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.

Cyclists in a professional race riding in rainy conditions. The leading cyclist in a blue jersey raises his arms in victory, with other cyclists closely following behind on the wet road. Everyone is wearing helmets and sunglasses for protection.

Sports and games

Performance-enhancing vices

Selfishness channels ambition, envy drives competition, pride aids the win. Does it take a bad person to be a good athlete?

Sabrina Little

A colourful, abstract image featuring a large, black and white bird in flight. The background is a swirling mix of purple, orange, and yellow hues. A small figure of a child walks in the distance, casting a long shadow.

Ageing and death

Peregrinations of grief

A friend and a falcon went missing. In pain, I turned to ‘Slaughterhouse-Five’ – and found a new vision of sorrow and time

Black and white image of Japanese soldiers in battle gear marching with a Rising Sun Flag, superimposed with large Japanese calligraphy characters on a plain background.

Nations and empires

Chastising little brother

Why did Japanese Confucians enthusiastically support Imperial Japan’s murderous conquest of China, the homeland of Confucius?

Shaun O’Dwyer

Abstract artwork featuring geometric shapes, primarily red and black triangles, against a white background. Russian text is interspersed, with a red triangle pointing rightward and a large white circle on the right. Various smaller shapes and text elements are scattered around.

Quantum theory

Quantum dialectics

When quantum mechanics posed a threat to the Marxist doctrine of materialism, communist physicists sought to reconcile the two

Jim Baggott

A historical map of Southern Europe, including parts of Austria, Hungary, Italy, Turkey, and the Balkans. Features cities such as Milan, Vienna, Rome, and Constantinople, with regions distinguished by different colours. Sea names such as the Adriatic and Mediterranean are also visible.

A United States of Europe

A free and unified Europe was first imagined by Italian radicals in the 19th century. Could we yet see their dream made real?

Fernanda Gallo

Illustration of soldiers in action, with one leading the charge and another crawling forward. Both wear military uniforms with helmets and carry rifles. The background is a vibrant red, enhancing the sense of urgency and movement.

Stories and literature

On Jewish revenge

What might a people, subjected to unspeakable historical suffering, think about the ethics of vengeance once in power?

Shachar Pinsker

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

PDF Download

Download this essay in PDF .

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

Follow 1000-Word Philosophy on Facebook , Twitter and subscribe to receive email notifications of new essays at 1000WordPhilosophy.com

Share this:, 8 thoughts on “ is immortality desirable ”.

Pingback: The Meaning of Life: What’s the Point? – 1000-Word Philosophy: An Introductory Anthology
Pingback: Meaning in Life: What Makes Our Lives Meaningful? – 1000-Word Philosophy: An Introductory Anthology
Pingback: Psychological Approaches to Personal Identity: Do Memories and Consciousness Make Us Who We Are? – 1000-Word Philosophy: An Introductory Anthology
Pingback: Are We Animals? Animalism and Personal Identity – 1000-Word Philosophy: An Introductory Anthology
Pingback: Pascal’s Wager: A Pragmatic Argument for Belief in God – 1000-Word Philosophy: An Introductory Anthology
Pingback: What Is It To Love Someone? – 1000-Word Philosophy: An Introductory Anthology
Pingback: Is Death Bad? Epicurus and Lucretius on the Fear of Death – 1000-Word Philosophy: An Introductory Anthology
Pingback: Online Philosophy Resources Weekly Update - Daily Nous

Comments are closed.

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 .

Sign up for the Live Science daily newsletter now

Get the world’s most fascinating discoveries delivered straight to your inbox.

"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.

A photo of a Hydra, the small invertebrates that could be immortal.

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.

Pregnancy may speed up 'biological aging,' study suggests

Chemicals that make babies smell sweet and teens smell 'goat-like' revealed

'Increased evidence that we should be alert': H5N1 bird flu is adapting to mammals in 'new ways'

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
Cite Icon Cite
Permissions Icon Permissions

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.

If one lives intensely, the time comes when sleep means bliss. If one loves intensely, the time comes when death seems bliss…The life I want is a life I could not endure in eternity. It is a life of love and intensity, suffering and creation that makes life worthwhile and death welcome. —( Kaufman , 1963 , p. 372) No animal endowed with much power of memory ought to live forever, or could want to, I should maintain; for the longer it lives, the more that just balance between novelty and repetition, which is the basis of zest and satisfaction, must be upset in favor of repetition, hence of monotony and boredom. Old animals and old people, in principle (exceptions are in degrees only) are bored animals and bored people. This is not essentially a glandular or circulatory phenomenon. It is psychological: one has felt and done most of the things that must be felt and done so many times before. As Jefferson wrote to a friend: “I am tired of putting my clothes on every morning and taking them off every evening.” Thus, he concluded, the Creator prepares us for death. Thus indeed. That many old people are spry and eager only proves that their chronological age gives but a rough index of psychological age. Thus all complaint against death itself seems misguided. Death is needed for the solution of an aesthetic problem, how memory is to be reconciled with zest. —( Hartshorne , 1958 , p. 387)

1. Introduction

Since the inception of philosophy, we have been interested in questions about death and immortality. In this “overview” paper, I will begin by distinguishing various different notions of immortality. I will then present three challenges to the idea that any kind of immortality could be appealing to us. These challenges come in part from a classic article by Bernard Williams ( 1973 , reprinted in Fischer, ed., 1993 , pp. 71–92), but they are also raised by various other philosophers. In this discussion I will focus primarily on a certain salient kind of immortality; antecedently, this sort of immortality would seem to be most promising candidate to present itself as choiceworthy (were it feasible) or, at least, appealing to human beings. I shall then sketch various ways of responding to the challenges. I shall defend the contention that certain kinds of immortality could be appealing to human beings; that is, I shall argue against the view of the Immortality Curmudgeons that immortality (in any of its forms) is necessarily not of any positive value (or in any way appealing) to human beings.

2. Various Kinds of Immortality

One might think that immortality is simply living forever. But, as usual in philosophy, the issues are a bit more complicated. First, one might distinguish between actually living forever (but with the possibility of dying) and necessarily living forever (that is, living forever without the possibility of dying). As far as I know, the first philosopher to make this distinction in print was H. Steele, who made the distinction between “contingent body-bound immortality” and “necessary body-bound immortality” (Steele, 1976 ; also, see Burley, 2009a ). A second distinction has to do with the immortal individual’s epistemic status, and it cuts across the first distinction. That is, it is possible that one be either contingently or necessarily immortal and not know it; it is also possible that one indeed knows that one is immortal (either contingently or necessarily). For the purposes of this paper, I will focus primarily on necessary immortality in which the individual knows that he is necessarily immortal; one might call this “robust immortality,” although I will generally dispense with this term and simply use “immortality.”

Many different kinds of immortality have been discussed in literature and philosophy. (For a taxonomy and discussion, see Fischer and Curl, 1996 , reprinted in Fischer, ed., 2009 , pp. 93–102.) Some conceptions of immortality are “nonatomistic”; they posit the fusion of the individual with another individual or individuals. In contrast, I shall fix on “atomistic” conceptions of immortality. Whereas some atomistic conceptions of immortality appear to involve “serial” lives (such as in certain Hindu and Buddhist conceptions of reincarnation), of greater interest to me in this piece will be atomistic, nonserial conceptions.

Even so, there are many different ways of conceptualizing such immortality. I shall assume that the immortality in question is bodily immortality. Additionally, I assume that the individual in question is biologically “frozen” at some age understood as the biological “prime of life.” Bernard Williams took this to be age forty-two (which was his age when he delivered the lecture at Berkeley that was the basis for Williams, 1973 ). Williams says, “If one had to spend eternity at any age, that seems an admirable age to spend it at” (Williams, in Fischer, ed., 1993 , p. 81). It is interesting that Todd May chooses a rather earlier age as relevant—early to mid-thirties (May, 2009 ). Indeed, May says, “For some, this might be too old: mid-twenties may capture the point of physical and intellectual peak” (May, 2009 , p. 55). The point is to imagine that by some means or another one is in possession of one’s biological features and capacities at a relatively healthy point, and although one of course ages chronologically, one does not “age” biologically. (This does not imply that one is not subject to the consequences of risky choices, which may indeed result in temporary or even permanent physical consequences. One might worry that if physical injury is possible, then, given an infinite period of time, it would be highly likely that one would become crippled to the point of incapacity. I don’t have the space here to address such worries adequately; one could however imagine the possibility of regeneration of biological health after a certain period of diminished capacity.)

The fact that one would not be subject to biological aging and deterioration is obviously important. Although there are different versions of the myth, in the ancient Greek myth of Tithonus, the youth is granted eternal life but, lamentably, not eternal youth. Similarly, in Gulliver’s Travels , Jonathan Swift depicts the struldbrugs as immortal but subject to biological aging. The struldbrugs begin their biological decay at around age thirty, and this eventually leads to blindness and other maladies of old age. Reflections on Tithonus and the struldbrugs should make it evident that an immortality that involves biological aging and deterioration would be anything but desirable.

In what follows I shall focus mainly on robust immortality of the atomistic, nonserial sort in which the individual somehow is ensured eternal “youth”; that is, the individual is biologically in the prime of life, is healthy, and does not deteriorate biologically over time. It is plausible that this sort of immortality is the best candidate for being of value to human beings. Also, I shall assume that the individual knows, not just that he will necessarily live forever, but also that his immortality is atomistic and that he will not be subject to biological aging.

3. Three Challenges to the Appeal of Immortality

It will be helpful to employ Bernard Williams’s framework for analyzing the potential desirability or value to humans of immortality, supplemented by an additional challenge. More specifically, Williams can be interpreted as posing two challenges to the appeal or value of immortality for human beings. (Williams, 1973 ; for discussion, see Fischer, 1994 ; and Fischer and Curl, 1996 ) These two challenges might be taken to presuppose two conditions on the appeal to us of any proposed conception of immortal existence: the identity condition and the attractiveness condition. Williams’s view is that any proposed story that purportedly presents (say) my immortal existence must fail to satisfy at least one of these conditions: either the story does not depict the life of an individual who is genuinely identical to me, or it does not depict an attractive life.

I believe that it is analytically helpful to introduce a third condition: the “recognizability” condition. That is, many philosophers object to certain depictions of immortality as not presenting the story of an individual who is leading a “recognizably human life.” This sort of objection might be thought to fit under either Williams’s identity challenge or his attractiveness challenge. For the purposes of this paper, I will break the challenges into three: identity, recognizability, and attractiveness. So the Immortality Curmudgeon is here interpreted as contending that any story purporting to present my immortal existence either does not tell my story, or it does not tell the story of any human being at all, or the life it depicts is not attractive to me (although arguably it is the story of a recognizably human being: me).

Let us begin with the challenge to the identity condition. With respect to what appears to be a version of this condition, Williams says:

The state in which I survive should be one that, to me looking forward, will be adequately related, in the life it presents, to those aims I now have in wanting to survive at all. That is a vague formula, and necessarily so, for what exactly that relation will be must depend to some extent on what kind of aims and (as one might say) prospects for myself I now have. What we can say is that since I am propelled forward into longer life by categorical desires, what is promised must hold out some hopes for those desires…at least this seems demanded, that any image I have of those future desires should make it comprehensible to me how in terms of my character they could be my desires. (Williams in Fischer, ed., 1993 , p. 85)

The concern then is that in an infinite life, it is plausible that one’s “categorical desires”—desires that propel one forward and are not simply conditional on continuing to live (such as the desire to be wellnourished if one continues to live, and so forth)—will change substantially (and, presumably, entirely). If an individual depicted in a story of infinitely long life has substantially or completely different categorical desires from mine now, how can this be my story? Why would I care especially about this individual (in the way in which we care especially about ourselves?

The second challenge—or set of challenges—comes from the worry that any story of an individual who lives an infinitely long life would not be the story of an individual who is recognizably human—sufficiently similar to us that we can understand the life as “human.” (Of course, a positive answer to the identity challenge would entail a positive answer to the recognizability challenge, but not vice versa.) Williams suggests a version of the recognizability worry when he contends that EM (Elina Makropulos, who has taken an elixir of eternal life and is “now” chronologically 342 years old) might lack any coherent character at all. (EM is a character in a story originally presented in a 1922 play by Karel Čapek, The Makropulos Case , and also told in a 1926 opera by Leos Janacek) That is, if the categorical desires are not allowed to change over time, her character is in danger of falling apart or disintegrating. If the categorical desires are allowed to change, then we are back to the identity problem sketched above.)

But there are various other worries that can arguably be considered versions of the recognizability challenge. Some have argued that aspects of the content of our lives depend precisely on the fact that our lives are finite; on this view, a life without borders would be “indeterminate” or “formless” (Heidegger, 1927 ; May, 2009 ) Perhaps a related worry is that our lives are structured essentially by anxieties (either conscious or unconscious) about death. One might say that our lives are in this way fraught (May, 2009 ). If the possibility of death is taken away, arguably this also changes the fundamental experiential nature of our lives—and perhaps our deepest values as well (Nussbaum, 1994 , 1999 , and forthcoming ).

