Author: Bill Vallicella

Philip Larkin on Death

David Rieff, son of Susan Sontag, writes movingly of her mother's love of life and her refusal to accept extinction in Swimming in a Sea of Death: A Son's Memoir (Simon and Shuster, 2008). Her attitude and his is close to the one expressed by Philip Larkin in the following poem which displays Larkin's power as a poet in tandem with his weakness as a philosopher. Rieff, p. 13, quotes approvingly from the stanza which I have bolded.

In my humble opinion, the "specious stuff" in Larkin's phrase below is not the wisdom of Epicurus to which allusion is made, but the boozy self-indulgence Larkin serves up. What annoys me, I suppose, is the poetic passing-off of substantive claims with nary an attempt at justification. Am I again criticizing poetry for not being philosophy as I did once before with reference to Wallace Stevens? Perhaps. Or perhaps I am objecting to the nihilism of much of the 'art' of the 20th century.

Larkin's poetry illustrates how life must appear to those for whom God is dead. Read some more of it here. It is skillfully symptomatic of the age.

Getting back to Rieff and Sontag, I find curious their unquestioning conviction that physical death just has to be utter extinction. How can they be so cocksure about that? Socrates, Plato, Moses Mendelsohn and a hundred other luminaries were just deluded fools? And then there is this thought: if physical death extinguishes us utterly, then the game is not worth the candle, and Sontag's stubborn refusal to accept her mortality even after 71 years worth of this ephemeral life is just ridiculous, and the opposite of anything that could be called wisdom.

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Saturday Night at the Oldies: There But For Fortune

OCHS

Tonight's episode is in memory of my grade school classmate Vincent Regan who languishes in prison for his part in a brutal rape and murder.  He belongs in prison for the rest of his life, and I don't believe that "there but for fortune go you or I."  But fortune, genetics, and environment have some imponderable roles to play in our behavior.  Thus the liberal point of view represented in tonight's selection deserves consideration.

Phil Ochs (1940-1976) was a major player in the '60s folk scene who died by his own hand in 1976.  Nowadays he is perhaps best remembered as the author of "There But For Fortune."  The haunting beauty of the song comes out best in this Joan Baez rendition.  Here is a live clip of Ochs singing his song in 1967 at The Bitter End.

 

 

 

 

Show me the prison, show me the jail  
Show me the prisoner whose life has gone stale
And I'll show you young  land with so many reasons why
That there but for fortune,  go you or I

Show me the alley, show me the train
Show me the hobo who sleeps out in the rain
And I'll show you young man with so many reasons why
There but for fortune, go you or  I — you or I.

Show me the whiskey stains on the floor
Show me the drunkard as he stumbles out the door
And I'll show you  young land with so many reasons why
There but for fortune, go you or  I — you or  I.

Show me the country where the bombs had to fall
Show me the ruins of the buildings once so tall
And I'll show you young land with so many reasons why
That there but for fortune, go you and I – you and I.

Do You Really Believe in an Afterlife?

A correspondent poses this question:  

If you believe in an afterlife, one in which things are presumably a lot better than here, why not be eager to "move on"?  I can understand the wicked fearing judgment, but why are the righteous not eager to shuffle off?
To put the challenge in a sharper form: "You say you believe you will survive your bodily death, and that death will be a liberation from the woes of this world.  And yet you behave like everyone else: you  fret over threats large and small  and do all in your power to prolong your bodily life.  I have to wonder whether you really believe what you profess to believe."
 
I'll try to give an honest answer.
 
1.   Belief in an afterlife  is not like the belief that I am sitting in a chair.  The latter belief is either knowledge or very close to it.  The will does not come into the formation or maintenance of this belief.    With respect to massive perceptual beliefs we are all doxastic involuntarists.  But no one this side of the Great Divide knows whether we survive our bodily deaths.  The considerations, both empirical and dialectical,  in favor of survival are not conclusive, but neither are the considerations against it.  (Which is not to deny that the world is filled with dogmatists who think they know what they do not know.) One must therefore decide what one will believe in this matter all the while knowing that one could be 'dead' wrong.  In this predicament, it is perfectly understandable why one would not be eager to hurry off  into what  is presently unknown. 
 
