Category: Death and Immortality

On Hitchens and Death

I just caught the last third of an interview of Christopher Hitchens by Charlie Rose.  He 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.

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?

Does Sincere Belief in an Afterlife Entail Religious Zealotry?

Spencer Case e-mails:

Greetings from Afghanistan. I’d very much like to hear your response to a sketch of an argument I’m developing. It goes as follows:

1. Suppose an afterlife is obtainable based on one’s performance in this life. If this afterlife is as I understand it, it must have an infinite value while all the goods in this life have only finite values. In fact, the value of afterlife goods (as I clumsily name them) must be infinite on two planes: quantitative and qualitative; quantitative because the duration of the reward is infinite, qualitative because, I assume—and I think, based on some recent blog posts of yours I’ve read, you would agree—no mortal goods, or accumulation of them, can be qualitatively better than the eternal goods to be found in the afterlife, even when we do not consider duration (this not the case with Islamic fundamentalists, who are promised virgins. But let that pass). Perhaps there is even a punitive afterlife with similar disvalue. 

I agree with this conception of the afterlife.  To put it in a slightly different way, the goods of this life are vanishing quantities axiologically speaking as compared to the goods of the afterlife as portrayed in sophisticated conceptions.  (We agree to set aside crude conceptions such as we find in popular Islam: endless disporting with black-eyed virgins, getting to do there all the sensual things that are forbidden here, etc.)

2.  If this ranking system is correct, it is hard to see how it could ever be rational for one to pursue any set of mortal goods—no matter how well they rank on the finite scale—when one could spend the same time and resources in the pursuit of the afterlife goods or avoiding afterlife evils, which are both endless in duration and of infinitely great quality. If extreme fasts are pleasing to God, and increase my chances of obtaining salvation by a tiny bit, then the rational thing for me to do is to live in such an ascetic state for as long as possible, unless it prevents me from doing other activities that could do even more to promote my own salvation.

Well, Spencer, you have put your finger on a genuine and serious problem, a problem I will rephrase in my own way.  If (i) this world and its finite goods is soon to pass away, and if (ii) one sincerely believes that there is a world to come the value of whose goods infinitely surpasses the values of the goods here below, and if (iii) whether or not one participates in this Higher Life or is excluded from it (either by being sent to the Other Place or by being simply annihilated at death) depends on how one lives in this world, then how can it be rational to pursue mortal goods beyond what is necessary for living in accordance with the precepts of one's religion?  The rational course would be to orient all one's activities to the achievement of the afterlife goal.

For example, if a young person is a Roman Catholic and sincerely believes the teachings of his church, especially as regards what are called the Last Things, and this person is free of such encumbrances as children or aged parents to care for, and has the health and other qualifications necessary to join a monastery, then why doesn't the person do so, and join the most rigorous monastery to be found?  Wouldn't that be the most rational course of action given (i) the end in view, (ii) one's beliefs about this end, and (iii) one's beliefs about the means for securing this end?

Converts often follow this course.  Unlike those who have been brought up in a faith,  they are seldom lukewarm.  They have found the truth with a majuscule 'T' (they think) and their authenticity demands that they act on it.  Thomas Merton, for example, after renouncing his worldly life and joining the RC church was not content to be a good practicing Catholic, or become a parish priest even; no, he had to go all the way and join not just any monastic order but the Trappists!  One can appreciate the  'logic' to it.  And then there is Edith Stein, the brilliant Jewish assistant of Edmund Husserl.  She was not content to convert to Catholicism; she abandoned her academic career and all the usual worldly blandishments (sex, love, children, travel, etc.) to spend the rest of life behind the walls of a strict Carmelite convent until the Nazis murdered her at Auschwitz.

I hope the conversion  'logic' is clear:  if in a few short years we will be pitched head first into Kingdom Come, then pursuing and fretting over the baubles of this life is like re-arranging deck chairs on the Titanic.

Let's note en passant that the same 'logic' is found in the thinking of adherents to nonreligious ideologies.  Thousands of young people, some of them among the best and the brightest, sacrificed their lives to the Communist illusion in the 20th century.  They wasted their lives in pursuit of a fata morgana, while at the same time contributing unintentionally and indirectly to the murder of over 100 million people.

3.  Anyone who pursues only afterlife goods in this way is a paradigm case of a religious zealot.

This formulation needs improvement.  Merton and Stein did not pursue ONLY afterlife goods.  They pursued  this-worldly goods too but only insofar as they were instrumental to the achievement of afterlife goods. (I ignore Merton's lapses.)  A better formulation is as follows:

3*.  Anyone who pursues afterlife goods primarily, and this-worldy goods only insofar as they are instrumental in the achievement of afterlife goods, is a religious zealot.

