Ethics -- Limit of the Christian paradigm

Consider these two verses from the Bible.

1. Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.

2. If someone slaps you on your right cheek, turn your other cheek to him as well.

These two sentences sum up in my opinion the great contribution of Christianity to Western ethics. They sound like two separate ideas, but they are very closely linked.

"Turn your other cheek," which I shall abbreviate to the TOC principle, is another way of saying that force does not equate to moral legitimacy. (This is the opposite of the Nietzschean position of "might makes right" which I discussed in the last entry). And it is right, for the simple reason that if you're using force on another person, then you're simply doing to him/her what s/he could have done to you if s/he had greater force him/herself; and if, in his/her position, you would register the situation to be 'unpleasant' or 'bad' or 'evil', then s/he will do the same when s/he is the victim. So by exerting force, you are not removing the 'bad,' you are simply standing on the other side of it. If you want to do something good rather than bad, then you have to find a way of settling your differences which does not involve force. (Once again, this does not invalidate Nietzsche's statement, it simply offers an alternative to it; because it presupposes that your opponent is your equal, which is not necessarily the case, and certainly not according to Nietzsche).

This is why the verse "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you" is connected to the TOC. Because both are based on the idea of an equality between two subjects, and on the need to accommodate differences in a way that is correspondingly equal to both sides, rather than unbalanced in favour of one or the other.

Just to be clear, this is not a principle that originates from Christianity. Aristotle already promoted the idea of justice as equality/equivalence in the Nicomachean Ethics, to mention but one prominent example. But I shall refer to the TOC and similar principles as representatives specifically of the Christian ethic, even if Christian doctrine and history aren't always in total harmony with them, because Christianity is responsible for crystallising them in the Western subconscious and giving them primacy. In other words, they did more to popularise and spread these concepts than anyone else. (For similar reasons, I referred to the "might makes right" principle as Nietzschean in the last article, even as I insisted that Nietzsche's actual ethics were more complex).



Even if you do not accept the idea that all humans are equal (and indeed it can only be accepted in principle, because in practice people are defined by their very differences, which are also inequalities), the Christian principle remains more than just valid - it is utterly inescapable. Atheists like to indulge in negation here, but there's no getting round the ethical preeminence of the Christian principle. This is why.

The discipline of ethics is informed by the question of how things *ought* to be. In other words, it relies on a projection. The opposite of this is how we think that things *must* be, and indeed are. The latter state of things is called determinism. (The opposition of personal projections versus determinism also gives rise to the problem of free will, which I shall not discuss here).

It is possible to favour determinism over projection (Dionysus over Apollo); and this possibility allows for the Nietzschean position, where power is favoured over morality. But as we have seen, this is not an ethical choice at all. Indeed it is *not a choice,* precisely because it is deterministic, and therefore it cannot be a projection (a choice implies a projection). Even just considering the question of 'how things must be,' or trying to understand or calculate it, is already an act of projection, and is therefore already an ethical act. This convoluted problem led us to the conclusion of our first entry, when we said that the two poles cannot exist separate from each other, and indeed both ethics and determinism coexist in us without our being able to settle on either. On, in and with this duality is formed our conscience. (And this is why Apollo and Dionysus are my choice of gods over those offered by monotheism, but that's a different story).

But as long as we're making an ethical choice or decision, it will always harken back to the Christian paradigm. We can define this either as the "Do unto others" or as the TOC, it doesn't matter - both go back to pretty much the same idea. And this idea can be expressed as follows:

Nature red in tooth and claw makes us fight. It makes conflict part of our necessary behaviour. We overpower the weaker members of our species (or other species) in our struggle for resources as part of the process of evolution. Therefore fighting is an expression of natural laws. And since nature is just another word for determinism, seen how it is just a chain of cause-and-consequence events with no *projection* in it anywhere, then the only way of making a choice which is not deterministic when faced with the possibility of conflict is by *not fighting.* Now an ethical choice is, by definition, a choice which is not deterministic. Therefore the only truly ethical choice faced to a situation of conflict is not fighting.

If you didn't fully understand the above paragraph, I invite you to read it again: in my opinion it is crucial to all moral systems and it is at the heart of Christian ethics. (This has nothing to do with Christianity as a religion; as I said, I'm using the term for convenience, but the ethical paradigm itself doesn't require the details of Christian history, theology or cosmology to be true (or not); it holds even without all of these things. Indeed it holds even if there is no God, simply by its own internal congruence. You cannot do without the Christian principle).



By choosing not to fight, you are assuming onto yourself the suffering that will necessarily result from the use of force (the alternative is to use force yourself and impose that suffering on the other). If you assume, accept, withstand the pain that the other would have to feel, you are undergoing the choice that Christ made on the cross. You are assuming onto yourself the pain of others. By doing this, though the suffering still subsists, the evil does not - because it is no longer a 'necessary' suffering, but one that is chosen with consciousness. In other words, it is no longer deterministic; it is congruent with your projection, and therefore the situation is 'ethical.' You have annihilated the 'bad' aspect of the scenario that one of the two participants in the conflict would have had to experience, if it had been resolved by a mutual use of force. You have truly done the good thing.

