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.  

Morality and Religion

Can one be moral without believing in God or at least in something, some unknown power that gives permanent significance to what we do? It sure seems one can be a good person without any such belief, somebody who is a good neighbour who doesn't lie to you or try to hurt you and who behaves decently. Someone who, by and large, does the right thing. Yet can one actually believe that actions are good or bad in themselves or that it really matters what we do and what we don't do without some kind of faith? If there is no God, just an unfeeling universe, if there's nothing and nobody that cares what we do, so that in the long run it doesn't make any difference what we do or don't do because it will all go to hell anyway (humanity will go extinct, or the sun will explode, or something else will happen that will destroy all traces of our existence), then it seems pointless to try to do the right thing. Because there is no right thing, and because no matter what we do, the result will always be the same: we are dead, and everyone else is too. All in vain. In order to be moral, deliberately moral, and not just accidentally so, we need to believe that it matters what we do, that it makes a difference, not just now and in relation to our present, transient interests and concerns, but absolutely. That there are more important things than our own existence and well-being. But what could there be more important than that if there are no permanent achievements, nothing that might actually change the course of the world?

I'm an atheist, but I share some of the intuitions that seem to inform the faith of religious people. I don't believe in God, but I do believe that things matter, and I'm trying to understand how that is possible and what it means. That is the reason why I'm currently organising, in collaboration with the theologian Nigel Biggar, a conference in Oxford on the question whether morality needs religion. The conference will take place at the MCDONALD CENTRE FOR THEOLOGY, ETHICS & PUBLIC LIFE and will run from 10.30am on 16 May to 1.00pm on 17 May. The cost is £50 (£30 for students),  including lunch. There will be an optional dinner in the Great Hall on Thursday evening. Limited space available. If you want to attend the conference or simply find out more about it, here's a link to the respective website: www.mcdonaldcentre.org.uk

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.”

Guilty of Being Human

Are we responsible for the crimes that our ancestors committed? Are Germans who were born after World War II responsible for the holocaust, the British living today for the atrocities of British colonialism, and young white Americans for pre-civil war African-American slavery? We are probably inclined to deny any responsibility in these cases. Why, after all, should we think ourselves responsible for what our ancestors did? It is not us who did those things. It is them. We did not participate, and in fact we strongly object to what they did. But what if we benefited from those crimes? Would that change anything? If yes, why exactly? Or what if the actual perpetrator of the crime in question were not some long-dead fellow countrymen, but one’s own father or grandfather? Would we in that case feel, and be, more responsible? What if the actions that we consider shameful or evil did not occur in our country’s past, but in the present? When Israeli troops kill Palestinian children, are all Israelis responsible, only those who support and approve of those actions, or only those who actively participate in the decision or the act? (Or none, because it’s all completely justified.)

Say someone is accused of a crime that they committed when they were younger. They admit to the crime, but deny that it was them who committed it, on the grounds that they are “a different person now” and that you cannot hold them responsible for what their younger self did. I can distance myself from my own past just as I can distance myself from my country’s past (or present). Perhaps it’s not quite as easy, but it’s possible. It is not in any way irrational or absurd not to acknowledge my own past, to refuse to own it. It is simply a question of how we want to define ourselves, with whom and with what we identify. But for that very same reason I can also say, yes, that was me, and yes, those people were my people. I can define (or find) myself as one of them and them as a part of me. Germans did this. I am German. Therefore I did this. In itself the logic may be fallacious, but it is not fallacious in the moral context. Responsibility must always be owned before it exists and there are no natural or logical limits to what we can own.

I was recently struck by a remark that Primo Levi makes in his book The Periodic Table. It is a passage in which he tells us how he felt after being rescued from the concentration camp: “But I had returned from captivity three months before and was living badly. The things I had seen and suffered were burning inside of me; I felt closer to the dead than to the living, and felt guilty at being a man, because men had built Auschwitz, and Auschwitz had gulped down millions of human beings, and many of my friends, and a woman who was dear to my heart.”

