Category: Death and Immortality

Wise Man and Fool on Their Death Beds

Wise man: 

This world is a vanishing quantity.  I am glad soon to be quit of it.  It has nothing to offer in the end but bagatelles that can fool only the foolish and must leave the wise unsatisfied.  Vanitas vanitatum; omnia vanitas.

Fool: 

Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rage at close of day;
Rage, rage against the
dying of the light.

Wise man:

Clever verse from a drunken fool to be admired by adolescents.  It amounts to:

Do not go gentle from this dark Cave,
Old age should cherish its lack of sight:
But rage, rage against the gaining of the Light.

Is Death an Evil or Not?

I go back and forth on this question.  I should be ashamed of myself.  Forty years a philosopher and no fixed view on such a fundamental question?  What am I (not) being paid to do?  To gain some clarity, I will sketch some possible views.  I will also sketch the  view to which  I incline (despite my vacillation).

But first I define 'mortalist.'  A mortalist is someone who holds that we human beings are mortal, i.e., subject to the natural necessity of dying, both in body and in mind.  Accordingly, all human beings will eventually die, and when they do they will utterly cease to exist as individuals, even if they persist for a while after death as corpses or as smoke and ashes.  (By the way, I consider transhumanist dreams of immortality here below to be the worst sort of self-deluding, ultra-hubristic sci-fi nonsense.  Pox and anathema be upon this house of cards.)  For the mortalist, then, as I define the term, there is no natural immortality, as in Platonism, nor any supernatural immortality via divine agency as in Christianity. 

A. Views According to which Death is not an Evil

1. The first view, that of the pessimistic mortalist, we can label 'Silenian.'  On this view, death is not an evil because it removes us from a condition which on balance is not good, a condition which on balance is worse than nonexistence.  This is the wisdom, if wisdom it is,  of Silenus, reported by Sophocles (Oedipus at Colonus, ll. 1244 ff.) and quoted by Nietzsche in The Birth ofTragedy, section
3:

There is an ancient story that King Midas hunted in the forest a long time for the wise Silenus, the companion of Dionysus, without capturing him.  When Silenus at last fell into his hands, the king asked what was the best and most desirable of all things for man.  Fixed and immovable, the demigod said not a word, till at last, urged by the king, he gave a shrill laugh and broke out into these words:  "O wretched ephemeral race, children of chance and misery, why do you compel me to tell you what it would be most expedient for you not to hear? What is best of all is utterly beyond your reach: not to be born, not to be, to be nothing.  But the second best for you is — to die soon."

Better never to have been born, but here we are.  So second best is to die as soon as possible.  Death is not an evil, but a good, since it releases us from an evil condition, that of being alive.

2. The second view is that of Epicurus. On the Epicurean view, death is not an evil for the one who dies because when death is, one is not, and when one is, death is not.  My being dead is not an evil state of affairs for me (though it may be for others) because there is no such state of affairs (STOA) as my being dead. There is no such STOA because when I am dead there is no bearer of the property of being dead.  And there being no such STOA entails that it it cannot be an evil STOA, or a good one for that matter.

I must point out that some find this reasoning sophistical.  Well, if it is, is is not obviously sophistical.  Some of the complexities of the reasoning are explored in a number of posts collected in the Death and Immortality and Epicureanism categories.  I can't go into this now since this post is mainly just taxonomic.

The Epicurean line is consistent with life affirmation. The Epicurean is not saying that being dead is good and being alive evil; he is saying that being dead is not evil.  It is not evil because it is axiologically neutral.  The Epicurean is therefore also committed to saying that being dead is not a good.

The Silenian pessimist renders a negative value verdict on life as a whole:  it's no good; better never to have been born, with  second best being to die young.  By contrast, the Epicurean's point is that the ontology of the situation makes it impossible for death to be an evil for the one who has died. 

3.  Platonism.  For the Silenian, death  is not evil because it releases one from life, which is evil.  For the Epicurean death is not  evil because the decedent is nonexistent, hence removed from all goods and evils.  One cannot experience loss, or suffer in any way, if one does not exist.  On the Platonic view death is also not an evil but for a different reason: death is release of the naturally immortal soul (the person in his essence) from embodiment.  From a sub-standard 'cave-like' existence, the soul is freed to enjoy a true existence.  On Platonism, the true self continues to exist post mortem in better conditions. 

