IMMORTALITY

The literature on the philosophical problems involved in the question of a future life begins with Plato. We cannot therefore do better than start with a quotation from Phaedo, the dialogue in which Plato deployed what is put forward as a demonstration of the immortality of the soul. Having heard and apparently accepted the supposed proof put into the mouth of Socrates, Crito asks:

"But how shall we bury you?" "However you please," Socrates replied, "if you can catch me and I do not get away from you." And he laughed gently, and looking towards us, said: "I cannot persuade Crito, my friends, that the Socrates who is now conversing and arranging the details of his argument is really I: he thinks I am the one whom he will presently see as a corpse, and he asks how to bury me. And though I have been saying at great length that after I drink the poison I shall no longer be with you, but shall go away to the joys of the blessed, he seems to think that was idle talk uttered to encourage you and myself."
(115cd)

This passage can be employed to fix two fundamental points by reference to which the main problems can be mapped.

The first point is that the essence of doctrines of personal survival (or immortality)—and precisely this and this only is what gives them their great human interest—is that they should assert that after our deaths we shall continue to exist (forever). Only in this way can they provide the basis for what John Wisdom has called "these logically unique expectations"—that we shall, to put it as noncommittally as possible, have "experiences" after death, that death will be not our terminus but the beginning of a new journey. This has to be underlined both because there have been some famous philosophical doctrines of immortality which have not been of this sort and because there have been other doctrines which either were from the beginning substitutes for, or have been so hedged and interpreted that they have now ceased to be, the genuine article, personal immortality. Thus, whatever one makes of Aristotle on the immortality of the intellect (De Anima 429a–431a) or of Benedict Spinoza on the eternal element in the mind (Ethics, V, xxiii ff.), it is certain that these views do not, nor were they intended to, provide any ground for such "logically unique expectations." Again, the man who urges that we all of us live forever because the ill (and sometimes even the good) men do lives after them indicates by the very irrelevance of his supporting reason that this sort of immortality is not the authentic personal brand.

The second basic reference point is that any doctrine of survival or immortality has one enormous and immediate obstacle to surmount before it can begin to qualify for any further consideration. This obstacle consists simply in our manifest universal human mortality. It is due to this ineluctably familiar fact that "All men are mortal" has become a trite truistic example in logic and that we so use the word survive that it is logically impossible for one and the same passenger to be both dead and a survivor after a crash. One can recognize and respect the longing that may lie behind the epitaph "Not dead, but sleeping," yet no one can deny that, literally interpreted, it is false. Indeed, even to consider the contrary possibility would be to enter the ghoulish world of Edgar Allan Poe. This second reference point is, of course, as obvious as the first though the inducement to disregard it is perhaps greater. And both points have to be kept constantly in view.

Three Doctrines of Immortality

There seem to be three ways of trying to circumvent the massive initial difficulty confronting any doctrine of personal immortality. If once the initial obstacle could be overcome, the remaining problems would turn out to be not philosophical but factual and practical.

immortal-soul doctrine

The first of the three doctrines is the Platonic attempt to demonstrate two points. One point is that we are essentially composite beings. Besides the more familiar corporeal element, the body, there is also something else, different in kind—the incorporeal soul. For the duration of a life the soul is somehow attached to—incorporated into or imprisoned in—its body. Although the soul is incorporeal, it is nevertheless a substance, something that could significantly be said to exist independently of anything else. This is precisely the point of Plato's arguments to the conclusion that the soul is not a harmony, for it would not even make sense to suggest that a harmony might survive or, for that matter, precede the elements of which it is a harmony. This is no more possible than that there could be a grin without a face to grin it (Phaedo 85e–86d and 91c–95a).

The other point is that the soul must be the person or, at any rate, the real, true, or essential person. This, though it is sometimes neglected, is crucial. Unless it is established that I am my soul, the demonstration of the survival of my soul will not demonstrate my survival, and the news that my soul will last forever could provide me with no more justification for harboring "these logically unique expectations" than the rather less elevated assurance that my appendix is to be preserved eternally in a bottle.

reconstitution doctrine

The second doctrine is, in its purest form, extremely simple and direct. It consists in urging the resurrection of the body or, more accurately, the reconstitution of the person. Whereas the first doctrine insists that I am the sort of thing that could perfectly well escape unharmed and unnoticed at death ("if you can catch me and I do not get away"); the second recognizes that to be truly a human person, I have to have the corporeal human form. It then relies on an act of sheer omnipotence to produce the immortal me.

shadow-man doctrine

Considering that the reconstitution doctrine or something approaching it has been part of traditional Christianity, it is surprising to find that Thomas Aquinas seems to be the only philosopher of the first rank to have discussed a version of it at any length. (See especially "Treatise of the Resurrection" in the supplement to Part III of the Summa Theologiae.) But the shadow-man doctrine seems to have received even less attention. It can perhaps best be regarded as an attempt to combine the strong points of the other two doctrines. It is the claim that a person is a kind of shadow man, sufficiently human and corporeal to overcome the problem of identification with the familiar flesh and blood person and at the same time sufficiently ethereal and elusive to have no difficulty in escaping unnoticed from the ordinary earthy body which is destined to be burned or buried. This view is found in some of the Christian Fathers (for instance, Tertullian in De Anima ). A similar view is also held by some modern spiritualists—"the astral body" detaches itself at death to proceed on its "journey to the summerland." Perhaps the best way of conveying the idea to the modern reader unfamiliar with either patristic or spiritualist literature is to refer to the many films in which a "spirit" is shown as a tenuous shadowy replica of a man that detaches itself from him at death and is thereafter visible to the entire audience but only to favored characters in the film.

difficulties in these doctrines

At first sight the third doctrine might appear to be the most promising way to avoid the initial difficulty. However, the doctrine is bold precisely where the other two are discreet. By insisting upon the essential incorporeality of the soul, the first neutralizes all the ordinary weapons of empirical inquiry; the second, by deferring the corporeal resurrection to an unspecified time and place, indefinitely postpones any occasion for their deployment. But astral bodies, detaching themselves at death from the other sort, should be empirically detectable here and now. The crucial and probably insoluble dilemma for the shadow-man doctrine is to provide a specification of the nature of an astral body in which an astral body remains sufficiently like an ordinary flesh and blood person to avoid difficulties of identification and at the same time to ensure that the claim that there are such things would be verified or, at least, not immediately falsified by the appropriate factual investigation.

In the time of Tertullian and even in the early days of modern psychical research there may have been some slight basis for believing that this might possibly be done. Tertullian himself appealed not only to purely theological considerations but also to such cases as that of the woman who claimed to have seen "a transparent and lucid figure in the perfect form of a man." The systematic investigation of such phantasms has shown, however, that though they do undoubtedly occur, they belong to the category of purely subjective and hallucinatory experience. (See, for instance, G. N. M. Tyrrell, Apparitions, London, 1953.) The third way must therefore be dismissed as a blind alley.

Any reconstitution doctrine confronted with the question "How is the reconstituted person on the last day to be identified as the original me, as opposed to a mere replica, an appropriately brilliant forgery?" There seems to be no satisfactory answer to this question, at least for a pure reconstitution theory. This question is, however, logically prior to all questions about the reasons, if any, that might be brought forward in support of such a doctrine.

This decisive objection seems rarely to have been raised, and when it has been, its force has not usually been felt. No doubt, the explanation lies largely in the fact that the doctrine is scarcely ever found in the pure form, unalloyed with any Platonic elements. There are two defenses that might be offered. It could be urged that God will infallibly ensure that the unending torments and the eternal ecstasies are allocated to the right people—that is, in the one case to the very same people who had incurred his disapproval and in the other case to precisely those who had won his favor. It might also be suggested that though there might indeed be cases in which all other merely human observers must be entirely at a loss, the person himself could not fail to know whether he was the original person rather than a changeling or a replica. These are, in substance, the arguments presented by John Locke in developing and defending his own analysis of personal identity; however, that analysis itself was intended to meet difficulties about the identification of the future victims of divine judgment with people now living on Earth.

