Maverick Philosopher: Strictly Philosophical

Immortality and Meaning

Some think that if  bodily death spells the extinction of the person, then bodily death consigns human life to meaninglessness.  For a life to have a final meaning that transcends the petty and particular meanings of the quotidian round, it cannot end in death. Or so many of us feel. Mortalism entail meaninglessness. But there are certain arguments from the naturalist camp that need to be addressed. One is that mortalism is a necessary condition of meaning.

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

Suppose one dies and goes to heaven. Might not a heavenly being wonder about the point of its existence in the same way an earthly being* does? It might even be urged by the naturalist that heavenly existence would exacerbate the problems of existential meaning. Earthly delights are brief, unreliable, and often hard to obtain, but this prevents them from being boring. Endless heavenly delights, however, without any admixture of pain or difficulty in their acquisition might prove unbearably boring. You might imagine that endless disporting with 72 black-eyed virgins would be the ultimate in bliss — until you had your fill of it.

A Twilight Zone episode from 1960, A Nice Place to Visit, illustrates the theme. A two-bit thug, shot to death by the police, wakes up on the far side. Given his life of crime, he is puzzled to find himself in what he takes to be heaven: a penthouse of Pascalian divertissement has been provided for him in which he can sate his every sensuous appetite. The supply of booze and broads is endless, and he can't lose at the gaming tables. But soon enough our man tires of the 'good life' and heads for the door — which is locked. Turning to his host, played wonderfully by Sebastian Cabot, the thug complains that he'd rather be in the other place. "This is the other place!" the host demonically laughs.

Indeed, it might be urged by the naturalist that it is precisely the brevity of life that lends it meaning and value: just as gold is precious because rare, life is precious because short. Life interminable would be life without meaning.

The naturalist argument for decoupling meaning and immortality might be summed up as follows. There is no connection between the meaning of a life and its temporal duration. So even if life did extend beyond the grave, this would not ensure its meaningfulness. And if there were a connection between the meaning of life and its temporal duration, it would be brevity, not longevity, of life that would ensure meaningfulness.

What are we to say to this? Note first of all that the naturalist presumes to know what the afterlife will be like. (Of course, he does not believe in it himself, but he presumes to know what the immortalist must mean by it.) It will be more of the same, but with the negatives removed. The naturalist's  conception is likely to be crassly materialistic, as materialistic as the popular Islamic conception. But no sophisticated immortalist thinks of the afterlife as more of the same, but with the negatives removed. He does not think of it as a mere continuation of the present life, as a temporal extension of this life. He thinks of it as a qualitative change, a transformation and purification of the selfish self of this life into a godlike self: ". . . it is deiformity, not mere endless continuance, which is held out to man as the prize of his calling." (A. E. Taylor, The Faith of a Moralist, vol. I, 256) The life to come on a sophisticated conception is a sharing in the divine life which completes and perfects the individual soul while at the same time harmonizing it with other souls. Immortality is a divine gift rather than something that naturally occurs. And although it is a gift, it is something that must be earned. For the soul can be lost as well as gained. This life takes on meaning as a "vale of soul-making" in Keats' phrase.

This is a very rough sketch of a sophisticated conception of immortality such as one finds in A. E. Taylor's The Christian Hope of Immortality (Macmillan, 1947). Armed with such a conception, the immortalist will have no trouble turning aside the naturalists' objections as follows:

1. The postulation of an afterlife is unavailing because the same problems about existential meaning that arise in this life will also arise in our post-mortem existence. Response: This is not the case. Immortality is not a mere survival of the present self, but a transformation of the self whereby the self participates in the divine life. Since that just is the meaning of existence, no further questions can arise about it.

2. The afterlife would be one of unbearable ennui. Response: This objection presupposes that the afterlife would be just more of the sort of thing that transpires here below. It is not, so that puts paid to the objection.

3. Far from immortality ensuring life's meaningfulness, it precludes it: life is meaningful and valuable precisely because our days are numbered. Response: This objection again presupposes that the afterlife is just an extension of this life, albeit with the negative removed. If this is what it is like, then a finite life would be preferable. But on a sophisticated conception, the afterlife is not more of the same, but a scarcely imaginable participation in the divine life.

______________________________

*The sophisticated reader will appreciate that 'earthly being' in this context cannot mean being who lives on the planet Earth any more than 'heavenly being' in this context means being who lives in space beyond the planet Earth.   Human astronauts far from Earth remain 'earthly' in the religious sense.

