Reality: Fundamental Topics is Metaphysics

Chapter XVII: Immortality

As i indicated at the beginning of this book, my aim has been to investigate and reach at least tentative conclusions about each of the fundamental topics of metaphysics identified by Kant in the historical rationalist tradition. For him, what the inquirer qua metaphysician would like to know about most, if he or she could—Kant, of course, thinks that s/he cannot—are God, freedom, and immortality. We will consider the last of these here. What, if anything, can we reasonably suppose with respect to whether human persons, or any persons, are or can be immortal? First of all, we may affirm, modestly and negatively (and in accord with Kant), that we do not in fact know that we, human persons, are immortal, nor that any persons, if there are any persons besides ourselves, are immortal either. in fact, this puts the matter so modestly as to seem almost coy. Many philosophers now, and in the past, would assert emphatically that there is no plausible evidence whatsoever that human existence extends beyond the existence of human bodies. Some philosophers, in fact—this view seems first to appear explicitly only in the twentieth century1 —take the position that there could not be a continued existence of an individual human person beyond the term of existence of that individual human person’s body, or of a body that is a successor substance to that human person’s body; where the modality—the “could”—is intended to be a metaphysical, or logical, or “in principle” one. Such philosophers as these regard immortality as a non-question. i shall presently consider this latter position. Let us first note some fairly obvious matters. Human bodies are, in fact, of only finite duration. C H A P t e R X V i i Immortality immortality 291 it is hard to see why it would be metaphysically impossible that there be a human body that continued indefinitely to exist. it would seem to be naturally impossible that this occur. that is, there are no possible worlds in which all and only the actual laws of nature hold which contain bodies which, in this, actual, possible world, would be correctly identified as human bodies, where any of those bodies exists for all times. However, with different laws of nature it is hard to see why an actual human body, animated by (and perhaps identical with) an actual human being, might not exist at all times.2 At any rate, such possibilities are clearly not the issue in this topic. this was not what Kant supposed humans generically yearn to know of, but cannot. More on target metaphysically would be the question whether an individual human person might continue to exist indefinitely through successive alterations, which never involve an interruption in spatiotemporal continuity, of what had been originally (whether or not it always continued to be) that human person’s human body. Here we would start to find divided opinions, with intelligent positions on either side. Some think it essential to human persons that they be alive, and there would be conceivable alterations to human persons’ material composition that would produce a moving, acting, and apparently thinking being that was not biologically living. Such philosophers might suppose that immortality might be possible if life were never lost. Others see life as non-essential to human persons. For some it is not so much life that is essential to human personal identity as it is the continued possession of a numerically selfsame brain (whether or not that brain came to be, or could come to be, primarily or wholly composed of non-living tissue). this cluster of issues too i shall postpone. We need first to point out that, though Kant (and others) see the metaphysical issue as immortality, it is more fundamentally the issue whether the identity of a human person can extend beyond the existence of that person’s body, whether or not the extension is literally unending. the metaphysical topic is really survival of bodily extinction, however long the survival. it is the question whether there could be a time when i exist, even though my body no longer exists. As i have indicated, there is one position on this matter which reaches an affirmative answer: it holds that i could exist, and in some possible worlds do exist, where and when my body did not, because enough transformations of my (current) body were made, including alterations of the material substance of my brain, which...