But, and here's the rub - even as this principle is inescapable, it is not exhaustive. Indeed there is a point at which this principle dies out, no longer becoming functional or applicable, and we shall now look at where this point is exactly. This is, really, the entire subject of this post (and it took me more than half the text to get there, so forgive me).

Something surprising in our philosophical tradition, at least in my experience, is how rarely people have acknowledged the proportional aspect of ethics - by this I mean that it is valid in different ways at different scales. Perhaps seduced by the (typical) Apollonian unitary dream, most of the writers I've read work under the assumption that what is right for one person will be right for ten people, and also for the whole of society. Plato is especially guilty of this, as he projects in the Republic a whole ideal society working in the same way as one ideally virtuous individual - and he seems to think this congruence makes his theory particularly full of merit. Indeed, this is the common idea behind an ethical principle: that it should always be true, no matter what. (This is the trap awaiting all proselytes of Apollo... though there are no ethics without Apollo, on the other hand if you follow him too far, he will lead you to this flattening out of differences and these universal generalisations which remove the practical uses of ethics in the first place).

In reality, ethics are every bit as relative as space and time. The great difficulty when it comes to morality is understanding how it changes when the variables of a situation, and the number of people involved in such a situation, change. I don't think a law can be found that solves this problem (for reasons that I may or may not expound on in a third post in this series). But the relativity of ethics is unquestionable, and it finds an excellent expression in the problem of war. If you transpose an argument from between two people to between two nations (or vice versa), you will see that the parallel does not hold when looking for solutions, simply because the responsibilities involved are different, as are the means of interaction. The fact that it may be right, for instance, for one of the men to solve it by punching the other in the face, doesn't mean that one of the nations is entitled to declare war; because in this case the result wouldn't be just a bruised cheek, but people actually dying. Conversely, if it's wrong for one of the men to solve the dispute by killing the other, it doesn't follow that it's wrong for one of the nations to declare war; because the nation losing the war isn't "killed" as a nation, though it may be impoverished.

The parallels between individuals and nations simply do not carry over. The same is true for the rapport between individuals and smaller groups of people, or between city-states and nations.

One film that illuminates this relativity wonderfully is Seven Samurai, one of the greatest movies ever made (if not the greatest). It tells of a village recruiting Samurais to defend themselves against a band of brigands - a small-scale war which reproduces, in its epic three-plus hours of sword-clashing and dialogue, the entire spectrum of ethical choices from those of the lone individual to society's as a whole, and the way they interact and clash and come together in the same historical moment. It was the first work of art that convinced me that, for all of my extreme pacifism, war can indeed be right in certain circumstances.

Seven Samurai

It should be noted that questions of scale and measure also come into play when considering not just the relation between two opposing agents, but also the potential consequences of their actions. What do I mean by this? I mentioned that the only ethical choice when presented with a conflict is *not fighting,* but that is under the condition that the consequences of the conflict will be equal for both the participants (in the same way that it presupposes that they be equal as human beings). But if you're engaged in a dispute with someone and you know that if you lose, you get killed, while if your adversary loses, he is only deprived of his car, then of course you would be justified in exerting force to solve the conflict. This is an example of the limits of ethical principles - while they're universal on paper, the 'equality between subjects' that they necessitate is almost never actualised in the real world. Ethical principles are an Apollonian projection, and Apollo is always a fiction. This is why there is no 'ultimate morality' of the type that religious people so often call for.

Suppose, then, that you postulated a scale for ethics. The ethics that apply to only one individual are level one. For two to five individuals it's level two. For six to thirty individuals it's level three. And so on. (These numbers are hypothetical - the actual ratios cannot be determined numerically, or if such a thing is possible, I have no bloody clue how). Morality changes and has different rules depending on which 'level' you're at.

The great limit of Christian ethics, then, is that *they only apply to level one.* Christian ethics are inescapable as individual ethics. As long as you're alone, they apply, and are in fact impossible to confute. There is no other choice you can take that is right, but the choice of Christ. But as soon as you enter a situation involving a larger group, they fail to apply. For instance, if you marry and have children, and an individual comes over and starts harming your wife and/or kids, you are not only justified but compelled to stop him, by means of violence if necessary. This seems intuitively obvious, and it is easy to explain by our principles, too: by applying the TOC on your wife and kids, you allow the suffering to subsist on someone who cannot or does not assume it - and therefore the 'evil' remains. (Unless the wife and kids themselves ask you not to intervene - in which case they are assuming individually the TOC, but while this could be true of your wife, it cannot apply to children). And so you *must* fight. Fighting is the right thing to do, and turning the other cheek is the wrong one. The Christian paradigm fails.

This does not delete the contribution of Christianity to our ethical systems. Not at all. But it does put it into perspective. The ethical system proposed by Jesus Christ is individual, not collective. Individual and collective ethical systems are two different things, and Christ has nothing to say or teach on the latter. It would not have been the right thing to do, for instance, if Churchill and Roosevelt had applied the TOC at the national level when faced with Adolf Hitler. Despite my own loathing of violence, an ethical system claiming that violence is always evil is simply not adequately nuanced - and therefore flawed. It is, at best, an Apollonian fiction.

