Daniel Came

Questions concerning death and the afterlife are amongst the most perennial in philosophy and theology. Traditionally, the afterlife was the answer that many religions offered in response to the mystery with which death presents us. This answer has metaphysical, anthropological, and ethical implications in that it appeals to a transcendent justification to ground our understanding of human nature, the concepts of justice and moral obligation, as well as more general propositions pertaining to the nature of reality. In recent years, with the advances in science, which have helped us to better understand the processes surrounding death and the developments in our thinking about personal identity, which have influenced how we construe the possibility of an afterlife, the more traditional conceptions of what we might expect after death have come under pressure.

I argue that there could not be grounds on which to introduce God into our ontology. My argument presupposes two doctrines. First, we should allow into our ontology only what figures in the best explanation of an event or fact. Second, explanation is contrastive by nature, in that the explanandum always consists in a contrast between a fact and a foil. I argue that God could not figure in true contrastive explanatory statements, because the omnipotence of God guarantees that for any true proposition p, God could have made it the case that ~p just as much as He could have made it the case that p.

The main theme of Nietzsche’s first published work, The Birth of Tragedy, is that the affirmation of life requires ‘illusion’ which allows us to cope with the ‘insight into the horrible truth’ of our condition. This article argues that Nietzsche held the same position in his later works: that illusion is a necessary to affirm life. The discussion is organized as follows. Section 1 sets out the core thesis of BT vis-à-vis the relationship between affirmation and illusion. Section 2 examines the role of illusion in one of Nietzsche’s litmus tests of affirmation found in The Gay Science of 1882, ‘amor fati’—that is, the ability ‘to see as beautiful what is necessary in things’. Sections 3, 4, and 5 consider Nietzsche’s understanding of ‘self-creation’ and how, through the employment of ‘distance’ and ‘pretence’, it engenders an affirmation of existence. Finally, Section 6 attempts a provisional assessment of Nietzsche’s conception of affirmation.