Kai Nielsen on Death and the Meaning of Life

In his 1978 paper “Death and the Meaning of Life”[1] Kai Nielsen argues that our lives can be meaningful even if a) death really is the end of us (i.e. total annihilation with no after-life or eventual resurrection) and b) there is no God, and that they can be just as meaningful as if there were a God or our death were not final. In other words, neither death nor the non-existence of God does in any way undermine or diminish our ability to live a meaningful life.

Nielsen admits that he finds it regrettable that he has to die because he would rather go on living forever. However, our having to die is, in his book, not particularly dreadful either. Regretting the fact that we have to die is one thing, but dreading it quite another. Regret is a reasonable reaction to our mortality, while dread and despair are not. The inevitability of our death does, after all, not devalue anything we do now. So instead of uselessly lamenting our mortality and needlessly letting our future death overshadow and effectively ruin our life, we had better face death stoically when it comes and in the meantime make the most of the life we have got. “Death should only be dreadful if one’s life has been a waste.” (154)

Nielsen objects to the (especially among Christians) common view that if we do not in some way survive our body’s death and if there is no God to make sure that “such a life will have a certain character”, “life will be pointless and morality without significance.” (155) Morality, he argues, is real even if there is no God or eternal life. Some things are wrong, plain and simple, we know them to be wrong, and they will be equally wrong in a godless world. “Torturing human beings is vile; exploiting and degrading human beings is through-and-through evil; cruelty to human beings and animals is, morally speaking, unacceptable; and treating one’s promises lightly or being careless about the truth is wrong.” (155) We do not, therefore, need God or immortality “to make sense of our lives as moral beings” (157). Nor do we need God or immortality to have a purpose in life. Without God there may not be a purpose to life or of life, but that does not mean that we cannot have any purpose or purposes in life. Perhaps there is “no plan for the universe or providential ordering of things in accordance with which we must live our lives”, but there will still be things that matter to us: “things worth achieving, doing or having, (…) things that bring joy, understanding, exhilaration or contentment to ourselves or to others” (157). That we cannot have those things forever does not in any way diminish their worth.

God, of course, promises a final redemption and salvation that we all crave but this world hardly ever grants us. The existence of God justifies our hope in the possibility of a better world, and it may well be thought that without God there is no such hope. Nielsen, however, asks us (not give up such hopes but) to pin them instead on our ability to make rational decisions that will eventually benefit the whole of humanity by bringing forth “a truly human society without exploitation and degradation in which all human beings will flourish” (158).

Commentary:

I have no beef with Nielsen’s overall position. Like him, I happen to believe that death (i.e. the death of the individual) is real and final and that there is no God to save us. I am, however, slightly confused by the details of his argument.

First of all, Nielsen seems to be combining a subjectivist account of meaning with an objectivist account of morality. Life is not pointless, he argues, because there are a lot of things we enjoy and value, even though there is no “providential ordering of things according to which we must live our lives”. I take this to mean that life is valuable to us insofar as there are things in it that we value. Life is valuable because there are things we value, but not because the things that we value are objectively valuable. Because if they were objectively valuable, then clearly there would exist some sort of “providential ordering of things according to which we must live our lives”, which Nielsen expressly denies. What he seems to be saying is, therefore, that it is of no consequence that the things we value are not objectively valuable. On the other hand, however, he does seem to endorse an objectivist account of morality when he insists that certain actions are wrong no matter what God (or anyone else for that matter) thinks about them. According to Nielsen, we do not simply believe they are wrong: we know they are, and while we can believe something that is not true, we cannot know something that is not true.

It seems strange, if not downright contradictory, to claim that meaning is (entirely) subjective, but morality objective, especially since Nielsen fails to distinguish clearly between morality and meaning. He seems to assume that a pointless life is a life in which certain things are not really morally wrong, so he insists that even in a godless world those things would continue to be really morally wrong. But can we not admit that certain things are really morally wrong and still feel that life is, all things considered, pretty pointless? Can we not, without contradicting ourselves, hold that certain things are indeed wrong and still think that there is, ultimately, no point in not doing what is really wrong (or anything else, for that matter)? Can we not concede the (experiential?) reality of morality, but still wonder if there is any point in living a moral life?

