David Rieff, son of Susan Sontag, quotes Marguerite Duras:"I cannot reconcile myself to being nothing." (Swimming in a Sea of Death, p. 167).
The unbeliever is in a tough predicament. He knows that he is not his own foundation, and that his ego must burst like an over-inflated balloon. And then nothing for all eternity.
Does it make sense to ask how probable God's existence is? I don't think so. God is more like truth than like a truth. One can sensibly ask after the probability of, say, The Dems will take back the House in 2018. It would make sense to say that this is likely, unlikely, more likely than not; that it has a 40-50% chance, etc.
But to ask after the probability of there being truths at all is to ask an incoherent question. Suppose someone were to say: it is more likely than not that there are truths, or: the likelihood of there being some truths is 27.5%
You can see that this is nonsense.
What I write on this blog and elsewhere implies that this is also nonsense with respect to God. God is not a being among beings, but Being itself. Would it makes sense to say that the probability of there being Being itself is 27.5%?
This old phrase, coined by Patrick J. Buchanan and deployed by Spiro T. Agnew, needs to be dusted off and re-deployed against the petty leftist crapweasels who will pick at everything Trump does or says. What a sorry lot of sore losers!
The collapse of the Evil Empire in December of 1991.
The attack of radical Islam on the USA in September of 2001.
The election of Donald Trump in November of 2016 and his destruction of the Bush and Clinton dynasties.
I coined 'higher infantilization' recently to cover what is going on in so-called institutions of higher learning. (The STEM disciplines excepted.) The New Criterion provides a good explanation of this infantilization which is also a feminization:
“Perpetual childhood.” Is there a better illustration of this enforced immaturity than the regime of “safe spaces,” “microaggressions,” and “trigger warnings” on campus? Increasingly, today’s students—and their tutelary overseers—are bred without intellectual or moral vertebrae. They exist in an amniotic fluid of shared prejudice that admits no challenging ideas from the world outside. The last few years have provided a series of high-profile and pathetic examples of what happens when these embryonic snowflakes collide with an opposing thought. Wailing. Protests. Excoriation. Disinvitation. Repudiation. The election of Donald Trump was the most serious violation of their safe space yet. There were no trigger warnings, for everyone they encountered assured them it was impossible. This was not a microaggression but a frontal assault. They responded accordingly, and with a unanimity that would make a murmuration of starlings seem haphazard.
Read it all, especially you girly girls, girly men, pajama boys, cry bullies and especially the lowest of the low, the cowardly and supine university administrators who by all appearances did their graduate studies in the Department of the Abdication of Authority.
University administrators weren't always authority-abdicating cowards. See Three Profiles in Civil Courage Among University Administrators
It would be pleasant to think that when one is dead one will be wholly out of harm's way. But is that true? Here is some Epicurean reasoning:
1. Death is annihilation. (Materialist assumption)
2. A harm is a harm to someone or something: for there to be a harm, there must be a subject of harm. (Conceptual truth)
3. Nothing is a subject of a harm at a time at which it does not exist. (Plausible principle)
Therefore
4. No dead person is a subject of harm.
Therefore
5. Death (being dead) cannot be a harm to one who is dead.
Assuming that (1) is accepted, the only way of resisting this argument is by rejecting (3). And it must be admitted that (3), though plausible, can be reasonably rejected. Suppose I promise a dying man that I will take good care of his young and healthy dog after he dies. But I renege on my promise in order to save myself the hassle by having the dog euthanized. Epicurus in hand, I reason, "There is no harm to my friend since he no longer exists, and there is no harm to the dog because its transition to nonexistence will be quick and painless. Caring for the mangy mutt, however, is a harm to me for years to come."
Thomas Nagel would disagree and call my reneging "an injury to the dead man." ("Death" in Mortal Questions, Cambridge UP, 1979, p. 6) For Nagel, "There are goods and evils which are irreducibly relational; they are features of the relations between a person, with spatial and temporal boundaries of the usual sort, and circumstances which may not coincide with him either in space or in time." (p. 6)
Failing to do what I promised a man I would do after his demise is such an evil to the man. Being dead is a circumstance that does not temporally coincide with the life span of the one who will die. In general, a thing can have properties at times at which it does not exist provided it once existed. Frege's posthumous fame is a property he now possesses even though he no longer exists.
