Suppose the executrix of my will fails to disburse the funds I have earmarked for the local food bank after my death and instead heads for Las Vegas with the loot. Has she harmed me? Stolen my money? Violated my wishes?
Substack latest.
I can't eat a no-longer-existent sandwich or kick a no-longer-existent ball. How then can she harm a no-longer-existent man?
Death viewed objectively seems normal, natural, and 'acceptable.' And not evil. Is it evil that the leaves of deciduous trees fall off and die in the autumn? There are more where they came from. It is nature's way. Everything in nature goes the way of the leaves of autumn. If this is not evil, why is it evil when we fall from the Arbor Vitae? Are we not just bits of nature's fauna? Very special bits, no doubt, but wholly natural nonetheless.
Viewed subjectively, however, the matter looks decidedly different. Gaze at someone you love at a moment when your 'reasons' for loving the person are most in evidence. Then give unblinkered thought to the proposition that the dearly beloved child or spouse will die and become nothing, that the marvellous depth of interiority that has revealed itself as unique to your love will be annihilated, utterly blotted out forever, and soon.
Now turn your thought back on yourself and try to confront in all honesty and without evasion your upcoming annihilation as a subject of experience and not as just another object among objects. Focus on yourself as a subject for whom there is a world, and not as an object in the world. Entertain with existential clarity the thought that you will not play the transcendental spectator at your demise and cremation.
The horror of nonexistence from which Epicurus wanted to free us comes into view only when we view death subjectively: I as subject, not me as object, or as 'one.' No doubt one dies. But it is not possible that one die unless it is is possible that I die or you die, where 'you' is singular. Viewing myself objectively, I am at a distance from myself and thus in evasion of the fact I as subject will become nothing.
That the self as subject should be annihilated ought to strike one as the exact opposite of normal, natural, and acceptable. It should strike one as a calamity beyond compare. For there are no more where the dearly beloved came from. The dearly beloved, whether self or other, is unique, and not just in the 0ne-of-kind sense. For there is no kind whose instantiation is the dearly beloved.
Which view is true? Can either be dismissed? Can they be 'mediated' by some dialectical hocus-pocus? These are further questions.
But now it is time for a hard ride as Sol peeps his ancient head over the Superstition ridge line.
Heute roth, morgen todt.
I woke up from a dream an hour ago. I was staying with Philip Roth in his New York City apartment where I noticed that my beard had been shaved off. I said to myself, "You look good even without it." The vanity was cover for the fear that I am losing my power. I made coffee to wake up and to read the final pages of Everyman, Roth's 2006 meditation on mortality. At novel's end, Everyman's lamentations and self-excoriations give way to a certain buoyancy of spirit. Conferring with the bones of his parents at the Jewish cemetery bucked him up. That and a conversation with a black grave digger. Everyman was starting to feel indestructible again. We are, after all, born to live, not to die.
On the last page, the 71 year old Everyman, a sort of post-modern Adam, though never named, accepts a general anaesthetic for surgery on his right carotid artery. And here Everyman and the eponymous novel come to their end:
He went under feeling far from felled, anything but doomed, eager yet again to be fulfilled, but nonetheless, he never woke up. Cardiac arrest. He was no more, freed from being, entering into nowhere without even knowing it. Just as he'd feared from the start.
……………………………………………
This morning, at a monkish hour, I penned the following on the fear of death.
What it reveals, perhaps, is that it is an illusion to suppose that one will be a detached spectator of one's demise. The spectator himself will cease to exist! The fear reveals the inevitability of a catastrophic loss. The fear, whose visitation is rare and typically nocturnal, is hard to recapture for analysis in the light of day because the transcendental spectator re-asserts himself. He would view death as an event in one's life, not as the end of one's life.
But it may be that such viewership is no illusion. It may be that the fear of death is not revelatory but a groundless fear and that the sense of spectatorship is revelatory. Fearing death, I fear a ghost: I am at my core immortal, and as an individual, not as the universal Atman or the like. The questions arise: Who am I finally? Who dies? What is death? Can you tell me what consciousness is? You can't. Might it then be presumptuous to suppose that you understand its absolute cessation?
Objective certainty is to knowledge what absolute immutability is to being. We want to know for sure; we want to be forever. The spiritually awake cannot be content to stumble along in the twilight and then just fall off a cliff.
This message will not get through to the sleepwalkers of the sublunary.
Perhaps a better man than I can reach them?
Substack latest.
Or is death just a natural event like any other? Merton the monk triggers a Maverick meditatio 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?
Genesis 3, 19 is true whether or not God exists and whether or not man is spirit.
The 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 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. If our secularist is a leftist utopian, then he pins his hopes on developments no reasonable person could believe in, and that he won't be around to enjoy in any case. His erasure of the historical record allows him to persist in his self-deception. The Left is at war with memory and its lessons.
