the most precious element any human has, the very measure of his individuality — time…. Everything we value, from love to lucre, takes time. Time is the measure of the conflicting demands put upon us, and as such is the measure of our very selves. It is the one commodity that turns out, for each individual, irrevocably, to be finite. (111, emphasis in original)

Seen from this perspective, there is nothing frivolous or optional whatsoever about “convenience.” This is true whether we live a worldly life seeking worldly ends or a monastic one seeking liberation. Without a belief in rebirth, we do not have anything like the infinite eons Śāntideva envisioned in which one could progress slowly on the bodhisattva path. He thought it was urgent for us to become monks and dedicate ourselves to liberation in this lifetime, because if we didn’t, we wouldn’t get another chance for billions of years. Yet just as importantly, eventually, after some unimaginable amount of time, we would get that chance, in a way that now seems unlikely at best. Without rebirth, death places an absolute limit on our time. Saving time is in a sense saving a life – for when we speak of “saving” a life, all we can ever mean is prolonging that life, which is in turn to say giving that life more time.

Saving time, then, can be among the noblest of human goals. The reason “convenience” looks so suspect, however, is that very often it doesn’t really save us time, doesn’t actually add anything to our lives. The biggest trap is the pattern all too familiar in the US: one spends one’s money on conveniences (convenience foods, labour-saving devices, and so on), in order to save time – and then spends the newly available time making more money, much of which itself is spent on conveniences. Little if anything is gained here. One might well argue that little time is genuinely saved. For too often we are trapped in the belief that our paid work should be our life’s fulfillment when, as Marx long ago noted, it is by definition alienated: to the extent that we work for pay, we work for others and not for ourselves. We might be lucky enough to find work we enjoy most of the time, but there is no reason to expect that paid work should be any more fulfilling than cooking or washing the dishes. Perhaps we are still a little too wedded to what Max Weber called the Protestant ethic, which rejected the use of money for pleasure and enjoyment (vacations, eating out, beauty products) but endorsed spending it on “comfort,” an idea not too far removed from “convenience.” The idea of making money to save time to make more money may have made sense within the dour world of Calvinist theology, but it’s a little bizarre that the rest of us would continue to follow it.

Still, these points all raise a related question: what, exactly, should our time be used for? Suppose that, as Marx imagined, we really could “hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticise after dinner” – should we do all of these? Thanks to the heroic work of the early twentieth-century labour movement, most of us have two days a week on which we can do exactly what Marx says – at least if we do not raise children in addition. But how then should we make decisions about how to use this precious “spare” time? Should we indeed spend the day in pastoral and agrarian pursuits followed by dinner, and then write critical philosophy in the evening – or should we spend the whole day doing one or the other if that’s what we love? Or should we play games and sports with friends and loved ones? Or should we raise children and spend the time doing that? Once we realize how finite our time on earth is, the way we spend it comes to take on great importance.

What then should we do about our impending death? The most common answers typically involve the supernatural, with belief in an afterlife. Christians will speak of an afterlife in heaven, Buddhists of rebirth. So all we have to do is be good in this lifetime (or ask forgiveness for our sins), and we’ll be able to continue “living” well after death. Such a view is comforting. Unfortunately, I don’t have any reason to believe it true. I’ve heard it argued that we really don’t know enough about consciousness to say that it ends with death. That may well be so. But we also don’t know enough to say that anything else happens to it, either – certainly nothing like the graphic hells that, according to Śāntideva, await those with sufficiently bad karma. In terms of any sort of survival of the self after death, it seems to me, the very best we can do is agnosticism, and perhaps not even that.

