The contemplation of death, one's own in particular, cures one of the conceit that this life has a meaning absolute and self-contained. Only those who live naively in this world, hiding from themselves the fact of death, flirting with transhumanist arcadian and other utopian fantasies, can accord to this life the ultimate in reality and importance.
If you deny a life beyond the grave, I won't consider you foolish or even unreasonable. But if you anticipate a paradise on earth, I will consider you both. And if you work to attain such a state in defiance of morality, then I will consider you evil, as evil as the Communists of the 20th century who murdered 100 million to realize their impossible fantasies.
Guercino – Et in Arcadia Ego – 1618-22 – Roma, Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Antica di Palazzo Barberini
"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 ?
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 stand
is 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.
I'm 70 years old, but I feel like I'm just getting started. Maybe that's a common experience.
I follow not far behind, and I can relate to the sentiment. I am just getting started as I near the end of the trail. The clock is running and I feel like a chess player in time trouble. I am working on a book that I hope will sum it all up for me and bring my life to a rounded completion. Will I have time before the flag falls?
Death is the muse of philosophy and one of her great themes. Now death is Janus-faced. One of her faces is that of the Grim Reaper, the other that of the Benign Releaser.
How bad can death be if it releases us from this obviously unsatisfactory and bewildering predicament? Only the spiritually insensate could be blind to the horror of this life, a horror mitigated but not outweighed by the beauty in the world and goodness in some people.
You live in a charnel house that is on fire and you pronounce it a wonderful abode? How could escape from it not be good? On the other side of the question, that persons cease to exist utterly seems to be a very great evil, something intolerable barely conceivable. To appreciate this one must not think abstractly and objectively — one dies, all men are mortal — but concretely and subjectively: I will die. You, dear heart, will die.
When we think concretely and personally about death, our own death, and the deaths of those we love, we find ourselves agreeing with Arthur Schopenhauer: "The heart rebels against this, and feels that it cannot be true." ("The Vanity of Existence" in The Will to Live, ed. R. Taylor, p. 229) Let us assume that you love and cherish your wife. Your loving her has conferred upon her uniqueness, at least relative to you. (Josiah Royce) Now imagine her lovable and loving unique personality blotted out of existence forever. Or consider your own case. You have devoted a lifetime to becoming who you are. You have worked steadily at the task of self-individuation. Only to become nothing? Could things be arranged so badly for us? But then the whole thing would be a bad joke.
Is death evil or not? No one knows. That we remain in the dark on a question so close to the heart and mind is yet another reason why our condition is a predicament. Should we therefore conclude that the good of escaping it outweighs the bad of personal cessation? No one knows.
The Epicurean reasoning strikes many as sophistical. And maybe it is, though it is not obvious that it is. "When I am, death is not; when death is; I am not."
Dying is the end of trail, the last step on the via dolorosa. It is indisputably evil, the only good thing about it being that it will force jokers finally to become serious. Will you be cracking jokes as you gasp for breath and feel yourself helplessly sliding into the abyss? Death, however, is not the last step; it is beyond the trail and its trials and beyond dying, a transcendent 'state' shrouded in mystery, or maybe not even a state: just mystery.
Sage advice from Bertrand Russell (1872-1970) who grew old indeed. The best part of his short essay follows:
I think that a successful old age is easiest for those who have strong impersonal interests involving appropriate activities. It is in this sphere that long experience is really fruitful, and it is in this sphere that the wisdom born of experience can be exercised without being oppressive. It is no use telling grownup children not to make mistakes, both because they will not believe you, and because mistakes are an essential part of education. But if you are one of those who are incapable of impersonal interests, you may find that your life will be empty unless you concern yourself with your children and grandchildren. In that case you must realise that while you can still render them material services, such as making them an allowance or knitting them jumpers, you must not expect that they will enjoy your company.
Without a doubt, "strong impersonal interests involving appropriate activities" is the key.