4. Illusionism.  Whether or not actually held by anyone, there is the possible view according to which  dying and being dead are illusions.  If so, then how can they be evil?  The enlightened sage sees through the veil of maya and recognizes his true identity as the deathless Atman (=Brahman).  We don't exist as separate individuals and we don't die as separate individuals. I am the eternal Atman, and as such deathless. Moksha, enlightenment, liberation,  is to realize  my identity with the eternal Atman thereby seeing through the illusion of separateness.  For some puzzles relating to moksha, see here.

5. The view to which I incline.  Although the process of dying for most of us won't be easy, physically or mentally, the evil of dying is outweighed by the good of being dead, the good of being released from a predicament which is plainly unsatisfactory, whether or not we survive our bodily deaths as individuals.   One aspect of the unsatisfactoriness of our present predicament — and it is indeed a predicament — is our deep ignorance, an ignorance that in some takes the form of delusion.  (We are de-luded, played for fools, by a world which obtrudes itself upon us as the ne plus ultra of reality when calm reflection shows that it can be no such thing.) 

If you deny that this life is plainly unsatisfactory, and can in the end offer us nothing that truly satisfies, then you live on a different planet and I can't help you except to refer you to Buddha, and the Preacher of Ecclesiastes, and Plato, and Augustine, and Thomas a Kempis, and Schopenhauer, and a thousand other philosophers and sages East and West.

Mine is not the position of the pessimistic mortalist, the Silenian, because I am neither an out-and-out pessimist nor a mortalist.  Life is not thoroughly bad, but a mixture of good and bad, a chiaroscuro of axiological light and shade if you will.  It's not all night and fog; there is daybreak and sunshine and thus intimations of Elsewhere.  And if this life is a vale of soul-making, as I am inclined to think, then it is instrumentally good.

Mine is not the Epicurean position because I am not a mortalist.

Mine  is not the Platonic position because I do not dogmatically affirm the immortality of the soul.  (By 'Platonic' I do not mean the actual views of Plato, whatever they were, but something much broader and caricature-like.)  I maintain merely that belief in it is rationally acceptable.  The rationality of the belief supports the hope that we may come to learn in death what we cannot learn in life.  On this view death is not an evil but an adventure into Shakespeare's "undiscovered country from whose bourn no traveller returns." (Hamlet's soliloquy.)  Death is an adventure, and one to be embraced and prepared for, given that one has perceived that this world has nothing much to offer us.

The poet and drunkard Dylan Thomas had it exactly wrong when he advised not going gently into that good night but raging, raging against the dying of the light.  I liked his famous lines (which I did not just now quote but paraphrase) when I was an adolescent, but I have put aside childish things.

Peter Lupu once asked me why, if I believe that being dead is good insofar as it is a release from this unsatisfactory predicament, I take such good care of myself.  My answer follows from what I have said.  This vale of tears is also a vale of soul-making.  So I need to 'do my time.'  (Here, in nuce, is an argument against suicide.)  I need more time here below to earn merit and make up for earlier transgressions.  I need more time to complete my philosophical projects and prepare for death.  No reasonable person embarks upon a long journey to a foreign land, there to take up permanent residence, without adequate preparations.  How foolish, then, not to prepare for the journey to Shakespeare's "undisovered country"?  You say there is no such "undiscovered country"?  Well, then you need to inquire into the grounds of your belief.  Or do you hold beliefs about matters of the utmost importance thoughtlessly?

B. Views According to Which Death is an Evil

6.  Optimistic Mortalism.  Death is an evil because life is unqualifiedly good and death deprives us of it.  Does this need refutation?

7.  Christian Mortalism.  Death is an evil because we were intended to live in an embodied state forever in paradise with God.  But now we are under sentence of death due to Adam's sin.  Death was not intended by God but is a punishment for Adam's sin.  Death, though an evil, is yet a portal to eternal life for those who accept Jesus as savior.  So Chrisitan mortalism is not mortalism full-strength as I defined it at the outset, but a mitigated mortalism which pins its hopes on supernatural divine agency and the resurrection of the body. 

