“Oh wretched, ephemeral race, children of chance and misery, why do you compel me to tell you what it would be most expedient for you not to hear? What is best of all is utterly beyond your reach: not to be born, not to be, to be nothing. But the second best for you is — to die soon.”

–“The Wisdom of Silenus,”⁰

Apologias for Mortality

I’ve recently read Greta Christina’s short book Comforting Thoughs about Death That Have Nothing To Do with God.¹ Christina is a major atheist blogger who wrote a book about why atheists are angry which rather liked. I’m a infidel crank with an interest in death. So it was a natural thing to attract some of my attention. I’m sorry to say that a fair amount of the book irritated me, except for the part of Christina’s cat, which only made me sad.

Irritation is an invitation to reflection, so here goes.

The intellectual meat of the book is it’s first few chapters in which Christina offers what I would call apologias for mortality. The fact that we are all going to die someday is painful and frightening to confront and likely motivates many people to hang on to religious faith that they might otherwise abandon. Since Christina thinks the world would be a better place with less — perhaps no — religious faith in it, she needs to offer some non-religious consolation for the ugly fact of death.

The Wonder of it All

There first class of these I’ll call the Wonder of It All. Christina explains it like this:

…[Y]ou can see death as a part of the way the world works. We are an animal species in the physical world, and animals in the physical world get sick, or get in accidents, or get birth defects, or die in natural disasters…And when it comes to contemplating your own death, you can see it in much the same way. Death is the thing that will ultimately separate you from the universe — and yet, paradoxically, it connects you with it as well…Death sucks, and premature death sucks worse. But it’s part of the package deal of getting to be alive. (Locs. 102-5)

So death is part of the “package deal” of being alive. You want the deal, right? Don’t you want to be alive?

Christina apparently thinks it’s a done deal at this point, but it’s important to note that there really is an assumption underlying the claim that we really would want the deal, which is that the world really is somehow a sufficiently nice place that we should be glad to be alive in it. In a culture that regards optimism as a requisite of sanity it might be difficult to see the assumption as an assumption. But assumption it is, and any number of thinkers, including important non- (or anti-) religious thinkers whom I must assume Christina has read have engaged with and challenged it, and in some cases outright rejected it. Consider, for example, Philo’s famous rejoinder about the badness of the world in David Hume’s Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion.

Admitting your position, replied PHILO, which yet is extremely doubtful, you must at the same time allow, that if pain be less frequent than pleasure, it is infinitely more violent and durable. One hour of it is often able to outweigh a day, a week, a month of our common insipid enjoyments; and how many days, weeks, and months, are passed by several in the most acute torments? Pleasure, scarcely in one instance, is ever able to reach ecstasy and rapture; and in no one instance can it continue for any time at its highest pitch and altitude. The spirits evaporate, the nerves relax, the fabric is disordered, and the enjoyment quickly degenerates into fatigue and uneasiness. But pain often, good God, how often! rises to torture and agony; and the longer it continues, it becomes still more genuine agony and torture. Patience is exhausted, courage languishes, melancholy seizes us, and nothing terminates our misery but the removal of its cause, or another event, which is the sole cure of all evil, but which, from our natural folly, we regard with still greater horror and consternation.²

The world as experienced by its sentient creatures is indeed a plenum of pain interrupted, as if to taunt us, with occasional feeble stirrings of pleasure.

The great and optimistic reformer like John Stuart Mill had an appropriately negative view of the world we live in, expressed in his essay “On Nature.”

