Epicurus, Epictetus, Christ
Answers to some questions (and one apology!) for Kaltrosomos:
Q: (quoting me) "In other words, a philosophy or world view which does not contain a metaphysical reason to support the idea of Natural Reason does not have a necessary reason or justification to propose that we should feel pain when others feel pain." What do you mean here by a ‘metaphysical reason’, and what is meant by "Natural Reason" as opposed to just Reason? Do you mean by ‘metaphysical reason’ an assumed axiom or axioms which are the basis of the rest of a man’s philosophy?
A: A metaphysical reason, in this context, means a reason supported by metaphysics, which is the study of the preconditions of other sciences.
For example, the belief that every effect comes from a cause is not a conclusions of physics; it is an axiom of physics but a conclusion of metaphysics. Physics properly so called cannot take place without it. Metaphysics can also be called the study of universals rather than particulars. Whether we live in a universe where the speed of light is absolute or relative is a matter of fact, determined by looking at the facts, and is a question of physics; whether or not all possible universes admit of the law of cause and effect is a question of metaphysics.
In the same way that the study of physics has axioms without which it cannot proceed, the study of ethics has also.
One such axiom of ethics is the principle of the categorical imperative: which says, in effect, that moral principles cannot be arbitrary, applying to some people and situations and not to others. Another way of saying this is the idea mentioned above: that all beings capable of moral reasoning must sympathize with the pain and suffering of all other beings capable of moral reasoning. Without this principle, call it the Golden Rule, there is no moral reasoning. The Golden Rule that one should do as you would be done by means nothing if you act if you should have no empathy for your victims: “Well, if I were rich, I wouldn’t mind if someone stole from me! Well, if I were that old and decrepit, I would not mind if someone killed me! It’d put me out of my misery, it would!”
“Natural Reason” here is a term of art: the phrase refers to those universal moral precepts all men know or should know in their consciences, as distinguished from moral precepts known only by divine revelation. That murder is wrong, all men naturally know or should know, even the painted savages of Patagonia who worship Setebos. That Sunday is the Sabbath no man knows until Moses on Oreb receives this information as Word of God.
My claim here is that any so-called moral code that does not have a metaphysical axiom to underpin the concept of Natural Reason, that is, the universality of innate moral precepts, therefore cannot support the conclusion that we should empathize with the pain of those we wrong. This for two reasons: first, Natural Law without an axiom to support it is merely an arbitrary assertion, and in logic, arbitrary assertions can be arbitrarily denied; second, there is no Golden Rule without a principle of Categorical Imperative, and there is no Categorical Imperative without Natural Law.
Q: (quoting me) "Wrong or not, for the purposes of my argument, all I need is to ask you to agree it is unsatisfactory for a human to be suicidal." I agree. Again I concede a point– namely that men desire to keep living. I do not know whether or not this desire stays the same towards the end of life, however.
A: My argument is that the human condition itself is intolerable: if we live in a world where all men perish and pass into nothingness, this is not something we should tolerate if we had a choice. Likewise, if we lived in a world were all men in their twilight years lost their will to live, turned suicidal, or adopted a stoical indifference to life or death, this is again not something we should tolerate if we had a choice.
Oblivion is not good for human beings. The desire for self-obliteration is not a part of healthy human psychology—and one would need to take pleasure from death in order to be both an Epicurean and mortal. The resignation to self-obliteration is not a part of healthy human psychology—and one would need to be indifferent and resigned to death in order to be both Stoic and mortal. To see an Epicurean laughing at a funeral and wearing a party hat would be a repugnant sign; to see a Stoic as stony-faced an indifferent at a funeral as at a wedding or christening would be likewise repugnant.
