Category: Impermanence

Ashes to Ashes, Dust to Dust

"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 standis sicker;
As with the wynd wavis the wicker,
Wavis this wardlis vanitie;
Timor mortis conturbat me.

(William Dunbar c. 1460 — c. 1520, from "Lament for the Makers.")

Here lie I by the chancel door;
They put me here because I was poor.
The further in, the more you pay,
But here lie I as snug as they.

(Devon tombstone.)

Here lies Piron, a complete nullibiety,
Not even a Fellow of a Learned Society.

Alexis Piron, 1689-1773, "My Epitaph"

Why hoard your maidenhead? There'll not be found
A lad to love you, girl, under the ground.
Love's joys are for the quick; but when we're dead
It's dust and ashes, girl, will go to bed.

(Asclepiades, fl. 290 B.C., tr. R. A. Furness)

The world, perhaps, does not see that those who rightly engage in
philosophy study only death and dying. And, if this be true, it
would surely be strange for a man all through his life to desire
only death, and then, when death comes to him, to be vexed at it,
when it has been his study and his desire for so long.

Plato, Phaedo, St. 64, tr. F. J. Church

All is Impermanent? Impermanence and Self-Reference

I have long been fascinated by forms of philosophical refutation that exploit the overt or covert self-reference of a thesis. To warm up, consider

   1. All generalizations are false.

Since (1) is a generalization, (1) refers to itself. So if (1) is true, then (1) is false. On the other hand, if (1) is false, as it surely is, then (1) is false. Therefore, necessarily (1) is false. It follows that the negation of (1), namely, Some generalizations are true, is not just true, but necessarily true. (1) is self-refuting and its negation is self-verifying.  Some generalizations are true is an instance of itself which shows that it itself is true: one instance suffices to verify a particular generalization.

There are those who dismiss arguments like this as quick and facile. Some even call them 'sophomoric,' presumably because any intelligent and properly caffeinated sophomore can grasp them — as if that could constitute a valid objection. I see it differently. The very simplicity of such arguments is what makes them so powerful. A simple argument with few premises and few inferential moves offers few opportunities to go wrong. Here, then, is a case where simplex sigillum veri, where simplicity is the seal of truth.  Now consider a more philosophically interesting example, one beloved by Buddhists:

   2. All is impermanent.

(2) applies to itself: if all is impermanent, then (2), or rather the propositional content thereof, is impermanent. That could mean one of two things. Either the truth-value of the proposition expressed by (2) is subject to change, or the proposition itself is subject to change, perhaps by becoming a different proposition with a different sense, or by passing out of existence altogether.  (There is also a stronger reading of 'impermanent' according to which the impermanent is not merely subject to change, but changing.)

Note also that if (2) is true, then every part of (2)'s propositional content is impermanent. Thus the property (concept) of impermanence is impermanent, and so is the copulative tie and the universal
quantifier. If the property of impermanence is impermanent, then so is the property of permanence along with the distinction between permanence and impermanence.

In short, (2), if true, undermines the very contrast that gives it a determinate sense. If true, (2) undermines the permanence/impermanence  contrast. For if all is impermanent, then so is this contrast and this distinction. This leaves us wondering what sense (2) might have and whether in the end it is not nonsense.

What I am arguing is not just that (2) refutes itself in the sense that it proves itself false, but refutes itself in the much stronger  sense of proving itself meaningless or else proving itself on the brink of collapsing into meaninglessness.

No doubt (2) is meaningful  'at first blush.' But all it takes is a few preliminary pokes and its starts collapsing in upon itself.

Michael Krausz ("Relativism and Beyond: A Tribute to Bimal Matilal" in Bilimoria and Mohanty, pp. 93-104) arrives at a similar result by a different route. He writes:

     Paradoxically, because all things are contexted, the idea of
     permanence cannot be permanent. But it does not follow that in the
     end all things are impermanent either, for impermanence too is
     contexted and it too finally drops out of any fixed constellation
     of concepts. (101)

Krausz invokes the premise,

   3. All things are contexted.

Krausz writes as if (3) is unproblematic. But surely it too 'deconstructs' itself. Just apply the same reasoning to (3) that we applied to (2). Clearly, (3) is self-referential. So (3) cannot express an invariant structure of being. It cannot be taken to mean, context-independently, that every being qua being is contexted.

