A Note on Immortality

            A friend of mine recently shared with me her doubts and queries on the subject of mortality and as this is the very best reason to write something I thought I might collect some of my own thoughts on the question to see if I could help. I will go back to the beginning and that is antiquity. In classical antiquity by and large (philosophers excepted) our lives and our deeds were preserved in the collective memory of other humans, as embodied in the family and the city. The Ancients, then, tended to get along with only a vague belief in personal survival after death as, indeed, did the ancient Hebrews. The memory of one’s deeds, whether famous or infamous, would live on in in these collectives. This lent gravity to what a person did in their lives as well as strengthened his or her concern for the collective future. After all, the death of one’s own family or the destruction of one’s city would be personal destruction as well. For instance, with the death of one’s descendants (or even their enslavement) would go all the rituals and ceremonies concerning the ‘ancestors’ which are the form in which the heritage of the past is continued in the present and on into the future. For most modern people this is not really good enough. After all the ancient view seems to assume an eternal world in which one’s name can be maintained forever along with ritual devotion to one’s ancestral spirit. In some versions of this belief the world moved in endlessly repeating cycles: if this is the case what one does now is rather important because it may be repeated again ad infinitum! As we are all to o sadly aware however this form of immortality is fragile and subject to historical disasters that can wipe out families, cities and whole civilizations. Anyway the close knit communities and tight family structures that supported these beliefs were often oppressive of human individuality in ways we moderns might find unacceptable. We are then left with the problem of what gives our deeds significance beyond the moment, with why it matters what we do given that all things end in the same nothingness. How, if time in its infinite annihilating energy erases all thoughts and all deeds, do my acts impinge in any significant way on the fabric of things.? What I do would seem to matter only if I, or others, were around to invest some significance in it. Why write a symphony rather than a jingle if all music is reduced in the end to the same nullity and insignificance? Why nurture a puppy instead of stepping on one? Why care rather than kill when care or kill my actions leave no permanent trace either way and will be raised by the sands of time, reduced to dead equality in the same oblivion? I am too Socratic to give my friend an answer and anyway it would be my answer not hers.

            Of course one option is that I can embrace personal immortality as a practical postulate or fundamental condition of my own freedom. If I am free then my actions must have significance. If my actions are to be significant then they must make some difference to the total or final configuration of things. This means there must be some meaning to the phrase “total and final configurations of things”. There must be some repository, some ‘universal mind’ which beholds the ‘total result’ and sees our place in it since we do not. Of course ‘universal mind’ is what we philosophers mean by God. Thus, as one author claims, I forget who alas, there are multiple levels of significance to my last sip of coffee. One level is my enjoyment of it in the moment. Another level is the contribution this makes to the human future: on the winds of the good mood inspired by my good coffee I may well write a classic essay on immortality! Finally, both of these levels of value contribute to the life of God who preserves the memory of them: perhaps my essay lives on in the eternal life of God! This sounds odd but the individual whose name I carelessly forgot to write down when I wrote his words in my notebook was a follower of A.N. Whitehead who thought that God interacts with the world such that what we do helps ‘make’ God. Personally I find this language questionable but it is nonetheless out there as a serious option. Plus, it does help us see how higher forms of ‘significance’ embrace and confirm lower ones. Each level preserves and amplifies the value of the level below it. It does so, however, only for God. Now if, of course, I am a good philosopher filled with a disinterested intellectual love of God this does not matter. I however am not such a philosopher having a bit too much tenderness for my own poor self. Though it is not up to me I would nonetheless like to think that I as a person, as an individual, transcend time and flux. If I give up a sip of coffee to save a kitten, I would like that has some long term significance in terms of my achieved personality and my 80 or so years on this mortal orb barely seem adequate to the task of achieving a ‘personality’ of such ultimate significance as to contribute to the ‘divine life’. I not only want to know the divine memory is pleased with itself but I would like if I could have some share in that happy knowledge. All these lower levels of significance (in which we can freely include the ancient ideas of community and family or indeed our own) seem at least to naturally culminate in my own fulfilled perception of myself in relation to the total significance of my life for myself and for all others. All this directly means is that I strive for a life which can sustain such a vision. If I were Himmler or Stalin this vision of myself-within- the-whole would be what the old writers called hell. If this vision spurred me to better myself so as to sustain it better it would be purgatory and the finished thing would, of course, be heaven. These are matters of high speculation though and I move onward in hope more than knowledge. My Socratic purpose is fulfilled if my friend and other readers begin to reflect on what gives their deeds substance and worth.