immortality essay

The Triumph of Death , anonymous, early Renaissance. Pinacoteca Nazionale, Siena. Photo by Scala/Getty

On going on and on and on

The fantasy of living forever is just a fig leaf for the fear of death – and comes at great personal cost.

by Paul Sagar   + BIO

The finale of Steven Spielberg’s Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (1989) sees the quest for the Holy Grail reach a dramatic conclusion. The film’s villain – the Nazi collaborator and artifact hunter Walter Donovan – knows that drinking from the sacred goblet will bring him eternal life. But from a table laid out with many false grails, he foolishly picks the most glittering cup of all. Donovan drinks his fill, but rather than receiving the gift of eternal life, he rapidly starts to age: his skin peels off, his hair falls out, and he turns into a skeleton that collapses into dust. As the immortal knight who guards the True Grail quips to Indy: ‘He chose … poorly.’

Moments later, Dr Elsa Schneider (also a Nazi) ignores the knight’s warning not to try to remove the Grail from the temple, causing the structure to collapse and the ground to split apart. Grasping for the prize of immortality, she attempts to reach the Grail before it falls into the bowels of the earth. So desperate is she to live forever, that she slips out of Indy’s grip, and plunges to her death. Indy himself almost suffers the same fate, until his father convinces him to ‘let it go’.

Immortality: a prize so great that some would die in attempting to secure it. But are they wise to do so? The Last Crusade suggests not. After all, not only are the two people who throw their lives away villains, but the knight who guards the Grail explicitly warns that the cost of living forever is having to stay in that very same temple, forever. And what sort of life would that be? Immortality – the film is suggesting – might be a curse, rather than a blessing.

Such a conclusion will not come as a surprise to philosophers who have considered the issue. In his essay ‘The Makropulos Case: Reflections on the Tedium of Immortality’ (1973), the English moral philosopher Bernard Williams suggested that living forever would be awful, akin to being trapped in a never-ending cocktail party. This was because after a certain amount of living, human life would become unspeakably boring . We need new experiences in order to have reasons to keep on going. But after enough time has passed, we will have experienced everything that we, as individuals, find stimulating. We would lack what Williams called ‘categorical’ desires: ie, desires that give us reasons to keep on living, and instead possess only ‘contingent’ desires: ie, things that we might as well want to do if we’re alive, but aren’t enough on their own to motivate us to stay alive. For example, if I’m going to carry on living, then I desire to have my tooth cavity filled – but I don’t want to go on living simply in order to have my cavity filled. By contrast, I might well want to carry on living so as to finish the grand novel that I’ve been composing for the past 25 years. The former is a contingent, the latter a categorical, desire.

A life devoid of categorical desires, Williams claimed, would devolve into a mush of undifferentiated banality, containing no reason to keep on going. Williams used as his example Elina Makropulos, a character from the opera The Makropulos Affair (1926) by the Czech composer Leoš Janáček. Born in 1585, Elina drinks an elixir that keeps her (biologically speaking) at age 42 forever. However, by the time she is over 300 years old, Elina has experienced everything she wants, and as a result her life is cold, empty, boring and withdrawn. There is nothing left to live for. Accordingly, she decides to stop drinking the elixir, and releases herself from the tedium of immortality.

Yet, as critics have pointed out, Williams’s argument isn’t really about immortality at all. Imagine that the natural biological lifespan of a human being was 1,000 years. In that case, in her 300s, Elina would have died comparatively young. Her problem isn’t that she is immortal , just that she’s gone on for too long already. If there’s a specific problem with immortality, it must lie elsewhere.

The moral philosopher Samuel Scheffler at New York University has suggested that the real problem with a fantasy of immortality is that it doesn’t make sense as a coherent desire. Scheffler points out that human life is intimately structured by the fact that it has a fixed (even if usually unknown) time limit. We all start with a birth, then pass through many stages of life, before definitely ending in death. In turn, Scheffler argues, everything that we value – and thus can coherently desire in an essentially human life – must take as given the fact that we are temporally bounded beings. Sure, we can imagine what it would be like to be immortal, if we find that an amusing way to pass the time. But doing so will obscure a basic truth: that because death is a fixed fact, everything that human beings value makes sense only in light of our time being finite, our choices being limited, and our each getting only so many goes before it’s all over.

Scheffler’s case is thus not simply that immortality would make us miserable (although it probably would). It’s that, if we had it, we would cease to be distinctively human in the way that we currently are. But then, if we were somehow to attain immortality, it wouldn’t get us what we want from it: namely, for it to be some version of our human selves that lives forever. A desire for immortality is thus a paradox: it would frustrate itself were it ever to be achieved. In turn, Scheffler implies, once we’ve reflected carefully on this deep fact about ourselves, we should junk any residual desire to live forever that we might still have.

You might think you want to live forever, but reflection should convince you otherwise

But is it quite so clear? Can we not sympathise, even just a little bit, with Donovan and Schneider’s grasping after the Holy Grail? What is interesting in this regard is that, when we return to wider popular culture, instances abound of immortality being presented not as a blessing, but a curse.

In Jonathan Swift’s satire Gulliver’s Travels (1726), the protagonist meets the peculiar race of ‘Struldbrugs’, humans born with a strange mark on their foreheads, indicating that they will live forever. Initially thinking that these must be the happiest of all beings, Gulliver revises his view when he learns that Struldbrugs never stop ageing, leading them to sink into decrepitude and insanity, roaming the kingdom as disgusting brutes shunned by normal humans. Or consider Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s poem Tithonus (1860), where an immortal narrator describes his physiological and psychological decay brought on by an endless life, and the horror and loneliness of being trapped in such a state.

It seems, then, that both philosophers and popular culture keep trying to tell us the same thing: you might think that you want to live forever, but reflection should convince you otherwise. And yet, if this is ultimately true – as philosophers and popular culture seem to want to say that it is – then another question arises: why do we keep needing to be told?

There is something both deeply and persistently appealing about the idea of immortality, and that cannot be dispelled by simply pointing to examples where immortality would be a curse. To see this, we have to think a little more carefully about what a desire for immortality might in part be about.

O n the face of it, a desire for immortality most obviously seems to be a response to the fear of death. Most of us are afraid to die. If we were immortal, we could escape both that fear and its object. Hence, it seems, a desire for immortality is simply a desire not to die. In the face of this, what philosophers, poets and novelists remind us of is that there are fates worse than death . Immortality might itself turn out to be one of them. If so, we should not desire to be immortal. No sane person, after all, wants to be a Struldbrug.

But when we look more closely, we see that fear is not the only important response to the fact of death. Here it is useful to turn to the words of the Basque philosopher Miguel de Unamuno in The Tragic Sense of Life in Men and Nations (1912):

I am presented with arguments … to prove the absurdity of a belief in the immortality of the soul. But these ratiocinations do not move me, for they are reasons and no more than reasons, and one does not feed the heart with reasons. I do not want to die. No! I do not want to die, and I do not want to want to die. I want to live always, forever and ever. And I want to live, this poor I which I am, the I which I feel myself to be here and now, and for that reason I am tormented by the problem of the duration of my soul, of my own soul. I am the centre of my Universe, the centre of the Universe, and in my extreme anguish I cry, along with Michelet, ‘My I! They are stealing my I!’

Part of what Unamuno is relating here is outrage and anger that something is being taken away from him (‘they are stealing my I!’). Unamuno is imagining the situation that most of us do when we are contemplating our own deaths: not a distant point of decrepitude, aged 107, trapped in a hospital bed, in an underfunded care home – but rather death as claiming us before we are ready . In other words, death is often thought of, and experienced (for example, by the terminally ill), as a sort of personal affront, a taking-away of one’s time, before one wants to go. It is, in other words, the most fundamental attack on one’s agency.

We do not just fear the inevitable fact of death, we also resent it as a personal affront. This is one reason why in Western culture death has often been literally personified: not a brute, indifferent, merely biological occurrence, but a Grim Reaper who comes to claim your individual soul. Likewise, it’s no coincidence that the Grim Reaper can be bargained with . If you beat him at chess – so the legend goes – he has to let you go. You, as the agent, can try to stay in control.

Of course, the harsh reality is that death comes either ‘too early or too late’

What this means is that there might be – contrary to Scheffler’s argument – a coherent desire for immortality after all. This is because desiring immortality might not simply be about having a desire to live forever . It might instead be a desire to control when we ourselves will die , choosing to end it all only when – and not before – we ourselves are ready.

Indeed, such a possibility is depicted in the ancient Sanskrit epic poem Mahabharata , where the great warrior Bhishma is granted the boon of ‘death upon desire’. Bhishma cannot die until he wills it – but that does not preclude him from later falling in battle at the hands of Arjuna, finding himself incapacitated on a bed of arrows. Still, even when so incapacitated, Bhishma is not yet ready to die. He elects first to lie on the field of battle and pass on his wisdom to Yudhishthira, until he has decided that the time has come for him to depart. Bhishma prepares himself for death, and when he is ready, draws his life to a close.

This capacity for ‘death upon desire’ is presented in the Mahabharata explicitly as a boon. And the contrast with immortality as being somehow unable to die is clear. Had Bhishma been impaled on the bed of arrows while being unable to die – and hence presumably having to stay there forever – he would certainly have laboured under a curse. As it is, things were different. Yet Bhishma’s boon seems coherent as something we might want for ourselves. It would eradicate fears of dying before we are ready, at the same time as preserving a capacity to call it quits when we’ve had enough – all the while accepting Scheffler’s point that eventually we will need to die for our lives to be worth living in the first place.

Of course, the harsh reality is that most of us will find that death comes – in Williams’s phrase – either ‘too early or too late’. Too early, if we are not yet ready to go. Too late, if we’ve gotten to the point where life is already not worth living anymore. Indeed, we hardly need philosophers to convince us that, for many people, there are fates worse than death: assisted dying clinics in countries such as Switzerland demonstrate that many people will choose to die rather than carry on in gross physical pain or continued indignity, especially when there is no prospect of recovery. It is a striking feature, however, of most societies that they deny people the choice to die at the very point when they most rationally desire it.

Immortality is, obviously enough, an impossible fantasy – hence it cannot be a genuine solution to the unfortunate yet elemental facts of the human condition, nor an answer to the fraught complexities surrounding euthanasia as regards both social policy and moral judgment. Nonetheless, the reason such a fantasy endures in popular imagination – as well as being a target for philosophical reflection – is that it taps into something important about our attitudes towards death. We are not simply afraid of death, we also resent it, because it is experienced as an assault on our personal agency. We can fully control our own deaths in only one direction – and that, of course, is usually no comfort at all. As with so many things in life, death turns out to be more complicated than it first appears.

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1000-Word Philosophy: An Introductory Anthology

Philosophy, One Thousand Words at a Time

Is Immortality Desirable?

Author: Felipe Pereira Categories: Ethics , Philosophy of Religion , Phenomenology and Existentialism Word Count: 998

Many people hope to live on after death, in heaven, forever . Even those who don’t believe in heaven usually agree that an eternal life there would be better than any finite, mortal life. [1] Are they correct?

Some influential philosophers have argued that no immortal human life would be worth living, in heaven or otherwise. [2] This view has been most famously defended by British philosopher Bernard Williams (1929-2003). This essay explores Williams’ argument and some important responses to it.

1. Williams’ Argument

Williams’ argument hinges on the concept of categorical desires .

Categorical desires are desires that give us reason to stay alive. [3] What makes you look forward to being alive? The prospect of earning a degree? Of seeing your child grow up? Of going on your dream vacation? [4] Whatever your answer is, that’s a categorical desire. [5]

Williams believed, however, that categorical desires can only give us reason to stay alive for so long—i.e., that categorical desires are exhaustible .

First, one might “exhaust” categorical desires by satisfying them. Imagine someone with a categorical desire to become the CEO of a particular company, i.e., someone who wants to stay alive in order to rise to the top of that company. By becoming that company’s CEO, she satisfies that desire, and no longer has that goal to give her reason to stay alive. [6]

We also “exhaust” categorical desires by losing interest in them. Think again of our aspiring-CEO. Suppose she fails to be promoted as CEO. In this scenario, her categorical desire to become her company’s CEO could, in principle, give her reason to stay alive until she, well, dies.

What if she doesn’t die? Suppose she’s immortal and tries, without success, to become her company’s CEO for millions (or billions!) of years. It seems likely that she’d eventually feel discouraged and lose interest. By then, the prospect of becoming her company’s CEO would’ve become too unappealing to continue to give her reason to stay alive. [7]

Williams believed that, just like that of becoming a CEO, any categorical desire would, given enough time, either be satisfied or lose its appeal. [8] If you were immortal, he argued, you’d sooner or later get to live long enough to have either satisfied, or grown tired of, every single categorical desire you currently have.

What would it be like to carry on living forever that way, with nothing else to look forward to? Williams thought it’d be, at best, unbearably boring. [9]

To avoid that fate, and stave off boredom, you could acquire entirely new categorical desires whenever your old ones were exhausted. But then your future-self eventually won’t be pursuing a single project, dream, or goal which you would care about right now. [10]

This insight makes it difficult to justify the claim that immortality could be desirable for us: why should we currently desire to live long enough (indeed, to be immortal) in order to pursue projects, dreams, and goals that we currently don’t even care about? [11]

So Williams’ argument is a dilemma: if we were immortal, we would eventually either (a) run out of categorical desires to pursue, or (b) find ourselves pursuing categorical desires that we, currently, have no interest in pursuing. Since Williams thought that neither outcome would be desirable, he believed that no immortal life is desirable for beings like us. [12]

2. Responses

2.1. are all categorical desires exhaustible.

One reply to Williams is that at least some categorical desires can be inexhaustible, e.g., the desire to pursue knowledge. [13] Imagine a scientist who has a categorical desire to discover the workings of the universe. Would she ever learn everything about the universe, or ever grow tired of learning? [14] It’s hard to picture her ever exhausting this categorical desire.

Others have argued that the desire to cultivate love and friendships, [15] or the desire for personal improvement [16] are similarly inexhaustible. If so, then at least some immortal lives are desirable, namely, immortal lives spent in pursuit of these (or other) inexhaustible categorical desires.

2.2. Can we “recycle” categorical desires?

Another reply is that immortality could be desirable if we can manage to “recycle” our categorical desires.

One suggestion is that, after enough time, we might forget having satisfied our categorical desires. Provided our memories remain imperfect, we would eventually find ourselves wishing to satisfy the same categorical desires time and again, indefinitely into the future. [17]

And perhaps some desires would tend to resurface. Even if you remember having satisfied that very same desire in the past, you may desire to, e.g., listen to your favorite song one more time, and feel motivated by that to stay alive. [18]

2.3. What’s so bad about boredom?

Others have responded that a life of complete boredom could still be meaningful and worthwhile in other ways, [19] e.g., if we were to discover that a director of an especially effective malaria-eradication program found life utterly tedious, we would still think that she had very good reasons to stay alive.

