Biographical note: Hume, David 1711-76, Scottish philosopher and historian. Hume carried the empiricism of Locke and George Berkeley to the logical extreme of radical skepticism. He repudiated the possibility of certain knowledge, finding in the mind nothing but a series of sensations, and held that cause-and-effect in the natural world derives solely from the conjunction of two impressions. Hume's skepticism is also evident in his writings on religion, in which he rejected any rational or natural theology. Besides his chief work, A Treatise of Human Nature (1739-40), he wrote Political Discourses (1752), The Natural History of Religion (1755), and a History of England (1754-62) that was, despite errors of fact, the standard work for many years.
The physical arguments from the analogy of nature are strong for the mortality of the soul; and these are really the only philosophical arguments, which ought to be admitted with regard to this question, or indeed any question of fact.
Where any two objects are so closely connected, that all alterations, which we have ever seen in the one, are attended with proportionable alterations in the other; we ought to conclude, by all rules of analogy, that, when there are still greater alterations produced in the former, and it is totally dissolved, there follows a total dissolution of the latter.
Sleep, a very small effect on the body, is attended with a temporary extinction; at least, a great confusion in the soul.
The weakness of the body and that of the mind in infancy are exactly proportioned; their vigor is manhood; their sympathetic disorder in sickness; their common gradual decay in old age. The step farther seems unavoidable; their common dissolution in death.
The last symptoms, which the mind discovers, are disorder, weakness, insensibility, stupidity, the forerunners of its annihilation. The farther progress of the same causes, increasing the same effects, totally extinguish it.
. . .
Nothing in this world is perpetual. Every being, however seemingly firm, is in continual flux and change: The world itself gives symptoms of frailty and dissolution: How contrary to analogy, therefore, to imagine, that one single form, seemingly the frailest of any, and from the slightest causes, subject, to the greatest disorders, is immortal and indissoluble? What a daring theory is that! How lightly, not to say, how rashly entertained!
David Hume, "Of the Immortality of the Soul," in his Essays: Moral, Political and Literary, LibertyClassics, 1985, pp. 596-7.
However, other idealists have a different view of the
meaning of death. It is not that we are immortal beings and
survive death in another life. Rather, we are eternal beings.
Immortality is just an imperfect picture of eternal being. Being
eternal does not mean surviving death in an endless life
anchored to an immaterial substance. In any case, it is not clear
that endless life is something desirable. It is easy to imagine
wanting to live more than the normal life span of human beings,
say, wanting to live 200 years, at least so long as others do so
as well. We think of all the additional things we might learn and
experience in that extra time. But it is more difficult to
imagine living forever. A trillion trillion years would be like an
instant to such a time. What could be the value in living
forever? Always more and more happiness without limit?
Becoming ever more good so as to become identical with God?
These seem only fantastic ideas.
The German philosopher G.W.F. Hegel (1770-1831) holds that to be eternal is to
be outside of time. Mathematical truths seem to be timelessly
true. They are true at all times, unchangeable, necessary. Now
how can a human being be conceived of as having a timeless
being? In life we exist in time, from moment to moment where
each moment is the dramatic focus where possibilities become
actualities and pass into something unchangeable, something
necessary. We ran into this idea when we were discussing
Kierkegaard's concept of freedom, and the claim that true
freedom implies that the future must be open. Now clearly
human beings are not like mathematical truths which are
timelessly true from the start. With human beings, the eternal
in us is something which accumulates through life, as more and
more possibilities pass into the realm of necessity which is our
unchangeable past. The meaning of death is the end of
possibilities. We no longer exist within the elasticity of time.
The possibility of change for us is over. In death, we are what
we have been, once and for all.
An analogy may help. Imagine that our lives are
accompanied by a process of recording. That is, everything we
do does not simply pass into oblivion once it is over but
remains on the record which we make. In death, what remains is
the record.
Heidegger argues that there is an important philosophical
meaning to the fact that human beings bury their dead. For
death is something different from perishing. A raccoon in the
woods does not die, it perishes. It ceases to be; perishing, in
the passage of time it is annihilated as an individual being; it is
nothing. The dead are not nothing, though there are people like
Hitler who have tried to turn the killing of human beings into an
annihilation. This is perhaps the deepest horror of the
holocaust. The "final solution" was supposed to not just kill all
the jews. The attempt was made to eradicate the memory of
them as distinct, individual human beings, to make it as if they
had never existed at all. That we remember the dead, thinks
Heidegger, shows that the dead continue to have a kind of being.
