief butts up against belief. There's no knowledge hereabouts.
So once again I say: In the last analysis you must decide what to believe and how to live. Life is a venture and and adventure wherein doxastic risks must be taken. Here as elsewhere one sits as many risks as he runs.
Wednesday, January 25, 2017
Is a Dead Person Mortal?
To be mortal is to be subject to death just as to be breakable is to be subject to breakage. But whereas a wine glass is fragile/breakable even if there is no future time at which it breaks, a man is mortal only if there is a future time at which he dies. If there is no future time at which he dies, then he is immortal. This is what we usually mean by 'mortal' and 'immortal.'
But what about my mother? She is dead. Is she mortal? Having died, she cannot die again. So there is no future time at which she dies. It follows that she is not mortal if mortality requires a future time at which the mortal individual dies. On the other hand, she is surely not immortal in virtue of having died. Is she then neither mortal nor immortal? Are dead people indeterminate with respect to this distinction? Or perhaps the dead are wholly nonexistent and for this reason have no properties at all.
An Aporetic Tetrad
a. Socrates is mortal.
b. Socrates is dead.
c. A man is mortal only if there is a future time at which he dies.
d. A man cannot die twice.
The limbs cannot all be true, yet each makes a serious claim on our acceptance.
I have a solution in mind. But let's see what the Londonistas have to say.
Monday, December 05, 2016
Friday, December 02, 2016
Thursday, December 01, 2016
Friday, November 25, 2016
The Horror of Death and its Cure
There is dying, there is being dead, and there is the momentary transition from the one to the other.
While we rightly fear the suffering and indignity of dying, especially if the process is drawn out over weeks or months, it is the anticipation of the moment of death that some of us find horrifying. This horror is something like Heideggerian Angst which, unlike fear (Furcht), has no definite object. Fear has a definite object; in this case the dying process. Anxiety is directed -- but at the unknown, at nothing in particular.
For what horrifies some of us is the prospect of sliding into the state of nonbeing, both the sliding and the state. Can Epicurus help?
If the Epicurean reasoning works for the state of being dead, it cannot work for the transition from dying to being dead. Epicurus reasoned: When I am, death is not; when death is; I am not. So what is there to fear? If death is the utter annihilation of the subject of experience, then, after death, there will be nothing left of me to experience anything and indeed nothing to be in a state whether I experience it or not. Clearly, a state is a state of a thing in that state. No thing, no state.
This reasoning strikes me as cogent. On the assumption that physical death is the annihilation of the person or self, then surely it is irrational to fear the state one will be in when one no longer exists. Again, no thing, no state; hence no state of fear or horror or bliss or anything. Of course, coming to see rationally that one's fear is irrational may do little or nothing to alleviate the fear. But it may help if one is committed to living rationally. I'm a believer in the limited value of 'logotherapy' or self-help via the application of reason to one's life.
I suffer from acrophobia, but it hasn't kept me away from high places and precipitous drop-offs on backpacking trips. On one trip into the Grand Canyon I had to take myself in hand to get up the courage to cross the Colorado River on a high, narrow, and swaying suspension bridge. I simply reasoned the thing out and marched briskly across staring straight ahead and not looking down. But then I am a philosopher, one who works at incorporating rationality into his daily life.
Why then do so many find the Epicurean reasoning sophistical? To Philip Larkin in "Aubade" it is "specious stuff":
This is a special way of being afraid
No trick dispels. Religion used to try,
That vast moth-eaten musical brocade
Created to pretend we never die,
And specious stuff that says No rational being
Can fear a thing it will not feel, not seeing
That this is what we fear — no sight, no sound,
No touch or taste or smell, nothing to think with,
Nothing to love or link with,
The anaesthetic from which none come round.
It seems clear that our boozy poet has failed to grasp the Epicurean reasoning.
Still, there is the moment of death, the moment in which the self helplessly dissolves, knowing that it is dissolving. My claim is that it is this loss of control, this ego loss, that horrifies us. Ever since the sense of 'I' developed in us we have been keeping it together, maintaining our self-identity in and through the crap storm of experience. But at the moment of dying, we can no longer hold on, keep it together. We will want to cling to the familiar, and not let go. This I suggest is what horrifies us about dying. And for this horror the reasoning of Epicurus is no anodyne.
So I grant that there is something quick and specious about the Epicurean cure. If one is rational, it has the power to assuage the fear of being dead, but not the fear of dying, the fear of ego loss.
