Addenda to earlier posts

In one of the earlier posts on this blog, I began with an observation that anyone who has ever written or created will recognize from their own experience: namely, that it is horrible to re-read any of one's own work. And this is usually so for the obvious reasons: the creations of one's younger self often strike one as pretentious, shallow, sloppy, and worse. Which is an awful feeling. But then, I noted, the alternative possibility is often no better. 

Uncomfortable as it may be to discover that something you wrote in the past is bad, that is to say, it can be even more unsettling to discover that it is good. As I put it in another post not long after: "This feels like an affront and a challenge to [one's] current, older self, who is supposed to be wiser but may in fact be duller and more complacent, like the elder lion who is chased out of the pride by his own offspring."

This too is a not entirely unfamiliar experience among other writers. One wishes, after all, to believe that one's life is a story of upward progress. To realize that maybe one's best work is now behind one is to upset this narrative and make one question the validity of going on with it now. As Dante Gabriel Rossetti counsels the writer in his poem "Soothsay":

Strive that thy works prove equal: lest 

That work which thou hast done the best 

Should come to be to thee at length 

(Even as to envy seems the strength 

Of others) hateful and abhorr'd,— 

Thine own above thyself made lord,— 

Of self-rebuke the bitterest. 

As I said in another post, this situation of being outdone by one's own past self also poses uncomfortable questions about the nature of identity. If "I" was capable of something in the past and could not repeat the success now, does that mean that "I" can still take credit for it? Or is the me that exists in present time someone different from the me that performed the miracle of some prior year?

Our tendency when viewing other people, of course, is to regard each one as a unity across time. We have to do this, because we are aware that at least some of those other people are now dead. When we speak of Einstein the physicist, therefore, we are obviously not talking exclusively about the present Einstein, since he is a mouldering nonentity, but the Einstein who lived and wrote as well—the Einstein of the past. 

As I concluded in that post, the fact of our mortality necessitates that we think of ourselves in much the same way. As biased as we may be toward seeing ourselves only in light of our present existence, and regarding any past achievement as therefore of far less reality than anything we can achieve now and in the future, the fact is that at some point every one of us is going to stop being able to achieve anything further. Our artistic career will end in the grave if nowhere else. 

We can of course choose to accept this, and focus on the present regardless, and simply make of our lives a Hobbesian struggle for "power after power ceasing only in death." But we will have to accept, as an unfortunate consequence thereof, that everything we've ever done, by the time we come to the end of that road, did not really belong to us. We will have to say that it was not really "us" acting, was not really our work or our accomplishment. 

If we wish to regard anything at all as having a real existence, we are going to have to grant to the past its share of reality. This means granting our past selves a reality too. As Spinoza would say, this means considering ourselves "under a species of eternity"—a notion he arrives at by way of his cosmic determinism. Since everything is linked to everything else by an unbroken chain of causality, he argues, then everything that has ever been must be, and therefore is, in the mind of God.

As he writes in his Ethics (Curley trans.): "Whatever the mind conceives under the guidance of reason, it conceives under the same species of eternity, or necessity [...] So whether the idea is of a future or a past thing, or of a present one, the mind conceives the thing with the same necessity and is affected with the same certainty. And whether the idea is of a future or a past thing or of a present one, it will nevertheless be equally true[.]"

We can leave aside here the old and fraught question of exactly what that Spinozan God is, and whether it is distinguishable in any way from the universe and the mere fact of existence. The point is simply that if we strip away the theological language, we have a notion that is not fundamentally dissimilar from the picture of the universe we get from the theory of General Relativity. If our existence unfolds in four dimensions, after all, then in a sense we "exist" across time, and do not cease to be at the moment of our deaths. 

Of course, viewed from our own perspective inside time's forward march, our existence begins at the moment of our birth and ceases with our death. In this sense, I make no claim to personal immortality for any of us. But the interesting thing is that Spinoza did not do so either. When he states that the human mind is eternal, he meant that it exists outside of time, not that it is of infinite duration; indeed, he explicitly disavows that it could continue within the perspective of time after the body has perished. 

Writes Spinoza: "our mind, insofar as it involves the essence of the body under a species of eternity, is eternal, and [...] this existence it has cannot be defined by time or explained through duration. Our mind, therefore, cannot be said to endure, and its existence can be defined by a certain time, only insofar as it involves the actual existence of the body[.]"

Here, then, we have a version of immortality that is far different from the notion that our personalities continue past our deaths; but which is far more reconcilable to our modern scientific conceptions. In the Einsteinian universe, after all, (at least according to an Alan Moore interview I once heard on Fresh Air) we still perish with our bodies, but if we were to be able somehow to step outside of the universe and regard it as a whole—a complete blob that is seen in all four of its dimensions, including that of time, then we would be able to see our own four-dimensional existence zigzagging through one tiny corner of that blob. And it could be regarded over and over again. 

This is perhaps how we can make sense of Spinoza's meaning in modern terms. This is how we can retrieve his famous phrase Sub specie aeternitatis and deploy it for our purposes not only as a snatch of poetry, but as a true fact of human existence. What we have done and been, all that we have valued, all the people who have meant something to us, are mortal, changeable, and perishable, when seen from within time. But from the vantage point of one outside the universe, able to regard it as a whole in all four of its dimensions, they are always there. They exist still, that is to say, under a species of eternity.