Death, Philosophically

By Thomas Scarborough

'While I thought that I
was learning how to live,
I have been learning
how to die.'
– Leonardo da Vinci

It would seem to be an all-important philosophical subject. Humans, wrote anthropologist Ernest Becker, contribute all of their waking actions to avoiding it or distracting themselves from the complete thought of it. No surprise, therefore, that philosophers tend to do the same.



The philosophical debate about death, whatever one might believe about it oneself, is most basically defined in terms of whether our present life is related to an afterlife, or not. The operative word is “related”. If indeed it is related to an afterlife, then we may ask on what basis this might be. And if not, then we may ask what the absence of such a relation might imply. With this in mind, we shall explore the subject of death from the point of view of Homo sapiens as a relation-tracing being.

Relation-tracing is what makes us human. We have the special ability to arrange our world, conceptually and materially. In fact, it is our relation-tracing ability which enables us to transcend space and time, to pursue ambitions and aspirations which lie completely beyond the scope of the animal kingdom. Such relation-tracing, further, has everything to do with motivation. Most basically, wherever we find that things are not arranged as we think they ought to be, we are motivated to act.

In thinking about death, it is important to understand that, if our relation-tracing has no reasonable prospect of fulfilment, this may ruin our motivation. Plans and ambitions generally need to have some prospect of completion, or we do not undertake them. And death, it need hardly be noted, may rob us of such fulfilment. While it may not take away every motivation in life, it would seem to take away any ultimate motivation we have. Philosopher Thomas Nagel writes, with this in mind, that we should best not let thoughts about such things enter our heads. 'The trick,' he writes, 'is to keep your eyes on what's in front of you.'

An important fact about death is that its moment is nearly always uncertain, more or less. As much as we might hope that we can control it today, we do not know at what point death will intervene in our lives. Therefore any arrangements which we make for the future (which is relation-tracing) will almost inevitably be cut short by death at some point. We are not going to finish all that we began. In fact, the bigger the ambitions we have, the more likely they are to be cut short by death. To this, philosopher Simon Blackburn comments: 'That might reasonably bother me a great deal.

Unless, that is, it should be possible in some way to continue our present activities after death. Rarely is it assumed that we will, but one does encounter the idea. More often than not, it is assumed that the story will continue in some other kind of way. Assume, for instance, that the real story of our life is not one of hopes and plans, but it is really one of sin and righteousness. What would matter then, for any continuation of the story, is whether I was a person of virtue in this life. Or, by way of contrast, the real story of our life may be one of faith and apostasy – and so on. Thus one may view continuation in a variety of terms.

This view would seem to present us with a respectable answer to the puzzle of death. With such prospects of continuation, we would retain our enthusiasm over the things of this life. Nothing would ever be lost – which is, nothing that really matters. It would not matter to us, therefore, if our hopes or our plans should be cut off in this life. However, there is an obvious difficulty with this view – for philosophers at any rate. There is no evidence – not that we can agree on anyway – as to whether there is continued consciousness after death.

But there may be other ways, in which we might find a continuation. Our plans and ambitions might leave a valuable legacy in this world. We might live on through our children, and their children again. And if we should want to be romantic about it, Edvard Munch (the Norwegian painter) wrote that we live on through the flowers which grow on our grave. This, too, might provide the motivation to carry on with the purposes of life, even though we might not personally survive to see them fulfilled. Of course one assumes – although it might seem presumptuous to some – that our purposes are worthwhile.

But perhaps we should not think too deeply on this option. No legacy lasts forever. No family line is eternal – and some have been short, with brutal ends. In fact, whatever might lie ahead of us, the stars, they say, will one day all go out. Realistically, we should think of our continuation merely for the time being, however long that might be. Yet this would seem to serve as a disincentive for anything that we might do. Let us perform a simple thought experiment. Would we continue to do what we do now if we knew with certainty that an all-powerful police state would frustrate and destroy it? Probably not.

We have a further possibility, however. Perhaps we may lose our own person, even while we are living. We may have no thoughts which are our own. We may lose ourselves in our society, or in our culture – to the extent that we do not exist. Our hopes, our desires, our intentions might not belong to us. The notion of death is, after all, a very personal thing, and would seem to be infinitely accentuated by our own self-awareness and self-importance. Might it not be possible to blend with a stream of consciousness from generations past to generations future? Or perhaps – it might not be culture with which we may blend, but the very universe. 'Forget yourself,' writes Yayoi Kusama. 'Become one with eternity.'

