Cormac McCarthy’s The Sunset Limited contains many good lines. Here’s one from near the end of the play:
“You can’t be one of the dead because what has no existence can have no community.” As I take it, “one of the dead” means “one belonging to a community of dead persons.”
It’s an interesting argument. Notice the presupposition that the dead do not exist. The complete argument thus goes something like this:
That which is dead doesn’t exist.
That which doesn’t exist has no properties.
Thus, that which is dead has no properties.
Therefore, that which is dead lacks the property of being communal.
If that which is dead lacks the property of being communal, then there is no community of the dead.
Hence, there is no community of the dead.
If there is no community of the dead, then if dead, one cannot belong to the community of the dead.
Hence, if dead, one cannot belong to the community of the dead.
(One could make a similar argument with respect to relations. That which doesn’t exist cannot stand in relations, including communal relations, etc.)
The argument is deductively valid. Is it sound? Only if the premises are true and there is no fallacy. The premises are (1), (2), (5), and (7). (2) is solid, in my view. So are (5) and (7). But (1) is debatable.
How so? Consider two metaphysical views on time: presentism and eternalism. According to Emery, et al., presentism holds that “no objects exist in time without being present (abstract objects might exist outside of time)” and eternalism is the view that objects from both the past and the future exist. On presentism, only the present moment exists, and therefore the Battle of Salamis does not exist, nor does Themistocles, nor does next week’s visit to the dentist, since these events and persons are not now. On eternalism, arguably, all three exist in some sense.
Now, if Themistocles exists despite being dead, then the dead exist. One might hold with some plausibility that the state of Themistocles’ existence (despite being dead) is necessary for us now to make true statements about him. Notice that if Themistocles exists despite being dead, then the eternalist might argue that persons exist while dead and thus can possess properties when dead, including perhaps the property of being communal.
Presentism and eternalism are complicated metaphysical theses, and I cannot go into them thoroughly here. The point at hand is that the eternalist might claim that a dead person can possess properties when dead. Aristotle addresses something like this view in Nicomachean Ethics, Book 1, Section 10, noting that it is worthy of philosophical discussion:
“Must no one at all, then, be called happy while he lives; must we, as Solon says, see the end? Even if we are to lay down this doctrine, is it also the case that a man is happy when he is dead? Or is not this quite absurd, especially for us who say that happiness is an activity? But if we do not call the dead man happy, and if Solon does not mean this, but that one can then safely call a man blessed as being at last beyond evils and misfortunes, this also affords matter for discussion; for both evil and good are thought to exist for a dead man [my emphasis], as much as for one who is alive but not aware of them; e.g. honours and dishonours and the good or bad fortunes of children and in general of descendants. And this also presents a problem; for though a man has lived happily up to old age and has had a death worthy of his life, many reverses may befall his descendants- some of them may be good and attain the life they deserve, while with others the opposite may be the case; and clearly too the degrees of relationship between them and their ancestors may vary indefinitely. It would be odd, then, if the dead man were to share in these changes and become at one time happy, at another wretched; while it would also be odd if the fortunes of the descendants did not for some time have some effect on the happiness of their ancestors.”
Here, Aristotle suggests that a dead person can suffer both good fortune and misfortune, suggesting that the dead exist (in some sense). The eternalist can therefore hold that, say, Themistocles exists despite being dead, and that he possesses the property of being communal when dead because he exists in communal-like relations to others who are dead. By virtue of this argument, the eternalist might deny (1).
How plausible is this denial of (1)? It is questionable, but I can’t get into the details now.
Deep and poignant.
Very nice post, Elliot. Your reconstruction is valid. You say that (2) is "solid." It is, but it is not self-evident. For one epistemically possible view is that the dead are nonexistent objects: they do not exist, but they have being, and have properties. Indeed, they actually have properties; it is not just that they could have properties. So on this view, there is no bar to a dead person's having the property of being communal or standing in the communal relation to other dead persons. This quasi-Meinongian view is skillfully developed by Palle Yourgrau in Death and Nonexistence (Oxford, 2019). It of course has problems of its own.
(5) and (7) are undoubtedly true.
And I agree that (1) is reasonably rejected on eternalism which is plausible. Surely wholly past individuals are not nothing despite their not being temporally present. They exist, but not at present. Presentists despite a lot of fancy footwork have a hard time accounting for this plain fact. This is why eternalism is well-represented among contemporary philosophers. Eternalism allows for a watered-down personal immortality which has been embraced by Einstein, Charles Hartshorne, and most recently by John Leslie. The main difficulty of eternalism is to give a clear account of existence simpliciter. But it appears that the presentist faces the same difficulty assuming that "Only the present exists" is not a miserable tautology that boils down to "Only what exists (present tense) exists (present tense."
As for Aristotle, he is standardly taken to be a presentist (see Feser, e.g.) and thus your invocation of the Stagirite in support of eternalism is questionable.