Some old people are oppressed by the fear of death. In the young there there is a justification for this feeling. Young men who have reason to fear that they will be killed in battle may justifiably feel bitter in the thought that they have been cheated of the best things that life has to offer. But in an old man who has known human joys and sorrows, and has achieved whatever work it was in him to do, the fear of death is somewhat abject and ignoble. The best way to overcome it -so at least it seems to me- is to make your interests gradually wider and more impersonal, until bit by bit the walls of the ego recede, and your life becomes increasingly merged in the universal life. An individual human existence should be like a river: small at first, narrowly contained within its banks, and rushing passionately past rocks and over waterfalls. Gradually the river grows wider, the banks recede, the waters flow more quietly, and in the end, without any visible break, they become merged in the sea, and painlessly lose their individual being. The man who, in old age, can see his life in this way, will not suffer from the fear of death, since the things he cares for will continue. And if, with the decay of vitality, weariness increases, the thought of rest will not be unwelcome. I should wish to die while still at work, knowing that others will carry on what I can no longer do and content in the thought that what was possible has been done.
[from “Portraits From Memory And Other Essays”]
The second paragraph raises deep and difficult questions. The philosopher in me has often entertained, with considerable hospitality, the thought that an immortality worth wanting must involve a transcending of the petty and personal ego, the self that separates us from other selves and the world. An immortality worth wanting must involve a sloughing off of the petty self and a merging into an impersonal, universal, transcendental awareness of impersonal Platonica including eternal truths, changeless essences, absolute values, and noble ideals. Those philosophers of a predominantly theoretical bent will be attracted to this conception reminiscent as it is of Aristotle's bios theoretikos as exemplified in its highest instance, noesis noeseos.
"But then you would no longer exist! You would be swallowed up in death, the greatest calamity of them all." To this objection I had a ready reply: "It all depends on who I am in the innermost core of my selfhood; if I am in truth the eternal Atman, and not this indigent and limited psychophysical complex; if I am the transcendental witness self, then I will not cease to exist. In the measure that I identify with that deathless, impersonal awareness of eide and Wahrheiten an sich, I am proof against extinction by the body's death. I will merge at last with the sea of transcendental awareness which is my true self and give up my false petty individuality for a greater individuality, that of the Absolute.
That is one strand, the monistic strand, in my thinking about selfhood and immortality. It dominated my thinking in my twenties and thirties.
But another is the personalist strand which takes very seriously the reality of persons in the plural and the possibility of deep I-Thou (as opposed to I-It) relations between persons and between a finite person and the ultimate person, the First Person, if you will, God.
On both conceptions there is a distinction between the true self and the false self. Controversy erupts over the nature of the true self. Is it trans-individual, or is it individuated? Is there one true self or many? Are we to aspire to an obliteration of the individual self or to its transformation? On neither conception is survival the schlepping on of the crass and carnal earthly self. Is the death of the individual a great calamity or is it a benign release into true selfhood? The controversy is ancient. Ramanuja to Shankara: I don't want to become sugar; I want to taste sugar!
As for Lord Russell, he would not have spoken of the eternal Atman, but he was a convinced atheist and mortalist. He was sure his individual consciousness would cease at death. But this did not bother him because the objects of his ultimate concern were impersonal. "The things I care for will continue, and others will carry on what I can no longer do."
You were born only once but every year you have a birthday. Equally, you will die only once but every year you have a death day, the date on which you will die. It is just that you don't know what it is.
Suppose you could know the date of your death but not the year. Suppose that date is 16 October. Then on that date you would be a little worried and especially careful, both physically and morally. And then on the 17th you could relax for a whole year.
Loyal Davis, Reagan’s father-in-law and a pioneering neurosurgeon, was just days away from death.
Something else worried Reagan: The dying man was, by most definitions of the word, an atheist.