The conclusion that I'm driving at is similar to the one with Nietzsche in the previous blog post. I'm not making an absolute conclusion either way. I'm not saying "the Christian principle is wrong" (or right). I'm saying we need it, and we need to study it and learn (from) it, but no more than we also need opposing ethical systems - including the (apparently incompatible) Nietzschean one. If we are to face the world, with its infinity of different situations and challenges, then we need an equally flexible moral understanding of it. "Flexible" doesn't mean that we can do whatever feels most convenient according to the situation. It means that it accounts for both the Apollonian and Dionysian poles in our psyche, both ideal and compromise, both ethics and power, both purity and experience, both what ought to be and what must be. We must know how to stand firm at the right times, and how to compromise at others. Neither the light nor the darkness are the answer to anything, for both leave us blind; it is only in the balance between the two that the human being is realised.

Ethics -- Does might make right?

Read this quote:

Moral law is an invention of mankind for the disenfranchisement of the powerful in favour of the weak. Historical law subverts it at every turn.
Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian.

Here is a succinct synthesis of Nietzschean ethics. Nietzsche's claim was that morality does not exist, and only power equates to legitimacy. The powerful are therefore legitimised in crushing the weak; as he puts it in The Antichrist, 'the weak must perish.'

Nietzsche's propositions have always been controversial, because our own sense of empathy insitinctively rebels against this notion that the weak should be killed. There's also the historical association with Nazism, which seemed to apply this rule (albeit under the non-Nietzschean assumption that the Jewish race represented 'weakness').

Our instinctive revulsion, however, is not enough to disqualify the statement. Questions of what is right and wrong must be subsidiary to the greater question of how our moral systems stand when confronted with power. For it is indeed true that historical law subverts moral dictates all the time. As soon as the opportunity presents itself, or as soon as the situation makes immoral acts advantageous, men will be known to choose the option which leads to greater power (or the exercise thereof). While morality (or the advantages of morality) rests for its application on the condition of power not being abused, power does not rest under any condition posed by morality. If men can exercise power under the endorsement of moral law, then all for the better. If they can't, they will do so without that endorsement or absolution. In this sense, it is true that power is a more important concept than morality.

But the question of whether power equates to moral legitimacy deserves greater attention. It is more often subject to gross simplifications and misinterpretations than to accurate examinations. (For one thing, such an assertion is itself a moral projection, and not an exercise of power, and therefore it is inherently paradoxical. But it is not the deconstructionist line of thought that I'm interested in today). I would argue that the 'synthesis' I have quoted above is an example of such a simplification, and it is therefore untenable, at least in that form.

Does might make right? Let's run this statement through a few historical and/or hypothetical scenarios.


Was Rome justified in invading Carthage and razing it to the ground, slaughtering all its inhabitants and even spreading salt on the ground, that nothing may grow of it again? Any Christian would answer, no. Nietzsche would say, yes. The very fact of their greater power over the second greatest civilisation of the world gave them the right to eliminate them. The statement may seem repellent at first, but at least it is equanimous: if the Carthaginians had been the most powerful, they would have had moral legitimacy in razing Rome to the ground. No bias is allowed, no questions of taste or culture or religion apply. History is the only judge.

Weighing up consequences is an act which does not come into the equation. It *does not matter* that Rome went on and civilised Europe, building roads everywhere and advancing science and engineering, literature and art (or, on the other hand, reducing thousands to slavery and indulging in gladiatorial horrors). These are all retrospective considerations which depend on the original exercise of power. The act is neither redeemed nor condemned by its consequences - both because these consequences, while conditional to the original act, are not inherent in it (things could have gone either way, depending on other, non-quantifiable factors), and also because the act is its own consequence. To judge the act by its posterior developments means to defer the moral judgement, not to proffer it.

This also means that the 'evolutionary' argument is null. Defendants of the Nietzschean statement sometimes argue something like this: "The weak must die and be replaced by the strong, so that the strong can use their strength for their great deeds, and thereby advance all of humanity. If the weak are not allowed to die, we never step forward, and a civilisation becomes mouldy, decadent and corrupt." I say it is an evolutionary argument because it can be synthesised like this: "the weak must die for the good of the species." Indeed this is exactly what nature does, killing off the weaker members of a species so the species as a whole is fortified. The argument that humanity works or should work according to the same principle, while cruel, is not wholly irrational. But it is not relevant to an application of Nietzschean ethics. As I said, if we judge the act by its posterior developments, we are not judging the act at all. This is not to apply Nietzschean ethics to an act, it is only to rationalise it. From the Nietzschean perspective, a killer is justified by his power, not by the later politically correct application of it. (Nietzsche would also argue that it is the original exercise of power which produces the cultural milieu and the moral standards which then justify the exercise which led them into existence).

The issue of the Roman destruction of Carthage cannot be judged by questions of right or wrong to the extent that these considerations are immaterial to the act itself. Regardless of whether it's right or wrong, power takes its own path anyway. Morality fails in the face of power.


Does might make right? Let's examine the question further. If a man kills another in a desert, is the act of murder justified by the very fact that the first man has the power to execute it? Again, the Christian says no, and Nietzsche says yes. Again, we are appalled by Nietzsche's statement, but we have no argument to propose against it: our considerations remain immaterial before the act itself. History *does not care* about what we think is right or wrong.

