Category: Death and Immortality

The Consolation of Philosophy

Dear Sir:
I read, or attempt to read, your blog almost every day. Some of your
"technical" analysis and commentaries go right over my head, but I try
to persevere.
Sometimes things click into place - from my point of view. And I found
your recent examination of the question Is Death Evil? very helpful.
Curious though it might seem, my fear of death was reduced (a bit) by
your considerations.
Alex A.
Lincoln
England.

Is Death Evil?

So is death evil or not?  What is my answer?  The answer depends on metaphysics.

1. If we are natural beings only, nothing but complex physical systems, continuous with the rest of nature and susceptible in principle of complete explanation by physics and biology, then I cannot see how death in general could be accounted evil.  The premature death of some is perhaps evil on the ground that death deprives the decedent of what he might otherwise have enjoyed.  The happy and healthy 20 year old who is cut down by a stray bullet arguably suffers a loss, not one that he can experience, but a loss nonetheless.  (One can suffer a loss merely by being the subject of it without actually experiencing it.)  There is of course a residual technical puzzle about how a person who no longer exists can be the subject of loss, but for present purposes I won't worry further about this.

My main point is that it cannot be maintained on naturalistic principles that death in general is evil for humans.  For suppose a person lives a productive life of 90 or so years, a life which on balance has been satisfying to the person and enriching to those who have come in contact with him.  What is evil about the death of such a person?  And if death is not evil for such a person, then the philosophical question whether death in general is evil must be answered in the negative.  Here are some further considerations:

a.  It is a conceptual truth that one cannot be deprived of the impossible.  Now healthy productive living after a certain age is nomologically impossible.  So a person who dies at a ripe old age of 90 or 100 is not being deprived of anything by dying.  (Adjust the numbers upwards if you care to.)  At the point at which further living become nomologically impossible, one cannot be said to be deprived by death of a good.  Of course, the old person may want  to live on a another year or decade, but that is irrelevant.

b. Death removes from the decedent  the goods of life but also removes the evils, which are not inconsiderable.  I will spare the reader a litany of the miseries and horrors of this life.  If he opens his eyes he will quickly become apprised of them.  (But don't generalize from your own favorable experience: readers of this blog are members of an elite cadre of well-placed and fortunate individuals.)

c.  Even if being dead involves a loss for the decedent after a long and satisfying life, there cannot on naturalistic principles be any experiencing of this loss by the decedent, so how big a deal could it be?  Suppose your will stipulates that on your death $100, 000 of your estate shall go to Oxfam. Your executrix blows the whole wad at Nordstrom's.  It is arguable though not perfectly clear that you have been violated — but you'll be able to 'live' with it, right?  Others can say that you were wronged.  But what could that be to you who no longer exists?

On this naturalistic way of thinking, then, death cannot in general be an evil for humans.  At most, the premature death of some individuals is evil.  But even this is not clear because of the problem of 'the subject of loss/deprivation.' 

But how do you know that naturalism is true?  That you believe it with great conviction cuts no ice.  As Nietzsche says, in his typically exaggerated and febrile way, "Convictions are the greatest enemies of truth."  Can you prove naturalism?  If you try, you will soon entangle yourself in a thicket of thorny metaphysical questions from which you will not escape unbloodied. You cannot prove it.  I guarantee it.

2.  How then could death be evil?  Here is one way.  Suppose there is the possibility of personal survival of bodily death (with divine assistance) and the possibility of further intellectual, moral, and spiritual development in fellowship with others who have survived and in fellowship with God.  Now if some such version of theism is true, and if one dies and becomes nothing — the possibility of survival not having been realized either because the person in question refuses the divine offer or is judged unworthy of it — then one will have been deprived of a great good.  One will have missed out on the beatitude for which we have been created.  So death (annihilation) would be a very great evil on this scheme, an incomparably greater evil than the evil of death on a naturalistic scheme, assuming it could be said to be evil on a naturalistic scheme.  (You will have noticed that 'the problem of the subject' arises on both schemes.) 

