Category: Death and Immortality

Death, Consolation, and ‘Life Goes On’

Transhumanist fantasies aside, we will all die.  Faced with the inevitable, one naturally looks for consolation.  Some console themselves with the thought that 'life goes on.'  In the words of the great Laura Nyro song, And When I Die:

And when I die
And when I'm gone
There'll be one child born in this world
To carry on, carry on.

The singer consoles herself with the thought that life goes on.  But is the thought that 'life goes on' a legitimate and reasonable source of consolation? Or is it an "escapist self-deception" as Robert Spaemann asserts? (Persons, Oxford UP, 2017, 115. Orig. publ. in German in 1996; first publ. in English in 2006)

Spaemann RobertI agree with Spaemann.  But it is not easy to bring the matter into clear focus, and for two reasons. One is that Spaemann writes in a somewhat loose and 'Continental' way.  The other reason is that the subject matter is elusive and intrinsically difficult. But I'll try my best; to do so, however, I will have to put things in my own way.

Talk of life's going on is a way of evading the reality of death, which is the death of a person and not merely the death of an animal. It is true that we are animals. It is also true that, to put it in the form of an understatement, we are very unlike other animals. Genesis has it that man alone is made in the image and likeness of God. I take that to mean that man alone is a spiritual animal, a personal animal.  Man alone has a higher origin and higher destiny, a destiny that Eastern Orthodox Christianity describes as theosis or deification.  Even Martin Heidegger, despite his distance from Christianity and the metaphysics that underpins it, speaks of an abyss (Abgrund) that separates man from animal. Max Scheler says that while the animal has an environment (Umwelt), man has a world (Welt). Aristotle tried to accommodate both our likeness and our unlikeness to animals when he distinguished us from all other animals by the capacity to reason and speak.  Man, he taught, is a rational animal, zoon logikon, with animal the genus, man the species, and rationality the specific difference.  To think of oneself in this way, however, as primarily a member of a zoological species and only secondarily as different from the other animals, is to think of oneself from an external point of view. "This is the 'view from nowhere' . . . ." (115)

Personhood cannot be understood in this, or in any, objective or objectifying way.  For a person  is different from a specimen of a species or an instance of a multiply instantiable nature.  Each person is unique in a way in which tokens of a type, as such, are not unique. To make this clear is not easy. But here we go.

Suppose I have a box of ten 100 watt, 120 volt incandescent light bulbs  from the same manufacturer.  They are alike in all relevant respects: size, shape, chemical composition of filament, date of manufacture, etc.  We have ten tokens of the same type. These tokens are numerically different from one another, but qualitatively identical.  The tokens are interchangeable. If I need to screw a bulb into a lamp, any one of the ten will do.  Persons, by contrast, are not interchangeable.  If you complain that a light has burned out, I say, "Replace it with another of the same type!"  But if your beloved wife dies, I don't say, "Replace her with a wife of the same type!" or "Replace Mary with her identical twin Sherry: they share all the same lovable attributes!"  Why not? Because your love of Mary is directed at a person who in her haecceity and ipseity is unrepeatable and irreplaceable.

The point is subtle.  It is perhaps more clearly made using the example of self-love.  Suppose Phil is my indiscernible twin.  Now it is a fact that I love myself.  But if I love myself in virtue of my instantiation of a set of multiply-instantiable properties, then I should love Phil equally.  For he instantiates exactly the same properties as I do.  But if one of us has to be annihilated, then I prefer that it be Phil.  Suppose God decides that one of us is more than enough, and that one of us has to go.  I say, 'Let it be Phil!' and Phil says, 'Let it be Bill!' So I don't love Phil equally even though he has all the same properties that I have.  I prefer myself and love myself  just because I am myself.  I am unique. I am not an instance of a type.  And because I am not an instance of a type, I ought not be consoled by the thought that other instances of h. sapiens will come along after I am gone.

This little thought-experiment suggests that there is more to self-love than love of the being-instantiated of an ensemble of properties.  For Phil and I have the same properties, and yet each is willing to sacrifice the other.  This would make no sense if the being of each of us were exhausted by our being instances of sets of properties.  In other words, I do not love myself solely as an instance of properties but also as a unique existent individual who cannot be reduced to a mere instance of properties. I love myself as a unique individual, as a person.  And the same goes for Phil: he loves himself as a unique individual, as a person.  Each of us loves himself as a unique individual numerically distinct from his indiscernible twin.

We can take it a step further.   If love is blind as folk wisdom has it, self-love is blind in excelsis.  In some cases self-love is present even when the lover/beloved lacks any and all lovable attributes.  If there are cases like this then there is love of self as a pure individual. I love me just because I am me and not because I instantiate lovable attributes.  I love myself, not as an instance of attributes, but as a case of existence.  Instances are interchangeable; cases of existence are not.   I love myself in that I am in a sense of 'am' that cannot be identified with the being-instantiated of a set of properties. I love my very existing.   If so, and if my love is a 'correct emotion' (Brentano), then my sheer existing must be good. 

I take this to show that self-love cannot be identified with, or reduced to, love of an instance of lovable attributes qua instance of those attributes.  It cannot, because love of self is love of a person, and a person is not a token of a type, or an instance of properties.

