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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.

Beyond Philosophy

Josef Pieper, Death and Immortality, trs. Richard and Clara Winston, Herder and Herder, 1969, pp. 129-130. Originally in German under the title Tod und Unsterblichkeit in 1968:

Thus we have now at last touched, and perhaps overstepped, the boundary which is set for the philosophical enquirer. Really to reach this boundary -- therein lies, I think, the true meaning and distinctive opportunity of philosophy. The great philosophers have always seen in philosophy a challenge to penetrate beyond philosophizing.

I divide the paths beyond into two main groups, call them 'mundane' and 'transcensive' or perhaps 'descensive' and 'ascensive' for want of better terms. Two examples of the former are Pyrrhonism as represented by the skeptic way of Sextus Empiricus and political activism as represented by Karl Marx and his followers. I have had plenty to say about both in these pages.

Examples of the higher and nobler paths include religion and mysticism. Here I write about their relation to each other and to philosophy.

The main thing, as it seems to me, is to forge onward and not fall back.  

 

 

The Uselessness of Stoicism in the Face of Death

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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. 

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.     

Related articles

David Benatar on Death and the Challenge of the Epicurean Argument in its Hedonist Form

Benatar, Death, and Deprivation

Benatar on Annihilation and the Existence Requirement

Ubi Amor, Ibi Oculus

They say that love is blind.  But if love blinds, is it love?  Or is it rather infatuation?  "Where there is love, there is sight."  I found this fine Latin aphorism in Josef Pieper, Death and Immortality (Herder and Herder, 1969, p. 21).  The translation is mine.  Pieper credits Thomas Aquinas, Commentary on the Sentences 3 d. 35, I, 21. Pieper adds that "The dictum comes from Richard of St. Victor." (Pieper, p. 133, n. 29.)

Only to the eye of love is the ipseity and haecceity of the beloved revealed, and only the eye of love can descry the true nature and true horror of death.  That is my gloss on the aphorism and its context.  I should arrange a confrontation between Pieper and Epicurus who Pieper views as a sophist. (p. 29)

Incarnation: A Mystical Approach?

I have been, and will continue,  discussing Trinity and Incarnation objectively, that is, in an objectifying manner.  Now what do I mean by that?  Well, with respect to the Trinity, the central conundrum, to put it in a very crude and quick way is this:  How can three things be one thing?  With respect to the Incarnation, how can the Second Person of the Trinity, the eternal and impassible Logos, be identical to a particular mortal man?  These puzzles get us thinking about identity and difference and set us hunting for analogies and models from the domain of  ordinary experience.  We seek intelligibility by an objective route.   We ought to consider that this objectifying approach might be wrongheaded and that we ought to examine a mystical and subjective approach, a 'Platonic' approach as opposed to an 'Aristotelian' one.  See my earlier quotation of Heinrich Heine.

1. The essence of Christianity is contained in the distinct but related doctrines of the Trinity and the Incarnation. Josef Pieper (Belief and Faith, p. 103) cites the following passages from the doctor angelicus: Duo nobis credenda proponuntur: scil. occultum Divinitatis . . . et mysterium humanitatis Christi. II, II, 1, 8. Fides nostra in duobus principaliter consistit: primo quidem in vera Dei cognitione . . . ; secundo in mysterio incarnationis Christi. II, II, 174, 6.

Knowledge Without Belief: A Dallas Willard-Josef Pieper Connection

A commenter on the Pieper post notes that Dallas Willard has a understanding of the belief-knowledge relation (or lack of relation) similar to that of Pieper. A little searching brought me to the following passage in Willard's Knowledge and Naturalism which substantiates the commenter's suggestion (I have bolded the parts relevant to my current concerns):

A Pieperian Argument for Doxastic Voluntarism

Josef Pieper (1904-1997) is a 20th century German Thomist. I read his Belief and Faith as an undergraduate and am now [December 2007] re-reading it very carefully. It is an excellent counterbalance to a lot of the current analytic stuff on belief and doxastic voluntarism. What follows is my reconstruction of Pieper's argument for doxastic voluntarism in Belief and Faith. His thesis, to be found in Augustine and Aquinas, is that "Belief rests upon volition." (p. 27. Augustine, De praedestinatione Sanctorum, cap. 5, 10: [Fides] quae in voluntate est . . . .) I shall first present the argument in outline, and then comment on the premises and inferences.