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featured essay: august 2002 The Consolations of Philosophy by Dale McGowan "Superstition sets the whole world in flames; philosophy quenches them." -Voltaire How are you doing with Death? Forgive me for asking. But since you are reading this, I assume that you've set aside the consolations of theology --- and that you're asking your children to do the same. But I'm frequently surprised to see disbelievers of all stripes merrily addressing the epistemological questions of how and what we know without acknowledging the gaping existential questions that are, after all, the real reasons religion was born and persists. We are, each of us in turn, going to die. Most likely our consciousnesses will vanish into nothingness. We live a very short while, then are dead forever. So how are you doing with that? And if the answer is "not too well," how are you going to help your kids resist the temptations of the heavenly hoax? What does it really mean to cease to exist? I can't imagine it myself. It is literally beyond our ability to form a conscious notion of our own utter nonexistence. Hence the alternative so many choose: deny it. We don't really die after all: we ascend to a higher reality. It works! Try it. It'll make you feel ever so much better. And you won't find out you're mistaken until...well, shoot, you'll never find out! So then...what kind of fools ARE we?! Well, no greater fools than Thomas Huxley, anyway. After the death of his beloved four-year old son, the 19th century biologist, agnostic, and champion of natural selection Thomas Henry Huxley asked himself much the same question in a letter to the Reverend Canon Kingsley. Kingsley had urged Huxley to renounce his agnosticism in the face of his loss, and to embrace the consolations of faith. Huxley replied with moving candor in a letter that many consider the single greatest and most profoundly moving testament to intellectual integrity ever conceived: "My convictions, positive and negative, on all the matters of which you speak, are of long and slow growth and are firmly rooted. But the great blow which fell upon me seemed to stir them to their foundation, and had I lived a couple of centuries earlier I could have fancied a devil scoffing at me and themand asking me what profit it was to have stripped myself of the hopes and consolations of the mass of mankind? To which my only reply was and isOh devil! truth is better than much profit. I have searched over the grounds of my belief, and if wife and child and name and fame were all to be lost to me one after the other as the penalty, still I will not lie."* Huxley is among my great intellectual heroes. But even Huxley, turning from false consolations in the midst of his grief, offered little in the way of true compensation beyond a picture of breathtaking intellectual courage. Yes, I want to reject the false consolations of theology --- but might there be a resource for TRUE consolation? Yes indeed. They are the consolations of philosophy. The secularization of the West that began in earnest five hundred years ago has proceeded at light speed along intellectual paths, replacing superstitious conjecture with empiricism and reason. But the development of naturalistic moral and conceptual frameworks to replace supernatural ones has taken place not in the bright light of scientific inquiry but in the quiet, reflective works of the moral and existential philosophers. It is to these works we can turn for what is literally "true consolation." For example: yes, we do die, for real and for good, notes the Greek philosopher Epicurus (third century BCE), but our fear of death is partly a reflection of our failure to truly grasp nonexistence. Creatures of consciousness, we can only conceive it as "me-floating-in-darkness-forever," a positively horrific notion. The key, Epicurus suggests, is to fully realize that death is the END of experience. One can only experience life, up to its final moment, so he asks: "If I am, death is not. If death is, I am not. Why should I fear something I will never experience?" Sufficient meditation on that simple insight can produce some real consolation --- and as parents, we are provided one more small way to help our children deal with death without immersing them in myths that we can only hope they will one day set aside. Of similar conceptual help is Epicurus' "symmetry argument," which says that anyone who fears death should consider the expanse of time before he was born. The 'past infinity' of nonexistence before one's birth is identical to the 'future infinity' of nonexistence after death. 'You' have already been there, in other words, though that is precisely the wrong way to phrase it. We don't generally consider not having existed for an eternity before our births to be a terrible thing, so we shouldn't think of not existing for an eternity after our deaths as a terrible thing. There is literally no difference in the two other than our ability to contemplate and anticipate the future. Though Richard Dawkins probably wouldn't call himself a philosopher, he has offered similar insights that can combine with the "two eternities" idea to produce an explosion of awe in the reflective person. Dawkins notes that for every person who has existed, trillions of potential but unrealized genetic combinations represent "people" who never had the chance to exist. But you and I, in all our ordinariness, beat the odds. We rose out of potentiality into actuality. By a roll of the dice, our consciousnesses came into being for a brief look around. The only difference between me and one of the "people" who never came to be is this fleeting, precious moment of consciousness. It is THIS, the brief moment of life, that is precious, that is unusual, that is truly inconceivable --- precisely the moment that Christianity teaches us to abhor, to reject, to look beyond. We can look to philosophy for insights into morality as well, with that added benefit that moral pronouncements (such as "Thou shalt not kill") are undergirded with reasoned arguments (such as Aristotle's virtue theory, Bentham's Utilitarianism or Kant on duty theory), most of which can be understood clearly enough to be explained to children. How much more satisfying to answer the "why" questions of morality with actual reasons instead of the theistic equivalent of "because Dad says so." Duty theory begins with the Golden Rule, then asks just what it is, exactly, that we wish others to "do unto" us --- and requires us to do the same. In 1930, British philosopher W.D. Ross built on Kant's work to lay out seven rational moral imperatives, all of which are easy to understand and to teach: - Fidelity -- the duty to keep promises - Gratitude -- the duty to thank those who help us - Justice -- the duty to treat others fairly - Beneficence -- the duty to work for the benefit of others - Self-improvement -- the duty to improve our intelligence and virtue - Nonmaleficence -- the duty to not harm others - Reparation -- the duty to compensate others we have harmed So yes, it's true that we can find consolations, answers, moral guidance and insights without theology, but too often we pretend it's as easy as falling off a log. Common sense only goes so far before it can begin to mislead. That's when we turn to philosophy, which is nothing more than the history of serious thinking about the problems of being human. I remember the first time I read the thoughts of Aristotle and was transfixed by the realization that his experience of life 2400 years ago was much more similar to mine than I could have imagined --- but he could think and write about it so much more clearly and deeply than I. And on it went as I read Montaigne, Erasmus, Descartes, Hume, each of whom was born, learned to walk, woke each morning, ate breakfast, belched, sang, felt lazy, felt inspired, fell asleep each night, dreamt, made love, thought well and hard about how to be a good person and whether death was the end --- and then sat down and wrote about it all. It is a great tragedy that our modern myopia --- what has been called our "chronocentrism" --- often blunts our appreciation of the treasury of insights of these great thinkers of past generations. We get the idea from somewhere that they're hard to read or irrelevant to our lives and too often we believe it. Well it ain't so --- and for those seeking secular wisdom and secular consolation, there's no better place to go. And there's no greater consolation for disbelievers, by the way, than the realization that so very many of the greatest philosophers of every age --- Socrates, Epicurus, Voltaire, Hume, Mill, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Russell --- were partial or complete skeptics about the religious beliefs of their times. It's reasonable to feel daunted by the vast expanse of the philosophical landscape, and not all philosophers are equally apt entry points, so I'll recommend a couple of good accessible guides. Read Bryan Magee's THE STORY OF PHILOSOPHY and Alain de Botton's CONSOLATIONS OF PHILOSOPHY (this month's book review feature) for a wealth of consolation and relevant knowledge for our lives, both as secular individuals and as secular parents. For the complete text of (among others) this astonishing letter by T. H. Huxley, go to http://aleph0.clarku.edu/huxley/letters/60.html |
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