If nothing else, regarding life as a temporary phenomenon in which I personally have only a limited stake makes moral reasoning beyond my lifespan problematical. There is many a man who thinks it atrocious for a polluter, let us say, to have no concern for problems outlasting his lifespan, but who would be baffled to explain why any human should take concern for anything to outlast the period of the extinction of the human race. We think a man selfish or imprudent for not leaving a will, but we might think it odd to be concerned with the wellbeing of the race of intelligent beetles destined to replace mankind once we humans have gone the way of the dinosaurs: but the logic of the two situations is the same, assuming death is oblivion. If death is merely the threshold to the settling of accounts on Judgment Day, the moral calculation is different; and, I would argue, it is a moral calculation more in keeping with human norms and simple decency.
If death is oblivion, then there is nothing wrong with a suicide-bomber. The bomber is beyond all retribution, and indeed does not exist in any way. If there is Judgment Day, however, then there is no easy escape from justice merely by self-destruction.
My argument is not that some human beings are not suicidal. My argument is that, in order to have a realistic emotional attitude toward the human condition, one would have to be suicidal, or, at least, stoically indifferent to life and death. These attitudes are unfit for normal human psychology or normal human existence: one ought not to be suicidal. A world where the rational thing is to be suicidal is intolerable. We tolerate it only because we have no choice: if we had a choice, we would and should choose something better.
Q: (quoting me) "I can only assume you are young and in good health and have no dead loved ones and have no sympathy for the suffering of your fellow man—and odd thing indeed, considering that you earlier claimed that sympathy for suffering was nigh universal."
You know what they say about assuming, don’t you? I don’t believe I have assumed any questionable traits in you, so could you please give me the same courtesy? Though I am young and in good health, I have dead loved ones whose death hurt me deeply. I know of others in my family who are dear to me but not long for this world. To suggest I have no sympathy for them or anyone else is insulting. I’m human just like you.
A: My sincere apologies. I mean no disrespect; I was merely employing a rhetorical shorthand. I do not mean you personally are necessarily lacking in sympathy for the dead: I merely mean that to the degree that you fail to live up to a hedonistic philosophy, and to that degree only, you are human, have human compassion, and know human sorrows.
Your reply confirms what my awkwardly-worded comment really means. If it is an intrinsic part of the human condition that you and I and everyone either has or will suffer this same pain and loss, then you know firsthand that to be in this condition is intolerable. You do not tolerate it; you grieve. Grieving is not tolerating. Grieving is to cry out against it.
Let me be blunt: a hedonist or an epicurean seeks to maximize the available pleasure offered him by his circumstances. But if he is by the graveside of a loved one, there is no available pleasure offered him.
More than this: his behavior would be shocking or immoral or insane if he attempted to flee from the mourning the situation calls far, but instead sought to quench his sorrow in wine, women, and song, or by fixing his mind on pleasant things, and going to a ball game or dancehall instead of to the funeral.
A person can be stoically resigned to the death of a loved one, because he has no choice, and because it is rational to be resigned to the inevitable. But no sane man enjoys or rejoices in it. It is not something we would tolerate if we could avoid it. It is intolerable. Death and loss and suffering is not something a human soul accepts, or should accept, nonchalantly.
Q: "Seriously; this is wishful thinking on your part. In reality, there is nothing but pleasure and pain after the death: everlasting joy of paradise or the endless pain of hellfire." And your thinking isn’t wishful too?
A: Not in my case. If my wishes were consulted, I would have preferred an afterlife somewhat more pagan, maybe with houri to caress, or Einheinjahr to battle, and I would prefer to be in far less danger of hellfire. If I were designing the universe, perhaps some system of graduated reincarnation would be more to my liking.
Q: Have you been there and come back? If you have not been to the other side, how do you know what is there?
A: Me, personally? Well, I did actually Christ in a vision, and He spoke to me. So either I am insane or I talked with a dead man. If I am insane, my mind is not what I think it is; if I am sane, the world is not what you think it is.
I know what lies on the far side of death the same way you know what lies on the far side of the moon: I place faith in the reports of those who have been there and returned and spoke of what they saw.