Afterlife Again

Yesterday I wrote:

The epitaph on Frank Sinatra's tombstone reads, "The best is yet to come." That may well be, but it won't be booze and broads, glitz and glamour, and the satisfaction of worldly ambitions that were frustrated this side of the grave. So the believer must sincerely ask himself: would I really want eternal life?

At funerals one hears pious claptrap about the dearly departed going off to be with the Lord. In many cases, this provokes a smile. Why should one who has spent his whole life on the make be eager to meet his Maker? Why the sudden interest in the Lord when, in the bloom of life, one gave him no thought? If you have loved the things of this world as if they were ultimate realities, then perhaps you ought to hope that death is annihilation.

As a reader points out, something like this thought is already to be  found in John Henry Cardinal Newman, Heaven is Heaven Only for the Holy.  Excerpt:

If then a man without religion (supposing it possible) were admitted into heaven, doubtless he would sustain a great disappointment. Before, indeed, he fancied that he could be happy there; but when he arrived there, he would find no discourse but that which he had shunned on earth, no pursuits but those he had disliked or despised, nothing which bound him to aught else in the universe, and made him feel at home, nothing which he could enter into and rest upon.

One might even go so far as to say that heaven would be hell for the worldly person.  And what the worldly person imagines heaven to be might reveal itself as hell, as in the Twilight Zone episode, A Nice Place to Visit.

I see that London Ed has some thoughts on the topic.  I agree with him that 'the objection from boredom' is no good.  I'm never bored here, why should I be bored there?  Never bored here, only tired.  But that's due to the bag of bones and guts that makes up my samsaric vehicle.  Free of crass embodiment, things might well be different on the far side.

You say I'm speculating?  True enough, but if a philosopher can't speculate, who can?

The Mortalist’s Hope

Must not the materialist, the mortalist hope that bodily death is the absolute end as death draws near? For he has lived as if it is. He has made no provision for anything else. He has decided that this life is all there is and has lived accordingly. He hopes he is in for no surprise. If he has lived in ways commonly regarded as evil, in the manner of a Saddam Hussein, say, surely he hopes that in the end there is no good and evil but only flimsy and fleeting human opinions.

So the mortalist too has his hope. He hopes for annihilation at death. He does not, after all, know that he is slated for annihilation. So he must hope. He has faith and hope. And love? He loves this world so much that he cannot allow even the possibility of another to distract his love.

These then are the mortalist's 'theological virtues.'

Companion post: Mortalism

Is a Thinking Person’s Afterlife Conceivable?

As far as I can tell, the popular Islamic conception of the afterlife is unbelievably crass, a form of what might be called 'spiritual materialism.' You get to do there, in a quasi-physical world behind the scenes, what you are forbidden to do here, for example, disport with virgins, in quantity and at length. And presumably they are not wrapped up, head-to-foot, like the nuns of the 1950s. You can play the satyr with their nubility for all eternity without ever being sated. But first you have to pilot some jumbo jets into some skyscrapers for the greater glory of Allah the Merciful.

That the afterlife is a garden of sensuous delights, a world of goodies with none of the bad stuff endemic to our sublunary sphere, is a puerile conception. It is a conception entertained not only by Muslims but also by many Christians. And even if many do not think of it in crassly hedonistic terms, they think of it as a prolongation of the petty concerns of this life. This, however, is not what it is on a sophisticated conception:

     . . . the eternal life promised by Christianity is a new life into
     which the Christian is reborn by a direct contact between his own
     personality and the divine Spirit, not a prolongation of the
     'natural' life, with all its interests, into an indefinitely
     extended future. There must always be something 'unworldly' in the
     Christian's hopes for his destiny after death, as there must be
     something unworldly in his present attitude to the life that now
     is. (A. E. Taylor, The Christian Hope for Immortality, Macmillan
     1947, p. 64, emphasis in original)

The epitaph on Frank Sinatra's tombstone reads, "The best is yet to come." That may well be, but it won't be booze and broads, glitz and glamor, and the satisfaction of worldly ambitions that were frustrated this side of the grave. So the believer must sincerely ask himself: would I really want eternal life?

At funerals one hears pious claptrap about the dearly departed going off to be with the Lord. In many cases, this provokes a smile. Why should one who has spent his whole life on the make be eager to meet his Maker? Why the sudden interest in the Lord when, in the bloom of life, one gave him no thought? If you have loved the things of this world as if they were ultimate realities, then perhaps you ought to hope that death is annihilation.

