PHILOSOPHICAL UNDERPINNINGS, PART III

By

Karl H. Puechl

October 2, 1988

In my previous talks entitled "Philosophical Underpinnings", I contended that man has two problems that he has never completely resolved: He has trouble accepting the fact that human life has no particular meaning and therefore that he, as an individual, has little significance; and, also he has trouble accepting death as being final. Even though man has trouble accepting the true situation, his ingenuity makes life bearable. He uses self-delusion as, what psychologists would call, defense mechanisms in order to satisfy his own ego. These delusions can be of the elaborate supernatural variety, or they can be much more down-to-earth; nevertheless, if they circumvent the realities of the human condition, they are delusions. I point out that delusions are not necessarily bad; there is nothing wrong with a psychological defense mechanism that makes an individual feel better without having any adverse effect on others; and that gives society greater cohesion and an impetus towards improvement. The problem has usually been that most delusions have been divisive, leading to conclusions such as: I am better than thou; we are superior to them; our ways are best and we must change other peoples' ways for the better; etc., etc., through local fights, wars, and inquisitions.

To get at a, perhaps, more benign delusion I asked the question, "Who am I?", and came up with the answer that we are the totality of impressions we make on others through our actions, accomplishments and all our acquired possessions and characteristics. With this more integrated view of individuality, society is not an aggregation of discrete individuals, rather it is a mosaic of overlapping regions; a much more cohesive and interdependent entity. Through this definition of individuality, one can readily conclude that a human being is not just a selfish entity concerned with his individual well-being, but is intrinsically also a social animal that is concerned with the well-being of others.

In this talk, I'm going to elaborate to see to what extent this broad definition of the individual helps man to deal with his mortality.

Eric Fromm in his book MAN FOR HIMSELF makes much of the fact that man is brought into being stifled by the "existential dichotomy" that is death. Birth means life ,but at that glorious moment, death is already preordained in the not too distant future. We must agree with Fromm that the death of our bodies is preordained; but what of ourselves using the broader definition of the individual? Is the death of impressions we make on others preordained, or can the life of our spirits, in this sense, be eternal?

We may liken the death of our body to the death of our childhood. During childhood our personality is formed and nourished by our parents, teachers and peers. As adults, our personality must depend primarily on its own foundations for further nourishment. Similarly, during the life of our body, our spirit, the impressions we make on others, is nourished by the body. After the death of our body, our spirit must live and develop by itself. We do not fear the passing of our childhood at the time of the transition. Why then fear the death of our body? We certainly must regret the death of our body since this is one of our treasured possessions. Also, those dear to us, who consider our body as part of themselves under our broad definition of individuality, will certainly have suffered a loss and a contraction of themselves. But through our definition of the individual, life defined as survival of the individual can be eternal. Immortality is achieved by the spirit which is not centered within the body but rather in the minds and hence bodies of others. Our spirits will live on earth. We will live on earth as long as there is in existence a race of individuals that can comprehend our achievements and our attributes.

Except for our broader definition of the individual, this is not a novel idea. Early Christian theology had some recognition of this fact. Early Christianity placed strong emphasis on the dualism between personality and body. Personality would achieve a life after death but the body would remain scattered as dust on earth. This concept is sensible if the definition of personality as used in early Christian theology is considered to be equivalent to the definition of spirit that I have used. Ovid probably subscribed to this concept of immortality since after completing the METAMORPHOSES he announced his own immortality with the words "per saecula omnia vivam"---I shall live forever. Plato also had an inkling of this concept. In his SYMPOSIUM, Diotima says to Socrates: "Think only of the ambition of men, and you will wonder at the senselessness of their ways, unless you consider how they are stirred by the love of an immortality of fame. They are ready to run all risks greater far than they would have run for their children, and to spend money and undergo any sort of toil, and even to die, for the sake of leaving behind them a name which shall be eternal."