I consider it salutary to cultivate this fear of dying. It is the sovereign cure to the illusions and idolatries of worldliness. But the cultivation is hard to accomplish, and I confess to rarely feeling the horror of dying. It is hard to feel because our natural tendency is to view everything without exception objectively, as an object. The flow of intentionality is ever outward toward objects, so much so that thinkers such as John-Paul Sartre have denied that there is any subject of experience, any source of the stream of intentionality. (See his The Transcendence of the Ego.)
Everyone knows that one will die; the trick, however is not just to think, but to appreciate, the thought that I will die, this unique subjective unity of consciousness and self-consciousness. This is a thought that is not at home in the Discursive Framework, but straddles the boundary between the Sayable and the Unsayable. My irreducible ipseity and haecceity of which I am somehow aware resists conceptualization. Metaphysics, just as much as physics, misses the true source of the horror of death. For if metaphysics transforms the I or ego into a soul substance, then it transforms it into an object. (Cf. the Boethian objectifying view of the person as an individual substance of a rational nature.) An immaterial object is still an object. As long as I think of myself from the outside, objectively, from a third-person point of view, it is difficult to appreciate that it is I, the first person, this subjective center and source of acts who will slide into nonbeing.
Now we come to "that vast moth-eaten musical brocade," religion, "created to pretend we never die." Although this is poetic exuberance and drunken braggadocio, there is a bit of truth that can be squeezed out of Larkin's effusion. The religious belief in immortality can hide from us the horror and the reality of death. It depends on how 'platonizing' the religion is.
Christianity, however, despite its undeniable affinities with Platonism (as well appreciated by Joseph Ratzinger, the pope 'emeritus,' in Introduction to Christianity), resolutely denies our natural immortality as against what is standardly taken to be the Platonic view. On Christianity we die utterly, and if there is any hope for our continuance, that hope is hope in the grace of God.
Is there then any cure for the horror of death? In my healthy present, my horror is that of anticipation of the horror to come. The real horror, the horror mortis, will be upon us at the hora mortis, the hour of death, when we feel ourselves sliding into the abyss.
In extremis, there is only one cure left, that of the trust of the little child mentioned at Matthew 18:3. One must let oneself go hoping and trusting that one will get oneself back. Absent that, you are stuck with the horror.
Nothing would be more foolish and futile than to take the advice of a different drunken poet, and "Rage, rage against the dying of the light." The dim light of the ego must die to rise again as spirit. In fact, it is the ego in us that 'proves' in a back-handed sort of way that we are spiritual beings. Only a spiritual being can say 'I' and saying it and thinking it isolate himself, distancing himself from his Source and from other finite selves even unto the ultimate Luciferian conceit that one is self-sufficient.
Friday, November 04, 2016
Dale Jacquette (1953 - 2016)
Professor Dale Jacquette died suddenly and unexpectedly at his home in August of this year at the age of 63.
I remember Dale from the summer of 1984. We were fellow seminarians in Hector-Neri Castañeda's National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Seminar at Indiana University in Bloomington. Dale struck me at the time as a classic introvert who spoke little but thought much. He made for a welcome contrast with some overconfident others who were of the opposite disposition.
He earns high praise in Nicholas Rescher's obituary. Other details in this local notice.
For a philosopher to die at 63 is to die young. May his passing remind us of philosophy's muse. For "Death is the true inspiring genius, or muse of philosophy." (Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation)
Sunday, October 16, 2016
Wednesday, August 31, 2016
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Saturday, September 26, 2015
Saturday Night at the Oldies: Youth, Fast Cars, and Death
We are coming up on the 60th anniversary of the death of James Dean. When the young Dean crashed his low slung silver Porsche Spyder on a lonely California highway on September 30, 1955, he catapulted a couple of unknowns into the national spotlight. One of them was Ernie Tripke, one of two California Highway Patrol officers who arrived at the scene. He died in 2010 at the age of 88. But what ever happened to Donald Turnupseed, the driver who turned in front of the speeding Dean, having failed to see him coming? His story is here. In exfoliation of the theme that "speed kills" I present the following for your listening pleasure:
Jan and Dean, Deadman's Curve (1964). But it is not just boys who are drawn to speed, little old ladies have been known to put the pedal to the metal. Case in point: The Little Old Lady From Pasadena.