As I see it, death is evil because it deprives us of what some of us feel is our 'birthright' as spiritual beings: continued intellectual, moral, and spiritual progress.  We cannot quite believe that we are nothing more than complex physical systems no more worthy of continuance than trees and swamps and clouds.  We feel it to be absurd that the progress we have made individually but also collectively will be simply obliterated, that our questions will go unanswered, our hopes dashed, that the thirsting after justice will go unslaked.  We are not reconciled to the notion that there will be no redemption, that there will be no answer to or recompense for the terrible crimes that have been inflicted on the innocent.  As easy as it is to be reconciled to the death of others viewed objectively, it is difficult to be reconciled to the utter annihilation of those we love.  If death is annihilation, then this life is absurd, a big seductive joke, and we are the butt of it.

Think of the great questions that have tormented the best minds for millenia.  Does it not strike you as a perfectly absurd arrangement that one day these questions will just cease with the last human being and go unanswered forever?  All that painstaking inquiry and no answer, not even the answer that the questions posed were meaningless and unanswerable!

There is a certain sort of secular humanist who fools himself with dreams of human progress toward a 'better world' in which a sort of secular redemption will be achieved.  But this is pure illusion and pure evasion.  It is nothing but feel-good claptrap.  On a naturalistic scheme there can be no redemption for the billions who have been the victims of terrible injustice.  Be a naturalist if you must, but don't fool yourself with humanistic fantasies.  There is no secular substitute for the redemption that only God could bring about.  Be an honest naturalist, a nihilist naturalist.

But of course what I have just said in exfoliation of the sense some of us have of being more than complex physical systems, a sense of having a higher destiny, proves nothing and can be easily rebutted: Death is not an evil because none of what some feel is their birthright as imago Dei is really possible.  It is just pious claptrap born of dissatisfaction with the way things are.  One may feel that it is 'a rotten deal' and 'a bad arrangement' that one must die and be annihilated just when one is starting to make real progress toward understanding and enlightenment and happiness.  But that feeling is just a quirk of some (malcontent) natures: it doesn't prove anything.

3.  So once again we end up in good old Platonic fashion, aporetically, at an impasse.  There is simply no solution to the problem of whether death is evil without a solution to the underlying metaphysical question in philosophical anthropology:  What is man?  (The fourth of Kant's famous questions after: What can I know? What ought I do?  What can I hope for?)  And to the question What is man? there is no answer that can withstand the scrutiny of, and receive the endorsement of, all able practioners.

That is not to say that there is no correct answer.  It is to say that, even if there is, one cannot know it to be correct.  And if one cannot know it to be correct, then it is not an answer in any serious sense of the term.

So I arrive once again at the following long-held conviction.  In the final analysis one must DECIDE what one will believe and how one will live.  There is no evading one's doxastic and practical freedom and responsibility.  When it comes to the ultimate questions one must decide what is true and how one will live.  No one can help you, not even God.  For supposing God, or a divine emmisary, to appear to you right now, you would still have to decide that  it was indeed God or a being from God who was appearing to you; and you would still have to decide whether or not to credit his revelation.  What if the divine intermediary told you to murder your innocent son?  What would you say?  If you were rational your would say, "Get the hell out of here; by commanding me to do what is plainly immoral you prove that you are an illusion."  Or maybe you would decide to accept the veridicality of the experience.  Either way you would be deciding.  (See Abraham and Isaac category and Doxastic Voluntarism category)

The decision as to what to believe and how to live is of course not whimsical or thoughtless or quick or light-hearted.  It must be made with all due doxastic vigilance and fear and trembling, but there is no getting around the need for decision.  But what if you refuse to decide and simply acquiesce in something imposed from without?  Then that too is a decision on your part.

 

Death as a Relational Harm?

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.  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 doesn't exist, and there is no harm to the dog because its transition to nonexistence will be quick and painless.  Caring for the dog, however, is a harm to me.  Sure, I will break my promise, but on consequentialist grounds, what's wrong with that?"

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)  Death is such an evil.  Being dead is a circumstance that does not temporally coincide with the decedent.  In other words, a thing can have properties at times at which it does not exist provided it once existed. (Few if any would claim that a thing can have properties at times at which it does not exist if it never existed.  And so it is not an evil for Schopenhauer's never- existent son 'Will' that he never existed.)

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 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 may 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.)