Similarly, some have contended that our lives are “narratives” and that narratives must have endings; these philosophers conclude that since the accounts of infinite lives could not have endings, these accounts would not be “narratives,” strictly speaking (May, 2009 , pp. 70–72). Finally, some philosophers have simply pointed out that infinity is fundamentally different from finite magnitudes, and thus we cannot extrapolate from features of finite lives to those of infinite lives (Burley, 2009a ). They would point out that, even if certain features would obtain in very, very long finite lives, there is no guarantee that they would obtain in infinite lives. We might then worry that we cannot even get a grasp on infinite lives; we cannot understand them well enough even to judge whether they are recognizably human.

A final challenge puts aside all the “recognizability” worries and simply posits that an infinitely long life would necessarily be unattractive. Perhaps the most salient version of this worry comes from Williams, who suggests that even if EM can be understood to have a determinate and recognizably human character, she would inevitably become hopelessly bored and alienated over the course of time. He says about EM:

Her trouble was, it seems, boredom: a boredom connected with the fact that everything that could happen and make sense to one particular human being of 42 had already happened to her. Or, rather, all the sorts of things that could make sense to one woman of a certain character. (Williams, in Fischer, ed., 1993 , p. 82)

Williams’s argument in defense of the necessary unattractiveness claim is (roughly) a trilemma. Over time in an immortal life, the individual will either change his or her character (and categorical desires), or not. If the former, then evidently the story will not meet the identity criterion. If the latter, there are two possibilities. If experience does not affect the individual, he or she will become alienated and completely disengaged from life. But if one is indeed affected by experience without the possibility of that experience changing one’s basic character, one will inevitably become bored.

4. The Identity Challenge

On Williams’s view, we are propelled into the future by “categorical desires”—such as the desire to raise a family, write a book, help the needy, save the planet from environmental destruction, make a fortune, find a true love, master the Goldberg Variations, and so forth. These are distinguished from “conditional desires,” such as the desire to be healthy, if alive, and so forth. Williams claims that it is the thwarting of categorical desires that makes death a bad thing for an individual who dies; thus, he contends that a life without any categorical desires would not be worth living. But equally problematic, it might seem, would be a future in which the categorical desires have changed substantially or even completely. Williams contends that a story of an individual with substantially different categorical desires would not be a story of me in a sense relevant to my special concern for my own future.

But the issues here are complicated. Suppose I now like to “challenge” myself in lots of ways—in work as well as hobbies. For example, I undertake many challenging commitments to write, lecture, and travel all across the world, and in my spare time I pursue “extreme sports,” such as rock climbing and skydiving as well as world travel to exotic destinations. (The reader will note that this is obviously an entirely hypothetical scenario!) Even so, I might recognize that over time my preferences will change, so that toward the end of my career and life I will wish to be much more “conservative,” undertaking less travel, fewer challenging commitments, and so forth. This is entirely “normal,” and it does not in any way etiolate my concern for my future, so envisaged. I can also entertain the possibilities that I will undergo significant and even radical changes in my ethical, political, and religious beliefs without diminishing my current concern for my future self. If this is the situation in a finite life, why not also in an immortal life (Fischer, 1994 )?

Employing the terminology of Frederik Kaufman, we might distinguish between the “thick self” and the “thin self” (Kaufman, 1999 and 2000 ). The thick self includes the categorical desires, whereas the thin self does not. One might think of the thick self as similar to the “moral self” or “moral personality” in the literature on autonomy, whereas the thin self is more like the “metaphysical self” (a self that can persist through changes in personality). Kaufman argues that invoking the distinction between thick and thin selves can help us to explain the intuitive asymmetry in our attitudes toward prenatal and posthumous nonexistence. On his view, we care about living longer than we actually do because we can envisage the thick self continuing at least for some period; but we are indifferent to having been born significantly earlier because the thick self could not have come into existence significantly earlier. After all, any individual who came into existence significantly earlier than I did would not have been me, thickly construed. (Here I will not pause to evaluate the inference from the previous sentence to the clause just before it; but, as I (and my coauthor) have argued elsewhere, the second sentence—with the merely subjunctive “would not”—does not entail the first—with “could not”: Fischer and Speak, 2000 ). And note that this approach to the asymmetry problem seems to apply nicely to the identity worry. If we care about our thick selves, and if immortal life would inevitably cause a substantial or total change in our thick selves, then we would not wish to be immortal—the focus of our care would necessarily be extinguished.

But elsewhere I have argued against the thesis that our commonsense asymmetry in attitudes between prenatal and posthumous nonexistence can be explained by reference to the contention that we care only about our thick selves (and that our thick selves could not have come into being significantly earlier) (Fischer and Speak, 2000 ; and Fischer, 2006b ). Note, for instance, that an individual adopted as an infant might regret that he was not raised by his biological parents; but this regret cannot be accommodated on the view that we only care about our thick selves. Also, it does not seem fundamentally confused (in the way envisaged by the proponents of the thick self view) to regret not having lived in a different era entirely. In these cases it seems that we can coherently care about our thin selves; our regret is that our thin selves did not get “filled out” in certain ways.

And a similar point would seem to apply to the identity challenge. That is, if I am correct in supposing that I can indeed care about my future self, even when I envisage significant (or even total) changes in my categorical desires, then it seems, again, that I do not only care only about my thick self. Arguably, I care about my thin self—my metaphysical self—in that special way that I care about my own future. This would appear to diffuse the identity challenge, insofar as it is based on the notions that I only care about my thick self that over time my thick self (categorical desires) will change significantly.

It might, however, be helpful to pause to make a distinction here. That is, we should distinguish between the special way in which I care about my own future and its being the case that that future is desirable. I suppose that a proponent of a version of the identity challenge could concede that it is possible to care in the special way about the thin self, but still not deem it desirable to continue as a mere thin or “bare” self through significant changes of categorical desires. (This then pushes the objection toward the “attractiveness challenge.”) But, as I contended above, we do appear to identify with, care about, and also judge desirable futures in which our categorical desires change considerably. It may be that what matters to us is that these changes take place “organically,” as it were, or via certain processes, rather than others. For example, one might feel the challenge strongly if one envisages that the changes in categorical desires are brought about via unconsented-to brainwashing, subliminal advertising, and even direct manipulation of the brain. But the crucial point is that it would be dialectically infelicitous to extrapolate from these special cases to the general claim that we would not ever find it desirable that our thin self continue to live through significant thick-self changes. That is, it is does not follow from the undesirability of such scenarios that we could not judge it desirable to live infinitely long lives, where our categorical desires are envisaged as changing organically (or even via certain radical and abrupt conversion experiences).

5. The Recognizability Challenge

In a sense, the recognizability challenge is even more “basic” than the identity challenge, since it contends that no story of an immortal life could be the story of a recognizable human life (much less the story of me). So if a story fails to meet the recognizability challenge, then (simply in virtue of this failure) it could not meet the identity or attractiveness challenges. The recognizability worry comes in different forms, and it will be helpful to address them individually.

5.1 Borders and Content

Some would argue that, in various more specific ways, an infinitely long life would lack the borders that define human life as we know it. One version of this worry makes the point that in general a thing is what it is at least in part because of its borders. So a particular sculpture is what it is in part because of its borders, a particular carpet is what it is because of its borders, and so forth. If one expands the borders of the carpet, one presumably generates a different carpet; and it might be argued that at a certain point, the imaginative expansion yields no carpet at all. Similarly, many have thought that an infinitely long life simply could not have any determinate content—it would not be a life of an individual human being at all. Todd May gives particularly vivid expression to this worry:

For humans, an immortal life would be shapeless. It would be without borders or contours. Its colour would fade, and we could anticipate the fading from the outset. An immortal life would be impossible to make my life, or your life. Because it would drag on endlessly, it would, sooner or later, just be a string of events lacking all form. It would become impossible to distinguish background from foreground. (May, 2009 , pp. 68–69)

Not so fast, though! First, note that extending one dimension of an object or process to infinity does not imply extending all dimensions similarly. So, for example, one can presumably imagine an infinitely long electrocardiogram (Fischer, 2006a ). From the fact that its “horizontal dimension” extends to infinity, it does not follow that at any particular time the electrocardiogram is amorphous. There are objects and processes that can have a determinate shape, even though (say) one dimension goes to infinity, and from the fact that we allow one dimension to extend to infinity, it does not follow that we must allow all the dimension to extend similarly.

Now, it may well be the case that, for some kinds of objects, a change in any ofthe borders of a particular object of that kind will imply that it is a different particular object. So, presumably a change in the borders of a particular sculpture—especially a change of a significant sort—will result in a different particular sculpture. Further, I doubt whether we would even have a sculpture (or, say, a carpet), if any of its spatial boundaries were allowed to extend infinitely. But it does not follow that all objects and processes are similar in this respect. For example, the set of positive integers has various determinate features, although it is infinitely large. So it would be a spurious transition to extrapolate from (say) carpets and sculptures to (for example) electrocardiograms and human lives.

Think of the dialectic this way. Arguably, at least, there are things and processes that can have determinate structure or content while having aspects or dimensions that are infinite. There are other objects that, by their very nature, arguably cannot have certain infinite aspects or dimensions while maintaining their integrity. The question then becomes whether life is in the first or second subclass. Given this way of conceptualizing matters, it would clearly be dialectically unfair to note that there are things such as sculptures and carpets that appear to fall into the second subclass and then precipitously to conclude that life could not have an infinitely long temporal dimension! That would indeed be too fast. Of course, this way of framing the dialectic presupposes that there might indeed be some things or processes that have at least one infinite dimension but still have determinate structure or content; my point is simply that does not follow from the existence of examples that appear to fall into the subclass that does not admit of infinity along one dimension that all cases must be similar in this respect. (For a similar analysis of the dialectic concerning whether death can be a bad thing for an individual despite not involving unpleasant experiences, see Fischer, 1997 .)

5.2 Human Lives Are Fraught

This worry comes in various specific forms. Sometimes it is put in terms of the essential nature of human experience. The idea here is that it is essential to our experience of life (in any recognizably human life) that we are aware—either consciously or somehow unconsciously—of its finitude. The possibility of death “haunts” us—either explicitly or implicitly. In the absence of this quality of being “fraught,” life would lose its preciousness—its urgency and its intense beauty (as well, perhaps, as its capacity for poignant tragedy.) Without this structural feature of human experience, it might seem that we would not have genuinely human experience. Todd May gives more concrete expression to this sort of worry as follows:

We learn as we grow older that one cannot be everything one wants to be. One must make choices. I would have liked to be a novelist, and have even written a couple of manuscripts. However, I could not become a novelist and a philosopher, and circumstances led me towards the latter. All of us, at some point or another, let go of futures we have envisaged for ourselves… If we were immortal, we would not face those choices. Our lives would not be constrained by the choices we do make, because we would be able to make others. I could be a philosopher and then be a novelist. I could ride a bike from New York to Arizona, as I once hoped I would…In this sense, it would eliminate one of the great sadnesses of life: regret. It would not eliminate all regret, of course. I could still, for instance, do things to others that I would come to regret. However, there is a certain and devastating kind of regret that immortality would eliminate …associated with who or what one tried to become or, better, allowed oneself to try to become. To fail to become something one works or trains or educates oneself for is a disappointment. But it pales in comparison to the regret of wondering whether one could have been that if one had only taken one’s chances. If we were immortal, we would not be subject to those regrets….There would always be time to try something….Personal relationships would change as well. They would become less serious, since less would be at stake. The bonds between parents and children would probably slacken if children were no long dependent on their parents for survival….The same would be true of friendships. The activities I perform with a friend, the confidences I share, the vulnerability I display, the competition we provide for each other: all these things could still happen, but their significance would be diminished by the limitations my immortality places on my ability to sacrifice for him. Moreover, given an infinite amount of time, there would always be the possibility of the same kind of friendship with someone else: if not sooner, then later. There would always be time. (May, 2009 , pp. 60–63)

Similarly, Martha Nussbaum states:

[T]he intensity and dedication with which very many human activities are pursued cannot be explained without reference to the awareness that our opportunities are finite, that we cannot choose these activities indefinitely many times. In raising a child, in cherishing a lover, in performing a demanding task of work or thought or artistic creation, we are aware, at some level, of the thought that each of these efforts is structured and constrained by time. (Nussbaum, 1994 , p. 229)

Nussbaum has also emphasized the importance of finitude and death for human values. In particular, certain virtues—such as courage—seem to be defined at least in part by the way in which the individual confronts the possibility of death (Nussbaum, 1994 , 1999 , and forthcoming ).