And what about the connection between the absence of God and death that for Nielsen is apparently so obvious that he does not even bother to explain how exactly they are connected? Nielsen starts his reflections with the presumed evil of death and denies that death is bad enough to justify despair. In his account, death is rather a minor inconvenience, unpleasant perhaps, but of no great consequence. We can just acknowledge its existence and then get on with our lives. Fair enough, I can accept that. What I don’t quite understand is what God has got to do with that. Despite the paper’s opening section and title, the bulk of it is concerned with God’s existence and how we don’t need God for morality or to find purpose in life. Yet we can imagine a world that is both free of God and of death (or at least a pre-programmed necessity to die), as well as a world where God (or some kind of God) exists and we still have to die. There is no logical connection between God and immortality, or death and godlessness, and it would seem wise to treat these as two separate issues. It seems clear to me that showing that we do not need God to live a meaningful life is different from showing that we can live a meaningful life even though we have to die (just as showing that we don’t need God for morality to be real is different from showing that we don’t need God to live a meaningful life).

Finally, religious hope is very different from the secular hope that Nielsen suggests we replace it with. Nielsen assumes that the hope that our belief in God’s existence allows us to entertain has the same object as the hope that is based on trust in humanity’s ability to get their act together and build a better world in this life rather than the next. However, there is a significant difference between those two scenarios. Part of the hope raised by our belief in God’s existence is that we ourselves will experience that future better world. We will be there to enjoy it. In contrast, when we hope that humanity will one day be able to build a perfect world for themselves, we know we will not have any part in it. Instead, we will still be dead.

---

[1] Republished in: The Meaning of Life, ed. E.D. Klemke, New York/ Oxford: Oxford University Press 2000, 153-159.

If you want to stay young forever, try jumping off a roof

In her dystopian novel “The Year of the Flood”, Margaret Atwood describes a place where women periodically go to get their ageing faces and bodies rejuvenated. They go there because they are frightened by the signs of mortality that their flesh exhibits. Yet when they come out, after all those signs have been removed for the moment, they are still frightened because they are already wondering when the whole thing might be happening to them again. “The whole signs-of-mortality thing. The whole thing thing. Nobody likes it, thought Toby – being a body, a thing. Nobody wants to be limited in that way. We’d rather have wings. Even the word flesh has a mushy sound to it.”

We resent being just another thing in the world, with its implications of limitation, lack of autonomy and true agency, passivity, and ultimately destructibility. We’d rather have wings, that is, some means to escape from our basic thingness, our being shackled to the material world, in which everything is subject to change, and everything is bound to perish in the end. Of course there is also a sense in which our bodies, made out of mushy flesh, are not things, a sense in which to be a mere thing actually appears preferable to being a living body. A thing may not be alive, but that also means that it cannot die, and if your fear to die is great enough, then you may prefer not being alive at all.

But perhaps it is not so much death that we fear, but ageing, that is the loss of our youth. “I hope I die before I get old”, Roger Daltrey once sang with The Who, almost fifty years ago now, giving voice to the anti-establishment sentiments of a whole generation, but also to the fear that one day one may end up being just like them, simply by growing up. I never really noticed there was a difference between the fear of death and the fear of ageing, until I read what Atwood wrote next, following the passage quoted above: “If you really want to stay the same age you are now forever and ever, (...) try jumping off the roof: death’s a sure-fire method for stopping time.” Is this just a bad joke, or is there more to it, some keen insight into the nature of our desire to stay young forever? That desire is, after all, (by logical implication) a desire to stop time, and if you can only stop time (for yourself) by dying, then the desire to stay young forever is tantamount to a desire to die. It’s a cleverly concealed death wish.

Unless, of course, eternal youth does not rule out change, so that we could go on changing, gathering experience, co-creating ourselves and the world we live in, without having to age. I don’t think that is possible, though, because it is not only our bodies that age. It is also our minds. To not age one would have to be like Peter Pan, the boy who refused to grow up,  who every night forgets what he has experienced that day and who remains forever untouched by the events in his life, which means that he doesn’t really have a life. And that is precisely why he ultimately represents death (as well as eternal renewal, which cannot occur without death). Atwood is right: eternal youth and death are one and the same, or more precisely: the one can only be gained if you are willing to pay the price of the other.