I find this remarkable because it is the victim who here identifies with the perpetrator. Levi is ashamed for being a human in a world in which humans do such terrible things to people like him. This is the greatest possible extension of responsibility, the most generous owning of responsibility. Humans did this. I am human. I did this. Looking at things that way certainly requires an unusual ethical commitment, but it is not absurd. The underlying logic may even be said to have its roots in a metaphysical insight: that the appearance of individual existence, of an existential separation between things, and, perhaps more importantly, between people, is merely an illusion, that the true nature of things is in a fact captured in the Tat twam asi of the Upanishads, in the realisation that “this is you”.

Gratuitous Violence in Tarantino and Homer

A couple of weeks ago I went to watch Quentin Tarantino’s new film, Django Unchained, and I must say I thoroughly enjoyed it. It was fun. But of course even while watching it I was wondering whether I really should be enjoying myself, whether I should not rather be disgusted and appalled by the sheer violence of the spectacle. People die by the score here, often in a rather gruesome manner, blood is splattering, and there is so much of it coming out of the bodies of the slaughtered that in one memorable scene the walls of a mansion are entirely covered with it. At the same time, perhaps because it was so exaggerated, so hyper-realistic, it was hard to take the violence seriously as violence. It was more like a Manga comic strip, a carefully choreographed dance sequence, a symphony in blood.

Accordingly, the people mutilated and killed did not come across as real people, but as actors, or dancers, playing their part in an orchestrated whole. Their death did not matter because they were never really alive in the first place. That is not to say that the acting was in any way bad, on the contrary. Christoph Waltz as Django’s bounty-hunting companion, Leonardo DiCaprio as the polished, but brutal plantation owner Calvin Candie, and Samuel Jackson as senior house slave Stephen were all superb. So were the dialogues. But it was all very much, and deliberately so, staged. The protagonists were more like characters in a play, a medieval mystery play perhaps, or even more an ancient tragedy where the roles were never freely chosen, but preordained by fate or the Gods. The story itself is of classic simplicity: a man has been treated unjustly and sets out to seek revenge and to find and win back the woman he loves and who has been taken away from him. And in order to get there he literally wades through seas of blood. This is the stuff of myths: injustice, revenge, love and death; the fight between good and evil. It’s basic stuff, resonating with the core of our being.

Of course, the whole thing is also very funny, which is exactly what makes it credible as a modern reinvention of ancient myths. The all-pervading humour saves it from becoming too pretentious. But still, do we really need so much graphic violence? Several critics have complained about the “gratuitous violence” that seems so central to Tarantino’s work, and many are worried that by making violence seem fun it might inspire actual acts of violence. I don’t know whether those worries are justified. Personally, I have no interest in hurting anyone, and I can honestly say that after watching almost three hours of Tarantino I didn’t feel any more inclined to shoot people or harm them in any other way or to find it funny when this happens in real life. But it may have a different effect on others.

I’m a bit puzzled, though, about the accusation of “gratuitous violence”, which suggests that there is also violence that is perfectly all right to show, or a way of showing it that is perfectly all right or at least acceptable. Gratuitous violence, presumably, is (depicted) violence that doesn’t serve any useful or good purpose, which seems to imply that as long as violence is useful it is fine. Of course the assumption may well be that the only useful or good violence is one that leaves no doubt that violence is a bad thing. The only acceptable violence would then be violence that teaches us to be non-violent. All other uses of violence would then be “gratuitous”. But what if there were no useful violence? What if all violence were inherently gratuitous, senseless, ultimately serving no purpose but its own? Could we in that case not learn about the true nature of violence through a depiction of gratuitous violence?

Compare Tarantino to Homer. Most of the Iliad consists in a description of violence. Limbs and heads are cut off, over and over again, people are being killed in all sorts of ways and by their hundreds, without pity or remorse, the bodies of the slain are torn apart by dogs, the suffering of the enemy sneered at. Compared to Achilles, Django is a gentle philantrophist. By today’s standards, Homer’s heroes were monsters. And the violence in Homer is in no way less gratuitous than Tarantino’s. Its depiction was not intended to turn readers into pacifists. It was meant to entertain, and to arouse our emotions. Should Homer be forbidden? Is Homer dangerous? Or was he when he was still read or heard? What exactly is the difference between Homer and Tarantino?  