In any case, it is the puerile conception with which some mortalists and atheists want to saddle sophisticated theists. (A mortalist is not the same as an atheist, but most of the one are the other.) But is there a non-puerile, a sophisticated, conception of the afterlife that a thinking man could embrace? The whole trick, of   course, is to work out a conception that is sophisticated but not unto utter vacuity. This is a hard task, and I am not quite up to it. But it is worth a try.

Our opponents want to saddle us with puerile conceptions: things on the order of irate lunar unicorns, celestial teapots, flying spaghetti monsters, God as cosmic candy man, and so on; but when we protest that that is not what we believe in, then they accuse us of believing in something vacuous. They would saddle us with a dilemma: you either embrace some unbelievable because crassly materialistic conception of God and the afterlife or you embrace nothing at all. I  explore this at length in Dennett on the Deformation of the God Concept.

Self-professed mortalist and former Jesuit Peter Heinegg writes, "It was and is impossible to conceive of an afterlife except as an improved version of this life (harps, houris, etc.), which doesn't  get one very far." (Mortalism, Prometheus 2003, p. 11) Granted, the harps-and-houris conception is a nonstarter. But is it really impossible to conceive of an afterlife except as an improved version of this life?

Suppose that a bunch of young adolescents were to claim that it is  impossible to conceive of adulthood except as an improved version of adolescence. These boys and girls imagine adulthood to be adolescence but with the negative removed: no pimples, no powerlessness, no pestering parents, no pecuniary problems, no paucity of facial hair or mammary deficiency, etc. They simply cannot conceive of anything beyond the adolescent level. If you were to try to convince them that  their horizon is limited and that there is more to life than  adolescent concerns you would not get through to them. For what they  need is not words and arguments; they need to grow up. The notion of growing up, though it entails persisting in time, is distinct from it:  it involves the further notion of maturation. They need to shed false beliefs and values and acquire true ones.

In this life, we adults are like adolescents: confused, unsure of what we really want, easily led astray. We have put away many childish  things only to lust after adult things, for example, so-called 'adult entertainment.' We don't read comic books, we ready trashy novels. We don't watch cartoons, we watch The Sopranos and Sex in the City.  We  are obviously in a bad state. In religious terms, our condition is  'fallen.' We are not the way we ought to be, and we know it. It is also clear that we lack the ability to help ourselves. We can make  minor improvements here and there, but our basic fallen condition  cannot be ameliorated by human effort whether individual or  collective. These, I claim, are just facts. If you won't admit them,  then I suggest you lack moral discernment. (I am not however claiming  that eternal life is a fact: it is a matter of belief that goes beyond  what we can claim to know. It is not rationally provable, but I think  it can be shown to be rationally acceptable.)

Contrary to what Heinegg says is impossible, I am able, employing analogies such as  the foregoing, to conceive of a radical change that transforms us from  the wretched beings that we presently are into beings who are  genuinely and wholly good. (I concede, though, that conceivability is  no sure guide to real possibility; but the issue at the moment is  conceivability.) What is difficult and perhaps impossible is to conceive the details of how exactly this might come about. As I said,  it can't be achieved by our own effort alone. It requires a divine  initiative and our cooperation with it.

It won't occur in this life: I must pass beyond the portal of death, and I must somehow retain my personal identity through the passage.  Much will have to be sloughed off, perhaps most of what I now consider  integral to my selfhood. As noted, the transition is a transformation  and purification, not a mere prolongation. Will anything be left after this sloughing off? I suggest that unless one is a materialist, one  has reason to hope that the core of the self survives.

And this brings us back to what Schopenhauer called the 'world-knot,'  the mind-body problem. If materialism could be demonstrated, then the  foregoing speculations would be mere fancies. But materialism, though  it can be assumed, cannot be demonstrated: it faces insuperable  difficulties. The existence of these difficulties makes it reasonable  to entertain the hope of eternal life.

Mortalism

According to Peter Heinegg, mortalism is "the belief that the soul – or spark of life, or animating principle, or whatever — dies with the body. . . ." (Mortalism: Readings on the Meaning of Life,   Prometheus, 2003, p. 9). Heinegg was raised Catholic and indeed was a member of the Jesuit order for seven years. In an essay prefatory to his anthology, he explains why he is a mortalist. Suppose we examine some of his statements.

