The Human Predicament_Life Without Illusions by David Benatar

Author:David Benatar [Benatar, David]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Philosophy
ISBN: 9780190633813
Google: -s6dDgAAQBAJ
Amazon: 0190633816
Goodreads: 32335759
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2017-06-07T00:00:00+00:00

* This is by far the longest chapter in the book. Those who prefer a shorter reading should consult “A Reader’s Guide” at the beginning of the book for suggestions of what may be skipped.

6 | Immortality

I do not want to die—no; I neither want to die nor do I want to want to die; I want to live for ever and ever and ever. I want this “I” to live—this poor “I” that I am and that I feel myself to be here and now, and therefore the problem of the duration of my soul, of my own soul, tortures me.

—MIGUEL DE UNAMUNO

The Tragic Sense of Life (Collins, Fontana Library, 1962), 60

Death is bad, but it does not follow from this that being immortal would be good. It is possible that death is bad, but that eternal life would be worse. Thus, we need to ask whether the human predicament would be meliorated or whether it would be exacerbated if we were immortal. The view that immortality would be worse than living for a limited time is one of two broad kinds of optimistic responses to the problem of mortality (that is, one of two ways of rejecting the view that our mortality is part of our predicament). The other kind of optimistic response is to deny, one way or another, that we are (or must remain) mortal.

Delusions and fantasies of immortality

Consider, first, the denial of our mortality. One form this takes is belief in physical resurrection at some future time. If this belief were true, it would make death a kind of suspended animation rather than annihilation. Assuming that the resurrected person would either not die a second time or would be endlessly resurrected after future deaths, this promises a kind of immortality.

Perhaps more common is the belief in an immortal soul. The comfort sought here is that though our bodies may die, we shall continue in some—preferably blissful—disembodied state despite our corporeal death and decay.

Such beliefs are instances of wishful thinking. We have no evidence that we shall ever be physically resurrected or that we shall endure as disembodied souls after our physical deaths. Religious texts may speak of these phenomena, but even when they are not waxing poetic and metaphorical, they do not constitute evidence. Indeed, it is much more reasonable to believe that death is annihilation of the self.

Are we really to believe that decomposed, cremated, atomically incinerated, and ingested bodies are to be reconstituted and reanimated? The challenges in understanding the mechanics of this dwarf even other notable problems, such as the logistics of physically accommodating all the resurrected.

These practical problems do not confront the belief in an immortal soul, but that belief faces no shortage of other problems. We have plenty of evidence that our consciousness is a product of our brains. When we are given general anesthesia—administered to our physical bodies and affecting our physical brains—we lose consciousness. When our brains are deprived of oxygen or when we suffer a sufficiently powerful blow to the head, we similarly lose consciousness.

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