Immortality

When we speak about the real, we are using a word derived from the Latin word res, meaning thing. The common designator “real estate” points to the most basic object of ownership, the fixed, permanent, physical, and immovable. When we use a phrase like “airy-fairy,” we mean the poetic, the imaginary—the insubstantial products of the human mind that cannot be pinned down because they’re not “concrete.” It is thus rather curious that the belief in some kind of immortality is so ancient and persistent. This belief takes various forms. In Asia the body is thought to perish but the soul or essence to move on, taking up another body to inhabit, unless the person has succeeded in escaping the Wheel of Karma and therefore rises to some higher realm. In the West we have a curious structure of beliefs. The soul is held to be immortal; the body dies; the soul exists in an imperfect manner after death; but at the end of time there is also a resurrection of bodies.

When the philosophers get involved, things get more complicated. Aristotle had the idea that if anything survives after we die, it is some “intellectual core.” As best as I can make out, this view is incompatible with Aristotle’s general scheme of things—the scheme of matter-form substantiality in which only the combination of the two is real; unformed matter and immaterial form exist in a kind of limbo called potentiality. Aristotle can be interpreted to say that personality remains in that surviving “intellectual core”—or that what survives is an impersonal intellect, hence the person disappears with death. In Plato’s view the survival of the soul is derived from its very definition; the soul is defined as simple; the simple cannot be corrupted because it has no parts, hence it is immortal. That is a neat argument, but beyond that it throws no light.

The understanding of the man on the street—and I class myself with him—is that immortality is meaningless unless we, ourselves, personally survive and have capacities for thought, memory, feeling, will, and action. Thus immortality for me is essentially linked to consciousness, and by consciousness I mean all of its usual tooling. In theories of reincarnation there is a radical forgetting between death and birth. Functionally that sounds equivalent to materialism for me unless more is asserted. The essential something that I am is lost in the process. Therefore this kind of “survival” lacks content and meaning.

I think that belief in immortality arose because, without it, all meaning disappears. Immortality is neither narcissistic nor a self-pleasing delusion. It is a necessary condition for any kind of meaning to be present at all. Consider. We live, strive, suffer, and hope; we love others, we work together, struggle, and share joys. What is the point of all this if it leads to nothing? Why did my Mother live, love, struggle, and suffer? And yes, she did suffer a great deal. What was the meaning of her efforts, the love she dispensed to four generations, the sacrifices she made—if she just vanished, after all that, without a trace? So that immortal genes could propagate—as some would have it? So that immortal memes could pass through her mind? If her existence is considered terminal, all of her acts had meaning in a process of life viewed impersonally, but she did not.

Life takes its deepest meaning from its directional flow, its end-seeking character. All of its moment to moment experiences also take their meaning from the onward flow. If the end of life turns out to be nothing—disappearance, cessation, vanishing—then the entire process loses its meaning as well. We understand this in our depths but, faced with the rude fact of death, we find it abruptly contradicted. It doesn’t take too much puzzling about the matter to conclude that the answer to this process must lie hidden in another dimension, on that side of the borderzone.

This line of thought is of the very essence of at least personal philosophy. The public, professional forms, of course, range over a much wider field of concepts; passions run high, schools compete, egos strive, etc. I am an old man at present, over seventy, so it might be thought that this sort of thing gets urgent when you’re nearing the ultimate passage. But, I must confess, this kind of thought preoccupied me even when I was a mere youngster in the Army and quite a wild man and about as far removed from philosophy as you can get.