In any case, this line of questioning is abortive. I could ask you with equal logic if you have ever been dead? If not, how do you know death is an oblivion destined to last forever?
I hope no one will think that the skeptic speaks from experience when he proposes that death is oblivion. Obviously this is the one field where mortals cannot speak from personal experience.
Q: Perhaps there is something on the other side, but I have seen little evidence of that to date. I’m willing to stay agnostic on the ultimate question until new information comes my way. Until then, I’ll do the best I can with what I have.
A: This is a prudent and cautious attitude, and I salute you for it. Let me suggest a place to start: http://www.near-death.com/evidence.html. This website recites a large number of accounts by people who claimed they experienced something while medically dead. The similarity between experiences is hard to explain if we restrict ourselves artificially to materialistic explanations.
Q: (quoting me) "One cannot argue that child-murder is bad merely because it causes pain, but also argue that painless child-murder is bad." I concede this point, so long as the child’s death is really painless. Was no pain felt by the parents, or others aware of the death?
A: Imagine a baby born while the mother was unconscious. The mother falls from unconsciousness into death. The baby, unable to nurse or care for itself, dies shortly after. Let us further suppose that both mother and child are overcome by chemical fumes that are odorless. Let us further suppose the pregnancy was unknown even to the father, who in any case felt no love for the baby and no loss at its demise. The baby, had it lived, would have been the next Beethoven or Einstein. Now it is dead.
I would say the death of this baby is a bad thing, even if the baby itself is never in any pain caused by the gas that kills it.
Let us make the hypothetical more pointed: suppose the only person aware of the death is an enemy, or a rival for a coveted inheritance, who, far from being sad, is delighted when he finds mother and child are dead, and dances a merry jig. To judge the act merely by the pleasure it causes, this death is positive.
The pleasure of an enemy, in this case, we should abhor. Clearly there is something more than the mere volume pleasure we must take into account when judging good and evil. The smiles of delight that flower over the faces of Nazi prison guards when one snatches a baby from the arms of a young mother and dashes its brains out against a stone wall is simply not the same as the smile of that mother when the babe was first born. Pleasure mixed with hate is sadism; pleasure without love is selfish; only pleasure mingled with love is divine.
Q: "I am saying it is an objective fact that the human condition is intolerable." The human condition can’t be that bad. Otherwise our ancestors wouldn’t have bothered to reproduce, and we wouldn’t be having this discussion. Clearly at least *some* people find it tolerable.
A: First, the condition in which most people find themselves includes the comfort and hope of religion. It is not ‘the human condition’ as we have here described it, the suffering of life followed by oblivion.
Second, you seem to assume that people reproduce only in situations they find tolerable. It seems to me that most men put aside the knowledge that they are mortal on a daily basis, and only confront it on the battlefield or the deathbed. But if you are doomed to die whether you are celibate or fertile, one choice over the other has no bearing on whether you prefer to be mortal.
Let us not be confused about the word I am using. Tolerate means:
1. to allow the existence, presence, practice, or act of without prohibition or hindrance; permit.
2. to endure without repugnance.
Mortality is something we endure because we must, but not "without repugnance". We cannot prohibit death, as this is beyond human power. (I suppose we hinder death where and when we can, and hold it to be immoral not to hinder it where we could. We consider a well-fed man who looks upon a starving child with bemused nonchalance to be a monster.) The human condition is neither something we allow, nor something we endure without repugnance. We do not tolerate it. It is intolerable.
When I say that the human condition is intolerable, I am not saying that men do not have seasons of happiness, the satisfaction of building a house or healing a patient, or chess games, mugs of rum, wild orgies with busty harlots, the splendor of parades of purple-garbed conquerors, the thrill of the chase when the hounds run, the satisfaction of a well-kept garden when the flowers bloom, a fire when its cold or green shade when its hot, a night at the opera, a day at Disneyland, or the taste of a mutton lettuce and tomato sandwich when the mutton is is nice and lean and the tomato is ripe and perky. I am not saying men do not enjoy pleasures both noble and base, sacred and profane. I do not mean men do not woo and wed, and delight in their children. I am not saying life is bad.