The idea of a record may be viewed from the side of those
who remember the dead as well as from the side of a living
person, the one who in living makes the record. For
philosophers such as Kierkegaard, Heidegger, and, as we will
see, Friedreich Nietzsche, it is crucial that we reflect on the
process of making the record. For one of the most important
implications of being free is that we have substantial control
over what the record will be. As long as the future is open for
us, as long as there are possibilities, the record is not yet
complete and we have an opportunity to shape how good the
final product will be. And in the end, it is the perspective of the
good, the "last" judgment of God one might say, which
permanently seals the record, leaving behind the record of what
we have made of our freedom. If a raccoon is not an eternal
being, it is because it is not a free being and hence does not
stand under the necessity of such a "last" judgment. Moreover,
in the end, it doesn't matter nearly so much whether others
remember us as that the record we make be as good as we can
make it. This is perhaps the lesson of Oscar Wilde's classic
story, The Picture of Dorian Gray. The graphic at the head of
this unit recalls the film version of the story and the contrast
between the everyday appearance of Dorian Gray, and the
picture of his character that was at the same time being made
on the portrait in the attic. The portrait in the attic is like the
record.
"The Picture of Dorian Gray was arch-aesthete Oscar Wilde's only novel, although he wrote a number of poems and children's stories before it was published in 1890 (in Lippincott's Magazine) and became a very successful playwright in the 1890s . . . The picture of the title is a splendid work painted by Basil Hallward of the orphaned boy Dorian Gray who is the heir to a great fortune. Lord Henry and Hallward discuss the boy and the remarkable painting. Dorian enters and declares that he would give his soul if he were always to be young and the painting instead would grow old. As the story pans out, Dorian leaves his fiancée - the actress Sibyl Vane - because through a single bad performance he claims that she has "killed" his love. She kills herself with poison and Dorian is unaffected. So begins the tale of the boy's descent into low society in London while still giving dinners and musicals for high society. He is inspired by two things: the book Lord Henry sends him that seems to predict his own life in dissecting every virtue and every sin from the past; and secondly the picture of himself which grows steadily older and more vicious looking compared to his own mirror image which remains young. Fanatical about the portrait, he is driven to murder and deception. As others are drawn into this web of evil Dorian himself longs to return to innocence but his method is horrific and tragic."
www.bibliomania.com. The GIF is from www.cinematographer.com/magazine/may97/dorian/.
The Concluding Chapter of The Picture of Dorian Gray
It was a lovely night, so warm that he threw his coat over his arm and did not even put his silk scarf round his throat. As he strolled home, smoking his cigarette, two young men in evening dress passed him. He heard one of them whisper to the other, "That is Dorian Gray." He remembered how pleased he used to be when he was pointed out, or stared at, or talked about. He was tired of hearing his own name now. Half the charm of the little village where he had been so often lately was that no one knew who he was. He had often told the girl whom he had lured to love him that he was poor, and she had believed him. He had told her once that he was wicked, and she had laughed at him and answered that wicked people were always very old and very ugly. What a laugh she had!--just like a thrush singing. And how pretty she had been in her cotton dresses and her large hats! She knew nothing, but she had everything that he had lost.
When he reached home, he found his servant waiting up for him. He sent him to bed, and threw himself down on the sofa in the library, and began to think over some of the things that Lord Henry had said to him.
Was it really true that one could never change? He felt a wild longing for the unstained purity of his boyhood-- his rose-white boyhood, as Lord Henry had once called it. He knew that he had tarnished himself, filled his mind with corruption and given horror to his fancy; that he had been an evil influence to others, and had experienced a terrible joy in being so; and that of the lives that had crossed his own, it had been the fairest and the most full of promise that he had brought to shame. But was it all irretrievable?
Was there no hope for him?Ah! in what a monstrous moment of pride and passion he had prayed that the portrait should bear the burden of his days, and he keep the unsullied splendour of eternal youth! All his failure had been due to that. Better for him that each sin of his life had brought its sure swift penalty along with it. There was purification in punishment. Not "Forgive us our sins" but "Smite us for our iniquities" should be the prayer of man to a most just God.
