We all believe that death is bad. But why is death bad?
In thinking about this question, I am simply going to assume that the death of my body is the end of my existence as a person. (If you don't believe me, read the first nine chapters of my book.) But if death is my end, how can it be bad for me to die? After all, once I'm dead, I don't exist. If I don't exist, how can being dead be bad for me?
People sometimes respond that death isn't bad for the person who is dead. Death is bad for the survivors. But I don't think that can be central to what's bad about death. Compare two stories.
Story 1. Your friend is about to go on the spaceship that is leaving for 100 Earth years to explore a distant solar system. By the time the spaceship comes back, you will be long dead. Worse still, 20 minutes after the ship takes off, all radio contact between the Earth and the ship will be lost until its return. You're losing all contact with your closest friend.
Story 2. The spaceship takes off, and then 25 minutes into the flight, it explodes and everybody on board is killed instantly.
Story 2 is worse. But why? It can't be the separation, because we had that in Story 1. What's worse is that your friend has died. Admittedly, that is worse for you, too, since you care about your friend. But that upsets you because it is bad for her to have died. But how can it be true that death is bad for the person who dies?This is one of those questions that we once understood to have a clear answer. We've discussed a mild version of Avicenna's proof for a Necessary Existent:
1) Everything we know that comes to exist gets its existence from something else.
2) An actual infinite series cannot exist,
∴
3) At least one thing exists of its own nature, rather than getting existence from something else.
Exactly what that thing is has been subject to much debate -- Allah, for Avicenna; God for Aquinas; perhaps some meta-laws that give parameters to the expression of quantum fields for contemporary physics (but where and how do these laws exist?). The point is that the first existent exists by nature; everything that follows from it exists contingently.
Thus to exist is to be like the first thing -- like God, like Allah, like the ultimate source of reality and therefore of all goods. Indeed, for Avicenna and Aquinas, existence and 'the good' were the same thing. To die, insofar as that means 'to cease to exist,' is to lose a likeness and a connection to that thing. To die is only a good if you die to actualize some perfect and lasting virtue, some beauty or some good so strong that it even more perfectly ties you to that everlasting source of good. So says the Havamal: 'Cattle die, kinsmen die, and you also will die: but the one thing I know never dies is the fame of the heroic dead.'
Once that was the easy knowledge of pagan and heathen, Christian and Muslim alike. Now a professor of philosophy from Yale seems not to be aware that the argument ever existed at all.
What's worse is that your friend has died. Admittedly, that is worse for you, too, since you care about your friend. But that upsets you because it is bad for her to have died.
ReplyDeleteStory 2 is worse.
Subjectively, story #1 is worse, but objectively, story 2 is worse -- if all commo with the spaceship ceases at 20 minutes after the launch, and the spaceship explodes 25 minutes into the flight, you cannot know that your friend has died. You will only suffer sorrow of separation, not grief over his (or her, in the narrative)death -- so, as far as you are aware, story 1 is worse.
*off in search of more nits to pick*
Now a professor of philosophy from Yale seems not to be aware that the argument ever existed at all.
ReplyDeleteIt's worse than it seems. He's the Acting Chair of the department...
Thus to exist is to be like the first thing -- like God, like Allah, like the ultimate source of reality. To die, insofar as that means 'to cease to exist,' is to lose a likeness to that thing.
ReplyDeleteI don't think this has anything to do with why actual human beings fear or hate death, or hate to see it in others, so that it is bad. People don't think their way into that, anymore than (most of the time) they think their way into being good neighbors or kind to children. Death is bad because we have instincts for survival, and some measure of sympathy.
In the book (not the radio) version of The Restaurant at the End of the Universe, the proprietors have genetically engineered a cow that likes to be killed and eaten, and walks up to your table and tells you so. You couldn't talk that critter into thinking otherwise by telling it it was more like God while it was alive, and less so when it was dead. (Though if someone had brought the issue up, Douglas Adams would probably have turned it into a joke about the Eucharist.)
As another example, consider why rape is bad. According to an argument I read here - admittedly speculative, if I remember - women have an especially strong instinct to be selective about whom they mate with, for perfectly good evolutionary reasons. Forcing them violates those instincts and so does a lot of harm. If our species had developed differently - if we had more of an "r" and less of a "K" reproductive strategy - then the instincts would be different, and rape might be no worse than any other kind of assault. Good and evil lie within human nature, not nature-nature.
I saw a much more excusable example of this recently, from a graduate student. He was making a version of this 'no harm in death' argument, and from that questioning whether there was any rational reason to avoid dying. He finally decided that, yes, if there was anything you just felt like you wanted to do before death, you had a reason to avoid death -- a subjective reason, but a reason at least.
ReplyDeleteOtherwise, he said, you could give no advice to prospective suicide at all: if they had no desire to life, they had no reason to live. The question of suicide was empty of content. They could choose to live or die with equal unconcern.
There as here, there was no reference to or respect for any of the philosophers who had gone before: not Aristotle, not Avicenna, certainly not Aquinas nor any Christian philosopher, and not even the old heathen sagas and poems. In a graduate student that's somewhat excusable, but I expect a professor to be better educated.
Joe:
ReplyDeleteYou've just made Aristotle's argument vice Plato. Allow me to illustrate:
People don't think their way into that, anymore than (most of the time) they think their way into being good neighbors or kind to children. Death is bad because we have instincts for survival, and some measure of sympathy.... Good and evil lie within human nature, not nature-nature.
