Heidegger and a Hippo Walk Through Those Pearly Gates Page 5

  These professionally produced films are not only screened at the funeral service and go home with each mourner in an attractive DVD sleeve, they can be punched up on each of the many video kiosks that dot Hollywood Forever Cemetery. And most significantly, these biopics are written by and star the deceased—prior to shedding his or her mortal coil, of course. HFC customers get to direct their own immortality!

  A fundamental philosophical question is raised by all of this, in fact, the prime question of historiography: What are the proper role and scope of history-recording? Who gets mentioned and who not? If a grocery clerk dies in the forest, did he exist?

  The philosophically minded historian Howard Zinn has argued that histories that only dwell on kings and presidents, or generals and explorers, leave out 99 percent of the population. In his seminal work A People’s History of the United States, he rights the balance by including such ordinary people as Plough Jogger, a farmer and participant in Shays’ Rebellion, and Harriet Hanson, a Lowell mill worker. So maybe Hollywood Forever has it right after all.

  One option for immortality in the minds and bank accounts of survivors is leaving loot behind. In this way, every time your grandniece, Tiffany, buys a new pair of snakeskin pumps, she will be thinking, “Thank you, Uncle Daryl!” or possibly, “Thank you for dying, Uncle Daryl!” Whichever. Your name lives on.

  Of course, as with every contractual agreement, slip-ups are unavoidable.

  “Hey, Bob, remember when you and I went fishing up north nine months ago and the car broke down in that thunderstorm and we wound up spending the night at that farm owned by that gorgeous widow? Remember?”

  “Yeah.”

  “You remember the gorgeous widow?”

  “Yeah.”

  “And she had that big, fabulous house and we slept in the guest room, and the next morning we got in the car and headed north and went fishing—you remember?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Well, nine months later I got a letter from her attorney.”

  “Oh?”

  “Did you happen to get up in the middle of the night and go pay her a visit?”

  “I did.Yes.”

  “And did you happen to use my name instead of telling her your name?”

  “I’m sorry. I did.Why do you ask?”

  “She just died and left me everything.”

  Undoubtedly the most cost-effective route to immortality in the memories of your survivors is a pithy and memorable final utterance. For some reason, the general populace gives these last words more weight than, say, something funny you once said at a party after your third martini.

  Here are a few of our all-time favorites: I am about to—or I am going to—die: either expression is correct.

  Dominique Bouhours, French grammarian, d. 1702

  LSD, 100 micrograms.

  Aldous Huxley (to his wife, who then injected him), d. 1963

  Leave the shower curtain on the inside of the tub.

  Hotel magnate Conrad Hilton, d. 1979.

  A truck!

  Comedian Emo Phillips’s grandfather.

  Don’t let it end like this. Tell them I said something.

  Pancho Villa, Mexican revolutionary, d. 1923

  Philosophers, on the other hand, seem to lack a certain panache in their final moments: I owe Asclepius a rooster.

  Socrates, the Number One philosopher of all time, d. 399 B.C.

  I desire to go to Hell and not to Heaven. In the former I shall enjoy the company of popes, kings and princes, while in the latter are only beggars, monks, and apostles.

  Niccolò Machiavelli, political philosopher, d. 1527

  It’s my turn to take a leap into the darkness!

  English philosopher Thomas Hobbes, d. 1679

  Go on, get out! Last words are for fools who haven’t said enough.

  Karl Marx, d. 1883

  But alas, Daryl, once you’re gone, there’s little you can do to keep your memory alive or, for that matter, to keep it cute. On the up side, what you don’t hear won’t hurt you.

  A man walks out of his office during a thundershower and, lo and behold, there’s an empty taxi right there! He hops in and remarks to the driver how lucky he is to get a taxi in such weather. The cabbie turns to him and says, “You obviously have perfect timing . . . just like Sheldon.”

  “Who?”

  “Sheldon Schwartz. Now that was a guy who did everything right. He was the luckiest guy in the world. Probably the closest thing to human perfection this planet has ever seen. For example, Sheldon always managed to get a parking spot right in front of the door, no matter where he went.”

  “Ahhh, come on! You’re exaggerating. Nobody’s that lucky!” says the passenger.

  “Sheldon was,” says the cabbie. “Not only was he lucky, but he was an amazing athlete. He easily could have been a golf or tennis pro. He had a voice that would shame Placido Domingo into giving up opera! He was handsome and sophisticated, more than Cary Grant. Boy, you should have seen him in a tuxedo! He was a prime physical specimen—big and tall and strong. He was also a terrific businessman. Everything he touched turned to gold. And boy! what a wonderful card player!”

  “Oh, come on!” said the passenger. “You’re making this up!”

  “No. I’m not. Sheldon had other gifts too. Like, he always knew how to please a woman. He was brilliant also. There was nothing he didn’t know, nothing he couldn’t fix. Not like me. I change a fuse, and I short out the entire neighborhood. And boy, did he know how to tell a story! He was the life of every party!”

  “Wow, he sounds incredible. How did you know this Sheldon?” the passenger says.