Temporal Immortality

I just finished writing a chapter for a volume of commentaries on the German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer's masterwork "The World as Will and Representation". My job was to cover the paragraphs 53 to 59, which deal with the nature of ethics (which can only ever be descriptive and never prescriptive), the immutability of character, the ubiquity and unavoidability of suffering, and finally death, or more precisely the unreality of death. I’ve always been fascinated by this latter part of Schopenhauer’s philosophy, and I find myself very much inclined to believe that what Schopenhauer argues here must be true: that we don’t die, that death is not real, that it’s just an illusion.

For Schopenhauer this conclusion follows logically from his metaphysical premises, according to which the world we know and we live in is merely an appearance. What we perceive is not the world as it is, but rather what our cognitive apparatus makes of it. It is a representation. Of what? Of the will, which is the true nature of all things, ourselves included. The world is the way the will appears to itself. If we imagine the will to be looking into a mirror, then the image reflected would be the world. And we are that will, just as everything else is. By distinguishing the will, which is the only really real thing, from its representation, which is a mere shadow, Schopenhauer, drawing very much on Kant’s transcendental philosophy, manages to separate reality from its forms of appearance, which include causality, space, and most importantly, time. So in other words, time is an illusion. But if time is an illusion, then change must also be one. And if change is an illusion, then death is too. We don’t die. It just looks (to others) as if we did.

Now if we had to accept Schopenhauer’s metaphysics and its corollary, that time is not real, to appreciate his argument for what he calls “temporal immortality”, then it would perhaps be of little interest to anyone. It is just too difficult to believe that time does not exist. I doubt that it even makes sense to claim that. However, it seems to me that Schopenhauer’s argument for temporal immortality does not require us to believe in the non-existence of time. It is in fact very complex and draws on many different sources and reflections. Much of it is based on peculiarities of the way we experience life and death. For one thing, although we don’t really, on a theoretical level, doubt that we, too, will one day have to die, we are also, deep down, convinced of our own personal immortality. It is just impossible to imagine that one day we could have ceased to exist, that the world will continue to be, but we will no longer be in it. How can there be a world if we are not there to perceive it? From our perspective it will be as if the world had never existed. It will end when we end. So if the world continues to exist (as we suppose), then we will too.

The main point, though, is this: our individual existence is linked to our consciousness. This particular consciousness can cease to exist, but that is only part of what we are, and perhaps a very superficial part. What makes us alive in the first place is not consciousness, but something deeper and less fleeting: a material urge, a force that pervades physical nature, an élan vital (as the French philosopher Henri Bergson called it) or will to live (as Schopenhauer calls it). This force of nature, this will, will continue to exist when “we” die, and in fact it does already exist in many other forms and ways. This force is active in me, as it is active in you and every other living creature. And to the extent that each of us ultimately is this force, this will to live, we always exist not only in this particular form, which we call our individual self, but also in everything else. When you look into the world with your eyes, perceive it with your senses, live in it with your body and your mind, then I look and perceive and live with you, because you are only another version of myself, just as I am only another version of yourself. Accordingly, when I die I will live on in you, and when you die, you will live on in me. In any case, the presence cannot be lost.

“Since will is the thing in itself, the inner substance of the world, that which is essential to it, while life, the visible world, the phenomenon, is only the mirror of the will, the latter will accompany will as inseparably as its shadow accompanies a body; and if will exists, so too life, the world will exist. To the will for life, life is thus certain, and so long as we are filled with the will for life, we cannot be concerned for our existence, not even at the sight of our death.”

“Above all, we must distinctly recognize that the form pertaining to will’s phenomenon, thus the form of life or reality, is only the present, not future nor past: these exist only in concepts, exist only in the context of cognizance so far as it follows the Principle of Sufficient Ground. No human being has lived in the past, and none will ever live in the future; rather the present alone is the form pertaining to all life, but it is also its sure possession, which can never be torn from it. The present always exists, together with its content; both stand firm, without wavering, like the rainbow on the waterfall. For life is sure and certain for will, and the present for life.”

If you don’t find this whole idea total bollocks, I recommend that you have a look at the original argument, which can be found in both § 54 of the first volume of “The World as Will and Representation” (published in 1819), from which the above quotes were taken, and in chapter 41 of the second volume (published 25 years later, in 1844). My advice would actually be to start with that later exposition because it is more comprehensive and has more the character of an independent essay rather than that of a chapter in a book with an ongoing argument. Also of interest might be a more recent version of the argument developed by Arnold Zuboff in his article “One Self: the Logic of Experience” (Inquiry 33 (1990): 39-68). Zuboff argues, without recourse to Schopenhauer, that your self and my self are in fact the same self, that, based on the logic of experience, there is in fact only one self.  