Cormac McCarthy Buries a World

Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, published in 2006, is a bleak tale about a father and his son trying to survive in a post-apocalyptic America. Only a few humans are left, and most of them would eat you alive if they got the slightest chance. No animals, no living plants, at least none that one could live on, all dust and ashes, empty and hopeless, a bit like the world that the traveller in H.G. Wells’s The Time Machine encounters when he travels on to the far future when humanity has disappeared from the planet. We don’t get any explanation for why the world has become that way; it just has. And McCarthy makes it pretty clear that there really is no hope left, nothing to live for. The world is a literally god-forsaken place and is quickly grinding to a halt. “The frailty of everything revealed at last.” The few people left are not survivors, because there is no world left for them to live in. Instead, they are the walking dead. But despite this utter hopelessness, and without knowing why, the man carries on, trying to protect his son, to keep him alive and to keep him human. Still, in the end he dies, because die he must, and his son lives on, for a while, having found new protectors in a man and a woman who take him under their wing. But of course the world is still the same empty place, so it seems only a matter of time before they too must succumb to the hostile world that can no longer be a home to them.

The strange thing about this story is that although the world is ending and there really is nothing left to hope for, the main protagonist, the unnamed man, stubbornly, almost defiantly, keeps on protecting his son, pushing him forward to a non-existing future. His actions betray a hope that persists against all hope, a hope that cannot be extinguished, not even by the greatest despair. And desperate he certainly is, cursing the God that has let this happen. “He raised his face to the paling day. Are you there? he whispered. Will I see you at last? Have you a neck by which to throttle you? Have you a heart? Damn you eternally have you a soul? Oh God, he whispered. Oh God.” But God doesn’t answer. He, too, has left, has abandoned his creation. Or perhaps he has never been there in the first place. Perhaps it has always been an illusion, the crazy idea that the universe has eyes and ears to see and listen to our pain and sorrows and, somewhere, somehow, a compassionate heart to feel for us and with us. Perhaps the world has revealed its true nature at last.

“He walked out in the gray light and stood and he saw for a brief moment the absolute truth of the world. The cold relentless circling of the intestate earth. Darkness implacable. The blind dogs of the sun in their running. The crushing black vacuum of the universe. And somewhere two hunted animals trembling like groundfoxes in their cover. Borrowed time and borrowed world and borrowed eyes with which to sorrow it.”

The revealed emptiness is almost unbearable. “There were few nights lying in the dark that he did not envy the dead.” So why carry on? Why not die with the rest of the world? Maybe because there is still some beauty left, which appears even more precious, far more precious, when it is in danger of vanishing forever, when it has become the rarest thing imaginable. Beauty in the human heart that loves, and beauty in the human form that is being loved.

“No list of things to be done. The day providential itself. The hour. There is no later. This is later. All things of grace and beauty such that one holds them to one’s heart have a common provenance in pain. Their birth in grief and ashes. So, he whispered to the sleeping boy. I have you.”

“There were times when he sat watching the boy sleep that he would begin to sob uncontrollably but it wasn’t about death. He wasn’t sure what it was about but he thought it was about beauty or about goodness. Things that he’d no longer any way to think about at all.”

The man tells the boy that they are the good guys and that they “carry the fire”. It seems important to the boy. What fire? The fire of humanity. The fire of what is, or ever was, good and true and beautiful in the world. This fire is also the breath of God. There is even a suggestion, on the very last page of the book, that the fire will always be there. Before his father dies he tells the boy that even when he will be dead the boy could still talk to him. But the woman who then finds him tells him about God, so he tries to “talk to God but the best thing was to talk to his father and he did talk to him and he didn’t forget. The woman said that was all right. She said that the breath of God was his breath yet though it pass from man to man through all time.”

However, the very last paragraph once again emphasises the impossibility to turn things around, to repair what cannot be repaired. That once things are lost, things that ought to be precious to us, they cannot be retrieved. Once they are lost, they are lost forever. And we are reminded of the beauty of this world and how important it is to take good care of it, so that it does not go away and leaves us behind in an empty world. We, not God, are this beauty’s guardians.

