Five Thousand B.C. and Other Philosophical Fantasies

by Raymond Smullyan

  Now let us forget about wishful and fearful thinking and ask ourselves honestly why we are in fact so disturbed by the thought of death. Many readers will reply, “You may be so disturbed, but I am not!” But I honestly find this rather doubtful. I believe that a few exceptional people are genuinely not disturbed but that many others only tend to repress their disturbance. After all, so many social factors encourage us to deny—even to ourselves—any fear of death. We are encouraged to “banish any such gloomy thoughts from our minds and to dwell on the beautiful things of life and on those lives to come.” We are taught that fears of our own death are unmanly, cowardly, selfish, “egocentric,” and so forth. One well-known writer said something to the effect that the charge of selfishness concerning our distress about death is unfair; it’s not that we are worried about ourselves, we are worried about our loved ones, and we cannot bear the thought that they should perish. Although I do believe that we are also concerned about our loved ones, I find it a bit sad that people should be so worried about their selfishness. Of course we are very much worried about ourselves, and why shouldn’t we be? All these moralistic charges of selfishness, cowardice, and so forth leave me quite unimpressed.

  I now want to turn to an analysis of why we are in fact disturbed by the thought of our dying. My purpose is not to reassure the reader who is disturbed that there is nothing to worry about but rather to take a look at what in fact is really worrying him. The first thing that of course leaps to mind is the thought of those who do enjoy life: “What a pity it must end! Just think of all the good things I will miss.” Then there is the rather deeper and more terrifying feeling that death is a state of loneliness, darkness, isolation, or separation from the rest of the world. It does little good to point out that it is really meaningless to talk of separation between something nonexistent and something existent, for we still have the psychological association of separateness. But the very feeling that after death we are separated from the rest of the world only indicates that we do think of ourselves as somehow existing after our death! Indeed, it is literally inconceivable to us that we can ever cease to exist. Here, I think, lies the true heart of the trouble! I believe it is not so much fear that is troubling us. The real trouble lies in our trying to force ourselves to believe something that in fact is psychologically incapable of being believed! One of Goethe’s arguments for immortality is that a person cannot even conceive of his nonexistence; how then can he possibly believe it? This argument strikes me as quite remarkable. Not that I draw from it the conclusion that we are immortal, but I believe that Goethe came closest of all to the real reason why people do believe in immortality. This factor seems to be far stronger than the motive of wishful thinking. How can we conceivably believe in our nonexistence? Yet there are very powerful social pressures to make us feel that we should (e.g., considerations of trying to be rational, avoidance of wishful thinking, etc.). So I believe that fear of death is not the real issue; the real issue is the conflict between our deepest intuitions and the social pressures exerted on us to deny them. Stated otherwise, I grant that many of us are indeed disturbed by the thought of our dying, but I believe that our disturbance is not really fear—as it appears to be—but rather the result of our trying to force ourselves to believe that which we are not capable of believing.

  Personal Views

  In this section, I shall state some purely personal views on the subject of life and death. I have already considered this subject from several angles—analytic, scientific, and psychological. I believe that a certain degree of objectivity in these matters is of great value, but I don’t believe that we should therefore neglect a purely subjective approach or that such an approach is worthless. After all, we do have our own intuitions in addition to our reasoning powers, and why should we allow either to be subservient to the other?

  When I talk of taking a purely subjective approach, what I have in mind is to simply state what one really does believe without worrying about whether the belief is or is not rational or whether it is or is not the result of some form of wishful thinking. This is less easy than may be imagined. Even if we temporarily waive all requirements of justifying our beliefs, it is not all that easy to know just what our beliefs really are. At least I find it so—particularly about such topics as life and death.

  Suppose I now honestly ask myself what I believe will really happen to me after my bodily death; will I continue to exist or will I go out of existence? To tell the absolute truth, both answers seem to me somehow wrong! The idea of going out of existence or of ceasing to exist is to me absolutely inconceivable, hence I (in the good company of Goethe) cannot possibly believe something that I cannot even understand—something that I can form no notion of. Therefore, I am forced to rule out the possibility of my ceasing to exist. From this, it might appear to follow that I believe I will continue to exist after my bodily death. But this is not so. I am open to the possibility that I will, but I have no particular reason to believe that I necessarily will. What about the proposition, “Either I will continue existing, or I will cease to exist.” Do I believe that? My answer is emphatically, “NO!” Now, this might appear to be completely contrary to the normally accepted Aristotelian logic with its classical principle of the excluded middle.4 If it does, I would not feel too bad, for although I fully accept classical logic in the exact sciences, I have some doubts that it is fruitful in the present area. But I don’t believe that my drastic rejection of this (apparent) disjunction really does violate the law of the excluded middle. Its truth is really dependent on (at least) three tacit premises: (1) The word I really denotes something; (2) there really is such a thing as time; and (3) I am in time.