I am saying those days of joy are not the sum of the human condition. To either side of the mountains of temporary happiness are valleys and chasms and pits where no sunlight comes. Father Time is not your friend, and scythe he carries cuts down all human things, and delivers them at harvest tide to a darker figure who grins and who also carries a scythe.
Q: "No one would select mortal suffering over immortal bliss." I’m not so sure about this. Immortal bliss, it seems to me, is no different from death in practical terms. Both are a static state. When you have perfection, you will not change. You will be frozen in your perfect state. With perfection there will be no need to move, to think, to laugh, to love, or to do anything else.
A: This is a facetious argument. We are not talking about opium addicts in stupor, overcome by soporific euphoria, supine in a ditch. The experience of religious ecstasy (and I speak from personal experience) neither numbs the faculties nor suspends the operations of the mind.
Perfection here bears only a superficial resemblance to one way we have of describing death, an inaccurate way. We describe death as an endless and unchanging condition. Actually, it is nothing of the sort: the dead man does not endure death forever because he does not endure anything forever. He is not. He is in non-existence. Now, in our language, being “in non-existence” sounds like being "in Cleveland, Ohio" — as if the person were in a place or condition. But oblivion is not literally a place or literally a condition.
To say that unending happiness and unending life must be the same as death because death is unending would be a play on words.
To say life is the same as death is a mere contradiction in terms. If that life were free from ennui and physical pain, toothaches and backaches, would not change this If that life were twice or thrice or a thousandfold the span of normal life would not change this.A life endlessly longer than the span of normal life, filled with pleasure and free of pain, is the perfect opposite of death in every way.
To assume that happy people do not move or act or think or whatever is not an assumption I would grant. I have known happy people to be more active and energetic, to laugh louder and longer, and to do more, than the morose.
The argument appears tacitly to assume that only the stimulus of pain moves a man to do anything. If we were meat machines whose only battery and gasoline were pain and fear of pain, perhaps removing pain would shut down our machine operations. We are immortal spirits dwelling for a breath of time in bodies of flesh: love is our engine. Love neither wearies us nor wears out, and there is always more to do, more to learn, more joy to give, when you are a man in love.
If you restricted your comments to the passive Nirvana of the Orientals, you might have some sort of argument, but the Christian religion promises the resurrection in perfected flesh for the faithful. The Christians are promised a new heaven and a new earth, not an opiate slumber. There is no reason to assume there will be no gardens to tend in paradise.
Q: Of course, if immortal bliss is not perfection but only a constant seeking after it, we come to an interesting situation. On earth we speak of a hedonistic treadmill. Perhaps in heaven there will be a Heavenly Treadmill, a constant seeking after a perfection you can never quite attain. I don’t see why that is any better than the hedonistic treadmill. No matter how much heavenly bliss you might get, you will keep being disappointed and search for more.
A: Your description does not even match the way ordinary people on Earth conduct themselves. You talk as if a genii banished all toothaches from the human world forever, we would all suddenly slump in whatever spot we’d been standing, like marionettes with our strings cut, having no reason to think or move, until and unless we developed a backache or a hunger pang.
No organism above the level of primitive microscopic life can be described as a hedonistic treadmill. The first thing a man who experiences true joy does, is he wants to share it. It moves him to greater action.
Joy is not the same as non-being, and happiness is not the same as death. Let us not equate two opposite things.
About John C Wright
John C. Wright is a practicing philosopher, a retired attorney, newspaperman, and newspaper editor, and a published author of science fiction. Once a Houyhnhnm, he was expelled from the august ranks of purely rational beings when he fell in love; but retains an honorary title.
