M. What, do you not believe them?
A. Not in the least.
M. I am sorry to hear that.
A. Why, I beg?
M. Because I could have been very eloquent in speaking against them.
A. And who could not on such a subject? Or what trouble is it to refute these monstrous inventions of the poets and painters?
M. And yet you have books of philosophers full of arguments against these.
A. A great waste of time, truly! For who is so weak as to be concerned about them?
M. If, then, there is no one miserable in the infernal regions, there can be no one there at all.
A. I am altogether of that opinion.
M. Where, then, are those you call miserable? or what place do they inhabit? For, if they exist at all, they must be somewhere.
A. I, indeed, am of opinion that they are nowhere.
M. Then they have no existence at all.
A. Even so, and yet they are miserable for this very reason, that they have no existence.
M. I had rather now have you afraid of Cerberus than speak thus inaccurately.
A. In what respect?
M. Because you admit him to exist whose existence you deny with the same breath. Where now is your sagacity? When you say anyone is miserable, you say that he who does not exist, does exist.
A. I am not so absurd as to say that.
M. What is it that you do say, then?
A. I say, for instance, that Marcus Crassus is miserable in being deprived of such great riches as his by death; that Cn. Pompey is miserable in being taken from such glory and honor; and, in short, that all are miserable who are deprived of this light of life.
M. You have returned to the same point, for to be miserable implies an existence; but you just now denied that the dead had any existence: if, then, they have not, they can be nothing; and if so, they are not even miserable.
A. Perhaps I do not express what I mean, for I look upon this very circumstance, not to exist after having existed, to be very miserable.
M. What, more so than not to have existed at all? Therefore, those who are not yet born are miserable because they are not; and we ourselves, if we are to be miserable after death, were miserable before we were born: but I do not remember that I was miserable before I was born; and I should be glad to know, if your memory is better, what you recollect of yourself before you were born.
If I think it through with a bit more care, I begin to see some inconsistencies in my morbid musings. Cicero is far ahead of me, and he points out that it is quite impossible to say that someone who doesn’t even exist can be miserable; what has no being cannot be anything at all.
Here I am, waffling back and forth between saying that death is a complete destruction of the self, and then saying that there is still something, however nebulous, left over to feel the loss. Well, which is it?
It is currently fashionable, along with the usual skepticism and relativism, for intellectuals to deny God and to deny the possibility of any afterlife.
It seems it was no different back in Cicero’s time, because the Auditor is quick to brush off the stories about the underworld, to dismiss them as childish fantasies not even worth the attention of a learned man. No, he is not afraid of any such mythical punishments, because he is convinced there can be no such place.
If I follow this model, then I can’t continue to say that being dead is a state of suffering, as there will be no awareness to contain any sense of pain or loss.
Of the three possible timeframes referred to earlier as being so miserable, we can now exclude the last, of being dead, because the dead exist no more. We can also exclude the first, of not yet being alive, because the unborn do not yet exist.
All that might remain is in the middle, the suffering of the living, and Cicero will turn to that matter in due course.
The Auditor still fights to have it both ways, since he cannot imagine that Crassus could be happy without his money, or that Pompey could be happy without his power.
What Crassus? What Pompey? By his own admission, there is nothing left of them. It isn’t just that something of them has been removed, which may indeed be a cause for sadness, but that everything about them has ceased, where there is no longer anyone to feel sad.
Now perhaps others may feel sad about Crassus and Pompey dying, or about the wealth and the power that were lost in the process, but that remains a question for the living; Crassus and Pompey are hardly affected.
The same will apply just as much to those who are yet to live. Before I came into existence, there was likewise no possibility of my experience. Can I somehow claim to remember something happening to me without the presence of a self?
Some thoughts that at first sound terribly profound, like saying that the unborn and the deceased are miserable in this way, can easily end up being contradictions dressed up in cleverness. They aren’t really thoughts at all, just words coming from disconnected feelings.
I have, on more than one occasion, heard people speculating that they would be much happier if they had been born as animals; in particularly melancholic moods, I have briefly entertained the possibility myself.
But once I can be a dog or a cat instead of a man, I will only be aware according to the nature of a dog or a cat, whatever that might be. It is nonsensical for me to suggest that my particularly human needs would be best met by not being human to begin with; what I appreciate now won’t be at all the same as what I appreciate as a completely different creature.
Having become a dog or cat, would I now pointlessly speculate on the benefits of being like that tall, hairless thing that forgot to fill my water bowl this morning?
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