I believe that one day in the next sixty years I will cease to exist. I will die. I don’t believe I’ve got a soul, immortal or otherwise. Perhaps a soul is possible—though the notion doesn’t make sense to me—but we shouldn’t confuse possibility with probability. My ceasing to exist one day causes me a fair amount of unease. It’s rather untoward of life to do such a thing as cease—human life, anyway: my life and those I love, anyway….
There are a number of things that might concern one about death and the meaning of one’s life. Two related concerns are that in a million years nothing we do now will matter and, assuming there is no soul-like immortality, because life on earth is finite, nothing has any meaning. Something like these two ideas seems to be running through the following quote from Hans Küng regarding Simone de Beauvoir: Simone de Beauvoir, the companion of Jean Paul Sartre, growing…
What follows are some first steps in thinking through an aspect of the possible relational identity of persons. I imagine there is a great deal of confusion herein. But so it goes with many beginnings. The question “What is it to be an…..?” is often, if not always, difficult to answer. Pick any object around the house, a chair, for example, and ask what is it that makes it a chair, and you can discover the difficulty. But when we…
In the well-known parable of the arrow, the Buddha responds negatively to the usefulness of answering certain metaphysical questions. The point that he makes is that they are not important for furthering the goal of alleviating dukkha (suffering/existential dissatisfaction): Whether the view is held that the world is eternal or not, Malunkyaputta, there is still birth, old age, death, grief, suffering, sorrow and despair – and these can be destroyed in this life! I have not explained these other things…
I have long been drawn to Buddhism and to Nietzsche’s ideas. After much thought, I propose a reconciliation; I propose the creation of a Nietzschean Buddhism. How could this be a possibility? After all, the third noble truth of Buddhism is that there is a way out of suffering, and the fourth noble truth gives us the way out. Suffering is optional, as is staying in samsara, the eternal recurrence of rebirth and a life of suffering. How is that…
In the original essay on the relational nature of personal identity, from October 10th, 2010, I wrote the following: What are some of the typical components of personal identity? 1) Body 2) Consciousness associate with/centered in one body (including will and self-consciousness). 3) Memories of consciousness (as the direct causal product of 2) But it seems to me that we should also include things such as: 4) Sets of beliefs 5) Attitudes/dispositions 6) Emotional make up 7) Ways of thinking…
The first poem I ever learned by heart was Mary Oliver’s “When Death Comes.” When death comes like the hungry bear in autumn when death comes and takes all the bright coins from his purse to buy me, and snaps his purse shut; when death comes like the measle-pox; when death comes like an iceberg between the shoulder blades, I want to step through the door full of curiosity, wondering: what is it going to be like, that cottage of…
Life as tapestry: the whole cloth is the great clod, our lives patterns of thread in relation to each other—the patterns, the threads of those dearest to us are interwoven with our own, and in places here and there the interwoven threads merge as our identities flow into each other…. The above is meant to be a poetic expression of the following, hopefully, more philosophically rigorous idea. Having lost my ex-wife, Jennie, to suicide seven months ago (and “ex-wife” does…
If we can be certain of anything, then it is of death (of course) and……not taxes (for one might live where there are no taxes)…..but suffering: death and suffering confront us as part of what it is to be human. Just as we must eat and drink to live, so too we must suffer and eventually die. Much may come between birth and death—real love and fulfillment would be “nice”—but two of the most important questions we should ask ourselves…