The case of Susan Sontag.
Top o' the Stack.
A Love of Life Inordinate and Idolatrous?
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6 responses to “A Love of Life Inordinate and Idolatrous?”
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Bill writes:
“It is perfectly plain that a mortal man, mortal because material, cannot live forever in a material world.”
Acknowledging that you’re being looser here, something rubs me the wrong way about the way this is formulated. The finitude (mortality) is not because he is (just) material, but because the material cannot subsist in Time in the form/composition that makes Man a Man, as we commonly understand it—and this setting aside whether a (strictly) materialist conception of our Being is true. Consider that we know that the physical stuff of our bodies is regularly lost, replaced, etc. Otherwise, the intention of say, transhumanism of various sorts would simply not make sense, nor would the idea of our existing in a recognizable sense any amount of time orders of magnitude beyond what we know, acknowledging that over time, the time length of our (possible) existence has been increasing as we better understand the nature and specifics of our existence.
So having said this, of Sontag’s inordinate love of life, I think is rather more just human (a la the human condition) than not; especially for so sensitive and creative a soul as hers that saw and felt something rather beyond life’s materiality, whether she consciously acknowledged that or not; but perhaps, for her, loving that stuff that *this* Life did (and does) have and her simply not wanting to acknowledge that it one day just ends, least of all for someone who is given a rather more blunt reminded of their finitude. -
Someone who knew her and George Steiner recently wrote a memoir of his friendship with them. In my view, they both sound bloody awful, although I prefer Steiner.
https://jewishreviewofbooks.com/american-jewry/14774/ruthless-cosmopolitans/# -
“I cannot reconcile myself to being nothing.”
Although a Christian who believes in the reality of the Resurrection and thus someone with hope in post-mortal existence, whether immediately after death as a disembodied soul or with the Second Coming as a resurrected body-soul composite, I find the mindset expressed in this quotation from Sontag strangely oblivious to the human predicament. If the only alternative is that of an endless life on this plane of existence, with its repeated modulation of some joy and much suffering, or a state of nothingness, the latter seems the more cogent choice. This is one of the profound truths of earliest Buddhist thought, and the only rational rejection of it is found in a theism that posits a loving God who wishes to preserve the sentient, rational souls that He has created. As a Western atheist outside the Buddhist tradition, I would think that someone like Sontag would have been more rational to adopt, whatever its philosophic shortcomings, an Epicurean point of view on death. Succinctly, her confident atheism, however strongly she professed it, collapses before the reality of the grave; she could not face the dark terminus to which it logically pointed. -
Today is the anniversary of the beheading of Mary Queen of Scots, who richly deserved it.
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EG
>>Otherwise, the intention of say, transhumanism of various sorts would simply not make sense,<< I'd say it doesn't. To be precise: it makes sense, but the sense it makes is not true. See here: https://williamfvallicella.substack.com/p/will-science-put-religion-out-of -
Oops, I’m off by one day because of leap year.
Mary the Queen of Scots, who blew up her husband with gunpowder, among other bad things, met her end on the EIGHTH of February, 1587.
Toodle-ooo, Queenie !
You may toast her tomorrow !
She was a Catholic plotter, in an age when religion was rather too intense.
We need the right amount of it.
“Moderation in all things.”
— Catacomb Joe
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