But I am not entirely convinced that such considerations show that an immortal life could not be recognizably human in the relevant respects. Start with a virtue such as courage. Why exactly is death (or an awareness of the possibility of death) required for courage? Why couldn’t one show courage in the face of a whole range of terrible dangers, such as pain, dismemberment and/or disability, separation, loneliness, depression, and so forth? Courage, it seems to me, involves persistence despite an awareness of significant danger; but I do not think the dangers in question need to include death. Of course, for an immortal being the precise ways in which courage would be instantiated might well not be the same ways in which courage actually is instantiated in our finite lives. But it does not follow that the relevant behavior would not be courage (that is, it would not follow that the behavior would not instantiate the crucial feature of persistence in light of danger). I could contend that similar considerations apply to the other virtues.

One might also ask why human life would inevitably lose its urgency and beauty if one were immortal. Certain tasks do not lose their difficulty in an immortal life—it would still be extraordinarily difficult to write a great novel or a lovely poem, to paint a beautiful picture, to establish decisively that causal determinism is compatible with moral responsibility, to master Bach’s Two-Part Inventions, or to run a four-minute mile (to name just a few tasks). Merely having more time does not make any of these tasks easy; also, to accomplish any challenging task would still be rewarding, even in an immortal life. With respect to other tasks, the bar might well go up in an immortal life. Given higher expectations that come with the opportunity for more attempts or more experience and skill, challenges will certainly remain.

Now, as May contends, in an immortal life at least we can sincerely try everything we truly care about. (Of course, as Jens Johansson has pointed out to me, we must believe that the actions in question are available to us; so, for example, I cannot try to be the first to swim the English Channel, insofar as I know that someone else has already done so.) I certainly grant that immortality would not be just like our finite lives. In an infinite life perhaps we can indeed try everything (or everything that might matter to us). Butthere would still be many and robust opportunities for failure in implementing our attempts. It does seem that an immortal life could be filled with challenges that would render it on balance sufficiently similar to finite life that we would deem it recognizably human.

Various features of our personal relationships would not change, under the assumption of immortality. Imagine that one is deeply in love with someone. Although one can certainly try to have a close and rewarding relationship with her, it takes two to tango, as they say. Further, the mere addition of an infinite amount of time does not diminish the pain, frustration, and loneliness attendant upon rejection; nor, if my own past experience is any guide, does it make it very likely that the rejections will (even eventually) turn into embraces. More time might simply provide more opportunities for rejection, separation, and despair. Further, we human beings seem to be acutely sensitive to what is going on with us now; arguably, we also are keenly attuned to what we take will happen to us in the future. But the mere thought—even if I had it—that eventually (say, after four hundred thousand years or a million years) my beloved will accept me (for awhile) does not provide much comfort to me now. If one is in pain or depression now, it is hardly comforting to know that eventually and given enough time one will feel better. We human beings are, as it were, psychologically attuned to the present and relatively near future. (Of course, someone might contend that this attunement is an artifact of our mortality. A less sketchy defense of my suggestion here would require serious consideration of the possibility that our psychological attunements would change under very different conditions, such as immortality.)

Even in an infinite life, there could be very long stretches in which I don’t have what I want—I am separated from someone I love, I have not accomplished something I have set out to accomplish, and so forth. And there is no guarantee that the mere addition of more time will rectify the situation (or do so without bringing new challenges). In these ways infinite life would be no different from finite life. Also, I do not see any reason to suppose that the mere fact of infinitely long life would imply that my choices and actions at a particular time (or during a stretch of time) would not rule out other choices or close off other possibilities (including possibilities of relationships) at that time or into the foreseeable future. Granted: immortal life would not be just like finite life. But it is a mistake to leap to the conclusion that it would not be sufficiently similar to finite life to count as recognizably human. Although the challenges would be different in certain ways, they would, no doubt, reemerge in new forms.

5.3 Our Lives Are Narratives

Some have claimed that human lives are—or correspond to—narratives, and, as such, they cannot be infinitely long. According to this view, an essential feature of a narrative is that it has an ending; indeed, the distinctive kind of illumination provided by a narrative involves a resolution or a holistic grasping of the totality of the relevant sequence of events. We might say that a narrative provides totalizing illumination, and there can be no such illumination of an endless sequence. Stories must have endings, and thus immortal lives cannot be stories (strictly speaking). If being—or corresponding to—a narrative is essential to human life, then an immortal life could not be recognizably human.

One might, however, distinguish various features of narratives; it might be that immortal lives have some but not all such features, and in virtue of possessing some features of narratives, immortal lives could be sufficiently similar to finite human lives (although, as noted above, not just like finite human lives). Since immortal lives extend infinitely, their depiction cannot have endings, and thus such lives will not have an important feature of narratives. But I contend that an immortal life can have another of the crucial features of narrativity—a distinctive kind of “meaning holism.”

In a narrative, an event gets its meaning from its relationships to other events in certain distinctive ways. The meaning of an event is not fixed and immutable, but it can change as the narrative develops in virtue of its relationships to subsequent events in the sequence; similarly, the meaning of an event in a narrative is in part a function of the event’s relationships to prior events. So, for example, a difficult period in a marriage might be a “deadweight loss” if nothing positive comes of it; alternatively, if one or both members of the couple learn from the difficult time, it can have quite a different meaning. In general, when one learns from or grows as a person as a result of a putative misfortune, the meaning of the “misfortune” is transformed. Also, flourishing as a result of one’s own hard work might well have a different meaning from the same flourishing that occurs as a result of a windfall (such as winning the lottery.) Similarly, subsequent events can vindicate a risky decision (or course of action) or exhibit it to have been wrong (Velleman, 1991 ; and Fischer, 1999 ).

Infinitely long lives could then be conceptualized as similar to (say) a series of novels (sets of interlocking stories) (Fischer, 2005 ). For instance, consider your favorite series of detective novels or even J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series. Also, think of television “soap operas,” whichare frequently referred to as “stories”; my grandmother used to excuse herself to go and watch she called “her story”—a TV soap opera. Nowadays, most successful (dare one say “good”?) television shows are essentially soap operas (in the sense that they feature a relatively stable set of characters who develop over time through an interlocking set of stories): Six Feet Under , Curb Your Enthusiasm , The Sopranos , The Office , Arrested Development , Mad Men , and so forth. A series of interlocking stories—short stories, novels, television shows—can exhibit the sort of meaning holism that is distinctive of narrativity. My contention is that an infinitely long life could exhibit exactly this sort of meaning holism, even in the absence of the possibility of totalizing illumination. Thus it might well be the case that immortal life could have enough similarity to finite human life to be recognizably human. Even though it would not have all the elements of narrativity, it could have an important and central feature of narrativity. Thus, granting (for the sake of this discussion) that narrativity is essential to human life, immortal life could still be sufficiently similar to finite human life, even if not just like our ordinary, finite human lives.

5.4 Infinity Is Fundamentally Different

Some have highlighted the fact—and it is indisputably a fact—that infinite magnitudes are in important ways different from finite magnitudes. They have concluded that immortality would be fundamentally different from even very long finite life. Perhaps their conclusion is epistemic: given that infinity is fundamentally different, we cannot know that immortal life would be sufficiently like finite life to render it recognizably human.

Various versions of this sort of worry can be distinguished. I shall begin by focusing on what I take to be a problematic version. Mikel Burley gives a clear expression of it here:

It seems reasonable to suppose that a proper judgment about the desirability of a life requires, as a minimal condition, the possibility of conceiving of that life in its entirety, rather than just some portions of it. With the possible exception of some mathematical contexts, it seems to make no sense to speak of completed infinite series. As many philosophers, from Aristotle to Kant to Wittgenstein, have pointed out, while we can make sense of the notion of a potentially infinite series—and hence of a process that could, in principle, be continued without end—there is nothing that could count as an infinite series that has reached its completion, for an infinite series is, precisely, a series that never reaches a point of completion: it just goes on and on forever. So if one agrees that a necessary condition of being able to assess the desirability of a life is that the life be conceivable as a whole, then it looks as though such an assessment cannot be made in the case of a putative immortal life (2009a, p. 539).

Burley goes on to emphasize what he takes to be a crucial difference between our finite lives and purportedly immortal lives:

[I]n the case of a finite life, even if we have only limited information available to us, we could in principle acquire a fully rounded picture of the life in question, and could thus reach a well-informed judgement about the desirability of that life. In the case of a purportedly infinite life, by contrast, we could not acquire such a picture even in principle, since there is nothing that could count as a “fully-rounded” picture of an endless life. (2009a, p. 540)

Here the “fundamental difference” between finite life and purportedly immortal life flows from our manifest inability to conceive of an immortal life as a whole. But I do not know why we would need to conceive of immortal life as a whole, in order to judge such life as recognizably human. It might be that Burley is pointing to the impossibility of totalizing illumination in an immortal life; whereas I am willing to concede this point, I argued above that it is not clear that the possibility of such illumination is required to render a life recognizably human.(After all, such a life could still be importantly like a narrative in possessing meaning-holism.) Note that, on my view, “totalizing illumination” need not involve complete knowledge of all details of a life; rather, it involves a certain distinctive kind of “resolution” that can only come from conceiving the life as a whole.

Further, note that at any point in an immortal life, the individual has not yet lived for an infinite number of years. The important insight here flows from a distinction that is implicit in Burley’s formulation above; that is, it is illuminating to distinguish between a potentially infinite series and an actually infinite series. (This distinction is also important in the discussions of the Kalam Version of the Cosmological Argument.) With the distinction in hand, we should notice that at any given point in even an immortal life, the individual has not yet lived an infinitely long time. At any given point in time, the individual has the potential to live for an infinitely long time, but he has not yet actually lived an infinitely long time. So, if we wonder about how such a life is going, we can, as it were, “freeze it” in our imagination at any given, arbitrary time and evaluate it relative to that time; and, for any such time, the individual in question would not have lived for an infinitely long duration (and thus there should be no special bar to envisaging and evaluating the life thus far). Given that we can so evaluate an immortal life with respect to any given time, it seems to me perfectly reasonable to suppose that this is enough to defuse the worry.

Perhaps we could put the point this way. It is frankly mind-boggling to try to imagine an infinitely long life as a whole. Friedrich Schleiermacher could be interpreted as capturing this idea when he asked, “[W]ho can endure the effort to conceive an endless temporal existence?” (Schleiermacher, 1799/1958 , p. 100). But it is a mistake, in my view, even to try to conceive an infinite temporal sequence. Rather, it seems to me enough that we are able to conceive of (and evaluate) the entire life up to any arbitrarily given time, even in a potentially infinite life.

But even so, I admit that there are deep mysteries lurking in the relationship between finitely and infinitely long lives. Todd May says:

What we have not really grasped yet is the temporal aspect of immortality. We have not yet come to terms with how long immortality really lasts. It is, after all, an infinite amount of time. [An aspect of immortality] that may challenge us as human beings is that our lives keep going on and on. (May, 2009 )

Right, and it is difficult to know exactly what to make of this. At the very least, it should make us circumspect in extrapolating from features of our ordinary finite lives (or even very long finite lives that we can imagine) to immortal lives. The situation here is a bit like the situation with respect to the Divine Attributes. Some argue that insofar as infinite magnitudes are fundamentally different from finite magnitudes (and thus God’s infinite goodness is fundamentally different from the finite goodness of which human beings are capable, and God’s infinite powers are fundamentally different from the finite powers possessed by human beings, and so forth), God’s nature must remain mysterious and inaccessible to us. Others would argue that we can understand the Divine Attributes on analogy with our own finite properties; so, on this sort of view, God’s goodness is to be understood as analogous to our (finite) goodness, and so forth. Thus, on this view, although God’s attributes are not just like ours, they are sufficiently similar to ours to allow us to grasp them.

In summary, I have argued that immortal life could be “recognizably human.” But perhaps I have conceded too much to Bernard Williams, who himself accepts the bodily identity criterion of personal identity, which would seem to imply that continuing to be human is a necessary condition of personal identity. In replying to Williams on immortality, it is helpful to accept as much as possible of his overall framework. But I do not see why we would need to accept that remaining human is a prerequisite for having a life recognizably like ours; and perhaps all that is required (with respect to this criterion for the appeal of immortality) is that the life in question be sufficiently like ours, not that it be recognizably human. As Nicholas Smith has pointed out, it is not obvious that the main character in the film Avatar makes a mistake in supposing that the lives of the Na/vi (the natives of the planet, Pandora), could be appealing (even from a human perspective). Also, the requirement that a life be “recognizably human” would seem to rule out, from the start, various Buddhist and Hindu conceptions of immortality. Whereas there are various difficulties with such conceptions, it is not clear to me they should be ruled out in virtue of embodying reincarnation, including the possibility of reincarnation as a member of another species.

6. The Attractiveness Challenge

Let us suppose that the identity and recognizability challenges have been met. We still want to know whether immortality (envisaged as we have been thinking of it) could be attractive. The Immortality Curmudgeons—such as Heidegger, Charles Hartshorne, Walter Kaufman, and Bernard Williams—contend that no sort of immortality could be attractive to us human beings. Williams emphasized that, under circumstances in which the identity and recognizability conditions are met, one would eventually suffer from boredom in an immortal life—a boredom so thorough, relentless, and alienating that it would render such life unattractive.