In modern times, Samuel Butler has been one of the most ardent exponents of this natural form of immortality. His popular novel, THE WAY OF ALL FLESH is filled with philosophical asides and searching commentary in support of this concept of immortality. However, his best presentation is given in EREWHON REVISITED, in a Chapter entitled "President Gurgoyle's Pamphlet on the Physics of Vicarious Existence". Dr. Gurgoyle's arguments proceed as follows:

"Life, he urged lies not in bodily organs, but in the power to use them, and in the use that is made of them---that is to say, in the work that they do. As the essence of a factory is not in the building wherein the work is done nor yet in the implements used in turning it out, but in the will-power of the master and in the goods he makes; so the true life of a man is in his will and work, not in his body. 'Those,' he argued, 'who make the life of a man reside in his body, are like one who should mistake the carpenter's toolbox for the carpenter.'"

Gurgoyle comes closest to our development of the definition of individuality when

"He went on to say that our will-power is not wholly limited to the working of its own special system of organs, but under certain conditions can work and be worked upon by other will-powers like itself: so that if, for example, A's will-power has got such a hold on B's as to be able, through B, to work B's mechanism, what seems to have been B's action will in reality have been more A's than B's and this is the same real sense as though the physical action had been affected through A's own mechanical system---A, in fact, will have been living in B. The universally admitted maxim that he who does this or that by the hand of an agent does it himself, shows that the foregoing view is only a roundabout way of stating what common sense treats as a matter of course.

"Hence, though A's individual will-power must be held to cease when the tools it works are destroyed or out of gear, yet as long as any survivors were so possessed by it while it was still efficient, or, again, become so impressed by its operation on them through work that he has left as to act in obedience to his will-power rather than their own, A has a certain amount of bona fide life still remaining. His vicarious life is not affected by the dissolution of his body; and in many cases the sum total of man's vicarious action and of its outcome exceeds to an almost infinite extent the sum total of those actions and works that were effected through the mechanism of his own physical organs. In these cases his vicarious life is more truly his life than any that he lived in his own person."

He goes on to elaborate:

"This vicarious life---is lived by every one of us before death as well as after it, and is little less important to us than that of which we are to some extent conscious in our own persons. A man, we will say, has written a book which delights or displeases thousands of whom he knows nothing, and who know nothing of him. The book, we will suppose, has considerable, or at any rate some influence on the action of these people. Let us suppose the writer fast asleep while others are enjoying his work, and acting in consequence of it, perhaps at long distances from him. Which is his truest life---the one he is leading in them, or that equally unconscious life residing in his own sleeping body: Can there be a doubt that the vicarious life is the more efficient?

"Or when we are waking, how powerfully does not the life we are living in others pain or delight us? How truly do we not recognize it as part of our own existence, and how great an influence does not the fear of the present hell in men's bad thoughts, and the hope of a present heaven in their good ones, influence our own conduct? Have we not here a true heaven and a true hell, as compared with the efficiency of which these gross material ones so falsily engrafted on the Sunchild's teaching are but as the flint implements of a prehistoric race? 'If a man,' said the Sunchild, 'fear not man, whom he hath seen, neither will he fear God, whom he hath not seen.'"

With regard to death, the death of the body, Butler further writes

"It may be urged that on a man's death one of the great factors of his life is so annihilated that no kind of true life can be any further conceded to him. For to live is to be influenced, as well as to influence; and when a man is dead how can he be influenced? He can haunt, but he cannot any more be haunted. He can come to us, but we cannot go to him. On ceasing, therefore, to be impressionable, so great a part of that wherein his life consisted is removed, that no true life can be conceded him."

"I do not pretend that a man is fully alive after his so-called death as before it. He is not. All I contend for is that a considerable amount of efficient life still remains to some of us, and that a little life remains to all of us, after what we commonly regard as the complete cessation of life. In answer, then, to those who have just urged that the destruction of one of the two great factors of life destroys life altogether, I reply that the same must hold good as regards death."