 

Silenian and Epicurean Sources of “Death is Not an Evil”

Clarity will be served if we distinguish the specifically Epicurean reason for thinking death not an evil from another reason which is actually anti-Epicurean. I'll start with the second reason.

A. 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 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."

Silenus B.  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 because there is no such state of affairs (STOA) as my being dead.  Since there is no such STOA, there is no bearer of the property of being evil.  If this property has a bearer it cannot be an individual or a property but must be a STOA.

And so 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 because axiologically neutral.  The Epicurean is therefore also committed to saying that being dead is not a good.

The first reason is axiological, the second ontological.  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. 

This reinforces my earlier conclusion that there is nothing nihilistic about the Epicurean position. 

The Dead and the Nonexistent: Meinong Contra Epicurus

Are there nonexistent objects in the sense in which Meinong thought there are? One reason to think so  derives from the problem of reference to the dead. The problem can be displayed as an aporetic tetrad:

1. A dead person no longer exists.
2. What no longer exists does not exist at all. 
3. What does not exist at all cannot be referred to or enter as a constituent into a state of affairs.
4. Some dead persons can be referred to and can enter as constituents into states of affairs.  (For example, 'John Lennon' in 'John Lennon is dead' refers to John Lennon, who  is a constituent of the state of affairs, John Lennon's being dead.)

Despite the plausibility of each member, the above quartet is logically inconsistent.  The first three propositions entail the negation of the fourth.  Indeed, any three entail the negation of the remaining one.  Now (1) and (4) count as data due to their obviousness.  They are 'datanic' as opposed to 'theoretical' like the other two.  Therefore, to relieve the logical tension we must either reject (2) or reject (3).

To reject (2) is to reject Presentism according to which only temporally present items exist.  One could hold that both past and present items (tenselessly) exist, or that past, present, and future items (tenselessly) exist.  Such anti-presentist theories break the two-way link between existence and temporal presentness: what is temporally present exists, but what exists need not be temporally present.

But another option is to reject (3).   One could adopt the view of Alexius von Meinong according to which there are items that stand jenseits von Sein und Nichtsein, "beyond being and nonbeing."  These items have no being whatsoever.  Meinong's examples include the golden mountain (a possible object) and the round square (an impossible object).  His doctrine was misunderstood by Russell and generations of those influenced by him.  The doctrine is not that nonexistent objects have a mode of being weaker than existence, but that they have no being whatsoever. And yet they are not nothing! They are not nothing inasmuch as we can refer to them and predicate properties of them.  They are definite items of thought possessing Sosein but no Sein, but are not mere accusatives of thought.  A strange view, admittedly, and I do not accept it.  (See my A Paradigm Theory of Existence, Kluwer 2002, pp. 38-42.)  But distinguished philosophers have and do: Butchvarov, Castaneda, T. Parsons, Routley/Sylvan, et al.)

So Meinongianism is a theoretical option.  The Meinongian line gives us a way to answer Epicurus.  For Epicurus death is not an evil because when we are, death is not, and when death is, we are not.  The point is that at no time is there a subject possessing the property of  being dead.  When I am alive, I am not dead.  And when I am dead, I do not exist.  It is not just that when I am dead I no longer presently exist, but that I do not exist at all.  (Presentism seems part and parcel of the Epicurean position.)  And because I do not exist at all when I am dead, I cannot have properties.   (Anti-Meinongianism  is also part and parcel of the Epicurean position: existence is a necessary condition of property-possession.)  But then I cannot, when dead, have the property of being dead, in which case there is no state of affairs of my being dead. And that gives us a deep ontological reason for denying  that death is an evil:  if there is no state of affairs of my being dead, then there is nothing to possess the property of being evil.  (Note that it is not the property of being dead that is evil, or me the individual, but the putative state of affairs of my being dead.)

As I read Epicurus, his position on death, namely, that being dead  is not an evil for the one who is dead,  requires both Presentism and Anti-Meinongianism.   If that is right, then one can answer Epicurus either by rejecting Presentism or by accepting Meinongianism.

Anti-Presentism breaks the two-way link between existence and temporal presentness, while Meinongianism breaks the two-way link between existence and property-possession.  The anti-presentist faces the challenge of giving a coherent account of tenseless existence, while the Meinongian owes us an explanation of how there can be items which actually have properties while having no being whatsoever.  Epicureanism maintains both links  but flies in the face of the powerful intuition that death is an evil.