  As to (1), we shall discuss this further in the next section. As to (2), the denial of the reality of time goes counter to common sense but is nevertheless a cardinal point believed—or rather felt—by many mystics. Suppose a mystic is asked, “Are you really serious about denying the reality of time? You really do not believe that some events occur before others?” Such a mystic—if he has a modicum of some philosophical orientation—might answer something like, “Of course, events occur in the phenomenal world—the world of appearance—and hence time may be said to exist in the world of appearance. But time does not exist in the world of reality.” I do not wish to now go into this highly interesting question; for purposes of this essay let me grant that time really exists. But this still leaves open the question whether I am really in time.

  If it surprises you that I have some doubts that I am really in time, let me say that it is of course obvious that I experience time, and I experience events in the normal time sequence. But does this necessarily mean that I—the experiencer—have to be in time for this to happen? Why can’t I be outside time and experience moments of time nevertheless? Am I something that actually moves through time; or am I stationary, with time moving past me?

  I realize that at this point I am becoming what the logical positivists would call ridiculously metaphysical, making one pseudostatement after another and asking one pseudoquestion after another. I hope that those of you who are positivistically oriented will at least give me credit for knowing what I am doing in the sense of realizing perfectly that the questions I am discussing are not questions about the physical world and are hence totally outside the scope of science. Therefore, scientific methods cannot be of help in this discussion, so if one wants to stick wholly to logic and the methods of the physical sciences, one will have to turn to a different topic.

  To return to the topic of time, as I said, it is not at all certain to me that because I experience time I am necessarily in time. If I am not in time, then the entire question of whether I will survive my bodily death becomes meaningless—the question simply disappears!

  But am I really outside time, or is my thought that I am only another example of wishful thinking? To tell you the truth, I don’t know that either! To say that I am outside time does not strike me as quite right. To say that I am in time does not str
ike me as wholly right either. Is it necessarily true that I am either in time or outside time? I doubt that also!

  Let me put it this way: I normally believe that I am inside time, but when I reflect on the matter, I am no longer so sure of this. Although it is wrong to conclude from the above that I am outside time, for my purposes it is enough that I do not believe that I am inside time; I therefore do not have to believe either that I will survive my bodily death or I won’t!

  I feel the same way, incidentally, about the question of my existence prior to my bodily birth. Did I really begin in the year 1919? I doubt that very much! Did I exist before 1919? I doubt that also. (This reminds me somewhat of the Kantian antinomy of whether the universe had a beginning or not.)5

  This about sums up my real feelings about life and death. Do I really believe I am not in time? Not wholly and not constantly; sometimes I do and sometimes I don’t. (Doesn’t this sound silly: Sometimes I believe I am in time and sometimes I don’t? But it becomes less silly when one distinguishes experiencing time from being in time.)

  Some people might say that they can form absolutely no notion of what it could possibly mean not to be in time. I would like to ask them the following question: Can you conceive the possibility of there being more than one time series (as in some science fiction stories)? If so, can you imagine being in a different one than this one? Assuming there were more than one time series, what would immortality mean? Would it necessarily mean continuing forever in this one? If you believe that upon your bodily death, you would no longer be in this time series but would jump into another one, would that satisfy you? Perhaps you could conceive of there being many different time series and of your being in any one of them but not of being in none of them!

  I am afraid that the whole problem of survival is intimately bound up with our very notions of time, which—except for purposes of science and practical, everyday living—are none too satisfactory. As I said at the beginning of this essay, I suspect that all thinking about these questions is somehow off the track, and I certainly don’t except my own. My hunch is that those who believe in immortality are closer to the truth than those who do not but still miss the real point. It is possible that the entire question is still not adequately formulated. To this topic I now turn.

  Some Eastern Approaches

  When I say that the whole question of life and death may be inadequately formulated, I am thinking of the Buddhist notion that the I is simply a fiction, despite our usual intuitions to the contrary. If this is true, then the whole notion of survival takes on a totally different significance. Buddhist thought regards psychic reality as a stream of consciousness that has no agent. (This position is like that of David Hume, who did not believe in the existence of the so-called self.) If this is so, then fear of death—or the feeling that death is a tragedy—is really ludicrous. It would be like a group of people who are worried that a certain town is going to be bombed; The optimists say, “No, it won’t be bombed, it will survive.” The pessimists say, “That is only wishful thinking; the town will be destroyed.” And then it turns out that the town they are all arguing about doesn’t even exist!