Other Love

Now it is a point of phenomenology that love intends to reach the very haecceity and ipseity of the beloved: in loving someone we mean to  make contact with his or her unique thisness and selfhood. It is not a mere instance of lovable properties that love intends, but the very  being of the beloved. It is also true that this intending or meaning is in some cases fulfilled: we actually do sometimes make conscious contact with the haecceity and ipseity of the beloved. In the case of self love we not only intend, but arrive at, the very being of the beloved, not merely at the co-instantiation of a set of multiply instantiable lovable properties.  In the case of other love, there is the intention to reach the haecceity and ipseity of the beloved, but it is not clear how arriving at it is possible. 

In the case of self love, my love 'reaches' the beloved because I am the beloved.  In the case of other-love, my love intends the beloved, but it is not clear that it 'reaches' her.

The question underlying all of this is quite fundamental: Are there any genuine individuals? X is a genuine individual if and only if X is essentially unique. (Josiah Royce) The Bill and Phil example suggests that selves or persons are genuine individuals and not mere bundles of multiply instantiable properties.  For each of the twins is acutely aware that he is not the other despite complete agreement in respect of  pure properties. 

Does life go on after one dies?

It does indeed. The point however, is that one is not, in one's innermost inwardness, just a bit of life, a specimen of the species, h. sapiens.  Qua person, I am not replaceable in the way an old animal is replaceable by a young one of the same species.  One cannot reasonably find consolation in the fact that 'life goes on.'  If one does, then one is alienated from one's own personhood. Spaemann is right: the thought that 'life goes on' is "escapist self-deception."

 

Time and the Existing Dead

Another round with David Brightly.  My responses are in blue.

Bill says,

We don't want to say that a dead man becomes nothing after death since he remains a particular, completely determinate, dead man distinct from others. If the dead become nothing after death then all the dead would be the same. If your dead father and your dead mother are both nothing, then there is nothing to distinguish them.

It's difficult to know what to make of this.  My guess is that Bill is conflating a thing with the idea of a thing. 

BV: I plead innocent. I hope David doesn't think that when a person dies, that person becomes an idea.  My veridical memories of my dead mother are memories of a woman not an idea.

First, 'particular' and 'completely determinate' do not denote properties of  concrete objects like men.  One can contrast 'I have in mind a particular man' with 'I have in mind a man' but 'particular' here qualifies not 'man' but rather the way of having in mind.  'Completely determinate' functions in a similar way.  What would 'partially determinate man' denote?  A partially determinate idea of a man makes sense, however; we know some of his properties but not others. 

BV: I beg to differ. Granted, my idea of David is incomplete: I know some of his properties but not others. But David is not the same as my idea of him, and that's a good thing for both of us. I say that David himself is complete (completely determinate), just like everything else that exists mind-independently.  It makes sense to say both that my idea of David is incomplete, and that David himself is complete.  The fact that there cannot be an incomplete man cannot be used to show that 'complete' cannot be a predicate of concrete items.  So why does David think that?

David may be relying on a Contrast Argument one form of which is as follows:

1) If a term T is meaningful, then there are items to which T does not apply.
2) There are no items to which T does not apply.
Ergo
3) T is not meaningful.

In the present case:

4) If 'complete' is a meaningful term, then there are concrete items to which 'complete' does not apply.
5) There are no concrete items to which 'complete' does not apply.
Ergo
6) 'Complete' is not a meaningful term.

Well, I reject Contrast Arguments. Bang on the link.  Similarly with 'particular.'  David appears to believe, pace Meinong, that there are no incomplete items in reality, and that all incompleteness is epistemic.  I think so too. But that is not the issue.  The issue is whether 'particular' and 'complete' can be predicated meaningfully of items like David and his dogs, or whether they qualify merely the way one has these things in mind.  He hasn't given me a good reason to change my view. 

Second, 'dead' is an alienating adjective.  If a man is a living thing and 'dead' means non-living, then a 'dead man' is a somewhat contradictory conception.  Better to think of 'is dead' as 'has died'.  A dead man is one who has passed through that final event that all living things inevitably come to, and has ceased to be. 

BV: Very tricky!  No doubt there are alienans adjectives (bang on the link), but is 'dead' (juxtaposed with 'man') one of them?  Clearly, a decoy duck is not a duck. But it is not clear that a dead duck is not a duck.  Now the corpse of a duck is not a duck.  But if your pet duck Donald dies you can still utter truths about him and have veridical memories of him. Those truths and memories are about a duck that has died, a particular duck, not a rabbit. And not about nothing. Try this triad on for size:

a) Tom Petty is a man.
b) Tom Petty is dead. (Tom Petty has died.)
c) Nothing dead is a man. (Nothing that has died is a man.)

Clearly, the singer is a man, not a duck or a valve-lifter in a '57 Chevy.  And clearly, Petty is dead. It seems to follow that Petty is a dead man.  So it seems we ought to reject (c) above.  Is (c) not more reasonably rejected than the other two limbs of the triad? I would say so.

Granted, Petty is not the man he used to be.  He no longer breathes, for example.  He has lost much of the typical functionality of a man. So there is rational pressure to deny (a).  There does not appear to be a clean solution to the (a)-(c) puzzle.  The propositions cannot all be true. But it is not obvious which of them to reject.