Both these arguments, though they possess a strong appeal, seem to miss the point. Notwithstanding the form of the original question, the difficulty is not one of "How do you know?" but of "What do you know?" The objection is that the reconstituted people could only be mere replicas of and surrogates for their earthly predecessors. Neither the appeal to the cognitive and executive resources of Omnipotence nor the appeal to the supposed special status of the person in question does anything at all to meet this contention.

The point can be brought out better in the case of the argument that the person cannot fail to know who he is. This argument depends on the premises that if I remember doing something, I must have done it and that normal people in normal situations are usually able to remember the most important features of their lives. Both premises are true, but it does not follow from them that if someone on the last day or any other day claims in all honesty to remember doing something, he must in fact have done it. From "He remembers doing that" it follows necessarily that "He did that," just as from "He knows that that is true" it follows necessarily that "That is true." But from "He claims to remember doing that, and he is not lying" it does not follow that "He did that," any more than from "He claims to know that that is true, and he is not lying" it follows that "That is true."

The crux in both cases is the possibility of honest error. However honest and however convinced, claims that you did something do not guarantee that you actually did it. In normal circumstances most such claims are no doubt entirely reliable, and the memories involved can properly be said to constitute knowledge. But the circumstances envisaged by the reconstitutionists are conspicuously not normal. In these circumstances the question of whether any of the ostensible memories enjoyed by the reconstituted people can properly be counted as memories at all must wait on the resolution of the logically prior issue of whether they have any past to remember, of whether, in particular, they are indeed the people they apparently think they are.

Thomas Aquinas seems to have appreciated that the immediate objection to any pure reconstitutionist view is decisive. This insight is no doubt one of the reasons that his own view incorporated important Platonic elements. In answer to the objection "that it will not be identically the same man that shall rise again. … After the change wrought by death the selfsame man cannot be repeated," Thomas replied:

The form of other things subject to generation and corruption is not subsistent of itself, so as to be able to remain after the corruption of the composite, as it is with the rational soul. For the soul, even after separation from the body, retains the being which accrues to it when in the body. … Consequently there has been no interruption in the substantial being of a man, as would make it impossible for the selfsame man to return on account of an interruption in his being. (Op. cit., IIIa, Supp. 79, 2, ad 1)

Immortal-Soul Doctrine

It thus seems that if any headway is to be made toward overcoming the first gigantic obstacle in the way of doctrines of survival or immortality, it will have to be, at least in its first stages, Platonic in an extremely broad sense. In this sense René Descartes's views on the nature of the soul and its relations to the bodily machine can be characterized as Platonic (see, for instance, The Passions of the Soul I, xxx ff.), and even Thomas must count as at least Platonizing. For everyone who maintains that the mind or the soul is a substance, in the sense that it could significantly be said to exist alone and disembodied, is thereby Platonizing, and everyone who identifies this putative substantial mind or soul as the real or true person is adopting a fully Platonic position.

Platonizing concerning the nature of the soul seems to be the essential condition of the possibility of any defensible doctrine of personal immortality or even survival. Philosophy that is Platonizing or Platonic in this sense constitutes an enormous field, so this article will concentrate on the views of Plato, Aristotle, and Descartes, making their positions serve as focuses. All three are well suited to serve in this way both because their work has been and is enormously influential and because they can each be seen as representative of a different approach to the problem. Since all three believed in some sort of immortality and since it is scarcely possible to treat their arguments about the nature of the soul without touching on their ideas of immortality, it will be convenient to consider the two together.

difficulties in the notion of the soul

One great and rather peculiar difficulty of our present subject is that it is very hard and, hence, very uncommon for anyone really to begin from the beginning. The key terms such as body, mind, and soul and their equivalents or near equivalents in other languages are all in a way familiar to all those acquainted with the languages concerned. Though there may be much unclarity about their meanings and perhaps even a certain indeterminacy in their usage, they are not the recognizably fresh coinages that both demand definitions and enable meanings to be prescribed with some confidence that the appropriate usage can be followed consistently by the prescriber and by others. (The point here is simply that speech habits, like other habits, can be very hard to break.)

Again, in the air there always are and always have been vulgar or not so vulgar theories about bodies, minds, and souls and their several natures, destinies, and relations, with no guarantee that these theories can be harmonized with the meanings of such terms as mind or soul as actually determined by whatever is the accepted correct usage of the culture concerned. For instance, correct usage—and this surely is and must be the only possible standard of meaning—may very well determine that the soul, in the relevant sense of soul, is not a substance, even though the people concerned entertain fantasies which presuppose that it is. This thesis has been fully developed in this connection by Gilbert Ryle, chiefly in The Concept of Mind. The consequence of this is that the issues tend to be presented not as a matter of first giving some suitable sense to the word soul or mind and then asking whether in that sense the term would in fact have any application but, rather, as an inquiry which presupposing that we have or are souls or minds, asks what is the nature of the soul or the mind. Such a presentation is bound to constitute a temptation to prejudge the question whether, in the sense eventually chosen, we have or are such things. By itself this might give rise to no more and no less trouble than the insistence of the modern analytic philosopher that he is not concerned with the reality of matter, time, or whatever but is merely searching for an adequate analysis of the notions of matter, time, and so on. In the present case, however, there are also the various theories in the background, and these theories happen to be of very different sorts and suited to answering very different questions.

The fundamental distinction needed is that between theories that might serve as answers to philosophical questions about the meanings of the terms mind, soul, and the like and theories that offer some sort of explanation of why the creatures that are said to have minds, souls, and the like behave and suffer as they do. Thus, for instance, in reading Aristotle's criticisms of his predecessors (De Anima I), we must distinguish—even if they, or he, did not—between those thinkers who said that the soul was a vapor, blood, or something of that order and must to that extent be interpreted as embryonic scientists and those thinkers who urged that the essence of the soul is motion, sensation, or some combination of the two and are therefore to be counted as philosophers.

Another crucial distinction must be made between explanatory and descriptive concepts. Suppose that for some person the meaning of the words mind and soul is to be given entirely in terms of certain capacities or incapacities and that in his use having a first-class mind is just being able to compass certain sorts of achievement. In his sense of mind, then, it can be no explanation to say that someone can do these things because he is endowed with a first-class mind, for to say this is, for him, only to redescribe the phenomenon. If his concept of mind is to be explanatory, he must give the word mind a meaning such that minds would be, in the terminology already explained, substances.

plato

There seems to be only one, very brief passage in Plato (Alcibiades I 129b–130c) where the argument is explicitly directed toward the justification of the Platonic presupposition that the soul is the person. Even in this passage the first presupposition, that we are composite beings, is very much taken for granted.

SOUL AS THE PERSON

Socrates is talking with Alcibiades, and the question is raised, "What are we, and what is talking with what?" The conclusion is that we are our souls. The argument runs in this way. In speaking, we use words. The user and the thing used are always different. We use our hands, our eyes, our whole bodies. Thus, I cannot be my body. Yet it is agreed that I must be my soul, my body, or a combination of both. However, because the user and the thing used are always different and because I use my body, I cannot be either my body or my body and soul combined. Thus, I must be my soul.

Considering how vital the conclusion is, Plato's argument may seem inadequate. But if, sympathetically, we call in the rest of Plato's writings to provide supplementary evidence, it becomes clear that it has to be taken as the epitome of many arguments. For Plato constantly talked of the phenomenon of self-control and the lack of it and of all those times when we are inclined to speak of being let down or dragged down by the weaknesses or by the excessive strength of the body or some part of it. Few concepts are, in the ordinary narrow sense, more typically Platonic.