2.4. What’s so bad about developing new desires?

A different reply notes that these gradual changes of categorical desires we would undergo if we were immortal aren’t any different from those we already undergo in (presumably worthwhile) mortal lives. [20] Surely, toddlers have good reasons to live well into adulthood even if their adult-selves will eventually pursue categorical desires they, as toddlers, would never consider pursuing. If that’s so, the same should apply for our future immortal selves. [21]

3. Conclusion

Bernard Williams was something of an “immortality curmudgeon.” [22] He argued for the view that no immortal human life would be worth living. Others have also argued for the same conclusion, although in different ways. [23]

Some philosophers argue that, if we were immortal, we wouldn’t value our achievements, [24] our loved ones, [25] or our health and safety. [26] Others argue that, without death to give us a deadline to finish our projects, we wouldn’t feel motivated to do anything, and lead lives full of apathy and indifference. [27] Others still maintain that an immortal human life would be plotless or meaningless, like a novel without an ending. [28]

Whether Williams, or any one of his followers, makes a compelling case or not, this issue raises interesting and important questions about what makes a life—immortal or otherwise—worth living.

[1] People do not, of course, tend to find any immortal human life desirable. Most people believe that eternal existence in hell would be terrible. For an introductory discussion on such versions of immortality, see Hell and Universalism by A. G. Holdier. And see Holdier (2017) for further discussion.

[2] It is important to note that Williams aimed to argue that any immortal life, not just an immortal after life, would be bad for creatures like us. One might imagine achieving immortality on earth by, e.g., becoming a vampire, uploading one’s consciousness into a computer, or living in some utopia where futuristic medicine keeps everyone healthy and young forever. Williams believed that both earthly and heavenly versions of immortality would be bad for us, and for the same reasons, namely those outlined in Section 1 of this essay.

[3] Williams (1973): 86.

[4] Note that categorical desires needn’t involve major life projects or long-term aspirations. One might answer the question “What makes you look forward to being alive?” by referring to smaller, short-term goals. For instance, imagine someone who is genuinely excited to watch an upcoming episode of her favorite TV series, which comes out next week. She may very well find that her desire to get to watch that episode gives her good reason to stay alive (at least until next week).

[5] Could the desire “to attain pleasure or happiness” be a categorical desire? Williams did not think so. He argued that categorical desires are supposed to be able to motivate a person to stay alive despite the prospect of unpleasant times (1973, pp. 99-100). Someone who leads a life full of suffering would not be motivated to stay alive by a desire for pleasure or happiness if she only sees unending suffering for her future.

[6] Williams concedes that a person can have many categorical desires at the same time. This means that, even after one satisfies (or loses interest in) a particular categorical desire, the categorical desires that remain will continue to give her reason to stay alive. In a realistic scenario, a person who gets to satisfy her categorical desire to become the CEO of a particular company would probably also have another categorical desire to be successful as a CEO, however she understands “success.” She could also have other categorical desires to give her reason to carry on living, even if they are unrelated to her CEO career. Williams’ main concern has to do with the possibility of a person running out of all categorical desires, thus lacking any reason to avoid death.

[7] Williams’ claim is only that categorical desires cannot remain “categorical” forever. One needn’t lose that desire altogether. After many unsuccessful attempts, one might still maintain a desire to become the CEO of a particular company, despite feeling too discouraged to pursue that goal, by believing that it would be great if one were to become a CEO there. That is consistent with the belief that one will never actually get to become a CEO there.

It is important to note, however, that such a desire would not be a categorical desire. A desire is a categorical desire only if the desirer wants to avoid death in order to either ensure that, or at least witness, that desire be satisfied. In other words, a categorical desire gives a person reason to stay alive in the sense that it gives her something to look forward to .

A person who maintains a desire to become the CEO of a particular company only as a far-fetched dream does not really look forward to becoming a CEO there. She does not have hopes of witnessing that desire satisfied, because she does not really entertain that as an outcome that has a non-negligible chance of actually happening.

[8] Williams (1973): 95.

[9] Williams (1973): 93. For sustained discussions about the role of boredom in Williams’ argument, see Bortolotti and Nagasawa (2009) and Gorman (2017). See also Erik Van Aken’s Camus on the Absurd: The Myth of Sisyphus for a related discussion about living in a world that doesn’t meet one’s expectations.

[10] An important, related question is whether we would survive these radical psychological changes. According to some accounts of personal identity through time, we would not be one and the same person as our psychologically alien future selves. For a general introduction to the debates about personal identity through time, see Personal Identity by Chad Vance. See Whiting (2016, ch. 1) for further discussion about personal identity through time, and whether we should care about our psychologically alien future selves.

[11] Williams (1973): 92.

[12] Something worth thinking about is what (typical) human features Williams must hold fixed in order for his argument to succeed. Perhaps some version of immortality would be desirable for beings slightly different than us, e.g., beings just like us, except less susceptible to getting bored.

[13] Levy (2005): 185.

[14] It may be worthwhile to think about whether learning new things would inevitably lose its appeal. After gaining a significant amount of knowledge, would one continue to feel excited to learn something new? Shelly Kagan (2012, p. 243) raises a worry along these lines.

[15] Fischer & Mitchell-Yellin (2014): 360.

[16] Buben (2016): 213.

[17] Belshaw (2015): 338-339.

[18] Fischer (2009): 85-86.

[19] Metz (2013): 135.

[20] Chappell (2009): 35; Fischer (2009): 90.

[21] Benatar (2017): 157.

[22] The term “immortality curmudgeon” was first used by Fischer (2009) in reference to Williams, and Williams’ followers, who argue that no immortal human life would be desirable.

[23] Interesting arguments have also been made for the related conclusion that, given our uncertainty about whether immortality would be good (or very bad!) for us, we have strong reasons to choose not to be immortal, were we given the option. See, for instance, Beglin (2017) and Gorman (2017).

[24] Smuts (2011).

[25] Todd May (2015) gestures towards this view.

[26] Scheffler (2013): 97.

[27] Nussbaum (1994, ch. 6); May (2009, ch. 2); Smuts (2011); Scheffler (2013).

[28] Malpas (1998); May (2009, ch. 2). See Behrendt (2016) for a critical discussion of arguments of this sort.

Beglin, D. (2017). Should I choose to never die? Williams, boredom, and the significance of mortality. Philosophical Studies , 174(8), 2009–2028.

Belshaw, C. (2015). Immortality, memory and imagination. The Journal of Ethics , 19(3–4), 323–348.

Benatar, D. (2017). The human predicament: A candid guide to life’s biggest questions . New York: Oxford University Press.

Behrendt, Kathy (2016). Learning to be dead. In M. Cholbi (ed.), Immortality and the philosophy of death . (pp. 157–172). Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield.

Bortolotti, L., & Nagasawa, Y. (2009). Immortality without boredom. Ratio , 22(3), 261–277.

Buben, A. (2016). Resources for overcoming the boredom of immortality in Fischer and Kierkegaard. In M. Cholbi (ed.), Immortality and the philosophy of death . (pp. 205–219). Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield.

Chappell, [S. G.]. (2009). Infinity goes up on trial: Must immortality be meaningless? European Journal of Philosophy , 17(1), 30–44.

Fischer, J. M. (2009). Our stories: Essays on life, death, and free will . New York: Oxford University Press.

Fischer, J. M., & Mitchell-Yellin, B. (2014). Immortality and boredom. The Journal of Ethics , 18(4), 353–372.

Gorman, A. G. (2017). Williams and the desirability of body-bound immortality revisited. European Journal of Philosophy , 25(4), 1062–1083.

Holdier, A. G. (2017). The agony of the infinite: heaven as phenomenological hell. In Simon Cushing (ed.), Heaven and philosophy . (pp. 119-136). Lanham, MD: Lexington Press.

Kagan, S. (2012). Death. New York: Yale University Press.

Levy, N. (2005). Downshifting and meaning in life. Ratio , 18(2), 176–189.

Malpas, J. (1998). Death and the unity of a life. In Jeff Malpas and Robert C. Solomon (eds.), Death and philosophy. London: Routledge.

May, T. (2009). Death: The art of living . New York: Routledge.

May, T. (2015). Love and death. In Enns, D. & A. Calcagno, A. (eds.), Thinking about love: essays in contemporary continental philosophy . (pp. 17-30). Penn State University Press.

Metz, T. (2013). Meaning in life: an analytic study . New York: Oxford University Press.

Nussbaum, M. (1994). The therapy of desire . Princeton: Princeton University Press.

S cheffler, Samuel (2013).  Death and the afterlife . Oxford University Press.

Smuts, A. (2011). Immortality and significance. Philosophy and Literature , 35(1), 134–149.

Whiting, J. (2016).  First, second, and other selves: essays on friendship and personal identity . Oxford University Press USA.

Williams, B. (1973). Problems of the self . New York: Cambridge University Press.

Related Essays

The Badness of Death by Duncan Purves

Is Death Bad? Epicurus and Lucretius on the Fear of Death by Frederik Kaufman

Hell and Universalism by A. G. Holdier

Happiness by Kiki Berk

Meaning in Life: What Makes Our Lives Meaningful? by Matthew Pianalto

Pascal’s Wager: A Pragmatic Argument for Belief in God by Liz Jackson

Camus on the Absurd: The Myth of Sisyphus by Erik Van Aken

Hope by Michael Milona & Katie Stockdale

Personal Identity by Chad Vance

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About the Author

Felipe Pereira is a PhD student at the University of Pittsburgh. His current research interests are in ethics and moral psychology. He is co-author of “ The (Un)desirability of Immortality ” in Philosophy Compass and “ Non-Repeatable Hedonism Is False ” in Ergo , both written with Travis Timmerman. He is also the author of “ What Is It To Love Someone? ” in 1,000-Word Philosophy . felipe-pereira.weebly.com

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Will humans ever be immortal?

The human body is really holding us back.

If you are human, you are going to die. This isn't the most comforting thought, but death is the inevitable price we must pay for being alive. Humans are, however, getting better at pushing back our expiration date, as our medicines and technologies advance. 

If the human life span continues to stretch, could we one day become immortal? The answer depends on what you think it means to be an immortal human. 

"I don't think when people are even asking about immortality they really mean true immortality, unless they believe in something like a soul," Susan Schneider, a philosopher and founding director of the Center for the Future Mind at Florida Atlantic University, told Live Science. "If someone was, say, to upgrade their brain and body to live a really long time, they would still not be able to live beyond the end of the universe." 

Scientists expect the universe will end , which puts an immediate dampener on a mystery about the potential for human immortality. Some scientists have speculated about surviving the death of the universe, as science journalist John Horgan reported for Scientific American , but it's unlikely that any humans alive today will experience the universe's demise anyway. 

Related: What happens when you die?

Many humans grow old and die. To live indefinitely, we would need to stop the body from aging. A group of animals may have already solved this problem, so it isn't as far-fetched as it sounds. 

Hydra are small, jellyfish-like invertebrates with a remarkable approach to aging. They are largely made up of stem cells that constantly divide to make new cells, as their older cells are discarded. The constant influx of new cells allows hydra to rejuvenate themselves and stay forever young, Live Science previously reported .

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"They don't seem to age, so, potentially they are immortal," Daniel Martínez, a biology professor at Pomona College in Claremont, California, who discovered the hydra's lack of aging, told Live Science. Hydra show that animals do not have to grow old, but that doesn't mean humans could replicate their rejuvenating habits. At 0.4 inches (10 millimeters) long, hydra are small and don't have organs. "It's impossible for us because our bodies are super complex," Martínez said. 

Humans have stem cells that can repair and even regrow parts of the body, such as in the liver , but the human body is not made almost entirely of these cells, like hydra are. That's because humans need cells to do things other than just divide and make new cells. For example, our red blood cells transport oxygen around the body. "We make cells commit to a function, and in doing that, they have to lose the ability to divide," Martínez said. As the cells age, so do we. 

We can't simply discard our old cells like hydra do, because we need them. For example, the neurons in the brain transmit information. "We don't want those to be replaced," Martínez said. "Because otherwise, we won't remember anything." Hydra could inspire research that allows humans to live healthier lives, for example, by finding ways for our cells to function better as they age, according to Martínez. However, his gut feeling is that humans will never achieve such biological immortality. 

Though Martínez personally doesn't want to live forever, he thinks humans are already capable of a form of immortality. "I always say, 'I think we are immortal,'" he said. "Poets to me are immortal because they're still with us after so many years and they still influence us. And so I think that people survive through their legacy." 

The oldest-living human on record is Jeanne Calment from France, who died at the age of 122 in 1997, according to Guinness World Records . In a 2021 study published in the journal Nature Communications , researchers reported that humans may be able to live up to a maximum of between 120 and 150 years, after which, the researchers anticipate a complete loss of resilience — the body's ability to recover from things like illness or injury. To live beyond this limit, humans would need to stop cells from aging and prevent disease. 

Related: What's the oldest living thing alive today?

Humans may be able to live beyond their biological limits with future technological advancements involving nanotechnology. This is the manipulation of materials on a nanoscale, less than 100 nanometers (one-billionth of a meter or 400-billionths of an inch). Machines this small could travel in the blood and possibly prevent aging by repairing the damage cells experience over time. Nanotech could also cure certain diseases, including some types of cancer, by removing cancerous cells from the body, according to the University of Melbourne in Australia. 

Preventing the human body from aging still isn't enough to achieve immortality; just ask the hydra. Even though hydra don't show signs of aging, the creatures still die. They are eaten by predators, such as fish, and perish if their environment changes too much, such as if their ponds freeze in winter, Martínez said. 

Humans don't have many predators to contend with, but we are prone to fatal accidents and vulnerable to extreme environmental events, such as those intensified by climate change . We'll need a sturdier vessel than our current bodies to ensure our survival long into the future. Technology may provide the solution for this, too. 

Long live technology

As technology advances, futurists anticipate two defining milestones. The first is the singularity, in which we will design artificial intelligence (A.I.) smart enough to redesign itself, and it will get progressively smarter until it is vastly superior to our own intelligence, Live Science previously reported . The second milestone is virtual immortality, where we will be able to scan our brains and transfer ourselves to a non-biological medium, like a computer. 

Researchers have already mapped the neural connections of a roundworm ( Caenorhabditis elegans ). As part of the so-called OpenWorm project, they then simulated the roundworm's brain in software replicating the neural connections, and programmed that software to direct a Lego robot, according to Smithsonian Magazine . The robot then appeared to start behaving like a roundworm. Scientists aren't close to mapping the connections between the 86 billion neurons of the human brain (roundworms have only 302 neurons), but advances in artificial intelligence may help us get there.

