Death and Immortality – Page 7 – Maverick Philosopher

Benatar on Annihilation and the Existence Requirement

Herewith, the eighth installment in a series on David Benatar's The Human Predicament (Oxford UP, 2017). We are still in the juicy and technically rich Chapter 5 entitled "Death." This entry covers pp. 102-118. People who dismiss this book unread are missing out on a lot of good philosophy. You are no philosopher if you refuse to examine arguments the conclusions of which adversely affect your doxastic complacency.

Epicurus, you will recall, is the presiding shade. His core idea, presented very simply, is that death can be nothing to us since when we are, it is not, and when it is, we are not. How then can death be bad for the person who dies? But for Benatar, being dead is bad, objectively bad, and for all. So our man faces an Epicurean challenge. I concluded a few entries back that he met the challenge in its Hedonist Variant.

If the only intrinsic goods and bads are conscious or experiential states, then being dead can't be bad since the dead don't experience anything. But there are intrinsic goods and bads that are not experiential. If so, then being dead can be bad in virtue of depriving the decedent of goods that would otherwise have accrued to him. A good or a bad can accrue to one even if it cannot be experienced by the one to whom it accrues.* That, roughly, is the Deprivation Response to the Epicurean challenge.

Benatar supplements it with the Annihilation Response: death is bad for the person who dies because it annihilates or obliterates him, whether or not it deprives him of future goods that he would otherwise have had. (102-103) One has an interest not only in future goods, but also an "independent interest" in continued existence.

The Existence Requirement

One fairly intuitive objection to the Deprivation Response, even when supplemented by the Annihilation Response, runs as follows. How can a person be deprived of anything, whether positive feelings or non-experiential goods, if he does not exist at the time the deprivation occurs? The Existence Requirement, then, is this:

ER. In order for something to be bad or good for somebody, that being must actually exist at the time at which the bad occurs. (111, 115)

It is not enough for the person to exist; the person must exist at the time at which the bad occurs. But when a person is dead, he is no more, so when is the badness of death upon him? Not when he is dead, given the truth of (ER). Recoiling from "Subsequentism," some have adopted "Priorism," the view that death is bad before the person dies. But how can being dead be bad for me if I am alive and kicking? Benatar goes on to consider three other unlikely views. But brevity is the soul of blog, and so I will ignore this discussion and jump to what I consider the heart of the matter.

The Aporetics of Being Dead

I lay it down that a philosophical problem is in canonical form when it is expressed as an aporetic polyad. When the problem before us is poured into the mold of an inconsistent triad, it fairly jumps out at us:

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 limbs of the triad are collectively inconsistent: they cannot (logically) all be true. Any two of the above propositions, taken together, entail the negation of the remaining one. For example, the conjunction of (1) and (2) entails the negation of (3). And yet each of the propositions makes a strong claim on our acceptance.

How do we solve this bad boy? Given that logically inconsistent propositions cannot all be true. we need to reject one of the propositions. Which one?

The Epicurean denies (3) and accepts (1) and (2). Benatar denies (2) and accepts (1) and (3). Benatar

. . . see[s] no reason why we should treat the existence requirement as a requirement. To insist that the badness of death must be analyzed in exactly the same way as other bad things that do not have the distinctive feature of death is to be insensitive to a complexity in the way the world is. (115)

Now is there any way to decide rationally between the two positions? I don't see a way.

I was initially inclined to hold that the Existence Requirement holds across the board, even for the 'state' of being dead. To put it rhetorically, how can it be bad for me to be dead when there is no 'me' at the times I am dead? It seems self-evident! Epicurus vindicatus est. But what is the source of the self-evidence?

The source seems to be the assumption that the 'state' of being dead and the state of having a broken leg are states in exactly the same sense of the term. If they are, then (ER) follows. But Benatar has brought me to see that it is not obvious that being dead is a state like any other.

The bad of a broken leg is had by me only at times at which I exist. This makes it natural to think that the bad of being dead, if a bad it is, is had by me only when I exist, which implies that being dead is not bad. But death is very different from other bad things. (115) Perhaps we can say that the bad of death is sui generis. If so, then we ought not expect it to satisfy the Existence Requirement.

We seem to be at an impasse. On the one hand we have the strong intuition that death is bad for the one who dies in that it (a) deprives the person of the goods he would otherwise have enjoyed or had non-experientially, and (b) annihilates the person. This is part of the explanation why Epicurean reasoning smacks of sophistry to so many. On he other hand, The Existence Requirement obtrudes itself upon the mind with no little force and vivacity. Our Czech colleague Vlastimil V finds it self-evident.

Benatar, however, thinks it merely "clever" to adopt the Existence Requirement, but "wise" to recognize that death is different from other bad things. (115-116) The wise course is to "respond to difference with difference and to complexity with nuance." (116)

Given my aporetic bent, I am inclined to say that the triad is rationally insoluble. I see no compelling reason to take either the side of Benatar or that of Epicurus.

What say you, Vlastimil?

________________

*The following example, mine, not Benatar's, might show this to be the case. A philosopher is holed up, totally incommunicado, in a hermitage at a remote monastery in the high desert of New Mexico. While there, the Schopenhauer Gesellschaft awards him its coveted Pessimist of the Year Award which brings with it a subtantial emolument. Unfortunately, our philosopher dies at the very instant the award is made. Not only does he not become aware of the award; he cannot become aware of it. And yet something good happened to him. Therefore, not everything good that happens to one need be something of which one is aware or even can be aware. And the same goes for the the bad.

Death, Deprivation, and Property-Possession

Vlastimil asks, "In which sense exactly IS it bad FOR the young person to BE deprived AT the time he NO longer exists? It's a nice sentence to say but I just don't know what it is supposed to mean."

We are assuming mortalism, the view that the body's death is the death of the person in toto. When physical death supervenes, the person will cease to exist even if his body continues to exist for a while as a corpse.