Plato believed (as I do) that the fact that we can unify a diverse set of things into 'good' and 'bad' means that there is a unifying concept, the Form of the Good. We are able to do this from our reason because our reason has roots in, and access to, the source of these forms.
Aristotle believed as you do: that the nature of the thing determines the nature of any virtues attached to it. What is good for a man isn't good for a horse, at least not always or in the same degree.
All of these thinkers would agree with you that people don't have to think their way to what's good or what is not: the point is that they could do so, not that they must do so. Because the good lies either in Nature (for Plato) or in the nature of the thing (for Aristotle), it is already present and embedded: there is no need to argue to it, and as you say, no possibility of arguing out of it. (This is the problem faced by our Yale professor!)
I disagree with the Aristotelian position here in part because of arguments like the one you just made. The fact that you can think outside of what we find good, to imagine other kind of good, doesn't strike me as evidence that a Platonic "Form of the Good" doesn't exist -- it strikes me as proof of the claim that it must exist, in order for us to see how we could find good in things that human nature tells us is bad.
I don't see that. Humans have parental instincts that say something about the moral impact of infantacide. A great creative artist of our time imagines the kreelies, who don't. That shows the flexibility of our ability to think and imagine (a very handy ability indeed) - but says nothing about these external "forms." I suppose Plato would say they were manifested, imperfectly, in chimpanzee proto-morality - but what is the need for "forms" to explain any of these things?
ReplyDeleteCassandra's latest post is apropos.
Grim,
ReplyDeleteI will admit I am a bit perplexed with you. Not with your position, but with your surprise that a Yale philosophy professor is ignorant of (or at least dismissive, if not contemptuous of) Christian and pagan philosophers. After all, they were "unenlightened" so what could they possibly contribute to his philosophy?
To be fair, I am completely engaging in a stereotype of Yale philosophy professors, and could be 100% wrong and off base here. I just happen (in this case) to doubt it.
Where there is life, there is hope. Where there is death for evil, there is a lot more than hope, there's a solution.
ReplyDelete"To be honest I do not think whether they live or die is the matter at hand. Life is not always better than death. It is not that simple. Living and being made to live are very different things. What matters is what the person chooses of their own free will. Whether or not it can be achieved or how difficult it is.
I want you to think about this: imagine if what matters most to you was taken away against your will. If that is indeed worth less than your life"
As for everyone agreeing that death is no good, that depends upon one's allegiance in the eternal struggle between Light and Shadow.
Joe:
ReplyDeleteYou're continuing to advance Aristotle's argument, given your emphasis on the faculty of imagination. This is exactly how he thinks we come to understand the nature of things: we can "re-image" the things in our minds, with or without different qualities, until we learn what is essential to the thing. We can also therefore imagine a person with their young-protective instincts abstracted from them.
Nevertheless, you seem to be lacking something important. What is it that you think a "form" is? Aristotle took it to mean the order and structure that we find in things, which give that thing the capacity to perform a function. For example, a table's form includes essential qualities of being flat and able to hold things off the ground; but its color is not an essential part of the form.
Plato also takes form to be order, although he disagrees about forms in some important ways.
Before we get into the difference, though, notice that you have asked what the need is for form to explain 'any of these things,' meaning the natural behaviors of ordinary objects. That question amounts to asking why we need to make reference to order to explain things that occur normally or for the most part: and that is to ask, 'Why do we need to assume there is an order to explain the order we observe?'
The existence of the form isn't in dispute; what's worth arguing over is just how different kinds of forms are sustained in nature. That's an interesting question, and it looks to me as if Plato and Aristotle may have both been right to some degree. Some forms are 'in the thing,' either because we put them there (we built the table according to a particular order) or because nature put it there (the DNA specifies a certain number of eyes, sensitive to light in certain ways).
Other forms don't seem to be. What does it mean for a thing to be good? It means that it is good for something -- but to say that is to apply some common standard of goodness to multiple kinds of natures. If goodness were a function of nature, then we would lose the ability to define "goodness" because there wouldn't be a common order that could explain the unity. Is killing babies good? No, if you're a person; yes, if you're a hungry tiger. That we can see the unity that allows us to use one term for two completely different kinds of things suggests that there is a higher unity than what arises from the nature alone. We wouldn't be able to recognize a "good" that unifies these things without "good" being a kind of order that transcends individual natures.
Speaking of unities that transcend, another example happens to be unity. What does it mean for a thing to be "one thing"? For physical things, it never means that the thing has no parts. It's very hard to explain what it is that makes a man one thing, in spite of his multiplicity of parts, without reference to something like a common purpose or order -- that is, a form.
Mike,
ReplyDeleteWhy be mean to the Yalies? They simply have a lot more unknown unknowns, is all.
I was amused by one of the comments on the Chronicle article, which was that it was funny that this piece was published in the same issue that had an article on how seminaries are struggling to remain relevant. Apparently they could usefully be teaching Aquinas and Avicenna, so that someone would exist to remind the philosophers of what they used to know.
Ymar:
Why "Shadow"?
I'm with Ymar.
ReplyDeleteWhy be mean to the Yalies? They simply have a lot more unknown unknowns, is all.
ReplyDeleteNow if only they KNEW how much they don't know...
...then they'd be Princetonians.
ReplyDeleteAt least, that's what Princetonians would have you believe.