What Would Your Super Power Be?

The Saturday edition of the British newspaper The Guardian comes with a magazine, the Guardian Weekend, which always contains a standardised interview with some public figure. It is called Questions & Answers. The questions are always the same, except that not all of them are asked each time. Among them are “What is your greatest fear?”, “Who would play you in the film of your life?” and “What is the worst thing anyone’s ever said to you?” The answers are often quite telling and can reveal a lot about the person who gives them. But my favourite question is this one: “What would your super power be?” I’m always disappointed when it is not asked.

Here’s a small selection of the answers that people have given to that question. At the top of the list is “immortality”, just one word, without further explanation. The answer betrays a firm belief in one’s own significance. Death is seen as a personal affront. Interestingly, immortality is the superpower of choice for the singer Tom Jones, the philosopher Martha Nussbaum and the founder of Playboy magazine Hugh Hefner. Who would have thought that those three had so much in common!

Then there are the do-gooders like the German tennis champion Boris Becker: “To make the world a better place.” That’s very good of him, of course, especially since that is something that money can’t buy, even if you’ve got lots and lots of it. Or is it? Even more absurd is the former British prime minister Gordon Browne’s answer: “Magic medicine. I’d love to be able to fix things for the sick and injured. The NHS is the closest thing to it – that’s why I’m such a passionate advocate of our system and its doctors and nurses.” I guess he can’t help himself.

In comparison the current British leaders David Cameron and his side-kick Nick Clegg appear refreshingly honest and surprisingly unanimous when it comes to their secret dreams. Cameron: “Teleporting – it would save a lot of travel time.” Clegg: “Easy. Teleporting.” Did they actually agree on saying that? What an interesting mixture of boyish romanticism (Beam me up, Scotty), pragmatism, and professionalism, which expresses perfectly both their character and the role they’ve chosen to play.

More sinister dreams are voiced by Danny DeVito (“To have people do things the way I want.”) and Lisa Marie Presley (“I’d be a witch.”), and more realistic and modest ones by an ageing Roger Moore (“Being able to get out of a chair without clicking knees or an aching back.”) and the British actor and political activist Tony Robinson who, in days of yore, brilliantly portrayed Rowan Atkinson’s servant Baldrick in Blackadder (“Having to wee only once a day.”)

Then there are the cultured ones like the conductor Daniel Barenboim (“To travel in time – in order to spend a day with Mozart.”) and those who are – how shall I put it? - more at home in the flesh like the late singer Amy Winehouse (“Super sexuality.”)

Very popular is also yet another form of easy locomotion. Bruce Willis: “Flying.” Cuba Gooding Jr.: “I dream about flying.” And, last but not least, my absolute favourite, with an unbeatable dry irony, Margaret Atwood: “The flying around thing. With a cape.”

Murakami on Death and Evolution

I'm currently reading Haruki Murakami's magnificent The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, which I hadn't read before. As usual, Murakami's protagonists are busy trying to figure out, mostly in vain, what is actually going on in a world that is both banal and familiar, and at the same time utterly mysterious and incomprehensible. Very much like the real world actually, the world that we all inhabit and that we're all trying to make sense of in one way or another, without being very good at it.

Chapter 10 of the Wind-Up Bird Chronicle is titled "May Kasahara on Death and Evolution". In this chapter, a 16-year old girl, which the main protagonist has befriended, reflects on the benefits of death, or more precisely the knowledge of one's own mortality. Here is what she says:

"If people lived for ever - if they never got any older - if they could just go on living in this world, never dying, always healthy - do you think they'd bother to think hard about things, the way we're doing now? I mean, we think about just about everything, more or less - philosophy, psychology, logic. Religion. Literature. I think, if there were no such thing as death, that complicated thoughts and ideas like that would never come into the world. (...) people have to think seriously about what it means for them to be alive here and now because they know they're going to die sometime. Right? Who would think about what it means to be alive if they were just going to go on living for ever? Why would they bother? Or even if they should bother, they'd probably just reckon, 'Oh, well, I've got plenty of time for that. I'll think about it later.' But we can't wait till later. We've got to think about it right this second. I might get run over by a truck tomorrow afternoon. (...) Nobody knows what's going to happen. So we need death to make us evolve. That's what I think. Death is this huge, bright thing, and the bigger and brighter it is, the more we have to drive ourselves crazy thinking about things."