The question is: Is it bad to be dead for the person who is dead? (Typically, it will be bad for others, but that is not the question.) And let's be clear that we are speaking of the 'state' of being dead, and not the process of dying, or the hora mortis, the time of transition from dying to being dead. I grant that the process is bad, and that the hora mortis is as well. (The hora mortis is where the true horror mortis resides.)

How then can being dead be bad? If death is the utter annihilation of the subject of experience, then, after death, there will be nothing left of me to experience anything and indeed nothing to be in a state whether I experience it or not. Clearly, a state is a state of a thing in that state. No thing, no state.

It seems reasonable to conclude that being dead cannot be bad. Of course it is not good either. It is axiologically indeterminate, to coin a phrase.

But now consider a person, call him Morty, well-situated, full of promise, who dies young. Dying young, he is deprived of all the goods he would have had had he not died young. Suppose these goods outweigh the future bads of which he will also be deprived. Don't we think that, on balance, it is bad for such a person to be dead?

Now when is it bad for him to dead? Not before he dies, obviously, and not at the time of transition, but after he dies. So, when he no longer exists, he is in the 'state' of being dead, a state made bad by his being in a 'state' of deprivation. Does this makes sense? Vlastimil says No.

Vlastimil is assuming that

(V) Nothing can have a property unless it exists at the time it has the property.

So Morty can't be deprived unless he exists at the time he is deprived. But Morty does not exist at the time at which he is said to be deprived; hence Morty is not deprived.

But isn't it true that Morty is dead? I should think so. So Morty has the property of being dead at times at which he does not exist. If so, it is false that nothing can have a property unless it exists at the time it has the property. But then Morty can be deprived and be in a bad way at times at which he does not exist.

It seems that what is true is not (V) but

(V*) Nothing can have a property unless it exists at the times it has it, or existed at earlier times.

(V*) preserves our anti-Meinongian intuition that a thing cannot have properties unless it exists. It is just that a thing that did exist can have properties at times at which it no longer exists.

Above I said that a state is a state of a thing in that state: no thing, no state. But now it appears that, while this is true, we should add the codicil: a thing can be in a state when it does not exist provided there were earlier times at which it did exist.

I don't deny that this way of looking at the matter raises problems of its own. Before Morty came to be he was, arguably, nothing at all, not even a possibility. (There was, before he came to be, the possibility that someone having his properties come to be, but no possibility that he, that very individual, come to be. He did not pre-exist his coming to be as a merely possible individual.) After he passed away, however, he did not revert to being nothing at all. After all, he was, and his name, so to speak, remains inscribed on the Roster of the Actual.

There is singular reference to wholly past individuals in the way there is no singular reference to wholly future individuals. Pace Meinong, however, there is no reference to the nonexistent. So past individuals, though not present, in some sense are. This seems to show that presentism cannot be true. I mean the view that only what exists in the temporal present exists, full stop. When a man dies he does not go from actual to merely possible; he remains actual, though no longer present.

Compare a merely possible past individual such as Schopenhauer's only son Will Schopenhauer with Schopenhauer. The latter has a rather higher ontological status than the former. The latter, though no longer present, once was present and remains actual. The former never was present and never was actual.

On Taking Pleasure in the Death of Enemies

Is it Schadenfreude to take pleasure in the death of an enemy? Only if it is bad to be dead. But it is not clear that it is bad to be dead. On the other hand, if it is bad to be dead, it might still not be Schadenfreude to take pleasure in the death of an enemy.

For I might take satisfaction, not in the fact that my enemy is dead, but that he can no longer cause me trouble.

But you want to know what Schadenfreude is. This is from an earlier post:

If to feel envy is to feel bad when another does well, what should we call the emotion of feeling good when another suffers misfortune? There is no word in English for this as far as I know, but in German it is called Schadenfreude. This word is used in English from time to time, and it is one every educated person should know. It means joy (Freude) at another's injuries (Schaden).

The great Schopenhauer, somewhere in Aphorismen zur Lebensweisheit, remarks that while envy (Neid) is human, Schadenfreude is diabolical. Exactly right. There is something fiendish in feeling positive glee at another’s misery. This is not to imply that envy is not also a hateful emotion to be avoided as far as possible. Invidia, after all, is one of the seven deadly sins. From the Latin invidia comes ‘invidious comparison’ which just means an envious comparison.

Benatar, Death, and Deprivation

This is the seventh entry in a series on David Benatar's The Human Predicament (Oxford UP, 2017). We are still in Chapter 5 and will be here for some time. This entry covers pp. 98-102.

Recall the Issue

If one is a mortalist, but also holds that human life is objectively bad, then one might naturally view death as escape or release, and therefore as good, or at least as not bad. This is the view I would hold if I were a mortalist. I am not in fact a mortalist: I believe in God, (libertarian) freedom, and immortality. I also hold that no one can establish with certainty the existence of these three great Objects of human concern. People who think there are proofs hereabouts are engaged in metaphysical bluster. There are good arguments for the Kantian trio, but no proofs. So I might be wrong. If I am wrong, then I welcome death as release from this world of misery, malevolence, ignorance, and strife. The Grim Reaper is, in truth, a Benign Releaser.

Death, where is thy sting?

Either I move on in the hope of further moral and intellectual growth on a higher plane, or I become nothing, in which case nothing can matter to me. For in the second case there won't be any 'me.' The only nasty part is the transition, the dying; for broadly Epicurean reasons I do not consider the 'state' of being dead bad. It is not bad if I survive and it is not bad if I am annihilated.

