The Man from Earth as Philosophy: The Desirability of Immortality

Abstract

The Man from Earth (2007) is an independent American film, based on a screenplay by the science-fiction writer Jerome Bixby (1923–1998), which tells the story of John Oldman – a 14,000-year-old man who looks to be in his mid-30s. This thought-provoking cult classic raises the philosophical question of whether immortality is desirable, and its answer is yes. This might not sound all that surprising unless you know that the most important paper on this topic in contemporary philosophy, Bernard Williams’s “The Makropulos Case: Reflections on the Tedium of Immortality” (1973), argues just the opposite – that an immortal life, no matter how wonderful, would be undesirable. The main purpose of this chapter is to bring The Man from Earth into dialogue with Williams’s classic paper. In addition, this chapter discusses a number of contemporary responses to Williams’s paper and explores some lesser-known arguments against the desirability of immortality, in particular those offered by Simone de Beauvoir (in 1946) and Martha Nussbaum (in 1989). This chapter argues that the core philosophical thesis of The Man from Earth, namely that immortality is desirable, holds its own against these arguments from so-called “immortality curmudgeons.”