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.

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*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.

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*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.

A Strange Experience in the Charles Doughty Memorial Suite

I had a strange experience in the late 1980s. Although my  main residence at the time was in Cleveland Heights, Ohio, near the bohemian district called Coventry, I was teaching at the University of Dayton and during the school year rented rooms not far from the university. One night, spirited philosophical   conversation with a graduate student aroused the ire of a bitter old man by the name of Charles Doughty. He occupied an adjoining  efficiency and thought we were being too loud. So he started shouting  at us through the closed door: "I'll kill you, you son of a bitch, God damn you, etc." Just to be on the safe side, when back in Cleveland Heights I  fetched my snub-nosed Colt .38 Detective Special -- which I had   purchased from yet another graduate student -- but luckily did not   have to use on old Doughty.

The lonely and miserable old bastard obliged me some time later by dying of a heart attack. Conversation with Mrs.  Brunner, my landlady, confirmed that he had had a heart condition and knew that he was not  long for this earth. Since Doughty's apartment was bigger and better situated than the ones I usually occupied, I took it over. I dubbed it  the Charles Doughty Memorial Suite at the Paul Brunner Estates.

Now in those days I never ever listened to the AM band on the radio.   I was still something of a liberal and stuck to the FM band where not only  the frequency is modulated but the voices of the announcers are as  well. I listened mainly to WYSO out of Antioch College in Yellow  Springs, Ohio, a sleepy little dorf redolent of the '60s where the scents of sandalwood and  patchouli still hung in the air. WYSO was the local National Public Radio affiliate, and I listened regularly to "All Things Considered."  (For more on Yellow Springs and Antioch College, see my Death By Political Correctness.) 

One night after moving into Doughty's old digs, I woke up in the   middle of the night to the sound of the radio in the living room. I  would not have left the radio on, being a very careful and cautious sort of fellow, and a lover of silence. So I got up to investigate. The radio was indeed on,  but what amazed me was that it was set to the AM band, which, as I said, I never listened to in those days.  Said band was for resentful  white 'deplorables' like Doughty.

Was the ghost of Doughty still hanging around the place? He was a bitter old man who ended his miserable life without family or friends in a crummy, shabbily furnished couple of rooms in an old 1940's building in a third-rate Midwestern city. Did he have nothing better to do than screw around with the radio of a sleeping philosopher who once disturbed him with the sounds of his dialectic?

So there you have it. The facts are that I awoke that night to a radio tuned to the AM band. Is that good evidence of a ghost? Not by itself.  Did I  sleep well on succeeding nights? Absolutely. I've trained myself to be skeptical. You can't be a philosopher without being at least a methodological skeptic. Doubt is the engine of inquiry and the mother-in-law, if not the mother, of philosophy.

But when Halloween approaches, and black cats cross my path, I give a thought to old Doughty and his crummy efficiency, the Charles Doughty  Memorial Suite at the Paul Brunner Estates.

If you want to read an excellent, balanced book on the paranormal by a very sharp analytic philosopher, I recommend Stephen E. Braude, Immortal Remains: The Evidence of Life After Death (Rowman and Littlefield, 2003).

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. 

Closer to the Grave, Further from Birth

With every passing day we are closer to becoming grave meat and worm fodder. Or dust and ashes.  That’s the bad news. The good news is that, with every passing day, one more day has been taken up into the ersatz eternity of the Past and Unalterable.

The medievals spoke of a modality they dubbed necessitas per accidens. Socrates drank the hemlock, but he might* not have: He might* have allowed his friends to arrange his escape from prison. So the drinking was logically contingent. But he did drink the poison, and once the drinking  occurred, that fact became forevermore unalterable, and in this sense accidentally necessary.

There is a certain consolation in the unalterability of the past. The old look back upon a sizeable quantity of past and see that nothing and no one can take away what has happened to them and what they have made happen. All of it is preserved forever, whether remembered or not. The terrain of the present may shift and buckle underfoot as one looks to a future for which there is no guarantee. But the past and its accomplishments are in one's sure possession, proof against every threat. It is curious that the mere passage of time should transmute the base coinage of temporal flux into the gold of an ersatz eternity.

Unfortunately, the treasures of the past are preserved in a region both inaccessible and nonexistent -- or should I say next to nonenexistent?  You will thus be forgiven for valuing  the gold in question no higher than iron pyrite.

And herein, in this hesitation, lies the riddle of the reality of the past. On the one hand, the present alone is real, and what is no longer is not. On the other hand, the past is not nothing. Surely it has some sort of reality, and a reality ‘greater’ than that of the merely possible. Kierkegaard existed and so did Regine Olsen. Their engagement existed and so did its breaking off. But their marriage did not exist: it remains a mere possiblity, unactualized and indeed forever unactualizable. Its time-boundedness makes of this mere possibility a present impossibility. Now what is the difference in ontological status between the mere possibility of their marriage and the past actuality of their break-up?  The latter is more real than the former, though both, in another sense, are modes of unreality.

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*These are nonepistemic uses of  'might.'

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 David 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, Oxford UP, 2017, 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.     

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.