But if death really is – or might be – the end of each individual, then what? Well: I posted a little while ago about three basic ways of life, three orientations to theoretical as well as practical philosophy: the asceticism of most Buddhists, Jains, Advaitins and early Christians; the traditionalism of most Jews, Confucians and dharmaśāstra; and the libertinism of Marx, Nietzsche, Rawls, Ayn Rand and the utilitarians. Asceticism and libertinism can each take on more egoistic or more altruistic forms. Stephen Walker challenged the formulation somewhat, noting that Mozi doesn’t comfortably fit it; but a typology like this must necessarily consist of ideal types in Max Weber’s sense, giving us extremes within which real examples take a middle ground, and Mozi seems like an altruist who takes on some elements of all three basic ways of life.

My point here, however, was to be that these three ways of life each seems to have a corresponding way of death – an attitude toward death that does not depend on the supernatural. This is true whether they take an egoistic or altruistic form, for others must die as surely as oneself. The traditionalist would take the path most people likely take, seeking immortality through her children. This is the path the Hebrew Bible offers – progeny represent immortality. (Thus the now-shocking happy ending to the book of Job: he loses all his children, but it’s all okay in the end because he gets more!) By contrast the libertine, it seems to me, must follow Lucretius’s advice: do not fear death; nothing bad can happen to you. True, you won’t have any of the things you loved during life, but that won’t matter, because you’ll be dead. You won’t notice any of it.

And the ascetic? Most ascetic traditions do rely in some sense on the supernatural, but I’m not sure that they have to. I’m particularly intrigued by the approach to death in Śaṅkara’s Advaita Vedānta philosophy. Our selves are illusion in the first place; the true nature of the world is a simple oneness identical with all our selves, if we could perceive it. Indian gurus will sometimes leave the words for their disciples: “I was not born, I did not die.” This sounds somewhat supernatural, but I don’t think that it must be – at least not if we take “supernatural” in the standard sense of “ideas incompatible with the evidence of natural science.” The Advaita view is not falsifiable by empirical evidence, and is not supposed to be; arguments for it take place at the pre-sensory level of a priori foundations, of what makes empirical knowledge possible.

Now the idea of immortality through one’s children requires a bit more fleshing out, to the point that Job’s version no longer satisfies. The simple fact of having children does nothing to defeat death, for one’s children are not oneself. Children can only offer a sort of immortality because they promise what Freud (or his translator) called cathexis (German Besetzung): the breaking down of self boundaries, so that we come to identify ourselves with our children, and really come to see ourselves as existing partially in those children. It seems unlikely that this happened in Job’s case; if new children were as good as the old ones, he can’t have been that closely cathected with the old ones to begin with. On the other hand, cathexis alone isn’t enough; we surely cathect with our spouses or other romantic lovers, but they will only survive a few decades beyond us at most, and usually not that. Children, on the other hand, can pass on their own cathexis, a new identification with our grandchildren and their descendants.

I suppose a similar kind of cathexis might happen in the attempt to achieve immortality through one’s work: artistic, scientific, philosophical, sociopolitical. If the creation one brings into the world is closely identified with oneself, and if it is everlasting, then it can similarly keep one around. But both kinds of cathexis face a similar problem: one cannot know at death whether the object of cathexis will survive. Will one’s descendants keep oneself alive, or will their bloodlines die out, as seems to be happening frequently in my generation where so few have children? Will one’s social accomplishments be toppled, will one’s artistic work fade into such obscurity that it is forever lost? (Woody Allen: “I don’t want to achieve immortality through my work. I want to achieve it by not dying.”) Lucretius’s comfort with nonexistence, and Śaṅkara’s identification with a unified cosmic Self, seem to promise a surer way.

I don’t know enough about Judaism to say how pervasive Soloveichik’s approach is in the tradition, or enough about the Tanakh to know how much it pervades there. But I find his view intriguing for a number of reasons, even if it is little more than Soloveichik’s own idiosyncrasy. First among these is the afterlife; for when I read Soloveichik’s article on this subject, I found it made me consider myself significantly more Buddhist.