To this I would add that, unless one is in the grip of childish conceptions, of the sort rampant among militant atheists, the encounter with the Lord of the universe can be expected to be terrifying. Fear and trembling,  Timor domini initium sapientiae, etc.  The exact opposite of a comforting illusion.  You might get more than you bargained for.  It is easily understandable that the believer, though at one level wanting to enter the divine presence, may prefer to put it off a while, especially if things are going well here below.  Do babies want to leave the womb?
 
2. Another aspect of the above challenge is the veiled accusation that one is professing what one does not really believe.  People on opposite sides of ideological divides are wont to taunt one another with You can't really believe that!  or You don't really believe what you ar saying! Well, how do we know whether or not a person really believes something?  From behavior.  Applied to the case before us:  does he pursue the afterlife question, think about it, research it, talk about it, write about it?  If he does, then it is a Jamesian live option for him.  Does he live in any way differently than those who do not hold the belief? Does his belief that he will be judged for his actions and omissions (a belief that Wittgenstein apparently could not shake) hold him back from any morally reprehensible actions? If the answers to these questions are in the affirmative, then the person does really believe what he professes to believe. 
 
3.  On many religious conceptions, this world is, in the words of John Keats, a vale of soul-making.   That is "the use of the world" as Keats says.  As  one of my aphorisms has it,  we are not here to improve the world, but to be improved by it.  It is by our sojourn through it, by our experience of its trials and tribulations, agonies and ecstasies, that we develop an identity, actualize ourselves, become full-fledged persons.  Identity is not a given but a  task.  Nicht gegeben sondern aufgegeben.  We are all sparks of the divine  intelligence, but only some of us becomes souls because only some of us acquire an identity.  The rest fall back into the divine fire. Embodiment, on this scheme, is thus a necessary condition of coming to acquire an identity, an haecceity and ipseity.  We come from God and we return to God.  But the trick is to return to God as individuals capable of enjoying the Beatific Vision.  If we merely return to God by a sort of Hindu reabsorption of the  soul into the ocean of Brahman, then we will not be able to enjoy God.  As Ramanuja puts it contra the Advaitins, "I Iwant to taste sugar, not become sugar!"  If the use of the world is to be a vale of soul-making, then the return to God is not a loss of identity in God but a fellowship with God.
 
Now if the use of this world is to be a vale of soul-making, then one would have a good reason to not want to "shuffle off" (in the words of my correspondent) too soon.  The reason is that there is work to be done in the development of one's personhood, and this work needs to be done in a place and predicament such as the one we are in.
 

For the New Year

One of the elements in my personal liturgy is a reading of the following passage every January 1st. I must have begun the practice in the mid-70s.

Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, Book Four, #276, tr. Kaufmann:

For the new year. — I still live, I still think: I still have to live, for I still have to think. Sum, ergo cogito: cogito, ergo sum. Today everybody permits himself the expression of his wish and his dearest thought: hence I, too, shall say what it is that I wish from myself today, and what was the first thought to run across my heart this year — what thought shall be for me the reason, warranty, and sweetness of my life henceforth. I want to learn to see more and more as beautiful what is necessary in things; then I shall be one of those who makes things beautiful. Amor fati: let that be my love henceforth! I do not want to wage war against what is ugly. I do not want to accuse. Looking away shall be my only negation. And all and all and on the whole: someday I wish to be only a Yes-sayer.

Nietzsche found it very difficult to let looking away be his only negation.  And so shall I.

Souls and Murder

 A guest post by Peter Lupu.  Comments in blue by BV.

If there are immortal souls, would murder be a grave moral breach?

1) Theists, like their atheist adversaries, consider murder a severe breach of morality. Unlike causing a minor physical injury to another or damaging or even completely destroying their home, car, or other belongings, murder is considered to be an altogether different matter. The emphasis upon the moral gravity of murder compared to these other moral infractions is, of course, justified and the justification rests in large part upon the finality and irreversible nature of the consequences for the victim. We can perhaps put these consequences as follows: once dead, always dead! Compared to those other infractions where we can perhaps assess the damage and convert such assessment into some sort of tangible remedy, we have no clue how to even begin such appraisal of harm when it comes to a matter such as ceasing to exist forever. If death would have been a temporary state, such as a long sleep for instance, from which one returns into being once again, I am certain we would have found a way to assess the damage done and assign suitable remedy. But, of course, death is not a temporary state such as sleep. Or is it?