In all the innumerable cases of bodily control or lack of it, it is possible to produce arguments of basically the same form, and it is not at all necessary to appeal to the assumption, which may not seem as obvious to everyone today as it did to Plato's Alcibiades, that I must be my soul, my body, or both. Thus, starting from the known fact that our eyes sometimes play tricks on us, we may go on to argue that this shows that we see not with, but through, them, that they are, as it were, built-in optical instruments (compare Theaetetus 184c ff.). Or, again, noting how natural and entirely proper it is to describe someone on some desperate occasion as "flogging on his protesting body," we may infer that we drive our bodies as we drive our cars. In every case the Platonic conclusion, expressed in a more modern idiom, would be that the personal pronouns, personal names, and all other person words, words which clearly must refer to something and which, it seems, equally clearly cannot refer to bodies, the only available corporeal objects, must therefore refer to some incorporeal objects, the conclusion is that these are the objects to which we apply the term souls.

This conclusion is wrong, however, and all arguments of this kind are misguided. It is not true that person words are words for any sort of incorporeal objects. People are what you meet. We do not meet only the sinewy containers in which other people are kept, and they do not encounter only the fleshy houses that we ourselves inhabit. It is therefore wrong to suggest that the word person is equivalent to the word soul in this sense of soul and, hence, to imply that it is contradictory to deny that people are incorporeal objects and that it is absurd to say that you can see a person. This basic fact about the meanings of person words is central and fundamental to the entire problem.

To deal in detail here with all the variations on the present argument would be impossible. The mistake involved in all such arguments seems to be that of insisting that because expressions such as "that person" are, for one reason or another, not synonymous with "that human body" and because we use all sorts of idioms in which I and my body are spoken of as if they were two substances, there must therefore be a special class of incorporeal objects for person words to refer to. This false conclusion seems to be one more product of the perennially disastrous unum nomen, unum nominatum theory of meaning—the misconception that every different class of word must refer to a different class of object. The truth seems to be that in this area we have a vastly rich and idiomatic vocabulary that provides us with all manner of subtle linguistic instruments, all of which we employ to say things about one sort of inordinately complicated but essentially corporeal creature, ourselves.

ARGUMENT FROM REMINISCENCE

Plato's second argument to the conclusion that we are incorporeal souls was his doctrine of reminiscence. This has two forms, each proceeding to the same conclusion from rather different premises. In one form the premise is that we can all be shown to possess some knowledge, which we have not acquired in this life, of a priori truths (Meno 81b–86b). In the other it is that we all have certain ideal concepts, such as the ideal of perfect equality, which we cannot have acquired in our lives because they are never fully instantiated in this world (Phaedo 73a–77a). In both forms the conclusion is that these facts can be accounted for only in terms of memory. We, or "our souls," must have acquired our knowledge of the conclusion of the theorem of Pythagoras or have been acquainted with the Platonic Idea of equality before this life began.

This argument has never been very popular, partly because of a well-grounded mistrust of both premises and partly because of the fact that the notion of preexistence involved in the conclusion does not square with the demands of Western orthodoxy. For its force the argument depends on the existence of an important logical link between (true) memory and personal identity. If I really do remember certain truths or being acquainted with certain objects, then it follows that at some time in the past I must have learned them or made that acquaintance. Plato's argument is sound, but he draws the wrong conclusion. The correct conclusion is not that we must be remembering from a former existence but that memory cannot be involved. It cannot be memory for the simple and basic reason that we were not available to acquire knowledge or anything else before we existed, because we are not, what this argument in fact assumes that we are, the sort of incorporeal things which could preexist our conception and growth.

It is worth remarking that although to products of Western cultural conditioning preexistence appears much less credible than immortality, Plato, in insisting on both, was adopting a much less arbitrary position than that of those who assert immortality alone. It was not without reason that in the ancient world Lucretius and other spokesmen for human mortality made much of the comparison between our nothingness before birth and our annihilation in death (see, for instance, Lucretius, De Rerum Natura III. 11. 830–842 and 973–977). As George Santayana once remarked, "The fact of being born is a poor augury of immortality."

ARGUMENT FROM RATIONALITY

Another argument was developed from distinctions embedded in Plato's account of Socrates' intellectual history (Phaedo 96a ff.). The Platonic Socrates here tells of his dissatisfaction with Anaxagoras, who apparently wanted to explain how the universe works rather than justify why everything is for the best. Socrates then goes on to contrast the physiological conditions of human behavior with the reasons the agent has for acting as he does. These categorial distinctions could serve as the foundations of an argument to the conclusion that since there are no necessary connections between the concepts of physiology, on the one hand, and the concepts that are peculiar to the distinctively human business of giving reasons for actions, on the other, it must therefore follow that rational agents are of their very nature incorporeal.

It would probably be going too far to attribute the argument in this form to Plato, although the conclusion and all the ideas involved are thoroughly Platonic. It is nevertheless one that needs to be noted here. C. S. Lewis and other contemporary apologists have tried to use these ideas to show that rationality is somehow essentially supernatural and that the bodily occurrences involved in rational behavior cannot be completely compassed in any scientific explanation.

There are two crucial points to be made in reply to this argument. The first is that precisely because the justification and appraisal of actions is so totally different from the causal explanation of physiological events, questions and answers belonging to the one universe of discourse cannot rival those belonging to the other. It is thus entirely possible to be confronted by a series of corporeal events—those, for instance, involved in what would normally be described as the oral development of an argument—and to ask and to answer both logical questions about the rationality of the whole performance considered as an argument and physiological questions about the causes of all the various glottal, oral, and nervous happenings considered as subject matter for the physiologist.

The second point is that to show that the concepts involved in the rational assessment of conduct are not logically reducible to purely physiological terms is not the same as to establish that agents must be essentially incorporeal. It would be equally impossible by purely logical analysis to translate the statement "Italy declared war" into a series of assertions about individual Italians, but this is no reason for thinking that "Italy" is the word for some incorporeal substance. Nor is the impossibility of a logical reduction any reason for thinking that it could even make sense to talk of incorporeal rational agents' or of Italy's taking part in international affairs if there were no individual Italians.

LIFE AS A SUBSTANTIAL SOUL

The Platonic approaches thus far considered have all involved thinking of the soul as the person; at the same time the person was wrongly thought of as an incorporeal substance. Another approach starts from the notion of a soul as a principle of life. It helps to note some peculiarities of the Greek language. The word ψυχὴ, translated "soul," is etymologically related to such words as ᾿ϵ́μψυχος, meaning "alive" (literally, "ensouled"), and λιποψυχία, meaning "swooning" or "death" (literally, "abandonment" by the soul). A popular idea to which Plato makes gently contemptuous reference was that death was a matter of the soul's permanently leaving its body; the soul was thought of as a puff of air, an invisible vapor, that would be dispersed in the breeze (see Phaedo 77d; compare, for instance, Euripides, Supplices 553–554). In this connection we might therefore distinguish two senses of "soul." In the first "to have a soul" means merely "to be alive"; in the second "soul" is the word for a class of supposititious entities, corporeal but elusive.

In the first sense one might speak, rather pretentiously, of the soul as the principle of life. In this sense we do have souls, for to say that a creature possesses a soul in this sense is just a misleadingly substantival way of describing it as alive. At this point Plato took another step, apparently without recognizing that any step was involved and, therefore, without providing the slightest warrant for taking it. He simply assumed what is manifestly false—that the word soul in this sense is equivalent to the term soul construed as a synonym for person (albeit for persons recognized to be incorporeal objects). He unjustifiably equated this "soul as the principle of life" with what the older commentators call "the soul as the bearer of moral values" (see, for instance, Republic 353d, a passage that is no less revealing for being found in an argument a little removed from our present concern).

