The pandemic awaits philosophy's cure

WITH the mild exception of Slavoj Zizek's Pandemic!, it is difficult to come across a gear-changing exploration of what the coronavirus pandemic means for the philosophical future of humanity.

Notwithstanding the Slovenian intellectual provocateur's apparent standing as the most dangerous philosopher in the West, his book blames the epidemiological crisis on capitalism. That is fine, but it is a bit like complaining that some people are slow to rise or are late for work because time exists. Since capitalist time exists and is likely to do so in the foreseeable future, what are we to do with it and with ourselves? Since Covid persists, how may we conduct our temporal affairs in the apparently eternal but epidemiologically stricken world of capital?

As we await a philosophical answer to such questions, it may help to look back to the future.

History has a good habit of breeding defiant philosophy in diseased times. The Greek historian Thucydides provided a contemporary account of the plague that struck Athens in

430 BC. It killed nearly a third of the population and destroyed belief in the gods, fear of the law, and the need for property.

Faith made little difference because both believers and disbelievers died. Laws became irrelevant since criminals did not expect to survive long enough to be brought to justice. Property became laughable. People spent what they could while they could when they saw the posthumous estates of the famous passing to lesser hands.

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The future simply disappeared. Death and disease became the final arbiters of religion; law and property as existence itself proved to be little more than the provisional gift of receding providence.

Lucretius invited the Greek recognition of faithless time into the Roman world. He employed the Thucydidean depiction of the plague as empirical evidence for the philosopher Epicurus' rejection of religion and belief in the gods.

The radical epistemology of Epicurus resides in his premise that humans can be happy like the gods if they stop fearing death and the gods themselves. To Epicurus, the "most terrible evil, death, is nothing for us, since when we exist, death does not exist, and when death exists, we do not exist".

In that spirit, the Stoic reading of virtue - as being not a means to pleasure but as an end embedded in the natural course of things whose final destination is unknown - produced the great pagan reconciliation of inevitable mortality with the need to live life to its incomplete but incomparable fullest.

The pagans proved that death is not the only truth because logically nothing can die until it has been born. Birth therefore is the first truth. There are many other truths, all contesting with the unknown hereafter as much as they contend among themselves here and now: truths such as compassion and dismissiveness; companionship and betrayal; love and pride; imagination and self-enclosure; politics, and the denial of the Other; sacrifice and greed; and so on.

What matters in this mad interplay of passions is to not leave duty undone. According to Plato, the last words of the condemned Socrates before he drank the poisoned hemlock were: "Crito, we owe a cock to Asclepius; pay it and don't forget." Greeks rewarded Asclepius, the god of health, by sacrificing a cock after recovery from illness. Socrates, celebrating his release from the disease of life in the imminent freedom of death, asked his wealthy friend Crito to repay philosophy's debt to the philosophically instructive cruelty of time. Socrates repaid his time spent on earth with the gift of philosophy.

The advent and spread of the great salvationist religions took the human story farther than the querulous gods of Greece and Rome would have allowed. The redemptive monotheism of Judaism, Christianity and Islam gave mortals in their flocks a tangible stake in a revealed afterlife. Fickle chance no doubt would plague mortals in the forms of disease, famine, war and death, but chance would no longer be destiny. Eternity had arrived within the tangible grasp of the here and now.

The rise of the modern nation-state produced the political template of a common destiny by reducing personal dependence on wayward chance for the conduct of public affairs. The Great Fire of London of 1666 (which helped to stop the bubonic plague) produced not fatalism and despair, but a defiant reconfiguration of recoverable space inherited from diseased time. Battered Britons rebuilt London into one of the architectural constants of modern history.

The plague is long gone. What remains is the architectural legacy of those who wished London to remain forever.

Covidean philosophy

Covidean philosophy today would have to focus on the recuperative possibilities of the state after an extended period of disease. It is the state, and only the state, that can equip citizens to be epidemiological warriors, fighters against disease - in the same way that only the state turns citizens into territorial warriors, soldiers whose remit is to protect the inviolate physical integrity of political sovereignty.

The secular state is well placed to execute this existential job. It owes its material power, not to a particular religion or to religion at all, but to the ability of its citizens to stand up to the nastiness of truculent chance. Unlike confessional states that can lay the blame for passing ills at the unseen door of the divine, the secular state realises the potential of the human will, as far as it can, so that disease and death are not foretold accompaniments of the physical condition but aberrations in the human mastery of time.

Religion can help the secular state today. For example, the Buddhist imperative of personal compassion emerges from the universal democracy of suffering - that is, the idea that humans are defined by suffering, and therefore that only unconditional kindness and pity towards others make individuals worthy of their redemptive place in time. The other great world religions, too, enjoin on their followers the duty to do good.

However, since there are many religions and many ways of doing good, not all of which can be reconciled, it is only the secular state (which has no justificatory religion of its own) that can gather up the dispersed energies of its citizens to fight a common war against all.

Paramedics, nurses and doctors live (and die) on the Stoic frontlines of the battle against Covid. Their common philosophy is that death is not the only truth: They (and we) stand between life and death. Beyond that, let the divine decide.

A philosophy of Covid would have to show how the disease has transformed the world's intellectual inheritance. Historians there are many, but philosophers are few. It is time for a reborn Epicurus or Lucretius.