The curiously carved mirror that Lord Henry had given to him, so many years ago now, was standing on the table, and the white-limbed Cupids laughed round it as of old. He took it up, as he had done on that night of horror when be had first noted the change in the fatal picture, and with wild, tear-dimmed eyes looked into its polished shield. Once, some one who had terribly loved him had written to him a mad letter, ending with these idolatrous words: "The world is changed because you are made of ivory and gold. The curves of your lips rewrite history." The phrases came back to his memory, and he repeated them over and over to himself. Then he loathed his own beauty, and flinging the mirror on the floor, crushed it into silver splinters beneath his heel. It was his beauty that had ruined him, his beauty and the youth that he had prayed for. But for those two things, his life might have been free from stain. His beauty had been to him but a mask, his youth but a mockery. What was youth at best? A green, an unripe time, a time of shallow moods, and sickly thoughts. Why had he worn its livery? Youth had spoiled him.
It was better not to think of the past. Nothing could alter that. It was of himself, and of his own future, that he had to think. James Vane was hidden in a nameless grave in Selby churchyard. Alan Campbell had shot himself one night in his laboratory, but had not revealed the secret that he had been forced to know. The excitement, such as it was, over Basil Hallward's disappearance would soon pass away.
It was already waning. He was perfectly safe there. Nor, indeed, was it the death of Basil Hallward that weighed most upon his mind. It was the living death of his own soul that troubled him. Basil had painted the portrait that had marred his life. He could not forgive him that. It was the portrait that had done everything. Basil had said things to him that were unbearable, and that he had yet borne with patience.
The murder had been simply the madness of a moment. As for Alan Campbell, his suicide had been his own act. He had chosen to do it. It was nothing to him.A new life! That was what he wanted. That was what he was waiting for. Surely he had begun it already. He had spared one innocent thing, at any rate. He would never again tempt innocence. He would be good.
As he thought of Hetty Merton, he began to wonder if the portrait in the locked room had changed. Surely it was not still so horrible as it had been? Perhaps if his life became pure, he would be able to expel every sign of evil passion from the face. Perhaps the signs of evil had already gone away. He would go and look.
He took the lamp from the table and crept upstairs. As he unbarred the door, a smile of joy flitted across his strangely young-looking face and lingered for a moment about his lips. Yes, he would be good, and the hideous thing that he had hidden away would no longer be a terror to him. He felt as if the load had been lifted from him already.
He went in quietly, locking the door behind him, as was his custom, and dragged the purple hanging from the portrait. A cry of pain and indignation broke from him. He could see no change, save that in the eyes there was a look of cunning and in the mouth the curved wrinkle of the hypocrite. The thing was still loathsome--more loathsome, if possible, than before--and the scarlet dew that spotted the hand seemed brighter, and more like blood newly spilled. Then he trembled. Had it been merely vanity that had made him do his one good deed? Or the desire for a new sensation, as Lord Henry had hinted, with his mocking laugh? Or that passion to act a part that sometimes makes us do things finer than we are ourselves? Or, perhaps, all these? And why was the red stain larger than it had been? It seemed to have crept like a horrible disease over the wrinkled fingers. There was blood on the painted feet, as though the thing had dripped--blood even on the hand that had not held the knife. Confess? Did it mean that he was to confess? To give himself up and be put to death? He laughed. He felt that the idea was monstrous. Besides, even if he did confess, who would believe him? There was no trace of the murdered man anywhere. Everything belonging to him had been destroyed. He himself had burned what had been below-stairs. The world would simply say that he was mad. They would shut him up if he persisted in his story. . . . Yet it was his duty to confess, to suffer public shame, and to make public atonement. There was a God who called upon men to tell their sins to earth as well as to heaven. Nothing that he could do would cleanse him till he had told his own sin. His sin? He shrugged his shoulders. The death of Basil Hallward seemed very little to him. He was thinking of Hetty Merton. For it was an unjust mirror, this mirror of his soul that he was looking at. Vanity? Curiosity? Hypocrisy? Had there been nothing more in his renunciation than that? There had been something more. At least he thought so. But who could tell? . . . No. There had been nothing more. Through vanity he had spared her. In hypocrisy he had worn the mask of goodness. For curiosity's sake he had tried the denial of self. He recognized that now.