Johnny Bond, Hot Rod Lincoln (1960)
James Dean, Public Service Announcement
James Dean, The 'Chicken' Scene
Beach Boys, Don't Worry Baby
Ike Turner/Jackie Brenston, Rocket 88 (1951). The first R & R song? With footage of Bettie Page. 'Footage' indeed.
Billy Joel, Only the Good Die Young
Public Service Announcement.
Slow down, speed kills. You'll die soon enough. And stop tail-gating. And turn off that bloody cell phone. Or I kill you.
Like Aaachmed the Terrorist. Trigger warning! Not for liberals.
Friday, March 06, 2015
Wednesday, February 18, 2015
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?
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.
More here.
Yesterday I quoted Christopher Hitchens. He's dead. 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 Source of his own ephemeral quasi-existence. Curious.
Wednesday, January 14, 2015
Sunday, August 17, 2014
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Friday, June 27, 2014
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Friday, May 30, 2014
Patrick Toner on Hylomorphic Animalism
Herewith, some comments on and questions about Patrick Toner's fascinating paper, "Hylemorphic Animalism" (Philos Stud, 2011, 155: 65-81).
Patrick Toner takes an animalist line on human persons. Animalism is the doctrine that each of us is identical to an animal organism. A bit more precisely, "Animalism involves two claims: (1) we are human persons and (2) human persons are identical with animals." (67)
Animalism
Let's consider the second claim. Toner endorses Eric Olson's 'thinking animal' argument for (2). Based on Toner's summary, I take the argument to go as follows. I am now sitting in a chair thinking a thought T. There is also now an animal sitting in this very chair and occupying the same space. Is the animal also thinking T? There are four possibilities.
a. I am identical to the animal occupying my chair, and the thinker of my thoughts is identical to this animal.
b. I am not identical to the animal occupying my chair, but I share the space with an animal that thinks all my thoughts.
c. I am not identical to the animal occupying my chair, but I share the space with a nonthinking animal.
d. There is no animal in my chair; hence I am not not identical to it.
Of the four possibilities, Toner considers (a) to be actual. "It's the least ugly of the choices. Indeed, it's positively common-sensical, compared with the other rather nutty options." (70)
I agree that (b) and (d) can be excluded right away. But I don't see that (c) is 'nutty' and I don't see that (a) is "positively common-sensical." Common sense has nothing to say about abstruse metaphysical topics such as this one.
The Corpse Objection to Animalism
On (a), the thinker of my thoughts is numerically identical to this living human organsm with which I am intimately associated. But If I am (identically) my body, then me and my body ought to have the same persistence conditions. But they don't: when I die I will cease to exist, but (most likely) a corpse will remain. Now if a = b, then there is no time t at which a exists but b does not exist, and vice versa. So if there are times when I do not exist but my body does exist, then I cannot be identical to my body. On (a), I will not survive death, but my body will: it will survive as a corpse. Therefore I am not identical to my body.
Toner's Response to the Corpse Objection
The Corpse Objection, in a nutshell, is that I cannot be identical to my animal body because it will survive me. My body exists now before my death and it will exist then after my death. It is the same body dead or alive. Toner's response is a flat denial of survival. My body will not survive me. Death is a substantial, as opposed to an accidental, change. When I die the animal body that I am will cease to exist and one or more new bodies will begin to exist. So it is not as if one bodily substance undergoes an accidental change, going from being alive to being dead; one bodily substance ceases to exist and one or more others begin to exist. The change is not alterational but existential. This implies that the body itself did not exist while the animal was alive. As Toner puts it:
Neither the body itself, nor any of its atomic parts, existed while the animal was alive. This just follows from the account of substance I've given, according to which substances have no substances as parts, -- there is only one substance here in my boundaries, and it's an animal. When the animal dies, whatever is left over is not the same thing that was there before. (71)
Two Questions
1. One question is whether, assuming that I am just this living animal body, my dying is an accidental change or a substantial change. I will suggest that it is more plausible to think of it as an accidental change.
If my dying is an accidental change, then something that exists now in one form will exist post mortem in a different form. This something could be called the proximate matter of my body. This matter is organized in a certain way and its organs and various subsystems are functioning in such a way that the entire bodily system has the property of being alive. (For example, the lungs are oxygenating the blood, the heart is pumping the blood to the brain, the pathways to the brain are unobstructed, etc.) But then suppose I drown or have a massive heart attack or a massive stroke. The body then ceases to have the property of being alive. On this way of looking at things, one and the same body can exist in two states, alive and dead. There is diachronic continuity between the living and dead bodies, and that continuity is grounded in the proximate matter of the body.