David tells us that a dead man has ceased to be. (I will assume that to be = to exist.)  But it is not at all clear that a dead man such as Tom Petty has ceased to exist.  On one way of looking at it, Petty exists just as robustly (or as anemically) as I do. We both tenselessly exist.  It is just that every moment of his existence is earlier than the present moment, whereas this is not the case for me.  Petty is wholly past whereas I exist at present, and presumably also in future.  But we both exist (tenselessly)!  This is a possible view, and distinguished thinkers have subscribed to it, Albert Einstein to mention one. So it is not obvious, pace David, that when a man or a dog or any living thing dies, it ceases to exist.  David may be assuming that only what exists (present tense), exists.  But this is a miserable tautology unless David can supply a non-presentist reading of the second occurrence of 'exists.'

Third, to speak of 'becoming nothing' on death is misleading.  Death is the end of all becoming.  One has finally begone, as it were. [?] It's not that the dead lack something to distinguish them. Rather, they are not there to be distinguished one from another.  But this is not to say that my parents were indistinguishable as objects.  Nor is it to say that my thoughts about my parents are now indistinguishable.  Surely I can say, My mother was short and my father was tall. 

BV: David can say these things, but these past-tensed truths are (i) logically contingent and (ii) true at present.  So they need truthmakers that exist at present.  What might these be if only what exists at present exists?  This, in nuce, is the grounding objection to presentism. I don't see that David has a good answer to it. If, however, existence is tenseless, then the truthmakers are easily supplied. 

DB quoting BV: Nor do we want to say that a person who dies goes from being actual to being merely possible. There is clearly a distinction between an actual past individual and a merely possible past individual.  Schopenhauer is an actual past individual; his only son Willy is a merely possible past individual

Once again I'm afraid I can't regard 'being actual' and 'being merely possible' as denoting properties of individuals. How these predications are to be understood is not an easy question.  Suffice it to say that there is clearly a problem with  'Schopenhauer's only son Willy' when the philosopher's only child was a daughter.

BV: I don't get the daughter bit.  But surely David is an actual individual, not a merely possible individual.  I have no idea why he balks at this.  He is actual, not merely possible, or necessary, or impossible.  What's more, he is contingent: although he actually exists, he is possibly such that he does not exist.  There is no necessity that he exist at any time at which he exists.  And note that if 'actual' is true of everything, it does not follow that 'actual' is not a meaningful term.

DB quoting BV: On the 'growing block' theory, dead Petty exists. (This is obviously not a present-tensed use of 'exists.') He does not exist at present, but he exists in the sense that he belongs to the actual world.  Once actual, always actual. Is this wholly clear? No, but it is tolerably clear and plausible. After all, we are making singular reference to Petty, a concrete actual individual, as we speak, and this is a good reason to hold that he exists, not at present of course, but simpliciter.

The 'growing block' theory sounds like a kind of four-dimensionalism deriving from the physicist's notion of spacetime as a four-dimensional manifold.  We trace the world-lines of the particles that were ever part of Petty and we find that they form a densely packed blob within a certain spacetime region.  We are tempted to identify the contents of this region with Petty himself.  If we think of the ensemble of worldlines of all material particles as the actual world itself, then yes, the Petty blob seems indeed to belong to the actual world.  But this is a mistake.  The worldline of a particle represents not so much the particle itself but rather its history.  Likewise the blob we take to be Petty represents his biography, in mind-numbing detail.  We are confusing a thing with the life it lived.  Of course Petty belonged to the world—I don't see quite what 'actual' adds here—it's just that he does not belong to it any more.  Perhaps Bill is emphasising that Petty was a real man, not, say, a character in a fiction like Spinal Tap.  There is more than a hint here that Bill is appealing to a theory of direct reference.  Petty has to exist in order that we may refer to him.

BV: There are several gnarly issues that need disentangling. I'll leave that for later. David tells us that Petty was actual but is not now actual.  That is true, but trivial.   It may be that what David is advocating is that we simply use tensed language and not make any trouble for ourselves by asking such as questions as: what makes it true that Petty was a musician?  It may be that he is a tautological presentist who maintains that whatever exists, exists, where 'exists' in both occurrences is present-tensed.  It may be that he is refusing to stray from ordinary English and credit such high-flying metaphysical questions as: Is the whole of reality restricted to the present moment or not?

The Idolatry of the Transient

It is because we want more than the transient that we cling to it, as if it could substitute for the More that eludes us. And so in some we find an inordinate love of life, a mad clinging to what cannot last and which, from the point of view of eternity, ought not last. I have Susan Sontag and Elias Canetti in mind.

The mature man, at the end of a long life, having drunk to the lees the chalice  of mortal existence, ought to be prepared bravely to shed the mortal coil like a worn-out coat and sally forth into the bosom of nonbeing, or into regions of reality glimpsed but not known from the vista points of the sublunary trail the end of which is in sight.  

After Enough Time Passes . . .

. . . de mortuis nil nisi bonum lapses.

(In justification of  some negative remarks about  Senator John McCain (R-AZ) posted on my Facebook page. I pointed out that while McCain served with great distinction in the Vietnam war, he failed to translate military valor into civil courage, while Donald J. Trump, who did not serve, has it in spades.)

Death as the Muse of Morality Limits Our Immorality

How much more immoral we would be if we didn't have to die! Two thoughts.