Soloveichik believes a Christian is committed to saying that Hitler or Pol Pot, if they sincerely repented their evil deeds moments before death, they would then end up in heaven. Richard John Neuhaus, creator of First Things, suggested that perhaps “Hitler in heaven will be forever a little dog to whom we will benignly condescend. But he will be grateful for being there, and for not having received what he deserved,” just as “we will all be grateful for being there and for not having received what we deserve.” Such a view is unacceptable in Soloveichik’s Judaism. He instead presents a view from Maimonides, according to which “souls are never eternally punished in hell: the presence of the truly wicked is so intolerable to the Almighty that they never even experience an afterlife. Rather, they are, in the words of the Bible, ‘cut off’: after death, they just… disappear.” [ellipses are Soloveichik's]

The point got me thinking: what would I like to think about the afterlife of the wicked? What would seem to be a fair view, if I were designing the cosmos? And I thought: neither the Christian instant forgiveness, nor the (presumed) Jewish elimination, seemed right to me – and eternal damnation for those who don’t repent seemed even worse. Rather, I thought, I would want to see something more like the Buddhist view: they would get punishment for a long time, but eventually get a clean slate. I realized that said something about my own ethical views on the treatment of evildoers in this world: forgiveness is a worthwhile goal, but it has to be to some extent earned; a moment of repentance isn’t good enough.

The point helped me learn to pay more attention to the supernatural dimensions of the traditions I study. I have generally Yavanay?na sympathies myself – I don’t generally believe in the supernatural and tend to think most traditions would be better off without it. But it’s worth paying attention to any thinker’s view of the supernatural – whether the afterlife, God, or karma – because it will wind up telling you a lot about that thinker’s view of everything else.

Lately I’ve slowly been making my way through Philosophy and Freedom, a collection of essays by and about the neglected Canadian Hegelian philosopher James Doull (rhymes with towel). Doull, like Socrates or George Herbert Mead, never published a book during his lifetime; his reputation derives almost entirely from being spread by his students and their students, mostly through the classics department at Dalhousie University and the great-books program at its affiliated University of King’s College. (I myself know Doull’s work only because a lifelong friend of mine is one of Doull’s “grand-pupils,” a devoted student of Doull’s students at Dalhousie and King’s.)

Doull’s work is difficult, both in the density of its prose and in the wide range of the texts it expects familiarity with – the chapter on ancient Greece covers not only philosophy but the full range of history, tragedy and comedy, viewing their scope all together through a Hegelian philosophical lens. Moreover, because Doull’s concerns are so wide-ranging, a study of his work does not immediately repay the reader with direct application to particular philosophical questions and problems. If ever there was a big-picture thinker it is this man, at least when it comes to Western philosophical traditions.

And yet studying Doull closely has ultimately paid off for me in thinking about the big question I’ve addressed above. I realize that this question of ethical motivation has, in its way, been central to Western philosophical tradition, not merely in the works of individual thinkers but through its history. Not all of what follows is said directly in Doull’s work, but it is inspired by it, and I think it is faithful to his spirit based on conversations with Doullian friends.

I’ve seen the point now particularly with reference to the book of Ecclesiastes, which Doull refers to and which I recently taught in my intro religion class at Stonehill. Ecclesiastes paints a picture of the world that differs greatly from more familiar books of the Hebrew Bible. The very message of the book of Exodus, for example, seems to be that God acts in history, that his presence in our lives is real and palpable, working his miracle everywhere one turns, bringing about cosmic justice for his chosen people if not others. Ecclesiastes, by contrast, gives us a remote and distant God, in a world where the wicked triumph and the unjust perish. There isn’t even an afterlife for the expectation of justice; all the dead go to sheol, “the grave” where they know nothing. It’s a moving text, and one which seems to fit the experience of our post-Darwinian age where God’s very existence seems questionable at best.