Is this a viable option? Is it potentially possible, not to take death into the heart of our reality? As Homo sapiens, we have said, we transcend space and time with our relation-tracing. We think all the time in terms which transcend our lives. We see beyond our beginnings and our ends. Not only this, but any escape from our individuality would seem to necessitate an exit from our society as we know it. Not only is our society dependent throughout on individualism: my rights and freedoms, my intentions and actions,seen apart from the group. It is so variegated and fragmented that any attempt to reunite it in a fusion of histories and beliefs and purposes seems beyond possible. The individual, say the philosophes, is prior to the group.

And then there is, of course, the option simply of living in tension – in terror, for some, of the end of all our dreams and designs. This is, after all, what many people do with death. 'Men fear it,' said Socrates, as if they knew that it is the greatest of evils.' The fear of death may well be born of a rejection of death – in the sense that we decide to carry on with life with disregard, even defiance, in the face of death. The only way to carry on, we might say, is to forge ahead with all of our plans and ambitions, yet with terror, if we grasp the full reality of it. Unreconciled is how we should die, wrote philosopher Albert Camus.

Or perhaps there is a way – which the ancients could not fully have imagined. We may enter a phase of life, at the end of life, which we call retirement – in which there is nothing more to be done, nothing left to lose. This is the time of life where we deliberately set it all behind us, burn our bridges, and enjoy the afterglow. We have already died the coward's death – so that if we should die tonight, we might only miss a cup of filter coffee in the morning, or a game of golf in the afternoon sun.

Doublethink 10 - Moving Factories

Philosophers and Truthiness

By Matthew Blakeway

The comedian and political commentator Stephen Colbert coined the term truthiness* . This is a way of mocking politicians who claim to know something intuitively but fail to put forward any evidence to support their assertion. Too often in political rhetoric, truthiness presents as fact what is merely an ideological belief – not a real truth, but a truth that we want to exist. As Colbert put it ‘Anyone can read the news to you. I promise to feel the news at you.’

Over the last few weeks, academic economists have started the share the fun. The equivalent term that Paul Romer coined to mock his less-than-rigorous colleagues is mathiness. This, he says, is an argument that looks like robust mathematics and sounds like robust mathematics, but actually isn’t. Sloppy economists create arguments that use terms that are mathematically defined elsewhere but which have subtly different meanings in the argument presented. In this way, an ideological position (e.g. if welfare is cut, the unemployed will all find jobs) can be presented as a solid economic argument. As Romer says: 

‘Academic politics, like any other type of politics, is better served by words that are evocative and ambiguous, but if an argument is transparently political, economists interested in science will simply ignore it.’ 

Mathematical theories, like those created by academic economists, should only be trusted when each term is precisely defined and consistently used. Only then can the conclusions of such arguments be empirically demonstrated to be either true or false. The example that he gives is growth theory, where competing versions all appear to be clearly stated, yet show no converging consensus.

And now that creating words to mock woolly thinking is in danger of becoming an epidemic. It occurs to me that the humanities need one of their own. Or, as Stephen Colbert might say, ‘truthiness’ and ‘mathiness’ just don’t feel right in our context. So I propose that we adopt the word ‘explaininess’ because I think this is a problem that is pervasive throughout writing in philosophy and human sciences. Explaininess is an intellectual Ponzi scheme where one nebulous notion is needed to explain another nebulous notion, but the cumulative whole is presented as an explanation.



For example, in connection with a current project of mine, I recently spent a two miserable weeks reading all the recent academic theories explaining various forms of mental illness. In one paper summarising four theories of borderline personality disorder, I was left struggling to succinctly state the difference between Theory B and Theory C. These used terms like ‘maternal imprinting’, ‘suppressed memory’, ‘learned anxiety’ and ‘secondary emotion’. At least an example was given for the last one: anger turns to shame. But I was left asking: is that normal? I certainly don’t think it happens that way with me, so if we are to talk about how that happens at all, we at least need a box and arrow diagram with meaningful things in the boxes and understandable causal relationships. Otherwise, the existence of secondary emotions is questionable and their causality is entirely unknown. Yet in the world of explaininess, this is a theory of a mental illness where competing theories don’t converge towards consensus because none of them are empirically verifiable.