We have seen, however, that Benatar holds that not only is life bad, but being dead is also bad. But then he faces the Epicurean challenge according to which death is nothing to us, and thus nothing bad. The Epicurean challenge comes in different forms. I judged in our last installment that he met the challenge in its hedonist variant. A little review can't hurt. The hedonist variant can be put like this (my formulation, not Benatar's):

Hedonism: Only conscious states are intrinsically either good or bad states.
Mortalism: No dead person is in a conscious state.
Therefore
No dead person is in an intrinsically bad state.

Hedonism is dubious if not untenable. The major is not obvious. Here is an example of my own. Consider the fact that there are painful conscious states. This is an intrinsically bad state of affairs. But it is not a conscious state. We now consider the deprivation response to the Epicurean challenge.

The Deprivation Response

On this response, death is bad for the one who dies because it deprives him of the intrinsic goods that he would otherwise have enjoyed. This response is consistent with different theories of the intrinsic good. Interesting, a hedonist could make this response. He could hold that what makes death bad is that it deprives the dead person of the pleasures that he otherwise would have enjoyed.

I don't think the deprivation response is compelling. Here are a couple of examples of my own.

Suppose a happy, healthy, well-situated 20-year-old full of life and promise dies suddenly and painlessly in a freak accident. Almost all will agree that in cases like this being dead (which we distinguish from both the process and the event of dying) is an evil, and therefore neither good nor axiologically neutral. It is an evil for the person who is dead whether or not it is an evil for anyone else. It is an evil because it deprives him of all the intrinsic goods he would have enjoyed had he not met an untimely end.

On the other hand, if the dead person is not, how can he be deprived of anything? Don't you have to be, to be deprived? If you are missing (nonexistent), how can you miss out? This strikes me as the crux of the matter to which we will come in later entries.

It is not quite the same for the 90-year-old. One cannot be deprived of the impossible (as a matter of conceptual necessity), and the older one gets the closer the approach to the nomologically impossible. (I assume that there is some age — 150? — at which it become nomologically impossible for what could reasonably count as a human being to continue to live.) So one cannot employ the same reasoning in the two cases. If we say that the being dead of the 20-year-old is bad because it deprives him of future goods, we cannot give the same reason for the badness ( if it is badness) of the being dead of the 90-year-old. Someone who lives a life that is on balance happy and healthy and productive and then dies of natural causes at 90 or 100 is arguably not deprived of anything by his being dead.

So it is not clear to me that the deprivation response shows that being dead is bad for one who dies.

In our next episode we discuss annihilation! Stay tuned.

David Benatar on Death and the Challenge of the Epicurean Argument in its Hedonist Form

This is the sixth in a series on David Benatar's The Human Predicament (Oxford UP, 2017). We are now in Chapter 5. I will need to proceed slowly through this rich and detailed chapter. There is a lot to learn from it. The entry covers pp. 92-101.

Does Death Release Us From the Human Predicament?

Logically prior questions: Is the human condition a predicament? And what does this mean?

Benatar holds that the human condition is a predicament. I agree. But it depends on what exactly a predicament is. I would define a predicament as an unsatisfactory state of affairs that calls for some sort of solution or amelioration or redemption or salvation or escape. I would add, however, that the solution cannot be easy or trivial, but also not impossible. Thus I do not build insolubility into my definition of 'predicament.' Call mine the weak sense of 'predicament.' This seems at first to accord with Benatar's understanding of the term. He tells us that "Real predicaments . . . are those in which there is no easy solution." (94, emphasis added.) 'No easy solution' conversationally implies that there might be a hard solution.

But he also speaks of 'the intractability of real predicaments, of which the human predicament may well be the paradigmatic example." (94) If our predicament is intractable, then it is insoluble. I suspect that this is what Benatar really holds. Call this the strong sense of 'predicament.' Accordingly, he holds, not that our predicament is difficult of solution, but that it is insoluble, and thus that a solution is impossible.

If so, then death, which he takes to be total annihilation of the person, is no solution and "only deepens the predicament." (94) This is a curiously counter-intuitive claim. If life is as objectively bad as Benatar says it is, then one might naturally see death not as a Grim Reaper, but as a Benign Releaser. One might think that if life is bad, then death must be at least instrumentally good insofar as it puts an end to suffering. Benatar's view, however, is that "death is no deliverance from the human predicament, but a further feature of it." (96)

How is that for a deeply pessimistic view? We are caught in an existential vise, squeezed between life which is bad and death which is also bad. Everyone alive will die. While alive we are in a bad way. When dead we are also in a bad way. There is no escape for those who have had the misfortune of being born. So being born is bad twice over: because life is bad and being dead is as well.

Benatar versus Silenus

Some confuse Benatar's attitude toward death with that of Silenus.

Silenus holds that death is not an evil. Death is not an evil because it removes us from a condition which on balance is not good, a condition which on balance is worse than nonexistence. This, the wisdom of Silenus, if wisdom it is, is reported by Sophocles (Oedipus at Colonus, ll. 1244 ff.) and quoted by Nietzsche in The Birth of Tragedy, section 3:

There is an ancient story that King Midas hunted in the forest a long time for the wise Silenus, the companion of Dionysus, without capturing him. When Silenus at last fell into his hands, the king asked what was the best and most desirable of all things for man. Fixed and immovable, the demigod said not a word, till at last, urged by the king, he gave a shrill laugh and broke out into these words: "O wretched ephemeral race, children of chance and misery, why do you compel me to tell you what it would be most expedient for you not to hear? What is best of all is utterly beyond your reach: not to be born, not to be, to be nothing. But the second best for you is — to die soon."

Benatar agrees with the first sentence, but not the second. For if dying and being dead are bad, then there is nothing good about dying sooner rather than later.

But Is Death Bad?

To be precise, the question is whether death is bad for the person who dies. If your child dies, then that is bad for you; the question, however, is whether it is bad for the child. And note that by 'death' we mean the 'state' of being dead, not the process of dying. There is no question but that dying, with its miseries and indignities, is bad for many. The real question, however, is whether you are in a bad way after you have finished dying. And to reiterate the obvious, Benatar is a mortalist who assumes that physical death is the annihilation of the person.