“I have never been able to subscribe to the divinity of Jesus Christ nor his virgin birth. I don’t believe in his resurrection, or a heaven or hell as places,” Davis once wrote. “If we are remembered and discussed with pleasure and happiness after death, this is our heavenly reward.”
Reagan, on the other hand, believed everyone would face a day of judgment, and that Davis’s was near. So the most powerful man in the world put everything else aside, took pen in hand and set out on an urgent mission — to rescue one soul.
This provides further insight into why the Left so hated Reagan: he was a man of faith.
I can't help but point out that what Loyal Davis says about "our heavenly reward" is disgusting nonsense. Why disgusting? Because it twists words to mean what they can't mean. There is nothing heavenly or rewarding about being the merely intentional object of a few flickering and intermittent memories of a few mortals soon to bite the dust themselves.
Memo to atheists: if you are a hard-assed naturalist, hoe the row to the bitter end and issue no claptrap about a heavenly reward. Man up, accept the consequences of your doctrine, and show some respect for the English language.
Death is ineluctable and irrevocable, but still equivocal this side of the divide. It presents itself, by turns, as the worst of calamities and as a welcome release from an untenable predicament.
The prospect of death, especially one's own, puts paid to frivolity. It makes us serious. The paradox, however, is that death, ineluctable and final, 'proves' the absurdity of human existence.
Death imparts seriousness to a life that it also suggests is a joke.
Are presentism and bodily resurrection logically compatible? Edward Buckner wonders about this. He got me wondering about it. So let me take a stab at sorting it out.
The Resurrection of the Body
I will assume the traditional doctrine of the resurrection according to which (i) resurrection is resurrection of the (human) body, and (ii) this resurrected body will be numerically identical to the body that lived and died on Earth. In other words, the pre-mortem and post-mortem bodies of a person are one and the same. After the resurrection you will have the very same body that have now. This is compatible with the resurrected body being property-wise different from the earthly body. I take this same-body view to be the traditional view. We find it, for example, in Aquinas:
For we cannot call it resurrection unless the soul return to the same body, since resurrection is a second rising, and the same thing rises that falls; therefore resurrection regards the body which after death falls, rather than the soul which after death lives. And consequently if it is not the same body which the soul resumes, it will not be a resurrection, but rather the assuming of a new body. (1952, 952, quoted from here)
For the sake of concretion, let's assume the hylomorphic dualism of Aquinas according to which a human being is a composite of soul and body where the soul is the form of the body. For Aquinas, the soul continues to exist after the body ceases to exist, and resurrection is the uniting of that soul with its body, not some body or other, but its body, the same one it had on Earth.
Presentism
I should also say something about presentism. The formulation of presentism is fraught with difficulties, but for present (!) purposes presentism is an ontological thesis about temporal entities and says nothing about any atemporal or timeless entities that there might be. An ontological thesis is a thesis about what fundamentally exists, and the ontological thesis of presentism is that only present items exist. This is of course not the tautological claim that only present items are present or that only present items presently exist. It is the claim that only present items exist in the sense of belonging to the ontological inventory. It is the claim that only present items exist in the sense of 'exist' that the presentist shares with the eternalist when the latter claims that past and future items also exist. (This is admittedly not quite satisfactory, but I must move on, brevity being the soul of blog.)
The claim, then, is that for any x in time, x exists if and only x is present. This is a biconditional formulation. More common is the 'only if' formulation: x exists only if x is present. It is presumably taken to be self-evident and not worth pointing out that all that is present exists.
Presentism implies that what no longer exists, does not exist at all, and that what does not yet exist, does not exist at all. Please note that it is trivial to say that the wholly past no longer exists. For that is but Moorean fallout from ordinary language and no controversial ontological thesis. The presentist is saying something controversial, namely, that temporal reality is restricted to what exists at present. What no longer exists, does not exist at all. This is far from obvious, which allows so-called eternalists to deny it. Steven D. Hales puts it like this:
Presentists agree that there may be things that do not exist in time, like abstract objects or God, but the root presentist idea is that everything that exists in time is simultaneous. You can’t have (tenselessly) existing things at different places in time. Everything that [tenselessly] exists, exists at once.