And yet. In the midst of this God-bereft world, where there is no justice and no reward for virtue, Ecclesiastes repeatedly tells us: “fear God and keep his commandments.” It seems, in its way, to be the paradigm of ethical externalism. One wants to ask: why? No reward awaits us for keeping God’s commandments, in this world or the next. And the approach to knowledge, if relatively untheorized, is similarly externalist: the truth is out there in God, whether we know it or not.

A couple centuries before this, Doull notes, the Sophists had innovated by presenting the opposite, internalist, position. Man is the measure of all things; everything, ethical and epistemological, is up to us. But this view runs into the problems I have addressed in recent posts about truth and contradiction. If we have no standards beyond our existing motivations, we have no grounds on which to change others’ behaviour, or our own.

For Doull, it is Aristotle who first resolves this problem, above all in the theory of eudaimonia – a human flourishing constituted by both virtue and happiness. But Doull agrees with the points Alasdair MacIntyre regularly makes about Aristotle – that this flourishing was embedded in the political context of the Greek polis, a community formed around shared ethical standards and practices. When the polis degenerated into a large and impersonal empire, virtue could no longer count on reward; so virtue and happiness became separated in the Stoics and Epicureans, who would define happiness entirely in terms of virtue (the Stoics) or vice versa (the Epicureans). But for both of them, as for Aristotle, internalism and externalism (in the sense of my previous post) remain united: our own motivations and the absolute ethical principle end up taking us to the same place. They could make this move because, unlike Aristotle, they dismissed the importance of external goods: our internal states were all that mattered. Sure, virtue doesn’t get you a public reward, but it gets you the internal state of undisturbed peace.

But the Stoics and Epicureans are in tension not only with each other – is virtue or happiness really the more important one? – but with the world itself. Our virtue is often lacking in spite of our best efforts of will, not enough to make us really happy; and some virtues (like friendship) seem constituted by external conditions that make them possible. This is part of the criticism that Martha Nussbaum has recently made of these Hellenistic thinkers, on quasi-Aristotelian grounds; but historically, the figure who made the point stick, on quite different grounds, was (Saint) Augustine – with help from the Jewish worldview that gave rise to Ecclesiastes.

Augustine accepts what seems like the commonsense view that virtue and happiness are not analytically equivalent. He notes that in this world, so full of suffering and misfortune, virtue is not rewarded with happiness; but further, neither real virtue nor real happiness can be adequately reached in this world, where humans are frail enough that they fall far short of the virtue and happiness they seek. Augustine’s solution is to put it all off into the next world, a world for which we can hope after death.

I haven’t yet been able to follow Doull’s story past this point. Which is something of a shame, for there’s an obvious problem with the resolution in Augustine’s time: we have no more evidence to believe in an afterlife of reward than we have to believe the virtuous are rewarded in this life. Wishful thinking is not an adequate basis on which to build a life. Neither is Pascal’s Wager, the argument that we should believe in God and follow his law just in case there is an afterlife; for it could just as easily be that the afterlife rewards vice. (MacIntyre in God, Philosophy, Universities goes so far as to say he doesn’t think Pascal himself believed the wager was a good argument.)

What appeals to me in all of this is a spirit that, in at least one respect, seems the opposite of analytic philosophy as normally practised. One could call Doull’s work synthetic philosophy: rather than cutting ideas up into ever smaller pieces, he puts them together. It’s an approach that I suspect leads ultimately to conclusions that are both truer and more satisfying. This isn’t to bash analytic philosophy or say there’s no place for it; but I do welcome a view that takes this larger scope.

The question troubling me now is: can we have Buddhism without rebirth? There’s a basic problem posed here by the First Noble Truth, the classic Buddhist idea that all is dukkha: all is suffering, painful, unsatisfactory, sorrowful, bad. If this is so, why not commit suicide? For a classical Buddhist, rebirth is the answer to this question, and the obvious answer. Suicide makes your dukkha even worse; as a bad, un-dharmic activity, it will trap you in a far worse rebirth, leave you far more sorrowful and suffering than you are.