1. Death sobers us and conduces to reflection on how we are living and how we ought to live.  We fear the judgment that may come, and not primarily judgment of history or that of our circle of acquaintances. We sense that life is a serious  'business' and that all the seriousness would be drained from it were there no final reckoning, no Last Judgment.  Some of us, like Wittgenstein, strive to make amends and put things to right before it is too late.  (Do not scruple over his scrupulosity but take the message of his example.)  We apply ourselves to the task of finally becoming morally 'decent' (anstaendig).  The end approaches swiftly, and it will make a difference in the end how we comport ourselves here and now.  One will especially feel this to be  so when the here and now becomes the hora mortis.

DRURY:  I had been reading Origen before.  Origen taught that at the end of time here would be a final restitution of all things.  That even Satan and the fallen angels would be restored to their former glory.  This was a conception that appealed to me — but it was at once condemned as heretical.

WITTGENSTEIN:  Of course it was rejected.  It would make nonsense of everything else.  If what we do now is to make no difference in the end, then all the seriousness of life is done away with.  Your religious ideas have always seemed to me more Greek than biblical.  Whereas my thoughts are one hundred per cent Hebraic.

(Recollections of Wittgenstein, ed. Rhees, Oxford,  1984, p. 161.)

Death has been recognized from the beginning as the muse of philosophy.  I supplement, or perhaps merely unpack, the Platonic thought by writing that death is the muse of morality.

2. Lives without limit here below would afford more time for more crime.  Death spells a welcome end to homo homini lupus, at least in individual cases.

Do You Disappear When You Die? Comments on Yourgrau

Here, by Palle Yourgrau. Comments by BV in blue.  HT: Vlastimil Vohanka.

Many philosophers seem to think you simply 'disappear' when you die, 'erased' from the framework of reality as one would rub out a drawing on the blackboard. I think it would be a serious mistake to think this way. Time maga­zine had it right when it represented the death of bin Laden, hence his 'nonexistence,' with a picture of him on the cover, crossed out with a big X. If you’re lecturing on the capture and killing of bin Laden, you might draw a picture of him on the blackboard, and then conclude your lecture by drawing, as Time did, a big X across that drawing. That would be the right thing to do. The wrong thing to do would be to simply erase the drawing, to rub it out. A blank blackboard does not represent the death of bin Laden. On the contrary, it represents nothing. Bin Laden, on dying, did not become nothing, just as he did not come from nothing. (Ex nihilo, nihil fit.)

Let us assume that a (human) person is just an animated human body and that there is no Platonic soul or Cartesian res cogitans or anything relevantly similar of an immaterial nature that continues to exist after bodily death.  Let us assume that at death all of a person's mental and spiritual functions cease. The issue is whether a person, upon dying, becomes nothing. To make the question totally clear, assume that the person's corpse has been fully cremated. Is a person after death and cremation nothing at all? I am with Yourgrau part of the way: Bin Laden is not now nothing. One simple consideration is this: bin Laden is an object of veridical memories and the subject of many true propositions.  So he can't be nothing.  The wholly past is actual, not merely possible; factual, not fictional; real, not imaginary. Those are datanic claims, it seems to me, or very near datanic. They lay claim to being Moorean facts beyond reasonable dispute.

If presentism in the philosophy of time is the claim that all and only temporally present items exist, then presentism is false. The dead rise up to mock those who would restrict the ontological inventory to what exists at present.  At Halloween and at every season.

What about Yourgrau's claim that bin Laden did not come from nothing?  That is true if all it means is that prior to his conception there were two gametes that had to join to produce his zygotic self. In simpler terms, bin Laden did not come from nothing because he had material causes and they were not nothing. (Nor was the copulation of his parents nothing.)  But it is false if it means that, prior to bin Laden's conception, that very individual, bin Laden, was something real, and not nothing. 

The following temporal asymmetry strongly recommends itself: what no longer exists is not nothing; but what does not yet exist is nothing. It seems quite clear that we do refer successfully to wholly past individuals and events such as bin Laden and his being killed.  It is rather less clear how anyone, including God, could refer to bin Laden, that very individual qua individual, before his conception.  See A Most Remarkable Prophecy for some reasons.

But let's not worry at the moment about future individuals, if any; let's focus on past individuals, and, in particular, the human dead, about whom we all  have a lively interest.

Just this, however, seems to have escaped many, if not most philosophers who’ve written about the metaphysics of death. Shelly Kagan, for example, writes in his popular study Death that “nonexistence is nonexistence. It’s no kind of con­dition or state that I am in at all [after I’ve died]." Kagan seems to believe that when you’ve died and ceased to exist, there’s “no one left” to be in any sort of state or con­dition. There’s no one left even to be in the state of nonex­istence, to have the property of nonexistence. He seems to subscribe to W.V. Quine’s doctrine that “in our common- sense usage of ‘exist’, that [bin Laden] doesn’t exist, means simply that there is no such entity at all.” If there’s no such entity, ob­viously, there’s no such entity to occupy the state of nonexist­ence, to have the property of nonexistence.

As I said, this is a widely held view among philosophers of death. To choose another prominent example, consider what Francis Kamm writes in Morality, Mortality: “Life can sometimes be worse for a person than the alternative of nonexistence, even though nonexistence is not a better state of being.” For Kamm, nonexistence is never a better state of being than is exist­ence because for her, apparently, nonexistence is not a state of being at all.

Kamm and Kagan, however, are mistaken. What they say is true not of Socrates but of the tooth fairy. The tooth fairy is indeed not in a state of nonexistence for the simple reason that there is no such person as the tooth fairy. By con­trast, there is such a person as Socrates. Nathan Salmon, in “What Is Existence?” puts the matter succinctly: “‘Kripke exists’ is true whereas ‘Napoleon exists’ is false. Kripke has existence. Napoleon has nonexistence.”