INCOMPATIBILITY OF LIFE AND DEATH

The false equation of two senses of "soul" is crucial in the most considerable of Plato's arguments for immortality (Phaedo 100b–107a). Of his other arguments the only one that retains more than antiquarian interest is the contention that the soul is something that moves itself and that whatever moves itself must be ingenerable and incorruptible (Phaedrus 245c–246a). And the interest of this argument lies mainly in its later theological development. It was the germ of some of the theology of Plato's Laws. This theology led to Aristotle's notions of God as the Unmoved Mover. And Thomas later quarried Aristotelian materials for the first of his five ways—the argument to the First Mover.

This most interesting of the Platonic arguments presupposes Plato's general theory of Ideas, or Forms, especially as expounded in Phaedo, in the Republic, and elsewhere; in fact, Plato's other arguments derive what plausibility they may have from the theory of Ideas as a background assumption. Plato believed that for every significant word, such as justice or equality, there is a corresponding abstract Idea, or Form. These Ideas are eternal and incorporeal substances, intelligible to the intellect as material things are sensible to the senses. All the many particular instances of some general class of things "participate" in the appropriate unique Idea, and this Idea serves as an ideal standard, itself apparently preeminently possessing the characteristic concerned. These Ideas are thought of as providing answers both to questions about criteria—What makes an X count as an X ?—and to questions of a more causal character—What is ultimately responsible for the existence of X 's?

The argument to show that life is incompatible with death starts from the notion of the soul as the principle of life, and this is equated, in terms of the theory of Ideas, with the Form of Life. Now, life in the abstract is as incompatible with death as equality is with inequality. Life can never be overcome by Death. Thus, the conclusion is that the soul as the very Idea of Life is essentially deathless and eternal and, hence, "the immortal part" of us is not destroyed by death, for "our souls will exist somewhere in another world" (Phaedo 106e and 107a).

The answer to this argument is that since Life and Soul are convertible terms in this context, there is as much or as little reason for saying that the Idea of Soul is eternal as there is for maintaining the eternal reality of any other Form. But, as Plato himself always insisted, the abstract Form is entirely different from the particular individual, whereas the nerve of the entire argument lies precisely in the equation of the Form of Soul with the particular soul. This identification is impossible not merely because, as we have seen, there is no reason to equate souls in the present sense with the souls that are people but, more fundamentally, because in the present sense no meaning has been given to the expression "an individual soul." This vital fact is one of the many that are obscured by the confusion of explanatory and descriptive concepts and by the failure to separate philosophical questions about criteria from factual questions about causes. Once these distinctions are made, it becomes clear that to say that someone has a soul (is alive) is not to say that he is alive only thanks to the presence of some mysterious extra substance, whether corporeal or incorporeal.

aristotle

Aristotle's De Anima is perhaps best approached as a philosophical treatise on life. Anima is Latin for "soul" and is the word from which our animate and inanimate are ultimately derived; the declared aim of De Anima is "to ascertain the nature and essence of soul" as "the principle of life" (402a–403b). The fundamental thesis is that life or the soul is "the form of the particular living body." The Aristotelian notion of form is complex and is to be distinguished from the Platonic. R. D. Hicks, the editor of the classic English language edition, stated that by the thesis that the soul is the form of the body Aristotle "so far from favouring materialism, secures once and for all the soul's absolute immateriality" (R. D. Hicks, ed., Aristotle: De Anima, Cambridge, U.K., 1907, p. xliii). Aristotle does dispose of all ideas that the soul is a lump of stuff. However, Aristotle's basic thesis is quite un-Platonic and leaves no room at all for any doctrine of immortality. An Aristotelian form is no more a corporeal thing than a Platonic Form would be, but it is not an incorporeal one either. In our sense it is not a substance at all. The soul as the form stands to the stuff of the particular body—and the examples are all Aristotle's—as the configuration of the statue to the materials of which it is made, as vision to the eye capable of seeing, as cutting power to the serviceable ax. Whatever else may be obscure, here it is obvious, as Aristotle himself said, that in this view the soul is not separable from the body (413a) and, furthermore, that this inseparability is a matter not of physical but of logical impossibility.

Had this been all that Aristotle said, Aristotle's views could not have been used in support of immortality. He also maintained, however, certain Platonic views that have given rise to much discussion and development, particularly among the Scholastics and others committed to a belief in personal immortality. These views concern the intellectual aspects of man and the corresponding intellectual (functions of the) soul. Despite the enormous labors of the commentators, precisely what Aristotle thought on these points is far from clear, possibly because Aristotle was not very clear in his own mind. There are nevertheless some relevant points that may usefully be made.

IMMORTAL ABSTRACT INTELLECT

The tradition descending from Alexander of Aphrodisias through Averroes attributes to Aristotle a belief in some sort of Eternal Intellect. This is, however, a doctrine of personal immortality offering "prospect of rewards and punishments," a point emphasized by St. Thomas (De Unitate Intellectus Contra Averroistes ). Furthermore, since the Abstract Intellect as opposed to the intellects of particular men is necessarily unique, it is not at all the right material to serve Thomas's own vital theoretical need for bridges between us and our successors in the next life.

TWO SENSES OF "ETERNAL"

The one kind of reason that might be proffered for saying that the Abstract Intellect (or any other putative Abstract Reality) is essentially eternal is really no reason for saying that anything at all actually goes on forever. In a way it is correct to say that such things as necessary truths and the logical relations between abstract mathematical concepts are somehow timeless and eternal. Yet this is not a matter of the existence of anything imperishable but, rather, of its not making sense to ask temporal questions about the periods during which any of these truths and these relations obtain. From eternity in this sense we can have nothing either to hope or to fear.

This distinction between two senses of eternity is fundamental in discussing personal immortality. We are concerned only with a life that would live on forever; the eternity of mere abstractions is not to the point. In the light of this distinction we can better appreciate the significance and the error of Plato's contention that the soul belongs to the same category as the abstract Ideas and, hence, that it is the sort of thing that may be presumed immortal (Phaedo 78b–80b).

The presumption that an incorporeal substance would be naturally incorruptible has always been the philosophers' favorite argument for the immortality of the soul. Thomas appealed to it, for instance, although he, of course, would not have included Platonic abstract Ideas in this category and although he was also careful to insist that souls, like everything else, are sustained by God and would be at once annihilated if he chose to withdraw his support (Summa Theologiae Ia, 75, 6; ad 2). It was perhaps with the same idea in mind that in the Republic Plato offered, as if it were a proof, the following unconvincing argument: Because every sort of thing has its one congenital evil, because nothing can be destroyed by anything but its own congenital evil, because the congenital evil of the soul is wickedness, and because wickedness as such is never directly lethal to the wicked man, our souls must be immortal (Republic 608e–611a).

REASON NOT LOCALIZED

Assuming that Aristotle had really wanted to suggest that it could make sense to talk of an individual intellect's existing separately, then, presumably, a large part of his reason would have lain in his belief that ratiocination, unlike sight or hearing, is not localized in any organ (De Anima 402a, 408a, 429a). This belief has, of course, turned out to be erroneous. But even if it had not, the absence of any special corporeal organ provides no justification for assuming that our intellectual attributes must, or even might, be those of special incorporeal substances. The lack of special organs of melancholy or of volition is surely not to be construed as grounds for seeking invisible subjects to which to attribute Eric's feeling glum or Katrina's wanting to go to sleep. These are simply and obviously attributes of the people concerned.