Once the human mind is in a computer and can be uploaded to the internet, we won't have to worry about the human body perishing. Moving the human mind out of the body would be a significant step on the road to immortality but, according to Schneider, there's a catch. "I don't think that will achieve immortality for you, and that's because I think you'd be creating a digital double," she said.

Schneider, who is also the author of " Artificial You: AI and the Future of Your Mind " (Princeton University Press, 2019), describes a thought experiment in which the brain either does or doesn't survive the upload process. If the brain does survive, then the digital copy can't be you as you're still alive; conversely, the digital copy also can't be you if your brain doesn't survive the upload process, because it wouldn't be if you did — the copy can only be your digital double. 

Related: What is consciousness?

According to Schneider, a better route to extreme longevity, while also preserving the person, would be through biological enhancements compatible with the survival of the human brain. Another, more controversial route would be through brain chips. 

"There's been a lot of talk about gradually replacing parts of the brain with chips. So, eventually, one becomes like an artificial intelligence," Schneider said. In other words, slowly transitioning into a cyborg and thinking in chips rather than neurons. But if the human brain is intimately connected to you, then replacing it could mean suicide, she added. 

The human body appears to have an expiration date, regardless of how it is upgraded or uploaded. Whether humans are still human without their bodies is an open question. 

— What could drive humans to extinction?  

— What if humans were twice as intelligent?

— Do lobsters live forever?  

"To me, it's not even really an issue about whether you're technically a human being or not," Schneider said. "The real issue is whether you're the same self of a person. So, what really matters here is, what is it to be a conscious being? And when is it that changes in the brain change which conscious being you are?" — In other words, at what point does changing what we can do with our brains change who we are? 

Schneider is excited by the potential brain and body enhancements of the future and likes the idea of ridding ourselves of death by old age, despite some of her reservations. "I would love that, absolutely, she said. "And I would love to see science and technology cure ailments, make us smarter. I would love to see people have the option of upgrading their brains with chips. I just want them to understand what's at stake."

Originally published on Live Science.

Patrick Pester is a freelance writer and previously a staff writer at Live Science. His background is in wildlife conservation and he has worked with endangered species around the world. Patrick holds a master's degree in international journalism from Cardiff University in the U.K.

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Death, Immortality, and Meaning in Life : Precis and Further Reflections

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• Published: 12 February 2022
• Volume 26 , pages 341–359, ( 2022 )

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I offer an overview of the book, Death, Immortality, and Meaning in Life , summarizing the main issues, arguments, and conclusions (Fischer 2020). I also present some new ideas and further developments of the material in the book. A big part of this essay is drawing connections between the specific issues treated in the book and those in other areas of philosophy, and in particular, the theory of agency and moral responsibility. I highlight some striking similarities of both structure and content between the death/meaning in life literature and the free will/moral responsibility literature.

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One might say, with some degree of oversimplification, that human beings have (at least) two basic drives: management of our anxieties about death and finding meaning in life. (Sex would be up there too!) Ernest Becker ( 1997 ) described the first as “terror management,” and Victor Frankl ( 2006 ) highlighted the human quest for meaning. Of course, neither was the first to identify these forces, but they are salient modern presentations of the ideas. My book (Fischer 2020 ) is essentially organized around these two drives.

The following is a brief overview of the book, with sketches of the main arguments and conclusions. I also include some “further reflections,” including material I have published after the book. These thoughts help to put the book in a larger context by connecting it to related debates. I highlight the relationships between the issues pertaining to death/meaning of life and agency (free will and moral responsibility). I also seek to build on some of the views in the book to show how they can be developed further. This essay is not just a summary, but an essay in which I attempt to make new contributions.

Meaning in Life

We typically (although not always) take premature death to be bad for the individual who dies—especially for those beings (like us) capable of living meaningful lives. Indeed, premature death is sometimes thought to be a tragedy for the deceased. (I will return to these assumptions of “common sense” in discussing death’s putative badness.) There is thus an important connection between the special badness of death for the deceased and the capacity for meaning in life, although I do not contend that death can be a bad thing only for those capable of leading meaningful lives.

I agree with Susan Wolf ( 2010 ) and others that there is no meaning of life for human beings in general, but I do think (unlike Wolf, as far as I can see) that there can be a meaning of a particular individual’s life. I hold that we can associate the meaning of an individual’s life with the content of her “life-story” or “narrative” (interpreted strictly). I further hold that it is important and illuminating to distinguish the meaning of an individual’s life from the level of meaningfulness of the life. They are two interrelated but separate notions. So: distinguish the meaning of life in general, the meaning of a particular person’s life, and the level of meaningfulness of a person’s life.

Some salient proposals (in “Western,” broadly speaking, societies, such as ours) for meaningfulness-enhancing features include fulfilling God’s purposes, loving another or others and having friendships, being in contact with something “greater” than oneself (where this need not be a perfect or divine being, but can include, among other things, ongoing activities such as science, the arts, athletics, and scholarship), leaving a lasting mark through accomplishments, and so forth. Note that many, if not all of the prominent suggestions, involve making important connections , or perhaps, connections of objective value.

Having a meaningful life—a life whose description counts as a narrative—is an all-or-nothing thing. It requires meeting two conditions: (i) non-delusory connection to reality and (ii) freedom. Such lives can be graded on a spectrum of meaningfulness, depending on our evaluation of the mix of meaning-enhancing and meaning-diminishing features of the life. A life that is meaningful can be located on the meaningfulness scale, so long as it meets the threshold specified by the two constraints.

Analytically then there are two moments in the evaluation of lives with respect to meaning. First one determines whether a person’s life meets the basic requirements for having a meaning. Next one judges the life’s level of meaningfulness in a scalar , not an all-or-nothing way. Meeting the basic constraints on having a meaningful life at all is the gateway to greater or lesser meaningfulness, as determined by an overall evaluation of the meaningfulness-relevant factors.

The abstract structure of this view is similar to my view about the relationship between moral responsibility and (say) blameworthiness. On my view, moral responsibility is the “aptness” to a set of normative responses—judgments, attitudes (such as resentment), and activities (such as punishment). Moral responsibility is the “gateway” to such responses, and it requires meeting certain basic epistemic and control conditions. Once these are met, there is a further evaluation of praiseworthiness and blameworthiness, and the application of the responses in question in a particular situation. Both views—about moral responsibility and meaning in life—involve two analytic steps, the first of which is all-or-nothing, and the second scalar. (For simplicity’s sake I am putting together judgments of [say] blameworthiness and whether the expression of blame is justified in a particular context; they are strictly speaking analytically separate scalar judgments.)

A person “writes” her narrative by acting freely. (I deem “acting freely” to be the freedom component of moral responsibility.) As with any author, she uses material from various “sources” in writing—she does not write in a vacuum. Others give important content to our stories, and then we stitch them together and give them a shape. A free action (an action where the agent acts freely) corresponds to a sentence in the narrative of one’s life.

In acting freely, one does not necessarily express a character trait or propound into public space a value for which one stands. For example, one may exhibit weakness of will, deception, or other failures of practical reasoning or its implementation in action. Rather, one adds an element to the narrative of one’s life—an element whose meaning interacts with other elements in a distinctive way. We can explain why there is no single meaning of human life in general by noting that there is no single agent (individual or group) who freely and intentionally acts so as to write a narrative of the human species.

I accept David Velleman’s ( 1991 , 2003 ) view that a narrative (strictly speaking, that is, not a mere story or chronicle) has three characteristics: it is apt to elicit an affective or emotional reaction in an appropriate audience, it features meaning holism (the meaning or value of one part can depend on its relationship to others), and it gives a distinctive kind of “totalizing” explanation of the life. A totalizing explanation yields an understanding of the whole life, and its parts, in terms of its ending.

In an important way the meaning of an individual’s life pulls apart from considerations of relative meaningfulness of lives: more or less meaningfulness is not a matter of better or worse narrative value, in any sense of “narrative value.” A better story (better “in the telling”) does not make for a more meaningful life. Neither does more or richer meaning holism. The features in virtue of which the chronicle of an individual’s life is a narrative do not bear directly on the degree of meaningfulness in a life, even though they endow the life with a specific meaning. Narratives tell the unique stories of individuals’ lives, and they can be placed on a scale of meaningfulness (relative to the consensus of a given social group or society).

It is an interesting question (that I explore in less detail than it deserves) to what extent we need to understand meaningfulness in terms of doing rather than being . Often being active rather than passive is prized in discussions of meaningfulness in human lives—we don’t want to be slothful couch-potatoes or “blobs,” to use Susan Wolf’s ( 2010 ) term. We do not however think that a Zen Buddhist monk’s life necessarily scores low on the meaningfulness scale. It is thus important to think more carefully about the distinction between activity and passivity. I (Fischer 2021 [a], 2021 [b]) believe that there is an active sense of “being,” by reference to which we can deem the Buddhist monk’s life relatively meaningful and distinguish it from those of some (but not all) couch-potatoes.

Why Is Death Bad, and Should We Fear It?

Many of us fear death, and sometimes this is a central fact of our lives. When we think carefully about death, however, it is puzzling how it can be a bad thing for the deceased. She’s not around anymore, and if it were not a bad thing, she shouldn’t fear death at all. These puzzles about death’s badness give rise to a strategy pioneered by Epicurus for alleviating our anxieties about death (given a secular framework). The Epicurean strategy is further developed by Lucretius and also by various contemporary philosophers, including Nussbaum ( 1994 ).

Epicurean Challenges

The Epicurean contends that death cannot be a bad thing for the individual who dies, because there is no individual left to be the subject of this purported misfortune. The point that there is no individual left implies that the status of being dead (as opposed to the process of dying) involves no unpleasant experiences on the part of the individual who dies. The Epicurean thus contends that it cannot be bad for her. Also, unlike other harms, it doesn’t seem that there is a time at which the badness of death occurs. At the time of being dead, there is no subject of the harm left: and when the subject still exists, the harmful state of affairs has not yet begun to obtain. Epicurus’s famous “rallying cry” is: “When the person is, death is not, and when death is, the person is not.”

Lucretius offered another argument in defense of the Epicurean position. He pointed out that our being dead and our status before we were born appear to be metaphysically symmetric (“mirror images”): they are both extended periods of nonexistence, and late birth and early death appear to be parallel. Given this metaphysical symmetry, it seems that we should have psychological symmetry—symmetric attitudes toward these two periods. On this view, since we don’t regret the time before we were born, we should not (say) fear death. The Epicurean concludes that death is nothing to fear.

I suppose it would be nice if these Epicurean points were uncontroversial and decisive, since they would provide comfort. This is, however, a bit optimistic, and some would even say, “wishful thinking.” I consider several ways of responding to the Epicureans, many of which are quite cogent. I contend, however, that there are important grains of truth in their views—insights that might be missed if one dismisses their arguments too abruptly.

The No-Experience Problem

I believe that various things can be bad for an individual, even though she doesn’t have negative experiences as a result: experience is not all there is to harm or badness (just as it is not all there is to goodness). I thus reject “experiential ethics,” and, more generally, the view that all kinds of value can be reduced to, or defined in terms of, experience.

I consider at some length an example offered by Thomas Nagel ( 1970 ). In this case an individual is betrayed behind her back by people who present themselves to her as friends. Perhaps they have regular “meet-ups” where they attack her scurrilously, accusing her of cheating on her partner, plagiarizing her writings, and so forth. The woman however never finds out about these meetings and is otherwise unaffected by them (even indirectly). I agree with Nagel that this sort of case indicates that one can be harmed by something—a bad thing can happen to one—even in the absence of any unpleasant experience caused by it. This is a first step toward defending the notion that death, conceived as an experiential blank, can be bad for the deceased.

The Epicurean however will not be convinced, because there is an important difference between the betrayal case and death: one could find out about and be affected (experientially) by the betrayals, but when dead the individual cannot (by hypothesis) have any negative experiences. This reveals a gap in the argument against Epicureanism based on the betrayal example.

I build on Nagel’s example by constructing a related case in which it is impossible (in the relevant sense) for a betrayed individual to find out about the “meet-ups” or be otherwise affected by them. In this sort of example, there is a “counterfactual intervener,” White, standing by, ready to block any information about the betrayals from reaching the individual in question. If someone were to seek to call her, the cell phone number would be blocked, if someone were to come to the door, the security system would be triggered, and so forth. We stipulate that everything in the “actual sequence” involving the betrayals is the same in both the original case and the modified case (including White). I contend then that if the individual who is the target of the scurrilous verbal attacks is harmed in the original case, she is also harmed in the modified case. Harm is an “actual-sequence” notion.

The case involving the counterfactual intervener, White, is parallel in structure to the widely discussed “Frankfurt-style Cases” (FSCs), which involve the counterfactual intervener, Black (Frankfurt 1969 ). The latter cases have been introduced to impugn the “Principle of Alternative Possibilities” (PAP), according to which moral responsibility for an action requires freedom to do otherwise, and thus to defend the claim that moral responsibility is an actual-sequence notion. Of course, it is controversial whether the FSCs are successful in dethroning PAP, and it is similarly unclear whether the modified betrayal case succeeds in refuting the “possible experience” requirement for harm. You might say that the issues are not Black and White! In the book I do however defend the dialectical efficacy of the modified betrayal case, as I have (elsewhere) defended the FSCs (Fischer 1994 , 2010 ). Both harm and moral responsibility are actual-sequence concepts.

The Timing Problem

There are some viable options (I resisted “live” options) for specifying the time of the harm of death, including “subsequentism,” according to which the badness of death takes place during the time at which the individual is dead. I suggest that “being harmed by death” at a time t (which can be an interval of time) is not a temporally nonrelational or intrinsic property of an individual existing at (or during) t . For example, Aristotle now has the property of being written about by John Fischer. Thus, the subsequentist need not be saddled with the Problem of Predication—the problem of making sense of the notion that an individual who does not exist at t can have an intrinsic property at t. The distinction between “hard” and “soft” properties (and facts), which is important in discussions of arguments for logical and also theological fatalism, is the same as the distinction between temporally nonrelational (intrinsic) and temporally relational (extrinsic) properties (Fischer 1983 , 1986 , 2016 ).

In the book I briefly suggest this strategy (employing the distinction between temporally intrinsic and temporally extrinsic properties) for answering the Problem of Predication and thus opening a path to subsequentism, I develop it more fully in an article that complements and extends the treatment in the book. (Fischer Forthcoming(a) ). My strategy for opening the door to a more complete defense of subsequentism employs the distinction between the time of the truth of a proposition about a subsequent time and the time of the occurrence of the truthmaker of that proposition.

In his important work on fatalism and free will, John Perry ( 2004 ) invokes this distinction to analyze the notion of “fixity” of the past. For Perry a proposition that is true in the past need not be considered “fixed” and out of one’s control to falsify until the truthmaker for the proposition occurs. Just as Perry analyzes the fixity of the past by making the crucial distinction, I analyze the time of death’s badness in terms of this distinction. This suggests an interesting connection between the literatures on free will and death—one which deserves further exploration.