If, on the other hand, my dying is a substantial change, and I am just this living body, then at death I cease to exist entirely, and what is left over, my corpse, is something entirely new, 'an addition to being' so to speak. I cease to exist, and a corpse comes to exist. But then the only diachronic continuity as between the live body and the corpse is prime (not proximate) matter.
But what makes the corpse that comes to exist my corpse? Suppose I am just a living animal and that I die at t1. A moment later, at t2, two corpses come into existence. Which one do you bury under the 'BV' tombstone? Which is the right one, and what makes it the right one? Or suppose Peter and I die at the same instant, in the same place, and that dying is a substantial change. Peter and I cease to exist and two corpses C1 and C2 come into existence. Which is my corpse and which is Peter's? Practically, there is no problem: we look different and our looking different and having different dimensions, etc. is due to our different proximate matter, matter that is the same under two different and successive forms.
What this suggests is that dying is an accidental change, not a substantial change. It is an accidental change in the proximate matter of a human body. But if so, then the Corpse Objection holds and animalism is untenable.
There is also the very serious problem that substantial change requires prime matter, and prime matter is a very questionable posit. But I won't pursue this topic at present.
2. My second main question concerns how animalism is compatible with such phenomena as the unity of consciousness and intentionality. On animalism I am just a living human animal. The thinker of my thoughts is this hairy critter occupying my blogging chair. Is it the whole of me that is the res cogitans? Or only a proper part of me? Presumably the latter. If an animal thinks, then presumably it thinks in virtue of its brain thinking.
The animalist thus seems committed to the claim that the res cogitans, that which thinks my thoughts, is a hunk of living intracranial meat. But it is not so easy to understand how meat could mean. What a marvellous metabasis eis allo genos whereby meat gives rise to meaning, understanding, intentionality! It is so marvellous that it is inconceivable. My thinkings are of or about this or that, and in some cases they are of or about items that do not exist. I can think about Venus the planet and Venus the goddess and I can think about Vulcan even though there is no such planet. How can a meat state possess that object-directedness we call intentionality? Brains states are physical states, and our understanding of physical states is from physics; but the conceptuality of physics offers us no way of understanding the intentionality of thought.
And then there is the unity of consciousness. Can animalism account for it? At Plato's Theaetetus 184c, Socrates puts the following question to Theaetetus: ". . . which is more correct — to say that we see or hear with the eyes and with the ears, or through the eyes and through the ears?" Theatetus obligingly responds with through rather than with. Socrates approves of this response:
Yes, my boy, for no one can suppose that in each of us, as in a sort of Trojan horse, there are perched a number of unconnected senses which do not all meet in some one nature, the mind, or whatever we please to call it, of which they are the instruments, and with which through them we perceive the objects of sense. (Emphasis added, tr. Benjamin Jowett)
The issue here is the unity of consciousness in the synthesis of a manifold of sensory data. Long before Kant, and long before Leibniz, Plato was well aware of the problem of the unity of consciousness. (It is not for nothing that A. N. Whitehead described Western philosophy as a series of footnotes to Plato.)
Sitting before a fire, I see the flames, feel the heat, smell the smoke, and hear the crackling of the logs. The sensory data are unified in one consciousness of a selfsame object. This unification does not take place in the eyes or in the ears or in the nostrils or in any other sense organ, and to say that it takes place in the brain is not a good answer. For the brain is a partite physical thing extended in space. If the unity of consciousness is identified with a portion of the brain, then the unity is destroyed. For no matter how small the portion of the brain, it has proper parts external to each other. Every portion of the brain, no matter how small, is a complex entity. But consciousness in the synthesis of a manifold is a simple unity. Hence the unity of consciousness cannot be understood along materialist lines.
Conclusion
I tentatively conclude that option (c) above -- I am not identical to the animal occupying my chair, but I share the space with a nonthinking animal -- is, if not preferable to Toner's preferred option, at least as good as it, and not at all "nutty.' The Corpse Objection to Animalism seems like a good one, and Toner's response to it is not compelling, involving as it does the idea that dying is a substantial change, a response that brings with it all the apories surrounding substance and prime matter. Finally, it is not clear to me how animalism can accommodate intentionality and the unity of consciousness.
But perhaps Professor Toner can help me understand this better.
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