Aristotle himself never employed any argument of this sort. On the contrary, he urged that the intellect, "since it thinks all things must needs, in the words of Anaxagoras, be unmixed with any, if it is to rule, that is, to know" (429a). This dark saying has been construed as an expression of a belief that our intellects are both incorporeal and substances, a belief that might seem to mesh well with the conviction, which Aristotle undoubtedly did have, that pure intellectual activity, abstract cognition, is something rather grand, almost divine, an occupation only for the highest sort of person (see, for instance, Nicomachean Ethics 1177a–1179b). Aristotle immediately went on to insist, however, that this pure intellect "has no other nature than this, that it is a capacity," and a capacity is not at all the sort of thing that can significantly be said to exist separately. Again, he seems elsewhere to have dismissed the idea of individual immortality with contempt (ibid., 1111b). And in the whole range of his works there is neither a positive treatment of the subject of a future life nor any promise of such treatment. The most plausible interpretation of Aristotle's view is surely that defended by Pietro Pomponazzi in Chapter 9 of his great polemic De Immortalite Animae. He concluded that the soul, including the intellect, "is in no way truly itself an individual. And so it is truly a form beginning with, and ceasing to be with, the body; nor can it in any way operate or exist without the body."

thomas aquinas

Thomas, as was mentioned, had urgent theoretical reasons for wanting to show that the soul is a substance, that it is, as he put it, "something subsistent." He was therefore inclined as far as possible to read Aristotle as holding the same view. In his Commentary on Aristotle's De Anima he explained the passage considered above (429a) in this way:

But our intellect … must itself lack all those things which of its nature it understands. Since then it naturally understands all sensible and bodily things, it must be lacking in every bodily nature; just as the sense of sight, being able to know colour, lacks all colour. If sight itself had any particular colour, this colour would prevent it from seeing other colours, just as the tongue of a feverish man, being coated with a bitter moisture, cannot taste anything sweet.

If this were indeed what Aristotle meant, he really was confused. For if intellect is, reasonably enough, to be compared with the sense of sight, it is because they are both (cognitive) capacities. But we need no particular argument to show why a capacity, as opposed to the subject that may possess that capacity, cannot itself have any material characteristics. The reason that the sense of sight is not yellow is not that being yellow must render it or its possessor incapable of seeing yellow things but that, generally, it is nonsense to attribute sensible characteristics to a capacity. (It is hard not to regard all this as the product, at least in part, of the bad habit of making nouns out of verbs and then succumbing to the temptation to presume that a substantive must be a word for a substance.)

It might seem that it is upon precisely this argument that Thomas himself relied in the Summa Theologiae to establish "that the principle of intellectual operation which we call the soul is … both incorporeal and subsistent." He even employed the same example of "a sick man's tongue being vitiated by a feverish and bitter humour," but here he was comparing the soul as "the principle of intellectual operation" with the organ, not the sense, of sight. Having thus supposedly established that "it is impossible for the intellectual principle to be a body," he proceeded:

It is likewise impossible for it to understand by means of a bodily organ; since the particular nature of the organ would prevent its knowing all bodies; compare the way in which liquid put into a glass vase seems to be of the same colour, not only when some particular colour is in the pupil of the eye but even when it is in the vase. (Ia, 75, 2)

In this version the argument escapes the previous criticism. But it escapes only at the price of removing what was in the commentary on De Anima offered as the proof of its major premise, here formulated as the proposition that "whatever knows certain things cannot have any of them in its own nature; because that which is in it naturally would impede the knowledge of anything else." The question arises, "How is this premise known?" The answer seems to be that it is not known, perhaps even that it is known to be false. Take Thomas's own example of the eye as the organ of sight. The eyes are admittedly material, yet that does not prevent us from using them for seeing material things, including other people's eyes and even—in mirrors—our own. Furthermore, even if the Thomist proposition did fit all the facts about our present sense organs, this would at most suggest that it was a contingent truth about them. But to serve Thomas's purpose, it must be known to be, if not actually necessary, at least sufficiently universal to apply not only to sense organs but also to "that principle of intellectual operation which we call the soul"—something which he himself is here trying to show to be radically different from anything corporeal.

descartes

Plato and Aristotle can be regarded as the archetypical protagonists of two opposing views of man. Plato is the original spokesman for a dualistic view, and it seems that it is upon dualism that a doctrine of personal immortality must be grounded if it is to possess any initial plausibility. As a defender of a monistic view, Aristotle was neither so consistent nor so wholehearted. Yet it is still fair to see him at his most characteristic as the philosophical founding father of the view that the person is the living human organism, a view that apparently leaves no room whatsoever for belief in personal immortality. Thomas, who generally followed Aristotle on this point, characteristically attempted a synthesis that would have opened, had it been successful, the doors to heaven and to hell. In the present perspective Descartes must be placed squarely in the Platonic tradition. Thus, in the final paragraph of Part V of the Discourse on Method, after remarking that "next to the error of those who deny God … there is none which is more effectual in leading feeble spirits from the straight path of virtue, than to imagine that … after this life we have nothing to fear or to hope for, any more than the flies or the ants," Descartes concluded that "our soul is in its nature entirely independent of the body, and in consequence that it is not liable to die with it. And then, inasmuch as we observe no other causes capable of destroying it, we are naturally inclined to judge that it is immortal."

SOUL AS A THINKING SUBSTANCE

Although his conclusions were thoroughly traditional, Descartes was nevertheless a revolutionary thinker. Unlike Plato, his chief intellectual interests were science, in particular physiology. Like Thomas Hobbes, the other great metaphysician of his period, Descartes quickly grasped the wider significance of the work of William Harvey and Galileo Galilei. Harvey's discovery of the circulation of the blood suggested to Descartes that both animals and human bodies might be regarded as machines. Descartes then asked himself how the creatures that we know might be distinguished from living machines. His answer was that with respect to animals there simply was no distinction in principle but that an automaton in human shape, however brilliantly constructed, could always be distinguished from a true human being in two ways. There were two sorts of test which were bound to reveal the absence of the vital rational soul: without a rational soul such an automaton would not be able "to reply appropriately to everything … said in its presence, as even the lowest type of man can do," and their lack of versatility would always reveal that the automata "did not act from knowledge, but only from the disposition of their organs" (Discourse on Method, Part V).

One fundamental distinction, often overlooked in discussing these questions, is that between logical and technical impossibility. In Part V of the Discourse, his first published treatment, Descartes seems to have been making a purely factual claim "that it is morally impossible that there should be sufficient diversity in any machine to allow it to act in all the events of life in the same way as our reason causes us to act." To make any such would-be factual claim must be both rashly premature and scientifically defeatist. Elsewhere and later, it becomes clear that what Descartes, like so many successors, really wanted to say is that it is inconceivable that any material mechanism could be responsible for certain sorts of things. Thus, in the Passions of the Soul he laid down the principle "that all that which is in us and which we cannot in any way conceive as possibly pertaining to a body, must be attributed to our soul" (I, iv). And in his view what has to be thus attributed is thought, in his own rather broad sense of "thought," which seems to include all actions and passions considered to involve consciousness (ibid., I, xvii ff.). "By the word thought I understand all that of which we are conscious as operating in us. And that is why not only understanding, willing, imaging, but feeling also here count as thought" (Principles of Philosophy, I, ix).

Descartes was thus insisting that it is inconceivable that matter, however disposed, could in this sense think. This is a notion of the same sort as the idea that purposive and rational beings could not, without benefit of control by some Higher Purpose, have evolved first from creatures of a lower order and, ultimately, from inanimate matter, an idea found in both some objections to evolutionary theory and some versions of the Argument to Design. Presumably, Descartes would have accepted both contentions and many others like them because they fall under the generic principle, which he formulated as the fourth of his "axioms or common notions"; "All the reality of perfection which is in a thing is found formally or eminently in its first and total cause" (Addendum to the Replies to the Second Set of Objections to the Meditations ).

It has since Immanuel Kant become the custom to dignify such principles with the title "synthetic a priori propositions." But the one with which we are here concerned, though certainly synthetic, can be described as a priori only in the quite artificial sense that it is wholly arbitrary and unwarranted. Descartes's more specific idea had been forcibly challenged long before by the Epicureans (see, for instance, Lucretius, De Rerum Natura II. 865–870 and 875–882). The challenge was later repeated by both Spinoza and Locke even before David Hume launched his decisive onslaught on the generic notion that it is possible to know a priori that some thing or sort of thing must be or cannot be the cause of some other thing or sort of thing. The points made, in their different ways, by both Spinoza and Locke were that there is no contradiction in the idea of something material being endowed with thought and that we are in no position to deny dogmatically that there are material creatures so endowed.

