Category: Death and Immortality

Fragility and Mortality

A piece of glass is fragile in that it is disposed to shatter if suitably struck. But there is no inevitability in any fragile object's ever breaking. There is no necessity that the disposition be realized. A chocolate bar is disposed to melt in certain circumstances.  It has this disposition at every time at which it exists. But it might never be realized: the bar might cease to exist, not by melting, but by being eaten.

Mortality is different. To be mortal is not to be dead, or moribund, but to be liable to die, apt to die, disposed to die. In his last book, Mortality, Christopher Hitchens, dying of cancer, says that we are all dying. That is not true. What is true is that we are all disposed to die. Every animal, even in the full bloom of heath and fitness, bears within itself this disposition. Its realization, however, is inevitable.

These points are relevant to the evaluation of the Epicurean argument which some dismiss as a sophism: when death is, I am not; when I am, death is not. So death, where is thy sting? The argument seems to ignore the fact that the disposition to die is when I am and at every moment I am, and that therein lies the 'sting.'

We should come back to this.

A Final Word to Brother Jackass

You've served me well, old friend, borne many a burden, and conducted me over many a pons asinorum. Your exuberance and animal spirits have caused me trouble, but they have also broadened and deepened my soul's experience. 

I too have served you well with my counsels and warnings. More than once have I saved your ass, or was it mine? I've reined you in as you have let me ride. But now it is time to say goodbye as you return to the earth and I to the sky.

Love and Death

A curious conjunction this February 14th: St. Valentine's Day and Ash Wednesday coincide datewise.  The folly of romantic love calendrically chastened by memento mori:

"Remember, man, thou art dust and unto dust thou shalt return." Memento, homo, quia pulvis es et in pulverem reverteris. This warning, from the Catholic liturgy for Ash Wednesday, is based on Genesis 3, 19: In sudore vultus tui vesceris pane, donec revertaris in terram de qua sumptus es: quia pulvis es et in pulverem reverteris.

How real can we and this world be if in a little while we all will be nothing but dust and ashes?

Vanitas 2The typical secularist is a reality denier who hides from the unalterable facts of death and impermanence.  This is shown by his self-deceptive behavior: he lives as if he will live forever and as if his projects are ultimately meaningful even though he knows that he won't and that they aren't.  If he were to face reality he would have to be a nihilist.  That he isn't shows that he is fooling himself.

Wherein resides the folly of the romantic fool? In the conceit that a finite good, woman or man, can finally satisfy the heart's desire. The idolatrous love of creatures is love of God shunted onto creatures.

 

Vitals or Mortals?

At the doctor's office the sawbones' assistant takes your 'vitals.' She checks whether your blood pressure, pulse, temperature, and O2 uptake are 'within range.' None of this would be necessary if you were not a mortal man on the way to death. But the young assistant is not interested in trading witticisms with an old man, so you refrain from remarking that she is about to take your 'mortals.'

A Love of Life Inordinate and Idolatrous?

Sontag

Dying of cancer, Susan Sontag raged against the dying of the light, hoping for a cure. "If only my mother hadn't hoped so much." (David Rieff, Swimming in a Sea of Death, Simon and Shuster, 2008, 139.) Hers was a false hope, one fueled by an inordinate and idolatrous love of life: ". . . my mother could not get enough of being alive, she reveled in being; it was as straightforward as that." (143) But this being was the being of a sick mortal human animal soon slated for destruction. And so the question arises: is an attitude toward life like that of Sontag excessive and idolatrous? Is it not absurd to attach an absolute value to something so transient and miserable?

There are inordinate loves in this life — of wine and travel, loot and land — and there is the inordinate love of life itself, this life, mortal life, life that ends utterly with the death of the body after a short span of years. That is the case of Susan Sontag, secularist. Convinced that this is it, she had no belief in a life beyond this mortal life.

The horrors of this world strike many as an argument against its value, and in the case of such anti-natalists as David Benatar, the horrors speak against the morality of human procreation. But the horrendous evils of this life did nothing to dampen Sontag's vital enthusiasm. "She thought the world a charnel house . . . and couldn't get enough of it. ". . . my mother simply could not get her fill of the world." (149) She thought herself unhappy . . .  and wanted to live, unhappy, for as long as she possibly could." (147) And ". . . how profoundly she had been unhappy." 

She lived in and for the future because she was unhappy in the present. ". . . my sense is that she had always lived in the future . . . and yet surely the only way to even remotely come to terms with death is to live in the present." (19-20) Sontag couldn't be here now and abide in the present. She lived for a future that must, she believed, lead in a short time to her extinction.

