Jonathan Miller - Death is not an exit (15/48)
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To listen to more of Jonathan Miller’s stories, go to the playlist: • Jonathan Miller (Theat...
Jonathan Miller (1934-2019) was a British theatre and opera director whose work includes a West End production of "The Merchant of Venice" which starred Laurence Olivier and a modern, Mafia-themed version of "Rigoletto". [Listener: Christopher Sykes; date recorded: 2008]
TRANSCRIPT: [CS] Were you... I mean if you are an atheist, I guess you are… I don’t know if you’d call yourself that or…
No, I don’t call myself an atheist because it’s not… no… least of all do I call myself an agnostic. I mean, agnostic has the connotations of hedging one's bets, and atheist seems scarcely worth having a name for not believing in God any more than I have a name for not believing in witches, I’m not an ahexist. It’s just that it’s never occurred to me that there might be a God or that there might be this immaterial entity called the soul. I don’t know what happens when we die… well, I think I do know, we just simply stop being, but I don’t think anything makes an exit at that moment, and these curious euphemistic terms that are used, he's passed away, make it sound as if, in fact, death is… coincides with something that makes an exit from the body and goes elsewhere, I don’t think that.
[CS] It can’t not have occurred to you that there might be something called the soul or God, because [sic] many very clever people spent ages thinking about it?
Yes, no, it never... Well, I didn’t, it never occurred to me, and I could never understand why people who quite clearly in many respects were very clever, could actually sustain such an idea. It wasn’t that it was wrong but it was incoherent. The idea of a disembodied person makes no sense at all, anymore than the idea of a circular rectangle makes sense. You can utter the phrase but it doesn’t mean that it’s meaningful.
[CS] Wittgenstein didn’t [sic]
Yes, I suppose. No, but long before… I mean, Wittgenstein gave me the lingo with which to talk that way, but I don’t think I ever thought about it very hard. I suppose that I was puzzled by what was the difference between something that was lively in the same way as I'd been preoccupied with looking at paramecium down the microscope.
Пікірлер: 41
You will be sorely missed :'( The digital you will live on for a long long time even if the physical you has ceased to exist...
@kazamshah4543
4 жыл бұрын
The original renaissance man, he could put his hand to anything. Grossly undervalued in the UK.
What I would give to be this eloquent!
Would saying RIP be worthwhile?
@MrPoupard
3 жыл бұрын
No. He's not resting figuratively or literally. He is dead.
David Gold inspiration?
Eternal returnity...death before conception...perpetual motion is all there is...
@dexcova7141
3 жыл бұрын
An interesting notion. What do you mean by this, exactly?
@tomfreemanorourke1519
3 жыл бұрын
@@dexcova7141 . Death before conception, the deception of one life only, this is wrong. The single-cell has to be a physical memory of function and experience or else there would be no life. The atom is a physical memory of function and experience, everything is atom structured. The cosmos is perpetual motion, all existence is perpetual motion, we all return to another existence on earth, at the moment of death there is conception always.... one's next visit is assured so to do one's best for this earth each time we return is our perpetual incompleteness, perpetual indeterminacy, perpetual uncertainty, perpetual innocent ignorance...perpetual motion unbeginning unending beginnings and endings... Love always.
@dexcova7141
3 жыл бұрын
@@tomfreemanorourke1519 Thanks😁 I’m going to look into this more. Do you have any suggestions of further reading on this subject?
@tomfreemanorourke1519
3 жыл бұрын
@@dexcova7141 . It is my own 67 years of study, the self-study style of Chomsky, Searle, McLuhan, the physicist's Einstein, Bhor, Shrodinger, the philosophers, Nietzsche, Kant, Hume, Spinoza, way back to the 19th century and even to the Greeks, my studies have never stopped. You will have to go beyond books, there are no answers in books or any other medium of learning, only clues...The understanding you already possess is beyond knowledge, and as Wittgenstein said the 'limits of language' ..... I will publish my studies when I am ready to release them. I write every day, notes to be reevaluated, notes to be reassessed, thoughts of past clues redressed as new in the context of the conduit of thought for that day... There are a few people around the world who are coming to terms with this 'Death Before conception, 'physical memory of function and experience' 'Meta-physical memory of function and experience' that connect the physical [to be, to do, to act] to the meta-physical [thinking] by memory which is both meta-physical and physical. The unbeginning unending beginnings and endings Perpetual motion, but very few will go so far as to admit their thoughts because they contradict their consensus collective beliefs..... We have a long way to go..... Stay in touch... Love always
Just Alan Bennett now left from Beyond the Fringe
@tarnopol
4 жыл бұрын
I know, I was thinking that. Those guys were just gods, at least in that show! :)
Now, as brilliant a man as Sir Jonathan is I suspect that, in 1960, he would have struggled with the idea that it would be possible for the contents of a spreadsheet to pass through the air and arrive, intact, in another spreadsheet on a different continent. So before viewers of this video despair of "passing" to a different and better place do bear in mind that Miller's opinion is just that, merely an opinion.
@AndrewWilsonStooshie
4 жыл бұрын
What evidence do you have that we pass into some other dominion?
@thejustice3139
4 жыл бұрын
@@AndrewWilsonStooshie There is none. But once we had no evidence that the earth was round either
@AndrewWilsonStooshie
4 жыл бұрын
@@thejustice3139 Correct, at one time, we had no evidence that earth was round. And claiming it is round, without any evidence is useless. Come back when you do have evidence of an afterlife.
@thejustice3139
4 жыл бұрын
@@AndrewWilsonStooshie I don't believe in the afterlife personally Andrew. I can see the idea of it is an issue for you, I hope you can resolve it one day.
@kazamshah4543
4 жыл бұрын
RIP JM, you were one of a kind, but grossly underrated in the UK.
It has nothing to do with being clever. It just requires that one has faith.
"Never occurred to me", how very sad.
@shelfstacker9317
11 ай бұрын
The problem that Western civilization has been suffering from since the Enlightenment
Mmm
Certain terms. Yawn.
Gosh, what a dreadful example of English snobbery.
@SP-ki5gn
8 ай бұрын
What did he say that was snobbish?
@SP-ki5gn
8 ай бұрын
What did he say that was snobbish?