Presentism is rejected by those who hold that both past and present items exist, and by so-called eternalists who maintain the unrestricted ontological thesis that all temporal items (individuals, events, times) exist, whether past, present, or future.
Buckner's Question
Suppose all that exists is present. So Socrates, no longer present, no longer exists. But at some point in the future, Socrates will be resurrected and come to be judged. So Socrates no longer exists, yet will exist, assuming the possibility of bodily resurrection.
Does this mean presentism is inconsistent with bodily resurrection?
The question is better formulated in terms of Socrates' body. It doesn't exist at present, obviously, and on presentism it does not exist in the past or in the future either. But if it doesn't exist in the future, how can Socrates' earthly body and resurrected body be numerically the same body? Buckner smells a contradiction:
p. Socrates' body does not exist at all: not in the past, not in the present, and not in the future. (presentism)
~p. Socrates' body exists in the future. (resurrection doctrine)
The conclusion would then be that presentism and the traditional resurrection doctrine are logically incompatible.
If this is what Buckner is driving at, the presentist could answer as follows. It is true now that Socrates' body does not exist. It is also true now that Socrates' body WILL exist. Where's the contradiction? There is none. The following propositional forms are logically consistent:
It is the case that ~p
It will be the case that p.
A Fly in the Ointment?
If it is true, and true at present, that Socrates' soul will, in the fullness of time, be re-united with his body, what is the truth-maker of this proposition? Contingent propositions need truth-makers. On presentism, the truth-maker must be a presently existing entity of some sort. Obviously, it cannot be a future entity. So what, in the present, makes true the future-tensed proposition?
Since questions about bodily resurrection presuppose the existence of God, we are entitled to invoke God as truth-maker. We can perhaps say that it is God's present willing to resurrect Socrates' body that makes true the future-tensed proposition that Socrates will get his body back.
But then it seems that our presentism cannot be of the open future sort.
This is the tenth installment in a series on David Benatar's The Human Predicament (Oxford UP, 2017). We are still in the very rich Chapter 5, "Death." Herewith, commentary on pp. 123-128. My answer to the title question is No, but our author has very effectively shown that the Epicurean argument is not compelling, and perhaps even that it is more reasonably rejected than accepted.
It may smack of sophistry, but the Epicurean argument is one of the great arguments of philosophy, forcing us as it does to think hard about ultimates. That's what philosophy is: thinking as hard as we can, and as honestly as we can, at the very margins of intelligibility, about great questions that tax our paltry minds to their limits. It is sobering to realize that not even the greats got very far in this enterprise. How far, then, can we lesser lights expect to get? But it is noble to strive, and as St Augustine says,
Maximae res, cum parvis quaeruntur, magnos eos solent efficere.
Matters of the greatest importance, when they are investigated by little men, tend to make those men great. (Augustine, Contra Academicos 1. 2. 6.)
So much for the sermon. Now let's get to work.
The Epicurean argument proceeds from two premises, both of them highly plausible:
1) Mortalism: Death ends a person's existence.
2) Existence Requirement: For something to be bad for somebody, he must exist at the time it is bad for him.
Given these assumptions, how can being dead be bad for the one who dies? When we are, death is not; When death is, we are not. Death is therefore nothing to us, and nothing to fear.
If being dead cannot be bad for the deceased, it cannot be good either. But surely we sometimes without sarcasm or malice say of a person who has died, 'He's better off dead.' What we say makes sense, and it is sometimes true. Suppose Jack is in excruciating pain from a terminal illness and then dies. It is true of him after he dies that he is better off dead than he would have been had he lived longer and suffered more.