Note also that if (3) is true, then every part of (3)'s propositional content is contexted: the universal quantifier, the concept thing, the  copulative tie, and the concept of being contexted are all contexted. What's more, the very contrast of the context-free and the context-bound is contexted.

In short, (3), if true, undermines the very contrast that confers upon it a determinate sense, namely, the contrast between the context-free and the context-bound. For if all is contexted, then so is this contrast and this distinction.

(3) collapses in upon itself and perishes for want of a determinate sense. And the same goes for all its parts. Copulative Being collapses into indeterminacy along with every other sense of Being: the   existential, the identitative, the veritative, the locative, the class-theoretic. Being ends up with no structure at all. If Being and Thinking are one, as Father Parmendides had it, then the collapse of
Being brings Thinking down with it.

Clearly, we are sinking into some seriously deep shit here, and it is of the worst kind: the formless kind, crap that won't own up to its own crapiness, the kind that deconstructionists, whether Continental or Asian, like to serve up. It is stuff so unstable that one cannot even say that it stinks. Do we really want to wallow in this mess?

Wouldn't it be better to admit that there is an Absolute?

Spiritual Complacency

The world's transiency is sufficiently stable to be soothingly seductive. One dies, no doubt, but one is still here and has been for a long time. One exploits the gap between 'one dies' and 'I die.'  A feeling of pseudo-security establishes itself. The hard and intransient truth of transiency is kept at arm's length. Hence one does not seek truth, or does so without fervor. One is lulled into complacency by pseudo-stability. The complacency comes to extend to complacency itself. One no longer cares that one no longer cares to wake up from the dream of life. The very idea, if entertained at all, is entertained for the sake of entertainment: the Quest becomes joke-fodder.

Can the Chariot Take Us to the Land of No Self?

An abbreviated version of the following paper was published under the same title in The Proceedings of the Twenty-First World Congress of Philosophy, vol. 9, ed. Stephen Voss (Ankara, Turkey), 2006, pp. 29-33.

……………….

According to Buddhist ontology, every (samsaric) being  is impermanent, unsatisfactory, and devoid of self-nature.  Anicca, dukkha,  anatta: these are the famous three marks (tilakkhana) upon which the whole of Buddhism rests.  I would like to consider a well-known Buddhist argument for the third of these marks, that of anatta, an argument one could call ‘The Chariot.’  The argument aims to show that no (samsaric) being is a self, or has self-nature, or is a substance.  My thesis will be that, successful as this argument may be when applied to things other than ourselves, it fails when applied to ourselves.

Continue reading “Can the Chariot Take Us to the Land of No Self?”

Is Everything Always Continuously Changing in Every Respect?

Over lunch today the Buddhist claim that all is impermanent came up for discussion.   Let’s see how plausible this claim of impermanence is when interpreted to mean that everything is always continuously changing in every respect. We need to ask four questions. Does everything change? Do the things that change always change? Do the things that always change continuously change? Do the things that change change in every respect?

Continue reading “Is Everything Always Continuously Changing in Every Respect?”

Closer to the Grave, Further from Birth

With every passing day we are closer to becoming grave meat and worm fodder. Or dust and ashes.  That’s the bad news. The good news is that, with every passing day, one more day has been taken up into the ersatz eternity of the Past & Unalterable.

The medievals spoke of a modality they dubbed necessitas per accidens. Socrates drank the hemlock, but he might* not have: He might* have allowed his friends to arrange his escape from prison. So the drinking was logically contingent. But he did drink the poison, and once the drinking  occurred, that fact became forevermore unalterable, and in this sense accidentally necessary.

There is a certain consolation in the unalterability of the past. The old look back upon a sizeable quantity of past and see that nothing and no one can take away what has happened to them and what they have made happen. All of it is preserved forever, whether remembered or not. The terrain of the present may shift and buckle underfoot as one looks to a future for which there is no guarantee. But the past and its accomplishments are in one's sure possession, proof against every threat. It is curious that the mere passage of time should transmute the base coinage of temporal flux into the gold of an ersatz eternity.

Unfortunately, the treasures of the past are preserved in a region both inaccessible and nonexistent — or should I say next to nonenexistent?  You will thus be forgiven for valuing  the gold in question no higher than iron pyrite.

