Hitchens, Christopher – Maverick Philosopher

Fragility and Mortality

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

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

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

We should come back to this.

Is Nothing Sacred?

The Los Angeles Dodgers, in 'go woke, go broke' mode, have foolishly breathed new life into the late Christopher Hitchens and the blasphemy question.

Substack latest.

But will the 'woke' go broke? That depends on us.

As our institutions continue to shove deviancy and degeneracy into our faces, the meaningful question is: Will the Right pledge to fundamentally transform the country? Unless a dramatic realignment takes place—unless Americans as a people reassert their sovereignty and discover the morality that must be present for republican government to have success—the sinews of civil society will snap.

Stunts like what the Dodgers pulled off (and Target tried to do) will continue save for the Right offering a long-term, systematic plan of resistance that changes the behavior of those sitting atop the state-corporatist power structures.

Cigarettes, Rationality, and Hitchens

Substack latest:

Let's talk about cigarettes. Suppose you smoke one pack per day. Is that irrational? I hope all will agree that no one who is concerned to be optimally healthy as long as possible should smoke 20 cigarettes a day, let alone 80 like Rod Serling who died at age 50 on the operating table. But long-term health is only one value among many. Would the creator of the celebrated Twilight Zone series (1959-1964) have been as productive without the weed? Maybe not.

Care of Soul and Body

To care properly for the first, live each day as if it will be your last. To care properly for the second, live each day as if your supply of days is infinite. (Adapted from Evagrius Ponticus.)

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The mortalist body-abuser is one puzzling hombre.

Christopher Hitchens loved to drink and he loved to smoke and he knew that the synergistic effects of drinking like a fish and smoking like a chimney could lead, as it did in the case of Humphrey Bogart, to an untimely shuffling off of the mortal coil. (Hamlet's soliloquy, Act 3, Scene 1) You would think that someone who was utterly convinced that he was nothing more than an animated body, a clever land mammal, would want to take care of his body. Hitchens was not suicidal. He loved to write and he had writing projects planned out. He died of cancer of the esophagus at age 62 in 2011. Those of us who champion free speech miss him greatly and what he would have had to say about the current state of the world.

People think they have plenty of time. But it's later than you think. The Reaper Man is sharpening his scythe as we scribblers sharpen our pencils.

Am I a Body or Do I Have a Body?

In his last book, Mortality, the late Christopher Hitchens writes, "I don't have a body, I am a body." (86) He goes on to observe that he has "consciously and regularly acted as if this was not true." It is a curious fact that mortalists are among the worst abusers of the fleshly vehicle. But that is not my theme.

Is a person just his body? The meditation is best conducted in the first person: Am I just my body? Am I identical to my body? Am I numerically one and the same with my body, where body includes brain? Am I such that, whatever is true of my body is true of me, and vice versa? Let's start with some 'Moorean facts,' some undeniable platitudes.

1. I am not now identical to a dead body, a corpse. No doubt there is a dead body in my future, one with my name on it. But that lifeless object won't be me. I will never become a corpse. I will never be buried or cremated. Indeed, I cannot be buried or cremated. I am not now, never have been, and never will be identical to a dead body. For when the corpse with my name on it comes to exist, I will have ceased to exist; and when I cease to exist, it will have come to exist.

'My' corpse is the corpse that will come into existence when I cease to exist, or, if mortalism is false, when I am separated from my body. Strictly speaking, no corpse is my corpse: hence the scare quotes around 'my' in the preceding sentence. But I can speak strictly of my body: my body is the body that is either identical to me, or is related to me in some 'looser' way.

2. I am obviously not identical to a dead body. And I have just argued that I will never become identical to a dead body. Am I then identical to a living body? Not if the following syllogism is sound: My living body will become a dead body; I will never become a dead body; therefore, I am not identical to a living body.

This argument assumes that if x = y, then whatever is true of x is true of y, and vice versa. Little is self-evident, but surely this principle, known in the trade as the Indiscernibility of Identicals, is self-evident. There is something true of my living body now that is not true of me now, namely, 'will become a dead body.' Therefore, I am not now identical to a living body. And since the only living body I could be identical to if I were identical to a living body would be my living body, I am not identical to my living body. Of course, I have a living body in some sense of 'have'; the point is that I am not identical to my living body.

