Abstract
Would personal immortality have any value for one so endowed? An affirmative answer would seem so obvious to some that they might be tempted to go so far as to claim that immortality is a condition of life’s having any value at all. The claim that immortality is a necessary condition for the meaningfulness of life seems untenable (as we saw in the last chapter). What, however, of the claim that immortality is a sufficient condition for the meaningfulness of life? Though some might hold this to be the characteristic religious view, this is certainly disputable. Thus McTaggart reminds us, for instance, that “Buddhism ... holds immortality to be the natural state of man, from which only the most perfect can escape.”1 I want to argue that we can imagine variants of personal immortality which would not be valuable and hence immortality in itself cannot be a sufficient condition for value. What is required for the meaningfulness of life is that life exhibit certain valuable qualities. But then the endless exhibition of these qualities is not only unnecessary for the meaningfulness of life, but the endlessness of a life can even devalue those qualities that would make valuable a single, bounded life.
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References
J. M. E. McTaggart, Some Dogmas of Religion (London: Edward Arnold, 1906), p. 278.
John Hick, Death and Eternal Life (London: Collins, 1976), Ch. 8.
Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, The Phenomenon of Man (London: Collins, 1959), p. 251.
Immanuel Kant, Critique of Practical Reason, trans. Lewis White Beck (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1956), p. 127.
Cf. J. A. Harvie, “The Immortality of the Soul” Religious Studies 5 (1969): 219–220.
Cf. also the proof from goodness in Anselm’s Monologian, Ch. 4. This passage might plausibly be seen as an argument for what Augustine merely asserts in The City of God (Bk. 12, Ch.1).
My objection here assumes the universe to be a finite collection of objects, as Aquinas believed. Hence he rejects the suggestion that there can exist an unlimited number of things (except potentially): “All created things must be subject therefore to definite enumeration. Thus even a number of things that happens to be unlimited cannot actually exist” (Summa Theologiae Ia, 7, 4). If, however, the universe is unlimited there need not exist even a de facto largest thing.
Jonathan Swift, Gulliver’s Travels, ed. Herbert Davis (Oxford: Basil Blackwell., 1959), pp. 207–214.
Bernard Williams, Problems of the Self, Ch. 6. The EM scenario discussed here is the one presented by Williams. However it differs from that found in Karel Capek, The Macropulos Secret, authorised English translation by Paul Selver (London: Robert Holden & Co., 1927). There EM claims to be 337 years old (p. 170). She took the elixir at 16 (p. 179) but she is commonly taken to be about 30 (pp. 18,169).
Williams, p. 91.
Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Random House, 1974), sect. 341.
See “Personal Identity” Philosophical Review 80 (1971): 3–27; “On ‘The Importance of Self-Identity’” Journal of Philosophy 68 (1971): 683–690; “Later Selves and Moral Principles” in Alan Montefiore ed., Philosophy and Personal Relations (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1973), pp. 137–169; and Reasons and Persons, Part Three. For the contrary claim that only the “simple view” of personal identity can satisfy our hopes and fears about immortality see Richard Swinburne, “Personal Identity” Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 74 (1973–4): 231–247; and “Persons and Personal Identity” in H. D. Lewis ed., Contemporary British Philosophy, Fourth Series (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1976), pp. 221–237.
Charles Sanders Peirce, Collected Papers, ed. Charles Hartshorne and Paul Weiss (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1935), 6.521.
Williams, pp. 93–94.
For an interesting discussion of this debate, based primarily on Nyāya materials, see A. Chakrabarti, “Is Liberation (Moksa) Pleasant?” Philosophy East and West 33 (1983): 167–182. On the concept of duhkha see also Bimal Krishna Matilal, Logical and Ethical Issues of Religious Belief (Calcutta: University of Calcutta, 1982), Ch. 1.
I call this principle “Platonistic” since it seems to have an ancestral link with Plato’s view that Goodness itself is the source of both being and goodness in everything else (Republic 509). The identity of being and goodness is certainly evident in Neo-Platonism: witness Plotinus’ claim that the One is both Being itself and the Good itself. Augustine takes over this view when he says that “every entity, even if it is a defective one, in so far as it is an entity, is good” (Enchiridion, Ch. 13). The principle that it is greater to exist in reality than not to do so is, of course, a presumption of Anselm’s first ontological argument (Proslogion, Ch. 2).
The Philosophical Works of Descartes, Vol. 2, trans. E. S. Haldane and G. R. T. Ross (New York: Dover, 1955), p. 186.
On perfectionism in Western thought see R. Newton Flew, The Idea of Perfection in Christian Theology (London: Oxford University Press, 1934); and John Passmore, The Perfectibility of Man (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1970).
“Wittgenstein: A Personal Memoir” in C. G. Luckhardt, ed., Wittgenstein: Sources and Perspectives (Hassocks: Harvester Press, 1979), p. 48.
A good discussion of this question is to be found in Nelson Pike, God and Timelessness (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1970).
Ludwig Wittgenstein, Culture and Value (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1980), p. 22 e.
D. Z. Phillips, Death and Immortality (London: Macmillan, 1970), p. 49. Phillips’ account here has been influenced by similar suggestions presented in Stewart R. Sutherland, “Immortality and Resurrection” Religious Studies 3 (1968): 377–389; and ‘“What Happens After Death?’” Scottish Journal of Theology 22 (1969): 404–418. (Compare also Wittgenstein’s Tractatus 6.4312.)
See, for example, Patrick Sherry, Religion, Truth and Language-Games (London: Macmillan, 1977).
On this point compare J. C. Thornton, “Religious Belief and ‘Reductionism’” Sophia 5 (3) (1966): 3–16.
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Perrett, R.W. (1987). Immortality. In: Death and Immortality. Studies in Philosophy and Religion, vol 10. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-009-3529-7_6
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