Recently Todd May has joined the Parade of the Immortality Curmudgeons (or, better, the torrent of rain on the Immortality Parade):

There is no reason to think that I couldn’t [immerse myself far more in jazz saxophone]. I might have decided to throw myself into jazz, staying up late at night to go to clubs, listening over and over again to old jazz records, practicing with possibilities the horn has to offer. But for how long? Even if I became dedicated to the music, could I do it for a thousand years? Five thousand? At some point, it begins to strain credulity to believe that one could stay immersed in a practice for an infinite amount of time. Does it, though? Great musicians practice for hours a day, day after day. They never seem to get tired of it. However, musicians, like the rest of us, are mortal. They throw themselves into what they are doing because they want to be as accomplished as possible in the limited amount of time they have to play. And that time is very limited: seventy to eighty years at the outside. Multiply that amount of time by ten. Then by a hundred. Then by a thousand. That is an awfully long time to be playing an instrument. And it would only be the beginning. There would always be more time to practice (May, 2009 , p. 61).

But I would suggest that the view of the Immortality Curmudgeons may be excessively bleak. I would concede that certain projects and activities—and the associated pleasurable experiences—might lose their force over time, perhaps becoming entirely extinguished at some point. I would however distinguish between what I have called “self-exhausting” pleasures and “repeatable pleasures.” If we focus entirely on activities that produce self-exhausting pleasures, we can lose sight of the existence of activities that plausibly generate positive experiences that are “repeatable”; I have called the latter experiences, “repeatable pleasures” (Fischer, 1994 ). An immortal life with an appropriate mix (or distribution) of activities that generate repeatable pleasures would not necessarily be boring, and would seem to offer at least one model of an attractive immortality (for an interesting discussions, see Wisnewski, 2005 ; and Burley, 2009b ).

I have contended that such activities as sex, eating fine meals, listening to music, experiencing beautiful works of art or nature, meditation, and prayer might provide repeatable pleasures (although perhaps “pleasures” was a slightly misleading term). It might have been better to put my pointas follows: such activities (and others) might well reliably (and repeatedly) generate experiences that are sufficiently compelling to render an immortal life attractive on balance. Unbeknownst to me, I was following a tradition (Lamont, 1965 ; Momeyer, 1988 ; see also the recent Chappell, 2009 ). Replying to Hartshorne’s curmudgeonly attitude toward immortality (expressed in the epigraph to this paper), Corliss Lamont says:

I deny that repetition as such leads necessarily to “monotony and boredom.” Consider, for instance, the basic biological drives of thirst, hunger, and sex. Pure, cool water is the best drink in the world, and I have been drinking it for sixty-two years. If we follow through with Hartshorne, I ought to be so tired of water by this time that I seek to quench my thirst solely by wine, beer, and coca cola! Yet I still love water. By the same token, the average person does not fall into a state of ennui through the satisfaction of hunger or sexual desire.(Lamont, 1965 , p. 33)

Although it is difficult to prove my contention, I am confident that a suitable mix or distribution of such activities could in fact reliably produce compelling experiences, even in an immortal life. Such a life could well be on balance attractive, even if it had periods of pain, suffering and boredom. After all, we do not suppose that a worthwhile finite life must never contain pain or boredom; why would we insist on a higher bar for an immoral life than a mortal life in this respect? Wouldn’t that constitute a doublestandard?

One might ask why so many excellent philosophers have focused on certain activities that arguably generate self-exhausting pleasures and have thus ignored the activities that could plausibly generate repeatable pleasures. I would offer the speculative suggestion that philosophers are attracted (at least in their philosophizing) to activities that reflect the uniqueness of human beings, rather than those that we share with mere animals. Some of the salient suggestions for repeatable pleasures come from behavior we share with the brutes, such as eating and sex. It is hard for many philosophers to confront the notion that such animal pleasures (rather than the higher, distinctively human rational activities) might be a basis for the appeal of immortal life.

Note, however, that the animal pleasures are not the only pleasures (or compelling experiences) on my list; I also included those associated with confrontation with beauty in art or nature, meditation, and prayer. Presumably, some will find doing mathematics or philosophy similarly compelling. There is no magic to any particular list, and, I would argue, no shame in sharing the fun with the animals (as it were!). Further, note that my suggestion proposes one way of addressing the problem of boredom in an infinite life; I do not suppose that this is the only promising way of addressing this problem. I certainly do not seek to reduce all value to pleasures of a certain sort (or even experience). It is important to emphasize this last point: nothing in my view implies a reduction of all value in our finite lives to pleasures or experiences. Our finite human lives may well have a rich texture of valuable activities of various kinds, for all I have said about the potential appeal of a certain sort of immortality.

I have observed that the Immortality Curmudgeons tend to focus on “projects” and activities that require “discipline” (such as practicing a musical instrument). There is a sense of the word “project” that involves something that one undertakes just to keep busy or take up time; I think here of activities one does in the last few minutes of an elementary school class before the bell rings (or after school and before one’s parents pick one up). And practicing a musical instrument can be a chore. Maybe the Immortality Curmudgeons are such spoilsports because they are operating too much within the framework of projects and activities that require effort and discipline. In some moods, I am tempted to think that they (or, at least some of them) just need to chill out a bit and allow themselves to be receptive to the magic and beauty of life as it unfolds. (This point evidently does not apply to Walter Kaufman, as quoted in the first epigraph to this paper.)

But even I must confess that it seems a bit reductionistic to fix even in part on (say) the pleasures of sex rather than the beauty of friendship and love, or the pleasures of eating good food rather than undertaking important and great accomplishments. If all other activities, including the development of relationships and striving for great accomplishments were to lose their power to engage us in an immortal life, this would, I confess, be significant and terrible. I am simply unsure about whether it is indeed true that in an immoral life, all “projects” involving activities that typically do not generate repeatable pleasures (or reliably compelling experiences) would become boring. But I wish to emphasize that nothing in my views requires taking a stand on this thesis. For all I know, one could still care about the development and enjoyment of deep relationships, even in an immortal life. (Sometimes I think that marriage requires an infinity of time to have a chance at getting it right!) All I am committed to is the notion that the activities associated with the repeatable pleasures could themselves be enough to warrant a positive attitude about immortality, quite apart from the difficult question about whether other activities would eventually and necessarily become boring. More needs to be said about these issues, but (lamentably!) I don’t have forever (or unlimited space)… 1

I am very grateful to helpful and generous comments by Mikel Burley, Todd May, Jens Johansson, and Ben Bradley. I have given a version of this paper at the Lewis and Clark College; I have benefited from comments I received on that occasion, in particular from Nicholas Smith, Rebecca Copenhaver, and Joel Martinez. Also, I have given a version of this paper as the College of Humanities and Social Sciences Distinguished Research Lecture at the University of California, Riverside.

Burley, Mikel . 2009 a. “ Immortality and Meaning: Reflections on the Makropulos Debate. ” Philosophy 84: 529–547.

Google Scholar

Burley, Mikel . 2009 b. “ Immortality and Boredom: A Response to Wisnewski. ” International Journal for Philosophy of Religion 65: 77–85.

Chappell, Timothy . 2009 . “ Infinity Goes up on Trial: Must Immortality Be Meaningless? ” European Journal of Philosophy 17: 30–44.

Feldman, Richard , Kris McDaniel , Jason R. Raibley , and Michael J. Zimmerman , eds. 2006 . The Good, the Right, Life and Death . Aldershot, UK: Ashgate Publishing.

Google Preview

Fischer, John Martin , ed. 1993 . The Metaphysics of Death . Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press.

Fischer, John Martin , ed.. 1994 . “ Why Immortality Is Not So Bad. ” International Journal of Philosophical Studies 2: 257–270. Reprinted in Fischer, ed., 2009, pp. 79–92.

Fischer, John Martin , and Ruth Curl . 1996. “Philosophical Models of Immortality in Science Fiction.” In George Slusser , Gary Westfahl , and Eric S. Rabkin , eds., 1996, pp. 3–12. Reprinted in Fischer, ed., 2009, pp. 93–102.

Fischer, John Martin . 1997 . “ Death, Badness, and the Impossibility of Experience. ” Journal of Ethics 1: 341–353. Reprinted in Fischer, ed., 2009, pp. 37–50.

Fischer, John Martin . 1999 . “ Responsibility and Self-Expression. ” Journal of Ethics 3: 277–297.

Fischer, John Martin 2005 . “ Free Will, Death, and Immortality: The Role of Narrative. ” Philosophical Papers 34: 379–404.

Fischer, John Martin . 2006 a. “ Epicureanism about Death and Immortality. ” Journal of Ethics 10: 355–381.

Fischer, John Martin . 2006b. “Earlier and Later Birth: Symmetry through Thick and Thin.” In R. Feldman , K. McDaniel , and J. R. Raibley , eds., 2006, pp. 189–192; reprinted in Fischer, ed., 2009, pp. 63–78.

Fischer, John Martin , ed. 2009 . Our Stories: Essays on Life, Death, and Free Will . New York: Oxford University Press.

Fischer, John Martin , and Daniel Speak . 2000. “Death and the Psychological Conception of Personal Identity.” In P. French and H. Wettstein , eds., 2000, pp. 84–93. Reprinted in Fischer, ed., 2009, pp. 51–62.

French, Peter A. , and Howard Wettstein , eds. 2000 . Midwest Studies in Philosophy . Vol. 24. Notre Dame: Notre Dame University Press.

Hartshorne, Charles . 1958 . “ Outlines of A Philosophy of Nature, Part II. ” The Personalist 39: 380–391.

Heidegger, Martin . 1927 . Being and Time . trans. 1962 by J. Macquarrie and E. Robinson . New York: Harper and Row.

Kaufman, Frederick . 1999 . “ Pre-Vital and Post-Mortem Non-Existence. ” AmericanPhilosophical Quarterly 36: 1–19.

Kaufman, Frederick . 2000. “Thick and Thin Selves: Reply to Fischer and Speak.” In P. French and H. Wettstein , eds., 2000, pp. 94–97.

Kaufman, Walter . 1963 . The Faith of a Heretic . New York: Anchor Books.

Lamont, Corliss . 1965 . “ Mistaken Attitudes toward Death. ” Journal of Philosophy 52: 29–36.

May, Todd . 2009 . Death . Stocksfield, UK: Acumen Publishing.

Momeyer, R.W. 1988 . Confronting Death . Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

Nussbaum, Martha . 1994 . The Therapy of Desire . Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Nussbaum, Martha . 1999 . “ Reply to Papers in Symposium on Nussbaum, The Therapy of Desire. ” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 59: 811–819.

Nussbaum, Martha . Forthcoming. “The Damage of Death: Incomplete Agents and False Consolations.” In James S. Taylor , ed., forthcoming.

Schleiermacher, Friedrich . 1799 . On Religion: Speeches to Its Cultured Despisers . trans. 1958, J. Oman . New York: Harper and Row.

Slusser, George , Gary Westfahl , and Eric S. Rabkin , eds. 1996 . Immortal Engines: Life Extension and Immortality in Science Fiction and Fantasy . Athens: University of Georgia Press.

Steele, Hunter . 1976 . “ Could Body-Bound Immortality Be Liveable? ” Mind 85: 424–427.

Taylor, James. S. , ed. Forthcoming. Death: New Essays on Metaphysics and Bioethics . New York: Oxford University Press.

Velleman, David . 1991 . “ Well-Being and Time. ” Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 72: 48–77. Reprinted in Fischer, ed., 1993, pp. 329–357.

Williams, Bernard . 1973. “The Makropulos Case: Reflections on the Tedium of Immortality.”In his Problems of the Self , pp. 82–100.

Williams, Bernard , ed. 1973 . Problems of the Self . Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Wisnewski. Jeremy . 2005 . “ Is Immortal Life Worth Living? ” International Journal for Philosophy of Religion 58: 27–36.

About Oxford Academic
Publish journals with us
University press partners
What we publish
New features
Open access
Institutional account management
Rights and permissions
Get help with access
Accessibility
Advertising
Media enquiries
Oxford University Press
Oxford Languages
University of Oxford

Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University's objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide

Copyright © 2024 Oxford University Press
Cookie settings
Cookie policy
Privacy policy
Legal notice

This Feature Is Available To Subscribers Only

This PDF is available to Subscribers Only

For full access to this pdf, sign in to an existing account, or purchase an annual subscription.

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

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

Cite this article

You have full access to this open access article

John Martin Fischer 1

9884 Accesses

2 Altmetric

Explore all metrics

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.

How Do Psychedelics Reduce Fear of Death?

Is dignity still necessary in health care from definition to recognition of human dignity, richard dean: the value of humanity in kant’s moral theory.

Avoid common mistakes on your manuscript.

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.

Note: All references to “the book” in the text of this article are to

Fischer, J. M. 2020. Death, immortality, and meaning in life . New York: Oxford University Press.

Google Scholar

Becker, E. 1997. The denial of death . New York: Free Press.