SUBJECTIVISM

Thus far, Descartes's originality, as against the Platonic tradition, has chiefly been in his positive scientific interests and in his mechanistic ideas about the body. His achievement was to form a new framework of discussion and to provide a metaphysical foundation for the further development of physiology. He was also revolutionary on a second count, for it was he who developed with compelling dramatic power a new approach to questions of mind and matter. For three full centuries this remained part of the accepted philosophical orthodoxy, an orthodoxy that even Hume seems never to have thought to question. This approach can be characterized, though with no intended moral overtones, as self-centered.

Whereas Plato generally—and Descartes, too, when he suggested tests of humanity—approached people from our common public world, Descartes at his most characteristic tried to approach the world from inside the closed circle of his logically private consciousness. Thus, in Part IV of the Discourse, having reached his rock-bottom certainty in the proposition cogito ergo sum, he asked what he was. "I saw that I could conceive that I had no body, and that there was no world nor place where I might be; but yet that I could not for all that conceive that I was not." He concluded that he "was a substance the whole essence or nature of which is to think, and that for its existence there is no need of any place, nor does it depend on any material thing; so that this 'me,' that is to say, the soul by which I am what I am, is entirely distinct from body, … and even if the body were not, the soul would not cease to be what it is" (compare, especially, Meditations, II).

Much of the power of the Cartesian argument lies in the use of the first-person personal pronoun and in the idiosyncratic choice of tenses and moods. For there is surely no difficulty at all, even for Descartes, in supposing that Descartes may one day be annihilated or that Descartes might never have been born. The most fundamental objections are founded upon a rejection of his unstated general assumption that (his) words obtain their meaning by reference to (his) logically private experiences. In particular, Descartes mistakenly assumed that all the words for all the things that he comprehended under the term thinking are words for such private experiences. Only on this assumption is it possible to assert that there could be—much less that we are—essentially incorporeal beings and, as such, fully capable of every sort of thinking. To insist that this assumption is wrong is not necessarily to adopt either a complete logical behaviorism—saying that all terms of this type refer only to public performances—or Ludwig Wittgenstein's extreme later position—apparently denying the very possibility of a language's containing words defined in terms of one man's logically private experience. It is sufficient to commit oneself only to the more modest claim that most thinking words refer wholly or partly to various actual or possible proceedings that are necessarily corporeal. To recognize that this is true and could scarcely be otherwise, it is sufficient to reflect for a moment upon the whole context in which we learn to use these terms; consider how we should teach the meaning of "He argued with her" or "She drew her own conclusions." In this perspective it becomes no wonder that, as Wittgenstein said, "The human face is the best picture of the human soul."

PERSONAL IDENTITY AND PARAPSYCHOLOGY

The appeal of the Cartesian approach and its influence can be appreciated by considering two examples, both relevant to the question of immortality—first, the discussion of personal identity initiated by Locke and continued by Joseph Butler, Hume, and Thomas Reid and, second, the investigation of the question of human survival by modern parapsychologists through the study of the possible relevance of the evidence furnished by all types of mediumistic performances.

Both investigations have started from the self-centered Cartesian standpoint and have taken for granted that, essentially, people are bodiless. Thus, the problem of personal identity was generally taken to be one of the identity of an incorporeal thinking thing. Locke tried to provide an analysis of personal identity, so construed, in terms of consciousness (memory). The decisive objection to any such analysis was sharply put by Butler: "And one should really think it self-evident that consciousness of personal identity presupposes, and therefore cannot constitute, personal identity" (Dissertation I, "Personal Identity," appended to the Analogy of Religion ).

But most of Locke's critics, Butler included, seem to have failed to appreciate just how difficult—even, perhaps, impossible—the problems of the nature of the identity and of the principle of the individuation of such putative incorporeal beings must be. If people are thought of as incorporeal substances having sorts of thinking, in the wide Cartesian sense, as their qualities (the substance, or "pure ego," theory of the self), then the question is how such substances are to be identified, what sense can be given to the expression "pure ego." If, with Hume, one is unable to provide any satisfactory answer to this question, the only alternative seems to be thinking of people as collections of experiences (the serial, or "bundle," theory of the self). Theories of this sort face two difficulties. First, it does not seem to make sense to speak of thoughts or experiences as "loose and separate" without anyone's having them, and, second, there seems to be no string capable of tying the bundles of experiences together while keeping one bundle distinct from another. The first difficulty may or may not be merely grammatical. The second, once the impossibility of using memory as the string is fully realized, appears very formidable. It was the second difficulty in a slightly different form that Hume had to confess to be "too hard for my understanding" (Appendix to Treatise of Human Nature ).

In parapsychology it seems to have been almost universally assumed that mediumistic material, insofar as it cannot be either satisfactorily explained away in terms of fraud and delusion or conveniently redescribed in terms of telepathic and clairvoyant transactions among the living, can and must be interpreted as evidence for human survival. Yet to interpret such material in this way is not to provide support for, but rather to presuppose, a Platonic-Cartesian view of man. For it is only insofar as a person is essentially incorporeal that it can even make sense to suggest that someone years ago dead, buried, and dissolved is even now communicating with us through a medium.

Other Arguments concerning Immortality

This article has thus far concentrated on philosophers who have adopted, more or less consciously, a Platonic or Platonizing view of man and who, if they have argued philosophically for any sort of immortality, have urged that the nature of the soul is such that it must be or must be presumed to be imperishable. None of these arguments requires any reference to a deity, and none appeals to any moral premises. This may perhaps be surprising, for most people—at least those in the European cultural tradition—are likely to think that beliefs in God and in immortality must go together. They are inclined to take it for granted that the main if not the only point of immortality—and sometimes perhaps of God, too—is to provide inordinate rewards and punishments. Yet there is no obvious inconsistency in believing in a Creator while denying that he has established a new world in a future life to redress the moral unbalances of the old. Nor does it appear that to assert our immortality is logically either to presuppose or to imply the existence of any sort of god. It may seem odd, but it is not manifestly inconsistent, for such avowedly atheist philosophers as J. M. E. McTaggart and C. J. Ducasse to affirm immortality, McTaggart offering exclusively metaphysical reasons and Ducasse appealing mainly to the evidence of parapsychology.

moral arguments

The most considerable philosopher to rest his case for immortality on morality was Kant. Unfortunately, this is one of the many cases in which it is difficult to give an account of Kant's position and reasons that is clear, consistent, persuasive, precise, and acceptable to Kant scholars. Kant himself may be at fault here not merely, as usual, because he obscured his thought with cumbrous and idiosyncratic expression but also because he presented imprecise and uncompelling arguments.

But with these warnings it can be said that in the Critique of Practical Reason and in the Critique of Judgment Kant offered freedom, immortality, and God as the three postulates of practical reason. Practical reason is for Kant the source of the universal imperatives of morality. A "postulate of pure practical reason" is defined in the Critique of Practical Reason as "a theoretical proposition which is not as such demonstrable, but which is an inseparable corollary of an a priori unconditionally valid moral law" (translated by L. W. Beck, Chicago, 1949, pp. 225–228). The form of the argument, in the cases of immortality and God, appears to be that something is said to be commanded by the moral law but could be obeyed only on a certain condition; therefore, the conclusion is drawn not that that condition must obtain but that it must be a postulate of practical reason. The first difficulty is to see how Kant, who in and after the Critique of Pure Reason regularly denied the possibility of proofs of immortality or of the existence of God, proposed to reconcile this denial with insistence on the validity of the present deductions. The most promising response to this is to suggest that they cannot be rated as proofs of the doctrines that Kant maintained to be unprovable because it has not been and cannot be shown that the moral ideas are indeed soundly based but that they do prove that to act in accordance with moral ideas is to act as if, or to act on the assumption that, these doctrines are true.

