Intimations of Immortality

Young’s paper (2012) offers an interesting and fruitful extension to recent work on Cotard’s syndrome, and in particular, a philosophical investigation of how and why beliefs around death and non-existence frequently co-occur with beliefs around immortality. In this brief response, we discuss a few issues from the paper. Namely, the issue of Cotard delusion being a natural kind, the seeming paradox of death and immortality and its relation to wider culture and literature, and the utility of the concept of misplaced being.

The Unity of Cotard

As Young points out, Cotard’s typically occurs as part of a wider mental illness, typically a depressive psychosis, but nihilistic beliefs can occur in other disorders such as schizophrenia, dementia, and episodes of mania. One of the early tensions in the paper is that Young endorses the clinical reality of heterogeneity of the Cotard syndrome (Young and Leafhead 1996, 154) and by moving from the notion of syndrome to delusion seems to suggest that this focus on it as a specific symptom, Cotard’s qua delusion, protects the concept from the charge of non-universality of features and supports the idea of a conceptual clinical unity. Against this, it could be argued that this may be an empty move: within the range of delusions that one could choose to call Cotard’s is an immense range of belief and experience. Indeed, in addition to a belief in not being alive, a Cotard delusion can also refer to the belief that a body part is missing or that some nonpersonal feature of existence has ceased to be, such as time. Of course, this could be a case of contemporary psychopathology having stretched Cotard’s initial description too far, or it could be that the same charge of heterogeneity of Cotard’s qua syndrome also holds when considered qua delusion. If there is a real rag bag of beliefs, with no true underlying unity behind ‘Cotard’s’ then one shouldn’t expect coherence in the range of beliefs we put under the Cotard umbrella: people may be able to believe they are both dead and immortal. Alternately, and more optimistically, these seemingly logically paradoxical beliefs may be explained by a second, underlying, factor: if their experience, for example, is around the absence or alteration in the perception and experience of time, or for Young, changes in the normativity of feeling, this factor may explain both.

Literature, Death, and Immortality

The alleged contradiction of immortality and death is routinely resolved in wider cultural considerations of immortality. Whereas death tends to refer to death for a living, organic, physical organism, immortality need not posit the ongoing existence of such an organism. Indeed, many of the world’s religions believe in a state of spiritual immortality only accessed after one’s physical death. Christianity’s ‘life of the world to come,’ for example, is qualitatively different to mortal existence, a difference underscored by the unfulfilled promise of the final judgment’s ‘resurrection of the dead.’ Thus, the soul’s immortality is contingent upon death: it is, as it were, a necessary requirement. The other arenas where the concepts are not opposed are in popular culture and literary fiction. For the former, horror films are full of the ‘living dead,’ reanimated corpses, whether mummies, zombies, or vampires, who have an ‘undead’ existence that may well be immortal. Similar ideas are echoed in the weird fiction of HP Lovecraft, particularly in his The Call of Cthulhu, where Cthulhu’s immortality is explained thus: ‘That is not dead which can eternal lie. And with strange eons even death may die’ (Lovecraft 1999, 156). This Lovecraft quote resonates particularly with the interconnection between time, depression, hopelessness, and depression (Broome 2005; Wyllie 2006). Hence, it is not inconceivable that many patients who believe themselves to be dead, yet also in some way conscious, also assume they may be immortal.

More widely, the Cotard delusion has a literary connection almost as long as its history, Jules Cotard providing a model for the socially awkward Dr. Cottard in Marcel...