A Nagelian rejection of (3) is respectable and plausible as a means of turning aside the Epicurean argument. But it is scarcely compelling. For the Epicurean can simply insist that there are no relational harms. After all, there is something metaphysically murky about maintaining that a person who is nothing is yet the subject of a harm or injury simply on the strength of his having once existed. If you are now nothing, then you are now nothing: why should your once having been something be relevant?
So it looks like a stand-off, an aporetic impasse. The considerations for and against (3) seem to cancel each other.
One consideration in favor of (3) is presentism, the doctrine that the present time and its contents alone exist. If the present alone exists, then past individuals do not exist at all. If so, they cannot be subject to harms. A consideration contrary to (3) is our strong intuition that harms and injuries can indeed be inflicted upon the dead. The dead, if nonexistent, do not have desires, but we are strongly inclined to say that they have interests, interests subject to violation. (The literary executor who burns the manuscripts entrusted to him; the agent of Stalin who deletes references to Trotsky from historical documents, etc.)
But suppose the dead are subject to harms. If so, then they are presumably also subject to missing out on various goods that they would have enjoyed had they lived longer. Suppose a happy, healthy, well-situated 20-year-old full of life and promise dies suddenly and painlessly in a freak accident. Almost all will agree that in cases like this being dead (which we distinguish from both the process and the event of dying) is an evil, and therefore neither good nor axiologically neutral. It is an evil for the person who is dead whether or not it is an evil for anyone else. It is an evil because it deprives him of all the intrinsic goods he would have enjoyed had he not met an untimely end.
This suggests that, contra Epicurus, one can rationally fear being dead. What one rationally fears when one fears one's being dead is a future state of affairs in which one cannot enjoy goods that one would have enjoyed had one lived longer.
This makes sense but is also raises thorny questions. One concerns the oddness of this state of affairs. Not only does it involve a counterfactual; who or what is the subject of this future state of affairs? There won't be one!
A second question concerns whether or not states of affairs can be said to be good or bad if they do not involve living beings. If I understand Philippa Foot, her view is that good and bad are grounded in living organisms and in nothing else where, roughly, goodness is proper functioning, and evil a natural defect or lack of proper functioning. If so, there cannot be any good or bad states of affairs whose subject is a dead animal.
I am definitely coming back to this topic.
This entry is an addendum to The Horror of Death and its Cure.
Here is one way to construe the Epicurean argument:
A. No person P can rationally fear any state S such that, in S, P isn't having any experiences.
B. A dead person is in a state, being dead, such that he is not having any experiences.
Ergo
C. No person P can rationally fear being dead.
A correspondent suggests that this is indeed the Epicurean argument, but goes on to question (A).
I too question (A). Suppose a man makes sure that his wife and children will be provided for should he die by doing such things as eliminating debts, taking out a life insurance policy, etc. He rationally fears a future state in which he won't be having any experiences, namely, the state in which his wife and children survive his demise but lack the wherewithal to live in the style to which they have become accustomed.
It thus appears that (A) is false. If so, the above argument is unsound. But is the above argument the only or best construal of the Epicurean reasoning?
I take the major premise to be, not (A), but
A*. No person P can rationally fear any state S of P such that, in S, P isn't having any experiences.
Now isn't (A*) self-evidently true?
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.
This is good poetry but bad philosophy. Larkin seems not to grasp that the question is not whether we fear "The anaesthetic from which none come round," but whether it is rational to fear it.
UPDATE (2 December):
Daniel M. writes,
(A*) isn't self-evident to me. Suppose you're told there's a 1/10 chance you'll die in your sleep tonight. Supposing you desire to keep living, wouldn't you fear ending up in the state of death tonight? And given your desires, wouldn't the fear be rational?
BV: I would say that the object of your rational fear is not being dead, but the transition to being dead which I described in my original post as ego loss, the sensation of your self irrevocably dissolving. The hour of death is a living dying, not a being dead. It is that living dying, or conscious dying, that reasonably horrifies us, and for which there is no Epicurean, but there is a Christian, cure. (See my original post.)
D. M. goes on to point that there are intrinsic and extrinsic aspects to one's being dead that affect the overall Epicurean argument. Discussing them would require a separate post.