Note that the propositions in question in the debates about the time of death’s badness are comparative and normative. They are about one life (say one in which death is later) being better than another. The already delicate issues pertaining to the timing problem and metaphysical grounding of propositions are rendered more challenging by the need to address such propositions. I am not familiar with a discussion of comparative normative propositions in the metaphysical grounding literature.

The Lucretian Mirror Image Argument

In the book I argue that there are attractive strategies for responding to Lucretius’s Mirror Image Argument: the Parfit-style ( 1984 : 165–166) response, which appeals to a reasonable psychological asymmetry (we care about the future in a way in which we don’t care about the past), the asymmetry of (plausible) possibility response (it is relatively easy to imagine a later death, but hard to imagine an early birth), and the preference-thwarting response (death thwarts preferences, while late birth does not).

I discuss a Parfit-style response developed by Anthony Brueckner and me ( 1986 ). It insists that we can prescind the metaphysics from the psychology; that is, the metaphysical symmetry noted by Lucretius need not imply a psychological symmetry of the relevant kind. In Parfit’s famous thought-experiments involving a patient who is awaiting news in a hospital, Brueckner and I “switch out” news about a painful surgery and replace it with a pleasant drug-induced experience. The examples show that, other things equal, we prefer our pains in the past (Parfit’s example) and pleasures in the future (Brueckner’s and mine). Since early death deprives us of future pleasures whereas late birth deprives us of past pleasures, we care more about early death. Here metaphysics does not drive psychology; the metaphysics is symmetric, whereas the psychology is (and arguably should be) asymmetric.

The asymmetry of plausible possibility response, suggested by Nagel (although he also worries about it), holds that there is indeed a metaphysical asymmetry: whereas it is plausible that an individual (the very same one) can live longer than she actually does, it is not plausible that she (the very same individual) could have been born significantly earlier than she actually was. This provides a different response to Lucretius, although the two strategies of response are entirely compatible.

Another (also compatible) response to the Lucretian Mirror Image Argument is suggested by Bernard Williams’s ( 1973 ) account of why death is bad. Williams rejects the deprivation theory of death’s badness on behalf of a “preference-thwarting” model. Accepting this approach, one could say that early death thwarts “categorical preferences” (to pursue projects that give one reason to continue living), whereas late birth does not (insofar as there are as yet no projects to thwart). I hold that this is also a promising avenue of response to Lucretius, worthy of further consideration.

I note here a final strategy of response, not explored in any detail in the book—the Asymmetry of Causal Power approach. Since we can causally affect the future but not the past, it makes sense to focus our practical reasoning on future possibilities, rather than the past. This asymmetric psychological orientation complements the Brueckner/Fischer point that this confers significant survival advantages. Insofar as an advantage in natural selection offers (part of) a rational justification, our future focus is shown to be (at least to some extent) rational, and not just a descriptive psychological feature of human beings.

The Deprivation Theory of Death’s Badness and Fear of Death

Why is death bad for the individual who dies, when it is indeed bad? An influential view is the deprivation account of death’s badness, according to which (roughly speaking) death deprives the deceased of goods she would have had, but for her early death. These goods would have made that life (in which she lives longer) better than the life she actually leads. Typically, premature death is bad because it both deprives the individual of good experiences in the future (as part of what would have been an on-balance better life), and it thwarts preferences to pursue projects that give meaning to life. When only one condition is met, death is bad to some extent; when both are met, death is bad in a stronger sense. This shows why the death of a nonhuman animal can be bad to some extent, whereas only the death of a human being (or person) can be a tragedy for the deceased.

I follow others, including Draper ( 2013 ), however, in distinguishing between judging that it is a bad thing that one dies prematurely and fearing this possibility. This is an important distinction, and it must be emphasized that the Epicureans were more concerned with diminishing fear than expunging negative judgments. Given that death is a non-experiential bad, it is very different from boredom or torture. We can take at least some consolation from this. It seems to me that fear is keyed to unpleasant experiences, whereas our judgments about harms are not constrained in this way.

If all of this is correct the Epicureans are at least partly vindicated, and the insight could be an important part of a secular strategy for terror management (as I note below in my discussion of near-death experiences). The partial vindication pertains to fear, rather than judgments of badness. Whereas I argued in the book that it is not irrational to fear premature death (the status of being dead) to some extent, I have changed my views on this particular point—moving toward the Epicurean position—since it was published.

I wish to sketch some reflections that motivate my new view. Recently I had (minor) surgery that required me to be under general anesthesia for an hour. When I reflect back on that surgery and focus on my status during that hour, I recognize that I had no experiences and, specifically, no unpleasant experiences. I further realize that there would have been no reason prior to the surgery to fear my status during that hour. Of course, I could reasonably have been concerned with whether the surgery would be a success, and even fear that I would never awaken from the anesthesia. I don’t think, however, that it would have been reasonable to fear being in the experiential black hole induced by the anesthesia, and there is no relevant difference (as regards fear) between this situation and one in which I would be under anesthesia for a very long time.

Further, I do not see any difference, as regards the relevant sort of fear, between this last situation and one in which I wouldn’t exist at all during the period under consideration. From the experiential point of view—i.e., from the “inside,” so to speak—there would be no difference. That is, there would be no difference between existing and having no experiences and not existing anymore (and therefore having no experiences). If fear is keyed to unpleasant experiences, there should be no difference with respect to fear. Thus, given that prior to my surgery it would have been unreasonable to fear my period of unconsciousness when under surgery, it would be similarly inappropriate to fear the status of being dead. I will return to my “conversion” on this issue in my reply to Timmerman in this symposium.

Before I move on, I pause here to consider a passage from Samuel Scheffler ( 2013 : 84).

One immediate objection to the [Epicurean] argument is that it seems to imply not only that we have no reason to fear death but also that nobody can ever have reason to wish for death. Imagine, however, a torture victim who is undergoing such horrible agonies at the hands of a sadistic Epicurean that he begs his tormenter to kill him. And imagine that the Epicurean torturer replies: ‘So death, the thing you fervently desire, is nothing to you, since so long as you exist, death is not with you; but when death comes, then you will not exist. It does not then concern you either when you are living or when you are dead…’

Scheffler goes on to point out that the torturer’s response is “preposterous.”

This is indisputably true, but no consequence of the Epicurean view. That view has it that the status of death in itself is not a matter of concern (specifically, fear) to us, but this does not imply that future possibilities for our lives will not be of interest. I certainly can hope that my future life will be as good as possible, and if the torture is bad enough, I can hope that the torture will end immediately. If it is evident that the torture will continue, or even continue a long time, I might well prefer an immediate death. This would not however because I prize the status of nonexistence, but because I care about my future life and avoiding terrible pain.

Similarly, some have wondered whether an Epicurean would have any reason to step off a track to avoid an oncoming train whose brakes have failed (an Epicurean Trolley Problem!). If the Epicurean can envisage a good life in her future, she certainly has reason to step off the track, but not because of the necessity of avoiding the status of being dead.

It is also odd that Scheffler refers to the torturer as an “Epicurean Torturer.” Charitably, this is probably not meant to be taken seriously. In any case, it makes sense only if an Epicurean must be an egoist, but this is not so. The Epicurean can care about what happens to her loved ones, potential torture victims, or the planet, for that matter, after she dies. She may, for example, make out a will or establish a trust for her loved ones. This would be because she now cares about how they will fare in the future, not because she will suffer after she has died if they unjustly struggle or be able to appreciate their flourishing. Epicurus held that one can have a range of reasons for action that affect the future, but these reasons don’t pertain to one’s positive or negative experiences during the period of being dead. There is nothing in the core Epicurean doctrine that “death is nothing to us” that implies that one cannot care about others (now and even after one dies). This point holds apart from any views of Epicurus himself, although Epicurus did commend the moral virtues and recognized the need for justice.

The “Forever” Wars

If death is indeed bad, would immortality be good? From the beginning of human existence, we have had a profoundly ambivalent attitude toward immortality. In his famous treatment, Gerald Gruman ( 2003 ) distinguished between “prolongevists” and “apologists.” Roughly speaking, the prolongevists are “pro-immortality,” whereas the apologists are anti-immortality. I have proposed a related, but slightly different, distinction between immortality optimists and curmudgeons.

I distinguish Immortality Curmudgeons, Optimists, and Realists. This refinement is rendered necessary in part by contemporary environmental crises. The Curmudgeons, most notably Bernard Williams ( 1973 ) in contemporary philosophy, argue that no form of immortality is worthy of choice by human beings, in virtue of basic facts about human character. His main thesis is that any human being would eventually become bored in an immortal life. Bernard Williams has done more than anyone else to propel discussions of the potential desirability of immortality into contemporary discussions in analytic philosophy. He is, you might say, the Chairman of the Bored, to borrow a phrase from the otherwise forgettable Iggy Pop song, “I’m Bored.”

The Optimists deny this contention of the Curmudgeons, and they further claim that it is likely (and, for some theorists, highly probable) that human beings will achieve the status of immortality in the not-so-distant future (with a range of not-so-distantness). The Realists reject the fundamental contention of Williams and the Curmudgeons, but they also disagree with the Optimists about the likelihood that we will achieve immortality (soon or perhaps ever). Their view is bleaker about the future of our increasingly fragile environment.

Since it is a view involving probabilities, there is a range of Realist views. I am an Immortality Realist. I hold that it is less likely than not that humans will be able to achieve a sustainably life-supporting environment into the future. Not impossible, but maybe only about 30%, so we have to get at it! The Immortality Realist has a healthy concern for the future of the human race—a worry that can result in action to save our planet.

The Immortality Curmudgeons and their Concerns

Daring to fire some salvos in the “Forever” Wars, I consider a panoply of arguments offered by the Immortality Curmudgeons, who are certainly in the majority among philosophers (historically and now). A large majority of philosophers (especially in contemporary discussions) are dreary spoil-sports about immortality! Such arguments include the worry that an immortal life would lack “form,” that it could not correspond to a narrative, that it would not have the stages required for a recognizably human life, that an infinitely long life cannot be grasped by the human mind, that such a life could not be the life of a single human individual, that it could not be “fraught” and thus precious, and that it would necessarily be boring. I find none of them persuasive, although I respect the worries. In particular, I remain cognizant of the difficulties of imagining and thus accurately evaluating, an immortal life, because so many features of our lives, as we know them, would have to be very different. I concede that we need to drive carefully in this terrain and respect reasonable philosophical speed limits.

In considering the Curmudgeons’ arguments, I emphasize an important distinction made by Steven Cave ( 2012 ). He distinguishes “medical immortality” from “true immortality.” If one is medically immortal, one will not die of “natural causes,” including diseases or (say) biological degradation caused by aging. Even so, one would be vulnerable to death by accidents, homicidal actions of others, and so forth. One expert estimates that nowadays medical immortality would be about six thousand years. That’s a (somewhat informed) guess as to how long (on average) a human being who is medically immortal (but not truly immortal) would last before he accidentally walks off a cliff, is involved in a fatal car accident, murdered by an assailant, and so forth.

A truly immortal individual is invulnerable to death and knows it. (This would seem to imply that he could not take steps to end his own life, which introduces difficulties.) In the book I contend that many of the Curmudgeons’ arguments depend on the assumption that the sort of immortality under consideration is true immortality, rather than medical immortality. The dialectic changes dramatically when we switch to medical immortality, which is, after all, the sort envisaged in Bernard Williams’s ( 1973 ) famous example of Elina Makropulos.

Elina can take an elixir that will ensure that she not die of diseases or aging for 300 years, at which point she again faces of decision about whether to take the elixir. There is no indication in the play or opera in which Elina appears that this elixir would render her truly immortal—invulnerable to death by any cause—for 300 years. Much of the discussion in the contemporary literature spawned by Williams’s classic paper is insufficiently attentive to the different challenges posed by medical and true immortality. Indeed, it is striking that some philosophers who employ the Makropulos case to introduce their worries go on to present arguments that target a different sort of immortality—true immortality!

As I pointed out above, many contemporary philosophers are Immortality Curmudgeons. I feel sometimes as if agreement with Bernard Williams on this point is a knee-jerk reaction among the philosophical cognoscenti . In one salient example (ed. Kolodny: 2013) of this “kumbaya—singing,” Samuel Scheffler, Niko Kolodny, and Seana Shiffrin all express their agreement with his conclusion, although not necessarily his argumentation.

Not all well-known and highly respected philosophers however are Curmudgeons. Thomas Nagel ( 2014 : Sect. 3) writes:

Couldn’t [immortal lives] be composed of an endless sequence of quests, undertakings, and discoveries, including successes and failures? Humans are amazingly adaptable, and have developed many forms of life and value in their history so far… I am not persuaded that the essential role of mortality in shaping meaning we find in our actual lives implies that earthly immortality would not be a good thing. If medical science ever finds a way to turn off the aging process, I suspect we would manage.

Immortality in an Afterlife

There are different routes to immortality: secular and religious. I argue that many of the same issues arise as to the potential desirability (and even coherence) of secular and religious immortality. One might say that Mark Twain ([original date unavailable]/ 1970 ) is to skepticism about the desirability of religious immortality (in some sort of “afterlife”) as Bernard Williams is to skepticism about that of secular immortality. Of course, Twain expresses his worries in a considerably less rigorous (although more colorful) way than does Williams! He laments the singing of hymns and waving of palm branches as a terrible way to spend eternity, expresses his preference for the company in hell (despite the better weather in heaven), and so forth. I argue that the responses to the Secular Curmudgeon are in many instances parallel to promising responses to Religious Immortality Curmudgeons. It is noteworthy that the arguments and responses are parallel.

For instance, I have invoked the possibility of “repeatable” pleasures as one (although not the only way) of resisting the contention that secular immortality would necessarily be boring. One does not have to sing hymns or wave palm-branches! This point has an analogue in the view of heaven presented vividly in the Koran, which is described as containing numerous sensual delights. I highlight the fact that many of the concerns about the recognizability and desirability of secular and religious immortality are similar, and the resources available to address them are also similar in interesting ways.

Of course, the specifics are different in the two contexts—secular and religious. Religious immortality in the monotheistic Western tradition is true immortality, not mere medical immortality. Arguably religious views that involve reincarnation posit medical immortality (at least as regards bodily death, as “currently” embodied). The recognizability problem emerges in religious immortality if we suppose that we (our souls) are literally “united” with God in an afterlife, or if we imagine resurrection as the relevant sort of communion with God. As regards reincarnation, it not obvious how I—the very same person—could start a different life as a member of another species.