There seem to be two arguments here, both directed against the desirability of a deathless existence and eternal youth. The one has to do with meaning. It is suggested that the unexamined life is not worth living and that we would have no reason to examine our lives if we didn't know that our lives will end sooner or later, and quite likely sooner than later. Without the certainty of death, our lives would be meaningless because there cannot be any meaningful life without a thorough reflection on its meaning. The second argument is about human development and progress. Without death we wouldn't bother to think about ourselves and our place in the world and if we didn't do that we would never have developed the rich intellectual culture that we are currently enjoying.

If that is correct, then the concerted efforts to find a way to halt and reverse the human ageing process and thus to conquer death (or at least the necessity of dying) - that insatiable, all-devouring evil dragon of the transhumanists - will, if successful, paradoxically lead to the end of all science and philosophy, and with it, of all human progress.

Ray Bradbury on Life and Death

I've been reading The Stories of Ray Bradbury lately, published in Everyman's Library, and I'm almost through. They make wonderful bedtime reading, and in several of them you can discover a whole philosophy of life. One of the stories that I liked most is called "The Leave-Taking". It is very short and not really much of a story at all. What happens is that an old woman dies. One day she decides that enough is enough and she lies down and stops living. Not that her life is bad in any way. She lives with her extended family, seems to be well-loved and cared-for, and loving and caring herself. She has had a good life, and is still having one. But that does not cause her to cling to her life as long as possible, as we might expect. On the contrary. It is the reason why she finds it easy to go. She has seen everything worth seeing, done everything worth doing, and it's simply time to go:

"Now it was as if a huge sum in arithmetic were finally drawing to an end. She had stuffed turkeys, chickens, squabs, gentlemen, and boys. She had washed ceilings, walls, invalids, and children. She had laid linoleum, repaired bicycles, wound clocks, stoked furnaces, swabbed iodine on ten thousand grievous wounds. Her hands had flown all around about and down, gentling this, holding that, throwing baseballs, swinging bright croquet mallets, seeding black earth, or fixing covers over dumplings, ragouts, and children wildly strewn by slumber. She had pulled down shades, pinched out candles, turned switches, and - grown old. Looking back on thirty billion of things started, carried, finished and done, it all summed up, totaled out; the last decimal was placed, the final zero swung slowly into line. Now, chalk in hand, she stood back from life a silent hour before reaching for the eraser."

When her decision to die becomes known to the family, her grandchildren try to change her mind - they need her, will miss her, don't want to be without her - she insists that there's nothing to be sad about. It's like watching too many movies in a row: "when the time comes that the same cowboys are shooting the same Indians on the same mountaintop, then it's best to fold back the seat and head for the door, with no regrets and no walking backward up the aisle. So, I'm leaving while I'm still happy and still entertained." And anyway, she says, she's not really leaving. It's only a small and insignificant part of her that will disappear. As we don't mourn a clipped fingernail, we shouldn't mourn the passing of a person, because a person is also only a part of a larger whole, which persists even when that particular person is gone, just like the body lives on when it loses some of its cells to be replaced by others. "Important thing is not the me that's lying here, but the me that's sitting on the edge of the bed looking back at me, and the me that's downstairs cooking supper, or out in the garage under the car, or in the library reading. All the new parts, they count. I'm not really dying today. No person ever died that had a family." It seems to me, though, that even without a family, without children, we can see our individual selves as being parts of a greater, more encompassing self, which lives on and in which we live on even when "we" are dead. The self is not fixed. It doesn't have clearly defined boundaries. It depends on where I see myself ending. I can see myself in you, can identify myself with the whole human community (or even the community of living beings). I can feel one with the universe, and then there's no reason to fear my own death because I will live on in others.

Bradbury's story ends with the death of the old woman, but her death is like a home-coming. It is described as if life had been a brief interruption from something else, something at least equally good: "A long time back, she thought, I dreamed a dream, and was enjoying it so much when someone wakened me, and that was the day when I was born." Now she is trying to pick up the thread of that dream, and then she finds it. "'It's all right,' whispered Great-grandma, as the dream floated her. 'Like everything else in this life, it's fitting.'" And with this glorious trust in the fittingness of all things, of life and death, the story ends.