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Thought Experiment 69: The Horror

10/17/2016

4 Comments

 
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Nice. This week's thought experiment is filled with deep, dark, existential angst. Now we're philosophising!

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     "The horror! The horror!"
     Many have speculated about what inspired Colonel Kurtz to utter those famous last words. The answer lies in what he realised just before he let out his last breath. In that moment, he understood that past, present, and future were all illusions. No moment in time is ever lost. Everything that happens exists for ever.
     That meant his impending death would not be the end. His life, once lived, would always exist. And so, in a sense, the life he had lived would be lived again and again, eternally recurring, each time exactly the same and thus with no hope of learning, of changing, of righting past wrongs.
     Had Kurtz made a success of this life he could have borne that realisation. He could have looked upon his work, thought "it is good," and gone to his grave serene in his triumph over death. The fact that he instead reacted with horror testified to his failure to overcome the challenges of mortal existence.
​     "The horror! The horror!" Would you react to the thought of eternal recurrence any differently?

Sources: Thus Spake Zarathustra by Friedrich Nietzsche, 1891; Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad, 1902.

Baggini, J., The Pig That Wants to Be Eaten, 2005, p. 205.
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What do you think? This isn't meant to be an accurate interpretation of what Conrad was trying to tell us through Kurtz's last words, but the thought experiment is thought provoking nonetheless. How can we deal with the eternal permanence of our actions? How do you?
4 Comments
John A. Johnson link
10/17/2016 11:11:29 pm

If I suppose all events are an inevitable consequence of the preceding events that caused them, then I find no horror in the idea of eternal recurrence. If I give up the sense of free will as "it could have been otherwise," then I find myself at peace with the permanence of my life as I lived it. It's not like I could have made a choice that would have made things turn out better but failed to make those choices. The choices I made were inevitable, given my past and the circumstances at each choice point. I was doing my best at every moment. Sometimes my best resulted in wonderful consequences, and sometimes the consequences were not so great. My life was neither entirely good nor bad, but a mixture of good and bad. I accept both and feel no need for congratulations on the fortunate choices or apology for the less fortunate choices. I feel no horror about my life as a whole, only fascination that the improbability of my life's existence was a reality.

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@EdGibney link
10/18/2016 11:02:20 am

That seems to be a logically consistent position as well as one that is exceedingly compassionate. A philosopher I'm friendly with on Twitter (Greg Caruso) would seem to agree with you according to his appearance on Philosophy Bites:

http://philosophybites.com/2016/04/gregg-caruso-on-freewill-and-punishment.html

I'm not convinced this deterministic stance on free will is the right one though. I think "it could have been otherwise," that we have "freedom" to choose, and as much as I exhort myself to do my best, I don't always do it, and certainly haven't always done so in the past. At least, I think I'm certain of that. : ) What would you say about someone who has done something truly horrible like my old boss who killed his wife during a nasty divorce by ramming her car and then stabbing her with a screwdriver over and over? He later committed suicide in jail. I imagine he felt horror looking back on what he'd done.

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John A. Johnson link
10/18/2016 03:06:22 pm

Thanks so much for the link to Greg Caruso's site. His position is indeed similar to mine. I came to my views partly through the reading of Tom Clark on this issue, http://www.naturalism.org/philosophy/free-will . Or maybe not. I think I may have already adopted the position before reading Clark's site and simply found his reasoning to be similar to mine.

I do not think that I have ever converted a single free-willer of any stripe to my position on the non-existence of free will, and I am not going to try to do that here. ;-) I would like to think that even if I am wrong, my position does, as you note, entail compassion. Furthermore, it does not necessarily rule out "punishment" for wrong-doers if the "punishment" has a good chance of changing that person for the better.

As far as cases like the screwdriver-stabber, this does indeed make me shudder. I am not sure I could come to terms if I had been the stabber, not having been in his position. Clearly he could not, and this is an example of a very sad, tragic series of events. But just because I would like it to be true that it could have been otherwise, that doesn't mean that it could have been otherwise. As someone once said, sh*t happens.

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@EdGibney link
10/19/2016 02:37:45 pm

Oh, well I've converted hundreds of determinists to my free will position. ... Ha! Just kidding. Any firm stances on free will only come after building a lot of scaffolding in the brain through extensive reading and thinking about the subject. It takes either incontrovertible facts about the issue to dismantle that, or a similarly long slog in the other direction. Since there aren't such incontrovertible facts, I just consider my (so far) limited writing on free will to be a signpost for people who haven't thought much about it yet. I've had some new thoughts on the subject recently though and hope to write more soon when the right thought experiment gives me an opportunity.

I agree with you about "punishment," by the way. Whether you are a determinist and think "it couldn't have been otherwise," or you are a compatibilist like myself who accepts that what's done is done, only three of the four traditional criminological categories of punishment make any sense, but those three can still be helpful. In my "Know Thyself" section on justice, I wrote this:

"The various means of punishment should be doled out as necessary and appropriate in an escalating order of: 1) restoration, 2) rehabilitation, and finally 3) incapacitation as a last resort. The focus of these punishments is the education of the criminal and the deterrence of future offenses by the populace. Seeking 4) retribution gives way to short-term emotions of vengeance that were useful in nature before the public good of justice was provided for by the state. Now, the emotions of the victim of a crime must not be allowed to override the use of reason to create justice and stability for the long term."

Speaking of crimes, shuddering over the stabbing was what many of us did. My boss who did it was the head manager of two very large construction projects that I worked on and I was his right-hand-man for project controls (managing time and money) on those 8- and 9-figure costing projects. He even wrote one of the recommendation letters for me for graduate school. He was a stereotypical ex-military hothead who had some anger control issues that made him challenging for corporate types, but feared and respected on the ground in the construction world. I was already gone for my MBA when his attack occurred, but I have wondered if my continued presence in his life might have changed things. He and I had had a lot of late afternoon chats in his office. I don't mean to imply I beat myself up over that or anything. Just wondered. Anyway, sh*t happens, but I still think it's important to believe we have some freedom to choose which sh*t. Otherwise the compassion looking backwards might be used as an excuse to relax going forward. More on that another time. In the meantime, thanks for the link to Tom Clark's site. I just started following his facebook group as it seems we may have a lot in common.

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