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Causal Interaction: A Problem for the Materialist Too!

Ed Feser has been giving Paul Churchland a well-deserved drubbing over at his blog and I should like to join in on the fun, at least in the in the first main paragraph of this post.

One of the standard objections to substance dualism in the philosophy of mind is that the substance dualist cannot account for mind-body and body-mind causal interaction. I have already quoted Dennett and Searle to this effect. Here is Paul M. Churchland repeating for the umpteenth time a standard piece of materialist boilerplate:

How is this utterly insubstantial 'thinking substance' to have any influence on ponderous matter? How can two such different things be in any sort of causal contact? (Matter and Consciousness, p. 9)

Churchland apparently thinks that a substance, to be 'substantial,' must be material. Churchland thereby betrays his inability to conceive of (which is not the same as to imagine) an immaterial substance.  Note that 'immaterial substance'  is not an oxymoron like 'immaterial matter.' Feser in his series of posts shows just how ignorant Churchland is of the history of philosophy, so it is no surprise that he cannot wrap his eliminativist head around the concept of substance as used by Descartes et al.   But let that pass. The issue for now is simply this: How can two things belonging to radically disjoint ontological categories be in causal contact? But here again, Churchland seems to be laboring under a false assumption, namely, that causation must involve contact between cause and effect. But why should we think that this 'billiards ball' model of causation fits every type of causation? Why must we think of causation as itself a physical process whereby a physical magnitude such as energy is transferred from one physical object to another? On regularity and  counterfactual theories of causation there is no difficulty in principle with the notion of a causal relation obtaining between two events that do not make physical contact.

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BlogWatch: Anecdotal Evidence

From the masthead: A blog about the intersection of books and life.  By Patrick Kurp, Bellevue, Washington.  Excerpt from a recent post:

I’m reading more than at almost any time in my life but spending less time reading online. The two facts have a common source – a festering impatience with shoddy writing. My literary gut, when young, was goat-like — tough and indiscriminate. I read everything remotely of interest and felt compelled to finish every book I started. This makes sense: Everything was new, and how could I knowledgeably sift wheat from chaff without first milling, baking and ingesting? Literary prejudice, in a healthy reader, intensifies with age. I know and trust my tastes, and no longer need to read William Burroughs to figure out he wrote sadistic trash.

I've read my fair share of Burroughs and I concur that his stuff is trash: Junkie, Naked Lunch, The Soft Machine, Exterminator.  All in my library.  But there is a place for literary trash.  It has its uses as do the pathologist's  slides and samples.  But put on your mental gloves before handling the stuff. 

A Contrarian I Once Knew

I once knew a highly contrary fellow. But he was intelligent and interesting and I enjoyed talking with him on occasion. If I asserted proposition p, he would more likely than not assert not-p. If I asserted not-p, then I could expect to hear the assertion of p.

One day I said, "You know, John, you are a really contrary fellow!"

He shot back, "No I’m not!"

What’s Wrong with Kitsch and Sentimentality?

April Stevens' and Nino Tempo's version of  Deep Purple  became a number one hit in 1963. I liked it when it first came out, and I've enjoyed it ever since. A while back I happened to hear it via Sirius satellite radio and was drawn into it like never before. But its lyrics, penned by Mitchell Parish, are pure sweet kitsch:

A Death Poem for Year’s End

As another year slips away, a year that saw the passing of John Updike, here is a fine poem of his to celebrate or mourn the waning days of ought-nine:

Perfection Wasted

And another regrettable thing about death
is the ceasing of your own brand of magic,
which took a whole life to develop and market ——
the quips, the witticisms, the slant
adjusted to a few, those loved ones nearest
the lip of the stage, their soft faces blanched
in the footlight glow, their laughter close to tears,
their tears confused with their diamond earrings,
their warm pooled breath in and out with your heartbeat,
their response and your performance twinned.
The jokes over the phone. The memories packed
in the rapid-access file. The whole act.
Who will do it again? That's it: no one;
imitators and descendants aren't the same.