Near-Death Experiences: Supernaturalism

Many, including (somewhat) scholarly writers on the subject, think that near-death experiences (NDEs) are a portal into immortality in the religious sense. They adopt the doctrine of “supernaturalism about NDEs,” according to which our minds are nonphysical (the doctrine of dualism—typically substance dualism), separate from our bodies in NDEs, and travel toward an otherworldly realm. To clarify, the supernaturalist does not contend that NDErs merely have experiences as of their minds or “souls” separating from their body and traveling toward an otherworldly realm. Rather, she holds that NDErs’ minds actually do separate from their bodies and actually do travel toward (and sometimes even reach) such a realm.

I canvass a suite of arguments for supernaturalism about NDEs. These include (but are not limited to) the contention that in NDEs people have conscious experiences when their brains are “offline”; that NDEs have similar content (at an abstract level) across persons, cultures, and times; and that some occur in contexts in which the NDErs accurately report verifiable contents that could not have been acquired via naturalistic means. I find them unpersuasive.

It is a staple of the NDE literature that NDEs take place when the brain is “offline” in the sense in which it could support consciousness (as opposed to the biological “housekeeping” tasks). This “NDE Timing Problem” plays a big role here, as in the discussion of the time of death’s badness. It is however totally unwarranted to conclude from the science, together with the NDE reports, that the conscious episodes experienced in NDEs take place when the brain could not have supported consciousness.

The primary reason for this is that, just as with dreams, their contents may not be presented as having taken place at the time at which the brain activity that plausibly supports the episode occurs. So, for instance, it is very plausible that the conscious stream of episodes in a dream take place as the brain is ramping up for awakening. Although this is when the episodes actually take place, it is typically not the time interval during which the depicted events are represented as taking place. There is simply no evidence here that conscious episodes take place when the brain cannot underwrite consciousness—so no evidence of dualism (in any form). Further, nearly all neuroscientists conclude that it is almost certain that consciousness does not survive the death of the brain. (One might say that NDErs are “woke!”)

Why Universality of Content?

NDEs have similar content across cultures and times, although the specific details are different and to some extent culturally determined. They typically contain some (but not necessarily all) of the following: an out-of-body experience, travel toward another (otherworldy) realm guided by deceased loved ones and/or religious figures, vivid colors and lucid imagery, ascension from darkness toward light, awakening just prior to making contact with the protected realm, a life review, and so forth.

Why this relatively abstract similarity of structure and content? The supernaturalists contend that it is because NDErs are in contact with a single otherworldly realm (heavenly or hellish). This however ignores the inconvenient differences in the contents of NDEs—some see Christian religious figures, some Hindu, some ride on the wings of butterflies, and so forth. If they are all grasping a single otherworldly realm, why the significant differences in specific contents?

The supernaturalist interpretation also ignores the fact that human beings have certain commonalities that can explain the similarity in contents of NDE reports. Our brains are similar. It is also relevant that human beings generally (although not universally) undergo similar psycho-social development, and we all have similar basic psychological tendencies. This kind of multifactorial naturalistic explanation can explain the general similarity in content, as well as the differences in details. We need not posit contact with a single otherworldly realm to explain the patterns in NDEs. We can more productively attend to features of the experiencer , rather than the putative object or cause of the NDE. The proponents of supernaturalism have “tunnel vision,” so to speak!

How do NDErs Know?

There are numerous veridical reports by NDErs of information that apparently could not have been acquired via ordinary naturalistic means. They are instances of what NDE researchers call “apparently non-physical veridical perception.” The supernaturalists place great weight on the fact that they are veridical , often using terms like “extraordinary” and “remarkable.” It is however not so extraordinary or remarkable that of the millions of NDE reports, some not insignificant number of them turn out to be true. It would indeed be surprising if the “apparently non-physical” part were actually non-physical, but this is much more difficult, if not impossible, to establish. One could be confused if one’s sole or even primary focus were on the veridicality of such reports, rather than their putatively non-physical means of generation.

Supernaturalism is a potent strategy of terror management. The intellectually and emotionally intoxicating cocktail of terror management and confirmation bias is indeed strong, but all the arguments for supernaturalism are unconvincing. The literature on NDEs—both popular and “academic” (published by MDs or PhDs in arguably scholarly books and journals)—is replete with pseudo-science and riddled with non-sequiturs (Mitchell-Yellin and Fischer 2014 , Fischer and Mitchell-Yellin 2016 , Fischer Forthcoming(b) ). It is however not surprising that the supernaturalist books sell millions of copies (and make the authors rich in dollars, if not insights), given the powerful terror management they offer and the human tendency toward confirmation bias.

After all, who wishes to read the judicious and skeptical reflections of an analytical philosopher, when one can read about the adventures of a neurosurgeon exploring a beautiful and compelling heavenly realm, flying on the wings of a butterfly? Many cling to what is comforting to them as they consider the prospect of death, and they do not wish to have this comfort threatened or etiolated in any way. The stakes are too high, and the comfort too great. Hence the not-so-peaceful responses to those who dare to challenge the supernaturalist orthodoxy by people who have allegedly imbibed the enlightenment offered by NDEs! I’m tempted to ask, “Where’s the peace, love, and understanding?”

I do not primarily seek terror management, but rigor antemortis , so to speak—an analytical rigor sadly lacking in much of the literature on NDEs. I do not however embrace NDE Denialism, the view that people do not have the NDEs they report. I believe that people really have NDEs with the contents they report, but that these contents are not necessarily literal and accurate depictions of external reality. As with my position of Immortality Realism, I am an NDE Realist.

As with my views about immortality and NDEs, I (Fischer 1994 , Fischer and Ravizza 1998 ) take a “middle path” in my account of moral responsibility. I (and my co-author) argue that the freedom-relevant component of moral responsibility is “guidance control,” which involves a certain kind of “reasons-responsiveness.” The sort of reasons-responsiveness in question is not strong, nor weak, but “moderate reasons-responsiveness.” (Fischer and Ravizza 1998 ) Further, my account of guidance control is squarely in between the requirement of alternative-possibilities freedom (“freedom to do otherwise”) and no requirement of freedom of any sort, a view attributed to Peter Strawson. ( 1962 ). I agree with Gautama Buddha’s insight that the middle path is often the path of wisdom.

As I explain in the next section, the NDE realist can explain the awe-inspiring and transformative capacities of NDEs by reference to a story that these experiences tell—a story that does not imply or presuppose supernaturalism. The beauty of NDEs can be captured in a naturalistic framework, which I present in the book and continue to develop in subsequent work (Fischer 2020 [a], 2020 [b], 2020 [c]).

Near-Death Experiences, Naturalism, and Meaning

For the supernaturalist, the story of NDEs is a story of separation from one’s body and travel toward (and sometimes into) an otherworldly realm. The stories purportedly show, as in the title of a prominent book, that “heaven is for real.” They offer a “proof of heaven.” These interpretations select only parts of the reported contents of most NDEs, and they interpret them literally. They offer a supernaturalist strategy for managing the terror we feel when considering death, and a view of meaning in life as alignment with an other-worldly being. The stories, interpreted in this way, are literally about the trip of an “after-lifetime” (Fischer 2020[c]).

In contrast, I focus on the totality of the reported contents, including their depictions of journeys from the known to the unknown, guided by a loving mentor, in search of an important connection. Further, I interpret the stories metaphorically. In the book I contend that we are deeply moved by the stories NDEs tell because of the centrality in our lives of voyages of discovery—journeys that take us along paths from the known to the unknown, guided by more experienced mentors and loved ones, toward an important connection. Taken literally, the contents of NDE reports do indeed depict a trip of an after-lifetime. I contend that it is more fruitful to interpret them metaphorically, and to home in on the “trip” part, rather than the “after-lifetime” part. Often spiritual experiences are described as “journeys” or “trips” (especially when induced by psychedelic substances), and NDEs are paradigmatic spiritual experiences.

This gives a naturalistic explanation of the deep meaning and transformational power of NDEs, insofar as we affectively “recognize” this sort of journey, which is featured at various points in human life. NDEs tap into an emotional template that is deep and profound in human life. They speak to us in ways that capture our attention and can result in lifelong transformations. My point: we do not need to adopt a supernaturalist interpretation of NDEs to explain their deep meaning and transformational potency.

My interpretation offers a different sort of approach to terror management. When we are anxious about “death,” sometimes we are thinking of death as the last part of dying, which can indeed be painful and lonely—quite frankly, worthy of fear and even terror. Our deaths however do not have to be full of pain and loneliness. The story NDEs tell is a story of loving guidance. In facing the most daunting part of our journey—from life to death—we need not be alone. One of the chief lessons of NDEs is that we should move toward more humane ways of dying, rather than continue the practice of extending life indefinitely in sterile and insolating institutional settings.

On my interpretation, the terror management offered by NDEs is about “death” in the sense of the last part of dying , i.e., the transition from being alive to being dead. It is not about the status of being dead. We can however employ this moral of NDE stories as an important part of an overall secular terror management strategy, which combines a more humane way of dying with Epicurean insights into the status of being dead. Supernaturalism has no monopoly on terror management. The famous psychiatrist Irving Yalom ( 2009 ) employs Epicurean ideas, especially about the status of being dead, in his clinical practice.

Besides terror management, another of the basic drives mentioned at the beginning of this piece is seeking meaning in life. NDEs model the core of meaningfulness in life: the importance of making valuable connections . After all, NDEs depict a journey toward a protected realm, guided by a loving mentor, in search of a connection of ultimate value. The stories of NDEs thus point to strategies for achieving meaning in our lives.

Return to the relationship between the theory of free will and moral responsibility and that of meaning in life. Throughout my career, I have sought to give a naturalistic account of moral responsibility (and its associated free agency) in terms of “guidance control,” which is a certain kind of agent-owned reasons-responsiveness. An individual can act from their own reasons-responsive capacities in a naturalistic world. When I act from my own, reasons-responsive mechanism, I do it my way . Free agency and moral responsibility involve a distinctive kind of guidance : active guidance in which the individual seeks to connect with reasons (Fischer 1994 , Fischer and Ravizza 1998 ).

As I’ve pointed out above, NDEs tell the story of guidance by loved ones from the known to the unknown, with the goal of forging a valuable connection. Active , “initiating” guidance is central to moral responsibility, and trusting acceptance of loving guidance is part of the stories of NDEs. Meaningfulness in human life in its various aspects, then, emerges from this combination of active initiation of guidance and trusting acceptance of it. We might say: meaning in life comes from guidance toward important connection. Perhaps the most basic element in both the active and passive context is guidance : exhibiting guidance control and accepting loving guidance.

Why is guidance the key element in these central normative dimensions of human life? This is a very difficult question, and I hesitate even to attempt an answer. I will however venture to do it, with the understanding that this is merely a tentative idea for consideration. It is meant simply to be suggestive.

Many philosophers in both the literatures on free will/moral responsibility and meaning in life have pointed out that human beings are “in between” God (as conceptualized by “perfect being theology) and nonhuman animals. (I do not here assume that such a God exists; rather, I’m simply working with the concept.).

Harry Frankfurt ( 1971 : 14) writes:

The concept of a person, then, is not only the concept of an entity that has both first-order desires and volitions of the second order. It can also be construed as the concept of a type of entity for whom the freedom of its will can be a problem. This concept excludes all wantons, both infrahuman and human, since they fail to satisfy an essential condition for the enjoyment of freedom of the will. And it excludes those suprahuman beings, if there are any, whose wills are necessarily free.

Gary Watson ( 1975 : 220) puts the point in a slightly different way:

The truth, of course, is that God (traditionally conceived) is the only free agent, sans phrase . In the case of God, who is omniscient and omnipotent, there can be no disparity between valuational and motivational systems. The dependence of motivation and valuation is total, for there is but a single source of motivation…. In the case of the Brutes, as well, motivation has a single source: appetite and (perhaps) passion. The Brutes (or so we think) have no valuational system. But human beings are only more or less free agents [insofar as they have both valuational and motivational systems].

These two famous agency theorists point out that we human beings are the only beings with two potentially conflicting subsystems of (or perhaps inputs to) practical reasoning: in Frankfurt’s case, higher and lower-order desires and in Watson’s, mere desires and values. The challenge for a free agent is to “secure conformity” (in Frankfurt’s phrase) between the two subsystems. In contrast, neither God nor nonhuman animals has this challenge, since they have only one subsystem in their practical ecologies.

I pause to note an anomaly in Frankfurt’s view—or perhaps it is simply a feature. He contends that God cannot be construed as a person, since His will is necessarily free: securing a conformity between his second-order volitions and first-order desires (if He has them) does not even arise. Frankfurt might be correct about this, but it conflicts with an influential view that God is a person. The reasons why some think of God as a person, and their relationships to God as “personal,” typically have nothing to do with the structure of God’s will. Although I cannot explore this issue in depth here, I simply note that it either shows (as Frankfurt contends) that, upon reflection, God is not a person, or that Frankfurt’s account of the concept of personhood is problematic.

Richard Taylor ( 1981 / 2019 : 777), whose topic is meaning in life (rather than agency), contends that we have an intermediate status with respect to the creation of meaning:

God, we are taught, did not merely come upon all this and decide to make it his own through sheer power. Instead, he created it all, we are told, and really if for this reason alone thought to be God. We are not gods, but we are not just animals either. We need not stagger dreamlike through the four stages of life to death, accompanied by a series of trivial thoughts… We can instead… live meaningfully, by creating our own meanings…

We have identified another connection between agency and meaning, and I am now in a position to offer a tentative suggestion about the key status of guidance. A perfect being is static; such a being does not change in some sort of transition toward perfection. It is already perfect in every way. Thus, God (if God exists) does not need guidance from another (and, in particular, a loving mentor or guide). Further, nonhuman animals cannot be guided by reasons qua reasons—they are not “reasons-responsive.” They might be able to guide their behavior by cues in their environment, but not reasons.

Human beings are imperfect. We are broken, all of us, or at least “incomplete,” and we strive to “fix” ourselves or achieve a kind of “completion.” We are in this sense not static, but dynamic. Unlike God, we need guidance by trusted mentors, who offer us reasons for action. Unlike nonhuman animals, we can guide our actions by these reasons: we are reasons-responsive . Imperfect beings like us generate value and meaning from a complex mix of active and passive guidance. These capacities for active and passive guidance are exquisitely attuned to each other: our trusted and loving mentors provide us reasons for action, and we are capable of guiding our actions by precisely those reasons. It’s a hand-in-glove fit.

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Acknowledgements

I am very grateful to the guest editor, Justin Capes, for supporting and organizing this symposium, and for his thoughtful comments. Thanks also to two anonymous referees for this journal whose comments helped to improve the paper greatly. Prior versions of the contributions to this symposium were delivered at the APA Pacific meetings in April 2020 (via zoom). On that occasion Connie Rosati was the third commentator, and I have benefited greatly from her insightful comments. I’m thankful to Becko Copenhaver for suggesting and facilitating this symposium.