A good solution eludes us.  And so once  again we end up in good old Platonic fashion up against the wall of an aporia.

Life-Death Asymmetry: An Aporetic Triad

Let us consider a person whose life is going well, and who has a reasonable expectation that it will continue to go well in the near term at least.  For such a person

1. A longer being-alive is better than a shorter being-alive.

2. A longer being-dead is not worse than a shorter being-dead. (Equivalently: A shorter being-dead is not better than a longer being-dead.

3. If a longer being F is better than a shorter being F, then a shorter being non-F is better than  a longer being non-F.

I claim that each limb of the triad has a strong claim on our acceptance.  And yet they cannot all be true: (1) and (3) taken together entail the negation of (2).  Indeed, the conjunction of any two limbs entails the negation of the remaining one.  To solve the problem, then, one of the limbs must be rejected.  But which one?  Each is exceedingly plausible.

Consider (1).  Surely a longer life is better than a shorter one assuming that (i) one's life is on balance good, and (ii) one has a  reasonable expectation that the future will be like the past at least for the near future.  Suppose you are young, healthy, and happy.  It is obvious that five more years of youth, health, and happiness is better than dying tomorrow.  (In these discussions, unless otherwise stated, the assumption is the Epicurean one that that bodily death is annihilation of the self or person — an assumption that is by no means obvous.)

From discussions with Peter Lupu, I gather that he would grant (1) even without the two assumptions.  He digs being alive and consciousness whether or not the contents of his life/consciousness are good or evil:  just being alive/conscious is for him a good thing.  My life affirmation doesn't go quite that far.  Whereas his life affirmation is unconditional, mine is conditional upon the contents of my experience.

Now consider (2).  John Lennon has been dead for 30 years.   Is it worse for him now than it was 10 years ago or 20 years ago?  Does it get worse year by year?  I mean for him alone, not for Yoko Ono or anyone else.  Intuitively, no.  Ceteris paribus, the longer we live the better; but it is not the case that the longer we are dead, the worse.  (Note that the second independent clause needs no ceteris paribus qualification.)

John F. Kennedy has been dead longer than Richard M. Nixon.  But Kennedy is no worse off than Nixon in precise point of being dead. (2), then, seems intuitively evident.

As for (3), it too seems intuitively evident.  If being respected (treated fairly, loved, provided with food, etc.) for a longer time is better than being respected (treated fairly, etc.)  for a shorter time — and surely it is — then being disrespected (treated unfairly, etc.) for a shorter time is better than being disrespected for a longer time.  And so if being-alive longer is better than being-alive shorter, then being non-alive shorter is better than being non-alive longer — in contradiction to  (2).

One solution would be to reject (2), not by affirming its negation, but by maintaining that neither it nor its negation are either true or false.  If there is no subject of being dead, as presumably there is not assuming that death is anihilation, then one cannot answer the question whether it is worse to be dead for a longer time than for a shorter.

Again we are brought back to the 'problem of the subject.'

 

Being Dead and Being Nonexistent, or: How to Cease to Exist without Dying

In general, being dead and being nonexistent are not the same 'property' for an obvious reason: only that which was once alive can properly be said to be dead, and not everything was once alive.  Nevertheless, it might be thought that, for living things, to be is to be alive, and not to be is to be dead.  But I think this Aristotelian view can be shown to be mistaken.

1. A human person cannot become dead except by dying.

2. But a human person can become nonexistent without dying in at least four ways. 

2a. The first way is by entering into irreversible coma.  Given that consciousness is an essential attribute of persons, a person who enters into irreversible coma ceases to exist.  But the person's body remains alive.  Therefore, a human person can cease to exist without dying. 

2b. The second way is by fission.  Suppose one human person A enters a Person Splitter and exits two physically and behaviorally and psychologically indiscernible persons, B and C.  B is not C.  So A is not B and A is not C.  What happened to A?  A ceased to exist.  But A didn't die.  Far from the life in A ceasing, the life in A doubled!  So human person A became nonexistent without dying.

