Immortality and the 'mystery of our mortal stardust'

For some, death means the joy of immortality, not "fathomless terror" 

Maria Popova has a notable presence on the internet, especially with her blog which "ferrets out nuggets of intellectual gold from the works of [literary] titans" and celebrates the creative life, including her own. I enjoy her weekly digest of The Marginalian (formerly Brain Pickings) and saw in her latest offering a series of comments that suggest that recently she has been made to face up to death.

With reference to some of the artistic figures she lays open for our edification, she speaks of "the mystery of our mortal stardust", of a poet returning "her borrowed stardust to the universe",  and her feature article is titled "The Backdoor to Immortality: Marguerite Duras on What Makes Life Worth Living in the Face of Death". 

In that article, Popova, Bulgaria born but resident in the United States for about two decades, states her own view of death:

On some deep level beyond the reach of reason, we come to believe that the people we love are — must be, for the alternative is a fathomless terror — immortal.

 Popova has been accused of overwriting, but that aside, we go with the flow as she continues:

And so, when a loved one dies, this deepest part of us grows wild with rage at the universe — a rage skinned of sense-making, irrational and raw, unsalved by our knowledge that the entropic destiny of everything alive is to die and of everything that exists to eventually not, even the universe itself; unsalved by the the immense cosmic poetry hidden in this fact; unsalved by the luckiness of having lived at all against the staggering cosmic odds otherwise; unsalved by remembering that only because ancient archaebacteria were capable of dying, as was every organism that evolved in their wake, we and the people we love and the people we lose came to exist at all.

Therefore, there is a "bewildering rage" at death; Popova looks to Duras for insight into "what fills our fragile mortality with meaning".

What a contrast between the view of death of most of humanity and the view that Popova expresses! She draws on the secular few who, lacking the resources to avoid seeing death as anything other than terror-inspiring or as stoking rage, then struggle to find the source of meaning in life.

That is part of the reason why Silicon Valley is central to the search of virtual immortality. There's a lot of pseudoscience involved, but a life of even 1000 years is not immortality. Another question here is, "Can we really engineer away the limitations of our biology without also forfeiting the joys of physical existence?" A further read with useful insights is to be found here.

Author Tim Staples writes:

From ancient Egypt’s Book of the Dead, to Western Civilization’s Bible, every civilization, every culture, in all of human history has attested to the existence of an after-life.

Some will point out the very few exceptions—one being Hinayana (or Theravedic) Buddhism—that deny the existence of “spirit”, or the soul [...].

Actually, the exception tends to prove the rule. And this, I would argue, is certainly the case with Hinayana Buddhism. Not only is this ancient form of Buddhism an anomaly in the world of religion, but the appearance of Mahayana Buddhism (that restored belief in “God” and “the soul”), very early in the history of Buddhism, and the fact that it is today by far the largest of the three main traditions of Buddhism, tends to demonstrate that the human is so ordered to believe in the afterlife that errant thinking here or there over millennia can never keep its truth suppressed for very long.

This belief is different from such beliefs of ancient times as, for example, that the earth is the centre of the circling planets because the belief in immortality is abstract whereas the nature of the universe is a material fact. However, we can prove the natural immortality of the human person by using our reason, in the usual manner of philosophy.

Key to an understanding of immortality, which pertains only to humans, is an understanding of what is known as the soul, which all living things possess. Staples clarifies the matter:

The soul is, by definition, the unifying and vivifying principle that accounts for the life and what philosophers call the “immanent action” of all living things. The word “immanent” comes from two Latin words that mean “to remain” and “in.” “Immanent action” means the multiple parts that comprise a living being are able to act “from within” in a unified way, and in accordance with its given nature, for the good of the whole being. The soul is what accounts for this unified action that is essential for there to be life. 

 There are three categories of souls:

1. Vegetative – This category of soul empowers its host to be able to take in nutrition and hydration, grow, and reproduce others of its kind. A rock can’t do this!

2. Sensitive – An animal with a sensitive soul can also acquire sense knowledge and use locomotion to both ward off danger and to gather goods it needs to survive and thrive.

These first two categories of souls are material in nature. [... T]hey are entirely dependent upon the material body for their existence. When the host dies, the vegetative or sensitive soul ceases to exist.

3. Rational – Capable of all the above, the animal possessing a rational soul is capable of acquiring intellectual, or “spiritual”, knowledge as well, and of choosing to freely act toward chosen ends.

Now we come to death. From a philosophical viewpoint, death is philosophical definition is: “The reduction of a composite being into its component parts.” This means that the material elements of a creature whether vegetative, sensitive or human, separate from each other. For the human, part of the person is rational/spiritual.

Staples makes the necessary point:

A spirit, by definition, has no parts. There is nothing to be “reduced to its component parts”. Thus, that which is purely spiritual cannot die.

But does the death of the human body also mean that the soul dies?

To answer that question we consider that nature of the soul and the nature of the person that continues to exist. Staples elucidates: 

The two principle powers of the soul are its power to know and to will. Why do we say these powers lie in the soul? In simple terms, it is because it is the entire human that comes to “know” or to “love” (love being the highest purpose of the will) not just “part” of him/her. This would seem to indicate that the same “unifying and vivifying principle” that explains a human’s life, would also explain his/her power to know and to will.

