Abstract
This chapter will treat the relation between substance dualism and the idea of an afterlife in historical and systematic perspective. It will answer the question how the position of substance dualism should be articulated under the present intellectual conditions. It will then show that the existence of an afterlife is not entailed by substance dualism, but that substance dualism is, very plausibly, necessary for the existence of an afterlife.
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- 1.
Regarding the three title-page inscriptions that have been quoted, see Descartes (1986), Meditationes/Meditationen, p. 22.
- 2.
Translation: U.M. The original text: Meditationes/Meditationen, p. 218: “Pour ce que vous dites, que je n’ai pas mis un mot de l’Immortalité de l’Âme, vous ne vous en devez pas étonner; car je ne saurais pas démontrer que Dieu ne la puisse annihiler, mais seulement qu’elle est d’une nature entièrement distincte de celle du corps, & par conséquent qu’elle n’est point naturellement sujette a mourir avec lui, qui est tout ce qui est requis pour établir la Religion; et c’est aussi tout ce que je me suis proposé de prouver”.
- 3.
It is not a good idea to require a maximal degree of ontological independence for being a substance. If one did require it, very few items would be a substance: only God (at best) would be a substance – which is a consequence only Spinozists can relish.
- 4.
This is the first independence assertion of substance dualism.
- 5.
This is the second independence assertion of substance dualism.
- 6.
In the practice of hyperbolic scepticism (which is Descartes’s method for finding the absolutely indubitable) it is a small step from allowing that automata could be under the hats and clothes of people walking by in the street (see Meditations II.13) to allowing that there could be imitatively perfect automata under those hats and clothes – that is, human bodies that act like human beings but are not human beings: because the corresponding psychological persons do not exist.
- 7.
Another thing that follows (with some plausibility) is this: the doubter – the psychological person – is a non-physical being. The argument to this conclusion goes like this: If the doubter can (in the weakest metaphysical sense of “can”) exist without the external world existing, then the doubter can exist without anything physical (in the realist sense) existing. Hence he can exist and not be physical. But if the doubter is a physical being, then he cannot (in the strongest metaphysical sense of “cannot”) exist and not be physical; for physicalness is an existence-essential property of everything that is physical. The doubter, therefore, is a non-physical being.
- 8.
In the concrete instances of radical Cartesian doubt, the doubters vary, and with them the psychological persons.
- 9.
If you are not aiming to convince others, you do not have to worry about burden of proof.
- 10.
A Treatise of Human Nature I, p. 302 (Hume 1962).
- 11.
As far as Parfit (1984) and Metzinger (2003) are concerned, see the entries in the list of references. Impressive quotations from Lichtenberg and Nietzsche (in the original German) can be found in Großheim (2002), Politischer Existentialismus, pp. 52 – 54. For William James, see James (1950), The Principles of Psychology I, chapter X.
- 12.
Compare: James, The Principles of Psychology I, pp. 138 – 141.
- 13.
I have defended this view in many publications, beginning with my book of 2004, The Two Sides of Being.
- 14.
Eternal youth is what the Cumaean Sibyl forgot to ask for when she asked Apollo for eternal life (that is, eternal life in the body) and was granted what she asked for. The consequences can be gathered from the epigraph to T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land.
- 15.
Is the mortality of the body natural or non-natural? Regarding this question, there is a certain ambivalence in traditional Christian doctrine. On the one hand, the mortality of the body is seen to lie in the (original and divinely intended) nature of matter, and is therefore considered to be natural – an (Aristotelian-Thomistic) view which finds further confirmation in the obvious fact that death has a positive function in nature. On the other hand, the mortality of the body is seen as a punishment by God for the sin – the disobedience – of Adam and Eve, and is therefore considered to be non-natural (a divinely induced permanent breach of the laws of paradisiacal nature). The modern view is that the mortality of the body is natural because it is due to the laws of nature; God, usually, does not enter into the picture at all.
- 16.
There are infinitely many such moments if time is continuous, and if time is continuous, then there must be either a last moment of death, or a first moment of resurrected life.
- 17.
In normal cases of such a “resurrection” (not Enoch’s, not Mary’s case), it would seem to common experience that a corpse is left behind. Is only the soul being “resurrected” (normally)?
- 18.
This view has actually been proposed: by Peter van Inwagen in “The Possibility of Resurrection” (1978).
- 19.
It is a well-known fact that there is no overlap between the two collections. Let it be supposed (in order to avoid peripheral complications) that both collections, and all parts of them, are at no time in any other person.
- 20.
References
Descartes, R.: Meditationes de Prima Philosophia/Meditationen über die Erste Philosophie, Latin and German, edited by G. Schmidt, Stuttgart: Reclam 1986.
Großheim, M.: Politischer Existentialismus: Subjektivität zwischen Entfremdung und Engagement, Tübingen: Mohr/Siebeck 2002.
Hume, D.: A Treatise of Human Nature. Book One, edited by D. G. C. Macnabb, Glasgow: Fontana/Collins 1962.
Inwagen, P. van: “The Possibility of Resurrection”, International Journal of Philosophy of Religion 9 (1978), pp. 114–121.
James, W.: The Principles of Psychology. Volume One, New York: Dover Publications 1950.
Meixner, U.: The Two Sides of Being. A Reassessment of Psycho-Physical Dualism, Paderborn: Mentis 2004.
Metzinger, T.: Being No One, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press 2003.
Parfit, D.: Reasons and Persons, Oxford: Clarendon Press 1984.
Thomas Aquinas: Summa Theologiae, Milan: Edizioni Paoline 1988.
Thomas Aquinas: De ente et essentia, in: Opuscula Philosophica, Turin and Rome: Marietti 1954, pp. 5–18.
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Meixner, U. (2017). Substance Dualism. In: Nagasawa, Y., Matheson, B. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of the Afterlife. Palgrave Frontiers in Philosophy of Religion. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-48609-7_14
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