Darkness and Light

2010.09.22
Days Remaining: 251

1. Clearly I've decided not to update this blog everyday. Now that the semester has started there are some days (particularly Tuesdays and Thursdays) when I know I'll be working throughout, and it occurred to me that I'd rather write less frequently but have something of substance to say, than to make a point of blathering every day.

2. For now, I'm navel-gazing because I am ill. What I thought was an allergy attack yesterday ('tis the season for it, or at least a season for it) now has me with a sore throat, low-grade fever, and an aching head, not normally symptoms of allergies. I made it through classes yesterday with my nose running like a faucet, but by the time I got home I was beginning to wear down significantly. This, because Murphy is unkind, was accompanied by a degree of wakefulness that kept me up until 130am (but, my newly recalibrated sleep cycle then had me awake by 8am). Thankfully, today I didn't need to go anywhere, and could work from my desk here. Now that the sun has set, my headache is coming back hardcore for some reason, and I may go to bed very early. Tomorrow I need to teach. Sigh.

3. Before I go further, I would like to voice a message of sympathy for my youngest sister, Silvia, and her fiance, whose father's health has taken a serious turn for the worst. They are apparently on watch for his death, something that I cannot imagine but to be terrible to go through.

4. I'm teaching a class right now called Love, Death & Desire which is sort of an intellectual history of European (mostly Christian, but with Jewish and Muslim elements thrown in) culture organized around the course title's key terms. We start with Hesiod, Genesis, Plato, etc. and then work through to the 20th century. Death has been on my mind a lot the past two weeks because of this, as we just read a very good short book by Herbert Fingarette titled Death: Philosophical Soundings (http://www.opencourtbooks.com/books_n/death.htm ). I put that book, which is about the ways that we imagine and think with death as a fact of life, in dialogue with another text I've been reading, which probably seems far more frivolous. It's a fanfiction rewrite of the Harry Potter series called Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality (http://www.fanfiction.net/s/5782108/1/Harry_Potter_and_the_Methods_of_Rationality ). In the rewrite, Dumbledore asks Harry (who is very different from the character in Rowling's books) why he thinks that Dark Wizards fear death. And, contrary to expectations, Harry gives an impassioned plea, couched in the language of cold reason, why we should all hate death and try to live forever. This has been troubling me since I read it. The rewrite's Dumbledore argues that death is the beginning of something further, a move towards an afterlife, and Harry (quite rightly) points out that Dumbledore has no real proof of that (in this rewrite, ghosts are basically energy shadows of wizards, not autonomous spirits).

5. But I cannot apparently bring myself to agree with the rewritten Harry. It's not because I believe that there is conclusive evidence for an afterlife (though I will say that there is very suggestive, if inconsistent and unfortunately mostly untestable, evidence). I suppose that it's because I am deeply suspicious, and even uncomfortable, with the idea that humans as humans are entitled to overcome the fundamental conditions of our existence. I worry, because this seems to me to be predicated on a body/mind dichotomy that goes back at least as far as Plato (and I would argue actually to the Pythagoreans if not earlier) in the West, which not only posits a fundamental distinction between our selves and our bodies, but also arranges them hierarchically, so that bodies become at best tools for our minds, and at worst enemies to be overcome. This may sound hyperbolic, but American culture today expends enormous amounts of financial, intellectual, and technological capitol on attempting to stave off dying for as long as possible. We regularly insist that we are more than our bodies, that we should be able to have it all (that is, our desires are felt to be unjustly thwarted by material contexts and constraints), and treat our bodies like toys (think how easy it is to eat junk, live unhealthily, and then assume that medical science should be able to prolong our existences).

6. Of course, the desire to live forever is hardly restricted to Western cultures; one of my favorite religious traditions, Daoism, has as one major strand in its larger composite the attempt, via alchemical (chemical, bodily, meditational, etc.) means, to transform one's body into a state that is aligned with the Dao, and therefore enduring and (if one is really good at it) eternal. There are lots of strong overlaps here with the West, although there are also important differences. What strikes me as crucial in both, for my current purposes, is the rejection of bodily limits as either unjust or fundamentally unnatural. In either case these limits (the biggest of them being mortality itself) are to be overcome.

7. And I don't feel that way. Eternity is only conceivable to me as a negation of regular aspects of life. Eternity would have to involve non-forgetting (because what's the point if you constantly replace old knowledge with new, such that your own identity becomes discontinuous over long periods of time?), non-hunger, non-tiredness, non-etc. I simply take my actual life and then undo all of the things that make up that life. Oddly enough, it sort of sounds like death when described in that fashion.

8. I just can't imagine true immortality being positive; I keep thinking I'd get bored. I'm more philosophically Daoist about this, I see life and death being intertwined and that not being a bad thing. I worry when human beings see themselves as fundamentally outside of the world. I'll follow Ursula K. LeGuin and Phillip Pullman on this: death is part of our pattern, and salvation is something you make in this life. I sound a little like Feuerbach or Marx when I write that, but I don't know that I would ever feel confident banking on the afterlife, given how uncertain that outcome is.

9. On a much lighter note, Belisarius has a very funny post about his two kids and their interactions, via note, on his blog: http://www.loudhandle.net/ . It's entitled "Sighned" and I recommend it very highly for a laugh.