Some think that if  bodily death spells the extinction of the person, then bodily death consigns human life to meaninglessness.  For a life to have a final meaning that transcends the petty and particular meanings of the quotidian round, it cannot end in death. Or so many of us feel. Mortalism entail meaninglessness. But there are certain arguments from the naturalist camp that need to be addressed. One is that mortalism is a necessary condition of meaning.

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

Suppose one dies and goes to heaven. Might not a heavenly being wonder about the point of its existence in the same way an earthly being* does? It might even be urged by the naturalist that heavenly existence would exacerbate the problems of existential meaning. Earthly delights are brief, unreliable, and often hard to obtain, but this prevents them from being boring. Endless heavenly delights, however, without any admixture of pain or difficulty in their acquisition might prove unbearably boring. You might imagine that endless disporting with 72 black-eyed virgins would be the ultimate in bliss — until you had your fill of it.

A Twilight Zone episode from 1960, A Nice Place to Visit, illustrates the theme. A two-bit thug, shot to death by the police, wakes up on the far side. Given his life of crime, he is puzzled to find himself in what he takes to be heaven: a penthouse of Pascalian divertissement has been provided for him in which he can sate his every sensuous appetite. The supply of booze and broads is endless, and he can't lose at the gaming tables. But soon enough our man tires of the 'good life' and heads for the door — which is locked. Turning to his host, played wonderfully by Sebastian Cabot, the thug complains that he'd rather be in the other place. "This is the other place!" the host demonically laughs.

Indeed, it might be urged by the naturalist that it is precisely the brevity of life that lends it meaning and value: just as gold is precious because rare, life is precious because short. Life interminable would be life without meaning.

The naturalist argument for decoupling meaning and immortality might be summed up as follows. There is no connection between the meaning of a life and its temporal duration. So even if life did extend beyond the grave, this would not ensure its meaningfulness. And if there were a connection between the meaning of life and its temporal duration, it would be brevity, not longevity, of life that would ensure meaningfulness.

What are we to say to this? Note first of all that the naturalist presumes to know what the afterlife will be like. (Of course, he does not believe in it himself, but he presumes to know what the immortalist must mean by it.) It will be more of the same, but with the negatives removed. The naturalist's  conception is likely to be crassly materialistic, as materialistic as the popular Islamic conception. But no sophisticated immortalist thinks of the afterlife as more of the same, but with the negatives removed. He does not think of it as a mere continuation of the present life, as a temporal extension of this life. He thinks of it as a qualitative change, a transformation and purification of the selfish self of this life into a godlike self: ". . . it is deiformity, not mere endless continuance, which is held out to man as the prize of his calling." (A. E. Taylor, The Faith of a Moralist, vol. I, 256) The life to come on a sophisticated conception is a sharing in the divine life which completes and perfects the individual soul while at the same time harmonizing it with other souls. Immortality is a divine gift rather than something that naturally occurs. And although it is a gift, it is something that must be earned. For the soul can be lost as well as gained. This life takes on meaning as a "vale of soul-making" in Keats' phrase.

This is a very rough sketch of a sophisticated conception of immortality such as one finds in A. E. Taylor's The Christian Hope of Immortality (Macmillan, 1947). Armed with such a conception, the immortalist will have no trouble turning aside the naturalists' objections as follows:

1. The postulation of an afterlife is unavailing because the same problems about existential meaning that arise in this life will also arise in our post-mortem existence. Response: This is not the case. Immortality is not a mere survival of the present self, but a transformation of the self whereby the self participates in the divine life. Since that just is the meaning of existence, no further questions can arise about it.

2. The afterlife would be one of unbearable ennui. Response: This objection presupposes that the afterlife would be just more of the sort of thing that transpires here below. It is not, so that puts paid to the objection.

3. Far from immortality ensuring life's meaningfulness, it precludes it: life is meaningful and valuable precisely because our days are numbered. Response: This objection again presupposes that the afterlife is just an extension of this life, albeit with the negative removed. If this is what it is like, then a finite life would be preferable. But on a sophisticated conception, the afterlife is not more of the same, but a scarcely imaginable participation in the divine life.

______________________________

*The sophisticated reader will appreciate that 'earthly being' in this context cannot mean being who lives on the planet Earth any more than 'heavenly being' in this context means being who lives in space beyond the planet Earth.   Human astronauts far from Earth remain 'earthly' in the religious sense.

John N. Deck's Contrast Argument against the Philosophy of Being

John N. Deck is a highly interesting, if obscure, figure in the neo-Scholasticism of the 20th century. I first took note of him in 1989, ten years after his death, when his article "Metaphysics or Logic?" appeared in New Scholasticism (vol. LXIII, no. 2, Spring 1989, pp. 229-240.) Thanks to the labors of Tony Flood we now have a better picture of the man and his work. The case of Deck may well prove to be a partial confirmation of Nietzsche's "Some men are born posthumously."

