Date: Wed, 30 Sep 1998 22:51:26 -0600
From: George Trail <gtrail-AT-UH.EDU>
Subject: Re: PLC: Generic equivalent


>Immanuel Smits wrote:
> The question remains as to whether
>> there is such a thing as an extensional experience of death.
>>
>
>	I'm not exactly sure what "extensional experience of death" is
>meant to mean, but I agree that "dead or alive" works
>better for the FBI than it does for most people precisely because it
>refuses to distinguish meaningfully between them,
>or resists their opposition.
>	I mean, isn't death not so much relative to life, but to the dead.
>One can be more or less dead.  The French, who have
>excelled at thinking nothing and death, realize that one can have a little
>death -- a petit mort -- orgasmic self
>dispossession.  Obviously it's a matter of extent and not whether.  Anyone
>who does lose themselves a little, someone
>whose lost all ecstacy, is separated comepletely from life and, I think,
>from death two.  For the self to which any
>dispossession would be relative would no be.
>	Perhaps "absolutely dead" is the fiction.  George is right, or DT:
>death got this whole life-thing going.
>
>Ciao,
>Reg

Reg, dig, as a rhetor, one piece of advice. Never  use absolutes. And, oh
yeah, "extensional" means the other part of "intensional." These are nonce
words to describe a very traditional read of objectivity (which is no
longer defensible) and subjectiviy, which is where we've all always been
anyway. Those who would like to hang on to some pre-romantic notion of
"objectivity" deal with it by talking about extensional meaning.

Of the English speakers (Greeks on death are simply
infuckingcomprehensible) Walt is my poet here. He writes (and can we do
some literature?) . . .there is ireally no death, /And if ever there was it
lead forward life, and does not wait at the end to arrest it,/And ceased
the moment life appear'd./All goes onward and outward [note, not upward],
nothing collapses,/And to die is different from what any one supposed, and
luckier."  And then, if you have the nerve, read section 7, and tell me
that the man who wrote those lines is dead. Just try.

Love,
g




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