[lit-ideas] Re: Is 'All men are mortal' unscientific?

John Wager writes
How about the view that the claim "All men are mortal" is neither scientific nor analytic, but is "phenomenologically" true, that is, true for each person when they examine the structure of their own lives as they live them?
It isn't clear to me why some immortal being couldn't examine the 'structure of its life' as it lived it. That people cannot enjoy the same sorts of experience more times than can be encompassed in three score years and ten is surely false—depending, of course, on the experience; I wouldn't care to give a Nobel prize acceptance speech more than half a dozen times, and once is enough for a tonsillectomy. 


This is the view of William Earle, in THE AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL CONSCIOUSNESS.
He says that examining the way we live our lives reveals that death is "built in." We all have the passion to get things done; we value experiences as unique; we experience development and growth, none of which would happen if we never died. If we never died, our lives would lack passion, uniqueness of experience, and psychological development.
Some experiences are unique, viz., everything that one does for the first time; but that they are thus unique doesn't mean that one would never want to repeat them. One can, I suppose, lose one's virginity only once but that doesn't mean that, doesn't usually mean, that one never wants sex again. (As Aristotle says, the better one gets at something the more one enjoys it.) That our lives would lack passion, 'uniqueness of experience' (been there, done that) if we lived, if not forever, for a very, very long time. Earle seems not to have noticed that one of the pleasures of life is anticipation, and that wanting to see how things turn out is an important part of life.
Bernard Williams, in 'The Macropoulos Case: Reflections on the Tedium of Immortality,' (in Problems of the Self, 1973), does a turn on Karel Capek's play—which became Janácek's opera—and concludes that immortality would be boring. I can't do those little v's at the tops of the c's here. Maybe someday. 

Robert Paul


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