In sober truth, nearly all the things which men are hanged or imprisoned for doing to one another are nature’s every-day performances. Killing, the most criminal act recognised by human laws, Nature does once to every being that lives; and, in a large proportion of cases, after protracted tortures such as only the greatest monsters whom we read of ever purposely inflicted on their living fellow creatures. If, by an arbitrary reservation, we refuse to account anything murder but what abridges a certain term supposed to be allotted to human life, nature also does this to all but a small percentage of lives, and does it in all the modes, violent or insidious, in which the worst human beings take the lives of one another. Nature impales men, breaks them as if on the wheel, casts them to be devoured by wild beasts, burns them to death, crushes them with stones like the first Christian martyr, starves them with hunger, freezes them with cold, poisons them by the quick or slow venom of her exhalations, and has hundreds of other hideous deaths in reserve, such as the ingenious cruelty of a Nabis or a Domitian never surpassed. All this Nature does with the most supercilious disregard both of mercy and of justice, emptying her shafts upon the best and noblest indifferently with the meanest and worst; upon those who are engaged in the highest and worthiest enterprises, and often as the direct consequence of the noblest acts; and it might almost be imagined as a punishment for them. She mows down those on whose existence hangs the well-being of a whole people, perhaps the prospect of the human race for generations to come, with as little compunction as those whose death is a relief to themselves, or a blessing to those under their noxious influence. Such are Nature’s dealings with life. Even when she does not intend to kill she inflicts the same tortures in apparent wantonness. In the clumsy provision which she has made for that perpetual renewal of animal life, rendered necessary by the prompt termination she puts to it in every individual instance, no human being ever comes into the world but another human being is literally stretched on the rack for hours or days, not unfrequently issuing in death. Next to taking life (equal to it according to a high authority) is taking the means by which we live; and Nature does this too on the largest scale and with the most callous indifference. A single hurricane destroys the hopes of a season; a flight of locusts, or an inundation, desolates a district; a trifling chemical change in an edible root starves a million of people. The waves of the sea, like banditti, seize and appropriate the wealth of the rich and the little all of the poor with the same accompaniments of stripping, wounding, and killing as their human antitypes. Everything, in short, which the worst men commit either against life or property is perpetrated on a larger scale by natural agents. Nature has Noyades more fatal than those of Carrier; her explosions of firedamp are as destructive as human artillery; her plague and cholera far surpass the poison-cups of the Borgias. Even the love of “order,” which is thought to be a following of the ways of Nature, is in fact a contradiction of them. All which people are accustomed to deprecate as “disorder ” and its consequences is precisely a counterpart of Nature’s ways. Anarchy and the Reign of Terror are overmatched in injustice, ruin, and death by a hurricane and a pestilence.³

But most magnificent (and pithy) of all in his denunciation of the world was Arthur Schopenhauer.

The pleasure in this world, it has been said, outweighs the pain; or, at any rate, there is an even balance between the two. If the reader wishes to see shortly whether this statement is true, let him compare the respective feelings of two animals, one of which is engaged in eating the other.

and further.

If you try to imagine, as nearly as you can, what an amount of misery, pain and suffering of every kind the sun shines upon in its course, you will admit that it would be much better if, on the earth as little as on the moon, the sun were able to call forth the phenomena of life; and if, here as there, the surface were still in a crystalline state.

Again, you may look upon life as an unprofitable episode, disturbing the blessed calm of non-existence. And, in any case, even though things have gone with you tolerably well, the longer you live the more clearly you will feel that, on the whole, life is a disappointment, nay, a cheat.⁴

Too long to cite in the body of this post, but not to be missed by the connoisseur of literary expressions human futility and misery would be Gicaomo Leopardi’s magnificent La ginestra.

The point, though, should be clear enough. The world’s an awful place, and life in it isn’t a deal we should want to take. If the world is a dunghill, then our intimate connection to it can neither be anything to celebrate nor any consolation for the fact that we must leave it.

Christina sometimes offers a variant on the Wonder of It All apologia which might be called You’re Lucky to Exist at All. It is

…[t]he idea that each one of us was astronomically lucky to have been born at all, and that complaining that our lives aren’t infinite is like winning a million dollars in the lottery and complaining that we didn’t win a hundred billion, or indeed all the money in the world. (Loc. 172)

Well, it seems plausible that the existence of any given person is extremely unlikely.⁵ If your parents had jiggled just a little differently in the act of sexual congress that resulted in you a different sperm would have fertilized a your mother’s ovum and the result would have been a different person. Or if one of your parents had had to work late that night then perhaps there would have been a different person in your place no person at all. Or if perchance they had never met there would have been no you. And what applies to them applies in turn to their parents before them, and their parents’ parents before them, back to the origins of sex. Contingency piles upon contingency to the point where the probability of there being you, at least estimated ex ante, is fantastically small. Don’t you feel lucky?

I don’t feel lucky. Underlying the claim that you’re fantastically lucky to exist at all is buried but easy-to-dig-out premise that coming into existence is a good thing for one who comes into existence. As we’ve seen, this premise is easily contestable. If the world is an awful place, then coming into it is a misfortune. Coming into existence isn’t like winning a million dollars rather than a hundred billion; it’s like waking up one day and finding you’re a million dollars in debt to the Mob. You have no memory of how you incurred the debt or of ever having consented to having incurred the debt, but that of course doesn’t mean the Mob doesn’t intend to make you pay — one way or another. (And of course, David Benatar has offered us strong arguments for thinking that coming into existence is a misfortune even if life is not on balance suffering.) If coming into existence is not a good thing, then the logic of Christina’s claim turns on its head. It’s incredibly unlucky for you that you came into existence at all. Consider that a quadrillion quadrillion quadrillion Might-Have-Beens-But-Never-Weres are uninterrupted in the blessed calm of non-existence, but fate has singled out you, uniquely among them, to be yanked forth into this web of misery where you will be condemned to your three-score and ten years (give or take a few decades) of suffering. Do you feel lucky now?