When you die and cease to exist, you aren’t 'erased', you aren’t 'rubbed out', nor do you turn into a different kind of being. You forfeit your existence, not your essence. Death affects that you are, not what you are. Thus, assuming, for the sake of argument, that persons are concrete objects and that that is part of their essence, when Socrates died he didn’t cease being concrete. He went from being an existent concrete object to being a nonexistent concrete object. And the same is true, analogously, of an inorganic concrete ob­ject like a rock. This will no doubt sound paradoxical (not to say, downright crazy) to many people. Surely, what’s not there can’t be concrete! After all, if something’s concrete, you can trip over it in the dark, whereas there’s no need to worry about tripping over the nonexistent. True enough, if we’re speaking about an actual, an existent concrete object. But here we’re speaking of concrete objects that have ceased to exist— i.e. that have lost their existence, but not their es­sence. (Indeed, what would it mean for something to lose its essence? What would make it that very thing that had lost it?

The moral, then, is this: Concreteness should not be con­fused with actuality.

What Yourgrau is proposing is a Meinongian or quasi-Meinongian theory of wholly past individuals such as Socrates.  Socrates, unlike the Tooth Fairy, is real, not imaginary or fictional or mythical. But Socrates does not exist.  His present nonexistence, though, does not entail his being nothing at all. He is something: a nonexistent essence. Yourgrau, by contrast is an existent essence. But Yourgrau too will die, and when he does, he will become a nonexistent essence and join the company of Socrates and all the other concrete nonexistent individual essences.  To get a sense of what is meant by 'individual essence' here, consider any concrete thing that exists such as the table in front of you and 'peel away' (in thought) its existence.  'Peel away' the thing's Dasein.  What's left over is the thing's quiddity or whatness or Sosein or individual essence.  But don't confuse this individual essence with an abstract property such as a Plantingian haecceity. It is not a property of the thing, but the thing itself 'minus' its existence. And it is not abstract, but concrete.  The distinction between (individual) essence and existence, while made by the mind, has a foundation in things, a basis in reality.  We are in the vicinity of the distinctio realis of the Thomists.  But as I read Yourgrau, he is pushing further in a Meinongian direction.  If I understand Thomas, an essence cannot be without existence; what Yourgrau is envisaging, however, are individual essences that are without existence. This is tantamount to Meinong's Independence of Sosein from Sein.

So you've got your existent essences and your nonexistent essences.  When you die, you don't disappear or cease to be; you remain as a nonexistent essence.  You don't remain in existence as a nonexistent essence; that would be contradictory. So what Yourgrau might be saying is that you remain in being as a nonexistent essence.  Accordingly, essences ARE but only some of them EXIST. Indications are that Yourgrau holds that existent essences are all and only the temporally present ones. That would make him a kind of presentist.  He would avoid my anti-presentist objection above by saying that, while the dead do not exist, they are.  Or he could go full Meinongian and say that a dead person is an essence or Sosein that has no Sein whatsoever.  This is Meinong's famous doctrine of Aussersein according to which nonexistent objects are jenseits von Sein und Nichtsein. Accordingly, when I remember my dead mother and say things about her, she is the beingless object of my veridical memories and the beingless subject of my statements. 

Here is one place where I would insert the blade of critique. It is difficult to understand how there could be items that have no being whatsoever but are yet mind-independent.  My dead mother is irremovably resident in the past no matter what anyone says or thinks about her, and whether anyone thinks about her at all.Her fate, and yours too, dear reader, will be to enter oblivion, and sooner than you think. But to be forever and wholly forgotten is not to be nothing. She will forever be something. But how can anything be something if it has no being at all?

But Yourgrau needn't go all the way with Meinong. He could say that the dead, while they they do not exist, yet ARE.

A difference between me and Yourgrau is that I would say that the dead (and all wholly past items) are actual, not merely possible. Yourgrau does not say this since for him, to exist is to be actual.  But then what is the modal status of the dead? Here the critical blade comes out again. 

If, when a thing ceases to exist, it ceases to be actual, what modal status does it acquire? 'Actual' is a modal word; it is a member of the (alethic) modal family including 'possible,' 'merely possible,' 'impossible,' 'necessary,' 'contingent,' and 'noncontingent.'  So when Socrates ceased to exist,  did he become merely possible? No. Past individuals are not merely possible individuals. They actually were. 

Since Yourgrau accepts concrete individual essences, he might say the following. Before Socrates was conceived, he WAS as a merely possible individual, an essence without existence.  When he came into existence, he became actual: his essence was actualized. When he ceased to exist, he ceased to be actual and became — what? An impossible individual essence? (If nothing can have two beginnings of existence, and our man has had one, then it is impossible that he exist and be actual again.)  There are nasty questions here.  For example, how can the modal status of an item change over time?  More later. It's Saturday night. Time to punch the clock, pour myself a drink, and tune in Judge Jeannine.