In philosophy, explaininess is rampant. A particularly egregious example is Jacques Derrida’s theory of deconstruction, based around two terms that Derrida coined differance and presance. These are two perfectly reasonable words intentionally misspelt by just one letter. Geddit? But he tells us that these terms can’t be defined; so how am I supposed to know that my understanding of them is the same as his? After a period of hair-tearing frustration, I was reassured to discover that Noam Chomsky and Michel Foucault had both stated that they didn’t understand it either. In this case, if you admit you don’t understand it, then you are in more elite company than if you pretend that you do.

Derrida is famous for his obscurity, but explaininess exists everywhere in philosophy. There are hundreds of books on ‘freewill’, for another example, but few of them offer a robust hypothesis as to what it is. If you are writing a book claiming that this concept is useful, then the burden falls on you to explain to your readers what it is. Too often, writers just presume that I understand the term, but actually I don’t. If freewill is a piece of brain hardware, then that is alright because eventually a neuroscientist will find it in the hypothalamus or somewhere. And if it is a piece of mental software, then eventually some mathy person will build a model of it so that we can all understand how it works; so that is all good as well. But if it is a part of your aura or something that is beamed to you through the aether, then I suggest that some academic philosophers should be seeking alternative employment. Oh, the joys of tenure!

The problem is that if we ban explaininess in philosophy, then there isn’t much left for us to talk about. But I think this points to the real objective of philosophy. Too often, people say that philosophy’s role is to ask questions, but it ends up with us talking ad infinitum about all the questions that can’t be answered – the things that scientists can’t be bothered with. If, on the other hand, philosophy’s objective is to answer questions, then we would all have given up in the 3rd century BC, by which time it was already clear that almost no progress would be made in concrete terms. My suggestions is that the objective of philosophy should be to take unanswerable questions and try to change them into ones that can be addressed in a scientific fashion. For example, if nobody can tell us what freewill actually is, then maybe we should change the question into ‘what is the cause of a human action?’ Already that is starting to sound like a scientific question, rather than a philosophical one. I'd say, pull off that trick, and true progress will have been made.



* More on 'Truthiness'  and on 'Mathiness' - as a PDF*

Doublethink 9 - Myself for Sale

BREAKING NEWS! Three ignominious Greek 'firsts'

Posted by Martin Cohen

Unfortunately, Icarus flew too near the sun, and the heat caused the wax and feathers to melt. The feathers fell off, and Icarus plummeted to the sea.

Here are Three Ignominious Greek 'Firsts'.

1. In a diplomatic first, March 2015, the Greek defence and foreign ministers threatened to unleash a “wave of millions of economic migrants” and jihadis on Europe unless the eurozone backed down on austerity demands.

2. In an international grade, damn lies and statistics, first, the country was only able to enter the currency bloc after brazenly claiming its deficit was less than 1 percent of gross domestic product, cocking a snook at the bloc’s 3 percent threshold. However, European Commission reports  reveal that Greece’s budget hasn’t been within the 3 percent limit a single year since its accession. Financial tricks have included failing to count gigantic military expenditures, or billions in hospital debt. Other countries fudged the figures to gain entry to the euro, but ten years on the Greeks had turned into a fudge factory - the deficit had expanded to 12 per cent. Part of the methodology for achieving this financial disaster in the face of the European Union rules, was expensive advice on concealing its trail from investment banks like Goldman Sachs. Goldman, who also played a helpful role in bringing the US banking system to its knees, arranged complex currency swaps for the Greek government which on magicked the debts off into the future.

3. And now the third unfortunate first is to be the first country excluded from the Euro.

Long, long ago, I wrote a piece (for the Guardian*) on how ethics - not economics - was the real sticking point on solving the Grexit Euro crisis...

Well, time has moved on and really now all the facts are in and the answer is that Greece is on the way out of the single currency, as Reuters posted on Sunday 14th June -  bar a theoretically possible change of heart amongst the Finance minsters in Luxembourg on Thursday. But there won't be a change of heart and here's why.

My take (as a philosopher and social scientist)  is very different from what the academic economists like Andrew Farlow even last week insisted was the logical situation.