At least death gets you off your ass

If the idea of the Wonder of It All doesn’t reconcile us to death, perhaps something else might. Christina’s other apologia is might be called At Least Death Gets You Off Your Ass (hey, if she can say “Death sucks” then I get to be a little colloquial too). This is an apologia driven by a personal realization by Christina in mid-life that she wasn’t going to live forever and that if she ever wanted to have a career as a writer she would have to get started, because otherwise she would die and that aspiration would be left unrealized. The fact that she was going to die was the great motivator: “I never would have done it without death.” She goes on

I’d love to think I’m the kind of person would would spend immortality doing marvelous things: writing novels and learning Latin, working soup kitchens and becoming a championship ballroom dancer, reading all of Dickens and traveling to Madagascar. But I know that’s bullshit. I’m the sort of person who would spend immortality sitting on the sofa eating chocolate chips and watching “Project Runway” marathons. (Loc. 132)

It’s a little tricky for me to handle this apologia, probably because my interpretation of my own present motivational structure is rather different from the one Christina offers for hers. I have no list of things that are Worth Doing but which I will not be motivated to do without the threat of death’s coming along and preventing them from ever getting done. I do things because I am unhappy now and know that the misery is going to continue and likely get much worse — for myself, for people I care about, perhaps even for people generally — if I don’t get off my sofa and find some useful distraction⁶ from myself. Making the misery go away is most of what makes me write — whether this post, or the Tales of Gnosis College and its associated projects, or just e-mail to friends. It motivates even my various image curation undertakings. They might be tedious work at times, but at least they help make my sense of myself go away, and that’s a blessed relief. I have no consciousness of the fact that I am going to die someday when I’m getting up off the sofa and, as far as I can tell, the fact doesn’t play a significant role in doing what it is that I do. I have given up on the notion that there are things Worth Doing and just try to focus on making things less awful.

That said, I don’t find it impossible to relate to Christina’s motivational structure, because it does describe a way that I used to to think about life but which I have (largely) surrendered, for reasons that will probably soon be evident. When I tried to envision the list of things that might have been Worth Doing, the list always exploded into something utterly unmanageable. The things that seemed Worth Doing were legion and generally very time-consuming: I should learn Greek and Hebrew well enough to read the scriptures in their original languages (a worthwhile project perhaps not in spite of, perhaps because of, my atheism). I should memorize Leopardi’s Canti (my command of Italian could use some work, too). I should learn to play piano well enough to credibly perform The Well-Tempered Clavier — all 48 preludes and fugues. I should master the sciences and mathematics and statistics as well at least as an MIT undergraduate who somehow majored in all of them. I should write at least a hundred volumes of the Tales of Gnosis College. And on. And on. There seemed to be no principled reason at all to choose among the various things I might have done, only arbitrariness, only meaningless existential choices. Every use of a minute was challenged by a thousand other uses for that minute. The opportunity costs of every choice were always heavy, and I found myself suffocating under them. Were anyone to attempt to do all the things Worth Doing the amount of time that would be necessary to do them would run into many centuries at least. On no plausible forecast of the future was I going to live that long. It ineluctably followed that if there were things Worth Doing, then I was never going to get to more than a pretty small fraction of them. And that was not consoling. That was the opposite of consoling. So if there really are things Worth Doing, then the facts of our mortality, as they are currently, are unspeakably awful and frustrating.

Why Be So Negative?

Now someone, it would seem, has presented Christina with some variant of my own pessimistic view. It seems to make her irritable.

Look. Questions like, “Is there a god?” “Is there a soul?” “Is there an afterlife?” — these are questions of fact,[⁷] questions we can and should be debating the evidence for. But questions like “Is it comforting to view death as a natural process, something that connects us with the great chain of cause and effect in the universe?” or, “Is it comforting to view death as a deadline, something we need to accomplish anything?” — the are questions of subjective opinion, personal perspective. We can discuss and debate them — but ultimately, they are questions which can be legitimately answered with, “if it’s true for me, then it’s true for me.” If it comforts people, it comforts people….And when it comes to questions of perspective and opinion and personal philosophy — whey not try to be positive? Why not try to frame our experience in ways that are hopeful and meaningful and comforting? (Loc. 439)

Let’s consider the notion that objective facts don’t point us toward either pessimism or optimism. (Christina would probably prefer to have her position characterized as “realism.” I’m sorry, but I just can’t accept that. If you really think you’re lucky to be alive then you’re an optimist if one was ever born.)