What interests me about Deck is that he attacks the neo-Scholastic philosophy of Being from within. Holding a Ph.D. in philosophy from the University of Toronto (1960), he cannot be suspected of any lack of acquaintance with the tradition against which he lodges his objections. Yet he arrives at conclusions similar to those of the pragmatist Sidney Hook (see his The Quest for Being) and the empiricist Donald C. Williams (see his "Dispensing with Existence," The Journal of Philosophy, vol. LIX, no. 2, 1962, pp. 748-763.)

I myself am neither a Thomist nor a neo-Thomist. My route to the philosophy of Being was via the transcendental philosophy of Kant, Husserl, and Heidegger. My dissatisfaction with the phenomenological approach to ontology as well as with the logical approach one finds in Frege and Russell led me to re-think in my own way and in my own terms the old Thomist idea of ipsum esse subsistens. I gave my thoughts a rough and provisional form in my 2002 book A Paradigm Theory of Existence to which I attached the perhaps excessively triumphalist subtitle, Onto-Theology Vindicated. The gist of the subtitle can be put in the slogan: Being is neither a phenomenological nor a logical notion, but an onto-theological one.

Not having discussed Deck in my book, I will make good that omission here in one or more posts.

It is a matter of experience that our world is a plural world, one consisting of a manifold of beings or existents. The manifoldness is undoubtedly real, but it is not a pure manyness but a plurality of things that are, that have Being or existence in common, that form a community of being. There are many beings, but each is. It is undeniable that Being is in some sense common to beings. As common, it must be distinct from each of them taken distributively and from all of them taken collectively.

The question in dispute, however, is whether both Being and beings are real in the "extra-cognitional order" to use a phrase of Deck's, or only beings are. I maintain that both Being and beings are extra-cognitionally real whereas Deck maintains that only beings are. Thus Deck's view is that beings exist outside the mind, but that their unity and commonality is merely that of a concept, and so is imposed by the mind to satisfy its own logical exigencies. Deck's view could be put as follows. When we say of a thing that it exists, what we say is true; but there is no real unity in things that grounds our application of the predicate 'exists' to them. There is no Being in the things that are that makes it true to say of them that they are: Being is a concept we impose. The diversity of beings is real (extramental, extra-cognitional), but their unity is merely conceptual.

One could say that Deck takes a deflationary line: there is no such 'thing' as Being outside the mind. Clearly, this must be opposed by anyone who, like me, sees merit in the notion of ipsum esse subsistens, self-subsistent existence. For to say that existence is self-subsistent is to say that it itself exists.  But in philosophy it all comes down to the arguments one can adduce for or against. In support of his deflationism, Deck says the following:

There is no alternative to being. Everything is. Thus there is no ultimate intelligibility in the contention that all things that are agree in this, that they are all opposed to, or even equally opposed to, non-being — they would be at one, as it were, in the non-non-being feature. (232)

This passage suggests a Contrast Argument:

1. If a term T denotes something real, then there must be items to which T does not apply.
2. There are no items to which 'being' or 'existent' does not apply.
Ergo
3. 'Being' or 'existent' does not denote anything real.

In point of validity, this argument is unobjectionable: it is an instance of Modus Tollens. But it is unsound. The following consideration suffices to refute the first premise. Since everything is self-identical, it is true to say of any particular thing that it is self-identical. 'Self-identical' is not rendered either senseless or reference-less by the plain fact that nothing is self-diverse. I don't think we need to waste any more words on the first premise. It is obviously false.

But even if you insist that (1) is true, there is still a problem with the argument. Although (2) is true, it does not have the implication Deck thinks it has. He seems to think that if everything exists, then it is unintelligible to suppose that there is a difference between existence and nonexistence. But this is a non sequitur. For although it is true that there is nothing that does not exist, a contingent being that does exist is possibly such that it does not exist. So there is a contrast after all. It is the contrast between (actual) existence and possible nonexistence.

It is quite clear that the difference between existence and nonexistence cannot be explained by giving examples of existents and examples of nonexistents. Pace Meinong and the Meinongians, there are no examples of nonexistents. But how it is supposed to follow from this that there is no real unity in things that grounds the application of 'exists' to them?