I will be coming back to this theme in connection with Ryszard Legutko, The Demon in Democracy: Totalitarian Temptations in Free Societies (Encounter Books, 2018). A quotation to tantalize: "Communism, as a system that started history anew, had to be, in essence, and in practice, against memory." (9) We saw that play out in our cities last summer, as the Left stood idly by, and in many instances encouraged, the destruction of statues and other monuments for reasons that are no reasons at all but nihilistic ventings from the pit.
Our plesance here is all vain glory,
This fals world is but transitory,
The flesche is brukle, the Feynd is slee;
Timor mortis conturbat me.
No stait in Erd here standis sicker;
As with the wynd wavis the wicker,
Wavis this wardlis vanitie;
Timor mortis conturbat me.
(William Dunbar c. 1460 — c. 1520, from "Lament for the Makers.")
Here lie I by the chancel door;
They put me here because I was poor.
The further in, the more you pay,
But here lie I as snug as they.
(Devon tombstone.)
Here lies Piron, a complete nullibiety,
Not even a Fellow of a Learned Society.
Alexis Piron, 1689-1773, "My Epitaph"
Why hoard your maidenhead? There'll not be found
A lad to love you, girl, under the ground.
Love's joys are for the quick; but when we're dead
It's dust and ashes, girl, will go to bed.
(Asclepiades, fl. 290 B.C., tr. R. A. Furness)
The world, perhaps, does not see that those who rightly engage in
philosophy study only death and dying. And, if this be true, it
would surely be strange for a man all through his life to desire
only death, and then, when death comes to him, to be vexed at it,
when it has been his study and his desire for so long.
Plato, Phaedo, St. 64, tr. F. J. Church
Heading out the door for a walk, the wife invited me along. I told her I had too much to do, that the clock was running, the format sudden death, the time-control unknown.
"But you're retired."
I reminded her that philosophy is my vocation. One can be retired from the largely meaningless job of teaching the unteachable, but one can never be retired from one's vocation in the proper sense of that term.
I hope to have my boots on when the flag falls.
In what state will death find you when the Reaper's scythe cuts you down? Will it matter? Is that a question that needs to be investigated?
According to Peter Heinegg, mortalism is "the belief that the soul – or spark of life, or animating principle, or whatever — dies with the body. . . ." (Mortalism: Readings on the Meaning of Life, Prometheus, 2003, p. 9). Heinegg was raised Catholic and indeed was a member of the Jesuit order for seven years. In an essay prefatory to his anthology, he explains why he is a mortalist. Suppose we examine some of his statements.
That anyone should be a mortalist does not surprise me, but it does surprise me that anyone should consider it an "obvious fact" that death is the "irrevocable end" of a person. But this is what Heinegg holds: "Everybody knows that the soul dies with the body, but nobody likes to admit it." (11) Priests and metaphysicians may prate about immortality, but deep down in the bowels of the body we all know that we are mortal to the core:
As surely as the body knows pain or delight, the onset of orgasm or
vomiting, it knows that it (we) will die and disappear. We have a
foretaste of this every time we fall asleep or suffer any
diminution of consciousness from drugs, fatigue, sickness,
accidents, aging, and so forth. The extrapolation from the fading
of awareness to its total extinction is (ha) dead certain. (13, emphasis added)
This is as close as Heinegg comes to an argument in his personal statement, "Why I am a Mortalist." (11-14) The argument has but one premise:
1. We experience the increase and diminution of our embodied
consciousness in a variety of ways.
Therefore
2. Consciousness cannot exist disembodied.
But surely (2) does not follow from (1). If (2) followed from (1), then it would be impossible for (1) to be true and (2) false. But it is easy to conceive of (1) being true and (2) false. It might be like this: as long as the soul is attached to the body, its experiences are deeply affected by bodily states, but after death the soul continues to exist and have some experiences albeit experiences of a different sort than it had while embodied. Variations in the quality of consciousness would be exactly what one would expect given the soul's embodiment.
Consider near-death experiences. A man has a massive heart attack and has a profoundly blissful experience of a white light at the end of a tunnel. Would any committed mortalist take such an experience as proving that there is life after bodily death? Of course not. The mortalist would point out that the man was not fully dead, and would use this fact to argue that the experience was not veridical. The mortalist would point out that no conclusions about what happens after death can be drawn from experiences one has while still alive. By the same token, however, a consistent mortalist should realize that this same principle applies to his experiences of the waxing and waning of his consciousness: he cannot validily infer from these experiences that consciousness cannot exist disembodied. For his experiences of the augmentation and diminution of of consciousness are enjoyed while the person's body is alive.
What puzzles me about Heinegg is not that he is a mortalist, but that he is so cocksure about it. One can of course extrapolate from the fading of consciousness to its total extinction, and not unreasonably; but that the extrapolation is "dead certain" is simply a leap of faith — or unfaith.
Related post: Near-Death Experiences: Do They Prove Anything?
A reader inquires,
I was wondering whether you had any direction you could offer for rational arguments for God's existence?