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Fischer, J.M. Death, Immortality, and Meaning in Life : Precis and Further Reflections. J Ethics 26 , 341–359 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10892-022-09392-8

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DOI : https://doi.org/10.1007/s10892-022-09392-8

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• Live Science - Will humans ever be immortal?
• Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy - Immortality
• Catholic Online - Immortality
• Christianity Today - Death and Immortality
• Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy - Immortality
• Academia - A Religious and Philosophical Assessment of the Idea of Immortality
• University of Notre Dame - Platonic arguments for the immortality of the soul
• McClintock and Strong Biblical Cyclopedia - Immortality
• Immortality - Student Encyclopedia (Ages 11 and up)

immortality , in philosophy and religion , the indefinite continuation of the mental, spiritual, or physical existence of individual human beings . In many philosophical and religious traditions, immortality is specifically conceived as the continued existence of an immaterial soul or mind beyond the physical death of the body.

The earlier anthropologists, such as Sir Edward Burnett Tylor and Sir James George Frazer , assembled convincing evidence that the belief in a future life was widespread in the regions of primitive culture . Among most peoples the belief has continued through the centuries. But the nature of future existence has been conceived in very different ways. As Tylor showed, in the earliest known times there was little, often no, ethical relation between conduct on earth and the life beyond. Morris Jastrow wrote of “the almost complete absence of all ethical considerations in connection with the dead” in ancient Babylonia and Assyria .

In some regions and early religious traditions, it came to be declared that warriors who died in battle went to a place of happiness. Later there was a general development of the ethical idea that the afterlife would be one of rewards and punishments for conduct on earth. So in ancient Egypt at death the individual was represented as coming before judges as to that conduct. The Persian followers of Zoroaster accepted the notion of Chinvat peretu , or the Bridge of the Requiter, which was to be crossed after death and which was broad for the righteous and narrow for the wicked, who fell from it into hell . In Indian philosophy and religion, the steps upward—or downward—in the series of future incarnated lives have been (and still are) regarded as consequences of conduct and attitudes in the present life ( see karma ). The idea of future rewards and punishments was pervasive among Christians in the Middle Ages and is held today by many Christians of all denominations. In contrast, many secular thinkers maintain that the morally good is to be sought for itself and evil shunned on its own account, irrespective of any belief in a future life.

That the belief in immortality has been widespread through history is no proof of its truth. It may be a superstition that arose from dreams or other natural experiences. Thus, the question of its validity has been raised philosophically from the earliest times that people began to engage in intelligent reflection. In the Hindu Katha Upanishad , Naciketas says: “This doubt there is about a man departed—some say: He is; some: He does not exist. Of this would I know.” The Upanishads—the basis of most traditional philosophy in India—are predominantly a discussion of the nature of humanity and its ultimate destiny.

Immortality was also one of the chief problems of Plato ’s thought. With the contention that reality, as such, is fundamentally spiritual, he tried to prove immortality, maintaining that nothing could destroy the soul. Aristotle conceived of reason as eternal but did not defend personal immortality, as he thought the soul could not exist in a disembodied state. The Epicureans , from a materialistic standpoint, held that there is no consciousness after death, and it is thus not to be feared. The Stoics believed that it is the rational universe as a whole that persists. Individual humans, as the Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius wrote, simply have their allotted periods in the drama of existence. The Roman orator Cicero , however, finally accepted personal immortality. St. Augustine of Hippo , following Neoplatonism , regarded human beings’ souls as being in essence eternal.

The Islamic philosopher Avicenna declared the soul immortal, but his coreligionist Averroës , keeping closer to Aristotle, accepted the eternity only of universal reason. St. Albertus Magnus defended immortality on the ground that the soul, in itself a cause, is an independent reality. John Scotus Erigena contended that personal immortality cannot be proved or disproved by reason. Benedict de Spinoza , taking God as ultimate reality, as a whole maintained his eternity but not the immortality of individual persons within him. The German philosopher Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz contended that reality is constituted of spiritual monads . Human beings, as finite monads, not capable of origination by composition , are created by God, who could also annihilate them. However, because God has planted in humans a striving for spiritual perfection, there may be faith that he will ensure their continued existence, thus giving them the possibility to achieve it.

The French mathematician and philosopher Blaise Pascal argued that belief in the God of Christianity—and accordingly in the immortality of the soul—is justified on practical grounds by the fact that one who believes has everything to gain if he is right and nothing to lose if he is wrong, while one who does not believe has everything to lose if he is wrong and nothing to gain if he is right. The German Enlightenment philosopher Immanuel Kant held that immortality cannot be demonstrated by pure reason but must be accepted as an essential condition of morality . Holiness, “the perfect accordance of the will with the moral law,” demands endless progress “only possible on the supposition of an endless duration of the existence and personality of the same rational being (which is called the immortality of the soul).” Considerably less-sophisticated arguments both before and after Kant attempted to demonstrate the reality of an immortal soul by asserting that human beings would have no motivation to behave morally unless they believed in an eternal afterlife in which the good are rewarded and the evil are punished. A related argument held that denying an eternal afterlife of reward and punishment would lead to the repugnant conclusion that the universe is unjust.

In the late 19th century, the concept of immortality waned as a philosophical preoccupation, in part because of the secularization of philosophy under the growing influence of science.

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15 Immortality

John Martin Fischer is Distinguished Professor and Chair of the Department of Philosophy at the University of California, Riverside, where he has held a University of California President’s Chair (2006‒2010). He has written on various topics in philosophy, including free will and moral responsibility. He has published papers on the metaphysical and ethical dimensions of death, and he is the editor of The Metaphysics of Death (Stanford University Press, 1993). His collection Our Stories (Oxford University Press, 2007) includes papers on death, immortality, and the meaning of life.

• Published: 28 December 2012
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This chapter, which analyzes questions about death and immortality, explains the different notions of immortality and discusses three challenges to the idea that any kind of immortality could be appealing to us. It proposes ways of responding to these challenges and argues against the view of the Immortality Curmudgeons, which holds that immortality is not necessarily of any positive value to human beings.

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Immortality: Would it be worth it?

In this essay, I argue that immortality (suitably understood) will make our lives better. The argument proceeds in three steps. Firstly, I show that immortality is good because it removes ageing. Secondly, I argue that immortality is prima facie good because it is, in general, better to live longer. Thirdly, I consider the worry that life will inevitably be too boring, and conclude that this won’t count against immortality. Lastly, I consider some worries concerning the type of life that immortality gives.

Related Papers

Ron Buenaventura

This paper discusses the desirability of an immortal life and considers Bernard Williams' concerns that we can only ever fulfill either the attractiveness condition or the identity condition that makes a continuous life desirable. It also considers John Martin Fischer's response that an immortal life isn't so bad when taking into account repeatable pleasures. However, the paper ultimately argues for the indeterminate desirability of an immortal life given its inconceivability and concludes that we ought instead to reserve our judgments.

Stephen Law

Philosophy Compass

Travis Timmerman , Felipe Pereira

While most people believe the best possible life they could lead would be an immortal one, so-called "immortality curmudgeons" disagree. Following Bernard Williams, they argue that, at best, we have no prudential reason to live an immortal life, and at worst, an immortal life would necessarily be bad for creatures like us. In this article, we examine Bernard Williams' seminal argument against the desirability of immortality and the subsequent literature it spawned. We first reconstruct and motivate Williams' somewhat cryptic argument in three parts. After that, we elucidate and motivate the three best (and most influential) counterarguments to Williams' seminal argument. Finally, we review, and critically examine, two further distinct arguments in favor of the anti-immortality position.

Immortality and the Philosophy of Death (ed. Michael Cholbi)

Roman Altshuler

Williams’s famous argument against immortality rests on the idea that immortality cannot be desirable, at least for human beings, and his contention has spawned a cottage industry of responses. As I will intend to show, the arguments over his view rest on both a difference of temperament and a difference in the sense of desire being used. The former concerns a difference in whether one takes a forward-looking or a backward-looking perspective on personal identity; the latter a distinction between our normal desire to continue living and the kind of desire implied in desiring immortality. Showing that there is some sense of identity and desire that support Williams’s conclusion goes some way toward providing support for his argument, if not a full-fledged defense of it.

Nordicum-Mediterraneum 2, 2012.

Rosa Rantanen

Firuze Nur Atmaca

Raven Rianne D . Sarreal

Introduction: Michael Cholbi's book "Immortality and the Philosophy of Death" offers a profound examination of the notion of immortality and its philosophical ramifications. Cholbi goes beyond surface-level discussions and delves deep into the paradoxes associated with immortality, assesses the significance of mortality, and scrutinizes death as a form of harm. This review intends to build upon the previous analysis by providing a comprehensive evaluation of the book's primary arguments, shedding light on their strengths and weaknesses in greater depth.

Ethical perspectives-Katholieke Universiteit Leuven

James Watson

Jewish Philosophy Past and Present: Contemporary Responses to Classical Sources

Aaron Segal

Jeremy Wisnewski

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Immortality

John carroll.

Department of Sociology, La Trobe University, Melbourne, 3086 Australia

This essay is an exercise in what might be called Metaphysical Sociology. It suggests that in the secular modern Western world immortality has become the great question mark. It explores possible responses, drawing on a range of fictional examples, including the novel and film Gone with the Wind and Nicolas Poussin's painting of The Last Supper . It draws a contrast between vitality and ego, on the one hand, and soul, on the other.

Immortality has become the great question mark. For the secular modern age belief in any form of life after death is in doubt. The metaphysical supports that directed earlier generations, keeping them on their feet and moving, have lapsed. Most no longer believe in a supernatural being—whether providential, guiding, punishing, or forgiving. God has become a figment of the archaic imagination; gods of any type are mere alien superstitions held once upon a time by naive, even primitive ancestors. Belief has long gone in an eternal destination for the departing soul at death—Heaven or Hell. The very existence of a soul is in question; never mind whether that hypothetical soul survives the death of the individual human. All in all, human consciousness has narrowed down to focus on mortal life lived here and now, on a this-worldly plane; a finite span bound by birth and death, governed by everyday pleasures and pains.

Individuals today find themselves in the position of Socrates, if they are honest. During his Defence at his trial in Athens in 399 BC, the seventy-year-old philosopher reflected that he did not fear death. Socrates knew fairly surely that he was going to be found guilty and sentenced to death. He told his fellow citizens that he did not know what awaited him once he was gone. There were two possibilities. Either death was final, like a form of eternal dreamless sleep. Or, his soul was immortal, and would migrate off, somewhere beyond, to join other immortal souls. Socrates was the paradigm agnostic.

The death question has not gone away. Its centrality for all humans, and in all times, is illustrated by the fact that religions pivot their theology on finding an answer to it—on proving that death is more than death. The first great work in the Western tradition, Homer’s Iliad , focuses on death: even though it is a war and conquest story, the nature of mortality is of much greater concern than fighting and glory. Christianity instated the Cross as its commanding symbol, a death and resurrection symbol. But today, in a seemingly quite different world, one pervaded by scepticism, what is it possible to believe? Where do the boundaries of metaphysical plausibility lie? In response, let me build up from first principles.

Consider a room full of people. When a stranger comes through the door, those whom he or she encounters will recognise that a kind of force has arrived, changing the atmosphere. An extraordinary concentration of presence has infiltrated among those assembled. That individual human being is more than the sum of their known and observed parts: physical form, the complex of their gestures and expressions, voice, and attributes of character, and its biography. The derogatory Yiddish term nebbish underlines the point, in negation, referring to an inconsequential person whose presence on entering a room is null.

We see this in parenthesis in some fictional examples. When Achilles stands up unarmed on the edge of raging battle, in Book Eighteen of The Iliad , and the goddess Athena bathes his head and shoulders in metaphoric golden light, the fighting Trojans stop in mid-stride, quaking in fear, although they are armed and winning the battle. When Audrey Hepburn enters the royal ball in My Fair Lady the assembled throng is hushed, awestruck by her shimmering beauty, a beauty that outshines gorgeous gown, gracious figure, and finely proportioned face. She is a modern goddess, a film ‘star’, the many association with divinity indicating that some kind of supernatural glow is seen to have manifested, emanating from her.

The stranger who enters the room is more than personality, although personality may have its own impact, whether brashly domineering, slyly insincere, formidably intelligent, sparklingly alert, or even insightful and knowledgeable. Personality may even predominate. It, in turn, may be amplified by physical bulk, litheness of movement, fidgety restlessness, or slothfulness.

Nor does the stranger introduce just a new energy field. Shadowing the physical form, some kind of spiritual aura has been revealed. Those already in the room, were they to calm themselves, put their egos into recess, and half-close the eyes, might sense a concentration of spectral force. Sacred impregnation of the ether contrasts with carnal thereness. Here lies the supreme potential power of living humans.

Intimidation may follow, as with Achilles on the edge of battle. Alternatively, a process of psychic contagion may impose myriad other influences. The presence of the other can inspire, excite, or charm; calm, or unsettle; or distress, deplete, and depress. Psychic contagion is arguably the least understood factor in personal and social relations, and the most underestimated.

This is why a corpse is unnerving. The physical form is there, largely unchanged. But the animating presence has gone, the light switched off. The face is a mask, whether chalklike or heavily made-up, ghastly, quite different from the prosaic outer form of the person who recently was. For, the corpse embodies an unimaginable horror.

The eerie horror that leaves the observer grave, shaken, and mute—that simply cannot be comprehended—is that this person, lying here as a ghostly physical residue, is gone forever. No breath remains to flutter the veil. The body, cold to the transgressive touch, commands deathly silence, awakening consciousness of the vacancy of life, its little consequence when seen in the context of the infinite, eternal void. So it is that a human corpse, in its negative power, is unlike a dead fish lying on a beach. This negative power, in turn, however, implies an opposite, positive truth—two sides of the same coin—a truth of such engaging potency that to remove or deny it, may paralyse the witness.

This brings me to my topic. It is difficult to believe that the concentration of spectral force that, but an hour earlier, animated the human entity that is now a cadaver, simply disappears into nothing. It is said that death is final. But those are mere words.

For the preceding three thousand years in our culture, it was assumed that a soul inhabited the living person. According to most beliefs, it arrived at birth and departed at death. With their last breath, the person ex-pired . The spirit that was breathed out for the last time was the ‘immortal soul’.

To progress further we need to distinguish between two quite different phenomena animating the human psyche. On the one hand, there is vitality, energy, life-force, and ego. On the other, there is soul. The former constellation is mortal. Energy ebbs as a person gets older, or sickens; the ego shrinks, even withers. When the person dies their vitality is snuffed out, extinguished; the door shuts and the life-force is no more. If we reflect on the nature of the human ego, it appears unambiguously mortal. Already in Homer, a distinction is made between the immortal soul, which has no psychological traits, and the vital self, which is mortal.