But let's imagine further. The murderer walks a little more into the desert, and encounters a third man. This third man is a brigand and even stronger, and he kills the murderer. (This is not an act of 'justice' motivated by law or revenge; imagine that this third man were simply looting the first). Again, from the Nietzschean perspective, this brigand is justified. But here's the catch: this system can go on indefinitely. The brigand can himself encounter another brigand who is even stronger and be legitimately killed, who in turn can encounter another stronger and more legitimate murderer, and so on. Each time, the killer in the desert can encounter another killer who is stronger than him, and each time he can get killed. And according to this logic, the new murderer will always be right.

This is important because there is never a final point, there is never a last man who is right, because there can always be someone more powerful. In theology, the chain would stop at God, which ironically supports Nietzsche's system: God is the ultimate right, simply because God is the ultimate power.

The defining aspect of power is that it is quantifiable. It may not be *measurable,* because there are no scales for it, but it's always a question of 'more' or 'less' of it. The more power you have, the more you achieve supremacy in your conflicts, and therefore (from the Nietzschean perspective) the more right you are. But the amount of power you can have goes up, theoretically, to infinity. There is never a point where you can stop and say, *this* is right.

Now this is important in light of how morality, at least traditional morality as we always understand it (including major philosophy), works. Here is a quote presented to me by Jack Hudson:

If there is no absolute moral standard, then one cannot say in a final sense that anything is right or wrong. By absolute we mean that which always applies, that which provides a final or ultimate standard. There must be an absolute if there are to be morals, and there must be an absolute if there are to be real values. If there is no absolute beyond man’s ideas, then there is no final appeal to judge between individuals and groups whose moral judgements conflict. We are merely left with conflicting opinions.
Francis Schaeffer. How Then Should We Live?: The Rise and Decline of Western Thought and Culture. 

Personally I disagree with the statement, and I wanted to discuss it, but I never found the time. This is not the occasion either, but it provides some important grounds for reflection. The writer is of course a Christian, and in this type of moral theology, one inevitably postulates what he calls an "absolute" moral standard. For our purposes, what matters is not the question of what such a standard is, but the fact that the projection/conception of morality requires an "absolute," a terminus, a final point.

What I am driving at is that morality is inherently Apollonian. I have discussed what Apollo and his counter-part Dionysus are in greater detail, in this article. (I must have linked this a thousand times, but that's because it is important). The point is that Apollo is THE absolute. Not just in morality, but in everything. Ethics, aesthetics, metaphysics, whatever. The conception of an ideal, any ideal, is a projection of Apollo. Platonic forms, for instance, are an example of Apollonian projection. Utopian texts, likewise. Nietzsche knew this, of course - he was the one who first established the Apollo vs Dionysus duality, after all.

In the Apollo vs Dionysus duality, there are no right and wrong. Both deities provide for representations which can be right or wrong in the traditional senses according to the circumstance, and always in relation to each other. A Dionysian movement destroying or corrupting what we perceive to be an 'absolute' good will be understood as evil, while a similar movement liberating us from a totalitarian Apollonian principle (as Apollo, for the good or for the bad, is always inflexible), will be seen as something good. Blasphemy would be an example of evil Dionysus, while the hippy movement would be seen as good Dionysus (depending on the perspective, you could say the opposite, too, and this proves the point).

Worshipping Dionysus. But folding over to become Apollo.

I think it can be agreed that ethics, whatever the culture or the philosophy behind them, always require an Apollonian projection. Everyone points towards or at least implies some final good, an ultimate referent by which to legitimise their actions. This referent is carefully elaborated in moral systems, though such a referent is false (as all Apollonian projections are false, or at least illusory, and no more in our grasp than Platonic forms). It is false because it does not apply in the real world. It only serves as that real world's referent, to lift a mirror to it and let it pass judgments on what is right or wrong.

Now the issue with power-based ethical systems, which I have so far been referring to as Nietzschean systems, is that they are quantifiable. Greater or lesser degrees of power. Since there is never a point where you can stop and say *this* is right, there can be no Apollonian projection in power-based ethics, and therefore no right (or wrong). This invalidates the claim that might makes right. The original quote by McCarthy falls under its own argument. Or, alternatively, it invalidates the idea that there are such things as right and wrong at all (which was Nietzsche's contention). There is no ethical justification behind power. If you are applying power, you are neither right nor wrong.

The claim that 'might makes right' is therefore bullshit, and it can be laughed into ridicule when anyone propounds it so simplistically. It is true that moral systems exist as temporary, frail projections which are brushed away according to historical whim, and they have no absolute referent to return to. But power is no such absolute referent either (and it cannot be mistaken for one), because it would have to be posited as an Apollonian value, and there can be no such thing as an Apollonian projection of power.

This is not to claim that morality does not exist. Instead, what (I think) I am saying is that power and morality are two separate concepts, at once interdependent and incompatible. Power is understood only as the ability to transcend moral law (for all law is moral law), while morality exists only as the negation of power. The question of whether might makes right is a confusion of terms - if you speak of one thing, you are instantly negating the existence of the other. Even Nietzsche did not claim that 'right' and 'wrong' in this sense did not exist - what he did claim was that they were fictional constructions. And they do exist, and even matter, AS such fictional constructions. Power is not a fictional construction, but precisely for this reason, it cannot be conceptualised, much less invoked as a moral scaffold. The moment that you *speak* about power, you are outside of the practice and exercise of power.

