Group A

Suicide is selfish in the sense that it destroys the brain and body of the individual who suffers from its endless craving to possess pleasure and escape pain. The problem is that new bodies and brains are constantly being created at exponential rates. When I was born in 1936 there were just over 1 billion bodies with brains on this planet; now, in 2020 there are almost 8 billion. The planet cannot sustain life at that pace—not even viral life because viruses need hosts, multi-celled animals and plants to survive. 

That’s the way the universe seems to be: billions of galaxies, stars, and planets appearing, creating space as they evolve at the speed of light and then collapsing back into nothingness in a “steady state,” as the astronomer Fred Hoyle speculated  in the 1950s.

Yet, as Russell sensed, there should be a way for human life to live harmoniously with its planet to the end of its life span. He sensed it through his definition of philosophy in Autobiography as “definite knowledge,”—i.e. physics, chemistry, and biology. All three are now detailed beyond what the human intellect can understand. That is what is quite properly called the mystery of existence.

In Autobiography Russell gave special attention to William James’s “radical empiricism,” Epicurus, Spinoza, Neo-Platonism, and Plotinus. He recognized that science, “definite knowledge,” results in mystery. That fact was intuited by the earliest human beings whose brains reached the level of consciousness.

Every child when born should be given a pill strong enough to take his own life, as Mynheer Peeperkorn did in Thomas Mann’s “The Magic Mountain.” If the child is well brought up, when he becomes an adult he will be happy to end it if he becomes a burden to others; for he can look forward to a next life of happiness being brought up well by his parents. If he is badly brought up, in the next life he will commit suicide. So it is that the process repeats itself until the human race becomes happy.

When I wrote this it seemed sensible, but my friend Elaine didn’t like it, in spite of all my attempts to explain its reasonableness.

Now I think I see why. It leads to Naziism and “final solutions.” Impressionable young people will very likely take the pill to commit suicide—it’s an easy way to die. That way they will be eliminated as undesirables like non-Aryans and those who are deficient in other ways, like those with Down’s syndrome. My original good intention to move the human race toward happiness would have profoundly evil results.

Now I believe the “strong pill” should only be given to a person when he/she is a fully grown adult–perhaps about age fifty.

As an undergraduate I often felt such a strong identity with authors I read—Plato in particular—that I would say to myself, “That’s precisely what I think; that’s me.” From the standpoint of consciousness that is correct; my thought was his thought; we are the same consciousness. But from the physical standpoint, of course, it is nonsense—although there is something in Plato’s Meno and Phaedrus that makes us want to believe that we are the person we identify with, having passed through the river Lethe to come back to life.

That was my feeling with many philosophers I read after switching from science to philosophy—which probably explains why I did very well in the subject. That same feeling occasionally occurred with novelists like Tolstoy and Camus (“The Stranger”), Thomas Mann (“The Magic Mountain”), and Henry James (“Wings of the Dove”), and with poets like Wordsworth and Keats (Keats’s “Odes” especially); but here the identity was only partial because I realized I had no ability to write fiction or poetry. The same is true of the arts—music, sculpture, and painting. That’s why my dissertation at Emory and my teaching of the humanities was effective; I could convey their content to the better students in my classes. 

But with philosophers (the best of them) the identity of consciousness was complete, and that is one reason I gave up teaching: in explaining the achievements of the great philosophers I was forced to temporarily abandon my own attempts to develop a philosophy to add to its history. As it turns out I have extended the tradition from Democritus through Epicurus, Spinoza, Kant, William James (his “Essays in Radical Empiricism”) and Bertrand Russell, though clumsily and incompletely</p>

Now I have (or would have if I had the strength) a desire to return to teaching again, not because I have discovered the Truth, but because I have discovered a next stage to that ever elusive goal. We hope, of course, that goal is God.

It is satisfying that E.O. Wilson seems to have reached the same conclusion, though having followed a different path—his a path of consistent effort, mine one of desultory laziness. 

I have spent a lot of time worrying over Hume’s statement, “Tis perfectly rational to prefer the destruction of the world to the scratching of one’s finger.” In fact it is not rational at all. As soon as the scratch is over one realizes that it is laughable to think the scratch on the finger logically implies the destruction of the world.

