Don Quixote Meets Mr. Gradgrind: A Neglected Proof for Immortality

Now, what I want is, Facts. Teach these boys and girls nothing but Facts. Facts alone are wanted in life. Plant nothing else, and root out everything else. You can only form the minds of reasoning animals upon Facts: nothing else will ever be of any service to them. This is the principle on which I bring up my own children, and this is the principle on which I bring up these children. Stick to Facts, sir!

the character of thomas gradgrind;

from hard times, by charles dickens

But after all, Sir, if I know anything of the Matter, you have no Occasion for any of these Things; for your Subject being a Satyr on Knight-Errantry, is so absolutely new, that neither Aristotle, St. Basil, nor Cicero ever dreamt or heard of it. Those fabulous Extravagancies have nothing to do with the impartial Punctuality of true History; nor do I find any Business you can have either with Astrology, Geometry, or Logick, and I hope you are too good a Man to mix Sacred Things with Profane.

from “the author’s preface to the reader,”

don quixote, by miguel de cervantes

Although it might appear strange to have selected the above two passages as a lead-in to this article, they capture, I believe, the essence of what we have come to know as the “fact-value” distinction, albeit at an extreme level. Thus, Mr. Gradgrind shows in exaggerated fashion the obsession with facts, to the neglect of values. And the very image of a Don Quixote, bravely pursuing his own world of values, utterly cut off from the harsh world of facts, speaks for itself. A fair amount of discussion on this issue has tended to focus on the supposed divide between the “is” and the “ought” that David Hume so famously put forward.¹ Yet at a general level, there is hardly a need today to enter into the details of any particular thinker in order to grasp what is at stake.² It is captured succinctly by Hilary Putnam, who claims that “the idea that ‘value judgments are subjective’ is a piece of philosophy that has gradually come to be accepted by many people as if it were common sense.”³ Putnam further clarifies this position as holding that “‘statements of fact’ are capable of being ‘objectively true’ and capable, as well, of being ‘objectively warranted,’ while value judgments . . . are incapable of object truth and objective warrant.”⁴ The central contours of this position arguably can historically be traced, as Charles Taylor reminds us, “to a central feature of the great seventeenth-century revolution in natural science, that we should cease trying to explain the world around us in subjective, anthropocentric, or ‘secondary’ properties.”⁵ The resultant dichotomy between fact and value that has come down to us has assumed prejudicial proportions such that, even when one wishes to argue against it—as Putnam and Taylor do—the onus probandi is upon the detractors.

As with so many other foundational philosophical distinctions, the real meaning is often not seen until at least some of the implications are brought to light. The fact-value distinction happens to have had an effect on the discussion of life after death—and consequently on the very notion of a “proof for the immortality of the soul.” A term like “wish-fulfillment,” so dear to Freudian analysis, and building on the Feuerbachian notion of a “human projection,” can be viewed as just such an implication. Indeed, although many of the traditional lines of thought on the soul’s immortality appear in the form of “demonstrations,” it is easy to see how a Feuerbach or a Freud would claim that they are thinly disguised human longings, masquerading as facts (albeit of a metaphysical stature). That is, subjective phenomena like wishing not to die would be seen as sorely out of touch with the objectively warranted facts of the matter—which latter seem to point all too decisively to ultimate extinction. While these and other such claims do not necessarily discredit traditional proofs...