So morality and power, at the heart of the most important conflict in ethics, are simply expressions of Apollo and Dionysus - the ultimate duality. Apollo is moral law, and Dionysus is the uncontrolled breaking thereof. Apollo is projection, concept and representation, Dionysus is pure immediacy and actualisation.

Usually the moral debate that I have been expounding on is framed in 'either/or' terms. You'll find idealists who claim that morals do exist (whether theologically based or not), and cynics who claim that morals are an invention and all that exists is human nature and instincts (or other expressions of power and determinism). Inbetween, there's a whole array of intermediates, people who believe that morals are relative or contextual, those who believe that morals exist but are too often corrupted, and others.

And yet the 'either/or' position doesn't hold. Both morals AND power exist, as the concepts which allow for each other. To remove one is to remove the other, and yet to promote one is to negate the other. If you defend power as the source of legitimation, you are already, inescapably making a moral statement; conversely if you defend morals, your arguments hold no weight face to the dynamics of power and ultimately mean nothing. And yet to promote the one is also to negate the other: if you invoke power, you are saying that morals are irrelevant and do not exist, while if you invoke morals, you are claiming there's a higher authority than power, which negates the idea of power in the first place.

This is the typical, interdependent structure of Apollo vs Dionysus dualities, and what I've just been writing about is the way that it expresses itself in the discourse of ethics. It certainly doesn't stop there.

Though I've re-iterated the importance of the A vs D tension in our ways of thinking, I'm sorry that I could not reach a more conclusive statement. I had originally set out to find a better type of closure, but there is none. There is, at best, transcendence of both the concepts of power and morality. To understand how they depend on each other and influence, determine our thought, is to go beyond both. Ethical systems which do not 'go beyond' in such a way, which do not recognise this ongoing duality and tension, are to me obsolete and of no interest, at least until I find a text that proves me wrong.

Two notes in closing. Firstly, if this is at all in question, none of what I've been writing invalidates or goes against Nietzsche's claims. This was never intended as a 'riposte to Nietzsche' or something like that, and this is because the guy's arguments were so much more than simply 'might makes right' (his antagonists usually reduce his philosophy to such a statement, which means not to read him). His ethics were actually based on the subtler, almost wholly intellectual principle of destroying Apollo and embracing Dionysus, as part of a cyclical historical process (this is the most puzzling aspect of Nietzsche's philosophy to me... I don't understand why he values one God more than the other, instead of recognising the positive and negative aspects of both). The identity that we assume by engaging with such an historical process is not that of the superman (again, ever so easily misinterpreted). Instead, the superman is the unconceivable telos at the end of the cyclical process of history; the reward of our studies in the humanities (the "above-man"); that which gives meaning to our struggle, but which we cannot conceive precisely because it is beyond our struggle (and inasmuch as it is non-descript, non-conceived, it is not an Apollonian projection). In Nietzsche's vision, we are fulfilled and find meaning in our strides towards the superman, not by actually becoming it. The superman does not really *exist*; he's not some tangible chap, or some real agent in history like Alexander or Napoleon. The superman is a myth, and if there can be such a thing, it is a myth of the future.

The second note is this: so much for my notion that "I'm not interested in the deconstructionist line today"! What I've spelled out has very much to share, and certainly owes very much (if not everything), to deconstruction. Apollo and Dionysus may never have been deconstructionist tropes, but this idea of interdependent and simultaneously incompatible concepts certainly is. I guess I'm going to have to give Derrida his dues, after all the jazz on Nietzsche. Though he certainly couldn't write half as prettily.

Death and the paradox

xxiii.

We have looked at the problems posed by the current views on death, and at the background provided by past approaches to the question. We are now going to consider the practical aspects of the question. When, where and what is the best death, and what is the nature of the choice (if any) that we have on the subject, and to what conclusions do these questions lead?

xxiv.

Once I have established that dying of old age is not necessarily the preferable or natural possibility, all alternatives left to consider amount to suicide (since death by accident cannot be chosen). So the question becomes (and it's a serious question): is it best to let oneself die of natural causes, or to choose one's death by means of a calculated suicide? And if so, when should we kill ourselves? We must of course consider that, framed in this way, death by natural causes is itself a choice - it's just that you don't choose WHEN you're dying. And so everything points to this as the most synthetic form of the question: when is the best time to terminate your life (if any)? We shall return to this later.

xxv.

The nature of the choice is not homogeneous for all of us, of course. It depends heavily on what kind of future we have, and what situation we're in when we reach an elder age. If certain conditions apply, the choice of death does not pose itself. If I have a family, for instance, all considerations of suicide must be dropped. The responsibilities towards my wife and children (even if the latter are economically independent, there's affective and emotive responsibilities) are enough to forbid me from choosing death.

xxvi.

If I do not have a family, or do no longer have one, or have lost all connections with the members of my family, then the dilemma of natural death versus suicide has the grounds to be posed, and it is only under this implicit condition that we shall now explore its possibilities.


xxvii.

