andie nachgeborenen wrote:
>
>
> But that doesn't mean you have eudaimonia _when you
> are dead_, you don't any anything when you are dead.
> Your are, in the immortal words of Monty Python, an
> ex-parrot. Or in those of Bob Dylan, you're not there.
> The dead, Homer says, have nothing; I don't recall
> whether Aristotle quotes Homer's dead Achilles (from
> the Odyssey), who explains to Odysseus that he would
> rather be poorest slave alive than the king of the
> dead (paraphrase), but that was a perfectly
> conventional sentiment for the ancient Greeks and one
> that fits with Aristotle's conception of eudaimonia,w
> which after all is a characteristic of a _good life_,
> something you don;t have when you're gone.
That homeric conception gets the worst of all perspectives. The dead _know_ that they are dead, while the Lucretian perspective is that when we are dead we aren't, period, and hence need not be bothered by the event. The dead don't know they are dead. Another way of putting it is that the Dead have no interests -- which Nussbaum disagreed with but I couldn't (or wouldn't) follow her argument. Engels echoes Marx & Lucretius in his memorial speech for Marx, Death is a tragedy for the living, not for the dead. That seems fine to me.
Carrol