And herein, in this hesitation, lies the riddle of the reality of the past. On the one hand, the present alone is real, and what is no longer is not. On the other hand, the past is not nothing. Surely it has some sort of reality, and a reality ‘greater’ than that of the merely possible. Kierkegaard existed and so did Regine Olsen. Their engagement existed and so did its breaking off. But their marriage did not exist: it remains a mere possiblity, unactualized and indeed forever unactualizable. Now what is the difference in ontological status between the mere possibility of their marriage and the past actuality of their break-up?  The latter is more real than the former, though both, in another sense, are modes of unreality.

_______________

*These are nonepistemic uses of  'might.'

 

Life’s Fugacity

Here the point is very cleverly made:

I turned 52 yesterday. The first decade of my life took 20 years. The second decade took 15 years. The third decade took a decade. The fourth decade took five years. The past dozen years took 12 minutes. At this rate, I'll be dead in less than half an hour.

As we age, the passage of time seems to accelerate.  This is a mere seeming since, if time passes at all, which itself may be a mere seeming, time presumably passes at a constant rate.  When we are young, the evanescence of our lives does not strike us.  But to us midstreamers the fluxious fugacity of this life is all too apparent.

Why does time's tempo seem to speed up as the years roll on?  Part of the explanation must be that there is less change and more stasis from decade to decade.  Dramatic changes in body and mind and environment occur in the first two decades of life.  You go from being a helpless infant to a cocky youth.  Your horizon expands from the family circle to the wide world.  In the third decade, biological growth over with,  one typically finishes one's education and gets settled in a career.  But there are still plenty of changes.  From age 20 to 30, I lived in about 15 different places In California, Massachusetts, Ohio, Austria, and Germany, studied at half a dozen universities, and worked as a guitar player, logger, tree planter, furniture mover, factory worker, mailman, taxi driver, exterminator, grave digger, and philosophy professor.  But from 30 to 40, I lived in only five different places with exactly one job, and from 40 to 50 in three places,  and from ages 49 to 59 I have had exactly one permanent address.  And it won't be long, subjectively speaking, before I have exactly one address that is permanent in the absolute as opposed to the relative sense.

Tempus?  Fugit!

Fake Halloween Tombstones and the Brevity of Life

One fake Halloween tombstone bore the inscription:

Ashes to ashes
Dust to dust
Life is short
So party we must.

But why not:

Ashes to ashes
Dust to dust
Life is short
So work out your salvation with diligence!

These are two diametrically opposed responses to one and the same admitted fact, the brevity of life. The worldling, to give him a name, take the shortness of life as a reason to make the most of it, to “grab for all the gusto you can,” in the words of a 1960’s beer commercial since, in the words of the same commercial, “you only go around once in life.” The idea is that since our days are few, our pleasures and experiences must be many, so that we may ‘get the most out of life.’

The seeker, however, rejects this merely quantitative solution to what strikes him as a qualitative problem. Fundamentally, the problem is not that our time is short, but that we are in time in the first place. Let me try to make this clear.

For the person I am calling the seeker, the problem is not that our days are few in number, a problem that could be solved by having more of them, but that each day, each hour, each minute is defective in its mode of being, so that even an endless supply of days would not solve the problem. The problem is that the world of change is a scene of unreality. Desire seeks a satisfaction it cannot find in any transient object so that piling one finite satisfaction upon another does nothing to yield true satisfaction. Among the seekers we find:

Gotama the Buddha: “Decay is inherent in all component things! Work out your salvation with diligence!” (Supposedly the Tathagata’s last words.)

Plato: “nothing which is subject to change…has any truth” (Phaedo St 83).

Aurelius Augustinus: “Things that are not immutable are not at all.”

Should we take the side of the worldling and view impermanence as a reason to enter into this life more appreciatively and to live it more fully, without hope for anything beyond it, or should we take the fact of impermanence as a reason to seek salvation from this world? Should we seek the deepest and richest satisfaction of our earthly desires in the brief time allotted us, or should we curtail or perhaps even renounce these desires in the hope of satisfying a higher desire? Should we party more or meditate more?

The answer depends on the answer to this question: Does impermanence entail relative unreality, a relative unreality that points to an absolute reality? Or is this impermanent world as real as it gets?