Let's go back to the question in the final form it revealed itself: when is the right moment to die (and is there one)? It is widely agreed that youth is the best part of life, so for all the emo kids who protest otherwise, definitely not then. As a rule, as long as you have full possession of your physical and mental faculties, there is no reason for you to consider death. It is also common sense that aging is not a pleasure, and that the longer you age, the more difficult it becomes. So if there has to be self-termination, it would have to be only after the body has reached a point of irreparable deterioration. If you contract a disease as lacerating and degrading as alzheimer's, for instance, it makes sense to end it before it gets to the stage that you've forgotten how to eat, even if you have a family.

xxviii.

Still, it's not that you should live or die because youth is pleasant and old age is painful. It's that when you're young, you haven't had the time to fulfill (or even choose) a 'purpose', and therefore to kill yourself then is to negate the value of life itself (you are essentially saying, it is better never to have been born than to live at all). I don't really agree with that statement and that's not the question I'm posing. I'm saying this: assuming that life is worth living, what is the right way to end it? All other questions would be thoughts on life, not thoughts on death, so they're not the subject of these meditations. Therefore if one should terminate life by one's own hand at all, it would have to be in old age, not so much to spare oneself the pains, but because I'm assuming that then you've had the time to do whatever it is that you've invested your life into doing. If you reach the age of eighty and you still have dreams you want to fulfill, the problem of killing yourself is again not to be posed.

xxix.

First scenario. I am seventy, and I seem to be pretty much as lucid now as I've been most of my life. My body isn't deteriorating too badly: I can still go out for a walk by myself, I can take care of things, and I'm not tormented with too much pain. Conclusion: no need to consider ending life. Even if you already feel accomplished, you haven't really lost anything you had when you were young (other than the possibility of playing rugby with your mates), so there's no more reason to kill yourself now than there was then.

xxx.

Second scenario. I am sixty, and I can feel that my mind is beginning to slip away. I forget things, I can no longer reason clearly, I often fail to make sense with my friends in conversations, and I am no longer good at the mathematics/economics/journalism that I've spent my life doing. I've suffered from a disease of the bones or the heart or the nervous system a few years ago, and now I've got killer back pains every night when I go to sleep, or it looks like I'll need a wheelchair five years from now, or I'm wetting my bed, or several of these put together, and I'll need a nurse to take care of me. Conclusion: the conventional objections to suicide do no longer hold.

xxxi.

Kant went down that road. Here's Scruton's account of his final days. It makes for a rending read:

Kant gave his last official lecture in 1796. By that time his faculties had begun to decline and a sombre melancholy had replaced his former gaiety. Fichte describes him as seeming to lecture in his sleep, waking with a start to his half-forgotten subject matter. Soon he lost his clarity of mind, his ability to recognise old friends, even his ability to complete simple sentences. He faded into insensibility, and passed from his blameless life on 12 February 1804, unaccompanied by his former intellectual powers.

Kant died at the age of eighty. Suppose that he'd died at the age of seventy. Would he or anyone else have lost very much? And if so, then what, exactly?


xxxii.

A common way to dismiss this would be to say, "These reflections only indicate a fear of aging." Yes, in part they do, but this misses the point. The conventional social response, the 'obvious' voice, is precisely the one which says - all of this is only considered by people who are afraid of becoming old. Even if there is some truth in it (and there is, of course), you must stop to consider that the statement is reversible. A Viking would say that we're only considering the alternative because we're afraid of death. Everyone would like to choose the path of courage, if that's a possibility, but once you strip away the clichés, the question remains of what is really courage, here. This is not a rhetorical question. Is it to shun the cold of solitude and pain, and by the bold decision to find death before both strength and mind are lost? Or is it to endure with patience the conclusive ride, and pay the debt of nature while enjoying the final skies? The whole point of these reflections is that the dilemma cannot be taken for granted. Yes, our society today says the second option is the right one. But others before it said different things. We cannot determine the answer simply by looking at what all the other people do (or are doing).

xxxiii.

So if one is done with his/her 'purpose' or interest by the elder age, and if s/he also doesn't have a family, what then? Is the dilemma of suicide then opened? Alas, no. Regrettably, this is where things get more rather than less complicated, and where the whole edifice of suicide is mined in its foundations, and it goes to show what we were saying from the outset: that a 'philosophy of death' is untenable from its inception.

xxxiv.

Planning your death involves a series of round-about psychological fuck-ups. For instance, it makes sense to plan on spending the last few years in hedonistic debauchery, throwing to the winds any money you don't intend to leave to charity. But as we mentioned, the hedonistic perspective doesn't work, even in such micro-versions. The moment you abandon yourself to pleasure with the justification that your imminent mortality allows it, the justification itself spoils the fun: you can't have fun without thinking that you're going to die. And then there's no fun. The agency contaminates the performance.


xxxv.

Another example. It would make sense for a writer or poet to produce his/her final works when s/he knows s/he's going to die: the knowledge of death would inspire very acute meditations on the subject (and from a cynical point of view, it would sell if s/he killed him/herself right after). We've seen it in everyone from Seneca to Sylvia Plath. So I could say, 'geez, I'll reach the age of 55, then write my last collection on the subject of death, then kill myself.' But the moment you start writing it, the act itself fucks you up: you become aware that you then become compelled to kill yourself to 'respect' the statement you're making, otherwise you're a charlatan. And this deterministic pressure is bound to have such horribly burdensome effects as to make the years under them not worth living, which defeats the point you were killing yourself for in the first place. The fact that you are, in a way, binding yourself, leads you to struggle against those binds, in the same process by which you originally struggled against the 'binding' of a death you did not like. It may even dissuade you from actually killing yourself - which makes the writing a waste of time, because if you hadn't planned on killing yourself, you wouldn't have written that which deterred you from killing yourself anyway!

xxxvi.