Brueckner, A., and J. M. Fischer. 1986. Why is death bad? Philosophical Studies 50(2): 213–223.

Cave, S. 2012. Immortality: The quest to live forever and how it drives civilization . New York: Crown.

Draper, K. 2013. Epicurus and the value of death. In The metaphysics and ethics of death , ed. J.S. Taylor. 2013, 71–79. New York: Oxford University Press.

Fischer, J. M. 1983. Freedom and foreknowledge. The Philosophical Review 92(1): 67–69.

Article Google Scholar

Fischer, J. M. 1986. Hard-type soft facts. The Philosophical Review 95(4): 591–601.

Fischer, J. M. 1994. The metaphysics of free will . Oxford: Blackwell.

Fischer, J. M. 2010. The Frankfurt Cases: The Moral of the Stories. The Philosophical Review 119(3): 315–336.

Fischer, J. M. 2016. Our fate: Essays on God and free will . New York: Oxford University Press.

Book Google Scholar

Fischer, J. M. 2020(a). Near-death experiences: To the edge of the universe. The Journal of Consciousness Studies 27(11–12): 166–191.

Fischer, J. M. 2020(b). Naturalism and the beauty of near-death experiences. The Journal of Consciousness Studies 27(11–12): 244–263.

Fischer, J. M. 2020(c). Are near-death experiences real? The New York Times : The Stone : Feb 13.

Fischer, J. M. 2021(a). The problem of now. Aeon : 8 January.

Fischer, J. M. 2021(b). We are all here now. The Blog of the American Philosophical Association : February 11.

Fischer, J. M. Forthcoming(a). When is death bad, when it is bad? Philosophia .

Fischer, J. M. Forthcoming(b). Review of After: A doctor explores what near-death experiences reveal about life and beyond . The Journal of Consciousness Studies .

Fischer, J. M., ed. 1986. Moral responsibility . Ithaca: Cornell University Press.

Fischer, J. M., and B. Mitchell-Yellin. 2016. Near-death experiences: Understanding visions of the afterlife . New York: Oxford University Press.

Fischer, J. M., and M. Ravizza. 1998. Responsibility and control: A theory of moral responsibility . New York: Cambridge University Press.

Frankfurt, H. 1969. Alternate possibilities and moral responsibility. The Journal of Philosophy 66(23).

Frankfurt, H. 1971. Freedom of the will and the concept of a person. The Journal of Philosophy 68(1): 5–20.

Frankl, V. 2006. Man’s search for meaning . Boston: Beacon Press.

Gruman, G. 2003. A history of ideas about the prolongation of life . New York: Springer Publishing Company.

Mitchell-Yellin, B., and J. M. Fischer. 2014. The near-death experience argument against physicalism: A critique. The Journal of Consciousness Studies 21(7–8): 158–183.

Nagel, T. 1970. Death. Nous 4(1): 73–80.

Nagel, T. 2014 (Jan. 9). After you’ve gone [Review of ed. Kolodny. 2013]. The New York Review of Books : Section 3, pages unavailable.

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

Parfit, D. 1984. Reasons and persons . Oxford: Clarendon Press.

Perry, J. 2004. Compatibilist options. In Freedom and determinism , eds. M. O. O’Rourke, and J. K. Campbell, 231–254. Cambridge: MIT Press.

Scheffler, S. 2013. Fear, death, and confidence. In Death and the Afterlife , ed. Niko Kolodny, 83–110. New York: Oxford University Press.

Chapter Google Scholar

Strawson, P. 1962. Freedom and resentment. Proceedings of the British Academy 48: 1–25.

Taylor, R. 1981/2019. The meaning of human existence. In Values in conflict: life, liberty, and the rule of law , [pages unavailable], ed. B. Leiser. London: MacMillan. Reprinted in Introduction to philosophy: classical and contemporary readings Eighth edition, eds. Perry, J., M. Bratman, and J.M. Fischer, 761–777. New York: Oxford University Press.

Twain, M. 1970. Mark Twain’s Quarrel with Heaven . Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield.

Velleman, D. 1991. Well-being and time. Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 72(1): 48–77.

Velleman, D. 2003. Narrative explanation. The Philosophical Review 112(1): 1–26.

Watson, G. 1975. Free agency. The Journal of Philosophy 72(8): 205–220.

Williams, B. 1973. The Makropulos case: reflections on the tedium of immortality . 82–100. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Wolf, S. 2010. Meaning in life and why it matters . Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Yalom, I. 2009. Staring at the sun: Overcoming the terror of death . San Francisco: Jossey-Dass (Wiley Imprint).

Download references

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.

Author information

Authors and affiliations.

Department of Philosophy, University of California, 92521, Riverside, CA, USA

John Martin Fischer

You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

Corresponding author

Correspondence to John Martin Fischer .

Additional information

Publisher’s note.

Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.

Rights and permissions

Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ .

Reprints and permissions

About this article

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

Download citation

Received : 07 June 2021

Revised : 13 January 2022

Accepted : 15 January 2022

Published : 12 February 2022

Issue Date : September 2022

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

Share this article

Anyone you share the following link with will be able to read this content:

Sorry, a shareable link is not currently available for this article.

Provided by the Springer Nature SharedIt content-sharing initiative

Meaning in life
Immortality
Near-death experiences
Find a journal
Publish with us
Track your research

Entertainment
Environment
Information Science and Technology
Social Issues

Home Essay Samples Philosophy

Essay Samples on Immortality

The desire for immortality in the epic of gilgamesh.

The idea of escaping human tribulations can be found in multiple cultures as a desirable element of the soul's life after death and in the poem “Epic of Gilgamesh,” we learn of the human need to understand this through immortality. The poem is written about...

Epic of Gilgamesh
Immortality

The Relation Between the Mortality Rate, Pib Per Capita and Human Development Index

What first brought our attention into this topic was the new Netflix´s documentary that was released on September 20, Inside Bill's Brain: Decoding Bill Gates. Bill and Melinda Gates came across disturbing results relatively to the number of deaths regarding the lack of sanitation in...

Human Development Index

The Puzzling Concept of Immortality in the Societal Narrative

Human beings appear to be dependent on the concept of immortality, and their long-standing fixation with it's been an area of cultural narratives—showing up within the ancient epic Mahabharatum, the hit fantasy series Harry Potter and also the Man from Earth, among several others. Our...

Harry Potter

Beowulf's Idea of Being Mortal and Becoming Immortal

Can you imagine waking up to screams and people crying bodies and blood everywhere? Imagine not being able to do anything. From waking up to seeing Grendel going through houses and then you see Beowulf coming to save you. Mortality in Beowulf is very present...

Philosophy of Life

A Fine Line Between Love and Immortality

In the novel, The Invention of Morel, we learn about a Venezualan fugitive’s life on what is said to be a dangerous uninhabited Polynesian island. He resides on the island because he is attempting to hide from the police. However, one day more people show...

Stressed out with your paper?

Consider using writing assistance:

100% unique papers
3 hrs deadline option

Best topics on Immortality

1. The Desire for Immortality in the Epic of Gilgamesh

2. The Relation Between the Mortality Rate, Pib Per Capita and Human Development Index

3. The Puzzling Concept of Immortality in the Societal Narrative

4. Beowulf’s Idea of Being Mortal and Becoming Immortal

5. A Fine Line Between Love and Immortality

Enlightenment
Michel Foucault
Philosophy of Education
John Stuart Mill
Just Society
Metaphysics

Need writing help?

You can always rely on us no matter what type of paper you need

*No hidden charges

100% Unique Essays

Absolutely Confidential

Money Back Guarantee

By clicking “Send Essay”, you agree to our Terms of service and Privacy statement. We will occasionally send you account related emails

You can also get a UNIQUE essay on this or any other topic

Thank you! We’ll contact you as soon as possible.

Immortality of Soul

To find inspiration for your paper and overcome writer’s block
As a source of information (ensure proper referencing)
As a template for you assignment

In Plato’s Phaedo , Socrates reflects the events from his life and reveals the most important ideas about the immortality of soul. In particular, the philosopher introduces the theory of separateness of immortal soul from the physical body by using a number of arguments.

In particular, Socrates refers to the analysis of oppositions, introduces recollection theory, and explains the concept of affinity to prove that soul is immortal and it is separate from the physical body.

From the perspective of the Opposites Arguments, if the physical body is mortal and physical, the soul is immortal and, therefore, it should not die. Because the body is subject to death in physical terms, the soul shapes its opposite.

To explain the existence of the opposites, Plato provides the analogy of cold and fire. Thus, in case the cold cannot be destructed and exists separately from fire, the latter can be destroyed by cold. Although the fire is destroyed, the cold will still exist. Similar opposites can be created while exemplifying the charges of magnets. Despite the fact that cold and fire are related to each other in terms of temperature differences.

They form the opposites and, nevertheless, they are linked to each other. At the same time, in case one object does not exist, the other object cannot exist. In this respect, can be said that fire can be identified as the absence of cold and, vice versa, cold personifies absence of fire. While identifying the analogy with body and soul, body cannot exist without soul and soul is the part of a body.

To prove the immortality of soul, it is necessary to refer to the theory of recollection. According to this theory, an individual possesses non-empirical knowledge, which implies that he/she can know something about the surrounding world at birth, but not in the course of living. In other words, people possess knowledge that is obtained as we gain experience about the object and event around use.

The theory, therefore, acknowledges the existence of previous knowledge about everything. The learning process is not associated with gaining knowledge from beyond, but recollecting what an individual is already aware of. The process of recollection is possible through proper questioning and, therefore, everything we know already can be regained.

While considering these assumptions, it is possible to assert that soul existed long before we have been born. What is more importantly, the theory also proves that the soul is immortal and it is capable of repeated reincarnation. Knowledge, therefore, forms the essence of soul eternity.

Each time the soul is incarnated in a new body, the knowledge could be forgotten because of the shock of birth. As a result, an individual perceives the recovery of knowledge as a learning process. The theory of recollection also justifies the existence of objective reality which does not depend on subjective evaluation because the matter of things existing in the world should not depend on the perception of individuals.

Finally, the evidence of existence of the soul can be analyzed from the viewpoint of affinity theory. According to this theory, the immortality is invisible and incorporeal whereas visible things are moral and corporeal. Within these perspectives, our soul is invisible and, therefore, it is immortal whereas our physical body can be seen and, therefore, it is mortal.

Although human bodies are subject to death, souls continue living. Unlike the two arguments discussed above, the affinity theory focuses on the nature of the soul. According to Plato, because the concept of soul is etymologically associated with the word “to breathe”, the philosophy demonstrates that, unlike breath, human soul cannot be blown away.

To shape the analogies under the affinity argument, soul is regarded as the form and it remains stable and unchanged, even when it encounters with the visible forms, such as physical body. When the body and soul are together, the latter controls the body because it is the nature of the soul to control the physical entity. In this respect, the soul can be identified with a divine being that is capable of ruling mortal beings.

Hence, the soul knows different forms owing to its ability to sense the material, although the soul is invisible. The affinity argument justifies the immortality of soul because it premises on the principles of analogies.

In other words, in case the soul knows forms and it is invisible, it can be imperishable. In contrast to the argument of analogy, the affinity concept can be presented as the argument about the nature of things. Therefore, the immortality of soul can be perceived as its function.

In conclusion, there proposed arguments, including opposites theory, theory of recollection, and affinity argument, the soul is immortal and it can exist separately of body.

With regard to the argument, the theory of opposites suits best for justifying the argument. In addition, the principle of analogues also contributes to understanding the concept of duality, which means that the body cannot exist without soul.

Plato's Metaphysical Ideas Validity
Plato's and Socrates's Philosophy
Death and the Afterlife: A Spiritual World After Death
Importance of Training Mind to Find Happiness and Meaning of Life
Philosophical Contributions by Soren Kierkegaard and Jean-Paul Sartre
The Theory of Cause and Effect
Ontological Vision vs. Teleological Argument
Philosophy of the Human Person
Chicago (A-D)
Chicago (N-B)

IvyPanda. (2019, April 15). Immortality of Soul. https://ivypanda.com/essays/immortality-of-soul/

"Immortality of Soul." IvyPanda , 15 Apr. 2019, ivypanda.com/essays/immortality-of-soul/.

IvyPanda . (2019) 'Immortality of Soul'. 15 April.

IvyPanda . 2019. "Immortality of Soul." April 15, 2019. https://ivypanda.com/essays/immortality-of-soul/.

1. IvyPanda . "Immortality of Soul." April 15, 2019. https://ivypanda.com/essays/immortality-of-soul/.

Bibliography

IvyPanda . "Immortality of Soul." April 15, 2019. https://ivypanda.com/essays/immortality-of-soul/.

Academia.edu no longer supports Internet Explorer.

To browse Academia.edu and the wider internet faster and more securely, please take a few seconds to upgrade your browser .

Enter the email address you signed up with and we'll email you a reset link.

