Reading by Larkin. A reading by another, with text. This is a great poem!
Author: Bill Vallicella
Is It Rational to Fear Death?
Dying is not the same as being dead. 'Death' is ambiguous as between 'dying' and 'being dead.' But I will use 'death' to mean 'being dead.' So the title question comes to this: Is it rational to fear the 'state' of being dead? There are ways of dying such that it is rational to fear them. But that is not my question.
The fear of death torments some. It appears to have tormented Philip Larkin as witness his poem "Aubade" reproduced here. The fear of death gets a grip on me sometimes, but then it dissipates in the light of clear analysis.
When I fear death, what am I fearing? Presumably what I am fearing is self-loss, my losing of my very self and the state of being lost to myself. My losing, not anyone else's. The loss of my self to me is what I fear, not the loss of my self to others.
But this raises the question whether it is possible that I suffer the loss of myself. If not, then the fear of death is groundless.
Either death is the annihilation of the self or it isn't. Either way, the self cannot be lost to itself.
If physical death is the annihilation of the self, then the moment of death is the moment of my utter cessation. After that moment I cannot lack anything either consciously or unconsciously. That which does not exist can neither possess anything nor lack anything nor be threatened with dispossession. The point is quite general: both having and lacking presuppose the existence of a subject of possession/nonpossession. That which does not exist, therefore, cannot gain or lose anything, have or lack anything.
It follows that if physical death is the annihilation of the self, then after death I cannot be in a state in which I experience the loss or lack of my self — or the loss or lack of anything.
If, on the other hand, physical death is not the annihilation of the self, and one survives bodily death, then too there can be no experience of self-loss for the self is not lost — precisely because it survives.
I conclude that the fear of death, the fear of being dead, is irrational. I can reasonably fear being bereft of house and home, wife and friend, but not of being nothing. The very phrase 'being nothing' signals the irrationality. Perhaps I can fear the process of becoming nothing — if nothing is what I become — but not of being nothing. For as long as I am merely becoming nothing, then I am something.
If, on the other hand, I survive my bodily death, then I can fear the state I will find myself in post mortem. I like to think that we are now in the shadowlands, and that yonder, on the other side, will be clarity and light. We will learn there what we cannot learn here. But what if the post mortem state is one even more confused and indeterminate and shadowy? That's an awful thought, and one that makes materialism attractive: if I can be certain that I won't survive, then I can be sure that there is an ultimate escape from the horror of existence and that I need fear no surprises. (But you are a fool if you think you can be certain of any such thing.)
But although I can reasonably worry about the state I will find myself in post mortem, what I cannot reasonably worry about it is being nothing. For if I survive then I am not nothing, and if I do not then I lack the primary requisite for experiencing anything, namely, existence.
Epicurus vindicatus est.
Looks like old Larkin was in dire need of some of my logotherapy (to hijack Viktor Frankl's term). But he's dead and so beyond the reach of my cognitive therapy. Not to mention that trying to reason with a poet or any literary type is a fool's errand. They are not equipped for that sort of thing — which is why they are poets and literary types in the first place.
Yes, there are exceptions.
Remembering an Old Man on the Skids
I once worked odd jobs out of Manpower Temporary Services in Culver City, California. One day on the job old broken-down Carl Murray delivered himself of a memorable line.
"Bill, there was a time I was limber all over and stiff in one place. But now it's the other around."
Old Carl didn't like Levi jeans. "They ain't got no ball room." Those were the days before the 'Gentlemen's Cut.'
Motorcycles he always referred to as "murdercycles." One day we were digging up sunken tombstones in a local cemetery, a fit job for a philosopher with his meditatio mori. Carl complained of the others that day who got the "gravy" jobs. But I found that breaking up concrete with a jackhammer was far worse than working with pick and shovel in a graveyard. And decidedly less meditative.
After work we would knock back a few cans of Brew 102 in his Culver City flophouse room and I would listen to his stories.
"Bill, there are just three things in this life I crave: women, cigarettes, and beer. In that order."
Saturday Night at the Oldies: Mose Allison
I used to catch Mose at The Light House in Hermosa Beach, California, late '60s, early 70s. Allison's in his 80s now, and last I checked, still going strong. Seems philosopher Tibor Machan likes him too.
Don't Get Around Much Anymore. Parchman Farm. Gettin' There. You're Mind is on Vacation.
Lust
How can something so paltry be such a huge spiritual impediment?