The Epicurean Challenge in its Hedonistic Form

Benatar maintains that death does not release us from the objectively bad human predicament because "death is an evil [a bad thing] and thus part of the human predicament." (110) Death is no escape, but part of the problem. But then he faces the arguments of Epicurus and his followers according to which death is not bad. If Epicurus and Co. are right, then, even if life is objectively bad for all, there is a Way Out, there is a solution to our predicament. The first Epicureasn argument to consider invokes a hedonistic premise.

When I am dead I won't be conscious of anything: I won't sense or feel anything. I won't feel pleasure or pain or be aware of being dead. So how can being dead be bad? This assumes that conscious states alone, or what Benatar calls "feelings," are intrinsically good or bad. The argument, which is close to what the historical Epicurus maintains, is this:

Hedonism: Only conscious states are intrinsically either good or bad states.
Mortalism: No dead person is in a conscious state.
Therefore
No dead person is in an intrinsically bad state.

The soundness of the argument may be doubted since the hedonistic premise is not self-evident. It implies that nothing is bad for a person of which he is not aware. Suppose your spouse cheats on you but you never find out. Intuitively, you have been wronged even if you remain forever in the dark about it and thus never have any negative feelings about it. Benatar:

It seems that your spouse's dalliances are bad for you even though they do not lead to any bad feelings in you. If that is so, then perhaps death can be bad for the person who dies even though it leads to no bad feelings. (99)

The hedonist might respond by saying that one could become aware of one's spouse's infidelity and come to feel negatively about it but one could not come to feel negatively about being dead. Or the hedonist might just insist on his premise. But suppose you do become aware of your spouse's infidelity and come to feel negatively about it. Do you have negative feelings because it is bad to be betrayed? Or is it bad to be betrayed because of the negative feelings?

Intuitively, what makes the betrayal bad is not the negative feeling elicited when and if the betrayal is discovered. The betrayal is intrinsically bad in and of itself. What justified the bad feelings is the underlying fact of the betrayal which is bad in itself whether or not it causes bad feeling when discovered.

If this is right, then hedonism is not the correct account of good/bad. If so, "negative feelings are not the the only things that are intrinsically bad." (100) And if this is right, then the Epicurean argument in its hedonist form is no refutation of Benatar. I think we should agree that the argument in its hedonist form is not compelling.

But there are other arguments!

Mary Neal’s Out-of-Body Experiences: Do They Prove Anything?

A repost from 16 December 2012 with minor edits.

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The personable Dr. Neal recounts her experiences during this 13 and a half minute video clip. The following from an interview with her:

The easy explanations—dreams or hallucinations—I could discount quickly, because my experience—and the experience described by anyone who's had a near death experience or other experiences that involve God directly—is different in quality and memory from a dream or hallucination. It's just entirely different. The memory is as precise and accurate now, years later, as it is when it's happening.

So then I thought it must be due to chemical changes or chemical releases in a dying brain. I did a lot of reading about that. If my experience had lasted five, six, seven minutes, maybe even eight minutes, I am sure that no matter how real it seemed to me, I would have said that's a reasonable explanation. But the people who resuscitated me would say that I was without oxygen for up to thirty minutes.

It took them ten or fifteen minutes to figure out, first, that I and my boat were both missing. Then once they identified where they thought I was, they started their watch. They're used to doing this—you have to know the timing so you can recognize whether you're trying to rescue someone or you're trying to go for body recovery. So on the watch it was fifteen minutes, but about thirty minutes in all. I tend to stick with the fifteen minutes, because that's an absolute timing. But even at fifteen minutes, that is way longer than can be explained by a dying brain. The human brain can hang on to oxygen for maybe five or six minutes, and so even if you give it another four minutes to go through its dying process, that still doesn't add up to fifteen minutes. And so after I looked at all that, my conclusion was that my experience was real and absolute.

To paraphrase Blaise Pascal, there is light enough for those who want to see and darkness enough for those who don't. Atheists and mortalists will of course not be convinced by Neal's report. Consider her first paragraph. She underscores the unique phenomenological quality of OBEs. Granting that they are phenomenologically different from dreams and ordinary memories, there is nonetheless a logical gap between the undeniable reality of the experiencing and the reality of its intentional object. Into that gap the skeptic will insert his wedge, and with justification. No experience, no matter how intense or unusual or protracted, conclusively proves the veridicality of its intentional object.

Phenomenology alone won't get you to metaphysics. Everything I am perceiving right now, computer, cup, cat, the Superstition ridgeline and the clouds floating above it (logically) might have a merely intentional existence. How do I know I am not brain in a vat? If I cannot prove that I am not a brain in a vat, how can I know (in that tough sense in which knowledge entails objective certainty) that cat, cup, etc. are extramentally real? The skeptic can always go hyperbolic on you. How are you going to stop him?

The other consideration Dr. Neal adduces will also leave the skeptic cold. Her point is that her brain had to have been 'off-line' given the amount of time that elapsed, and that therefore her experiences could not be the product of a (mal)functioning brain. We saw in an earlier post that Dr. Eben Alexander employed similar reasoning. The skeptic will undoubtedly now give a little a speech about how much more there is yet to know about the brain and that Neal is in no position confidently to assert what she asserts, etc.

The mortalist starts and ends with an assumption that he cannot give up while remaining a mortalist, namely, that there just cannot be mental functioning without underlying brain activity, and that therefore no OBEs can be credited if they are interpreted in a manner to support the claim that consciousness can exist without a physical substratum. How does the mortalist/materialist know this? He doesn't. It's a framework assumption. He certainly doesn't know it from any natural-scientific investigation. It is clear that some brain changes are followed by mental changes. That shows that embodied consciousness is dependent on the brain. But it says nothing about consciousness in its disembodied state.