We're Hiring!
Help Center

On The Feeling of Immortality in Youth

[William Hazlitt discusses how young men contemporary to his time nourished the idea of immortality. He includes himself amongst these young generation of French Revolution and nostalgically narrates, from first person's view, how the revolution instilled in the youths a sense of immortality but died down before it could deliver its promise of Liberty, Equality and Fraternity. Hazlitt convincingly diagnoses this young mentality and picks out reasons which cast a magic spell on young mind to consider themselves as immortal, and also points out at the peripatetic turns which again instill realization in youths that they are old enough to solicit death. "On The Feeling of Immortality in Youth" was first published in the Monthly Magazine, March, 1827. Following is a close analysis of the essay divided into convenient paragraphs] 1. "No young man believes he shall ever die. It was a saying of my brother's and a fine one. There is a feeling of Eternity in youth which makes us amends for everything. To be young is to be as one of the Immortals. One half of time indeed is spent-the other half remains in store for us with all its countless treasures, for there is no line drawn, and we see no limit to our hopes and wishes. We make the coming age our own-"The vast, the unbounded prospect lies before us."" and see no end to prospect after prospect, new objects presenting themselves as we advance, so in the outset of life we see no end to our desires nor to the opportunities of gratifying them.

Related Papers

Rod Hemsell

This is a study of certain truths of the spirit from the point of view of three major religions: Hinduism, Buddhism, and Christianity. It includes substantive references to such authorities as Augustine, Hegel, Newman, Bergson, Sri Aurobindo, and Pannikar in order to present, as authentically as possible in a short course, such fundamental ideas as the creative Logos, Paravak, the immutabiliy of Spirit, the Trinity as transcendent, universal, and individual Self , and the importance of sacrifice in the fulfilment of human potential.

Mel Copeland

Bijaya Ghimire

From the dawn of man, death has captured the interest of all spans of people including poets, philosophers, artists, scientists, and laypersons alike attempting to integrate the concept of death into an explanation of the meaning of life.

A Commentary on Plato’s Phaedo: The Importance of Plato’s View of the Human Soul and Immortality for Our Time. New York, New York: Global Scholarly Publications, 2010.

Martha Beck

A Commentary on Plato’s Phaedo This book was written in response to a request by a colleague for a commentary on the Phaedo that would be easy for first year undergraduates to read. It compares Plato’s arguments to the types of arguments students are familiar with. I describe to students the people I know who embrace each argument, or each type of argument. The Introduction describes all the obstacles to a serious conversation about whether or not the soul is immortal, especially an irrational fear of death. The first argument, “Soul as a Natural Duvamis,” is what I call the “Ecologist’s” argument. The second arguments is what I call the “Mathematical Mystic’s” argument. The third, “Dualism: Soul is its Activities” is what I call the “Theologian’s” argument. The Interlude shows that Simmias and Cebes still fear death and what Socrates to prove the soul is immortal, which Socrates cannot do. Socrates, however, says what he has to to save philosophy from dying. If the people in the room and/or Plato do not understand Socrates’ way of, why it is by nature the best and why they should keep the legacy of the Socratic Way of Life alive, then it will die. The fifth argument, “Soul as Harmony,” is the “Prozac” argument: just take whatever drugs you need to to keep your brain chemistry in balance. The sixth “argument” is not explicitly an argument for immortality at all, but it is Plato’s serious argument. It focuses on the “Soul as Mind (Nous). It is obvious this is what Socrates thinks because he says his entire life has been driven by his mind and that is the reason he is sitting in prison about to die. In the Republic, Plato says that dialectical education is an education for the power of the mind (nous). All of Plato’s dialogues are trying to trigger this power. Socrates’ way of life is the life of the mind. This is not an explicit proof for immortality of even claims to be because, as Socrates says in the Apology, no one knows if the soul is immortal. Socrates does know that he has lived the best life because the mind is the highest power of the soul, what humanity is above all, and a life driven by that power is the best and most natural. The last argument, “The Soul as the Cause of Life in a Body,” is the “Biologists” argument. The concluding myth is Socrates’ effort to use irrational emotions, the fear of eternal punishment, to motivate Simmias and Cebes to continue pursuing philosophy. Readers to not know if they ever did. Further, readers do not know if Phaedo really understood Socrates and his way of life, even though Phaedo did start a philosophical school after Socrates died. It is up to the reader, therefore, to pick up the torch, activate their minds, live this life and pass on that legacy to the next generation. Plato understood this and did what he could by founding a school and writing dialogues. The rest of us must do what we can to pass on the legacy, a legacy that has lasted in some form or another for 2400-odd years.

Roslyn Mackay

History of Political Thought

Ramon Lopez

While a city can only persist through common action and justice, eros may cause citizens to privilege their private interests over the good of the city. However, eros cannot simply be eliminated, as it is necessary for the existence of the city. In the Laws, the Athenian Stranger proposes to solve this problem by using eros against eros, demonstrating how to do so in three cases: wine, warfare and women. But although this approach may manage eros for a time, we are shown that no city can persist forever. Thus, through eros we are shown the essential tragedy of politics.

Faculty of Education,Alumni association of Education,B.H.U.

Sunil Kumar Singh

This paper is related to the perspective on knowledge and the practice of the acquired knowledge for being.It focusses on some Indian terms like Vidya and Dharma.It is related to the Universal Religion and Education and was published as an article in a book of International Conference on Universal religion and education (ICURE) scheduled from 16-18 Nov. 2018 as part of Centenary Celebrations of Faculty of Education,Banaras Hindu University (BHU), Kamachha ,Varanasi, India.

Gabi Michel

What is the soul? How does the soul i.e. the human psyche work? This paper seeks to understand that nature of the human psyche through a comprehensive literature review and analyses of texts from the ancient religious texts to modern founders of subjects of psychology.

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.

RELATED PAPERS

setiawan ignasius

Fabio Milioni

Maria Angelica Fierro

Al-Adab Journal, College of Arts, University of Baghdad, Baghdad, Iraq

Fadi Habash

Mubassir Anjum

International Journal for Philosophy of Religion

Ted Preston

Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplement

Drew Chastain

C. Peter Bankart, Kathleen H. Dockett, and G. Rita Dudley Grant , kathleen dockett

Swami Vedatitananda

Aditya Zanjad

sarala muthaian

Lisabeth During

Adrienne Kisner

Alexander Nehamas

Shyamveer Singh

Dana Trusso

Richard Schoch

Mikhail Mavrotheris

Authors Press New Delhi

S.P. Ward (Ph.D.)

Charu Gupta

Abdulkadir Hamarat

Shivam Singh

Religions, MDPI

Jeffery Long

Alexandru Badescu

S.L Peeran , Dr. Satesh Chandra Pande , Aju Mukhopadhyay

Ohio State nav bar

The Ohio State University

BuckeyeLink
Find People
Search Ohio State

Immortality Introduction

Immortality is one of the major topics that accompanies the question: What is the meaning of life? When discussing immortality, it seems as though there are as many views on this as there is on other large topics like politics and other social issues. Our group has decided to take advantage of this and has looked at different sources and opinions in order to gain a more in depth knowledge of who believes what in certain circumstances. We have used people of different religions, different ages, and even a few movies to see the differences in thoughts. To determine who picked what topics, we each chose what interested us each the most and who had easy access to different sources of information. The following part of this website that discusses religious views on immortality was conducted by a student with friends of different religions and the section of age groups was conducted by a student that interviewed many different people to see if their views change with age.

In lecture, we spent about two weeks discussing various philosophers and their thoughts and opinions on what immortality would do to humans and if they would be changed if they knew that their lives would never end. To avoid the monotonous ‘reading an essay’ feel, here are the basic views of a couple of the more influential ones, followed by fun graphics:

Schoeffler: assumptions and thoughts on what a “doomsday” scenario would do to the human race.

Every-day tasks
Taking care of other people would be more important than ourselves
Fine cuisine
Roller coasters
Bungee jumping
Scuba diving

Susan Wolf: It might be all gloom-and-doom for a while, but soon we would realize that maybe it’s not so bad. She had SOME of the same views as Schoeffler, but not as terrible.

We would inititally freak out! (as would be expected in this situation)
Video Games
Other hobbies
Because it WOULDN’T MATTER!
Helping others be as comfortable in their final bit of time
Everybody else is in the same situation, so why fight?

In light of the recent political tensions and presidential candidates, I thought it’d be fun to make bumper stickers for these two, as if they were running for office:

In order to get some of my own feedback, rather than simply depending on the writers’ whose information is included later on, I conducted a survey of my floor of my building on campus to see what people thought about living forever. I simply made a post on my floor’s “GroupMe” page that there was a survey near the elevator that I’d appreciate their participation on. I purposely didn’t disclose any other information because I wanted to see what people thought of the idea of immortality without the influence of my thoughts. From the results, while disappointingly lacking, it seems that people don’t like the idea of living forever (or at least the small sample size that I used). I think this might because there are too many open ended questions that need to be answered. Some of these that come to mind for me personally are:

Will I retain my mental capabilities?
Will I remain physically capable?
To what point will I progress? (mentally and physically)
Can other people I care about live forever with me?
Can I choose those people?
And SOOOO many more with time to think and contemplate the decision.

In the remainder of this blog, please keep an open mind and think about what your answer would be if someone were to ask YOU if you’d like to live forever.

One thought on “ Immortality Introduction ”

Thank you for this great information! “Immortality Introduction” Immortality & Science forum: https://bilimyurt.com please accept thanks

Immortality: Blessing or Curse?

Immortality, an ability to live forever, has been contemplated by philosophers since ancient times. There is hardly a person who would not have thought, at least once, how it would be – to live eternally. Physical and mental never-ending bodies would obtain the opportunities to explore each of the Earth’s parts, study every science existing, or enjoy life itself. One may suggest that immortality is a blessing, another one – a curse, and both will be right. However, the possibilities, coupled with the responsibility of eternal living, make this blessing a burden.

Immortality entails not only the possibility to enjoy and explore life for as much as possible but also the responsibility to take care of the planet that one lives on. At the moment, the world population stands at 7,8 billion people, each with their needs and dreams (Chamie). Due to the expansion of advanced medical facilities and services, life expectancy has grown significantly for the past 30 years, even without immortality. If each individual can from now on live eternally, one may clearly see that the population numbers will exponentially grow since the death rates are no longer valid.

Technology, science, and art may be the next victims of the newfound eternity. “Immortality implies a never-ending existence, regardless of whether or not the body dies,” the Andrade states (para. 1). Be it a technological advance, or a scientific discovery, or a literary work, all of them are inspired by human’s deepest desire – to transcend death. Technology is being developed to enhance the quality of life and prolong life expectancy, and scientific discovery is being made to explore the other planets and the possible forms of life. Books are being written to investigate the notions of life and death; to make a mark in history. Each of them is just another form of an inner wish to come closer to physical or incorporeal immortality. If the stimulus, the awareness of inevitable death, is not present, the individual is no longer needs to develop and explore technology, science, or art.

Still, the formula of eternal life may allow sufficient time to travel across the world. The Great Pyramid of Giza (Egypt), the Hanging Gardens of Babylon, the Statue of Zeus at Olympia (Greece), the Colossus of Rhodes, the Lighthouse of Alexandria (Egypt), and other beautiful places can be discovered (“Seven Wonders of the World”). With the amount of time available to each individual for earning money, planning, and thinking, everyone will be able to cross the planet twice, to say the least. The setting of a movie, the jungles from a book that was available solely in another person’s words, could then become a reality.

The eternal life, enabled by a specific formula, is an insidious gift. One will always long for life without the fear of death, but this wish might be expensive. The responsibility one should assume may be challenging for those who do not expect from immortality anything but a pleasure. Overpopulation may be one of the difficulties one may deal with during their eternity. To keep the thirst for life, in other words, to develop sciences, technology, and art are the other challenges. Still, immortality offers ample time to discover all the parts of the Earth that were not known to an individual. However, while the researchers are seeking the formula of eternal life, everyone is free to articulate their opinion on the issue.

Works Cited

Andrade, Gabriel. “Immortality.” Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Web .

Chamie, Joseph. “ World Population: 2020 Overview .” YaleGlobal Online.

“Seven Wonders of the World.” New World Encyclopedia , 2019.

Cite this paper

Chicago (N-B)
Chicago (A-D)

StudyCorgi. (2022, February 14). Immortality: Blessing or Curse? https://studycorgi.com/immortality-blessing-or-curse/

"Immortality: Blessing or Curse?" StudyCorgi , 14 Feb. 2022, studycorgi.com/immortality-blessing-or-curse/.

StudyCorgi . (2022) 'Immortality: Blessing or Curse'. 14 February.

1. StudyCorgi . "Immortality: Blessing or Curse?" February 14, 2022. https://studycorgi.com/immortality-blessing-or-curse/.

Bibliography

StudyCorgi . "Immortality: Blessing or Curse?" February 14, 2022. https://studycorgi.com/immortality-blessing-or-curse/.

