Summary:
a materialistic rebuttal
of the soul, of the concept of an afterlife; an essay published in
1916 (in the midst of WWI)
AFTER DEATH-NOTHINGNESS!
(so wrote Dr Max Simon Nordau in 1916.)
It was with some difficulty
that I managed to find an electronic version of this essay in its entirety
a little over three years ago, as pages nineteen to twenty-six (Nordau’s
materialistic exposition begins on page twenty-six) of the compendium in
which it was published appear to have been removed from the copy owned by
the University of California Libraries, a book which was subsequently
digitised by a famous Internet company and made available to the public on
the Internet, at https://archive.org/details/whathappensafter00newyrich/page/28/mode/2up.
However, I was able to find
the text in full at the HathiTrust (an association of academic
institutions that run a digital archive), at https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/ssd?id=hvd.hn1ymm;page=ssd;view=plaintext;seq=40;num=26.
In addition, upon returning on the Internet Archive to check the
links only very recently, I realised that, for some reason, I had
overlooked the copy belonging to an academic library in India and which
had been digitised as part of the Public Digital Library of India and
thereafter made available online through the Internet Archive.
This complete version of Dr Max Simon Nordau’s essay is available at https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.87143/page/n39/mode/2up.
To me, this piece is merely a
series of rhetorical fallacies – reminder: a fallacy is a deceptive
argument. However, I do not wish to deconstruct each argument and I shall
thus leave it to the reader to exercise their ability to discriminate the
truth from the falsehood. Strangely, after I had read this essay some
three years ago, I did not even care to go through the rest of the essays,
however appalled I had been by Mr Nordau’s powerful but highly deceptive
string of false arguments, simply because I did not (and still do not)
need to find more arguments to buttress my conviction that the view that
nothing is left of us on the immaterial plane after we die will simply
resonate as being plainly wrong with anybody who is a minimum awake from a
spiritual perspective.
Lastly, our age is one of inversion: lies and falsehoods pass for
truth, darkness for light. Yet I do not expect this age of
darkness to last forever: at some point, the power of lies, deceit and
deception will no longer have any hold over the spiritual beings that we
are by essence – even if many still fail to admit that we are such beings.
As to when this is to take place, I have no idea. This however should not
prevent us from making sure that our soul gets the proper nourishment,
simply so as to ensure that it does not stray from the right path...
AFTER
DEATH-NOTHINGNESS!
[An essay published in 1916, as part of
What happens after death?
A Symposium by Leading Writers and Thinkers
Funk & Wagnalls Company: New York and London]
Death means final extinction of consciousness and eternal dissolution of
what was a personality. It is a piteous spectacle to behold how horrified
even strong minds shrink back from this notion, how desperately they cling
to the fond self-deception of a continuation of some sort of life after
death.
Is immortality really something so ardently to be yearned
after? Does it really deserve to be so fervently prayed for? It suffices to
analyse it in order to be convinced that it is one of the most vain and
inane delusions ever adumbrated by the childish imagination of man.
Let us admit for one moment its reality.
Divested from the body as from a garment, the soul finds
itself free in space. Now, either the soul has preserved all its memories,
feelings, conceptions, all that makes the Ego, or it has forgotten them,
lost them, shaken them off together with the flesh. In the second
alternative, the soul is no longer the Ego, the personality which so
passionately longed after the continuation of its existence; it is something
different, alien, vapid, the immortality of which can have no more meaning
and interest for our conscious Ego than the indestructibility of the atoms
composing our mortal body. What value, what interest can an immortality have
for me in which I should no longer love what I have loved, no longer hate
what I have hated, no longer remember my past life, my small and great
adventures, my moments of joy and my days of sorrow, my sweet and my bitter
emotions, my ambitions, my yearnings, my
disappointments, my pains, and my consolations—in one word, all that
composed that personality the preservation of which seemed so hugely
important to me? In this case it is not me that survives, the immortality of
this alien soul is not my immortality and does not concern me in any way.
But the first alternative is still far worse. Suppose my
immortal soul would really be my conscious Ego, all the essentials of my
personality surviving the death of my body. It would remain connected with
everything that was dear to me, it would preserve all my feelings. Now,
think of this: Reduced to the state of a soul without organs, without means
for exercising the slightest action on the material world, I would see my
child weep and would be unable to comfort it; I would accompany her life,
watch it in every moment, witness her distress, her pains, her dangers, her
despair, and I would be incapable of aiding her, helping her, protecting
her, defending her, encouraging her. Why, this would be a fiendish torture,
worse than all the torments attributed to hell! Why, annihilation would be
an inestimable blessing compared with this existence of a feeling but
paralytic soul, impotent witness of all
sufferings, a prisoner, fettered and gagged, shut in in its eternity and
deprived of all possibility to communicate with all that it loves more than
itself.
Let us go one step farther.
My Ego is composed of certain definite notions or
conceptions. The contents of its consciousness are the world which it knows,
are the beings which have always surrounded it. Now eternity means a rather
long time. All that I know, all that I love, all that concerns or interests
me in any way, will have disappeared, say, in a couple of centuries. In two
thousand years, perhaps, not even my nation will exist any longer. What
interest, this globe of ours, shall it then offer to me? What will be the
contents of that immortality which is so fervently wished for? The soul will
have to fill itself with other, new interests which I cannot guess. But in
this case again the soul will not be my soul, mine Ego.
No. The immortality of the personality is neither
conceivable nor desirable. Nothingness is more consoling. And all one ought
to desire is a death which does not come prematurely, but at the precise
hour when one has accomplished all one’s tasks and completed the circle of
the vital obligations. Such a death—this is my innermost conviction—can have
no terror for anybody.
Lausanne, 18th December 2020