It seems to me that Deck is making a rather obvious mistake. He is assuming that existence or Being is a highest what-determination. He is thinking of 'being' as a maximally general term which, due to its all-inclusive extension, is virtually nil in intension. Here is what he has to say:

The distinction between 'being' and, for example, 'dog,' is then a distinction between the more general and the less general. This is a logical or cognitional distinction, which does not necessarily reflect anything in the nature of things. Nor does it necessarily point to any real composition within things. It is analogous to the distinction made between 'animal' and 'dog' when it is said that Rover is a dog and Rover is an animal, which distinction does not point to two distinct principles within Rover — dog and animal. Rover is a dog who is an animal, an animal who is a dog. His being a dog and his being an animal are the same in him, even though there are other animals. Similarly, Rover is both a being and a dog — there are other beings, but this does not change the fact that for him, to be a dog is to be a being, to be a being is to be a dog. (232-233)

This passage shows that Deck is thinking of being as a highest genus. Rover is a dog, an animal, a living thing, a physical thing . . . a being. On this way of thinking, being is the most general what-determination. But if anything is clear, it should be that Being or existence is not a summum genus as Aristotle pointed out at 998b22 of the Metaphysics. And as Kant pointed out in his famous discussion, Being or existence is not a reales Praedikat: Being or existence is no part of what a thing is.

I'll have more to say about this later. For now, the main point is that Deck's Contrast Argument above is unsound. Not only does it share the defect of every contrast argument, it also confuses Being or existence with a highest what-determination.

John N. Deck is a highly interesting, if obscure, figure in the neo-Scholasticism of the 20th century. I first took note of him in 1989, ten years after his death, when his article "Metaphysics or Logic?" appeared in New Scholasticism (vol. LXIII, no. 2, Spring 1989, pp. 229-240.) Thanks to the labors of Tony Flood we now have a better picture of the man and his work. The case of Deck may well prove to be a partial confirmation of Nietzsche's "Some men are born posthumously."

What interests me about Deck is that he attacks the neo-Scholastic philosophy of Being from within. Holding a Ph.D. in philosophy from the University of Toronto (1960), he cannot be suspected of any lack of acquaintance with the tradition against which he lodges his objections. Yet he arrives at conclusions similar to those of the pragmatist Sidney Hook (see his The Quest for Being) and the empiricist Donald C. Williams (see his "Dispensing with Existence," The Journal of Philosophy, vol. LIX, no. 2, 1962, pp. 748-763.)

I myself am neither a Thomist nor a neo-Thomist. My route to the philosophy of Being was via the transcendental philosophy of Kant, Husserl, and Heidegger. My dissatisfaction with the phenomenological approach to ontology as well as with the logical approach one finds in Frege and Russell led me to re-think in my own way and in my own terms the old Thomist idea of ipsum esse subsistens. I gave my thoughts a rough and provisional form in my 2002 book A Paradigm Theory of Existence to which I attached the perhaps excessively triumphalist subtitle, Onto-Theology Vindicated. The gist of the subtitle can be put in the slogan: Being is neither a phenomenological nor a logical notion, but an onto-theological one.

Not having discussed Deck in my book, I will make good that omission here in one or more posts.

It is a matter of experience that our world is a plural world, one consisting of a manifold of beings or existents. The manifoldness is undoubtedly real, but it is not a pure manyness but a plurality of things that are, that have Being or existence in common, that form a community of being. There are many beings, but each is. It is undeniable that Being is in some sense common to beings. As common, it must be distinct from each of them taken distributively and from all of them taken collectively.

The question in dispute, however, is whether both Being and beings are real in the "extra-cognitional order" to use a phrase of Deck's, or only beings are. I maintain that both Being and beings are extra-cognitionally real whereas Deck maintains that only beings are. Thus Deck's view is that beings exist outside the mind, but that their unity and commonality is merely that of a concept, and so is imposed by the mind to satisfy its own logical exigencies. Deck's view could be put as follows. When we say of a thing that it exists, what we say is true; but there is no real unity in things that grounds our application of the predicate 'exists' to them. There is no Being in the things that are that makes it true to say of them that they are: Being is a concept we impose. The diversity of beings is real (extramental, extra-cognitional), but their unity is merely conceptual.

One could say that Deck takes a deflationary line: there is no such 'thing' as Being outside the mind. Clearly, this must be opposed by anyone who, like me, sees merit in the notion of ipsum esse subsistens, self-subsistent existence. For to say that existence is self-subsistent is to say that it itself exists.  But in philosophy it all comes down to the arguments one can adduce for or against. In support of his deflationism, Deck says the following:

There is no alternative to being. Everything is. Thus there is no ultimate intelligibility in the contention that all things that are agree in this, that they are all opposed to, or even equally opposed to, non-being — they would be at one, as it were, in the non-non-being feature. (232)

This passage suggests a Contrast Argument:

1. If a term T denotes something real, then there must be items to which T does not apply.
2. There are no items to which 'being' or 'existent' does not apply.
Ergo
3. 'Being' or 'existent' does not denote anything real.

