Issue #36 December 2020

Some Notes on Berkeley and the After-life

Toko Shinoda — “Ascent” — (c.1979)

On Berkeleyan after-lives and -worlds

Alfredo Castañeda — Creyente (1980)

On our own deaths

Toko Shinoda — A Duet

On Berkeleyan self-interest

To Berkeley’s call for obedience, I would like to call for a plainer alternative where we strip away any appeal to things not or not yet imprinted upon our senses, a la after-lives and -worlds, a la my own death. The pursuit of self-interest must be understood as a matter of charting courses through a given world and given laws. This is also to say that this pursuit can only be made on the basis and within limits of what is imprinted upon our senses. Our own deaths and what shall come after death are two things which shall always evade our senses. They are then two things we must do without. However we wish to live, our pursuits must be made as if we cannot die, as if we shall forever live in this world.

Raphael Chim is a postgraduate student in the Department of English at Chinese University of Hong Kong, on the way to becoming an intellectualized bureaucrat so complacently complicit this complicity would, before he knows it, be remarketed as “integrity as an educator”.

Works Cited

11

Though I cannot go into details concerning this self-knowledge here, I think it worth noting at least that Berkeley held self-knowledge to not consist of ideas, but exist as a “notion” (PHK Part. 1 passage 27, 140, 142, etc.).

22

By this I mean that we would be thinking of our own deaths as both the loss of our possibilities of being in this world, and in terms of our own being-towards-death. Heidegger has held the treatment of our own deaths as the mere “end” of our worldly lives improper, since this would mean treating human beings as something like a nonhuman equipment (something present-at-hand or ready-to-hand, in his terms) (289).

33

See here Helen Yetter-Chappell’s “Idealism without God” in Idealism: New Essays in Metaphysics, where she argued that the personalities, dispositions, etc. of God could be detached from the sensory experiences of God, which alone was required to sustain the world as given to our senses.

#36

December 2020

Introduction

On Virtuality: Deleuze, Bergson, Simondon

by Matt Bluemink

What Is A Monad? Leibniz’s Monadology

by John C. Brady

Phenomenology — Eine Übersichtliche Darstellung

by Giorgi Vachnadze

Some Notes on Berkeley and the After-life

by Raphael Chim