The second difficulty lies in the supposed derivations themselves. In the case of the postulate of immortality the conclusion is to be drawn from the premise that the moral law commands us to achieve a perfect correspondence between our will and that law. This is taken to be out of the question in this life. Thus, what the law really requires is an endless progress toward the ideal, which is possible "only under the presupposition of an infinitely enduring existence and personality of the same rational being." If this is what Kant meant—as it certainly is what he said—then the moral law includes one very strange command. For to reach the proposed conclusion, we have to construe that law not as stating that we should approach as near to perfection as is humanly possible, or, as Kant seemed at first inclined to say, that we must actually achieve perfection, but, rather, that we must forever approach asymptotically this eternally unattainable ideal.

In the case of the third postulate of God the moral premise is that the law requires us to promote the highest good, which involves a perfect correspondence between the morality and the happiness of every individual. But the only guarantee of the possibility of this correspondence would be the existence of God, presumably because God alone would possess the power necessary to achieve it. Consequently, practical reason demands this postulate.

There seems to be a crucial disharmony between the premises of the second and the third arguments. Only at first in the second but throughout the third, Kant apparently wanted to insist that the ideals prescribed by practical reason must be practically and not just theoretically possible. Surely, it is merely the contingent weakness of the flesh that makes holiness something "of which no rational being in the world of sense is at any time capable," whereas if the theoretical possibility of achieving the necessary correspondence was all that was at stake, there would be no call "to assume the actual existence of God." Yet Kant had urged in the second argument that the true imperative is to press ever closer to an ideal which is, it seems, not even theoretically attainable. This is fatal. If it is once allowed that an imperative can be to get as near as is humanly possible to an ideal that may be practically—even theoretically—unattainable, then the whole foundation of both arguments collapses. For such more modest demands could be satisfied in an earthly lifetime and without benefit of God.

Three general points about the Kantian arguments should be particularly noted. First, that the cases for the second and for the third postulate are separate. Second, Kant scrupulously avoided any suggestion that the authority of the moral law is at all dependent on the availability, here or hereafter, of rewards and punishments. Third, Kant was careful not to make the mistake of trying to deduce what is the case from premises affirming only what ought to be. It is not often that any of these things can be said for some more popular arguments for immortality.

For instance, it is often urged—most commonly, perhaps, in Roman Catholic textbook apologetic but elsewhere, too—that the lack of appropriate rewards and punishments would make nonsense of the claims of morality. Thus, the Jesuit M. Maher wrote:

But in the judgement that conduct entailing a sacrifice ought to be pursued, there is implied a further judgement that it cannot be ultimately worse for the agent himself to do that which is right. … The supposition that virtue can finally result in … misery for the agent; or that wickedness may effect an increase in the total quantity of his personal happiness is seen to be in conflict with reason, and to be destructive of all morality. (Rational Psychology, London, 1940, p. 530)

Maher proceeded to argue that God could not permit this and, therefore, that there must be immortality, with penalties and compensations. He himself believed that the existence of God is independently established by natural theology (p. 533), but "some of the proofs of Immortality are amongst the most forcible arguments for the existence of a Deity" (ibid., pp. 525–526). It is interesting to compare the distress of Henry Sidgwick, who saw the moral situation similarly but was unable to share the supposedly saving religious convictions (Methods of Ethics, London, 1874, especially Part IV, Ch. 7).

Even if it were to be allowed that some such view is correct, it certainly does not warrant the suggested conclusions. Suppose we allow that rewards and penalties are indeed morally necessary; at most, this could support a demand not for immortality but for a temporary survival. Nothing has been said in the premises to explain why these necessary rewards and penalties have to be eternal. Indeed, to the secular moralist, to whom no revelation has been vouchsafed, it might seem that to provide eternal penalties for temporal offenses would be to make the universe infinitely worse. More generally, it is essential to insist that no argument from purely gerundive premises—stating only what ought to be or what is in some other way desirable—can by itself either establish or make probable any conclusion about what is actually the case. (Compare J. S. Mill, Three Essays on Religion, London, 1874, especially the essay "Theism.")

In any case it is certainly no part of the meaning of moral obligation that the obligation must always accord with the eventual self-interest or the person obliged. The sense in which categorical imperatives can be characterized as essentially rational refers to their universality and impartiality rather than to any implication that obedience must always be ultimately the best-paying policy. If anything, surely, it is part of the very idea of morality that sacrifices are sometimes required.

argument from desire

Many other arguments have been and are put forward. It is urged, for instance, that the allegedly almost universal belief in survival is somehow evidence of its own truth, a contention rejected by J. S. Mill for the decisive reason that to urge this is not to offer a good ground but, rather, if anything, to concede tacitly that there is none. Again, attempts have been made (by Dugald Stewart, for instance) to make something of the allegedly almost universal desire for immortality or of the existence of human potentialities that cannot be realized in a mere three score years and ten. If the existence of a desire really were a reason for affirming not merely, as perhaps it is, that this desire has some describable object but also, as it manifestly is not, that this object must actually be realized, then the argument could still be refuted by the consideration—pressed by Hume in his essay "Immortality"—that the certainly no less nearly universal fear of annihilation equally demands its real object. Of course, the existence of a desire for immortality, where it is found, does call for—and can easily be given—a naturalistic explanation. Such a desire, however, begins to be useful to the advocate of immortality only insofar as it can be used in conjunction with some idea of a God who may be relied on to arrange for the ultimate fulfillment of (some of?) the desires and (some more of?) the potentialities that he has arranged for us to have. (The qualification "some of" has, presumably, to be put in to allow for the existence of ambivalent and evil desires; the "some more of" is needed if we are to have an argument that even appears to hold.)

To consider the possibility of establishing the existence of such a God is beyond the scope of this article. Yet it is perhaps worth suggesting that the existence of these ostensibly frustrated wholesome desires and these apparently unfulfilled splendid potentialities must, by itself, count as evidence against, rather than for, the existence of this kind of God. It is, as Hume insisted both in his Dialogues and in the first Enquiry, very odd—notwithstanding that it is very common—to argue from what in themselves would have to be rated as defects of the familiar world to the conclusion that this world is the work of a being without defect, who will in the future make good all present deficiencies.

Arguments against Immortality

Philosophers opposed to the belief in immortality have generally confined their case to attacking weaknesses in the arguments thought up by immortalists. But some have also advanced arguments intended to show that human beings do not survive the death of their bodies. Thus, in the essay mentioned above Hume was not satisfied with pointing out the flaws in the metaphysical and the moral arguments for immortality but urged a number of considerations "from the analogy of nature" in favor of "the mortality of the soul." Similarly, many other writers who are not materialists and who are not committed to the view about the meaning of person words presented in this article maintain that there are powerful empirical grounds supporting a negative position on immortality. The most popular and impressive of these is what may be called the "body-mind dependence argument," an argument that, according to its more recent exponents, has received powerful confirmation from modern brain research. Bertrand Russell wrote,

We know that the brain is not immortal, and that the organized energy of a living body becomes, as it were, demobilized at death and therefore not available for collective action. All the evidence goes to show that what we regard as our mental life is bound up with brain structure and organized bodily energy. Therefore it is rational to suppose that mental life ceases when bodily life ceases. The argument is only one of probability, but it is as strong as those upon which most scientific conclusions are based. (Why I Am Not a Christian, New York, 1957, p. 51)

Philosophers in the Hume-Russell tradition have also generally insisted that in the case of immortality the onus of proof must lie entirely with the believers. In their view it is quite wrong that we start with an open question. As this article urged at the beginning, the familiar facts of life and death establish an overwhelming presumption of mortality. Given these facts and the fact that person words mean what they do mean, there are massive philosophical obstacles to be overcome before the question of a future life can be shown to be sufficiently open to leave any room at all for appeals to evidence or even to faith.