But how is this possible if Jack no longer exists? How can it be true of him that he is better off at a time when he no longer exists? The puzzle is generated by the conjunction of (1) and (2). If both are true, then it cannot be true of Jack that he is better off dead. But it is either obvious or extremely plausible that he is better off dead. Given that Benatar, as a metaphysical naturalist, assumes the truth of (1), it is off the table.
Now which is more credible, that Jack is better off dead, or that (2) is true? The former according to Benatar. (p. 123) So while the Epicurean cannot be decisively refuted, there are good reasons to hold that a person who is dead and therefore no longer existent can be the subject of goods and bad. This strikes me as a reasonable position to hold. Whether or not we can make sense of how something could be good or bad for a person at a time when he doesn't exist, it is evident, if not quite self-evident, that Jack is better off dead.
How Bad is Painless Murder?
Here is a another consideration that casts doubt on the Epicurean view.
To be murdered is bad, but how bad is painless murder? If one is an Epicurean, it seems one would have to 'dial down' one's assessment of the evil of murder. What follows is my example, but it is based on Benatar's discussion. Suppose Henry the hermit, about whom no one cares except Henry, is murdered while in a deep sleep by an injection that he doesn't even feel. Suppose Henry has no enemies and does not fear for his life.
If our Epicurean holds that conscious states alone are either intrinsically good or intrinsically bad, then it would seem that there is nothing bad about Henry's being murdered. If it is held that there are non-experiential goods and bads, then it would presumably be bad for Henry at the moment of his being murdered, but only then.
These counterintuitive consequences may not refute the Epicurean, but Benatar is on solid ground with his claim that death is part of the human predicament. (127)
"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?
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 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.
This is the ninth installment in a series on David Benatar's The Human Predicament (Oxford UP, 2017).
We now take up the Lucretian symmetry argument insofar as it bears upon the question whether being dead is bad. That is what Benatar maintains. Being dead is bad for the one who is dead even though to be dead is to be nonexistent. Our predicament is not Silenian. Death does not liberate us from our predicament; it is part of our predicament. Our predicament is an existential vise: we are squeezed between life which is objectively bad for all, no matter how fortunate they are, and death which is also objectively bad for all.
The symmetry argument, roughly, is that if it wasn't bad for us before we were born, then it won't be bad for us after we are dead. But we need to be a bit more precise since it is obvious that we existed before we were born. Each of us had a pre-natal existence, but none of us on naturalist assumptions had a pre-vital existence. So "the argument claims that because our pre-vital nonexistence was not bad, neither is our post-mortem nonexistence." (118) The crucial assumption is that the two periods of nonexistence, the pre-vital and the post-mortem, are axiologically or evaluatively symmetrical.
One way to reject the argument is highly implausible. One accepts the symmetry but claims that because our pre-vital nonexistence was bad for us, so is our post-mortem nonexistence. The other way to reject the argument is by rejecting the symmetry thesis. This is the tack Benatar takes.
His view is that a person's pre-vital nonexistence and post-mortem nonexistence are axiologically asymmetrical, and that only the latter is bad. One might think, however, that if the deprivation argument works for one's post-mortem nonexistence, then it should also work for one's pre-vital nonexistence. According to the deprivation argument, being dead is bad for a dead person because it deprives him of goods he would otherwise have had. Why then doesn't one's pre-vital nonexistence deprive one of goods one would have had had one been alive earlier?
The following example is mine, not Benatar's. Plato knew Socrates. Some of Plato's disciples, however, were too young to have known Socrates. They missed out on the experience of a lifetime. Was it bad for those disciples, in the pre-vital period of their nonexistence, not to have known Socrates?
Benatar makes a plausible case that the answer is in the negative. One argument makes use of Frederik Kaufman's distinction beyween 'thin' and 'thick' persons. I won't discuss this argument. The second argument is that death is bad for the one who dies not merely because it deprives but because it annihilates. Pre-vital nonexistence, however, cannot possibly be the product of annihilation. Correspondingly, while one who exists has an interest in continuing to exist, one who has not yet come into existence has no interest in coming into existence. Therefore, pre-vital and post-mortem nonexistence are axiologically asymmetrical. One who has died and has been annihilated is in a bad way because of his annihilation. But one who has not yet come into existence is not and cannot be a subject of the bad of annihilation.