Putting (1) and (2) together: I am neither identical to a dead body nor to a living body. Contra Hitchens, I am not a body.

3. Consider now the following rather more plausible identity claim: I am (identically) a self-conscious animal. Let's unpack this. I am a living human animal that says 'I' and means it; I am a thinker of I-thoughts, an example of which is the thought *I am just a self-conscious animal.* I am self-aware: aware of myself as an object, both as a physical object, a body, through the five outer senses, and their instrumental extensions, and as a psychological object, a mind, through inner sense or introspection. I examine my conscience. I evaluate morally my actions and my failures to act. I study my emotions, how they arise, how they subside, which of them are dominant, and so on. Both my body and my mind are objects for me as subject. As such a self-aware animal, I am aware of being different from my body. In some sense I must be different from my body (and from my mind) if they are to be my objects, where 'my objects' means 'objects for me as subject.' Why?

Well, is it not self-evident that if x is aware of y, then x cannot be strictly identical to y? If x = y, then there is no 'distance' between subject and object. There is no 'distance' such as would allow for the thing to become an object for a subject. In a rock, no duality of subject-object can arise: no rock is self-aware. In a man this duality does arise. No rock objectifies itself, and by the same token, no part of a rock is the subject for which the rest of the rock is an actual or potential object. But I objectify myself, both my body and my psyche. I ascertain objective facts about myself: weight, pulse rate, blood pressure; I note that consumption of media dreck can induce a pointless anger; I observe that I feel an aversion to unpunctual people, etc. Who is the subject for whom I am the object? Who is the knower of the known self? I am both subject and object. And yet this identity harbors a curious duality.

What is the nature of this duality? What is the nature of the 'distance' within me that makes possible my becoming an object to myself? It is obviously not a spatial or temporal distance. We may call it a transcendental difference since it is a necessary condition of the possibility of self-objectification. I cannot be an object for myself, as I plainly am, without this transcendental difference.

At this point one will be tempted to reify one or both of the terms of the duality and make of the transcendental duality/difference an ontological duality/difference. Am I a composiite of two substances, a thinking substance (res cogitans) and an extended substance (res extensa)? That way Cartesian substance dualism. I won't now say anything further about the ontologization of the transcendental difference. I will however insist that there is at least a transcendental difference within me between subject and object.

We can sum that up by saying that I am transcendentally different from the psychophysical complex that bears the name 'BV.' If so, I am not identical to the psychophysical complex that bears my name and wears my clothes.

Now if you were paying attention you noticed that I made an inferential move the validity of which demands scrutiny. I moved from

a) I am aware of being different from my body

to

b) I am different from my body.

A materialist is bound to resist this inference. He will ask how we know that the awareness mentioned in (a) is veridical. Only if it is, is the inference sound. He will suggest that it is possible that I have an non-veridical, an illusory, awareness of being different from my body. I can't credit that suggestion, however. It cannot be an illusion that I am different from anything I take as object of awareness including any body parts such my brain or any part of my brain. That is a primary and indubitable givenness. Awareness is by its very nature awareness of something: it implies a difference between that which is aware, the subject of awareness, and the object of awareness. Without that difference there could be no awareness of anything. If the self-aware subject were identical to that object which is its animal body, then the subject would not be aware of the body.

4. Will you say that the body is aware of itself? Then I will ask you which part of the body is the subject of awareness. Is it the brain, or a proper part of the brain? When I am aware of my weight or the cut on my arm, is it the brain or some proper part of the brain that is aware of these things? This makes no sense. My brain is no more the subject of awareness than my eye glasses are. My glasses don't see the wound; I see the wound by the instrumentality of the glasses. Similarly, my brain doesn't see the wound; I see the wound by the instrumentality of the brain (and the visual cortex, and the optic nerves, and the glasses, etc.) The fact that my visual awareness is causally dependent on my having a functioning brain does not show that my brain or any part of it is the subject of awareness. I am not identical to my brain or to any bodily thing.

5. Who or what asks the question: Am I identical to this body here? Does the body ask this question? Some proper part of the body such as the brain? Some proper part of this proper part? How could anything physical ask a question?

"Look, there are are certain physical objects that ask themselves whether they are identical to the physical objects they are, and entertain the (illusory) thought that they are not identical to the physical objects they are."