2c.  The third way is by fusion.  Two dudes enter the Person Splicer from the east and exit to the west one dude.  The entrants have ceased to exist without dying.

2d.  The fourth way is theological.  Everything other than God depends on God for its very existence at every moment of its existence.  If God were to 'pull the plug' ontologically speaking on the entire universe of contingent beings, then at that instant all human persons would cease to exist without dying.  They would not suffer the process or the event of dying  but would enter nonexistence nonetheless.  Because they had not died, they could not be properly said to be dead.

Therefore, pace the Peripatetic,

3.  Being dead and being nonexistent are not the same  — not even for living things.

(Time consumed in composing this post: 40 minutes. )

Death: Distinctions, Terminology, Questions

To think clearly about death we need to draw some distinctions, fix some terminology, and catalog the various questions that can arise. Herewith, a modest contribution to that end.

1. Process, event, state.  There is first of all the process of dying and that in which it culminates, the event of dying.  Both are distinct from the 'state' of being dead.  The inverted commas signal that there is a question whether there is such a state.  A state is a state of something which is 'in' the state. Call it the subject of the state.  But if bodily death is annihilation of the self, then it is arguable (though not self-evident) that there is no subject of the state of being dead, and hence no such state.  And if there is no such state, then it cannot be rationally feared.

The process of dying can be so short as to be indistinguishable from the event of dying, but no one can be in the 'state' who has not suffered the event.  You cannot become dead except by dying.

2. All three (process, event, state) can be objects of fear.  But it does not follow that each is an object of rational fear.  It is clearly sometimes rational to fear the process of dying.  But it is a further question whether it is ever rational to fear the 'state' of being dead.

3. Fear is an intentional state whose object is a future harm, evil, or 'bad.'  Process/event and state are rationally feared only they are indeed evils.  So the axiological questions are logically prior to the empirical-psychological question of fear and the normative-psychological question of the rationality of fear.

4.  Ontological questions would seem to be logically prior to the axiological questions.  Whether death is good, bad, or neutral depends on what it is.  For example, the 'state' of being dead cannot be evil unless there is such a state.  A state is a state of something.  But if death is annihilation, then there is no subject after death which seems to imply that there is no state of being dead.  If so, it cannot be an evil state.  And if being dead is not an evil state, then it cannot be rationally feared.

5. This raises the question whether bodily death is indeed annihilation of the self.

6. And what exactly is it for an animal to die?  One will be tempted to say that x dies at time t iff x ceases being alive at t.  But an animal that enters suspended animation at t ceases to be alive at t without dying!  Or suppose a living thing A splits into two living things B and C.  Since B and C are numerically distinct, neither can be identical to A.  So A ceases to exist at the time of fission.  Ceasing to exist, A ceases to be alive.  But one hesitates to say that A is dead.  Similarly with fusion.

Defining 'dies' is not easy.  See Fred Feldman, Confrontations with the Reaper (Oxford 1992, ch. 4).

7.  Mortality.  In addition to the question whether being dead is evil and the question whether dying (process or event) is evil, there is also the question whether it is evil to be subject to death.  This is a question about the axiological status of mortality: is being mortal good, bad, or neutral?  If mortality is evil, then, given that we are mortal, we cannot fear it, fear being future-oriented, but we can, for want of a better word, bemoan it.  And so the question arises whether it it rational to bemoan our mortality.  Is mortality perhaps a punishment for something, for Original Sin perhaps?

But we need to think more carefully about what it is to be mortal.  First of all, only things that are alive or once were alive can be properly said to be mortal.  My car is not mortal even if it 'dies.'  It is also worth noting that being mortal is consistent both with being alive and with being dead.  My dead ancestors have realized their mortality; I have yet to realize mine.  But my mother did not cease being mortal by dying.  (Or did she?  If she is now nothing, how can she have any property including the property of being mortal?) For a living thing to be mortal is for it  to be subject to death. But this phrase has at least two senses, one weak the other strong.

WEAK sense: X is mortal =df x is able to die, liable to die, has the potential to die. Mortality as posse mori.

STRONG sense: X is mortal =df X has to die, is subject to the necessity of dying, cannot evade death by any action of its own, is going to die, will die in the normal course of events. Mortality as necessitas moriendi.

