[lit-ideas] Re: Is 'All men are mortal' unscientific?
- From: Robert Paul <rpaul@xxxxxxxx>
- To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Wed, 19 Mar 2008 20:28:52 -0700
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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