Of course, there is nothing to stop anyone from giving what sense he likes to the expression "disembodied person." The difficulty is to attach enough sense to the expression so that some discovery about disembodied people could provide us with grounds for believing that we survive death. In their present senses person words have logical liaisons of the very greatest human importance. Personal identity in the present sense is the necessary condition of both accountability and expectation. This is only to say that it is unjust to reward or punish someone for something unless, as a minimum condition, he is the same person who did the deed and that it is absurd to expect things to happen to me in 2014 unless, as a minimum condition, there is going to be a person in existence in 2014 who will be the same person as I. The difficulty is to change the use of person words so radically that it becomes significant to talk of people's surviving dissolution without changing it in such a way that these crucial logical liaisons must be broken.

If this difficulty cannot be overcome—and there seems little reason to think that it can—then the apocalyptic words of the early Wittgenstein are to the point: "Our life is endless as the visual field is without limit. Death is not an event in life. Death is not lived through" (Tractatus Logico-philosophicus, London and New York, 1922, Secs. 6.431 and 6.1411).

See also Aristotle; Butler, Joseph; Death; Descartes, René; Ducasse, Curt John; Eternity; Galileo Galilei; Harvey, William; Hobbes, Thomas; Hume, David; Kant, Immanuel; Lewis, C. S. (Clive Staples); Locke, John; McTaggart, John McTaggart Ellis; Mill, John Stuart; Mind-Body Problem; Moral Arguments for the Existence of God; Parapsychology; Personal Identity; Plato; Pomponazzi, Pietro; Punishment; Reid, Thomas; Russell, Bertrand Arthur William; Ryle, Gilbert; Santayana, George; Socrates; Spinoza, Benedict (Baruch) de; Tertullian, Quintus Septimius Florens; Thomas Aquinas, St.; Wisdom, (Arthur) John Terence Dibben.

Bibliography

For a massive survey of the history of the doctrine of immortality, see W. R. Alger, A Critical History of the Doctrine of the Future Life (New York, 1871). For surveys of particular aspects of the doctrine, consult the bibliography of Antony Flew, ed., Body, Mind, and Death (New York: Macmillan, 1964), an anthology that includes a number of important pieces on immortality. The sources for the views given in the text are cited there.

St. Augustine's De Immortalite Animae has been translated by George G. Leckie in St. Aurelius Augustine, Concerning the Teacher and On the Immortality of the Soul (New York and London: Appleton-Century, 1938). Pietro Pomponazzi's De Immortalite Animae is available in an English translation by W. H. Hay II, revised by John H. Randall Jr., in The Renaissance Philosophy of Man, edited by Ernst Cassirer, Paul Oskar Kristeller, and John H. Randall Jr. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1948).

Moses Mendelssohn's Phaedon (Berlin, 1767) is a famous dialogue on immortality that consciously imitates Plato's Phaedo. Hume's "Of the Immortality of the Soul" first appeared in Two Essays (London, 1777); it is reprinted in A Modern Introduction to Philosophy, 2nd ed., edited by Paul Edwards and Arthur Pap (New York: Free Press, 1965). The translation of Immanuel Kant's Critique of Practical Reason quoted in the text is that of L. W. Beck (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1949). Dugald Stewart's Philosophy of the Active and Moral Powers of Man is contained in The Works of Dugald Stewart, Vol. V (Cambridge, MA: Hilliard and Brown, 1829), pp. 366–423. J. M. E. McTaggart's views can be found in Some Dogmas of Religion (London: Arnold, 1906). For C. J. Ducasse's views see Nature, Mind, and Death (La Salle, IL: Open Court, 1951) and The Belief in a Life after Death (Springfield, IL, 1960). Joseph Butler, The Analogy of Religion (London, 1736), Part I, Ch. 1, is a detailed argument for immortality with replies to objections. John Fiske, The Destiny of Man (Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1884) and Life Everlasting (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1901); William James, Human Immortality (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1898; 2nd ed., with reply to critics, 1917); Harry Emerson Fosdick, The Assurance of Immortality (New York, 1926); John Baillie, And the Life Everlasting (London, 1934); A. E. Taylor, The Christian Hope of Immortality (London: Unicorn Press, 1938); and Jacques Maritain, The Range of Reason (New York: Scribners, 1952) all present arguments for immortality, as does "Ten Reasons for Believing in Immortality," a sermon by John Haynes Holmes, published in The Community Pulpit (1929–1930) and reprinted in Edwards and Pap, op. cit. G. T. Fechner, Büchlein vom Leben nach dem Tode, translated by John Erskine as Life after Death (Chicago, 1906), is a panpsychist defense of immortality. A. S. Pringle-Pattison, The Idea of Immortality (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1922), holds that if there is personal immortality, it is not the inherent possession of every human soul but must be won by continual effort. E. S. P. Haynes, The Belief in Personal Immortality (Londo: Watts, 1913); Chapman Cohen, The Other Side of Death (London, 1922); Clarence Darrow, The Story of My Life (New York: Scribners, 1932); and Corliss Lamont, The Illusion of Immortality (London and New York, 1932) argue against immortality. Bertrand Russell, Why I Am Not a Christian and Other Essays (London: Allen and Unwin, 1957), should be consulted for a representative sample of Russell's arguments against immortality. A negative position similar to that presented in this article is found in C. B. Martin, Religious Belief (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1959).

C. D. Broad's The Mind and Its Place in Nature (London: Kegan Paul, 1925), though somewhat dated, is perhaps the most valuable work on the problem of mind and body so crucial to the question of immortality. In Section D, Broad argues against the moral argument for immortality.

The source of the discussion of personal identity is Locke's Essay concerning Human Understanding, edited by A. C. Frazer, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1894), Vol. II, Ch. 27. For the contributions of Butler, Hume, and Reid and for later works on this topic, see the bibliography of the Personal Identity entry.

The classic parapsychological study of immortality is F. W. H. Myers, Human Personality and Its Survival of Bodily Death (London and New York: Longmans, Green, 1903). See also Ducasse, op. cit.; C. D. Broad, op. cit., Religion, Philosophy, and Psychical Research (London: Routledge, 1953), and Lectures on Psychical Research (London: Routledge, 1962); Antony Flew, A New Approach to Psychical Research (London: Watts, 1953); and the bibliography of the Parapsychology entry. For the investigations of psychical researchers into the nature of the experiences of spirits, see, for instance, G. N. M. Tyrrell, Apparitions (London: Society for Psychical Research by G. Duckworth, 1953). J. R. Hick, "Theology and Verification IV," in Theology Today, 17 (April 1960), reprinted in The Existence of God, edited by J. R. Hick (New York: Macmillan, 1964), presents a view opposite to the thesis of this article on the difficulty of identifying the reconstituted person with the original person.

F. C. Copleston, Aquinas (Harmondsworth, U.K.: Penguin, 1955), gives a sympathetic and illuminating account of Thomas's views on immortality.

For the most important recent criticism of the Cartesian doctrine of the soul, see Gilbert Ryle, The Concept of Mind (London and New York: Hutchinson, 1949). For a Wittgensteinian criticism see P. T. Geach, Mental Acts (London: Routledge & Paul; New York: Humanities, 1957).

For the view that the bodily occurrences involved in rational behavior can be completely explained only supernaturally, see, for example, C. S. Lewis, Miracles (London and New York, 1957), especially Ch. 2. For a fuller development of the view that such occurrences can be the subject matter of the physiologist while logical questions as to the rationality of the performance considered as an argument can be raised and answered, see Antony Flew, Hume's Philosophy of Belief (New York: Humanities Press, 1961), Ch. 5.

Antony Flew (1967)