This difficulty of speaking coherently of the dead is by no means confined to philosophers of death, nor, indeed, to philosophers of any stripe. It’s especially noticeable in book dedications, where authors simply cannot bring themselves to refer to the dead, themselves, substituting instead refer­ence to the memory of the dead. When you think about it, however, this is absurd. Unlike the dead, our memories of the dead are alive and well, and in any case, are a poor substitute for the loved ones being honored in the dedications. It’s your mother who taught you to love music, not your memories of your mother, your father who first took you to a poetry reading, not your memories of your father, and so on. What could be more different from a dead parent than a living memory? The nonexistence of the dead should make us more attuned to what’s real, not less. For the dead relative is every bit as real as, though less existent than, the living memory. “Never . . . think of a thing or being we love but have not actually before our eyes,” Simone Weil wrote in Gravity and Grace, “without reflecting that perhaps this thing has been destroyed, or this person is dead. May our sense of reality not be dissolved by this thought but made more intense. . . . Love needs reality”

This is an extract from the book 'Death and Nonexistence' by Palle Yourgrau (Oxford University Press, August 2019).

Yourgrau makes some excellent and true points here.  The dead are real.  When I remember my dead mother I remember her, not my memory of her.  But his Meinongian or quasi-Meinongian theory raises some difficult questions.  

Yourgrau palle

Six Types of Death Fear

1. There is the fear of nonbeing, of annihilation.  The best expression of this fear that I am aware of is contained in Philip Larkin's great poem "Aubade" which I reproduce and comment upon in Philip Larkin on Death.  Susan Sontag is another who was gripped by a terrible fear of annihilation.

There is the fear of becoming nothing, but there is also, by my count, five types of fear predicated on not becoming nothing.

2. There is the fear of surviving one's bodily death as a ghost, unable to cut earthly attachments and enter nonbeing and oblivion.  This fear is expressed in the third stanza of D. H. Lawrence's poem "All Souls' Day" which I give together with the fourth and fifth (The Oxford Book of Death, ed. D. J. Enright, Oxford UP, 1987, pp. 48-49).

They linger in the shadow of the earth.
The earth's long conical shadow is full of souls
that cannot find the way across the sea of change.

Be kind, Oh be kind to your dead
and give them a little encouragement
and help them to build their little ship of death.

For the soul has a long, long journey after death
to the sweet home of  pure oblivion.
Each needs a little ship, a little ship
and the proper store of meal for the longest journey.

3. There is the fear of post-mortem horrors.  For this the Epicurean cure was concocted.  In a sentence: When death is, I am not; when I am, death is not. Here too the fear is not of extinction, but of surviving.

4. There is the fear of the unknown.  This is not a fear with a definite object, but an indefinite fear of one-knows-not-what.

5. There is the fear of the Lord and his judgment.  Timor domini initium sapientiae.   "The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom."  (Proverbs 9:10, Psalms 111:10)  A certain fear is ingredient in religious faith.  Ludwig Wittgenstein was one who  believed and feared that he would be judged by God.  He took the notion of the Last Judgment with the utmost seriousness as both Paul Engelmann and Norman Malcolm relate in their respective memoirs.  In 1951, near the end of his life, Wittgenstein wrote,

God may say to me: I am judging you out of your own mouth.  Your own actions have
made you shudder with disgust when you have seen other people do them." (Culture and Value, p. 87)

Wittgenstein had trouble with the notion of God as cosmic cause, but had a lively sense of God as final Judge and source of an absolute moral demand.

6. Fear of one's own judgment or the judgment of posterity.

Jack Kerouac Went Home in October

Jack Kerouac quit the mortal coil 50 years ago today, October 21st, securing his release from the samsaric wheel of the quivering meat conception, and the granting of his wish:

The wheel of the quivering meat conception . . . . . . I wish I was free of that slaving meat wheel and safe in heaven dead.  (Mexico City Blues, 1959, 211th Chorus).

The Last Interview, 12 October 1969.  "I'm not a beatnik. I'm a Catholic."  "I just sneak into church now, at dusk, at vespers. But yeah, as you get older you get more . . . genealogical."

As much of a screw-up and sinner as he was, as irresponsible, self-indulgent, and self-destructive, Kerouac was a deeply religious man.  He went through a Buddhist phase, but at the end he came home to Catholicism.  

"Everybody goes home in October." (On the Road, Part I, Ch. 14, Para 1) Here's the whole paragraph:

At dawn my bus was zooming across the Arizona desert — Indio, Blythe, Salome (where she danced); the great dry stretches leading to Mexican mountains in the south. Then we swung north to the Arizona mountains, Flagstaff, clifftowns. I had a book with me I stole from a Hollywood stall, "Le Grand Meaulnes" by Alain-Fournier, but I preferred reading the American landscape as we went along. Every bump, rise, and stretch in it mystified my longing. In inky night we crossed New Mexico; at gray dawn it was Dalhart, Texas; in the bleak Sunday afternoon we rode through one Oklahoma flat-town after another; at nightfall it was Kansas. The bus roared on. I was going home in October. Everybody goes home in October.

 "Pretty girls make graves." (Dharma Bums) 

 Jack Kerouac, Desolation Angels (G. P. Putnam 1965), p. 48:

Outside it's October night in Manhattan and on the waterfront wholesale markets there are barrels with fires left burning in them by the longshoremen where I stop and warm my hands and take a nip two nips from the bottle and hear the bvoom of ships in the channel and I look up and there, the same stars as over Lowell, October, old melancholy October, tender and loving and sad, and it will all tie up eventually into a perfect posy of love I think and I shall present it to Tathagata, my Lord, to God, saying "Lord Thou didst exult — and praise be You for showing me how You did it — Lord now I'm ready for more — And this time I won't whine — This time I'll keep my mind clear on the fact that it is Thy Empty Forms."