In the grip of that materialist framework assumption, the mortalist will do anything to discount the veridicality of OBEs. Push him to the wall and he will question the moral integrity of the reporters. "They are just out to exploit human credulousness to turn a buck." Or they will question the veridicality of the memories of the OBEs. The human mind can be extremely inventive in cooking up justifications for what it wants to believe. That is as true of mortalists as it is of anyone. To paraphrase Pascal again, there is enough darkness and murk in these precincts to allow these skeptical maneuvers.

Our life here below is a chiaroscuro.

There is no proof of the afterlife. But there is evidence. Is the evidence sufficient? Suppose we agree that evidence for p is sufficient just in case it makes it more likely than not that p. Well, I don't know if paranormal and mystical experience is sufficient because I don't know how to evaluate likelihood in cases like these.

So let's assume that the evidence is not sufficient. Would I be flouting any epistemic duties were I to believe on insufficient evidence? But surely most of what we believe we believe on insufficient evidence. See Belief and Reason categories for more on this.)

Those who believe that it is wrong, always and everywhere, to believe anything on insufficient evidence believe that very proposition on insufficient evidence, indeed on no evidence at all.

Is a Thinking Person’s Afterlife Conceivable?

A repost from over five years ago. Reposts are the reruns of the blogosphere. You don't watch a Twilight Zone or Seinfeld episode only once, do you? No you don't. The savoring of the riches therein contained requires many viewings. Same with what follows, mutatis mutandis. Resurrected due to its relevance to a recent thread on anti-natalism.

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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.' You get to do there, in a quasi-physical world behind the scenes, what you 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, is 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, they think of it as a prolongation of the petty concerns of this life. 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)

The 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 glamor, 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 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.

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 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 is 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 ready 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.

The Horror of Death and Its Cure

This entry is a companion to On the 'Inconceivability' of Death.

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There is dying, there is being dead, and there is the momentary transition from the one to the other.

While we rightly fear the suffering and indignity of dying, especially if the process is drawn out over weeks or months, it is the anticipation of the moment of death that some of us find horrifying. This horror is something like Heideggerian Angst which, unlike fear (Furcht), has no definite object. Fear has a definite object; in this case the dying process. Anxiety is directed — but at the unknown, at nothing in particular.

For what horrifies some of us is the prospect of sliding into the state of non-being, both the sliding and the state. Can Epicurus help?

If the Epicurean reasoning works for the state of being dead, it cannot work for the transition from dying to being dead. Epicurus reasoned: When I am, death is not; when death is; I am not. So what is there to fear? If death is the utter annihilation of the subject of experience, then, after death, there will be nothing left of me to experience anything and indeed nothing to be in a state whether I experience it or not. Clearly, a state is a state of a thing in that state. No thing, no state.

This reasoning strikes me as cogent. On the assumption that physical death is the annihilation of the person or self, then surely it is irrational to fear the state one will be in when one no longer exists. Again, no thing, no state; hence no state of fear or horror or bliss or anything. Of course, coming to see rationally that one's fear is irrational may do little or nothing to alleviate the fear. But it may help if one is committed to living rationally. I'm a believer in the limited value of 'logotherapy' or self-help via the application of reason to one's life.

I suffer from a touch of acrophobia, but it hasn't kept me away from high places and precipitous drop-offs on backpacking trips. On one trip into the Grand Canyon I had to take myself in hand to get up the courage to cross the Colorado River on a high, narrow, and swaying suspension bridge. I simply reasoned the thing out and marched briskly across staring straight ahead and not looking down. But then I am a philosopher, one who works at incorporating rationality into his daily life.

Why then do so many find the Epicurean reasoning sophistical? To Philip Larkin in "Aubade" it is "specious stuff":

This is a special way of being afraid
No trick dispels. Religion used to try,
That vast moth-eaten musical brocade
Created to pretend we never die,
And specious stuff that says No rational being
Can fear a thing it will not feel, not seeing
That this is what we fear — no sight, no sound,
No touch or taste or smell, nothing to think with,
Nothing to love or link with,
The anaesthetic from which none come round.

It seems clear that our boozy poet has failed to grasp the Epicurean reasoning.

Still, there is the moment of death, the moment in which the self helplessly dissolves, knowing that it is dissolving. My claim is that it is this loss of control, this ego loss, that horrifies us. Ever since the sense of 'I' developed in us we have been keeping it together, maintaining our self-identity in and through the crap storm of experience. But at the moment of dying, we can no longer hold on and keep it together. We will want to cling to the familiar, and not let go. This I suggest is what horrifies us about dying. And for this horror the reasoning of Epicurus is no anodyne.

So I grant that there is something quick and specious about the Epicurean cure. If one is rational, it has the power to assuage the fear of being dead, but not the fear of dying, the fear of ego loss.

I consider it salutary to cultivate this fear of dying. It is the sovereign cure to the illusions and idolatries of worldliness. But the cultivation is hard to accomplish, and I confess to rarely feeling the horror of dying. It is hard to feel because our natural tendency is to view everything without exception objectively, as an object. The flow of intentionality is ever outward toward objects, so much so that thinkers such as John-Paul Sartre have denied that there is any subject of experience, any source of the stream of intentionality. (See his The Transcendence of the Ego.)

Everyone knows that one will die; the trick, however is not just to think, but to appreciate, the thought that I will die, this unique subjective unity of consciousness and self-consciousness. This is a thought that is not at home in the Discursive Framework, but straddles the boundary between the Sayable and the Unsayable. My irreducible ipseity and haecceity of which I am somehow aware resists conceptualization. Metaphysics, just as much as physics, misses the true source of the horror of death. For if metaphysics transforms the I or ego into a soul substance, then it transforms it into an object. (Cf. the Boethian objectifying view of the person as an individual substance of a rational nature.) An immaterial object is still an object. As long as I think of myself from the outside, objectively, from a third-person point of view, it is difficult to appreciate that it is I, the first person, this subjective center and source of acts who will slide into nonbeing.