Correspondingly, there are strong and weak senses of 'immortal':

STRONG sense: X is immortal =df x is not able to die.

WEAK sense: X is immortal =df x is able to die, but is kept alive forever by a factor distinct from x.

For example, in Christian theology God is strongly immortal: he cannot die, so 'deicide' is not an option for him.  The immortal souls of humans, however, are weakly immortal, not immortal by 'own-power' but by 'other-power.'  Prelapsarian Adam was weakly, not strongly, mortal whereas postlapsarian Adam and his descendants are strongly, not weakly, mortal.

Christian theology aside, we are strongly mortal: we are subject to the necessity of dying whether this necessity be nomological or a metaphysical. Is our mortal condition evil?  Or is mortality perhaps a condition of life's having meaning and value?

8. Mortality and Brevity.  Related question: Is the brevity of life a condition of its meaningfulness, as many maintain?  Mortality is not the same as brevity because (i) one could be mortal in the weak sense even if one lived forever and (ii) a short life is consistent with the necessity of dying.

9.  Why is sooner worse than later? So far we have distinguished the following questions: Is dying (whether process or event) evil?  Is being dead evil?  Is being subject to death evil?  Is the brevity of life evil?  But there is also the question why, if dying is evil, dying sooner is worse than dying later.  Intuitively, dying at 20 is worse than dying at 60 ceteris paribus.  But why?  Because the one who dies at 20 'misses out on more' than the one who dies at 60?  But how can the one who dies at 20 miss out on anything if death is annihilation?  The dead cannot be deprived of their future because they are not there to be deprived of anything.

 

The Epicurean Death Argument and Nihilism

Epicurus1 A reader suggests that the "Epicurean argument leads to nihilism. Why live if death is not an evil to you? (assuming there is no one to grieve you)."

In Letter to Menoeceus, Epicurus makes the point that death is ". . . of no concern to us; for while we exist death is not present, and when death is present we no longer exist.  It is therefore nothing either to the living or the dead since it is not present to the living, and the dead no longer are." (125)

If this is the Epicurean argument, then I do not see how it leads to nihilism, if 'leads to' means 'entails' and if nihilism is the view that life is not worth the trouble.  The Epicurean point is not that death is good but that it is axiologically neutral: neither good nor bad.  This follows from his assumption that ". . . all good and evil lie in sensation and sensation ends with death."  If being dead were good, then I think one could reasonably infer nihilism.  For if being dead were good, then being alive would be either bad or neutral, both of which are forms of nihilism.

But the Epicurean view is that being dead is value-neutral whence it follows that being alive is either good or bad, and only one of these is nihilism.  Therefore, the Epicurean position does not entail nihilism.

It is worth noting that the historical Epicurus had a therapeutic end in view: he wanted to relieve us of our fear of death.  This soteriological motive is at the back of his claim that death is nothing to us.  Because it is nothing to us, we have nothing to fear from it.  So if you accused him of nihilism he would probably respond with au contraire or rather the Greek equivalent.  He would probably say that his purpose is a life-affirming one.  His aim is to make men happy by removing from them the fear of death.

To clear Epicurus of the charge of nihilism is of course not to pronounce his position probative.

The Evil of Death and the Rationality of Fearing It

Is death an evil?  Even if it is an evil to the people other than me who love me, or in some way profit from my life, is it an evil to me?  A few days ago, defying Philip Larkin, I took the Epicurean position that death cannot be an evil for me and so it cannot be rational for me to fear my being dead: any fear of death is a result of muddled thinking, something the philosopher cannot tolerate, however things may stand with the poet.  But I was a bit quick in that post and none of this is all that clear. A re-think is in order.  Death remains, after millenia, the muse of philosophy.

My earlier reasoning was along the following Epicurean-Lucretian lines.  (Obviously, I am not engaged in a project of exegesis; what exactly these gentlemen meant is not my concern.  I'll leave scholarship to the scholars and history to the historians.)  

1. Either bodily death is the annihilation of the self or it is not.
2. If death is annihilation, then after the moment of dying there is no self in existence, either conscious or unconscious, to have or lack anything.
3. If there is no self after death, then no evil can befall the self post mortem.
4. If no evil can befall the self post mortem, then it is not rational to fear post mortem evils.
5. If, on the other hand, death is not annihilation, then one cannot rationally fear the state of nonbeing for the simple reason that one will not be in that 'state.'
Therefore
6. It is not rational to fear being dead.