But a human is more than just a soul. He/she also directly experiences the “I” that unifies all that he/she is and all that he/she has done down through the decades of his/her life. This “I” represents the individual “person” that constitutes each human being.

Is there a distinction between the soul and the person?  Staples explores this:

There is no doubt that the body contributes to the soul’s ability to come to know. A damaged brain is a clear indicator here. The soul needs a properly functioning brain to be able to come to know anything, ordinarily speaking.

Yet, it is also interesting to note that according to philosopher and theologian, J.P. Moreland, a human is much more than a body as well. Moreland provides this example:

“… neurosurgeon Wilder Penfield electrically stimulated the brains of epilepsy patients and found he could cause them to move their arms or legs, turn their heads or eyes, talk or swallow…”

But yet, Moreland says, the “patient would respond by saying, ‘I didn’t do that. You did.”’ Further, no matter how much probing and electrical prodding, Penfield found there is no place in the brain that can “cause a patient to believe or decide” (Lee Strobel, The Case for a Creator, p. 258.).

Thus, the “I,” or, the person, seems to use the body, or here, the brain, but the “I” is not determined by it.

We can also say with confidence that the “I” is not synonymous with the intellect and will, or the soul, either because “I” can struggle to remember, to know, or to exercise my will. There seems to be more to a person than just a body, or even just a soul. [Each person] seems to be a body/soul composite. Both [the person's] body and soul contribute to the great and mysterious “I”.

With some understanding of the soul, we can follow philosophers' train of though as they describe their seven proofs for the existence of an immortal soul.

1. The Intellect Possesses the Power of Abstraction

We have seen above that whatever is spiritual cannot die because it has no parts. Parts are also known as “accidentals”, the non-essential, or changeable, aspects of  a person, for example size, color, and weight. Humans have the capability to abstract from the conglomeration of accidentals. A person's intellect abstracts the “form” of “man-ness” from that male individual or "woman-ness" from a female individual, or "human-ness" if an observer abstracts from the accidentals of both sexes.

This “form” the intellect abstracts is an immaterial likeness of the object thought about or seen. It is ordinarily derived from a particular object, like [any individual], but it transcends the particular individual. The form gets at the essence of  [the individual]. It is that which is universal concerning individual humans]. That a person is risible (they laugh), they reason, worship, and more. This is that which is changeless and applies not just to any individual, but to all humans. And very importantly for our purpose, we must remember that this essential “form” abstracted by the intellect is a spiritual reality. It transcends the individual.

Dogs, cats, birds, and bats have memory, Staples explains. Non-rational animals do not have the power to abstract the form of “man.” Only human beings can comprehend “man-ness” or “dog-ness”.  There is a philosophical principle that “Action follows being” If the soul has this spiritual power to “abstract” the form of “tree,” or “man,” it must be spiritual. And if the soul is spiritual [so that it cannot be “reduced to its component parts”] it has to be immortal.

If this way of looking at the nature of our existence is not off-putting for you, go to Staples' article that I am using here for a full description of the argument being made. The link was given above, but here it is again. For the sake of completeness I will list the six remaining arguments offered as proof that the person is immortal.

2. The Soul Forms Ideas of Realities That Are Immaterial

3. The Will Strives for Immaterial Goods

4. The Intellect Can Reflect Upon Its Own Act of Knowledge

5. Humans Have a Natural Desire to Live Forever

6. The Testimony of Mankind Over the Centuries and Millenia (given above)

7. The Existence of the Moral Law

To end, some thoughts from a directly Christian perspective:

The reason why many people without faith in God live individualistic and materialistic lives is simply because there is no real motivation to drive them to live their lives for others, since they have only one life to live.  They only live for themselves and for this life, which is simply to enjoy and get as much pleasure out of it as possible, since we are only material beings and we do not have a soul or a spirit that lives on after death. 

This is not to say that all atheists have no moral values because they would still have a conscience, although in many instances because they do not believe in God, they have no moral reference point, and so their conscience tends to be uninformed, misinformed and sometimes warped.  When we do not have faith in an after-life, it is more difficult to tell someone to make sacrifices, deny himself, and suffer for the greater good of others.

Skeptics have often accused believers of projecting the present life to the future life, whether in terms of marriage, or pleasures, abundance of food and drink, etc.  These images have been used in scriptures but they are not literal portrayals of heaven.  Rather, like the Lord, we must be reticent about what heaven is like except the fact that life will be complete. 

There will be eternal joy and communion of life and love.  What kind of bodily existence we will have, St Paul said, “These are stupid questions” (1 Cor 15:35 JB) The resurrected life is beyond conception as Paul wrote: “No eye has seen, nor ear heard, nor the human heart conceived, what God has prepared for those who love him.”  (1 Cor 2:9)

In talking about mortality and immortality, whether it is of the "literary titans" of our age or previous ages or not, it is incumbent upon us to be rational rather than succumbing to enthusing over death as a tragedy in the fashion of the "archetypical Romantic" Dylan Thomas or as the dead appearing as butterflies to cheer our existence. The dead are too busy celebrating the fact of reaching their homeland and meeting the only one who can fill their hearts and minds. 

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