The Lucretian symmetry argument therefore fails. So while it wasn't bad for us during the pre-vital phase of our nonexistence, this fact has no tendency to show that it will not be bad for us during the post-mortem phase of our nonexistence.
Josef Pieper, Death and Immortality (Herder and Herder, 1969), p.101:
But the profound discord and hidden infirmity, with which the Stoic doctrine was already infected at its root in classical times, is nowhere revealed so baldly as in its attitude toward death. There is nothing surprising about this. The maxim not to let our hearts be affected and shaken by anything may on occasion be quite worthy of respect; but it must become absurd in the face of an event whose whole importance consists in shaking to the very depths not only the energies of our soul, but our existence itself.
The Stoics teach that there are things that are in our power, and things that are not. The flood that sweeps away my house is not in my power; but my response to the flood is. I can make myself miserable by blaming other people, from the president on down; or I can limit my suffering by taking control of my own mind. Your insulting me is not in my power; but whether or not I let it affect me is in my power.
The Stoics had a very important insight into the mind's power to regulate itself. When you really understand their point it can come as a revelation. I was once thinking of a dead relative and how he had wronged me. I began to succumb to negative thoughts, but caught myself and suddenly realized that I am doing it. In other words, I am allowing these negative thoughts to arise and I have the power to blot them out. The incident was years in the past, and the malefactor was long dead. So the present mental perturbationwas entirely my own creation. My sudden realization of this — aided no doubt by my reading of Stoic and other wisdom literature — caused the disturbance to vanish.
In short, the Stoics discerned the mind's god-like power to regulate itself and master, rather than be mastered by, its thoughts. They saw that, within certain limits, we create the quality of our lives. Within limits, we can make ourselves miserable and we can make ourselves blessed. There is an inner citadel into which one can retreat, and where a very real peace can be enjoyed — assuming that one is willing to practice, rather than merely read about, the Stoic precepts.
The fundamental Stoic project, in the words of Pierre Hadot, is "the delimitation of our own sphere of liberty as an impregnable islet of autonomy, in the midst of the vast river of events and of Destiny." (The Inner Citadel, p. 83) We can beat a retreat to the inner citadel, the autonomous true self, the soul, the ruling principle (hegemonikon).
As useful as Stoic therapeutics is for everyday life, it is useless as soteriology. It can calm the soul, but not save it. For while the ruling principle has a god-like power to control its attitudes toward the blows of fate, it is not a god. It has no control over its own nature and existence. The Stoics leave us in the lurch in the face of death.
Pieper, then, is right. Death is not an external event that can be kept at mental arm's length and calmly contemplated from an inner 'safe space.' For no human space is safe from death.
I can to a certain extent identify with the hegemonikon or guiding element within me which stands above the fray, observing it. I am that ruling element, that transcendental witness. But I am also this indigent body, this wholly exposed mass of frailties. And try as I might, I cannot dissociate myself from it. The ideal of the Sage who negotiates with perfect equanimity fortune and misfortune alike is unattainable by us. In the end, the precepts and practices of Stoicism are unavailing.
We cannot save ourselves via the path of political activism as many 20th century Communists learned the hard way. But a wholly self-reliant quietism is also a dead-end whether Stoic or Buddhist. We cannot be lamps unto ourselves. If salvation is to be had, it must come from Elsewhere. Nur ein Gott kann uns retten, "Only a God can save us," as Heidegger said in his Spiegel-interview near the end of his life.
Many find the Epicurean reasoning about death sophistical. Among those who do, we encounter some strange bedfellows. To compress the famous reasoning into a trio of sentences:
When we are, death is not. When death is, we are not. Therefore, death is nothing to us, and nothing to fear.