And so we come back to the original paradox: that you can't speak or think of death because any philosophy of death is a philosophy of life. It only holds, and it MUST be held, until you reach the point of executing it in practice. You can't plan the actions of your end, because if you end, there are no actions, and therefore whatever you're planning is not the end.

xxxvii.

It's impossible to have a philosophy on death, but it's also impossible NOT to have one, simply because we cannot make our choices in life unless we are thinking of how we want it to end. To be alive necessarily implies to think of death (even if you say, 'I do not think of death,' you are already thinking of death), but in order to truly think of death, you would have to be dead. This is the inescapable paradox on which all thoughts of death must depend. The ethics of suicide are valid and sustainable, at least as much as those behind natural death, but the fact of death itself makes these ethics performative rather than descriptive - they are something that we *do,* not something that is right or wrong. (And I suspect all ethical systems may be like that, in truth). The irony is that society spends so much of its energy into condemning suicide, which is something that we can't implement anyway. At least not until we have no choice. And then it isn't really suicide, or at least, it doesn't have the same ethical weight.

xxxix.

I expect several other of the philosophies and systems that we use to bear us forward, those which speak not just of death but of the meaning of life, are based on equally intangible foundations - paradoxes which cannot be sustained, yet simultaneously cannot be demolished. It is incredible how effectively they hold us together.

xxxx.

For the rest, nothing has changed. For the rest, you are immortal for as long as you're alive.

xxxxi.

...the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.

Death and responding

xi.

I mentioned there's no natural way of dying. The thing is that, while our methods for relating to other people or making love or cultivating a family have several features which are inbuilt, there's nothing inbuilt on how to die. Nature kills animals off by violence, but that simply means that the animal couldn't choose his mode of death. We're 'programmed' to be happy or unhappy when certain things happen, but death is simply not in the programs, not in the scripts, not in the blueprints. We simply have no referent to determine what's the best way to die. That's why the Viking option and the modern option can be weighed against each other, but it's impossible to evaluate them other than by experience. And since no-one comes back from the experience of dying, we've got no report to go by. In the end, both these philosophies of dying prove, once again, to be no more than philosophies of living.

xii.

And yes, I'm aware of Freud's death drive, but I don't think this solves our problem at all. In theory it means that death is 'in our script.' But for one thing, the drive expresses itself as a desire to return to the womb, which is not at all the same thing as dying in the real world (meaning that whatever event we can encounter which makes us die, will never correspond to our internal 'script'). And for another, the problem remains that building a life-philosophy on the basis of such a script doesn't necessarily make the quality of said life better. If it were as easy as that, the Vikings would never have gone against their self-preservation instincts to develop their doctrines. Or the Samurais. Or the Spartans. Or the Mongols. Or the buccanneers. Or the Crusaders. Or...



xiii.

The problem is that even though it's impossible to have a view on death, it's also impossible NOT to have a view on death. The fact of our mortality is so immense and inescapable that we simply cannot choose not to respond to it. The way that we construct our response to death is often the compass by which we orient ourselves in life. This is true regardless of whether you think there's nothing after these years of breath, or whether you think we all go to some magical cloudy place where everybody is 'maximally' happy forever.

xiv.

And so I must fall into a moral dilemma regarding death even as I'm aware that such a dilemma is inherently flawed in its terms. Once you assume that dying when you're old isn't necessarily the best way to go, what position must you take? What is left for you to take? We shall come back to this question in considerable death. Whoops. In considerable depth.

xv.

"Everybody dies of old age unless forced otherwise. Therefore, dying of age is the best way to die." That's a stupid syllogism. Dying of old age is just another case of being forced to die.



xvi.

"The only logical response to death is hedonism. Since we're all going to die and nothing is going to be left or matter after that, I should just concentrate on eating and fucking as much as I can, while I still have the possibility." This too is MASSIVELY STUPID. Augmenting the pleasure doesn't resolve the problem that pleasure passes. From an economical point of view the above statement is correct, but the questions of the human spirit cannot be reduced to 'an economical point of view.' We don't reason (about death, and in general) so grossly.

xvii.

More to the point, constructing a philosophy based on maximising pleasure on account of death is self-defeating. It fosters a hunger which cannot be sated, and so cannot lead to happiness or peace, which in turn corrodes the pleasure. Yeah, it's important to have a life-philosophy which allows for rather than represses pleasure, but I think it's clear that we should not confuse that with one which priorities only pleasure at the expense of all the rest. So let's drop hedonism here. As a response to death, it is delusional.

To be continued soon(ish) in Part III!!

Thoughts About Death

i.

Here's a quote by author Sam Harris, taken from this article:

A world in which global health is maximized would be an objective reality, quite distinct from a world in which we all die early and in agony.