But if there is no rebirth? Then death starts to look disturbingly like nirvana. The suttas are cagey about describing nibb?na; they’re more ready to say what it is not, and it is not like the sorrowful existence we face in worldly sa?s?ra. Etymologically, the Pali or Sanskrit word connotes “extinguishing,” like blowing out a candle. When they do venture to characterize nirvana the suttas identify it as peaceful, tranquil, undisturbed. And in those same suttas, while one can attain nirvana in life, the death of a person who has attained nirvana is spoken of as the highest nirvana, parinibb?na. The cycle of sa?s?ra and rebirth, on the other hand, is characterized as a weary, sorrowful place from which we would do well to escape if only we could. Seen in this light, an anti-supernatural worldview turns out to be oddly good and hopeful news: we don’t have to go through all the rigours of the Buddhist path to find the end of suffering. We merely have to die.

But if all this is so, the logical consequence seems to be one that would make most Buddhists, and everyone else, uneasy: we should end it all, quickly, with a suicide.

At least, that would seem to be the consequence for Therav?da tradition, in which our own liberation from suffering is paramount. But the consequences for Mah?y?na would seem even grimmer. True, without rebirth, the Mah?y?nist needs to prolong her own life in order to save others from suffering. But how can one best end others’ suffering? One might easily provide the answer: kill them. Universal euthanasia. One avoids suicide so that one can kill others. The conclusion is not as far-fetched as one might wish it were: Wilhelm Halbfass in Tradition and Reflection notes that classical Indian sources refer to a group called the Sa?s?ramocakas, who were said to practise compassionate murder in order to liberate others from suffering. But if we are led to the Sa?s?ramocakas’ position, we have at least prima facie reason to think something has gone seriously wrong, somewhere, with our reasoning.

I don’t think one can get out of this problem through a deeper examination of the concept of dukkha and its classification. True, the suttas tell us that there are three kinds of dukkha: basic dukkha (dukkhadukkha), dukkha from change (vipari??madukkha), and dukkha from conditions (sa?kh?radukkha). I’ve seen some people try and look to this distinction as a solution: for example, this essay by Omar Moad at the British magazine The Philosopher.

Only basic dukkha is obviously, visibly, immediately painful or sorrowful, and not everything is basic dukkha, it can be the other kinds. But the thing is, the other two are painful and sorrowful as well – we just don’t see it. All three are undeniably bad, and everything is composed of them. And contrary to Moad’s article, even dukkha from conditions, sa?kh?radukkha, does not merely arise from a limited perspective; it is part of the conditioned nature of things. As Moad notes, for those who have attained proper insight, “even the most blissful existence as a deva in one of the Buddhist Heavens would seem to be a miserable Hell.” Buddhists can remain optimistic in that there is a way out of all this – but that way involves transcending it all. And if rebirth is no longer an issue, one way to transcend it would be through suicide – or murder, if one is being altruistic.

Is there a way out of the problem? I can see two. The most straightforward approach, which I have previously taken, is to deny the First Noble Truth: life is good. But in saying this, one denies a great deal of Buddhist tradition, at least as much as one would do by denying karma. A more Buddhist approach would be to take N?g?rjuna’s M?dhyamika lead and say nirvana is merely sa?s?ra properly viewed, so that the life of the bodhisattva is in fact blissful, much better than mere extinguishing. But if that’s true, then if we were to somehow know that someone will not become a bodhisattva, then would it not seem that that person is better off dead?

The biggest problem with Lucretius’s advice is that it’s so hard to follow. Often those who don’t fear death simply don’t treat it as a real possibility. (The young, I think, are especially prone to this.) Once you really contemplate the possibility of your own death, the fear becomes much more real. You think you don’t fear death, but you really do.