If you are looking for arguments that are not merely rational, but rationally compelling, I don't believe that there are any. I also believe that there aren't any such arguments for the nonexistence of God. A rationally compelling argument for a proposition is a proof; a rationally compelling argument for its logical contradictory is a disproof. When it comes to God, and not just God, there are no proofs or disproofs. There are arguments, some better than others. That's as good as it gets.
Note that my claim that this is so is not a proposition that I claim to be able to prove. I claim merely that it is reasonable to believe. I do believe it and will continue to believe until someone gives me a compelling reason not to believe it. If I am right, however, that cannot happen. For my meta-philosophical thesis is substantive, and if I am right, said thesis can neither be proven nor disproven. So the the best you could do would be counter me with the contradictory of my meta-thesis. But then we would be in a stand-off.
What is it for an argument to be rationally compelling?
In the absence of compelling arguments, what should one do?
I don't believe that there can be talk of proof when it comes to God, the soul, and other big topics, assuming you use 'proof' strictly. After considering all the evidence for and against, you will have to decide what you will believe and how you will live. The will comes into it. One freedom comes into it. I thus espouse a limited doxastic voluntarism. In the shadowlands of this life there is light enough and darkness enough to lend support to either answer, that of the theist and that of his opposite number. So it is up to you to decide what you will believe and how you will live.
For me the following consideration clinches the matter. Bring the theoretical question back down to your lived life, your Existenz in the existentialist sense. How will you live, starting right now and for the rest of your days? Will you live as if you will be utterly extinguished in a few years or will you live as if what you do and leave undone right now matters, really matters? Will you live as if life is serious, or will you live as if it is some sort of cosmic joke? Will you live as if something is at stake in this life, however dimly descried, or will you live as if nothing is ultimately at stake? Will you live life as if it has an Absolute Meaning that transcends the petty particular relative meanings of the quotidian round? Will you take the norms that conscience reveals as so many pointers to an Unseen Order to which this paltry and transient sublunary order is but prelude?
It is your life. You decide. You can drift and not decide, but your drifting in the currents of social suggestion and according to the idols of the age is a deficient mode of decision. Not to decide is to decide.
Now suppose that when Drs. Mary Neal and Eben Alexander die the body's death, they become nothing. Suppose that their phenomenologically vivid paranormal after-death experiences were revelatory of nothing real, that their experiences were just the imaginings of malfunctioning brains at the outer limits of biological life. What will they have lost by believing as they did?
Nothing! Nothing at all. You could of course say that they were wrong and were living in illusion and giving themselves and others false hope. But no one will ever know one way or the other. And if the body's death is the last word, then nothing ultimately matters, and so it can't matter that they were wrong if turns out that they were.
If they were right, however, then the moral transformation that their taking seriously of their experiences has wrought in them can be expected to redound to their benefit when they pass from this sphere.
Arguably not. Here is an argument:
1) A dead animal can be buried if and only if it is identical to its corpse.
2) A dead animal is not identical to its corpse.
Therefore
3) It is not the case that a dead animal can be buried.
Argument for (2):
4) If a dead animal is identical to its corpse, then it survives its death as a corpse.
5) No animal survives its death as a corpse.
Therefore
2) A dead animal is not identical to its corpse.
Suppose you hear that I was involved in a terrible auto accident. You ask whether I survived. You get the response, "Yes, here he is in the morgue. The good news is that he survived; the bad news is that he is dead." If you find that response absurd, then you will accept (5) and with it (3), and you will understand that a dead animal cannot be buried. You will agree that you cannot bury me, "on the lone prarie" or anywhere; you can only bury my corpse which is not me. Even if I am only a living human body, I am not identical to 'my' corpse either before death or after it.
When an animal dies, it ceases to exist, and you cannot bury what does not exist.
But intuitions differ. Suppose that a 200 lb. man dies in his bed, and that a man is just a living material thing. If the man ceased to exist at death, but the 200 lb. mass in the bed did not, then something new came into existence in the bed, a corpse. If that sounds absurd, you may be tempted to say that one and the same thing that was alive is now dead, and that that one thing will be buried. So you did bury old Uncle Joe after all and not merely his remains. And the old cowboy's request not to be buried on the lone prarie, where the coyotes howl and wind blows free, makes sense.
Welcome to the aporetics of death and burial.
If you wait until you have proven that there is personal immortality before you live as if there is, then you will never live as if there is. But if you live as if there is, then it will not matter whether you ever prove that there is.
There are the troubles that come to us and there are those we bring upon ourselves. But death doesn't care to distinguish them. It will end both equally.
"Are you quite sure? Mightn't there be post-mortem troubles consequent upon bad behavior here below? Can you confidently rule out that possibility?"
Living long is a kind of low-grade preparation for death: the longer one lives, the more obvious the vanity of life becomes. An old soul can discern it at a young age, but even he will see it more clearly as his body ages. Paradoxically, vanity will be better appreciated if one in younger days fancies life full and rich and equal to its promises. For then the disillusionment will be all the greater. Or as one of my aphorisms has it:
Live life to the full to perceive that it is empty.