I can accept (3*), but I would add that being a zealot is not necessarily bad, despite the fact that the word generally carries a pejorative connotation.  Aren't we all legitimately zealous when it comes to the preservation of our lives and the lives of those animals and humans in our care?  Suppose Al Gore is right, and global warming is about to do us all in, then GW zealotry would be justified would it not?

4.  So, accepting these very basic religious propositions makes one rationally committed to religious zealotry and denying our normal reasons for acting.

I don't think your conclusion follows in quite the way you intend it.  For one thing, you seem to be assuming that zealotry as such is bad.  But surely not all zealotry is bad.  To modify a saying of Barry Goldwater: Zealotry in the defense of liberty is no vice!  (He had 'extremism' where I have 'zealotry.')  You may also be assuming that the religious claims are false.  Suppose they are true.  Then one would have a good reason for denying/modifying our normal reasons for acting.  (The same would hold in the case of nonreligious ideologies.)  A 'normal' person, if if he is a practicing adherent of a religion, pursues all sorts of pleasures and diversions which do not advance him toward his spiritual goal, but rather, in many cases, impede his realization of it.  The 'normal' Buddhist, for example, does not carry the precept "Conquer desire and aversion!" to the point where he eats whatever is put on his plate.  (If a fly lands in his soup he does not practice nondiscrimination and eat the fly with the same relish or lack thereof with which he eats the rest of the soup.)  But if our Buddhist really believed Buddhist teachings would it not be rational for him to modify 'normal' behavior and bend every effort towards achieving enlightenment?

What I hope this shows is that religious belief (at least in the religions you and I are most likely to debate about) disallows moderation, which I take it, is a bad thing. What I especially like about this argument is it seems to be an argument that appeals to conservatives, because conservatives are most likely to have strong intuitions against ideologies that tell us to ignore our ordinary reasons for acting.

I think you are right that religious belief, if sincerely professed and lived, disallows moderation of the sort that the average  worldly person displays.  But it is not just religious belief that has this property.  So do many ideologies or action-guiding worldviews.  I gave the example of Communism above.  Other examples readily come to mind. 

You are assuming that moderation of the sort displayed by 'normal' worldly people is a good thing.  But if Communism or Catholicism were true, then moderation of that sort would not be good!  True-blue reds devoted all their energies to their chimerical Revolution  just as true Christians consecrate their lives, without reservation, to Christ.  They don't 'hedge their bets' they way most people do.  Whether that singlemindedness is good or bad depends on whether the underlying beliefs are true or false.  Of course we now know that Communism is a god that failed, but the religious God is safely insulated in a Beyond beyond our ken.

So if your thesis is that sincere belief in an afterlife entails (or maybe only leads to) religious zealotry, and is for that reason  objectionable, then I don't think you have made your case.  Genuine belief in an afterlife will lead to behavior that is 'abnormal' and 'immoderate'  as measured by the standards of the worldly.  But this won''t cut any ice unless worldly standards can be shown to be correct and truly normative, not just statistically 'normal.'

Of course, as you’ve no doubt noticed, this argument does not take into account epistemic uncertainty. Uncertainty about the existence of the afterlife might make it more rational for us to go ahead and pursue other goods. I haven’t yet done the research in probability theory, but I’d be willing to guess our levels of epistemic confidence in religious propositions would have to be very low in order for it to be rational to pursue anything else.

This is another  important side to the problem of balancing the claims of this world with the claims of the next.  People fool themselves into thinking they KNOW all sorts of thinks they merely BELIEVE.  Now it seems to me that no imtellectually honest person can claim to KNOW (using this word strictly) that there is an afterlife: the evidence from parapsychology, though abundant, is not conclusive, and the philosophical arguments, though  some of them impressive, are not compelling.  But I do KNOW the pleasures of good food, and strong coffee, and fine cigars, and chess, and good conversation, and scribbling away as I am now doing, all of them activities which are not necessary for my salvation, and perhaps stand in the way of it.  (Not to mention disporting with ladies of the evening, etc.)

So what is the rational thing to do given my epistemic predicament in which what I KNOW is confined to this ephemeral world which cannot be worth much, and my access to the other is via mere belief and the occasional religious/mystical experience whose veridicality is easily called into question?