Yes, the Greeks are victims - but not of the ECB or Germany - of their own splintered and dysfunctional society. 'Austerity' never touched the military budget, at 2.5% one of Europe's highest, and  the wealth of the Greek Orthodox Church remains, well, sacrosanct - the church is exempt normal taxes.

The fact is, that Greece is one of the most unequal societies in Europe, and one of the most corrupt. It has money for the Generals to have new warships, and to pay train drivers on rural routes that in the rest of Europe would long ago be closed down, salaries of $130 000 and retire at 50. It is both very poor and very affluent - with some of the highest rates of second home and luxury car ownership in Europe - indicators harder to falsify. But not entirely!

A few months ago, (per reports) the Greek traffic police caught Michalis Liapis, a former transportation minister, driving his luxury sport utility vehicle through a stop sign in the seaside town of Loutsa outside of Athens.

It turned out that the former 'New Democracy' minister was driving with fake plates and no insurance, characteristic of the tax avoidance endemic in Greece

“I am a pensioner, and I, too, have been affected by the crisis,” he told reporters, prompting Greek papers to print their own estimates of Mr. Liapis’s net worth, which appears substantial and certainly includes owning 20 properties. A mock “Free Liapis” Twitter campaign sprang up, and the former minister was jeered as he came to court in December. But in the West, too many take such self-serving accounts uncritically.

Okay, but wouldn't it be the end of the Euro if the Greeks go bust? Why should it be? The Greeks are tiddlers in this fishpond - a mere Bear Stearns or Northern Rock or Halifax. Crude geopolitics allowed them into the Euro despite not meeting the criteria, it must not try to keep them there.

Update, Thursday 18 June 2015 - the day of the Luxembourg Showdown

There's an old Eastern European joke that gives a profound psychological insight into the Greek mindset. Part of the problem with the interminable Greece-Eurozone negotiations has been that it is Western Europe talking to Eastern Europe - Mars to Venus!

Anyway, here's the joke:

A man receives a visit from his fairy godmother and she says he can have whatever he wishes for. But of course, there's a catch, which is that whatever it is that he wishes for... will be given to his worst enemy two-fold – twice as good! (So if the Greek President wishes for a new car - the German one will have two lovely new cars...)

So what does the man request? Why, that one of his eyes be gouged out.

And here's todays quote from Dimitris Stratoulis, the Greek Social Security Minister, for comparison:

“If we are forced to say the big no the difficulties will last for a few months …. but the consequences will be much worse for Europe.”

UPDATE2! July 10

The new Greek proposals look acceptable. They should do, as they were written by the French using insights from what the Germans thought were confidential discussions between Hollande and Merkel on what would make the next Greek proposal acceptable. Proud Mr Tsipras could not quite bring himself to sign them though, nor Mr Varoufakis to vote for it (citing 'family commitments')...

The battle remains as it ever was, between spendthrift European governments, led by France, and those who make the Euro work - led by Germany. And  the billion euro question for the Eurozone remains not what the proposals say, but the willingness to implement them. That is clearly... nil.

See also:

* http://www.universityworldnews.com/article.php?story=20150630102218579
* http://www.theguardian.com/business/economics-blog/2012/aug/30/economic-madness-eurozone

Picture Post No. 1 : 'Chien derrière camion'

'Because things don’t appear to be the known thing; they aren’t that what they seemed to be neither will they become what they might appear to become.'

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Posted by Tessa den Uyl

Route N10 Skoura-Ouarzazate, December 2014

“The privileged position of one who is behind”

A change of perspective can mean that the way that you look at something can change radically. It can upturn how you actually perceive a reality that -  all of the sudden - appears illogical. Meanings can become twisted yet open up sparkles of hope demanding renewed attention. (Exchanging the direct interpretation given to words, that in their proper nature are ambivalent.)

What this photo gives to me, is not a renewed tradition (where dromedaries have made place here for a truck), but rather, what it communicates about the loss of contemplative thinking.
 
Finding a dog travelling like this, in front of your car, explodes in a moment of bewilderment: the dog resets the ethical aspects innate to wonder. Does the dog hand back to us an ethics of principle that moves beyond tradition? Then, we might say that:

“The ethical home fulfils itself in the space of its non-identification”

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Doublethink 3 - Raising the Dead

Index: 173