StudyCorgi . 2022. "Immortality: Blessing or Curse?" February 14, 2022. https://studycorgi.com/immortality-blessing-or-curse/.

This paper, “Immortality: Blessing or Curse?”, was written and voluntary submitted to our free essay database by a straight-A student. Please ensure you properly reference the paper if you're using it to write your assignment.

Before publication, the StudyCorgi editorial team proofread and checked the paper to make sure it meets the highest standards in terms of grammar, punctuation, style, fact accuracy, copyright issues, and inclusive language. Last updated: November 11, 2023 .

If you are the author of this paper and no longer wish to have it published on StudyCorgi, request the removal . Please use the “ Donate your paper ” form to submit an essay.

University of Notre Dame

Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews

Home ›
Reviews ›

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.

An official website of the United States government

The .gov means it’s official. Federal government websites often end in .gov or .mil. Before sharing sensitive information, make sure you’re on a federal government site.

The site is secure. The https:// ensures that you are connecting to the official website and that any information you provide is encrypted and transmitted securely.

Publications
Account settings

Preview improvements coming to the PMC website in October 2024. Learn More or Try it out now .

Advanced Search
Journal List
Springer Nature - PMC COVID-19 Collection

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 .

Publisher’s Note

Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.

an image, when javascript is unavailable

By providing your information, you agree to our Terms of Use and our Privacy Policy . We use vendors that may also process your information to help provide our services. This site is protected by reCAPTCHA Enterprise and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.

‘Tuesday’ Review: Julia Louis-Dreyfus and a Talking Bird Co-Star in A24’s Fairy Tale About Death

Vikram murthi.

Share on Facebook
Share to Flipboard
Share on LinkedIn
Show more sharing options
Submit to Reddit
Post to Tumblr
Print This Page
Share on WhatsApp

It doesn’t take long for Death to arrive in front of the terminally ill, wheelchair-using teenager Tuesday (Lola Petticrew), but it takes even less time for her to quiet the voices in his head. Just as he’s about to end her life, she disarms his foreboding presence with a lame joke and then talks him through a panic attack. The voices suddenly disappear, providing a brief respite for the otherworldly being. You see, Death might be a size-altering bird, but Tuesday recognizes that he also needs what anyone who has a lot going on needs: to take a nice bath, vape a little weed, and probably set some boundaries to offset the toll high emotional intelligence takes on one’s mental health. After all, stress can just easily fall away when you rap along to Ice Cube’s “It Was a Good Day.” (“A classic,” Death intones as he stares at Tuesday’s laptop.) Related Stories The 14 Best Thrillers Streaming on Netflix in June, from ‘Fair Play’ to ‘Emily the Criminal’ Celebrate the 70th Anniversary of Akira Kurosawa’s ‘Seven Samurai’ with a Trailer for the 4K Restoration — Watch

It’s a genuine testament to Pusić that this type of earnest whimsy — present throughout the film in some capacity — doesn’t render “Tuesday” a dead-on-arrival, teeth-grinding nightmare, even when it tumbles headlong into some cringeworthy ideas (did I mention a CGI bird briefly raps an Ice Cube verse?). Fortunately, the writer-director has some prior experience with high-concept visual and narrative ideas. In her 2013 short film “The Beast,” a pesky bat (another VFX creation) drives a wedge between an elderly woman and her even older mother. Pusić’s follow-up, “Rhonna & Donna,” chronicles two teenage conjoined-twin sisters in the midst of a nasty fight while starring in a local production of “Romeo and Juliet.”

“Tuesday” can needlessly underline this somewhat-trite relationship dynamic, but Louis-Dreyfus and Petticrew successfully imbue it with a mix of tenderness and irritation. Tuesday’s patience towards her mother, rooted in a resigned acceptance of her illness, combined with Zora’s worn, brave-face expression tend to bring out the best in both performers. After Zora buys the two of them some more time when she impulsively tries to “kill” Death, the details of which should go unspoiled, mother and daughter share a lovely morning together. They exchange relaxed banter and goofy jokes in the warm confines of their London flat, and yet tension persists on the margins of even the most caring moments. It finally bubbles over when Tuesday discovers how much Zora has sacrificed for her while also exhibiting a complete disregard for her wellbeing.

This wouldn’t be as much of an issue if Tuesday wasn’t such a thinly drawn character, but she generally exists to be a level-headed figure in the face of wanton dysfunction. I suppose it’s ironic that she spends an inordinate amount of time calming other people down — her mother, her nurse, Death — even as she struggles alone with pain, but this mild cleverness mostly exposes the flimsiness of her characterization. “Tuesday” might mainly be a mother’s story, but by the end, the daughter feels more like a teaching tool rather than a full-fledged person.

As much as death lingers over “Tuesday,” the actual character isn’t on screen that much, despite being the film’s most “spectacular” invention. One would assume Death manifesting as a talking bird would be the film’s biggest liability, but Pusić actually introduces it with naturalistic ease and embraces its unreality. Its compositing can sometimes be distractingly dodgy, but to the film’s credit, the creature is never supposed to be a seamless part of its environment. It’s designed to be an interruption whose alarming presence tends to be unfortunately offset by Kene’s alternately ominous and cutesy voice performance.

Of course, Zora ultimately comprehends the depths of her daughter’s pain and faces death (and Death) square in the eye, which is when “Tuesday” hits its prescribed, tear-jerking story beats to mixed effect. A parent witnessing the passing of their child will inevitably rend hearts even with a flawed execution, and Louis-Dreyfus is certainly up to the dramatic task of conveying the depths of her character’s grief. Yet, as much as “Tuesday” strives to be an adult fairy tale about accepting loss, it struggles to be truly effective because, by design, it traffics in an adolescent sandbox. The fantastic can bring a fresh lens to old truisms, like how the dead live on in the stories and memories of the living, but it’s difficult to enliven them while utilizing the language of a child.

An A24 film, “Tuesday” is now playing in select theaters.

Most Popular

The Idea of Immortality in Different Mythologies

Categories: Immortality Mythology

About this sample

Words: 2384 |

12 min read

Published: Nov 5, 2020

Words: 2384 | Pages: 5 | 12 min read

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.

Cite this Essay

Let us write you an essay from scratch

450+ experts on 30 subjects ready to help
Custom essay delivered in as few as 3 hours

Get high-quality help

Verified writer

Expert in: Religion Science

+ 120 experts online

By clicking “Check Writers’ Offers”, you agree to our terms of service and privacy policy . We’ll occasionally send you promo and account related email

No need to pay just yet!

Related Essays

2 pages / 1141 words

7 pages / 2974 words

2 pages / 826 words

2 pages / 908 words

Remember! This is just a sample.

You can get your custom paper by one of our expert writers.

121 writers online

Still can’t find what you need?

Browse our vast selection of original essay samples, each expertly formatted and styled

Related Essays on Immortality

Heintzman, P., & Andrade, R. (2018). Memento mori: The impact of mortality salience on the pursuit of material possessions. Journal of Consumer Psychology, 28(4), 646-656. doi:10.1002/jcpy.1040Lee, S., Kim, H., Kim, J., & Joo, [...]

In the vast tapestry of Greek mythology, one character stands out for his cunning intellect, unwavering determination, and relentless pursuit of immortality - Odysseus. As the legendary hero of Homer's epic poems, the Iliad and [...]

With the age of 80 years the human lifespan has increased a lot the last 100 years. At the beginning of the 20th century the lifespan in America was about 50 years. This means the lifespan has almost doubled in 100 years, and it [...]

Mortality can be defined as 'the state of being subject or opposed to death.' Most people find immortality as a prized possession. It is considered an honor to live a healthy life and die of old age. But for others, the main [...]

Emily Dickinson`s, Because I Could Not Stop For Death is a complex type of poem, that provides us important question about the construction of the poem. Why did she choose to talk about death?, how? and in what way?. Each poet [...]

Immortality is not a myth. The unrealistic expectations some people have is the myth. Immortality is more attainable than what most people imagine. This paper will discuss the steps of achieving immortality. From why we die and [...]

Get Your Personalized Essay in 3 Hours or Less!

We use cookies to personalyze your web-site experience. By continuing we’ll assume you board with our cookie policy .

Instructions Followed To The Letter
Deadlines Met At Every Stage
Unique And Plagiarism Free

Paying tribute to the writer who got us all saying ‘Kafkaesque’

A century after Franz Kafka’s death, writers like Georges Rodenbach, Dino Buzzati, Zoran Zivkovic and C.D. Rose carry on his off-kilter legacy.

Franz Kafka died on June 3, 1924, at the age of 40. In the 100 years since, his literary reputation has soared, nearly every scrap he ever scribbled has been published, and his life and works have been studied from seemingly all possible angles. What’s more, “Kafkaesque” has become our go-to adjective to describe an off-kilter, nightmarish world of bureaucratic runaround, vague threat and existential bleakness. Just think of the first sentence of “The Trial”: “Somebody must have made a false accusation against Joseph K., for he was arrested one morning without having done anything wrong.” Or consider that unnerving observation: “A cage went in search of a bird.” And then, of course, there’s this: “One morning when Gregor Samsa awoke in his bed from restless dreams he found himself transformed into a monstrous insect.”

That’s the opening sentence, in Mark Harman’s new translation, of “Die Verwandlung,” which he calls “The Transformation.” It’s hard to shake our memories of Edwin and Willa Muir’s more famous and poetic title, “The Metamorphosis,” especially with its entomological associations, but if you’ve never read Kafka before or if you already love him, you’ll still want Harman’s “ Kafka: Selected Stories .” In its 277 pages, Harman provides a 68-page, illustrated biographical introduction, a bibliography for further reading, extensive interpretive endnotes and, not least, valuable footnotes detailing the linguistic nuances of the German original’s trickier words.

Besides “The Transformation,” nearly all the major stories are here, including “The Judgment,” “In the Penal Colony,” “A Hunger Artist,” “A Country Doctor,” “A Report for an Academy” and “Before the Law,” as well as several minor ones (which I would have traded for “The Hunter Gracchus,” “Investigations of a Dog” and “The Great Wall of China” — but you can’t have everything). It’s an extremely handsome, well-designed book, and you couldn’t ask for a better introduction to Kafka.

While this sickly Jewish-Czech-Austrian literary genius remains unique, we can nonetheless re-experience something of that distinctive Kafkaesque vertigo in the work of a wide range of more or less fabulist writers, some old, some new. Jorge Luis Borges, Vladimir Nabokov and Italo Calvino spring readily to mind. Yet Kafka is also part of the zeitgeist of our own troubled 21st century. For proof, consider “ A Cage Went in Search of a Bird: Ten Kafkaesque Stories ,” from Catapult Books. Its prizewinning contributors include Tommy Orange, Joshua Cohen, Ali Smith and Helen Oyeyemi, among others, as well as my Book World colleague Becca Rothfeld , who provides a characteristically astute introductory essay.

Long ago, Borges observed that strong authors create their own precursors. In the case of Kafka, one might look back to Georges Rodenbach and his 1892 masterpiece, “ Bruges-la-Morte .” It is currently available in Will Stone’s translation from the wonderful Wakefield Press, which specializes in European symbolist fiction and poetry. Illustrated with grainy, period photographs, this short novel begins five years after Hugues Viane’s wife has died. In his grief, he has moved to Bruges, a Flemish city of canals and churches that he finds matches his melancholy. The autumnal opening chapters, underscoring this urban version of the pathetic fallacy — the outside world reflecting our inner state — beautifully evoke the profound loneliness of a man living in the irretrievable past.

One late afternoon, during his daily walk, the grieving Viane glimpses a woman who looks exactly like his dead wife. He shakes off this apparent hallucination but later sees the woman again. From this point on, he grows obsessed with the possibility that, in some way, the love of his life has come back to him. Ultimately, the novel abandons dizzying uncertainty as it morphs into a conte cruel, closing with a kind of poetic justice in its final pages.

Over the past year or two, New York Review Books has been reissuing the fiction of Dino Buzzati in new translations, starting with the allegorical existentialist novel “ The Stronghold ,” formerly known as “The Tartar Steppe.” In the fall, NYRB will publish Buzzati’s collected stories, reminiscent by turns of Calvino and the absurdist Donald Barthelme. In the meantime, readers should seek out “ The Singularity ,” in the English version of Anne Milano Appel. (The book was previously titled “Larger Than Life” in an equally fine translation by the poet Henry Reed.)

The novel opens: “In April 1972, Ermanno Ismani, a forty-three-year-old university professor of electronics, received a letter from the Ministry of Defense requesting that he meet with Colonel Giaquino, the head of the research and development division.” Buzzati never lets up on this air of the slightly ominous. It turns out that Ismani has been requested by a supersecret experimental facility to spend two years on a project, the nature of which cannot be revealed to him. The first quarter of the book describes the gradual approach to this highly guarded equivalent of Area 51 and culminates when Ismani meets its director, who exclaims, “We will become masters of the world!”