A difficult question.  I don't know that there is an afterlife, and I don't know that there isn't.  It strikes me as highly irrational to live for this life alone since it is nasty, brutish, short, miserable, full of natural and moral evil, and of scant value if it doesn't lead to anything beyond it.  It also seems irrational to forego every positive value in this world which is not conducive to otherworldly salvation on the strength of mere belief in that otherworldly possibility.

So my tentative answer is that the rational course is to  inquire ceaselessly into the matter in a critical, exploratory and tentative spirit; avoid being bamboozled by the dogmas of churches and sects which claim to have the Truth; enjoy the limited goods of this life in a measured way while realizing that, in and of themselves, they are of no ultimate value.

In short, be neither a worldling nor a monk.  Be a philosopher! (Not to be confused with being a paid professor of it.)

Death Bed Reading

What will you have on your death stand? Whose thoughts will occupy your mind in your final moments in the dying of the light, as the breath comes short and the cancer cells conquer organ after organ?   Speaking for myself, I'll take Plato over Putnam, Boethius over Butchvarov, Aquinas over Quine, the Psalms over Sartre. Reading Quine at a moment like that would like looking for bread among the dusty and jagged shards in a stone quarry.

It is not too soon to begin making a list.

A Strange Experience in the Charles Doughty Memorial Suite

I had a strange experience in the late 1980's. Although my  main residence at the time was in Cleveland Heights, Ohio, near the bohemian district called Coventry, I was teaching at the University of Dayton and during the school year rented rooms not far from the University. One night, spirited philosophical   conversation with a graduate student aroused the ire of a bitter old man by the name of Charles Doughty. He occupied an adjoining  efficiency and thought we were being too loud. So he started shouting  at us through the closed door: "I'll kill you, you son of a bitch, God damn you, etc." Just to be on the safe side, when back in Cleveland Heights I  fetched my snub-nosed Colt .38 Detective Special — which I had   purchased from yet another graduate student — but luckily did not   have to use on old Doughty.

The lonely and miserable old bastard obliged me some time later by dying of a heart attack. Conversation with Mrs.  Brunner, my landlady, confirmed that he had had a heart condition and knew that he was not  long for this earth. Since Doughty's apartment was bigger and better situated than the ones I usually occupied, I took it over. I dubbed it  the Charles Doughty Memorial Suite at the Paul Brunner Estates.

Now in those days, I never ever listened to the AM band on the radio.   I was still something of a liberal and stuck to the FM band where not only  the frequency is modulated but the voices of the announcers are as  well. I listened mainly to WYSO out of Antioch College in Yellow  Springs, Ohio, a sleepy little dorf redolent of the '60s where the scents of sandalwood and  patchouli still hung in the air. WYSO was the local NPR affiliate, and I listened regularly to "All Things Considered."  (For more on Yellow Springs and Antioch College, see my Death By Political Correctness.) 

One night after moving into Doughty's old digs, I woke up in the   middle of the night to the sound of the radio in the living room. I  would not have left the radio on, being a very careful and cautious sort of fellow. So I got up to investigate. The radio was indeed on,  but what amazed me was that it was set to the AM band, which, as I said, I never listened to in those days.

Was the ghost of Doughty still hanging around the place? He was a bitter old man who ended his miserable life without family or friends in a crummy, shabbily furnished couple of rooms in an old 1940's building in a third-rate Midwestern city. Did he have nothing better to do than screw around with the radio of a sleeping philosopher who once disturbed him with the sounds of his dialectic?

So there you have it. The facts are that I awoke that night to a radio tuned to the AM band. Is that good evidence of a ghost? No. Did I  sleep well on succeding nights? Absolutely. I've trained myself to be skeptical. You can't be a philosopher without being at least a methodological sceptic. Doubt is the engine of inquiry and the mother-in-law, if not the mother, of philosophy.

But when Halloween approaches, and black cats cross my path, I give a thought to old Doughty and his crummy efficiency, the Chas. Doughty  Memorial Suite at the Paul Brunner Estates.

If you want to read an excellent, balanced book on the paranormal by a very sharp analytic philosopher, I recommend Stephen E. Braude, Immortal Remains: The Evidence of Life After Death (Rowman and Littlefield, 2003).