Hume opens his Treatise on Human Nature with the statement, “All the perceptions of the human mind resolve themselves into two distinct kinds, which I shall call Impressions and Ideas.” I have always thought this a silly statement; it is gratifying to realize the statement about being reasonable to prefer the destruction of the world to a scratch on the finger is equally silly.

Of course Hume could not have been aware of the scientific approach to philosophical questions we now have, though he ought to have been better aware of what Copernicus, Galileo, and Newton had achieved. Locke, at least, was aware of these achievements In his struggle to understand the relation between “primary” and “secondary” qualities.

It is a truism: “Let history be the judge.”

But suppose those who come after us have lost all belief and faith in truth and reason. What kind of judges will they be?

That’s the case in the United States right now.

It seems the best judges of history will be those who have died—Herodotus and  Thucydides in the West. In the East there are many to choose from.

“Buridain’s Ass” is regarded as a philosophical problem. It is, but not in the way current philosophers think it is. It is a philosophical problem because science is now philosophy, as Bertrand Russell realized.

The ass is faced with a problem of desire, not reason or logic. It wants both the straw or water with equal desire, and so is frozen by indecision and hence dies from hunger or thirst.

Hume put the issue this way: “Tis reasonable to prefer the destruction of the world to the scratching of one’s finger.” That is biological desire at work.

I think I sensed this in a paper I wrote at the University of Chicago titled “Reason and Risk in Moral Behavior” which I saved all these years after I escaped the program with a masters degree in 1962 I think it was. That was the year analytic philosophy replaced the Great Books approach of Adler, Hutchins, and McKeon to philosophy and took control of the department. I haven’t read the paper since because I know what is in it and it brings back bad recollections.

 Dreamcatchers were originally intended by the Iroquois to keep a sleeping person’s good dreams and let his bad dreams pass through. In fact what happens in dreams is that we lose our identity; we become another person, another “soul.” That’s what has to be “caught” or prevented. 

When I doze off in my recliner I enter a new world and take on a new identity; it becomes a new umwelt and the old one disappears. Fear of that must be one reason I have trouble sleeping. If I didn’t have that fear I could become a good Epicurean or Buddhist monk of the Hinayana sort; one disappears and becomes satisfied with the new identity.   

As it is, I look forward to what will happen and regret what has happened in the past. Spinoza comes into the picture here because to him regret is a weakness, a loss of our power or virtue (in the classic sense of the term).

In point of biological fact, we simply respond to whatever the moment brings as if it were the only reality. That is what we must learn to control.

It is interesting how China is handling the Confucian tradition, trying to reconcile it with the official atheism of Stalinist Russia and the Chinese Communist Party itself. It has five tiers, at the top of which are the founders of modern China: Mao of course, and Deng Xiao Ping to whom temples are built in Beijing in recognition of their founding of the Communist Party with Chinese Characteristics. At the bottom are the traitors and enemies of the Party, who are recognized only locally in their family graves.

Sitting in the dining room of Milford Place watching house sparrows flying up under the eaves I was surprised to see house finches joining them. No doubt they will be competing with each other when it comes time to build nests, and there is no doubt the house finches will get the best spots because they are more agile and fly faster. The house sparrows will be driven extinct (to the delight of birdwatchers living in cities). I felt like a young Darwin watching one species drive another to extinction.

In an interview with the Guardian shortly after Donald Trump was elected president in November, 2016, Sir David Attenborough said with a chuckle, “We could shoot him. It’s not a bad idea.”

  It would be a good thing if Trump were to die, especially from a stroke where he is dead before his head hit the ground. We won’t have to worry about him becoming a martyr like Jesus; his followers are largely bad or indifferent people, whereas followers of Jesus were largely good (with exceptions like Tertullian). Trump’s followers would go back to their former lives of doing routine and uninteresting things, contributing nothing to what we hope will be a human genetic drift towards goodness. That process, of course, could take many thousands of years, even as long as it took small reptiles to reach the monstrous size of dinosaurs. It could happen on some of the millions of earth-like planets in our galaxy.

  Current evangelicals supporting Trump will no doubt go back to preaching and practicing their childish forms of Christianity—for example, “Prosperity Theology.”