"If to live is to be influenced and to influence, and if a man cannot be held as living when he can no longer be influenced, and a man cannot be held dead until both these two factors of death are present. If failure of the power to be influenced vitiates life, presence of the power to influence vitiates death. And no one will deny that a man can influence for many a long year after he is vulgarity reputed dead."

As we have already mentioned, the death of the body can be likened more to the passing into maturity, rather than to partial dying.

With regard to the life of the spirit after death, Butler gives the following illustration:

"....The Sunchild was never weary of talking to us ... about a great poet of that nation to which it pleased him to feign that he belonged. How plainly can we not now see that his words were spoken for our learning---for the enforcement of that true view of heaven and hell on which I am feebly trying to insist? The poet's name, he said, was Shakespeare. Whilst he was alive, very few people understood his greatness; whereas now, after some three hundred years, he is deemed the greatest poet the world has ever known. 'Can this man,' he asked, 'be said to have been truly born till many a long year after he had been reputed as truly dead? While he was in the flesh, was he more than a mere embryo growing towards birth into that life of the world to come in which he now shines gloriously: What a small thing was that flesh and blood life, of which he was alone conscious, as compared with that fleshless life which he lives but knows not in the lives of millions, and which, had it ever fully revealed even to his imagination, we may be sure that he could not have reached?"

"...Which, then, of this man's two lives should we deem best worth having, if we could choose one or the other, but not both? The felt or the unfelt? Who would not go cheerfully to block or stake if he knew that by doing so he could win such a life as this poet lives, though he also knew that on having won it he could know no more about it? Does not this prove that in our heart of hearts we deem an unfelt life, in the heaven of men's loving thoughts, to be better worth having than any we can reasonably hope for and still feel?"

Ashley Montagu, a more recent exponent of this philosophy, has used some of these same quotations from Butler in his lectures on IMMORTALITY. Montagu goes on to say:

"Butler gives us a view of immortality to which, I believe, every man may subscribe, and one may opine that it is a viewpoint which all mankind will one day universally embrace. A great part of mankind has already gone a long way toward doing so.

"...And since men's thoughts are a reflection of their souls, of themselves, their souls, in this sense, may be said to live on in their thoughts, in their deeds, in their works. And this, I believe, is the only real immortality."

From these quotations, it is apparent that a number of philosophers in the past have attempted to foist this delusion of vicarious immortality on the general public but with only limited success. Perhaps, greater acceptance will come about if our derived integrated view of individuality is recognized as being a reasonable starting premise. Then, each of us is immortal because each of us is the totality of impressions he makes on others through the totality of his accomplishments and his acquired characteristics and possessions.

It must be recognized that man deludes himself whenever he tries to justify his actions by ascribing long-term objectivity or benefit. However, such delusion, no matter how irrational, can be beneficial if it gives individual people a seeming purpose and, thereby, immediate comfort or "happiness". Any delusion, whether based on the natural or the supernatural, is irrelevant unless there are practical immediate or near-term consequences that result from its belief. A delusion may look to the future, but, to become generally accepted, its benefits must accrue here and now. When comparing delusions, the one that man will be believe in is not the one that most accurately predicts the future; rather, it is the one that makes him feel better today. Man must strive for a generally acceptable delusion that not only brings immediate personal satisfaction but that also leads all of mankind to a future that is worth living.

Self-delusion need not be on a grandiose scale. Man also deludes himself in order to justify relatively routine actions. At some time, most of us have deliberated over the purchase of a replacement automobile. Logically, the replacement can almost never be justified. Usually, the cost of repairing the old jalopy can be estimated to be far less than the initial outlay and subsequent depreciation of a shiny new model. Yet, we go ahead and purchase the new car; rationalizing (deluding ourselves) that it was a logical decision. This relatively minor self-delusion is probably to our benefit. We become elated and somewhat proud; perhaps, because under our derived definition of individuality we have expanded our life. It doesn't take deep philosophizing to show that man deludes himself and that it helps him to muddle through.