In point of validity, this argument is unobjectionable: it is an instance of Modus Tollens. But it is unsound. The following consideration suffices to refute the first premise. Since everything is self-identical, it is true to say of any particular thing that it is self-identical. 'Self-identical' is not rendered either senseless or reference-less by the plain fact that nothing is self-diverse. I don't think we need to waste any more words on the first premise. It is obviously false.

But even if you insist that (1) is true, there is still a problem with the argument. Although (2) is true, it does not have the implication Deck thinks it has. He seems to think that if everything exists, then it is unintelligible to suppose that there is a difference between existence and nonexistence. But this is a non sequitur. For although it is true that there is nothing that does not exist, a contingent being that does exist is possibly such that it does not exist. So there is a contrast after all. It is the contrast between (actual) existence and possible nonexistence.

It is quite clear that the difference between existence and nonexistence cannot be explained by giving examples of existents and examples of nonexistents. Pace Meinong and the Meinongians, there are no examples of nonexistents. But how it is supposed to follow from this that there is no real unity in things that grounds the application of 'exists' to them?

It seems to me that Deck is making a rather obvious mistake. He is assuming that existence or Being is a highest what-determination. He is thinking of 'being' as a maximally general term which, due to its all-inclusive extension, is virtually nil in intension. Here is what he has to say:

The distinction between 'being' and, for example, 'dog,' is then a distinction between the more general and the less general. This is a logical or cognitional distinction, which does not necessarily reflect anything in the nature of things. Nor does it necessarily point to any real composition within things. It is analogous to the distinction made between 'animal' and 'dog' when it is said that Rover is a dog and Rover is an animal, which distinction does not point to two distinct principles within Rover — dog and animal. Rover is a dog who is an animal, an animal who is a dog. His being a dog and his being an animal are the same in him, even though there are other animals. Similarly, Rover is both a being and a dog — there are other beings, but this does not change the fact that for him, to be a dog is to be a being, to be a being is to be a dog. (232-233)

This passage shows that Deck is thinking of being as a highest genus. Rover is a dog, an animal, a living thing, a physical thing . . . a being. On this way of thinking, being is the most general what-determination. But if anything is clear, it should be that Being or existence is not a summum genus as Aristotle pointed out at 998b22 of the Metaphysics. And as Kant pointed out in his famous discussion, Being or existence is not a reales Praedikat: Being or existence is no part of what a thing is.

I'll have more to say about this later. For now, the main point is that Deck's Contrast Argument above is unsound. Not only does it share the defect of every contrast argument, it also confuses Being or existence with a highest what-determination.

Money, Power, and Equality: An Egalitarian Paradox

 J. R. Lucas, "Against Equality," in Justice and Equality, ed.  Hugo Bedau (Prentice-Hall, 1971), pp. 148-149:

Since men value power and prestige as much as the possession of wealth---indeed, these three `goods' cannot be completely separated---it is foolish to seek to establish an equality of wealth on egalitarian grounds. It is foolish first because it will not result in what egalitarians really want. It is foolish also because if we do not let men compete for money, they will compete all the more for power; and whereas the possession of wealth by another man does not hurt me, unless I am made vulnerable by envy, the possession of power by another is inherently dangerous; and furthermore if we are to maintain a strict equality of wealth we need a much greater apparatus of state to secure it and therefore a much greater inequality of power. Better have bloated plutocrats than omnipotent bureaucrats.

This is a penetrating passage from a penetrating essay. Lucas is in effect pointing out a paradox at the heart of the egalitarian  position. If the egalitarian wants to equalize wealth, perhaps via a scheme of income redistribution, then he will need to make use of state power to do it: the wealthy will not voluntarily disembarrass themselves of their wealth. But state power is of necessity concentrated in the hands of a few, those who run the government,  whose power is vastly greater than, and hence unequal to, the power of  the governed.

The paradox, then, is that the enforcing of equality of wealth requires inequality of power. But, as Lucas points out, the powerful are much more dangerous to us than the wealthy. Your being wealthy takes away nothing from me, and indeed stimulates the economy from which I profit, whereas your being powerful poses a threat  to my liberty.

But I hear an objection coming: "Wealth is convertible into power since the wealthy can buy their way to political influence, whether legally or illegally." True, but the seriousness of this problem is a function of how intrusive and overreaching the government is. A government stripped down to essential functions offers fewer opportunities for the power-hungry. Note also that the wealthy may  feel it necessary to buy influence just to protect themselves from  regulatory zeal.