The novel (and film), Gone with the Wind (1936, 1939), makes the point—a 2014 survey found it the second favourite book of American readers, just behind the Bible. Gone with the Wind contrasts Scarlett O’Hara, as lead character, with Melanie Hamilton. Scarlett is a force of nature, extraordinarily vital and resilient; petulantly childish, selfish, insensitive, and indomitable; all ego, yet shrewd and realistic in practical matters. Melanie is soulful, an exemplar of selfless charity and goodness. She is low on ego, naive, and sickly; whereas Scarlett is low on soul. Scarlett’s vitality seems to have its source less in a love of life’s potential fulfilments, than a tenacious clinging, driven by an assertive, buoyant ego that refuses to be cowed. The inference may be drawn that once the struggle is over nothing will be left—and indeed for Scarlett the life essence is struggle . Scarlett’s one reverent attachment is to her land, Tara, expressed at the end of the novel, if only as a consoling flicker. In general, the animal life force, which Scarlett incarnates to the full, does expire.

With Melanie, the grip on actual living is weak; the influence of her spirit strong and resolute. Most who move within her orbit, hold her in awed respect. She is the unassuming centre of gravity in the novel: her grace, kindness, and incandescent virtue a beacon to others—evocatively portrayed by actress Olivia de Havilland in the film version of the story. It is more difficult to imagine the extinguishing of her spirit when she dies, which she does in the story.

St. Augustine made a distinction between two deaths, the death of the soul and that of the body. The soul may die but the person goes on living—they die twice. As an illustration, those rendered permanently unconscious by severe stroke, with the body still breathing, the heart beating, may give the overwhelming impression to those close to them that the spirit has already absented itself—the animating aura of the person, or the soul, appears to have departed. Vernacular references to the ‘walking dead’, or the ‘living dead’ suggest something similar.

Primo Levi, in If This is a Man (1958), his account of his own experience in Auschwitz, draws an inflexible distinction among humans between those who are saved, and those drowned—a more useful distinction today, it seems to me, than the moralised one between the saved and the damned. The distinction was more obvious in the extreme environment of the Nazi concentration camp. The camp term used for those who had lost the will to live, but were still alive, was Muselmänner :

an anonymous mass, continually renewed and always identical, of non-men who march and labour in silence, the divine spark dead within them, already too empty to really suffer. One hesitates to call them living: one hesitates to call their death death, in the face of which they have no fear, as they are too tired to understand.

J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter is the singular book and film phenomenon of recent times, in terms not just of sales and viewing, but of capturing the imagination of child and adult alike, its scope as vast as its world-wide influence. The seven-volume Harry Potter series posits a similar understanding of the immortal soul, by casting sinister black, wraithlike creatures called Dementors, which chill the atmosphere whenever they are present, making anyone in their vicinity gloomy and unhappy—they represent psychic contagion writ large. When Dementors attack, they attempt to kiss the victim, in order to suck out the soul, through the mouth. Professor Remus Lupin puts it:

You can exist without your soul, you know, as long as your brain and heart are still working. But you’ll have no sense of self anymore, no memory, no…anything. There’s no chance at all of recovery. You’ll just—exist. As an empty shell. And your soul is gone forever…lost.

In a largely post-Christian world, it is telling that Primo Levi and J. K. Rowling should evoke almost identical imagery for the existence of the soul. Auschwitz had swarmed with Dementors.

This reflection may be deepened by considering a work from a much earlier time: Nicolas Poussin’s painting of The Last Supper (1647), the one that belongs to his second series of Seven Sacraments , now hanging in Edinburgh. The Gospel scene provides the vehicle for a Poussin meditation on immortality.

Jesus presides in a gloomy room, dimly lit by a tri-branch oil-lamp with three small flames hanging over the circle of his followers, sprawled around a low table. Poussin’s Jesus is a massive figure, wearing a white tunic covered by a heavy red cloak. He sits erect, with his right hand, the one of command, pointing, it seems, inwards to his own breast. With his other hand he holds up, in front of him, a golden bowl—the cup of fate, about to be fulfilled next morning, in his arrest, trial, and crucifixion. The wine in the bowl is his blood—reflecting the red cloak. The bowl itself is numinous, as if hovering weightless, resonating his presence. It combines with the lamplight above, and Judas over on the far left, to hint at some transfiguration of the wine into charged vapour, which becomes the essential medium of the scene. A curtain hanging behind Jesus shields the breath of spirit.

In John’s account, as painted here, the single disciple to receive bread dipped in wine—the unholy wafer—is Judas, also in red, who is exiting through a door on the left. Poussin depicts Judas in deep shadows with his right hand raised, index finger extended close to his lips, as if motioning himself to silence. In his mouth, the wine has not been transmuted into sacred blood. The gesture, and facial profile, signal two ways: one, angry resentment and malicious deliberate intent; and two, that his own breath has stopped—in shock—sucked out, as if by a Dementor. The remaining eleven followers sprawl around in their dark circle, agog with incomprehension and dread.

But what is the nature of the Jesus presence here? His form is misty, enigmatically obscure—charismatically dominant yet, at the same time, absent. Eyes no longer penetrate the world, seizing it, taking it on. Abstracted, they are already in transition, distant, gazing beyond. His pointing at himself seems in part to anchor his being in the world for one last moment, as if to warn about not taking outer forms literally, for all that matters is what in-dwells, however fleetingly, constrained in the cup of destiny. And what dwells within is independent of the body, and the logic of its vitality. In this paradigmatic scene, it is the force that has taken over the room, possessing Judas with a negative compulsion that chases him out, his own malevolent absence repulsive to himself, a non-man shuffling into oblivion.

We might call it the power of soul , for want of a better expression, that has overwhelmed this darkened room—a soul unique in its charisma, yet representative of the potential of all human souls. Its force has intensified here in inverse proportion as the active Jesus self withdraws (a trope also found in the character of Melanie Hamilton). Infinite expanses of eerie spirit dwelling somewhere beyond are marshalled, attracted, and concentrated here, conjoining with what swells within this man, an infinite wellspring surging up and spilling out, unchained from worldly concerns, timeless, overflowing the cup of destiny. Ordinary everyday chronological time gives way to epic kairos time—one particular Thursday night, long ago in Jerusalem, standing for everywhen, everywhere.

Jesus, in the antechamber of his own death, has set up a magnetic field, charging the atmosphere with eerie other-worldliness, in this darkened upper room, deranging all the others present. Peter reels backwards, blank-eyed; John is frozen in horror, mouth open, fingers tightly clasped (struck with sacred fear); the remaining followers of Jesus are diminished to a frenzied, confused insignificance. And Judas, the only one tuned in to Jesus, in negation, is seized by the discharge of this force, his own animating spirit wrapped up by it, straitjacketed so he can hardly breathe, and propelled out of the room. In his case, nothingness awaits non-being; or, in the cryptic, portentous words John uses to end his account of the scene: ‘And it was night.’

Viewers who manage to immerse themselves in the painting may find themselves captured by an ‘oceanic feeling’, to use Romain Rolland’s term. The way in is through identification with Jesus, which he invites, by pointing at himself. To sit, as it were, inside his skin, is to lose self as he does, the spirit freed, to dwell, hovering in the transformed air, dark with fearful wonder, flowing out in expanded consciousness. The scene contrasts the saved with the drowned.

Romain Rolland writes of a feeling he was never without, of something limitless, unbounded, a sensation of eternity. He suggests that this feeling is the universal source of religious energy, whatever the religion and whatever the particular forms of belief and worship. Tolstoy evokes something very similar in his description of the death of Prince Andrei in War and Peace . The oceanic feeling, Romain Rolland adds, brings no assurance of personal immortality.

Human tragedy is not the only transmitter of the potential embrace of an oceanic beyond. The modern world continues to provide its own meditative devices. There is, for instance, a work of art like this neo-classical painting, its own meditation independent from any saving God, or doctrine of Resurrection. The leitmotif in Harry Potter runs parallel. Poussin and J. K. Rowling both give authority to the existence of an immortal soul.

On another modern front, work, when it takes the form of vocation, is the most commonly practised of meditations. Vermeer, contemporaneously with Poussin, revealed its archetypal sacred quality. In the Dutch painter’s portraits of astronomer, geographer, and lace-maker, solitary individuals all focus silently on the task at hand, with contemplative devotion. Heads bowed over their task—inwardly focussed in secular prayer—they are taken out of themselves, transported into some vast other-worldly domain.

Plato suggested that all things have an ideal form—for every imperfect table there is an archetype, to which the real carpentered creation approximates, to a greater or lesser degree. On those rare occasions on which a novelist, poet, or painter gets the form right a sense of fulfilment and right order follows, for creator, as for reader or viewer. Pride and Prejudice is a near perfect novel, as is The Great Gatsby ; Raphael’s Sistine Madonna a near perfect painting; and Donatello’s Mary Magdalene a near perfect sculpture. Contrariwise, when a story has the wrong ending, or seems unfinished, the reader feels instinctively unsettled, ill at ease, even cheated. When the act of creation is going well, the writer, artist, or composer will usually be unconsciously tuned in to the hidden, completed form. They will intuit when the work is not quite right—something missing here, something awry there, or the ending discordant. They will then await clarification.

In sum, things, including human creations, have their right forms, as if determined by some eternal law, a law that transcends both the creator and the time of creation. Here is another intimation that humans belong to a timeless, higher order. Maybe it is the soul of the writer or artist that is attuned to the inviolable laws inscribed in some metaphysical domain.

The concept of the soul mate, and, with it, soul-mate love, has recurred in the Western tradition since Plato first articulated it around 380 BC. An affinity between two people is signalled, an elective affinity different in constitution and more enduringly powerful than shared interests, compatible personalities, or physical attraction. True, it often fails when subjected to the test of time, and reality, coming to be looked back upon as misguided, or an illusion. But not always. Popular culture alludes to a union of heavenly complexion, created in the stars, one that transcends earthly setback and suffering. And indeed, attitude surveys show that the feeling that She is the One; He is Mr Right continues to project a widespread hope today, even among otherwise sceptical and unsentimental new generations of young adults. Here is further evidence that while God may not have survived, belief in the immortal soul has.

The most direct modern experience of the oceanic feeling is in nature. Out on the sea, adrift on a lake at night, climbing mountains, hiking through forest or bush, camping, resting under a tree, or lying in long grass, the spirit may soar—the person finding release from self, their consciousness expanding to conjoin with an infinite oneness. Romantic painting and literature evoked the sublime catharsis of storm, raging ocean, precipitous cliff, and soaring peak. Kairos conjoins with cosmos, and the human individual is saved from drowning.

Jesus, on the night before his crucifixion, has unconscious knowledge of what will come—he refers to his ‘hour’. He tunes in to what lies in the cup of destiny. Others may too, alerted as they approach the end of their own life path, tuned into another dimension, the kairos dimension, intuiting what is to come by means of premonitions, or dreams. Alternatively, as I have myself witnessed, an unconscious drive may direct someone about to depart, but completely oblivious to the fact, to get their worldly things in order. Here are obscure signs that the script of fate is written on a page kept in a paranormal domain, hovering somewhere behind the chronological line of events charting an individual life from birth to death, shadowing and directing those events.

We might also ask whether some choose their time, or is the cup of destiny inviolable? It may partly be a case of choice for the last of the line of Buddenbrooks, as described by Thomas Mann in his epic depiction of the decline of the bourgeois order in nineteenth-century Germany. Hanno Buddenbrooks dies, aged fifteen, of a lack of will to live. His is an issue of both vitality and soul—a feebleness of soul sapping his vitality. Dying from lack of a will to live is perhaps common, but in people who are eighty-five rather than fifteen. It might, however, equally be said of Hanno that he was chosen from the start to be who he is, and from that moment the path was set.

At the other end of the spectrum from Hanno, some resist impending death. They wrestle with a body that has betrayed them—perhaps, by becoming cancer-ridden and sinking them in unspeakable pain. They cry out: I am not ready to die; I have more to live for . Disturbance of soul may be suggested, in some cases, by such disharmony between the cup of destiny and the mortal will.

Let us now turn our angle of vision through a hundred and eighty degrees. What would sceptics say? In fact, they can counter with one simple axiom: Fear of death gives birth to many a powerful illusion.

The pure atheist, at the extreme, does not believe in God, and goes further, to reject all metaphysics. A counter-faith is set up, a new orthodoxy staked to materialist science, which, it is held, explains everything; or at least will do so, once it advances further along its path. Human beings are but material entities, and when they die, matter rots and decays, returning to dust, as it was in the beginning. Whatever cannot be proved by scientific method and experiment, is mocked as fairy tale and superstition, fantasy food for those who are insecure, or a bit backward. Likewise, the human mind is no more than myriad neuron reactions in the brain; love merely a learnt survival mechanism with origins in the collective behaviour of ants and bees. This brand of hard-core atheism is a form of monomania that is hard for the sensible person to take seriously. It would dismiss Homer, Shakespeare, and Jane Austen as kin to the tooth fairy; Raphael and Poussin as daydream doodlers; and Plato and Freud as speculators in froth.

Excessive reliance on reason is a type of ideological defence against the deep and enigmatic truths. Hard-core atheists appear to display a common human dissociation, that between what a person thinks consciously and their inner knowledge.

I shall restrict myself to the case put by the more moderate and cautious sceptic—Freud himself was one. Freud interpreted the belief in God as a product of anxiety, triggering regression to the early childhood security of having a benevolent and protective father. The fantasy of the all-powerful, invincible father is projected onto God, who is then worshipped, propitiated, and slavishly obeyed. A similar line of thought might be applied to death anxiety. Fear of death motivates the compensatory illusion that the essence of the person survives them.

Let one elaboration serve to illustrate. It is common to hear the life partner of someone who has just died claim that they can, at times, feel the presence of the departed near them. The departed spirit remains nearby, watching over the living. The experience may continue for a few weeks, in rare cases much longer. Freud suggested that mourning involves sadness at the loss of a part of the self, which dies with the loss of someone close—the other had been internalised. This sounds analogous to the reports of those who have had a limb amputated, sometimes feeling that the limb is still there. The sceptic might point out further, that powerful human experience tends to generate vivid memories, but ones that recede and dim with time. All in all, the departed is still present in fantasy, but not reality.

On the other hand, acute human experience, notably death, may leave psychic residues that are more substantial than fantasy imaginings. To give a personal example. I was told after I had bought a house, by the previous owner, that there was a ghost in one of the bedrooms. I took little notice of this until several years later when a friend of one of my daughters, visiting from Europe, slept in that room, and announced the next morning over breakfast that there was a ghost. Not long after, a woman I didn’t know, who claimed to have psychic powers, was looking around the house: she commented that someone had died in that same room—the death, she added, was not a particularly disturbed one. I was reminded of an experience of much greater gravity. Once, when visiting the German city of Munich, I was shocked to see a station at the end of an ordinary train line named Dachau . How, I thought, could a ‘normal’ suburb be built on the site of one of the most notorious Nazi concentration camps, given what traces of unutterable human nightmare must swarm in the air, and contaminate the soil.