The thing is, as long as your worldview focuses on yourself, your death is inevitably going to be a problem for you. You can live to improve the remaining moments of your life, but eventually those get fewer and fewer. Egoistic consequentialism, at least, seems to end in futility. This would seem a logical reason to fear death, against Lucretius – maybe not death itself, but the last moments that precede it, where everything you do means nothing.

Here, I think, a Buddhist view can help – especially ??ntideva’s. He takes the basic Buddhist doctrine of non-self and runs with it: claims that because the concept of a self makes no sense, we need to live for everyone and not just ourselves. I’m not sure I buy the metaphysical arguments, but there’s a lot to be said for their practical consequences. One of ??ntideva’s verses that has really stuck with me is BCA VIII.129: “All who are suffering in the world are suffering because of their desire for their own happiness. All who are happy in the world are happy because of their desire for others’ happiness.” ??ntideva doesn’t explain what he means by this, but I think this may be a part of it: getting over ourselves helps us to be happy, partially because it lets us live for things that extend beyond our deaths. (I’m reminded of this passage when I read of Jesus saying “Whoever tries to keep his life will lose it, and whoever loses his life will preserve it.”) On this score, it seems to me, ??ntideva helps us to be better Lucretians.

Now, I’ve tried to be explicit that this is a philosophy blog, not a personal blog – while a great deal here is autobiographical, the purpose of even those entries is to point to bigger questions, questions that I hope my life story can help illuminate in some way. So I’m going to talk today a little bit about my reasons for deciding to marry. The particular reasons, of course, are all about my sweetheart herself, a beautiful, smart, funny, playful, charming, sexy, adventurous, responsible, virtuous woman. But there are more general reasons that tie to the blog’s bigger concerns.

Above all, my action this weekend is not one that ??ntideva, or the Buddha of the Pali suttas, would view as a part of the highest, best, most fully virtuous life. They speak at length of the disadvantages of the household life, the life spent among family with a paid job in the everyday world. The life of a monk is a higher and better one to pursue. Eros keeps us mired in the suffering of everyday life, enslaved to the desires and craving that only cause us yet more suffering. The monk, by contrast, devotes himself or herself fully to the development of virtue, much more able to rise above craving and suffering.

Of course Indian Buddhists made room for householders – they’re the ones who kept the monks fed and clothed. But the classical Indian renouncer traditions, Jainism and Buddhism above all, make it very clear that the householder’s path is a lesser one, a path for those who are not as well developed. It may well be best for certain people – probably most people – to choose a householder’s life, but that’s because those people are weak, their bad karma too strong. There are echoes here of Paul in the New Testament saying “better to marry than to burn” (meaning “burn with lust,” not “burn in hell”). On the logic of classical Indian Buddhism, if marriage is the best path for me, it’s because I’m weak and unvirtuous, not good enough.

Now I’ve lived long enough to see a lot of my weaknesses. It’s not the characterization of myself as weak and unvirtuous that I object to; I can see a lot of that in myself, which is one reason I see such appeal in chastened intellectualism. Nevertheless, I do ultimately disagree that the monk’s life is the best life a human being can aspire to. Don’t get me wrong, I have an enormous degree of respect for monks. Overall, I suspect most lifetime monks are better off and more virtuous than the rest of us – they spend so much time cultivating themselves that they can be far less wrapped up in self-destructive behaviour than most. And yet, I do think that ultimately, the best, most fully human life is one that partakes of the pleasures of love and friendship, probably even of sensual pleasures like food and sex – while still being aware of the dangers of excessive attachment to them. Ultimately, on the question of external goods, I do end up closer to Martha Nussbaum’s worldly view than to ??ntideva’s. I have defended ??ntideva against Nussbaum many times, in my dissertation and elsewhere, and will continue to do so, because I think his side of the story doesn’t get nearly enough of a hearing; it’s worth listening to and there is a lot to learn from it. But in the end, I do not stand with him.