. . . This world, the palpable thought of God . . . [ellipsis in original]

Alela Diane, We Are Nothing  

Jack Kerouac, Tristessa (written 1955-56, first published in 1960), p. 59:

Since beginningless time and into the never-ending future, men have loved women without telling them, and the Lord has loved them without telling, and the void is not the void because there's nothing to be empty of.

Henry Mancini, Moon River.  Video with shots of Rita Hayworth. YouTuber comment: indimenticabile Rita, stupenda Rita, vivi nei nostri ricordi, vivi nei nostri cuori. This was Jack Kerouac's favorite song.  Ellis Amburn, Subterranean Kerouac (St. Martin's 1998), p. 324:

One night he [Kerouac, during a 1962 visit to Lowell, Mass.] left a bar called Chuck's with Huck Finneral, a reedy, behatted eccentric who carried a business card that read: "Professional killer . . . virgins fixed . . . orgies organized, dinosaurs neutered, contracts & leases broken."  Huck's philosophy of life was: "Better a wise madness than a foolish sanity."  They drove to a friend's house in Merrimack, New Hampshire, and on the way, Jack sang "Moon River," calling it his favorite song.  Composed by Henry Mancini and Johnny Mercer, "Moon River" was the theme song of the popular Audrey Hepburn movie Breakfast at Tiffany's.  Sobbed by a harmonica, later swelling with strings and chorus, the plaintive tune's gentle but epic-like lyrics describe a dreamer and roamer not unlike Kerouac.

Indeed they do.  A restless dreamer, a lonesome traveller, a dharma seeker, a desolation angel passing through this vale of mist, a drifter on the river of samsara hoping one day to cross to the Far Shore.  

Jay Farrar and Ben Gibbard, California Zephyr

10,000 Maniacs, Hey Jack Kerouac

Tom Waits, Jack Kerouac on the Road

Aztec Two-Step, The Persecution and Restoration of Dean Moriarty

Some readings:

Jack Kerouac, Mexico City Blues, 228th Chorus

Jack Kerouac, The Wheel of the Quivering Meat Conception.  "I wish I was free of that slaving meat wheel, safe in heaven, dead." Steve Allen on piano.

Jack Kerouac, Charlie Parker.  "Charlie, Parker, lay the bane off me, and everybody."

Jack's Grave

Roger Kimball on Elias Canetti on Death

An excerpt from Roger Kimball, Becoming Elias Canetti:

. . . . Canetti’s response to the fact of death—“the only fact,” as he sometimes puts it—is a tragic stance of rebellion against an ineluctable fate. The overriding question for every individual, he writes in The Torch in My Ear, is “whether he should put up with the fact that a death is imminent for him.”

Canetti has never worked out his thoughts on death in any systematic fashion. His basic message would seem to be the unexceptionable admonition not to go gentle into that good night. Yet he also uses the rejection of death as the starting point for other, often more questionable, sorts of statements. At one point, for example, his insistence that the individual take a stand against death leads him to the pious declaration that “I care about the life of every human being and not just that of my neighbor.” And in one of his essays, he goes beyond the posture of stoically resisting death to tell us that “So long as death exists, no beauty is beautiful, no goodness is good.” We must of course be grateful that Canetti cares about the lives of all of us, even if the word “cares” is rendered practically empty in this context. But as for the relation between death and beauty and death and goodness—well, here I think we must question Canetti’s dictum. For it seems at least equally plausible that beauty and goodness can emerge as compelling forces in our lives only against the background of mortality; in this sense, death, as Wallace Stevens put it, is the mother of beauty. Things matter to us precisely because neither we nor they last forever. Now, I do not doubt that Canetti’s meditations on death betray a core of genuine pathos. But in the end I’m afraid that they amount to little more than a collection of sentimental exhortations; their chief function would seem to be to perpetuate the atmosphere of intellectual melodrama within which Canetti prefers to operate. Indeed, they would hardly be worth scrutiny, except that Canetti insists on placing them at the very center of his thought.

Canetti quoted: “So long as death exists, no beauty is beautiful, no goodness is good.” Canetti paraphrased:  To those who live free of illusions, nothing ultimately matters if neither we nor they last forever. Kimball quoted:  "Things matter to us precisely because neither we nor they last forever."

The Christian View of Death and Immortality

Thanatology presupposes philosophical anthropology: what death is taken to be depends on what the human being is taken to be. Although Christianity certainly has affinities with Platonism, so much so that Nietzsche could with some justice speak of Christianity as Platonism for the people, the Christian view of man is in an important respect un-Platonic. In terms of Aquinas' Latin, Platonism holds that homo est anima utens corpore, man is a soul using a body. On this view the person is essentially the soul, and the body is a temporary and accidental housing or vehicle. There are Platonic passages in which the soul is described as "imprisoned" in the body. The body is the prison house of the soul. The soul is in the body like an oyster in its shell. These and other metaphors can be found in the Platonic dialogues.  If one thinks in this way, then death is not a calamity but something good. Death is liberation, release, the separation of one thing, the soul, from another, the body, to which it should not have been attached in the first place. The fall into time is a fall into the flesh.  For Platonism, death undoes the fall into time. Death is to that extent good, and the philosopher welcomes it. Indeed, the philosophical life is a preparation for death. (Plato, Phaedo, 67e)

Conceiving the Afterlife: Life 2.0 or Beatific Vision?