That anyone should be a mortalist does not surprise me, but it does surprise me that anyone should consider it an "obvious fact" that death is the "irrevocable end" of a person. But this is what Heinegg
holds: "Everybody knows that the soul dies with the body, but nobody likes to admit it." (11) Priests and metaphysicians may prate about immortality, but deep down in the bowels of the body we all know that we are mortal to the core:

     As surely as the body knows pain or delight, the onset of orgasm or
     vomiting, it knows that it (we) will die and disappear. We have a
     foretaste of this every time we fall asleep or suffer any
     diminution of consciousness from drugs, fatigue, sickness,
     accidents, aging, and so forth. The extrapolation from the fading
     of awareness to its total extinction is (ha) dead certain. (13, emphasis added)

This is as close as Heinegg comes to an argument in his personal statement, "Why I am a Mortalist." (11-14) The argument has but one premise:

   1. We experience the increase and diminution of our embodied
   consciousness in a variety of ways.

   Therefore

   2. Consciousness cannot exist disembodied.

But surely (2) does not follow from (1). If (2) followed from (1), then it would be impossible for (1) to be true and (2) false. But it is easy to conceive of (1) being true and (2) false. It might be like   this: as long as the soul is attached to the body, its experiences are deeply affected by bodily states, but after death the soul continues  to exist and have some experiences albeit experiences of a different sort than it has while embodied.

Consider near-death experiences. A man has a massive heart attack and has a profoundly blissful experience of a white light at the end of a tunnel. Would any mortalist take such an experience as proving that there is life after bodily death? Of course not. The mortalist would point out that the man was not fully dead, and would use this fact to argue that the experience was not veridical. The mortalist  would point out that no conclusions about what happens after death can be drawn from experiences one has while still alive. By the same token, however, a consistent mortalist should realize that this same principle applies to his experiences of the waxing and waning of his   consciousness: he cannot validily infer from these experiences that consciousness cannot exist disembodied.  For his experiences of the augmentation and diminution of of conscousness are enjoyed while the person's body is alive.

What puzzles me about Heinegg is not that he is a mortalist, but that he is so cocksure about it.  One can of course extrapolate from the fading of consciousness to its total extinction, and not unreasonably; but that the extrapolation is "dead certain" is simply a leap of faith — or unfaith.

Related post: Near-Death Experiences:  Do They Prove Anything?

Deserving Immortality

I lately aphorized:

Which is better: to inquire whether there is immortality, or to live in such a way as to deserve it? Both are good, but the second is better.

A childhood friend and committed Christian offers this well-crafted comment:

You are meant for immortality but cannot live in such a way as to deserve it. The only thing you can “do” in this regard is step aside and let the only person so qualified for this task (of deserving a living survival from death) substitute for you. Your willingness to step aside to let this uniquely qualified individual do the thing that only he can do will change you. Until that change you are incompletely made as it were and are qualified for going from death to death. God sees our unfitness to be fully in his presence. When the substitution takes place, God sees the substitute’s fitness as an attribute of our soul and we are accepted into God’s presence. This is immortal life. This is possible for any man.

The substitute is qualified and ready. The transition event pivots on our willingness to either use our free will as though its purpose is to allow us to be established as independent from the presence of God or to accept God’s purpose in equipping us with this free will which is to accept freely this offer of substitution, admit our inability to make ourselves fit to be fully in God’s presence, and submit to the process of substitution and be born again.

Note first that the comment is consistent with the truth of my aphorism.  I asked which is better: to examine the question of personal immortality or to live in such a way as to deserve it.  It should be obvious that while both are good — the first as an instance of the Socratic principle that the examined life is better than the unexamined life –  the second is better.  The second is better even if nothing we do or could do suffices to secure for us personal immortality.  In other words, the second disjunct does not presuppose the possibility of attaining immortality 'on our own power' and as our just desert.  One can live so as to deserve immortality even if one does not, in the end, deserve it.