It’s true (unless you’re a moral realist, which I’m not) that there’s no fact of the matter as to how one is to react to the world as it is. If dunghills fill you with fizzy feelings, then there’s no evidence which I or anyone else can appeal to to show you that you are wrong to feel that way (ask any dung beetle). I would take issue only with those who look at dunghills and insist on seeing flowered springtime hillsides.

There are propositions — sometimes formulated consciously, sometimes not — that serve as the predicates of people’s sense of joy or meaning in life. We might call these propositions Affirmations. Here are some specimen Affirmations: “I am well above the median in my profession, and my profession is an important one for humanity.” “I am so lucky to be married to my spouse.” “My children are brilliant and creative and will visit me often in my old age.” “I am a proud and patriotic citizen of the freest, greatest nation that ever was on Earth.” “If I work hard enough and play by the rules, I will succeed in life.” “I have free will and I shape myself and my own life in accordance therewith.” “I am making a positive difference in my community and the world.” “I am a rational person and my beliefs are founded on evidence and clear-thinking.” “I’m good enough, I’m smart enough, and doggone it, people like me.”

You may see in these Affirmations the outward manifestations of good mental health. I see in them as a mass of self-deception, wishful thinking, failure to properly evaluate relevant counterfactuals, and a slew of other cognitive biases. (These two views aren’t necessarily contraries — perhaps there is no such thing as “good mental health” without lots of self-deception and wishful thinking.) They’re not just expressions of a purely subjective world-outlook. They contain within themselves factual (or quasi-factual) claims, and those factual claims are frequently wrong. Only half of any given profession can be above the median, but if you survey that profession’s members you’ll find that perhaps 90 percent of them believe that they are. How often your children will visit you in your old age is a matter of objective fact and as it happens there are an awful lot of lonely old people with grown children in the world. Most people think that hard work makes for success, but success is mostly just luck. (In this modern world of downward mobility and escalating inequality the notion of working hard and succeeding is nothing but a cruel joke on most people. Looking deeper into the matter, the philosophically-inclined will see that everything that happens to us is luck.) You might think that you shape your own life, really you’re just a puppet acting in accordance with old imperatives of natural selection that are pulling your strings.. You’re making a positive difference in the world? Interesting claim — please tell me how and how often you measure the difference you’re making in the world. Tell me how much difference you made at your last measurement. Be sure not to leave off the units if you want credit for your answer.

If your defense of your world view is that it rests on sounder foundations than the world-views of those religious people whose rationality you are so eager to question, you’d better be prepared to face the unpleasant facts of life and insist that only a view of the world without cognitive biases is well founded. I think that if people’s self-deception and wishful thinking were somehow stripped away their joy and their sense of meaning would largely crumble. Christina would do well to contemplate the finding of psychologists that it is mild-to-moderate depressives, not “normal” people, who tend to have accurate assessments of themselves and their life prospects.

“But still, some people find my view consoling…” is the defense. But is the view Christina has on offer really consoling? Consider the difference between how a pessimist and an optimist might react to a suffering person. To the pessimist for whom the world is a dunghill the response can be something like “I am so sorry, my friend and fellow sufferer. Be assured of this — we all suffer. it is the way of things in a world which is a plenum of suffering. Your suffering is not your fault.” What can the optimist say? “Well, the world’s a wonderful place and…” And what? An implication of optimism is that if you’re miserable in the world, then it’s because you perversely won’t open your eyes to the wonder of it all. In short, if you’re miserable, something is wrong with you. You’re a bad person. Or you’re willfully blind. Or you’re sick. Or broken. And you need to be silent about your perceptions of the world, because if you won’t you’re being a downer for the rest of us and we certainly won’t stand for that. If you must complain about life, do so in the therapist’s office, and don’t dare express any doubts about the value of life or the world in public. (I take “you need therapy” in response to complaints about the world as an insult, and I am right to do so.) The larger point is — this is supposed to be consoling? Being cavalierly diagnosed as the author of your own misery? Being so diagnosed because you won’t (really, can’t) reach around a flick some little attitude-adjustment switch in the back of your skull that the optimist thinks we’re all equipped with? Being told to shut up?