Now we come to "that vast moth-eaten musical brocade," religion, "created to pretend we never die." Although this is poetic exuberance and drunken braggadocio, there is a bit of truth that can be squeezed out of Larkin's effusion. The religious belief in immortality can hide from us the horror and the reality of death. It depends on how 'platonizing' the religion is.

Christianity, however, despite its undeniable affinities with Platonism (as well appreciated by Joseph Ratzinger, the pope 'emeritus,' in Introduction to Christianity), resolutely denies our natural immortality as against what is standardly taken to be the Platonic view. On Christianity we die utterly, and if there is any hope for our continuance, that hope is hope in the grace of God.

Is there then any cure for the horror of death? In my healthy present, my horror is that of anticipation of the horror to come. The real horror, the horror mortis, will be upon us at the hora mortis, the hour of death, when we feel ourselves sliding into the abyss.

In extremis, there is only one cure left, that of the trust of the little child mentioned at Matthew 18:3. One must let oneself go hoping and trusting that one will get oneself back. Absent that, you are stuck with the horror.

Nothing would be more foolish and futile than to take the advice of a different drunken poet, and "Rage, rage against the dying of the light." The dim light of the ego must die to rise again as spirit. In fact, it is the ego in us that 'proves' in a back-handed sort of way that we are spiritual beings. Only a spiritual being can say 'I' and saying it and thinking it isolate himself, distancing himself from his Source and from other finite selves even unto the ultimate Luciferian conceit that one is self-sufficient.

On the ‘Inconceivability’ of Death

Thomas Merton poses the problem in his Journals, vol. 6, pp. 260-261, entry of 8 July 1967:

Victor Hammer is critically ill . . . . Death is shocking in anyone, but most shocking in the case of someone of real genius and quality and someone you know and love well. The blunt fact is that it is just not conceivable that Victor Hammer should cease to exist. This is a basic absurdity which [Albert] Camus confronted, and which religious explanations may perhaps help us only to evade. [. . .] Yet what is man that his life instinct should translate itself into a conviction that he cannot really altogether die? Where is it illusory and where not? To my mind this is a great and pertinent question and one worthwhile exploring metaphysically — not by abstractions but by contemplative discipline and by a kind of mystical "pragmatism" if you like . . . . (italics added)

I agree with Merton that the problem needs to be attacked via "contemplative discipline," i.e., in a non-discursive way by meditation. But I disagree with the "not by abstractions" bit whereby Merton advertises his poetic and literary and anti-philosophical bias. The problem has to be addressed both discursively via the discursive intellect and also by meditative Versenkung. (A great German word that suggests sinking below the storm-tossed surface of ordinary mind into its quiet depths.)

But what exactly is the problem?

Some will say that there is no problem at all. Death is perfectly natural and easily conceivable. We know that we are animals and we know that animals die. (And stay dead!) A loved one's death may be shocking, especially if it is sudden, but it is certainly not inconceivable. It is no more inconceivable than the death of a cat or a dog or a flea or a flower.

Yet when we think concretely and personally about death, our own death, and the deaths of those we love, we find ourselves agreeing with Merton and with 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.

Of course, what I have written does not show that it is not a bad joke. Maybe it is! (That's an epistemic use of 'maybe.') But then are you prepared to appropriate existentially this putative truth? In plain English: Are you prepared to live as if your life is a bad joke, "a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing?" Or will you live in denial of what you take to be true?

The problem in its sharpest formulation is that it is both conceivable and inconceivable that one should cease to exist. Assuming that no contradiction is true, the task is to remove it. The task, in other words, is to show that the apparent contradiction is merely apparent. Expressed as an aporetic dyad:

A. It is conceivable that one cease to exist utterly.
B. It is not conceivable that one cease to exist utterly.

The problem arises in the collision of two points of view, one objective and external, the other subjective and internal. Objectively viewed, we cease to exist utterly. Subjectively viewed, we don't. The problem is genuine and worth pondering because it is not easy to see how either point of view could displace the other in a fair and rational accounting. For this reason it is not plausible simply to deny one of the limbs of the contradiction. The facile answers of the naive religionist — one has an immortal soul — and the naturalist — one is just a clever land mammal — won't cut it. There is evasion of the problem on both sides. I will now try to argue this out. One needs to 'marinate' oneself in the problem and not reach for a quick 'solution.' That is the way of philosophy. The other is the way of ideology.

An Objectivist Way Out via Naturalism?

Consider naturalism, which is the dominant form of objectivism. Naturalism, for present purposes, is the metaphysical view according to which causal reality is exhausted by the space-time system and its contents. (On this latitudinarian understanding of the term one can be a naturalist while admitting so-called 'abstract objects.') A naturalist in this sense maintains that (1) all causes are natural causes involving only natural entities; (2) "the distribution of minds in the universe is late and local" in a sense that implies that minds are necessarily tied to highly evolved organisms; (3) "there is nothing that is divine, or sacred, or worthy of worship." (Quotations from the Graham Oppy essay in Christianity and Philosophy, pp. 29-30) In other words: there is nothing concrete apart from the causal nexus of nature as understood by current physics; there is no God; there are minds (minded organisms) but they enjoy no higher (divine) origin but are merely products of evolution.

A naturalist would presumably just deny (B). The problem with this objectifying 'solution' is that it leaves out the first-person point of view and with it subjectivity. Or rather it either leaves it out, or, attempting to understand it in objective terms, fails to understand it adequately.

