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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 24 October 2008
Often we feel there is something odd about death, and especially about our own. This latter at least we often feel beyond our ken. Well, I think in a sense it may be; but in another, clearly is not. Among those who have felt this strangeness is Ramchandra Gandhi who, in an excellent recent work, The Availability of Religious Ideas (Macmillan, 1976), maintained –
There is no difficulty in seeing that I cannot intelligibly conceive of my own death – the ceasing to be, for good, of myself, my consciousness. I can conceive of temporary lapses into unconsciousness, always overcome by a return to consciousness. The difficulty is this: in asking myself the question 'What will it be like to be irreversibly unconscious?' (and the state of affairs here sought to be visualized would exclude all dream activity and dream-thinking of all types), I want both to remain self-conscious and visualize actual loss of capacity for self-consciousness. This cannot be done (p. 39; italics mine).
page 166 note 1 Lewis, H. D., ‘The Elusive Self’, Talk of God (Macmillan, 1969), p. 169.Google Scholar
page 169 note 1 I think Kant thought that, if existence is a pre-condition of there being properties, it cannot be listed among them, it cannot be a property; much as some have thought that, if self-consciousness is a pre-condition of thought, it cannot be found embraced by it, it cannot be thought about. But, to combine the two suggestions, from the fact that I must first exist to be able to think - to have this dispositional property - it follows neither that I cannot think of my existence, nor that existing cannot be one of my properties. It would be an odd property, since it would be found where all other properties were found, and not without them, quite as they, severally, would not be found without it. But an odd property is still a property. Something that is found where everything else is found is not a non-property on that account. Space and time perhaps are like this; though I wouldn't care to say what kind of properties space and time are.
Still, I think existence is not a property for another reason: that it makes no sense to predicate it of things. For there are no things without it. But a property can of its nature be predicated or denied of things. Perhaps this is what Kant meant. If so, it seems more a point about the concept ‘property’ than about the nature of things. For certainly it is true that things 'exist. And we might as easily choose, or have chosen, to define ‘the properties’ of things as the things which are true at any given time of them. I just don't think we have.
page 174 note 1 Lewis, H. D., op. cit. p. 169.Google Scholar
page 175 note 1 In a quite remarkable book called Thinking, vol. I of The Life of the Mind (Secker and Warburg, London, 1978Google Scholar), Hannah Arendt says what amounts to the same. In speaking of self-presentation, a human act, and self-display, a merely animal one, she remarks, ‘self-presentation would not be possible without a degree of self-awareness - a capability inherent in the reflexive character of mental activities and clearly transcending mere consciousness, which we probably share with the higher animals’ (p. 36).
page 176 note 1 Lewis, H. D., op. cit. p. 169.Google Scholar
page 176 note 2 Lewis, H. D., op. cit. p. 169.Google Scholar
page 176 note 3 Hindu and Buddhist thought speaks of vāsanās and samskāras, both roughly translatable as ‘innate and/or acquired inclinations or dispositions’, as determining, not only the manner we are initially inclined to behave, always, but the very person and station we come into this world as, or with.