To put matters bluntly, optimism is cruelty to the suffering, pessimism the true grounds of compassion. And what is more, in pessimism there is an apologia for death that I think a rational person can accept. Because when you die, your suffering ends. You have flown the realm of every tyrant to a refuge where you can never be pursued. Yours is the blessed calm of nonexistence. As Schopenhauer put it “Life is a task to be done. It is a fine thing to say defunctus est; it means that the man has done his task.”

Notes

⁰This version of the Wisdom of Silenus is Nietzsche’s, and appears in Section 2 of The Birth of Tragedy. The context, in English translation, is as follows:

“There is an ancient story that King Midas hunted in the forest a long time for the wise Silenus, the companion of Dionysus, without capturing him. When Silenus at last fell into his hands, the kind asked him what the best and most desirable of all things for man. Fixed and immovable, the demigod said not a word, till at last, urged by the kind, he gave a shill laugh and broke out into these words. ‘Oh wretched, ephemeral race, children of chance and misery, why do you compel me to tell you what it would be most expedient for you not to hear? What is best of all is utterly beyond your reach: not to be born, not to be, to be nothing. But the second best for you is — to die soon.'” See Walter Kaufmann, ed. and trans. The Basic Writing of Nietzsche. (New York: Modern Library, 1992.), p. 42.

The original German text is available at the Project Gutenberg version of Die Geburt der Tragödie: Versuch einer Selbstkritik (Accessed May 2, 2015).

Es geht die alte Sage, dass König Midas lange Zeit nach dem weisen Silen, dem Begleiter des Dionysus, im Walde gejagt habe, ohne ihn zu fangen. Als er ihm endlich in die Hände gefallen ist, fragt der König, was für den Menschen das Allerbeste und Allervorzüglichste sei. Starr und unbeweglich schweigt der Dämon; bis er, durch den König gezwungen, endlich unter gellem Lachen in diese Worte ausbricht: `Elendes Eintagsgeschlecht, des Zufalls Kinder und der Mühsal, was zwingst du mich dir zu sagen, was nicht zu hören für dich das Erspriesslichste ist? Das Allerbeste ist für dich gänzlich unerreichbar: nicht gebore zu sein, nicht zu sein, nichts zu sein. Das Zweitbeste aber ist für dich – bald zu sterben`.”

Back to main text.

¹Proper bibliographic citation here is a little tricky, as the book exists in an electronic edition but not in paper, and further the electronic edition neither appears to list standard publication information nor gives page numbers. The Amazon page for the book gives its publisher as Pitchstone Publishing (n.p.) and gives an expected publication date for the paper edition as September 1, 2015. References to in this post will be to the electronic location numbers given in my Kindle edition. Return to text.

²The text here is taken from the Project Gutenberg e-text version: http://www.gutenberg.org/files/4583/4583-h/4583-h.htm (Accessed April 25, 2015). Back to main text.

³The text here is taken from an electronic text available here: https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/mill-john-stuart/1874/nature.htm (Accessed April 25, 2015). Back to main text.

⁴The text is taken from “On the Sufferings of the World,” from The Essays of Arthur Schopenhauer: Studies in Pessimism, translated by T. Bailey Saunders, M.A., and originally appearing in Schopenhauer’s Parerga und Paralipomena. The text used here is from the Project Gutenberg e-text version: http://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/10732/pg10732.txt. (Accessed April 25, 2015.) Back to main text.

⁵I can only say “plausible” here because of course there are metaphysical views — which Christina does not consider — that are themselves at least somewhat plausible on which the existence of any given person is not unlikely. For certain kinds of temporal metaphysics the existence of any given actually-existing person is not merely not unlikely, but inevitable. And if something like David Lewis’s modal realism is true, then every possible person exists in at least one world that is just as real as the world in which we exist. See David Lewis, On the Plurality of Worlds. (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2001). Back to main text.

⁶Mostly distraction, anyway. Given that my writing tends to have an increasing element of horror in it there is perhaps an element of sublimation as well. My use of the terms here follows Thomas Ligotti, who in turn follows Peter Wessel Zapffe. For an explication, see Thomas Ligotti, The Conspiracy against the Human Race: A Contrivance of Horror. (New York: Hippocampus Press, 2010), pp. 30-2. Back to main text.

⁷This isn’t quite correct, because it is possible, at least in principle, to be an anti-realist or a fictionalist about theological questions. See a discussion here.