The Afterlife of a Philosopher | Life is but a dream. But whose dream? | Endless Chains
Last updated on Friday 19, April 1996
Have you ever imagined what will happen to your body after your death? Here's an example. Philosopher Jeremy Bentham had his skeleton preserved and displayed with a wax head on it. I have seen another photograph (in the TLS , No. 4847, February 23, 1996) that shows his mummified head put on a plate between his feet. Thus, the inventor of the Panopticon keeps watching you.
Jeremy Bentham On-Line shows images of his body, updated every five minutes with a video camera pointed at it.
About Mr. Bentham Tweedledum would say, "Isn't he a lovely sight?" That's what he said (in Alice's Adventures through the Looking-Glass ) about the sleeping Red King. He told Alice that she was a sort of thing in the King's dream and that she was not real. He was right. You know Alice was not real. Do you know then, that you are real and are not a sort of thing in someone else's dream?
Actually, the relation between Alice and the Red King is a bit more complicated. Because the King did not only dream about Alice, but he was dreamed about by Alice at the same time. At the end of the story, Alice wondered which had dreamed it all. She thought it must have been her or the King, but why not both? Imagine two people support their respective existence by reciprocally dreaming about each other. The relation of dreaming about and being dreamed about goes in a circle.
In Borges' short story, Circular Ruins, a man dreams his son into existence. After the younger man left him, he remembers that he was also born from another man's dream. Maybe here too the chain of dreams is endless.
You will find more information about Borges in the Garden of Forking Paths.
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