Closer to the Grave, Farther from Birth
A rumination upon the curious modality, necessitas per accidens
With every passing day we are closer to becoming grave meat and worm fodder. Or dust and ashes. That’s the bad news. The good news is that, with every passing day, one more day has been taken up into the ersatz eternity of the Past and Unalterable.
The medievals spoke of a modality they dubbed necessitas per accidens. Socrates drank the hemlock, but he might* not have: He might* have allowed his friends to arrange his escape from prison. So the drinking was logically contingent. But he did drink the poison, and once the drinking occurred, that fact became forevermore unalterable, and in this sense accidentally necessary. The unalterability is absolute. As Thomas Aquinas says somewhere, not even God can restore a virgin. As with the virgin’s lapsus carnis, so too with all regrettable deeds: nothing and no one can undo them.
There is also a certain consolation in the unalterability of the past. The old look back upon a sizeable quantity of past and see that nothing and no one can take from them what has happened to them and what they have made happen. All of it is preserved forever, whether remembered or not. Memory’s oblivion is merely epistemic, not ontic. The terrain of the present may shift and buckle underfoot as one looks to a future for which there is no guarantee. But the past and its accomplishments are in one's sure possession, proof against every threat. It is curious that the mere passage of time should transmute the base coinage of temporal flux into the gold of an ersatz eternity.
Unfortunately, the treasures of the past are preserved in a region both inaccessible and nonexistent — or should I say next-to-nonexistent? You will thus be forgiven for valuing the gold in question no higher than iron pyrite. Ersatz eternity is not the genuine article.
And herein, in this hesitation over the value of the no longer, lies the riddle of the reality of the past. On the one hand, the present alone is real, and what is no longer is not. On the other hand, the past is not nothing. Surely it has some sort of reality, and a reality ‘greater’ than that of the merely possible. Kierkegaard existed and so did Regine Olsen. We know that to be true if we know any historical facts at all. Their engagement existed and so did its breaking off. But their marriage did not exist: it remains a mere possibility, unactualized and indeed forever unactualizable. Its time-boundedness makes of this mere possibility a present impossibility. Now what is the difference in ontological status between the mere possibility of their marriage and the past actuality of their break-up? The latter is more real than the former, though both, in another sense, are modes of unreality if, as many are tempted to say, the present alone is real.
The foregoing is a mere preambulatory warm-up to a rigorous formulation of the problem of the reality of the past, a problem as mind-boggling as they come. My aim here is merely to convey the perplexity that is the philosopher’s lot. For we have it on the highest authority from the titans of our tradition that “Wonder is the feeling of the philosopher and philosophy begins in wonder.” (Plato, Theaetetus 155 d; Aristotle, Metaphysics 982 b 17 ff.)
But where does it end? In silence.
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*These are non-epistemic or ontic uses of 'might.' An epistemic use is illustrated by this exchange: “Is Poindexter in his office?” “Could be!” The response conveys that the man’s being in his office is consistent with what the listener knows at the time of the exchange.