The distinguished German Thomist, Josef Pieper, in his Death and Immortality (Herder and Herder, 1969, orig. publ. in 1968 under the title Tod und Unsterblichkeit) speaks of
. . . a deception which men have long employed, particularly in classical antiquity, in the attempt to overcome the fear of death. I refer to the sophism of not encountering death, which Epicurus seems to have been the first to formulate; "Death is nothing to us; for as long as we are, death is not here; and when death is here, we no longer are. Therefore it is nothing to the living or the dead." [In footnote 13, p. 134, Pieper reports, "Ernst Bloch, too, has recently repeated the old sophism. Das Prinzip der Hoffnung, Frankfurt a. M., 1969, p. 1391] The same argument, or variations of it, has been repeated many times since, from Lucretius and Cicero to Montaigne and Ernst Bloch; but the idea has not thereby become more credible. (p. 29)
Why does Pieper consider the Epicurean philosopheme to be a sophism?
What Epicurus attempts to do is to quarantine death, restricting it to the future period when when we will be dead and presumably nonexistent. Or perhaps we can say that Epicurus is engaged in an illicit compartmentalization: there is being alive and there is being dead and the two compartments are insulated from each other. Thus when we are alive we are wholly alive and death is nothing to us. And when we are dead, death is also nothing to us because we no longer exist.
I read Pieper as maintaining that this is a false separation: death is not wholly other than life; it is a part of life. We are not wholly alive when we are alive. Rather, we are dying at every moment. Compare Benatar for whom death is part of life in that "death [being dead] is an evil and thus part of the human predicament." (The Human Predicament, p. 110) Part of what makes the human predicament bad is that death awaits us all as a matter of nomological necessity. Now Pieper would never say that the human condition is bad or evil, believing as he does that the world is the creation of an all-good God; but the two thinkers seem agreed on the following precise point: death cannot be assigned to the future in such a way that it is nothing to us here and now.
For Pieper, the image of death as Grim Reaper, although apt in one way, is misleading in another, suggesting as it does that death is wholly external to us, attacking us from without and cutting us down. Of course it is true that our lives are threatened from without by diseases, natural disasters, wild animals, and other humans. To this extent death is like a scythe wielded from without that cuts us down. But it is not as if we would continue to live indefinitely if not attacked from without. Death does not kill a man the way his murderer kills him. What images such as that of the Grim Reaper hide, according to Pieper, is the fact
. . . that we ourselves, in living our life away, are on the way to death; that death ripens like a fruit within us; that we begin to die as soon as we are born; that this mortal life moves towards its end from within, and that death is the foregone conclusion of our life here. (28)
If so, then death cannot be pushed off into the future where it will be nothing to us. It is something to us now in that we are now, all of us, dying. While alive we are yet mortal: subject to death. But not in the sense that it is possible that we die, or probable, but in the sense that it is necessary. To be mortal is to be potentially dead, and living is the gradual actualization of this potentiality. Death would be nothing to us while we are alive if we were non-mortal until death overtakes us. But this is not the case: we are mortal while we are alive. We don't go from being wholly alive to wholly dead; we go from being potentially dead to actually dead.
The Epicurean therapeutics is supposed to allay our fear of being dead, and to some extent it does, on the assumption that we are wholly mortal. But it does nothing to allay our anxiety over being mortal. Being mortal, and knowing that I am, I know what is coming, my personal obliteration.
Why do some find the Existence Requirement self-evident? Could it be because of a (tacit) commitment to presentism?