But this murder--was it to dog him all his life? Was he always to be burdened by his past? Was he reallyto confess? Never. There was only one bit of evidence left against him. The picture itself-- that was evidence. He would destroy it. Why had he kept it so long? Once it had given him pleasure to watch it changing and growing old. Of late he had felt no such pleasure. It had kept him awake at night. When he had been away, he had been filled with terror lest other eyes should look upon it. It had brought melancholy across his passions. Its mere memory had marred many moments of joy. It had been like conscience to him. Yes, it had been conscience. He would destroy it.
He looked round and saw the knife that had stabbed Basil Hallward. He had cleaned it many times, till there was no stain left upon it. It was bright, and glistened. As it had killed the painter, so it would kill the painter's work, and all that that meant. It would kill the past, and when that was dead, he would be free. It would kill this monstrous soul-life, and without its hideous warnings, he would be at peace. Heseized the thing, and stabbed the picture with it.
There was a cry heard, and a crash. The cry was so horrible in its agony that the frightened servants woke and crept out of their rooms. Two gentlemen, who were passing in the square below, stopped andlooked up at the great house. They walked on till they met a policeman and brought him back. The man rang the bell several times, but there was no answer. Except for a light in one of the top windows, the house was all dark. After a time, he went away and stood in an adjoining portico and watched.
"Whose house is that, Constable?" asked the elder of the two gentlemen.
"Mr. Dorian Gray's, sir," answered the policeman.
They looked at each other, as they walked away, and sneered. One of them was Sir Henry Ashton's uncle.
Inside, in the servants' part of the house, the half-clad domestics were talking in low whispers to each other. Old Mrs. Leaf was crying and wringing her hands. Francis was as pale as death.
After about a quarter of an hour, he got the coachman and one of the footmen and crept upstairs. They knocked, but there was no reply. They called out. Everything was still. Finally, after vainly trying to force the door, they got on the roof and dropped down on to the balcony. The windows yielded easily--their bolts were old.
When they entered, they found hanging upon the wall a splendid portrait of their master as they had last seen him, in all the wonder of his exquisite youth and beauty. Lying on the floor was a dead man, in evening dress, with a knife in his heart. He was withered, wrinkled, and loathsome of visage. It was not till they had examined the rings that they recognized who it was.
www.bibliomania.com. The GIF is from www.cinematographer.com/magazine/may97/dorian/.
So in short, for this version of idealism, to be an eternal
being is not to be immortal; it is not to survive death in an
ongoing life in time. There is no contradiction in the idea of
being both mortal and eternal, however. The idea of
immortality should be viewed as only an imperfect picture of
eternal being. The crucial truth in the picture is not that we
survive death in time, i.e. go on living, having experiences,
possibilities, and so on. That is both metaphysically false and
ethically dangerous insofar as it fails to identify death as the
end of possibilities, the closing of one's future. Rather, the
truth in the idea of immortality is that in the record we have
timeless being, a "permanent" record of how we have used our
freedom to realize the good in our lives and to stamp our being
with it finally, in the end. In life, the record is what we will have
been (future imperfect tense). In death, who we were, is, finally,
what we are, once and for all.
However, if this concept of eternal being can stand, there remains a confusion in it as it is presented above. At least, so Nietzsche would think. For it suggests that eternal being is something that waits for us, something which only emerges at the end, when all possibilities are exhausted. But Nietzsche would have us understand that "the future is now." He articulates his idea of eternal being in two famous passages.
The urgency of the challenge to make good use of our freedom comes in part from the eternal significance of human being, something that Nietzsche expressed in the idea of the eternal recurrence, found in the passage below. The idea looks like something one might find in eastern religious thought rather than western philosophical thought. Nietzsche was certainly familiar with the religions of the orient, but whether he meant the idea of the eternal recurrence to be interpreted literally or rather as a metaphor for the eternal significance of life has been a source of much debate among students of his philosophy. In either case, he certainly meant to impress upon us the idea that our very mortality gives each moment of life a special significance. The passage below is perhaps the most famous one in which the doctrine of the eternal recurrence is expressed. But the one which follows, the Zarathustra's riddle, from Thus Spoke Zarathustra, is another vivid presentation of the idea. How would you answer the riddle?