Analogies, Souls, Harm to Souls, and Murder

Peter Lupu comments:

Bill has argued that my murder-argument relies upon a faulty analogy. I have a very general response to this charge: while the murder-argument indeed relies upon an analogy, the analogy upon which it relies is one employed by the soul-theorists themselves. Thus, I contend that if the soul-theorists are entitled to a certain analogy, then I am entitled to use the very same analogy in order to marshal an argument against this or that aspect of the soul-hypothesis. And conversely, if I am not entitled to use a certain analogy, then the soul-theorists are not entitled to it either. But, as I shall show, if the soul-theorists are not entitled to the relevant analogy, then there is an even more direct argument than the murder-argument I have given to the conclusion that according to soul-theorists murder is not a grave moral wrongdoing. [What Peter means to say is not that soul-theorists officially maintain as part of their theory that murder is not a grave moral wrongdoing, but that, whether or not soul theorists realize it, soul-theory entails that murder is not a grave moral wrongdoing.]

Continue reading “Analogies, Souls, Harm to Souls, and Murder”

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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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.
 

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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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.

Soul, Conceivability, and Possibility: An Aporetic Exercise

I am puzzling over the inferential move from X is conceivable to X is (metaphysically) possible. It would be very nice if this move were valid. But I am having trouble seeing how it could be valid.

I exist, and I have a body. But it is conceivable that I exist without a body. 'Conceivable' in this context means thinkable without broadly logical contradiction.   I distinguish between narrowly and broadly logical contradiction.  'Some cats are not cats' is NL-contradictory: it cannot be true in virtue of its very logical form.  (It is necessarily false, and its being necessarily false is grounded solely  in its logical form.) 'Some colors are sounds' is not NL-contradictory: the logical form of this sentence is such that some sentences of this form are true.  And yet 'Some colors are sounds' is contradictory in a broad sense of the term since it is necessarily the case that no color is a sound, where the necessity in question does not have a merely formal-logical ground but a 'material' one.

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Hartshorne and Immortality Subjective and Objective

The following is excerpted from a letter from an uncommonly astute correspondent, Brodie Bortignon:

. . . some time ago I read a series of your posts on immortality. You covered what are the orthodox views on immortality, including the various materialist denials. What you didn't address was one of the views of some process theologians, one that has a claim to being the 'orthodox' process view. Immortality, for them, is the eternal, unblemished remembrance of the individual in the divine mind: 'objective immortality'. This, they say, is all the immortality worth wanting. In the words of Hartshorne, to desire 'a career after death' is, in a sense, blasphemous: it is the vaunted wish to attain the everlasting existence distinctive of God, and only God. In Dombrowski's words, 'To think that we should live forever in subjective immortality is hubris. What makes God distinctive is necessary existence and other perfections' (Rethinking the Ontological Argument, p.134).

For my own part, this is deeply inadequate. Take the example of a child who was born into an abusive family; she was beaten, sexually assaulted, emotionally abused. She finally dies from neglect. That God will eternally remember her abuse, or that he will somehow 'redeem the memories' he has of her life, seems wholly inadequate–perhaps not to God, but certainly to the girl. Such a view of immortality would then, to my mind, reflect negatively on the love and justice of God, which process theologians of this stripe do not wish to deny. 'God will remember your horrible life' is hardly recompense for that horrible life; there is no redemption there, or justice.

What is supposed to be the philosophical basis for this 'divine memory' view of immortality seems to me obviously unsound. It is based, I think, on a false equivocation between everlastingness and immortality. When people, such as you, speak of personal immortality, they are not speaking of everlastingness in the sense of being wholly uncreated, that is, of having existed at all times necessarily (I assume most people don't believe in the pre-existence of individual souls). There was a time when I came into existence; if human immortality is true, there will never be a time when I go out of existence. But this sort of immortality isn't the same as divine everlastingness. To put it differently, all everlasting persons are immortal, but not all immortal persons are everlasting. This conflation of two clearly distinct types of immortality–created and uncreated–renders the charge of 'hubris' against believers in an unending afterlife philosophically unjustified. Or so it seems to me.

There is one more objection leveled against the believer in subjective immortality by the orthodox process theologian: the claim that such a belief leads to an immoral and socially dangerous renunciation of material existence. But this objection is not unique to process theology, so I won't go into it. Needless to say I don't find it very convincing.

Do you have any opinion on the 'objective immortality' view of process theology?

If I understand it, then, the 'orthodox process view' of Charles Hartshorne and some of his students is that (i) we are objectively immortal in that our lives, in every last detail, continue to exist as objects of divine memory, and that (ii) subjective immortality — immortality as a continuing subject of experience — is neither available to us in the nature of things nor worth wanting.  My reaction to this is that it is a rather sorry substitute for the Genuine Article.

Continue reading “Hartshorne and Immortality Subjective and Objective”