I first heard of monks and renouncers when I was quite young, visiting India with family, and I heard the explanation that people would follow this hard path to free themselves from sorrow. I expressed then what was probably my first real philosophical thought: “But if you free yourself from sorrow, you also free yourself from joy!” And this, to me, is a real problem. The classical Buddhist texts would say that even joy is itself sorrow – even sukha is dukkha – because joy comes to an end, because we inevitably lose the things we love, at death if not before. The inevitability of loss is indeed real, and terrible. But it is not clear to me that this loss must be so terrible. Does the pain of grief really outweigh the joys of togetherness? There is something to that idea – happiness researchers like Daniel Gilbert tell us we do lose more happiness from losses than we get from gains – but I don’t think it tells the whole story. Research in the same field also suggests that marriage (unlike childrearing) does do a lot to make you happy. And on death itself – so often emphasized in criticisms of material goods – the loss is itself not necessarily painful. Some of the wisest counsel on death comes from the Roman Epicurean Lucretius: true, when we die, we lose everything. But so what? We won’t be around to mourn the loss!

EDIT (1 November): My fiancée has asked me that her last name not be mentioned on this site, as she’s entering a critical phase of her career, and I post some fairly controversial opinions on the blog.

My problem is with the literal concept of hell, the one you see preached in evangelical sermons. I’ve been tempted to think of it as just a superstition for those who haven’t thought their Christianity through very well. But it isn’t that. Even Augustine, a profound thinker I have a deep respect for, seems to say fairly clearly that the damned suffer physical and psychological torment for eternity. This, to me, raises huge problems.

I can’t figure any way around the view that a God who damns people to hell for all eternity is evil. Such a God would deliberately inflict far more suffering than Hitler, Stalin and Pol Pot put together (and added to every other vicious tyrant you might care to name). Moreover, such a punishment seems completely gratuitous, far more than anything the sufferers could reasonably be said to deserve. Augustine argues the point merely by reference to Cicero and the Roman customs of the time: “we have punishments more severe than the crime all the time!” Such a point convinces me only of the barbarism of Rome, not of God’s justice. Nietzsche notes with some satisfaction that Aquinas and Tertullian go even further than this: among the pleasures granted to the elect in heaven comes the ability to see the ways the damned are punished. What kind of God would encourage such a thing?

Buddhist hells, by contrast, give us two ways out of the dilemma. First, they’re not permanent; everybody gets a second chance, as one should expect from a merciful god. Second, and more fundamentally, nobody put them there. Like all the other suffering in the world, they’re just an unpleasant fact of nature, one we need to find a way to deal with. If the Buddhas could eliminate the hells, they would; they’re omniscient and omnibenevolent, but not omnipotent. ??ntideva, in redirecting his good karma, hopes that the hells will become glades of lotuses – he just doesn’t succeed in effecting this transformation, at least not for the majority of the hells.

Am I missing something here? With respect to the God of the medieval theologians, if he existed, it’s not just that I would find it hard to believe him omnibenevolent. Rather, I would find it hard to believe him benevolent at all.

The intended rhetorical significance of this phrasing is pretty clear: life good, death bad. But I find myself taking it somewhat differently. The problem with contemporary worldviews, in my books, isn’t that we have a culture of death. The problem is that we don’t have a culture of death, and we should.

All life ends in death. This isn’t news. How, then, could we imagine a culture of life that isn’t a culture of death? We need a culture that enables us to face the inevitable reality of our own deaths and the deaths of our loved ones, and that’s exactly what we don’t have. In our everyday lives we allow ourselves to think that death won’t really happen to us. I think of the generally forgettable movie Practical Magic, which rests on the premise that its leading women suffer from a curse: a man who falls in love with them “will die.” Not die young, not die prematurely; just “he will die,” and this is seen as something horrible. But we all suffer from this curse. We just don’t want to admit it – because we don’t have a culture of death.

Plato said the love of wisdom – philosophy – is the practice of death. We should listen.