“Once there were brook trout in the streams in the mountains. You could see them standing in the amber current where white edges of their fins wimpled softly in the flow. They smelled of moss in your hand. Polished and muscular and torsional. On their backs were vermiculate patterns that were maps of the world in its becoming. Maps and mazes. Of a thing which could not be put back. Not be made right again. In the deep glens where they lived all things were older than man and they hummed of mystery.”

Ishiguro on Life's Turning Points

Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day, which was first published in 1989, was recently reissued as an Everyman’s Library Contemporary Classic, which prompted me to read it. I had never done so before, just watched, several times I believe, the film with Anthony Hopkins as Mr Stevens, the butler who wastes his life away in an at first unthinking and then increasingly desperate attempt to uphold an idea of dignity that even he himself cannot help realising is ultimately a mere excuse for not engaging with other people and with what is going on in the world. It is a kind of professional autism, and the considerable pride that Stevens seems to take in it, barely conceals the emptiness of a life that is spent entirely in the service of another, in complete identification with a particular role, which is constantly worn like a mask or camouflage. Emma Thompson played the housekeeper Miss Kent and the woman who might have loved him if he had only managed to open up a bit, to show some human feeling. But he never does, and then it’s too late, she leaves and never comes back. He had his chance, his one chance of redemption, of becoming an active player in the world instead of merely watching it from the sidelines, and he missed it. It’s a thoroughly depressing story of a failed life.   

The story is being told by Stevens himself. As a narrator he is clearly unreliable, his memory distorted not only by the passage of time, but also by his need to think good of himself, to see his past actions as justified and his life as meaningful. However, he is not entirely blind to the fact that some of his choices (though as a reader one never quite feels that he ever does have a real choice) eventually led to consequences that, if he had been aware of them, he would have rather wished to avoid. But the trouble is, and that is a problem not only for Stevens, but for all of us, that we don’t always know which of all the many things that we do will turn our lives in a direction that we might later find impossible to reverse. Only in retrospect do we realise that an action or event that at the time seemed rather insignificant, just a little thing really, actually had huge repercussions and markedly shaped our fate. In the novel, Stevens comes to the conclusion that one of the major turning points in his life came when he, yet again, rebuked the housekeeper Miss Kent for a minor oversight. He doesn’t really understand what exactly happened that day and why it should have had the consequence it did have, but he is acutely aware that it was the point when she slipped out of his reach for good. He wonders briefly what would have happened if he had acted differently, but then quickly shies away from dwelling too much on the matter:

“But what is the sense in forever speculating what might have happened had such and such a moment turned out differently? One could presumably drive oneself to distraction in this way. In any case, while it is all very well to talk of ‘turning points’, one can surely only recognize such moments in retrospect. Naturally, when one looks back to such instances today, they may indeed take the appearance of being crucial, precious moments in one’s life; but of course, at the time, this was not the impression one had. Rather, it was as though one had available a never-ending number of days, months, years in which to sort out the vagaries of one’s relationship with Miss Kenton; an infinite number of further opportunities in which to remedy the effect of this or that misunderstanding. There was surely nothing to indicate at the time that such evidently small incidents would render whole dreams forever irredeemable.”

Stevens may well be right that we often overlook the significance of events and actions, but we may still draw a lesson from his failure to secure happiness for himself, or at least the chance to find happiness. Things done cannot be undone, but it is equally true that things undone often cannot be done at a later time. Especially in human relationships small things have a tendency to add up until eventually a breaking point is reached. You fail to make a phone call to acknowledge a friend’s birthday, and that, without being obvious at the time, effectively brings an end to that friendship. Or you have one argument too many with your spouse, or you say something, in the heat of the moment, that you don’t really mean, and the other never forgets it, and never forgives, and everything is suddenly very different from what it used to be. So what is there to be learned? I guess it is something very simple, very banal really, a truism: we should try to figure out what is really important to us and then work hard to make sure that we get it, and, once we have got it, not to lose it. Don’t take things, and especially relationships, for granted. Not ever. They are fragile and need to be cultivated. What’s undone cannot be redone. What is lost can never be retrieved. So let’s try not to lose, or make it impossible for ourselves to reach, what gives, or would give, meaning and light to our lives.