Biographical note: Friedreich Nietzsche (1844‹1900), A German philosopher whose theory that an authentic human being strives to attain his or her true powers as an individual person. His views influenced literature, psychoanalysis, and existential philosophy. Nietzsche's views were distorted by the Nazi's and some of his own family to make his ideas appear to form a foundation for fascism, with Hitler embodying the ideal of the overman. Of course, insisting upon the subjection and obedience of the rest of humanity contradicts Nietzsche's idea that each of us are called to be overmen.
The greatest weight.-- What, if some day or night a demon
were to steal after you into your loneliest loneliness and
say to you: "This life as you now live it and have lived
it, you will have to live once more and innumerable times
more; and there will be nothing new in it, but every pain
and every joy and every thought and sigh and everything
unutterably small or great in your life will have to
return to you, all in the same succession and sequence -
even this spider and this moonlight between the trees, and
even this moment and I myself. The eternal hourglass of
existence is turned upside down again and again, and you
with it, speck of dust!" Would you not throw yourself down
and gnash your teeth and curse the demon who spoke
thus?... Or how well disposed would you have to become to
yourself and to life to crave nothing more fervently than
this ultimate eternal confirmation and seal?
from Nietzsche's The Gay Science (Joyful Knowledge), s.341, Walter Kaufmann transl.
Once we have "used up" our time, our freedom, all that is left is for the record of our lives to play endlessly, to repeat over and over, ceaselessly. There is no chance to come back and cut another album. So, Nietzsche seems to be saying, it is fearfully important that we make our first album a good one, for it will be the only one. The short passage below comes from one of Nietzsche's books, Thus Spake Zarathustra. Zarathustra is a wise man, a prophet. The books tells us of his struggle to become wise and of his effort to share his wisdom with others. As is often the case with prophets, people don't care to listen to him and dismiss him as mad. Well he certainly is not easy to understand, for like Jesus in the Bible he speaks in parables and riddles. The riddle which he poses to the dwarf is a riddle about time and eternity. Time and eternity here are contrasted. Instead of the common idea that time is eternal, where "eternal" means something like "extends forever," eternity is presented as the closure of time. When does time end? At some point very far in the future? But what happens after that? Must not time go on? How can we make sense of the idea of time coming to an end? The riddle suggests that time "comes to an end" in each moment. But how can that be if there are further moments? Remember Kierkegaard's idea of time in terms of possibility, necessity and actuality (Unit One). Ask yourself, "What is it that comes to an end each moment?
- "Stop, dwarf!" I said. "It is I or you But I am the stronger of us two; you do not know my abysmal thought. That you could not bear!"
- Then something happened that made me lighter, for the dwarf jumped from my shoulder, being curious; and he crouched on a stone before me. But there was a gateway just where we had stopped.
- "Behold this gateway, dwarf!" I continued. "It has two faces. Two paths meet here; no one has yet followed either to its end. This long lane stretches back for an eternity. And the long lane out there, that is another eternity. They contradict each other, these paths; they offend each other face to face; and it is here at this gateway that they come together. The name of the gateway is inscribed above: 'Moment.' But whoever would follow one of them, on and on, farther and farther‹do you believe, dwarf, that these paths contradict each other eternally?"
- "All that is straight lies," the dwarf murmured contemptuously. "All truth is crooked; time itself is a circle."
- "You spirit of gravity," I said angrily, "do not make things too easy for yourself! Or I shall let you crouch where you are crouching, lamefoot; and it was I that carried you to this height.
- "Behold," I continued, "this moment! From this gateway, Moment, a long, eternal lane leads backward: behind us lies an eternity. Must not whatever can walk have walked on this lane before? Must not whatever can happen have happened, have been done, have passed by before? And if everything has been there before‹what do you think, dwarf, of this moment? Must not this gateway too have been there before? And are not all things knotted together so firmly that this moment draws after it all that is to come? Therefore‹ itself too? For whatever can walk‹in this long lane out there too, it must walk once more.
- "And this slow spider, which crawls in the moonlight, and this moonlight itself, and I and you in the gateway, whispering together, whispering of eternal things‹must not all of us have been there before? And return and walk in that other lane, out there, before us, in this long dreadful lane‹must we not eternally return?"
- Thus I spoke, more and more softly; for I was afraid of my own thoughts and the thoughts behind my thoughts. . . .
http://www.learnlibrary.com/zarathustra/index.htm
