Immortality

The idea of life after death is pervasive across cultures. Traditionally it involves another world contrasting positively or negatively with the natural one, in which some or all of the deceased are reunited with ancestors or encounter supernatural beings. The images of this are unresolved between immaterial and material scenarios. So, for example, it is sometimes said that following death the person goes to another place where s/he sees beautiful landscapes and other figures they recognise, and then perhaps moves towards a bright and loving light which they are drawn into. In this other world they neither age nor change but live forever. Two features of this sort of account are striking. First, there is the resemblance to dreams, the experience of which very likely gave rise to the idea of leaving one’s earthly body and surroundings and going to another place, with the mixture of the familiar and the strange that is characteristic of dream narratives. Second, there is the fact of bodily and non-bodily descriptions. The latter is the source of both philosophical scepticism about an after-life and of different metaphysical accounts of it. In Judaism up until close to the New Testament period there was only limited belief in personal immortality. Instead, the focus of the hope of survival and future life was on the people of Israel being safe and flourishing in their own land under the governance of a benign and powerful leader, the Messiah. The Gospel narratives and Epistles introduce the promise of future life through bodily resurrection following the example of Jesus. The classic source of this I Corinthians 15 where Paul responds to a community in Corinth asking about the second coming of Christ (the Messiah) and wondering about what happens in the meantime to those who die. Paul explains that the latter will be raised again and answering the question ‘with what kind of body’ he says (perhaps with the post-resurrection appearance of Jesus) ‘a spiritual one’ (soma pneumatikon). This, however, suggest the earlier problem of the coherence of thinking in terms of bodies that are spirits. Among the early Greek Church Fathers, the idea that the afterlife involves ‘subtle bodies’, or as we might say ‘ghostly forms’, was encouraged by their adoption of Platonic dualism which distinguishes body and soul, and regards the first as inferior and mortal and the second as superior and immortal. This tension between ‘body’ and ‘spirit’ images and conceptions persist into the present. So far as philosophical arguments are concerned it is important to note that the possibility of surviving death, or of being resurrected or reincarnated is not itself a guarantee of immortality, i.e. of never dying. It could be that like bodies souls also have a limited life. That said, most who argue for a life after death also argue that it is one beyond the reaches of death. The main focus of such arguments is the non-identity of the person, or psychological self with the body. This is supported by considerations purporting to show the non-materiality of consciousness and/or of intellectual activity.