Nevertheless, it is a very important question whether, if there is personal immortality, we can secure it by our own efforts.  The Christian answer is in the negative.  As a result of the Fall, we are so out of right relation to God that nothing we could do could restore us to right relation.  Adam's sin condemned him and his descendants to death.  The Platonic notion that man is naturally immortal, in virtue of the immortality of his soul, is foreign to Christianity.  Immortality was a supernatural gift in our prelapsarian state, and, after the Fall, it became a gift again only because of the substitutionary sacrifice of the God-Man, Jesus Christ, agnus dei qui tollit peccatum mundi. 

My old friend is suggesting that all we can do is confess our impotence in bringing about our own salvation and accept exogenic assistance, substituting for our own vain efforts the Savior's efficacious efforts.  One comment is that, while my friend was brought up Catholic, he now seems perilously close to the Protestant sola fide, a a doctrine I have never understood.  How could faith alone suffice?  Works don't count at all? Nothing we do makes any difference?  As I understand the Catholic doctrine — which strikes me as balanced where the Protestant one is unbalanced — there is no soteriological bootstrapping: one cannot save oneself by one's own efforts alone; still, works play some role, however exiguous that role may be.

As a philosopher, however, my problems lie far deeper than this intramural theological dispute, having to do with the exact meaning of the Fall, and the sense and possibility of Trinity and Incarnation. My friend is presupposing the truth of Christianity.  But for a philosopher, the truth of Christianity is a problem, not a presupposition.

And so once again we are brought back to the fruitful tension between Athens and Jerusalem, the tension between the need for autonomous understanding and the need to accept, faithfully and obediently, Biblical revelation.  The Bible-based believer has his truth and so sees no need to inquire; the philosopher, however, well disposed as he may be to the claims of revelation, cannot help, on pain of violating his own nature and integrity, inquiring whether what the believer calls truth really is truth.

Saturday Night at the Oldies: Death and Resurrection

Johnny Cash, Ain't No Grave
Johnny Cash, Redemption
Mississippi John Hurt, You've Got to Walk that Lonesome Valley
B. B. King, See That My Grave is Kept Clean
Blind Boy Grunt (Bob Bylan), Gospel Plow
Bob Dylan, Fixin' to Die
Johnny Cash, Personal Jesus
Johnny Cash, Hurt
Johnny Cash, Final Interview.  He speaks of his faith starting at 5:15.

Ludwig Wittgenstein, Culture and Value, p. 45e: "Go on, believe! It does no harm."

Journeys and Preparations

We plan our journeys long and short.  We lay our plans for trips abroad well in advance.  And those who leave their homeland and emigrate to another country take special care.  Why then are we so careless about the journey on which all must embark and none return?

"Because it is a journey into sheer nonexistence.  One needn't be concerned about a future self that won't exist!"

Are you sure about that? Perhaps you are right; but how do you know?  Isn't this a question meriting some consideration?

Peter Hitchens Remembers His Brother

Excerpt:

Last week I saw my brother for the last time in a fairly grim hospital room in Houston, Texas. He was in great pain, and suffering in several other ways I will not describe. But he was wholly conscious and in command of his wits, and able to speak clearly. We both knew it was the last time we would see each other, though being Englishmen of a certain generation, neither of us would have dreamed of actually saying so. We parted on good terms, though our conversation had been (as had our e-mail correspondence for some months) cautious and confined to subjects that would not easily lead to conflict. In this I think we were a little like chess-players, working out many possible moves in advance, neither of us wanting any more quarrels of any kind.

". . . and suffering in other ways I will not describe."  I understand and respect the reticence of the Englishman, a reticence we Americans could use a little more of; but that is one teaser of an independent clause!  One wants to know about that mental or spiritual suffering, and not just out of idle curiosity.  The moment of death is the moment of truth.  The masks fall away.  No more easy posturing as in the halcyon days of health and seemingly endless invincibility.  In wine there is truth, but in dying even more.  Ego-display and cleverness are at an end.  What was always hollow is now seen to be hollow.  Name and fame for example.  At the hour of death one hopes for words from the dying that are hints and harbingers and helps to the living for their own preparation for the hour of death. 

Peter's chess image is a curious one.  We work out many possible moves in advance the better to inflict material loss, or time-trouble, or checkmate  upon our opponents.  We are cautious, not so as to avoid conflict, but to render it favorable to ourselves.  On second thought, however, the chess comparison is apt:  in the end the brothers circled around each other 'keeping the draw in hand.'  Each could then withdraw from the fray feeling neither that he had lost to the other nor that he had bested him.