  “Well, I never actually met him,” admits the cabbie.

  “Then how do you know so much about him?” the passenger asks.

  “After he died, I married his wife.”

  Okay, Daryl, had your fill of anxiety-soothing gags now? Anxiety-soothing? Now I’m more depressed!

  That’s okay. Now we can get down to some neat philosophical takes on Eternity!

  · II ·

  Eternity When You Least Expect It

  Is Eternity out there in the Great Beyond? Or is it lurking right here in the neighborhood? If so, who has time for it?

  { 6 }

  The Eternal Now

  Don’t be such a sourpuss, Daryl. It’s not only unbecoming, it’s unnecessary, because great news is on the way! And it’s happening right now.

  Because here’s one that boggles the mind from here to eternity: Eternity is Now!

  Let’s start with the basics. It is always now. Right now, for example. You, Daryl, getting up off the porch with your pooper scooper and slouching over to that spot on the lawn where Binx made his little mess, now doing your scooper thing, depositing it in your neighbor’s mailbox, now climbing back onto the porch and cracking open a can of Bud Light. “Now” follows you the whole way. Oops, it’s now again. Or, rather, it’s still now. And it always will be!

  This puts the idea of Eternal Life into a whole new framework, like, Eternity is right now, not after death when you thought it was.

  Major twentieth-century philosophers Ludwig Wittgenstein and Paul Tillich had interesting takes on the concept of the Eternal Now. Ludwig had his take in two different points in space, Vienna, Austria, and Cambridge, England; Paul’s were in Frankfurt, Germany, and Cambridge, Massachusetts.

  Tillich, an existentialist Christian theologian, believed that eternal life is not life that goes on and on with no end in sight, like Law and Order. To Tillich, as to Heidegger, that would be an image of Hell. Rather, the eternal is right here in every moment of time. It is a dimension of time that cuts into time. The eternal is present now as the Eternal Now.

  Unlike, say, rocks, human beings can look down on time and see the big picture, including the end, and thereby experience anxiety and despair. That’s the bad news. But Tillich is an existentialist, and like Kierkegaard, he sees the fact that we are creatures capable of such anxiety as good news.
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  How so? Because it indicates that unlike rocks, human beings are only partially in time. We also have one foot outside of time, or else we wouldn’t be able to look down on our situation and see it in its finitude and experience the anxiety of death. For example, we can use the term “life span” and know whereof we speak.

  TIME AND ETERNITY: THE INTERSECTION

  So eternal life for Tillich is not endless life in the “sweet bye and bye”; it is life lived in the Eternal Now. The trouble is that we fall out of touch with the eternal dimension; we become “separated” from it and fall into despair, but it is there just the same. The trick is to try to reach that transcendental perspective. Like right now!

  “When it’s eternity here,

  it’s still early morning on the West Coast.”

  To understand what Tillich is getting at, we have to jump out of linear time as we experience it, the before-and-after, see-you-next-Saturday kind of time that we normally think of. Instead, we have to try to get our minds around the idea of Time itself—time the dimension, time the organizing principle. For help, we again turn to the contemporary philosopher Allen Stewart Konigsberg, or, as he is known to everyone but his mother, Woody Allen. Says Königsberg, “Time is nature’s way of keeping everything from happening at once.”

  KEEPING IN TIME

  Jumping “outside of time” should not be confused with “messing with the sequence of time,” the latter currently being a popular storytelling device used in such films as Memento and Mulholland Drive, and in the gag riddle that goes like this:

  Q: What happens when you play a country song backward?

  A: You get your girl back, you get your truck back, you may even get your dog back.

  Reversing the time sequence, even though it can open interesting questions about cause and effect, and about how we construct our memories, still remains within the structure of linear time. Jumping-out-of-time views the entire dimension of time as, well, a dimension.

  It is not often that we get to quote the analytic philosopher Ludwig Josef Johann Wittgenstein alongside Woody Allen and Paul Tillich, but now seems as good a time as any. In his seminal work, the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, L.J.J.W. says, “If we take eternity to mean not infinite temporal duration, but timelessness, then eternal life belongs to those who live in the present.”1

  By “timelessness,” Ludwig seems to mean, “apart from or outside of the dimension of time.” The “now” we always exist in is timeless—it is not a “part” of time. Wittgenstein’s conclusion that eternal life belongs to people who live in the present has a surprisingly New Age feel to it, more often associated with people like Baba Ram Dass (known to his mother as Dickie Alpert). In the early 1970s, everybody who was anybody made time to read Baba’s tract Be Here Now, a guide to post-hallucinogenic spiritual consciousness. The title says it all; it is a guide to living in the present.

  Psychologically and spiritually, getting in touch with the Eternal Now can be problematic. We tend either to dwell on the past or anticipate the future and end up never getting around to simply being here now.

  Thinkers and gurus in the East have approached this difficulty in a practical way: they have devised rituals to lead us into existing in the moment. Meditation, yoga, and tai chi are techniques for emptying the mind and simply Being.

  IS NOW OVER YET?