Was Sontag's attitude toward and valuation of life reasonable? You might retort that reason doesn't come into it: the love of life is irrational! Yet Sontag was science-based and had utter contempt for the false hopes and cancer 'cures' peddled by her New Age friends. Secular to the core, religion for her was but a tissue of superstitions.  She was too rational for religion but not so rational as to see the absurdity of attaching an infinite value to her miserable life.

Rieff quotes Marguerite Duras: "I cannot reconcile myself to being nothing." And then he quotes his mother: "Death is unbearable unless you can get beyond the 'I'." "But she who could do so many things in her life could never do that." Rieff thinks his mother "the very incarnation of hope." (167) 

I'd say her hope was a false hope, false because baseless and irrational.  An absurd hope, absurd because an unquenchable love of life cannot be satisfied in a charnel house. It is perfectly plain that a mortal man, mortal because material, cannot live forever in a material world. It would be more reasonable to take one's unquenchable love of life as pointing to a fulfillment beyond this life. Why would we have this unquenchable love if we were not made for eternal life? This non-rhetorical question can be cast as an argument, not that it would be rationally coercive; it would, however, properly deployed, render rationally acceptable the belief in and hope for eternal life.

But Sontag couldn't bring herself to believe in eternal life. So she should have made friends with finitude and dismissed her excessive love of life as delusional and idolatrous.

One of the questions that arise is whether an atheist can be an idolater. I answer in the affirmative over at Substack.

Hitchens, Death, and Literary Immortality

Substack latest. Excerpt:

To the clearheaded, however, 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 of memory 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 in its egomania, collapses into a black hole in the hora mortis. 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.

Anthony Flood comments:

Eloquent, Bill, well worth exposing to a wider audience . . . and an occasion to remind you of Woody Allen's quip: "I don't want to achieve immortality through my work; I want to achieve immortality through not dying. I don't want to live on in the hearts of my countrymen; I want to live on in my apartment." The Illustrated Woody Allen Reader (1993) Unfortunately he hasn't (as far as I know) yet accepted God's terms for enjoying aionian life during which death will no longer be working in him as it is inexorably now. 

Tony has unwittingly, or perhaps wittingly, goaded me into thinking and writing about a further topic: the difference between the eternal and the aionian.

Platonism and Christianity: Josef Pieper on Phaedrus 246c

At the center of the confrontation between Platonism and Christianity on the question of the survival of death lies the tension: immortality of the soul or resurrection of the body? More fully:  immortality of the disembodied soul or resurrection of the en-souled body? Connected with this is the question of whether and to what extent Christianity has been illegitimately Hellenized, in particular, Platonized. Platonism holds that the soul is the true self and that death is liberation of the soul from its entrapment by the body. This puts Platonism at odds with Christianity which teaches the resurrection of the body and which comports better with the Aristotelian-Thomistic (A-T) view of the human person as a soul-body composite, and thus as essentially embodied. For Platonism, I am (identical to) my soul, and my body is an accidental adjunct. On the A-T view, however, I am not my soul, but a soul-body composite, both components of which are essential to me and to each other. But Platonism is one thing, Plato another. It is not clear that Plato was a Platonist.

Josef Pieper takes it a step further and roundly asserts that "Plato himself, however, is no Platonist." He refers us to the late dialogue, Phaedrus, and to the passage at 246c. The passage is concerned with the question "how it is that a living being is called mortal and immortal." Pieper takes Plato to be suggesting:

If ever immortality is conferred upon us, not just the soul but the entire physical human being will in some inconceivable manner participate in the life of the gods; for in them alone is it made real in its original perfection. . . . Plato himself, therefore, here concedes that it is a catachrestic, inadequate, use of language to call the soul immortal. (Death and Immortality, Herder and Herder, 1969, p. 116.)

Unfortunately, Pieper's interpretation, which attempts to assimilate Platonism to Christianity, is not borne out by the text:

This composite structure of body and soul joined together is called a living being and is further designated as mortal. Immortal it is not on any reasonable supposition: in fact, it is our imagination, not our vision, not our adequate comprehension, that presents us with the notion of a god as an immortal living being equipped both with soul and with body, and with these, moreoever, joined together for all time. (trs. Helmbold and Rabinowitz, emphasis added)

Pieper's mistake is a surprising one for a philosopher of his stature to make. But it is a mistake that does not detract much from the high quality of Death and Immortality, which I strongly recommend, and to which I regularly return.