I am struck once again by the insignificance of blood-relations.  These two brothers in the flesh came to inhabit different planets.  As one of my aphorisms has it, consanguinity is no guarantee of spiritual affinity.

A second case in point: the flaming atheist David Stove and his Catholic son.

On Hitchens and Death

The Hitch is dead.  The following is a re-post, slightly emended, from 16 August 2010. 

………………….

I just caught the last third of an interview of Christopher Hitchens by Charlie Rose. Hitchens looks bad, the chemotherapy having done a nasty tonsorial number on him. But his trademark intellectual incandescence appeared undiminished. 'Brilliant' is a word I don't toss around lightly, but  Hitch is one to whom it unarguably applies. Public intellectuals of his caliber are rare and it will be sad to see him go. Agree or disagree with him, it is discourse at his level that justifies the high regard we place on free speech.

In the teeth of death the man remains intransigent in his unbelief. And why not? He lived in unbelief and so it is only fitting that he should die in it as well. He lived for this life alone; it is fitting that he should die without hope. As I read him, God and the soul were never Jamesian live options. To cop out now as debility and death approach must appear to him to be utterly contemptible, a grasping for straws, a fooling himself into a palliative illusion to ease the horror of annihilation.

For what he takes to be the illusion of immortality, Hitch substitutes literary immortality. "As an adult whose hopes lay assuredly in the intellect, not in the hereafter, he concluded, 'Literature, not scripture, sustains the mind and — since there is no other metaphor — also the soul.'" (Here)

 But to the clearheaded, literary immortality is little more than a joke, and itself an illusion. Only a few read Hitch now, and soon enough he will be unread, his books remaindered, put into storage, forgotten. This is a fate that awaits all scribblers but a tiny few. And even they will drink the dust of oblivion in the fullness of time.

To live on in one's books is a paltry substitute for immortality, especially when one recalls Georg Christoph Lichtenberg's aphorism: Ein Buch ist ein Spiegel, aus dem kein Apostel herausgucken kann, wenn ein Affe hineinguckt. "A book is a mirror: if an ape peers in, no apostle will look out." Most readers are more apish than apostolic.  The fame they confer cannot be worth much, given that they confer it.

To live on in one's books is only marginally better than to live on in the flickering and mainly indifferent memories of a few friends and relatives. And how can reduction to the status of a merely intentional object count as living on?

The besetting sin of powerful intellects is pride. Lucifer, as his name indicates, is or was the light-bearer. Blinded by his own light, he could see nothing beyond himself. Such is the peril of intellectual incandescence. Otherworldly light simply can't get through. One thinks of Nietzsche, Russell, Sartre, and to a lesser extent Hitchens. A mortal man with a huge ego — one which is soon to pop like an overinflated balloon.

The contemplation of death must be horrifying for those who pin all on the frail reed of the ego. The dimming of the light, the loss of control, the feeling of helplessly and hopelessly slipping away into an abyss of nonbeing. And all of this without the trust of the child who ceases his struggling to be borne by Another. "Unless you become as little children, you cannot enter the kingdom of heaven." But this of course is what the Luciferian intellect cannot do. It cannot relax, it must hold on and stay in control. It must struggle helplessly as the ego implodes in upon itself. The ego, having gone supernova, collapses into a black hole. What we fear when we fear death is not so much the destruction of the body, but the dissolution of the ego. That is the true horror and evil of death. And without religion you are going to have to take it straight.

Have you read Philip Larkin's Aubade?

What would Hitch lose by believing? Of course, he can't bring himself to believe, it is not a Jamesian live option, but suppose he could. Would he lose 'the truth'? But nobody knows what the truth is about death and the hereafter. People only think they do. Well, suppose 'the truth' is that we are nothing but complex physical systems slated for annihilation. Why would knowing this 'truth' be a value? Even if one is facing reality by believing that death is the utter end of the self, what is the good of facing reality in a situation in which one is but a material system?

If materialism is true, then I think Nietzsche is right: truth is not a value; life-enhancing illusions are to be preferred. If truth is out of all relation to human flourishing, why should we value it?