Gradually, Buzzati threads together several themes: lost love (similar to that in Rodenbach’s novel), the nature of identity, muted eroticism and the development of what we would now call artificial intelligence. The book climaxes in a scene that recalls the ancient myth of the prophetic Sibyl of Cumae, who was granted immortality but not perpetual youth. When asked what she herself wanted, she replied, “I want to die.”

Summer reading

Zoran Zivkovic, the great Serbian fabulist, is among my favorite contemporary writers . Comparisons are invidious but useful: If you like Paul Auster’s “The New York Trilogy,” you’ll definitely enjoy Zivkovic’s “The Papyrus Trilogy,” in which Inspector Dejan Lukic investigates a series of inexplicable deaths associated with the Papyrus bookshop. Reading Zivkovic, one is reminded, by turns, of magic realism, hypertext fiction, the short stories of Steven Millhauser, old television series such as “The Twilight Zone” and “The Avengers,” and, not least, Kafka, albeit a more playful, lighthearted Kafka. All of Zivkovic’s many books have been published in English by Cadmus Press in a uniform format.

The most recent, “ The Four Deaths and One Resurrection of Fyodor Mikhailovich ” — translated by Randall A. Major — consists of a quartet of stories that play off the life of the Russian novelist Dostoevsky. In one, Fyodor Mikhailovich accidentally wanders through a portal into the multiverse; in another, he has been murdered in a train’s restaurant car and a vaguely familiar police inspector must solve the crime; in the third, his consciousness is resurrected and installed in an artificial body, and then the great writer orders to make his work more politically correct. (For example, “The Idiot” will now be called “The Naive” but was nearly retitled “The Prince With Special Needs.” Soon, too, there will be “The Sisters Karamazov.”) In the book’s final story, a suicidal Dostoevsky encounters a figure from the future in a Turkish bath.

All these jeux d’esprits are entertaining but relatively uncomplicated, especially when compared with Zivkovic at his head-spinning best (for that try “Impossible Stories”). One could say much the same about C.D. Rose ’s “ Walter Benjamin Stares at the Sea ,” a highly varied collection of strange, formally experimental fictions by the author of that playful masterpiece “The Biographical Dictionary of Literary Failure” and the only slightly less impressive “Who’s Who When Everyone Is Someone Else” and “The Blind Accordionist.”

Shadowy European bars, train station waiting rooms, deserted seasides — these are the settings to which Rose gravitates in his stories, several of which could be labeled “portraits.” We learn about the true inventor of moving pictures long before the Lumiere brothers began their experiments; discover that philosopher-critic Walter Benjamin didn’t kill himself, and instead escaped the Nazis and is now unhappily settled in Southern California; and, most amusing of all, listen in as “St. Augustine Checks His Twitter Feed”: “It’s a good office, the one he has, not as good as Jerome’s, maybe, he knows that, no lion or anything, but pretty good anyhow with the view of the Med and the rolling hills and the ships in the harbour, so he briefly entertains a notion of getting his own lion, and maybe a painting too, and posting that, #hardatworkwithfloofyfriend or something, but quickly changes his mind, that’s not his brand at all, he’s got to stay on brand, and most of all he’s got to get some writing done this morning.”

In “A Brief History of the Short Story,” Rose imagines how French, Russian and American writers would approach the same set of characters and situations. There are some particularly apt observations in the Russian section: “It wasn’t engineers of human souls they were looking for now; it was middle managers.” (Stalin called writers “the engineers of human souls.”) Still, Rose’s most dazzling piece must be “What Remains of Claire Blanck”: It consists entirely of elaborate footnotes at the bottom of blank pages.

And so there you have it. Harman’s edition will give you pure Kafka, while something like a Kafkaesque frisson can be felt in the wide-ranging Catapult anthology as well as books by an 1890s symbolist, a writer of speculative fiction, a Central European fabulist and an English experimental postmodernist. All of these volumes can nonetheless be shelved in the same bookcase — if there’s room — next to Kafka’s (incomplete) novels “Amerika (The Man Who Disappeared),” “The Trial,” and “The Castle,” the letters to his family and girlfriends, Ross Benjamin’s just-published translation of the unexpurgated diaries, and, not least, the invaluable three-volume biography by Reiner Stach. Given such plenty, Kafka has clearly done all right for a guy convinced that his unpublished manuscripts deserved only to be burned.

We are a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program, an affiliate advertising program designed to provide a means for us to earn fees by linking to Amazon.com and affiliated sites.

IMAGES

Immortality Essay Example
Immortality of Soul
'Ode: Intimations of Immortality' by William Wordsworth ESSAY by Curt's
The Immortality of the Soul Essay Example
(PDF) Immortality An essay on science, technology and religion
Platonic Arguments For The Immortality Of The Soul Definition Essay

VIDEO

Immortality
Is immortality impossible?
Immortality Ode/ Wordsworth
Immortality with Lyrics By: Celine Dion ft. Bee Gees
On superstitions by A.G. Gardiner| Summary| Explanation in Hindi| BA in English| Second Semester|
Bloodsuckers and Blockbusters: Vampires in Modern Media

COMMENTS

There's a big problem with immortality: it goes on and on
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
Immortality. Immortality is the indefinite continuation of a person's existence, even after death. In common parlance, immortality is virtually indistinguishable from afterlife, but philosophically speaking, they are not identical. ... An Essay Concerning Human Understanding. WLC. 2009. Ludemann, Gerd. The Resurrection of Christ: A Historical ...
Is Immortality Desirable?
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.
Essays on Immortality
This essay delves into the philosophical implications of immortality, exploring the existential questions it raises and the ways in which it challenges our understanding of the human experience. Writing an essay on immortality is important as it allows us to delve into a complex and thought-provoking topic that has captivated human imagination ...
Will humans ever be immortal?
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. Even though hydra don't ...
Immortality
Abstract. 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 ...
Immortality
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 ...
Death, Immortality, and Meaning in Life
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 ...
Odysseus Immortality Analysis: [Essay Example], 682 words
Odysseus' quest for immortality ultimately shapes his character and influences his actions in profound ways. His cunning intellect, unwavering determination, and resilience in the face of adversity are all traits that stem from his desire for eternal glory. Through his journey, Odysseus teaches us the importance of perseverance, courage, and ...
The Way People Can Achieve Immortality
The Way People Can Achieve Immortality. The quest for immortality is one that has enticed, motivated, and moved humankind from the very beginning. We have always wanted to escape the inescapable, deter the undeterred, avoid the unavoidable and live forever. We dreamed about eternal life, created entities that were eternal, books, poems, art ...
(PDF) 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 ...
Immortality Essays: Samples & Topics
Essay Samples on Immortality. Essay Examples. Essay Topics. The Desire for Immortality in the Epic of Gilgamesh. The idea of escaping human tribulations can be found in multiple cultures as a desirable element of the soul's life after death and in the poem "Epic of Gilgamesh," we learn of the human need to understand this through ...
Immortality of Soul
Immortality of Soul. In Plato's Phaedo, Socrates reflects the events from his life and reveals the most important ideas about the immortality of soul. In particular, the philosopher introduces the theory of separateness of immortal soul from the physical body by using a number of arguments. We will write a custom essay on your topic.
On The Feeling of Immortality in Youth
"On The Feeling of Immortality in Youth" was first published in the Monthly Magazine, March, 1827. Following is a close analysis of the essay divided into convenient paragraphs] 1. "No young man believes he shall ever die. It was a saying of my brother's and a fine one. There is a feeling of Eternity in youth which makes us amends for everything.
Intimations of Immortality
John Harrisholds the Sir David Alliance Chair of Bioethics at the University of Manchester, UK. He is the author of Clones, Genes and Immortality (Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1998) and editor, with Søren Holm, of The Future of Human Reproduction (Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1998). He is a member of the United Kingdom Human Genetics Commission.CREDIT: ALLAN BURCH
Immortality Introduction
Immortality Introduction. Immortality is one of the major topics that accompanies the question: What is the meaning of life? When discussing immortality, it seems as though there are as many views on this as there is on other large topics like politics and other social issues. Our group has decided to take advantage of this and has looked at ...
Immortality: Blessing or Curse?
Physical and mental never-ending bodies would obtain the opportunities to explore each of the Earth's parts, study every science existing, or enjoy life itself. One may suggest that immortality is a blessing, another one - a curse, and both will be right. However, the possibilities, coupled with the responsibility of eternal living, make ...
Analysis Of Immortality Through The Epic Of Gilgamesh: [Essay Example
Analysis of Immortality Through The Epic of Gilgamesh. Mortality can be defined as 'the state of being subject or opposed to death.'. Most people find immortality as a prized possession. It is considered an honor to live a healthy life and die of old age. But for others, the main objective is to gain or create a legacy.
Is Immortality Desirable?
Williams concludes that death is a necessary evil; we should hope to die if we are to avoid the alternative of immortality. My second argument to why immortality is not desirable is based on the meaning of life. I believe that death and the very limitations that it sets down gives life meaning. My second argument overlaps with my first but what ...
Our Stories: Essays on Life, Death, and Free Will
An associated essay, "Philosophical Models of Immortality in Science Fiction" (1996, with co-author Ruth Curl), considers various types of immortality postulated in works of science fiction. "Epicureanism About Death and Immortality" (2006) responds to arguments of Martha Nussbaum concerning death and immortality.
Immortality
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 ...
The Possibility Of Human Immortality: [Essay Example], 682 words
To conclude, I think that human immortality is not possible. Humans cannot live forever and overcome death. All studied approaches have led to people living slightly longer and with better quality lives, but not indefinitely, which means that human immortality is not feasible at all. Artificial limbs, robotic avatars and longevity drugs may be ...
A century after his death Franz Kafka is still in the zeitgeist
Kafka's literary immortality would probably be a surprise to him—and a betrayal. He was not famous when he succumbed, age 40, to tuberculosis, two years after retiring from his job at the ...
Tuesday Review: Julia Louis-Dreyfus & a Bird Co-Star in A24 ...
By Vikram Murthi. June 7, 2024 9:30 am. 'Tuesday'. A24. While Death has taken many physical forms throughout history, its core mission remains static: to shepherd a dying person's soul out of ...
The Idea of Immortality in Different Mythologies
Introduction. Immortality is a very common theme of mythology around the world. The notion of immortality is a common theme in humanity as well, as it is something humans have been trying to achieve for thousands of years. Humans have often turned to religion as a place where they can achieve this immortality in the afterlife.
Paying tribute to the writer who got us all saying 'Kafkaesque'
Franz Kafka died on June 3, 1924, at the age of 40. In the 100 years since, his literary reputation has soared, nearly every scrap he ever scribbled has been published, and his life and works have ...

On going on and on and on

Is Immortality Desirable?

1. Williams’ Argument

2. Responses

2.2. Can we “recycle” categorical desires?

2.3. What’s so bad about boredom?

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

3. Conclusion

Related Essays

PDF Download

About the Author

Follow 1000-Word Philosophy on Facebook , Twitter and subscribe to receive email notifications of new essays at 1000WordPhilosophy.com

Will humans ever be immortal?

Sign up for the Live Science daily newsletter now

Long live technology

Most Popular

15 Immortality

1. Introduction

2. Various Kinds of Immortality

3. Three Challenges to the Appeal of Immortality

4. The Identity Challenge

5. The Recognizability Challenge

5.1 Borders and Content

5.2 Human Lives Are Fraught

5.3 Our Lives Are Narratives

5.4 Infinity Is Fundamentally Different

6. The Attractiveness Challenge

This Feature Is Available To Subscribers Only

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

Cite this article

Similar content being viewed by others

How Do Psychedelics Reduce Fear of Death?

Meaning in Life

Why Is Death Bad, and Should We Fear It?

Epicurean Challenges

The No-Experience Problem

The Timing Problem

The Lucretian Mirror Image Argument

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

The “Forever” Wars

The Immortality Curmudgeons and their Concerns

Immortality in an Afterlife

Near-Death Experiences: Supernaturalism

Why Universality of Content?

How do NDErs Know?

Near-Death Experiences, Naturalism, and Meaning

Note: All references to “the book” in the text of this article are to

Acknowledgements

Author information

Corresponding author

Additional information

Rights and permissions

About this article

Share this article

Essay Samples on Immortality

The Relation Between the Mortality Rate, Pib Per Capita and Human Development Index

The Puzzling Concept of Immortality in the Societal Narrative

Beowulf's Idea of Being Mortal and Becoming Immortal

A Fine Line Between Love and Immortality

Immortality of Soul

On The Feeling of Immortality in Youth

Related Papers

RELATED PAPERS

RELATED TOPICS

Ohio State nav bar

Immortality Introduction

One thought on “ Immortality Introduction ”

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Immortality: Blessing or Curse?

Works Cited

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

Immortality

‘Tuesday’ Review: Julia Louis-Dreyfus and a Talking Bird Co-Star in A24’s Fairy Tale About Death

Most Popular

The Idea of Immortality in Different Mythologies

Table of contents

Cite this Essay

Related Essays

Still can’t find what you need?

Related Essays on Immortality