  Things get really confusing when we try to set a time limit on “now.” Zeno, of Achilles-races-the-tortoise paradox fame,2 argued that time could be divided into an infinite number of portions. That sure doesn’t leave much time for “now.” Or, as the contemporary British playwright and wit Michael Frayn put it, “Ah, now! That odd time—the oddest time of all times; the time it always is . . . by the time we’ve reach the ‘w’ of ‘now’ the ‘n’ is ancient history.”

  Fortunately, we have a more practical idea of ‘now’ from that dependable pragmatist, the late-nineteenth-century American philosopher and psychologist William James. He called now “the specious present,” by which he meant the false sense we have that “now” has some content, albeit slight, and some duration, albeit short, when in fact the present doesn’t exist at all. It’s merely the boundary line where the past meets the future, neither of which can really be said to exist either, at least not now. In other words, “now” is a subjective construct that we use to mark our experience of time.

  This raises one of philosophy’s perennial questions:

  “Nothing happens next. This is it.”

  Is the experience of a length of time relative to the experiencer, especially if one of the experiencers happens to be a pig?

  A guy is driving down the road and sees a farmer lifting a pig up under an apple tree. Each time the farmer lifts the pig up, it bites off an apple. The guy in the car stops and asks what’s going on.

  The farmer says, “I’m feeding my pig.”

  The guy in the car says, “If you just shook the tree and let the pig eat the apples off the ground, wouldn’t that save a lot of time?”

  And the farmer says, “What’s time to a pig?”

  The mystic poet William Blake wrote,

  To see a World in a grain of sand,

  And a Heaven in a wild flower,

  Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand,

  And Eternity in an hour.

  Pants pressed while you wait.

  Just kidding—we added that last line.

  You know, I get your point this time, guys. In fact, I’ve always planned on living in the present someday. But you guys are supposed to be philosophers, right?

  Sort of, Daryl. More like superannuated students of philosophy. What’s your point?

  So you’re telling me that none of these big-time serious thinkers just looks at death and says it sucks, plain and simple?

  Funny you should ask.

  After all the philosophical attitudes that somehow accommodate death—often making it the logical and desirable bookend to birth—and all the theological and cultural paradigms that make it a mere step to a grander condition, there is something refreshing about the position of just being pissed off that life has to end. Supremely pissed off!

  But come to think of it, we can’t think of a single major philosopher or world religion that subscribes to the position that death is nothing more than a dreadful prospect, the worst possible cheat imaginable. To be sure, it would be counterintuitive to presume that religion would take this attitude—reconciliation, in one form or another, is basic to religions’ appeal. They wouldn’t stay in business long if they told us that death is final and it sucks.

  But one would think that at least one of those truth-seekers known as philosophers would face the end squarely and just plain abhor it. Not so. Raging against death appears to be the business of poets: Do not go gentle into that good night,

  Old age should burn and rave at close of day;

  Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

  Dylan Thomas

  · III ·

  Immortality the Old-fashioned Way—On the Soul Train

  Do we have an immortal soul?

  Where is it?

  Can you sell it on eBay?

  { 7 }

  Plato, the Godf ather of Soul

  Where do you guys live—in a cave? Death isn’t The End, it’s the Beginning! Haven’t you ever heard of the immortality of the soul?

  Of course we’ve heard of the immortal soul, Daryl. It’s just that we’ve never seen one. Not only that, but Ernest Becker places the idea of immortality of the soul high on his hit list of delusionary systems.

  But before we slam the coffin shut on this idea, let’s nail down what a soul is. We don’t want any surprises down the road, like if we find out that the part of ourselves that survives death is some part we don’t even like.

  The ancient Greeks are a good place to start. Apparently these guys in togas had a lot of time on their hands to ponder such things as the soul. (Who was cooking supper while the guys were schmoozing is a question for F
eminist Ethics.) The Greeks were dualists—not to be confused with duelists, which was more of a Roman thing; they thought the soul and the body are two totally different kinds of beings. One of the earliest Greek philosophers, Thales, saw the soul as simply the force that moves the body. He had acutely observed that one of the big differences between a dead body and a live one is that the former doesn’t move, at least not on a level surface. Ipso facto, something must leave the body when it dies—like, say, the motor. Other pre-Socratic philosophers noticed that dead people don’t seem to know anything anymore and added knowing to the functions of the soul. Still others noticed that dead people don’t seem to see or hear either and added the function of perceiving.

  But it was Plato who put together a comprehensive picture of the soul. He said there are three parts of the soul: Reason, Spirit (or Will), and the Appetites. Reason—wouldn’t you know?—is the highest part, the part that is able to commune with the eternal Ideas or Forms, like Beauty, Wisdom, and the Triangle—that is, the Ideal Triangle, the triangle “Form” from which all earthly, imperfect triangles get their triangularity. (Don’t ask.)

  The Will is one of the irrational parts of the soul, but, on the upside, it is nobler than the Appetites. Properly harnessed, the Will inclines toward Reason. The Appetites, on the other hand, resist reason, pulling us down toward our sensuous desires, which spells trouble with a capital T (i.e., Trouble).