True, I am an object in the natural world. But I am also a subject for whom there is a natural world. I am a measly bit of the yeast of life, but I am also a "spectator of all time and existence." Subjectivity or mind in the broadest sense includes all of the following: consciousness in the sense of sentience; consciousness in the sense of intentionality; self-consciousness as evidenced in the thoughtful deployment of the first-person singular pronoun; conscience or moral sense; the sense of being a free agent; sensitivity to reasons as opposed to causes, and to the difference between good and bad reasons, in a word, rationality; sensitivity to norms in ethics and in axiology; concern for objective truth and for subjective-existential truthfulness.

Can each of the items on this (incomplete) list be adequately understood in an objectifying, naturalistic way? No, not even the first rather paltry item. It is widely recognized that it is a very hard problem indeed to fit so-called qualia into the naturalist picture. It is so hard that it is 'popularly' known among the learned as — wait for it — the Hard Problem. We've been over this many times before, so I won't go over it again. See the categories Qualia and Consciousness and Qualia.

For present purposes, suffice it to say that a blisteringly strong case can be made against the conceit that everything can be adequately and exhaustively understood in naturalistic terms.

Naturalism is involved in a vicious abstraction: it abstracts away from the necessary conditions of anything's being cognized or thought about in the first place. In trying to understand the whole of concrete Being, the naturalist must of course try to understand minds as well. But what does he have to work with? Only more objects. For example, the functioning brain of a particular animal. Could a brain be in an intentional state? No, it makes no sense. No physical state is an intentional state. No such state has semantic properties. No physical state can be either true or false. And so on. See the categories Intentionality and Mind.

Long story short, subjectivity or mind in the broad sense sketched above is not just real, but irreducibly real. It can't be eliminated and it can't be reduced. Obviously, an adequate case for this cannot be made in a single blog post. Besides, as my metaphilosophy teaches, no substantive philosophical thesis can be proven strictly speaking. (And if you are not speaking strictly in philosophy, then you are just fooling around.) But the irreducible reality of mind and truth are reasonably believed.

This goes some way towards showing that our aporetic dyad cannot be easily solved. No doubt we are animals in nature. If that is all we are, then our ceasing to exist utterly at death is easily conceivable. But that is not all we are. We are also subjects with all that that entails: sentience, intentionality, self-awareness, moral sense, reason, etc. We are not merely animals in a physical environment (Umwelt); we are also subjects for whom there is a meaningful world (Welt). (I am using 'world in the transcendental-phenomenological sense one finds in Husserl and Heidegger and their spiritual descendants.) A mere animal has an environment, but no animal has a world. (This is not self-evident: perhaps in some low-level sense my cat inhabits a world of meanings meager and mousy as it must be: the dude is, after all, sentient, pace Renatus Cartesius, and it seems we share a sort of emotional bond.)

We can sum this up by saying that man is a spiritual animal. Neither angel nor beast, he is a riddle to himself. He asks himself: Could I be just a monstrous fluke of evolution? But in asking this question he is spiritually outside of and above the horror chamber of nature red in tooth and claw.

But do I have any positive reason to think that my nonexistence as a subject or spirit is inconceivable? Well, everything objective about myself can be conceived not to exist include my body and its brain. But the I in its ultimate inwardness as pure subject is not objectifiable. The ultimate condition of all objectification cannot itself be objectified. As transcendentally other than every object it is not itself an actual or possible object. Only what I can think of as an object can I think of as nonexistent. But I cannot think of the transcendental I as an object among objects. Therefore, I cannot conceive of it as nonexistent. I cannot think my own nonexistence as thinker.

In short, there is something non-objective and non-objectifiable about me and it is inconceivable that it not exist.

But I hear an objection coming.

"Granted, you cannot doubt the existence of thinking while it is occurring. But surely you and your thinking might never have existed! After all you have written about modal fallacies, I hope you are not confusing the necessity of the consequence with the necessity of the consequent! Surely you can't infer from 'Necessarily, if I think, then I exist' that 'Necessarily I exist.'"

I plead innocent of that particular fallacy. Both valid and fallacious inferences presuppose what I have called the Discursive Framework. The point I am trying to make lies deeper than the framework in question. The non-objectifiable is transcendentally prior to the Discursive Framework.

My claim is not that I necessarily exist as an object among objects, but that I — in my inmost egoity if you will — cannot be conceived by me not to exist. For to do that, I would have to think of myself as an object, either physical or meta-physical — when that is precisely what I am not, but the transcendental I for whom there are objects.

So there is some sense in which there is something necessary about me that cannot be conceived not to exist.

An Objectivist Way Out Via Metaphysics?

We are in the conceptual vicinity of the Cartesian cogito. Does it follow that I am a res cogitans, a thinking thing, a soul substance? Not that either. For wouldn't that just be another object whose existence I could doubt? Not a physical object, of course, but a meta-physical object. Husserl grapples with this problem but fails to solve it.

One cannot think without objectifying. If I try to think the I behind my thoughts I objectify it and make of it a meta-physical object, a thinking substance. This is what Descartes does. But then it seems I can conceive its nonexistence. Buddhists and Humeans have no trouble conceiving the nonexistence of a substantial self behind thoughts.

I cannot be identical to the (live) animal sitting in my chair and wearing my clothes. Let 'A' denote the animal in my chair wearing my clothes. 'I = A' is not a formal identity statement of the form 'x = x.' The latter is a truth of logic. 'I = A' is not a truth of logic. It is in some sense contingent, although not in a sense explicable by ordinary modal means within the Discursive Framework. The thought is not that there are possible worlds in which I exist, but A does not exist, or possible worlds in which A exists but I do not exist. On the other hand, the thought is of course not that in every world in which A exists, I = A. The logic of objects breaks down at the transcendental boundary of the logical.