Harris is discussing ethics, and he's trying to use an extreme-case scenario to drive us to a moral conclusion - that a world where we live longer is better than one where we die early and in agony. I don't think this is nearly as obvious as Harris would like to think. I'm not even sure it's true at all.

ii.

The 'obvious' argument is a tenet of a number of philosophers. Here's Thomas Nagel defending it, cited from that same article:

For example, a world in which everyone was maximally miserable would be worse than a world in which everyone was happy, and it would be wrong to try to move us toward the first world and away from the second. This is not true by definition, but it is obvious, just as it is obvious that elephants are larger than mice. If someone denied the truth of either of those propositions, we would have no reason to take him seriously...

I guess there's no reason to take me seriously, but I find this daft. Or at the very least, a case of false rhetoric. So much maturity and illumination is attained through sacrifice and pain, that imagining a 'happy' human being as a human being with no misery is a meaningless exercise. When you imagine 'maximal' misery, you stretch the concept of misery to such a point that it is no longer in touch with its original meaning (if any at all). Besides, it's equally vacuous to postulate a world where everyone is 'maximally miserable' when joy and misery are relative to other people - if everyone is maximally miserable, it's tantamount to saying that everyone is maximally happy. Formulating hypotheses which are not just unattainable but even inconceivable is not useful to clarify a discourse - and so much philosophy is based on precisely such hypothetical 'examples,' which take given real-world conditions and project them to extremes so as to test their 'universality,' that I usually lose interest quickly.

But then, much common sense is based on the same things. And one example of an 'obvious' truth is the claim that it's better to die old than young, in peace rather than in pain.

iii.

In the natural world, death in the animal kingdom is almost always violent. You could say that we are designed to end abruptly, rather than pine away and decay. As most everything else we do, our ways of dying are a violation of the natural order.


iv.

I don't know of any major culture which does not celebrate, with variations in colour, death on the battlefield. In most cases, it's even thought of as the best or the only way to die. The Vikings came to the point of vilifying death by natural causes. They told the story that if you didn't die in battle, then eventually an old lady would come in your tent at night and strangle you (this was meant to be the most abhorrent mode of death - unmanly, unnatural and unholy). I mention this only to say that dying 'of natural causes' (which, as we have seen, is not natural) has only recently become established in the popular imagination as the normal way of dying. The Vikings would have been revolted at Harris' *obvious* best-case-scenario for the death of men. And they're hardly alone. How many of our civilisations produced heroes who died young? Start from Achilles and count the bodies.

v.

Though I'm trying to keep a discussion of gender at the margins of these meditations, the parallel comes to my mind of the young lady in love who dies - another particularly popular trope. I wonder if it relates to Achilles somehow. Manon Lescaut, Madame Bovary, Anna Karenina, Lucinde, Nana, all the endless young ladies of Opera, all the femme fatales in Hollywood. There's just no end to them. This time the correlation is between love and dying young, rather than violence and dying young. Two forms of passion, I guess.



vi.

The problem with living longer lives is that the (perceived/expected) duration of your life determines the way you behave with it. That's why the equation longer life = better life is simply not tenable, even if we're talking about one same person. Knowing that you're bound to die at a comparatively young age may foster life-styles and philosophies which are less materialistic and more concentrated on enjoying the present moment. And you can eat, drink, smoke, play, fuck as much as you like, if that's your fancy. Our current culture encourages an attitude to death which is projective, and this of course has its downsides. Think about all the books you've read not for the pleasure of reading, but to build up your culture. Ours is the first civilisation which had to draw the distinction between pleasure-reading and, well, every other type of reading. Originally the two things were the same. Think about all the hours you've spent packed into a gym. Modern cultures are kind of religious even when they're at their most secular, in that they promise happiness as a postponed state, and they see the present as the labour-camp. (Ironically, they have reached this conclusion by negating the existence of an afterlife).

vii.

A few things I should clarify. Firstly, I'm not saying that the modern stance is 'bad' and that that of the Vikings is the better one. It's not like I'm bemoaning those dear old times when people died by the sword all the time. I'm not committing to either of the two teleologies, in fact. I only refuse to take either of them for granted. The thing about both of these philosophical paradigms is that it's impossible to determine which one makes us happier from our position. And this is because there is no 'natural' way of dying, but more on this later.

viii.

Secondly, I'm not commending violence, even indirectly, much less war. I have no interest in violence (at least not in the terms of this particular discussion).


ix.

The problem is that it's impossible to have a 'view' on death. You cannot 'speak' of death. You cannot have a philosophy to deal with it. Consider the cliché of stating that one is not afraid of death. It's a rhetorical turn of phrase utilised, amusingly, by both Christians and atheists, though they invoke opposite motivations (theists claim to have no fear because they know there's salvation after death, atheists say that their lack of faith in such a metaphysical immortality points precisely to their lack of fear of death). But it fails the test of experience - there's no reason to imagine that people staking such a claim would be any less terrified than anybody else if you pointed a loaded gun to their face (would you?). You cannot have a philosophy of death because it would always, necessarily, be a philosophy of life.

x.

The only discussions of death which can be taken seriously must come from people who have risked their lives. If you defeated cancer, been involved in a military fire-fight or survived an airplane crash, *then* you can say something meaningful about it (assuming you're not mentally incapacitated by trauma).

To be continued in Part II tomorrow!