Commentary

Viewed from a third-person point of view, death seems entirely natural, not evil or tragic.  Deciduous trees give up their leaves in the fall, but new ones arrive in the spring.  Where's the evil in that? We too are parts of nature; we hang for a time from des Lebens goldener Baum, and then we drop off.  So far there has never been a lack of new specimens to take our places in a universe that can get on quite well without any of us.   But "imitators and descendants aren't the same."  No indeed, for what dies when we die is not merely an animal, not merely a bit of biology, not merely a specimen of a species, a replaceable token of a type, but a subject of experience, a self, an irreplaceable  conscious individual, a being capable of saying and meaning 'I.'  "Who will do it again?"  No one!  I am unique and it took me a lifetime to get to this level of haecceity and ipseity.  This interiority wasn't there at first; I had to make it.  I became who I am by my loving and striving and willing and knowing: I actualized myself as a self.  It was a long apprenticeship that led to this mastery.  If I did a good job of it I perfected, completed, mastered, myself: I achieved my own incommunicable  perfection, which cannot be understood objectively, but only subjectively by a being who loves.  In the first instance that is me:  I love myself and as loving myself I know myself.  In the second instance, it is you if you love me; loving me you know me as an individual, not as a specimen of a species, a token of a type, an instance of a universal, an object among objects.  There were all those outside influences, of course, but they would have been nothing to me had I not appropriated them, making them my own.  As a somewhat greater poet once wrote, Was du ererbt von Deinen Vätern hast, erwirb es, um es zu besitzen.

And so therein lies death's sting: not in the passing of a bit of biology, but in the wasting of that unique and incommunicable perfection, the instant evaporation of that ocean of interiority.  But is the perfection wasted?  Does the magic just cease?  The animal ceases no doubt, but the magic of interiority?  These questions remain open.

Is Obesity a Disease?

Long-time reader Bob Koepp e-mails:

Since, for me, exploring the concepts of 'health' and 'disease' is a minor hobby, I couldn't resist commenting on your recent "How to Lose Weight." While I agree with what I take to be your moral point, I think your argument goes off the rails when you consider the "disease status" of obesity.

For what it's worth, 'obesity' has traditionally been used by the medical community to refer to an overweight condition that is pathological, i.e., that interferes with natural functional processes. I know that colloquially 'disease' is a much narrower category than 'medical pathology,' but it's because diseases are pathological conditions that they contrast with the condition of healthfulness. That obesity (usually) results from voluntary acts and/or omissions isn't relevant to it's status as a pathological condition. And, of course, even if the fact that something is a pathological condition is sufficient to mobilize medical concern (questionable in itself…), it isn't enough to underwrite political action!

Bob makes an excellent point here.  Since I am always going on about the importance of using terms precisely, I have to accept his point that 'obesity' used as a (relatively) precise medical term stands for a pathological condition, and is therefore a disease, despite the fact that it results from voluntary acts and omissions.  So I should agree, contrary to what I said earlier, that there is an epidemic of obesity.  But I stand pat on the point that there is no call for political action, a point on which Bob seems to agree.

 

“Have You Read Them All?”

IMG_0240 It is not unusual for a non-bookman, upon entering the book-lined domicile of a bookman, to crack, "Have you read them all?"  The quip smacks of a veiled accusation of hypocrisy, the suggestion being that the bookman is making a false show of an erudition and well-readedness the likes of which  he does not possess.  I invariably reply, "This is no show library, this is a working library."  That tends to shut 'em up.

A nephew gave me a coffee cup inscribed thusly: "A room without books is like a body without a soul."  The attribution was to Cicero, but one learns to take such attributions cum grano salis.   Whatever the quotation's source, it sums up the matter well.

Intellectual Maturity

One mark of intellectual maturity  is the ability to tolerate uncertainty, the ability to withhold assent, the ability to withstand contradiction and recognize the merit of opposing views – all of this without lapsing into skepticism or relativism.  The intellectually immature, by contrast, bristle when their pieties and subjective certainties are called into question.  Their doxastic security needs trump their need to inquire into the truth.