I suppose my reflex intuition about Dachau was something akin to the folk wisdom that the spirits of those who suffer a tormented death find it difficult to escape, continuing to haunt the place where they died. The Homeric Greeks believed that the soul hangs round for a few days after death.

Experience points in two opposite directions here. It is common to revisit a place in which fateful personal events had taken place—tragedy, romance, sporting triumph, or even the house in which one grew up—to find it resistant to nostalgic memory, cold and empty, indifferent to the past, as if that past had never happened. The bedroom of a child who has left home, or died, may similarly be most striking for the total absence of the person who once animated it. Maybe the suburb of Dachau is just like any other modern Western community, with a bank, a supermarket, and a children’s playground. The minds of the living may be haunted by ghosts from their own past, but those ghosts will vanish with them, or even before.

Yet, the opposite is equally true. There are places haunted by ghosts from the past—personally, I find it hard to imagine this is not the case with Dachau. There are spaces that resonate with sacred atmosphere—Delphi comes to my mind, as does the inside of Bourges cathedral, the Alhambra in Granada, and some ancient Australian Aboriginal ceremonial grounds.

We are in territory in which there are no proofs. Even in the case of someone living with an ever-present, reassuring sense of eternity, their feeling, as Romain Rolland remarked, does not necessarily imply personal immortality.

Let me press further. In Poussin’s Last Supper , Jesus awakens the sense of eternity in the darkened room, by responding to this moment in his life, and the company he has gathered, shaped in the cup of destiny. Through him, the room is bathed in otherworldly energy. But the oceanic feeling, activated here, depends on what is present within the man himself: an inner concentration of timeless being, infinitely expansive in its pulse. This wrought serenity should not to be confused with ego, for it is the switching off of worldly pride that has helped free the charismatic spirit. The ego fears death; the soul does not. Accordingly, people are drawn to charisma in another, as to a beacon from beyond, signalling that an eternal flame may kindle their own particular spark. The difference in the high drama of Poussin’s Last Supper is that the charisma is blinding in its demonic potency.

Jesus is never free from the sense of eternity within, which includes confidence in personal indestructibility. Except at rare moments, like his agony in the Garden of Gethsemane, which occurred directly after the Last Supper: in the garden, he loses his nerve, crying out that he has been forsaken and wants to evade his fate. This moment serves to underline how different was his normal condition; how much his Gethsemane dispiritedness was at odds with his prevailing temper.

Jesus is known by those who flock to him, including his followers, as the Teacher. The ultimate truth he teaches, as recorded by Mark, is cryptically put in two words: ‘I am!’ Timeless being, he implies, is the still-point around which everything else in life orbits. It is the key to equanimity and fulfilment. This teaching finds its expressive climax at the Last Supper, as painted by Poussin.

Here is the Judas secret. Judas is a man of insight who sees himself as lesser than Jesus. The lack is not a failure of personality, or weakness of character. It is a corrupted or inadequate quality of soul. He is not whom he would like to be, and this recognition drives him mad. In the painting, one can feel the withering of the soul as he absents himself.

There are cases, in contrast with that of Judas, in which the soul is stifled by the housing personality, rather than being flawed in itself. Scarlett O’Hara is deeply moved by the death of Melanie Hamilton, as if by the death of the universal soul, following which she returns home to Tara, to free her own spirit, let it breathe, in hope it may come to life. The Mafia gangster Tony Soprano is enchanted when wild ducks settle in his swimming pool, then devastated when they fly away, never to return. The ducks represented the hope for metamorphosis, out of his violent, sadistically sociopathic self—he is a drowning swimmer, the soul choked by weeds. After the ducks leave, he collapses unconscious in a panic attack—symbolic death.

Achilles set the paradigm of metamorphosis. In battle, he is ego supreme, the rampaging man-slaughtering hero, without pity, driven by a mania of blood-lusting grief and revenge. The gods punish him for his excess. After the battle, Achilles changes into a paragon of courtesy, welcoming the enemy king to his tent, addressing him ‘Aged, magnificent sir!’ and proceeding to weep with him about the tragedy of mortal human life, the loss of those who were close, and the futility of glory and victory. Achilles has found a charismatic, other-worldly aura similar to that emanating from Jesus at his last supper.

Shakespeare’s King Richard II provides a modest variant. As king, Richard lacks judgment: he is proud, wasteful, lazy, irresponsible, and unjust. Once he loses power, however, he switches into a dignified, majestic reflection on life:

Let’s talk of graves, of worms, and epitaphs, Make Dust our paper, and with rainy eyes Write sorrow on the bosom of the earth…. For within the hollow crown That rounds the mortal temples of a king Keeps Death his court;…. I live with bread like you, feel want, taste grief, Need friends.

Once Richard tunes in to these things of ultimate gravity, he stills the audience. He has been transported out of the realm of worldly ambition, achievement, ego, and flawed character. Liberated, he surrenders to timeless truth, embracing it, and he gains the rare power of being able to speak with its voice.

The deep and eternal truths about the human condition are one of the soul’s currencies. The hollow crown within which Death keeps his court, as poetry, somehow neutralises the paralysing potency of Richard’s impending death, and frees the soul, to pass through a door into another order. So does a Bach death Cantata, for instance Ich Habe Genug (I have enough) .

Let me return to the Jesus poise. There is a sceptical psychological interpretation of the feeling of indestructibility. As usual, it is most cogently made by Freud. He suggested that devoted, loving mothers can induce an infallible sense of omnipotence in a favourite child; further, those chosen ones will go on to feel like conquerors throughout their lives, irrespective of what happens to them. Yes, up to a point, and in some, perhaps many cases. Freud’s argument supplies a psychological context. However, the conqueror referred to is the triumphant ego, and has little to do with the soul.

Freud admitted to being religiously unmusical. His interpretation of the omnipotence feeling is limited, deaf to the quality of immortal spirit evoked in some of the greatest Western art—by Homer, Aeschylus, Donatello, Raphael, Shakespeare, Poussin, Vermeer, Bach, Mozart, and Tolstoy. Evoking this quality might well be the deepest purpose of art. High art provides a range of meditations on immortality.

Freud’s psychology also fails to address the eternal laws that govern individual works of art, orchestrating their forms. It has no grip on archetypes. Nor does it explain all that happens when a stranger enters the room.

What I am suggesting, in conclusion, is that Romain Rolland’s abiding sense of eternity beyond the individual is matched by a sense of eternity within. An electric current needs two poles. It is the conjoining of the two, beyond and within, that counters the threat of drowning. This is precisely what Vermeer and Poussin paint.

The belief in the immortal soul has its roots somewhere here.

is Professor Emeritus of Sociology at La Trobe University in Melbourne. Website: johncarrollsociologist.wordpress.com .

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Home — Essay Samples — Religion — Immortality — The Idea of Immortality in Different Mythologies

The Idea of Immortality in Different Mythologies

• Categories: Immortality Mythology

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Published: Nov 5, 2020

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Table of contents

Introduction, immortality in chinese mythology, immortality in japanese mythology, immortality in korean mythology, immortality in irish/celtic mythology, comparing and contrasting immortality asian mythology and irish mythology, personal reflection.

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Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews

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Our Stories: Essays on Life, Death, and Free Will

John Martin Fischer, Our Stories: Essays on Life, Death, and Free Will , Oxford UP, 2009, 184pp., $65.00 (hbk), ISBN 9780195374957.

Reviewed by David Hodgson, Supreme Court of New South Wales

1 Bernard Williams, Problems of the Self (Cambridge University Press, 1973), p. 89.

2 Martha Nussbaum, The Therapy of Desire (Princeton University Press, 1994), p. 203.

3 I have attempted to support such an account in various writings, for example in an essay available at < http://users.tpg.com.au/raeda/website/why.htm > and published in Times Literary Supplement on 6 July 2007.

Wordsworth's Poetical Works

By william wordsworth, wordsworth's poetical works summary and analysis of "ode; intimations of immortality".

Full Title: "Ode; Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood"

The speaker begins by declaring that there was a time when nature seemed mystical to him, like a dream, "Apparelled in celestial light." But now all of that is gone. No matter what he does, "The things which I have seen I now can see no more."

In the second stanza the speaker says that even though he can still see the rainbow, the rose, the moon, and the sun, and even though they are still beautiful, something is different...something has been lost: "But yet I know, where'er I go, / That there hath past away a glory from the earth." The speaker is saddened by the birds singing and the lambs jumping in the third stanza. Soon, however, he resolves not to be depressed, because it will only put a damper on the beauty of the season. He declares that all of the earth is happy, and exhorts the shepherd boy to shout.

In the fourth stanza the speaker continues to be a part of the joy of the season, saying that it would be wrong to be "sullen / While Earth herself in adorning, / And the Children are culling / On every side, / In a thousand valleys far and wide." However, when he sees a tree, a field, and later a pansy at his feet, they again give him a strong feeling that something is amiss. He asks, "Whither is fled the visionary gleam? / Where is it now, the glory and the dream?"

The fifth stanza contains arguably the most famous line of the poem: "Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting." He goes on to say that as infants we have some memory of heaven, but as we grow we lose that connection: "Heaven lies about us in our infancy!" As children this connection with heaven causes us to experience nature's glory more clearly. Once we are grown, the connection is lost. In the sixth stanza, the speaker says that as soon as we get to earth, everything conspires to help us forget the place we came from: heaven. "Forget the glories he hath known, and that imperial palace whence he came."

In the seventh stanza the speaker sees (or imagines) a six-year-old boy, and foresees the rest of his life. He says that the child will learn from his experiences, but that he will spend most of his effort on imitation: "And with new joy and pride / The little Actor cons another part." It seems to the speaker that his whole life will essentially be "endless imitation." In the eighth stanza the speaker speaks directly to the child, calling him a philosopher. The speaker cannot understand why the child, who is so close to heaven in his youth, would rush to grow into an adult. He asks him, "Why with such earnest pains dost thou provoke / The years to bring the inevitable yoke, / Thus blindly with thy blessedness at strife?" In the ninth stanza (which is the longest at 38 lines) the speaker experiences a flood of joy when he realizes that through memory he will always be able to connect to his childhood, and through his childhood to nature.

Hence is a season of calm weather Though inland far we be, Our souls have sight of that immortal sea Which brought us hither, Can in a moment travel thither, And see the Children sport upon the shore, And hear the might water rolling evermore.

In the tenth stanza the speaker harkens back to the beginning of the poem, asking the same creatures that earlier made him sad with their sounds to sing out: "Then sing, ye Birds, sing, sing a joyous song!" Even though he admits that he has lost some of the glory of nature as he has grown out of childhood, he is comforted by the knowledge that he can rely on his memory. In the final stanza the speaker says that nature is still the stem of everything is his life, bringing him insight, fueling his memories and his belief that his soul is immortal: "To me the meanest flower that blows can give / Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears."

"Ode; Intimations of Immortality" is a long and rather complicated poem about Wordsworth's connection to nature and his struggle to understand humanity's failure to recognize the value of the natural world. The poem is elegiac in that it is about the regret of loss. Wordsworth is saddened by the fact that time has stripped away much of nature's glory, depriving him of the wild spontaneity he exhibited as a child.

As seen in "The world is too much with us," Wordsworth believes that the loss stems from being too caught up in material possessions. As we grow up, we spend more and more time trying to figure out how to attain wealth, all the while becoming more and more distanced from nature. The poem is characterized by a strange sense of duality. Even though the world around the speaker is beautiful, peaceful, and serene, he is sad and angry because of what he (and humanity) has lost. Because nature is a kind of religion to Wordsworth, he knows that it is wrong to be depressed in nature's midst and pulls himself out of his depression for as long as he can.

In the seventh stanza especially, Wordsworth examines the transitory state of childhood. He is pained to see a child's close proximity to nature being replaced by a foolish acting game in which the child pretends to be an adult before he actually is. Instead, Wordsworth wants the child to hold onto the glory of nature that only a person in the flush of youth can appreciate.

In the ninth, tenth and eleventh stanzas Wordsworth manages to reconcile the emotions and questions he has explored throughout the poem. He realizes that even though he has lost his awareness of the glory of nature, he had it once, and can still remember it. The memory of nature's glory will have to be enough to sustain him, and he ultimately decides that it is. Anything that we have, for however short a time, can never be taken away completely, because it will forever be held in our memory.

Wordsworth’s Poetical Works Questions and Answers

The Question and Answer section for Wordsworth’s Poetical Works is a great resource to ask questions, find answers, and discuss the novel.

To a Butterfly by William Wordsworth

D reminds him of forgotten days

Explain the philosophical, socio-cultural and religious concerns in the Tintern abbey

This is a pretty detailed question for this short space. You can actually find what you need at the GradeSaver link below:

https://www.gradesaver.com/wordsworths-poetical-works/study-guide/summary-lines-composed-a-few-miles-above-tintern-abbey

Differences and similarities between London and London 1802?

I know the poem London 1802. Is there a separate poem called only London?

Study Guide for Wordsworth’s Poetical Works

Wordsworth's Poetical Works study guide contains a biography of William Wordsworth, literature essays, quiz questions, major themes, characters, and a full summary and analysis.

• About Wordsworth's Poetical Works
• Wordsworth's Poetical Works Summary
• Character List

Essays for Wordsworth’s Poetical Works

Wordsworth's Poetical Works essays are academic essays for citation. These papers were written primarily by students and provide critical analysis of William Wordsworth's poetry and prose.

• Wordsworth and Blake: The Plight of Mankind
• Back to the Future: Wordsworth's "Ode to Duty" and "Elegiac Stanzas"
• The Union of Opposing Elements: Poems by Wordsworth and Coleridge
• The Connection between the Natural Scene and the Speaker's State of Mind in William Wordsworth's "I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud"
• Blake and Wordsworth Versus Society

Lesson Plan for Wordsworth’s Poetical Works

• About the Author
• Study Objectives
• Common Core Standards
• Introduction to Wordsworth's Poetical Works
• Relationship to Other Books
• Bringing in Technology
• Notes to the Teacher
• Related Links
• Wordsworth's Poetical Works Bibliography

E-Text of Wordsworth’s Poetical Works

Wordsworth's Poetical Works e-text contains the full text of William Wordsworth's poetry and prose.

• Table of Contents
• A Slumber Did My Spirit Seal
• Composed Upon Westminster Bridge
• I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud
• It Is a Beauteous Evening

Wikipedia Entries for Wordsworth’s Poetical Works

• Introduction