I get a sense of this strange contingency when I look into a mirror. It seems in some sense contingent that I should be this particular man, with these particular features, and this particular ancestry and history and so on. Again, 'I = A' is not a tautology; it seems to give some sort of information, namely, that this man in the mirror, and no other, is the man that I am. You might think to make a Fregean move: 'I' and 'A' differ in sense but agree in referent. I can show that this does not work. But not now.

So one might be tempted to make an objectifying meta-physical move: 'I' refers to my soul; 'A' refers to my body.

But if I cannot be identical to a chunk of the physical world, how could I be identical to a meta-physical soul substance? Doesn't the same problem arise again? Suppose I have such a soul, denote it by 'S.' 'I = S' is not a tautology of the form 'x = x.' It asserts an identity between me and a metaphysical object, an identity that is 'contingent' in the boundary sense above alluded to. But then my subjectivity is reduced to an object, and in being reduced, eliminated! This object, in addition, could cease to exist or be annihilated by God. So we cannot secure the inconceivability of death by identifying the ego with the soul substance.

A Dialectic Tapering Off into Mystery

Following out the dialectic we arrive at a Grenzbegiff, a boundary notion of transcendental subjectivity that cannot be objectively articulated in a manner to satisfy the discursive intellect.

So is death inconceivable or not? Objectively, whether physically or meta-physically, death as utter annihilation is conceivable. But I cannot be reduced to anything objective. So there remains an element of inconceivability in the death of any person qua person.

But this cannot be made clear in the objectifying terms of the Discursive Framework. One cannot have a 'theory' about it. Our aporetic dyad above is insoluble. It is a sort of marker, this side of the Boundary, of the mystery of death and of spirit. We cannot speak of it, and so we must enter into silence, or, like, a positivist, deny the reality of the Transcendent entirely.

Any further understanding will not be discursive in nature. And so Merton is in one sense right: "contemplative discipline" is needed. All philosophy can do is show the way to the Boundary. Crossing it is not in her power. And to make up objectifying theories about the Far Side is arguably profanation.

Of Death and Detachment

St. Alphonsus Liguori, Preparation for Death, p. 11:

My Lord, since Thou hast given me light to know that what the world esteems is all mere vapour and folly, give me strength to detach myself from it before death detaches me.

I find it very interesting that 'detach' is being used in two very different senses in this passage. The one sense is spiritual while the other is physical.

The saint is praying that he be given the strength to detach himself spiritually from the transient objects of worldly desire before death physically detaches him or his soul from his body. The saint is not assuming that physical detachment will occasion spiritual detachment. To expect such a thing would be naive. It would be as if a man who spent his entire life 'on the make,' in hot pursuit of property and pelf, pleasure and power, were suddenly at death to renounce the earthly lures and to have a burning desire to meet his Maker.

The saint is assuming, though, that spiritual detachment can be achieved only while one is in the body, and that after one quits it one will be stuck with the spiritual attachments one has at the hour of death.

Physical death does not have the power to detach me spiritually from worldliness with its vapours and follies. For this is possible: my body dies but my soul lives on fully attached to the objects of worldly desire. We may speculate that Hugh Hefner is presently still lusting after nubile females. It is just that he presently lacks the physical apparatus with which to realize his lusts.

This too is possible: I remain physically attached to my body while living spiritually detached from the bagatelles of this life.

This is a fertile field for further thought. What exactly is spiritual attachment? How is it put in place, and how is it mitigated? One mode of mitigation is by meditation: one distances mentally from one's thoughts; one observes them as from a distance, refusing to live in or lose oneself in them.

And how can the soul be physically attached to the body if only one of them is physical? Is perhaps the soul's physical attachment to the body reducible to a special sort of spiritual attachment whereby I become embodied by spiritually attaching myself to a chunk of the physical world, a particular animal organism? By taking a particular animal organism to be me?

Las Vegas Rampage: The Existential Lesson

"Impermanence is swift." (Dogen) Alive in the morning, dead at night. Heute rot, morgen tot.

Royce Revisited: Individuality and Immortality

This is a draft of a paper from years ago (early aughts) that it looks like I may never finish. But it is relevant to present concerns. So here it is.

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ROYCE REVISITED: INDIVIDUALITY AND IMMORTALITY

“What is it that makes any real being an individual?” Near the beginning of his 1899 Ingersoll lecture, The Conception of Immortality, Josiah Royce identifies this as the fundamental question whose answering must precede any serious discussion of the immortality question.ⁱ Since the latter concerns whether we survive bodily death as individuals, it is clear that the logically prior question is: What is it to be an individual?

This question, “formal and dreary” as it may seem, yet “pulsates with all the mystery of life.”ⁱⁱ I share Royce’s enthusiasm since I count it as one of his greatest insights that “the logical problem as to what constitutes an individual being” is identical to “the problem as to the worthy object of love.” (CI 32-33) This essay sets itself three tasks. The first is to expound the main features of Royce’s doctrine of individuality in a rigorous and contemporary manner. The second is to raise some critical objections to it. The third is to sketch an alternative which preserves Royce’s insights.

Continue reading “Royce Revisited: Individuality and Immortality”

At Funerals

At funerals one hears pious claptrap about the dearly departed going home to 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? He who loves the things of this world as if they are ultimate realities ought perhaps to hope that death is annihilation.

Accept No Substitutes!

The ersatz immortality of progeny is a poor substitute for the genuine article, as is 'literary' immortality. Ditto for the miserable after-existence of a merely intentional object in the fallible and flickering memories of a few acquaintances not known for the justice of their assessments, acquaintances themselves slated for the Reaper's scythe.

Names on Grave Stones

The names on grave stones are proper names for a time, while the memories of survivors provide reference-fixing context. But with the passing of the survivors the names revert to commonality. After a while the dead may as well lie in a common grave.

What lies below the stone is not Patrick J. McNally, but a Patrick J. McNally. And not even this; rather, the bodily remains of a Patrick J. McNally. The person has fled or no longer exists.