The argument is valid, but are the premises true?  (1) is an instance of the the Law of Excluded Middle. (2) seems obviously true: if bodily death is annihilation of the self, then (i) the self ceases to exist at the moment of death, and (ii) what does not exist cannot have or lack anything, whether properties or relations or experiences or parts or possessions.  (ii) is not perfectly obvious because I have heard it argued that after death one continues as a Meinongian nonexistent object — a bizarre notion that I reject, but that deserves a separate post for its exfoliation and critique. 

Premise (3), however, seems vulnerable to counterexample.  Suppose the executor of a will ignores the decedent's wishes.  He wanted his loot to go to Catholic Charities, but the executor, just having read Bukowski, plays it on the horses at Santa Anita.  Intuitively, that amounts to a wrong to the decedent.  The decedent suffers (in the sense of undergoes) an evil despite not suffering (in the sense of experiencing) an evil.  And this despite the fact, assuming it to be one, that the decedent no longer exists. But if so, then (3) is false.  It seems that a person who no longer exists can be the subject of wrongs and harms no less than a person who now exists.  Additional examples like this are easily constructed.

But not only can dead persons have bad things done to them, they can also be deprived of good things. Suppose a 20 year old with a bright future dies suddenly in a car crash.  In most though not all cases of this sort the decedent is deprived of a great deal of positive intrinsic value he would have enjoyed had he not met an untimely end.  Or at least that is what we are strongly inclined to say.  Few would argue that in cases like this there is no loss to the person who dies.  Being dead at a young age is an evil, and indeed an evil for the person who dies,  even though the person who dies cannot experience the evil of being dead because he no longer exists.

So we need to make a distinction between evils that befall a person and are experienceable by the person they befall, and evils that befall a person that are not experienceable by the person they befall.  This distinction gives us the resources to resist the Epicurean-Lucretian thesis that death is not an evil for the one who dies.  We can grant to Epicurus & Co. that the evil of being dead cannot be experienced as evil without granting that being dead is not an evil.  We can grant to Epicurus et al. that, on the assumption that death is annihilation, being dead cannot be experienced and so cannot be rationally feared; but refuse to grant to them that dying and being dead are not great evils.

In this way, premise (3) of the above argument can be resisted.  Unfortunately, what I have just said in support of the rejection of (3) introduces its own puzzles.  Here is one.

My death at time t is supposed to deprive me of the positive intrinsic value that I would have enjoyed had I lived beyond t.   Thus I am a subject of an evil at times at which I do not exist.  This is puzzling.  When I exist I am of course not subject to the evil of death. But when I do not exist I am not anything, and so how can I be subject to goods or evils?  How can my being dead be an evil for me if I don't exist at the times at which I am supposed to be the subject of the evil?

We will have to think about this some more.

Is It Rational to Fear Death?

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.

On Praying for Christopher Hitchens

There is something strange, and perhaps even incoherent, about praying for Christopher Hitchens if the prayers are not for his recovery or for his courageous acceptance of death, but for conversion or a change of heart.  Let's think about it.

I do not play the lottery; I have good reasons for not playing it; I have no desire to win it, and I believe that I would be worse off if I were to win it.  Suppose you know these facts about me, but say to me nonetheless, "I am praying that you win the lottery," or "I hope you win the lottery."  Surely there is something strange about praying or hoping that I get something that I don't want and that I believe would make me worse off were I to get it. But beyond strange, it may even be incoherent.  Given that I do not play the lottery, there is no way I can win it; so if you hope or pray that I win it, then you are hoping or praying for the impossible.  Of course, you could hope or pray that I start playing.

Hitch does not want salvation of his soul via divine agency, and he has reasons that seem good to him for denying that there is such a thing.  And he presumably believes (though I am speculating here) that survival of bodily death and entry into the divine milieu would not be desirable.    For one thing, his brilliance would be outshone by a greater Brilliance which would be unbearable for someone with the pride of Lucifer, the pride of the light bearer.  It may also be that he believes, as many atheists and mortalists do, that the meaning of life here below, far from requiring a protraction into an afterlife, is positively inconsistent with such an extension.  "How boring and meaningless eternity would be, especially without booze and cigarettes and (sexual intercourse with) women!"