  Personally, I am somewhat dubious about Buddhist metaphysics. I find far more comprehensible the Brahmanic, or orthodox Hindu, notion that the I is not a fiction but is nevertheless quite different from what we think. It may be that the individual I does not exist, but the universal I does. Rather, it may be that what we think is the individual I is in reality the universal I. (My God, if the universal I disappeared upon the death of just one individual, then there would be something to worry about! It would mean that nothing would be left! I would not be surprised if deep down that is what we are really worried about!)

  Again, it may be misleading to talk of the individual I and the universal I; perhaps we should talk of only one I. This seems to me the most important idea in Brahmanic philosophy. Let me elaborate a little.

  Obviously, I make a distinction between your sensations, feelings, and thoughts and mine. But from this it does not follow that the agent who experiences your thoughts is different from the agent who experiences mine. The question is, Are the agents really the same? It may seem completely counterintuitive that they are. But this intuition really appears to be culturally induced. It seems that the intuition of most Westerners is, “Of course they are not the same. I am I, and you are you, and that’s all there is to it.” But the intuition of many Easterners really seems to be that you and I are literally the same person.

  Is not this the central issue of Brahmanism? It strikes me as far more radical and thoroughgoing than the Hegelian and post-Hegelian ideas of the Absolute, which is something like an “oversoul” that, so to speak, includes your soul and mine but is somehow infinitely greater than both. By contrast, the Brahmanic idea is far more drastic. Indeed, it appears to come close to outraging logic itself. It is that you and I are not parts of some supreme being but that we are the very same being.

  I hope that you realize the fantastic ramifications that this hypothesis has on the question of life and death! Assume for the moment that the hypothesis is true. It follows that I will not die upon my bodily death as long as one other live creature remains, for this creature is also me. I hence do not have to believe in my soul going to a spiritual realm or in reincarnation. I already am reincarnated; rather, I am already incarnated in all other conscious beings. So when my body dies, there will be countless copies of me left. Indeed, whether your body dies or my body dies, the effect will be no different on me (or on you, which is the same thing).

  Is it not possible that all of us deep down feel that this idea has some truth in it and that’s why we in fact don’t fear death more than we do? Is it not possible that this is the real reason we treat each other as well as we do, and why we are as concerned as we are about protecting each other’s lives? It is our own lives we are protecting!

  In many ways, this viewpoint is quite remarkable! To use another analogy—an elaboration of one devised by Schopenhauer—imagine looking at a point of light through a crystal. We see a thousand images, but they are all of the very same point. Similarly, our individual selves are but multiple appearances of one fundamental self. An individual death, then, is like blocking off a single facet of the crystal, and an individual birth is like opening up another facet. So the images vary and change and come and go, dancing their “dance of life,” but the real point of light remains totally unaltered during the whole procedure.

  A similar analogy is drawn by the Vedanta. It likens the relation of the one true self and its individual selves to the one sun simultaneously illuminating a thousand rooms of a palace. The rooms are of course like the individuals. Each has its own individual light but not its individual source of light. Thus (this is my analogy), an individual death is like drawing a shade or curtain on the window of an individual room. The individual room, it is true, goes dark. But none of the sunlight is lost! Not even that portion of light that formerly illuminated the room is lost; it now illuminates the shade or curtain. If the pedantic reader asks, “But suppose the shade or curtain is dark brown or black?” my answer is, “Yes, then the light gets lost, but not the energy of the light, which is transformed into heat.”

  Some Chinese Thoughts on the Subject

  Having touched a little on the Buddhist and Brahmanic approaches, I would like to conclude with some contributions made by Chinese philosophy to the subject.

  When Confucius was asked to expostulate on the nature of death, he replied that we do not even know the nature of Life; how then can we talk of the nature of Death?”

  Confucius’s reply strikes me as quite sound albeit a trifle pedestrian. My favorite writers of all (on this as well as many other matters) are the Taoists such as Laotse, Liehtse, and Chuangtse. They give neither analogies nor any rational explanations whatsoever! In total defiance of all logic, they soar their merry way upward like birds in free flight.

  For example, Laotse once said that he who dies but does
not perish has life everlasting.

  It is amazing how differently people react to this! Some (like myself) simply burst out laughing. Others become very solemn and serious and try to analyze what distinction Laotse could possibly have had in mind between dying and perishing. But I can assure you that any such analysis will totally miss the point! The line means absolutely neither more nor less than exactly what it says.

  I love the incident from Liehtse about the group who came across a skull. Many of the group recoiled in horror. But one member said, “Both the skull and I know that there is no such absolute thing as life and death.”

  Finally, there is the following gorgeous passage from Chuangtse —one of the most remarkable passages ever written.6

  Nan-po asked Nu-yu, “Sir, you are old, but have the look of a child. How is this?”

  “I have learned Tao,” replied Nu-yu.

  “Can Tao be learned?” Nan-po said.

  “Ah! How can it?” replied Nu-yu.