Why Philosophy Matters
Nicholas Rescher, The Strife of Systems (University of Pittsburgh Press, 1985), p. 229:
The life of the mind, of which rational inquiry is an integral component, is an essential constituent of our conception of the human good. And rational inquiry leads inexorably to philosophizing. For we engage in philosophy not (merely) because it is intellectually diverting — a game one can play for its own sake. It orients our thought, clarifies our values, guides our actions. Philosophy matters because it clarifies and systematizes our thought about issues that matter.
Gratitude: A Thanksgiving Homily
Here again my annual Thanksgiving homily:
We need spiritual exercises just as we need physical, mental, and moral exercises. A good spiritual exercise, and easy to boot, is daily recollection of just how good one has it, just how rich and full one's life is, just how much is going right despite annoyances and setbacks which for the most part are so petty as not to merit consideration.
Start with the physical side of your life. You slept well, and a beautiful new day is dawning. Your breath comes easy, your intestines are in order. Your mind is clear, and so are your eyes. Move every moving part of your body and note how wonderfully it works, without any pain to speak of. Brew up some java and enjoy its rich taste, all the while rejoicing over the regularity of nature that allows the water to boil one more time, at the same temperature, and the caffeine to be absorbed once more by those greedy intercranial receptors that activate the adrenalin that makes you eager to grab a notebook and jot down all the new ideas that are beginning to percolate up from who knows where.Finished with your body, move to your mind and its wonderful workings.
Then to the house and its appliances including your trusty old computer that reliably, day after day, connects you to the sphere of Nous, the noosphere, to hijack a term of Teilhard de Chardin. And don't forget the country that allows you to live your own kind of life in your own kind of way and say and write whatever you think in peace and safety.
A quotidian enactment of something like the foregoing meditation should do wonders for you.
In the Interests of Prandial Harmony
Some of you will be at table with relatives today. Experientia docet: Occasions of putative conviviality can easily degenerate into nastiness. A prophylactic to consider is the avoidance of all talk of politics and religion. But to paraphrase G. K. Chesterton, What else is there to talk about? An exaggeration, no doubt, but God and Man in relation to the State does cover a lot of ground.
Attitude, Gratitude, Beatitude
The attitude of gratitude conduces to beatitude. Can it be said in plain Anglo-Saxon? Grateful thoughts lead one to happiness. However you say it, it is true. The miserable make themselves miserable by their bad thinking; the happy happy by their correct mental hygiene.
Broad generalizations, these. They admit of exceptions, as goes without saying. He who is afflicted with Weilian malheur cannot think his way out of his misery. Don't get hung up on the exceptions. Meditate on the broad practical truth. On Thanksgiving, and every day.
Liberals will complain that I am 'preaching.' But that only reinforces my point: they complain and they think, strangely, that any form of exhortation just has to be hypocritical. Besides not knowing what hypocrisy is, they don't know how to appreciate what actually exists and provably works. Appreciation is conservative. Scratch a liberal and likely as not you'll find a nihilist, a denier of the value of what is, a hankerer after what is not, and in too many cases, what is impossible.
Time To Be Unreasonable
It is not reasonable to be reasonable with everyone. Some need to be met with the hard fist of unreason. The reasonable know that reason's sphere of application is not limitless.
Avoid Misanthropy
The timber of humanity, though crooked, is nonetheless mostly sturdy and termite-free.
A Good Aphorism
A good aphorism should swim suddenly before the mind fully formed. If you have to piece it together it will show its seams. Grunts of effort rarely produce good ones. Bukowski's "Don't try" finds application here. The good ones are grantings — from Elsewhere. Be grateful for them, on Thanksgiving, and every day.
Aphorisms and Poems
Aphorisms and poems have this in common: neither can justify what they say while remaining what they are.
John 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.
Herder on the Dream of Life
Ein Traum, ein Traum ist unser Leben
Auf Erden hier.
Wie Schatten auf den Wolken schweben
Und schwinden wir.
Und messen unsre trägen Tritte
Nach Raum und Zeit;
Und sind (und wissen's nicht) in Mitte
Der Ewigkeit . . .
Johann Gottfried Herder
My loose translation:
A dream, a dream is our life
Here upon the earth.
In a sea of shadows we drift and disappear
Like whitecaps on the surf.
Our sluggish steps we measure
By space and temporality;
Moving in the midst (though we know it not)
Of eternity . . .