Hitch has lived his life as if God and the soul are childish fictions.  As a result, he has done none of the things that might earn him him immortality and fellowship with God, even assuming he wanted them.  This suggests that it is not just strange, but incoherent to pray for Hitch's metanoia.  For that would be like praying that he win the lottery without playing, without doing the things necessary to win it.

If a merciful God exists, then he should do the merciful thing and simply give Hitch what he wants and expects, namely annihilation.  Either that, or assign him another go-round, or series of go-rounds, on the wheel of samsara until such time as he is ready to accept the divine offer of everlasting life.

As for the prayer day in his honor, Hitch won't be attending.

 

Can Only the Mortalist Love?

From the mail: 

A friend of mine (a philosophy professor) and I were discussing issues of immortality, meaning, and love on Facebook. I explained to him that the love I feel for others in some sense 'seeks' immortality, as the depth of the feeling is such that without that belief, love would be almost too painful for me to bear. He expressed a diametrically opposed view, wherein love REQUIRES that we acknowledge the mortality of both the other and ourselves. This is, he said, because time is only a limited commodity and the time we spend with someone else is only valuable because there is a limited amount of it, and so spending time with someone is only really an act of love for the one for whom time is extremely limited.
 
Your friend seems to be maintaining that only a mortalist (one who maintains that bodily death spells the end of a person) can truly be said to love another person.  Your friend's argument seems to be this:
 
1. The time spent with the beloved is valuable only because it is limited; therefore,
 
2. One cannot love without acknowledging the mortality of both lover and beloved.
 
First of all, I would say that this is a non sequitur.  For even if we suppose that (1) is true, (2) is obviously false.  Gabriel Marcel did not acknowledge the mortality of himself or his wife, and yet he loved his wife.  (On this topic, Marcel is one of the people to read.)  Whether or not love is genuine cannot hinge on whether one is right or wrong about the mortalism/immortalism question.  It would be both churlish and absurd to say to Geach and Anscombe, "You two don't really love each other because you are immortalists!"
 
Your friend might respond by saying that the intensity of a love believed to be undying must be less than the intensity of a love believed to be as mortal as the lovers.  To this I have two responses.  First, the question of intensity is not the same as the question of whether the love is genuine.  The genuineness of love varies independently of its intensity.  Second, it is not obvious that a love believed to end with the lovers must be less intense. One could easily argue the opposite:  if I believe that my love cannot survive bodily death, then I am more likely to practice something like Buddhist nonattachment with respect to the beloved and with respect to my loving of the beloved in accordance with the 'truth' that all is impermanent and therefore  nothing is worthy of a full measure of commitment.  In other words, you could argue against your friend that it is precisely because love can conquer death that you value it as highly as you do, and that because he does not believe this, he ought to value it less.    You could say to him, "Look, if you believe that you and your love will soon pass away, then it is irrational of you to ascribe much value to yourself or your love. Impermanence does not intensify value; it argues lack of value!"
 
Saying this to your friend, you will not convince him ( I am quite sure of that!) but you will neutralize his argument and show that it is not compelling.  And that is about all one can accomplish in a philosophical discussion. But it is also all you need to accomplish to be able to show that your intuitions are rationally acceptable.
 
As for (1), it is arguably false, and for some of the same reasons I have just given.  If contact with the beloved ends utterly with death, then this could be taken to show that the contact was not so valuable  in the first place on the Platonic-Augustinian ground that impermanence argues (relative) unreality and unimportance.  I grant that this is not absolutely compelling, but it is as compelling as the opposite, namely, that impermanence increases value and importance.
 
I'm with you: love is a harbinger of Transcendence; it intimates of Elsewhere.  You won't be able to convince your friend of this, but don't let that bother you.  Any argument he can throw up, I can neutralize.
 
If you haven't read Augustine, you should.  I also recommend P. T. Geach, Truth. Love, and Immortality: An Introduction to McTaggart's Philosophy (University of California, 1979), esp. the last chapter.