Here again is the Existence Requirement:
(ER) In order for something to be bad for somebody, that person must exist at the time it is bad for him. (D. Benatar, The Human Predicament, 111,115)
Assuming mortalism, after death a person no longer exists. It is easy to see that mortalism in conjunction with the Existence Requirement entails that being dead is not bad for the person who dies. (of course it might be bad for others, but this is not the issue.) Our Czech colleague Vlastimil V., though he is not a mortalist, accepts this line of reasoning. For he finds (ER) to be well-nigh self-evident. Vlastimil's view, then, is that if one is a mortalist, then then one ought to hold that the dead are not in a bad way; they are not, for example, deprived of the goods they would have had had they been alive.
Initially, I thought along the same lines. But now it seems less clear to me. For now I suspect that a tacit or explicit commitment to the questionable doctrine of presentism is what is driving the sense that (ER) is self-evident. Let's think about this.
At a first approximation, presentism is the ontological thesis that only present items exist. But 'present' has several senses, so we'd better say that on presentism, only temporally present items exist. If so, then what is wholly past does not exist, and likewise for what is wholly future. But let's not worry about future items. And to avoid questions about so-called abstract objects, which either exist at all times or else timelessly, let us restrict ourselves to concreta. So for present purposes, pun intended,
P. Presentism is the ontological thesis that, for concrete items, only temporally present items exist.
Note that 'exist' in (P) cannot be present-tensed on pain of siring the tautology, Only what exists now exists now. The idea is rather that only what exists now exists simpliciter.
Consider Tom Petty who died recently. On mortalism, he no longer exists. On presentism, what no longer exists (i.e., what existed but does not now exist) does not exist at all. So on presentism, Petty does not exist at all. If so, dead Petty cannot be subject to harms or deprivations.
It is beginning to look as if presentism is what is driving the Existence Requirement. For if presentism is true it is impossible that a person be subject to a harm or deprivation at a time at which he does not presently exist. For a time at which he does not presently exist is a time at which he does not exist at all. And if he does not exist at all, then he cannot be subject to harm or deprivation.
What if presentism is false? One way for it to be false is if the 'growing block' theory is true. We could also call it past-and-presentism. On this theory past and present items exist, but no future items exist.
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.
But what does this mean? It is not easy to explain. But if we don't have a notion of existence simpliciter, then we won't be able to make any of of the following substantive (non-tautological) claims:
A. Presentism: Only what exists now exists simpliciter.
B. Past-and-Presentism: Only what exists now and what did exist exists simpliciter.
C. Futurism: Only what exists in the future exists simpliciter.
D. Eternalism: All past, present, and future items exist simpliciter.
We understand these theories, more or less despite the questions they raise; we understand how the theories differ, and we understand that (C) is absurd. So we have an understanding of existence simpliciter. Perhaps we could say that x exists simpliciter just in case x is actual as opposed to merely possible.
I consider (B) preferable to (A).
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. I am assuming the reality of the past. The assumption is not obvious. An anti-realist about the past might say that the past exists only in memory and thus not in reality. But that strains credulity unless you bring God into the picture and put him to work, as presentist Alan Rhoda does in Presentism, Truthmakers, and God.
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.
Now suppose that something like the 'growing block' theory is true. Then one would have reason to reject the Existence Requirement. One would have reason to reject the claim that a thing can be a subject of harm/deprivation only when it exists (present tense). One could hold that Petty is deprived of musical pleasure on the strength of his having existed. Having existed, he exists simpliciter. Existing simpliciter, he is available to be the subject of harms, deprivations, awards, posthumous fame, and what all else.
Summary
If I am on the right track, one who subscribes to the Existence Requirement must also subscribe to presentism. But presentism is by no means self-evident. (ER) inherits this lack of self-evidence. This supports my earlier claim that the following aporetic triad is rationally insoluble:
1) Mortalism: Death ends a person's existence.
2) Existence Requirement: For something to be bad for somebody, he must exist at the time it is bad for him.
3) Badness of Death: Being dead is bad for the one who dies.
The Epicurean denies (3) and accepts (1) and (2). Benatar denies (2) and accepts (1) and (3). I say we have no rationally compelling reason to go either way.