This little materialist speech is absurd by my lights since no physical object — as we are given to understand 'physical object' by physics — could do such a thing. If you insist that some physical objects can, then you have inflated 'physical' so that it no longer contrasts with 'mental.'

So with all due respect to the late Mr. Hitchens, brilliant talker about ideas whose depth he never plumbed, I think there are very good reasons to deny that one is identically one's body.

Further questions: If I am not identical to any physical thing, can it be inferred that I am identical to some spiritual thing? If I am not identical to my body or any part thereof, do I then have a body, and what exactly does that mean?

"I ain't got no bod . . . y."

Hitchens, Horowitz, Clinton, and Impeachment

Christopher Hitchens died on this date in 2011. The synergistic effects of his excessive consumption of smoke and spirits did him in at the tender age of 62. By comparison, David Horowitz is still going strong at 81 churning out books, manning the ramparts, and fighting the good fight. May he live to be 100!

We who live the life of the mind celebrate the longevity of Horowitz while mourning the loss of Hitchens despite the latter's excesses and aberrations. I will quote David Horowitz on Hitchens on Bill Clinton. This is relevant to the current impeachment proceedings against Donald J. Trump. The case for impeaching Clinton was much stronger than the case that was actually brought against him. There is no case at all against Trump.

In his mordantly incisive articles in both Vanity Fair and Salon, Hitchens has demonstrated that the nation's commander in chief cynically and mendaciously deployed the armed forces of the greatest power on earth to strike at three impoverished countries, with no clear military objective in mind. Using the most advanced weaponry the world has ever seen, Clinton launched missiles into the Sudan, Afghanistan and Iraq for only one tangible political purpose, to — as Hitchens puts it — "distract attention from his filthy lunge at a beret-wearing cupcake."

Hitchens' claim that Clinton's military actions are criminal and impeachable is surely spot-on. Republicans, it seems, were right about the character issue, and failed only to demonstrate how this mattered to the policy issues the public cares deeply about. Instead they got themselves entangled in legalistic disputes about perjury and obstruction, losing the electorate along the way. In making his own powerful case against Clinton, Hitchens has underscored how Republicans botched the process by focusing on criminality that flowed from minor abuses of power — the sexual harassment of Paula Jones and its Monica Lewinsky subtext — while ignoring a major abuse that involved corrupting the presidency, damaging the nation's security and killing innocents abroad.

[. . .]

Given the transparent morality of Hitchens' anti-Clinton crusade, it is all the more revealing that so many of his comrades on the left, who ought to share these concerns, have chosen instead to turn on him so viciously. In a brutal display of comradely betrayal, they have publicly shunned him in an attempt to cut him off socially from his own community. One after another, they have rushed into print to tell the world at large how repulsed they are by a man whom only yesterday they called "friend," yet whom they now apparently no
longer even wish to know.

Leading this pack was Hitchens' longtime colleague at the Nation, Alexander Cockburn, who denounced him as a "Judas" and "snitch." Cockburn was followed by a second Nation columnist, Katha Pollitt, who smeared Hitchens as a throwback to McCarthy-era informers ("Let's say the Communist Party was bad and wrong — Why help the repressive powers of the state? Let the government do its own dirty work."). She was joined by a 30-year political comrade, Todd Gitlin, who warned anyone who cared to listen that Hitchens was a social "poison," in the same toxic league as Ken Starr and Linda Tripp.

Consider the remarkable nature of this spectacle. Could one imagine a similar ritual performed by journalists of the right? Bob Novak, say, flanked by Pat Buchanan and William F. Buckley, pronouncing an anathema on Bill Safire, because the columnist had called for the jailing of Ollie North during the Iran-contra hearings? Not even North felt the need to announce such a public divorce. When was the last time any conservative figure (let alone a gathering of conservatives) stepped forward to declare they were ending a private friendship over a political disagreement?

The curses rained on Hitchens' head are part of a ritual that has become familiar over generations of the left, in which dissidents are excommunicated and consigned to various Siberias for their political deviance. It is a phenomenon normal to religious cults, where purity of heart is maintained through avoiding contact with the unclean. To have caused the left to invoke so drastic a measure, Hitchens had to have violated some fundamental principles of its faith. So what were they?

Read it all. An updated and extended version appears as "Defending Christopher," Chapter 23 of Hating Whitey and Other Progressive Causes (Spence 1999), pp. 240-248.