In chapter 9 of Beyond Consolation, Waters goes head-to-head with none other than that great monolith of Irish culture and literature, Famous Seamus. When being interviewed by Mariane Finucane on the occassion of his 70th birthday, Seamus Heaney was asked about his experience of a recent stroke that had temporarily immobalised him. Mariane Finucane asked him whether, in the straits of sudden immobility and weakness, he had thought much about life's fundamental questions and the possibility of life after death. Heaney responded by saying that his sense of religion (Catholicism) had eroded over the years and that beyond death there was only one certain outcome: extinction. Waters notes that Heaney's attitude ("we've moved beyond the superstitious religiousity of yesteryear but Christ's example and moral teaching are still valuable in themselves") is reflective of the contemporary cultural atmosphere. As such, his pronouncements about religion and life after death were readily recieved by the public at-large but also (it appeared) by Mariane Finucane who did not press him to justify his assertions.
Such is the context for Water's spirited critique of our Nobel Laureate. There are just two things I very briefly want to zone in on. First, pp. 117-119, where Waters manages, with what I think is great aplomb, to deconstruct the notion that is religiously accepted and promulgated by many as a stock answer to some of life's deepest questions (ie. two in particular: where did we come from? what comes after death?) That notion is, of course, 'Nothing'. I might as well just quote a chunk:
"We throw the word 'nothing' around as though it were obvious what it means. But there is no such entity, knowable to the vast majority of humankind, as Nothing. A few mathematicians and philosophers may have some tenuous grasp on some abstract sense of what Nothing is, expressing it as zero or emptiness or vacuum, but for most of us it remains an abstraction. We cannot conceive of it. Nothing is beyond our grasp, like Infinity and Eternity and the Absolute....we know nothing about Nothing. And yet, although we readily throw cold water all over the idea that a human being might live forever; or that our humanity is an infinite phenomenon that, like matter or energy, cannot be destroyed...we speak of Nothing as though it were the most self-evident concept in existence, throwing the word around as if we had meditated upon the question at great depth and come up with words which by their very essence contradict the concept we are seeking to communicate. Nothingness, extinction: names for things that cannot be seen or known. How then can they be named?"
The bottom line, of course, is that such things cannot be named. There are conjectured, self-created concepts that correspond to a reality that cannot be known. Insisting that extinction and some vast Nothing follow death seemingly smacks of intellectual acuity of the highest order and a sober spiritual maturity. But it is, in fact, nothing but sheer fideism (believing in something despite the sheer lack of reasoned justification or evidence for its existence). It is a whim-based presupposition that can not be demonstrated by the appeal to argument or evidence. Waters presses this home:
"For a human being to think about nothing, not to mention to think about Nothing, would require the thought and the human thinking it to disappear, and for the space from which both the human being and the thought had emanated to be absorbed into an absolute nothingness containing neither space nor matter, a non-entity that could not possibly exist and could neither observe nor be observed. No, it would require more: it would require this not to have happened, for time to reverse itself and erase even the possibility of such a human ever existing, never mind having such a thought, and for time then to curl itself into a ball and evaporate itself into something that could not be air or space or anything at all, but would not be amenable to sense or description, even if those phenomena could exist without the intervention of humanity which of course, because humanity had never existed or had become 'extinct', they could not..."
...and this sentence you are reading could never happen (never mind whatever other evidence you might care to mention) or even be contemplated, which must mean, if it means anything, that Nothing does not exist.
Now, Seamus Heaney has written some great poems but unless he has somehow satisfied the criteria Waters outlines above (ie. unless he has metamorphosed into Absolutely Nothing - impossible anyway - then returned from this state of being (Nothing cannot be "a state of being") to state some irrevocable truth about the nature of Nothing and the fact that it will succeed the event we call 'death'), his assertion on extinction following death turns out to be mere uninformed opinion. More broadly too, this same opinion held by so many, is just that: uninformed opinion. An opinion that, when analysed properly, is actually a fallacy. The very notion of Nothing is a self-contradictory notion. It cannot be known nor demonstrated.
Poignantly, however, we stash away this talisman called Nothing into a bundle of established and incontrovertible truth and deploy it in the course of thinking processes for the whole of a life surrounded by Somethings but no Nothings. And we hand on such a bundle to children who must have necessarily emerged from this Nothing to do the same thing.
A belief in Nothing is despair dressed up as realism. Further, although it smacks of a sober, insightful resignation to "things-as-they-are", it is actually just lazy thinking.
Well, that's the first of two things I wanted to touch on here. But I've already gone on too long. No matter, I'll cover the rest in the next post,
Until then,
The Scribbling Apprentice
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