This weekend I had the pleasure of a visit from Dale Tuggy, noted philosopher of religion.  We discussed a number of topics at table and on trail including imago dei, the nature of forgiveness, the role of Platonism in Christianity, and death and afterlife.  His position on the latter topic I would characterize as 'Life 2.0,' the essentials of which I set forth below in a slightly revised version of an entry from 2013.  I see Dale as a sort of spiritual materialist whereas he probably sees me as a kind of gnostic or Platonizer whose conception of the afterlife is so hopelessly abstract as to be devoid of  any human meaning. I recently wrote in Soteriology for Brutes?

. . . the Beatific Vision will so entrance those of us who get to enjoy it that we will give no thought to our sublunary animal companions. But this is consistent both with their survival and with their non-survival of their bodily deaths. Perhaps my cats will go to cat heaven where they will be compensated for their suffering here below, but I will be so swept up into the Visio Beata as to give them no thought at all, any more than I will give any thought to that Gibson ES 335 that I never should have sold.

IMG_0423On our long ramble over desert trails on Saturday morning, Dale eloquently defended his view, one I respect   while respectfully rejecting. I have no illusions about dissuading him from it any more than I expect ever to get him to see that God cannot be a being among beings, a topic we have vigorously discussed on several occasions, see here, for example.   Agreement here as elsewhere is out of reach, and perhaps not even reasonably pursued; mutual clarification of differences, however, is well within reach, and worth pursuing.   That is my aim below.

 

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

That the afterlife is a garden of sensuous delights, a world of goodies with none of the bad stuff endemic to our sublunary sphere, strikes me as a puerile conception. It is a conception entertained not only by Muslims but also by many Christians. And even if many do not think of it in crassly hedonistic terms, as I am sure Dale Tuggy does not, they think of it as a prolongation of the concerns of this life including the petty ones.   They think of it, in other words, as Life 2.0, an improved version of life here below.  This, however, is not what it is on a sophisticated conception:

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

A. E. Taylor is no longer much read, but he is 'old school' in the depth of his erudition, unlike most contemporary academics, and is thus well-worth reading. In the passage quoted he makes a penetrating observation: the true Christian is not only unworldly in this world, but also unworldly in his expectations of the next.  This by contrast with one who is worldly in this world and desires his worldliness prolonged into the next.
 
Sinatra graveThe epitaph on Frank Sinatra's tombstone reads, "The best is yet to come." That may well be, but it won't be booze and broads, glitz and glamour, and the satisfaction of worldly ambitions that were frustrated this side of the grave. So the believer must sincerely ask himself: would I really want eternal life?
At funerals one sometimes hears pious claptrap about the dearly departed going off to be with the Lord. In many cases, this provokes a smile. Why should one who has spent his whole life on the make be eager to meet his Maker? Why the sudden interest in the Lord when, in the bloom of life, one gave him no thought? If you have loved the things of this world as if they were ultimate realities, then perhaps you ought to hope that death is annihilation.  Do you really desire direct contact with the divine Spirit? Why would you suddenly love there what you don't love here?

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

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

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

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

In this life, we adults are like adolescents: confused, unsure of what we really want, easily led astray. We have put away many childish  things only to lust after adult things, for example, so-called 'adult entertainment.' We don't read comic books; we read trashy novels. We don't watch cartoons; we watch The Sopranos and Sex in the City. We  are obviously in a bad state. In religious terms, our condition is  'fallen.' We are not the way we ought to be, and we know it. It is also clear that we lack the ability to help ourselves. We can make  minor improvements here and there, but our basic fallen condition  cannot be ameliorated by human effort whether individual or  collective.

These, I claim, are just facts. If you won't admit them,  then I suggest you lack moral discernment. (I am not however claiming  that eternal life is a fact: it is a matter of belief that goes beyond  what we can claim to know. It is not rationally provable, but I think  it can be shown to be rationally acceptable.)

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

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

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

Beatific VisionBut if the afterlife is not Life 2.0  and is something like the visio beata  of Thomas Aquinas, wouldn't it be boring 'as hell'?  Well, it might well be hell for something who was looking forward to black-eyed virgins and a carnal paradise.  But suppose you are beyond the puerility of that view.  You want not sex but love, not power but knowledge, not fame but community, not excitement but peace and beatitude.  You want, finally, to be happy.

Would the happy vision be boring?  Well, when you were in love, was it boring?  When your love was requited, was it boring?  Was it not bliss?  Imagine that bliss ramped up to the maximum and made endless.  We tire of the finite, but the divine life is infinite.  Why then should participation in it be boring?  Or consider the self-sufficient bliss tasted from time to time here below by those of us capable of what Aristotle calls the bios theoretikos.  Were you bored in those moments?  Quite the opposite.    You were consumed with delight, happy and self-sufficient in the moment. Now imagine an endless process of intellectual discovery and contemplation.

What I am suggesting is that an afterlife worth wanting would be one, not of personal prolongation, but one of personal transformation and purification along lines barely conceivable to us here below.  God is just barely conceivable to us, and the same goes for our own souls.  So we ought to expect that the afterlife will be the same.  If we descry it at all from our present perspective, it is "through a glass darkly."