Immortality

by Stephen Cave

  If this speculation about infinite time sounds a little abstract, we can look at the experience of those who suddenly realize their time is very finite. People who narrowly escape death frequently experience a realization of the shortness of life and at the same time a newfound joy in its preciousness. The psychiatrist Irvin D. Yalom, who works with the terminally ill, has noted that even those diagnosed with diseases such as cancer experience an “enhanced sense of living … a vivid appreciation of the elemental facts of life … and deeper communication with loved ones.” So evidence suggests that life is already so long that we fail to appreciate it—more time, or indeed infinite time, could only exacerbate this.

  Many philosophers have argued that only death makes our deeds count. It gives urgency to our choices and makes the outcomes matter. It is by choosing to sacrifice some of our precious, limited time—or even our lives—in the service of others that we demonstrate virtue. These skeptics point to the stories of the Greek gods as a case study: freed from the bonds of mortality, they are fickle and frivolous. They are spectators on a world in which only the mortals can demonstrate heroism or decency.

  The existentialists say we are defined by the choices we make, such as whether to collaborate with the invaders or risk our lives fighting for la résistance. But these choices are only meaningful because life is short. If I have a mere seventy years before me, it is a crucial question whether I spend them in a decadent jamboree or building hospitals for the poor, but with infinite time I can—and if Borges is right, will—do all these things many times over. Our choices become meaningless, and there is nothing left to define us as moral beings.

  What is particularly interesting about this problem—the problem of an infinite future—is that it does not affect all immortality narratives equally. If, for example, one of Linus Pauling’s successors formulates a medical elixir that could stave off aging indefinitely, they would not thereby make us immune to death in all its forms. So-called medical immortals could always hope to live to the next year or decade or century, yet the Reaper’s scythe would still be hovering. Given all the things that could go wrong, from a piano falling on their head to the heat death of the universe, the medical immortals would not therefore be faced with a truly infinite future. They might have a challenging time planning their lives, not knowing if those lives would last fifty years or fifty thousand, but it would not be impossible.

  The situation of what we might call a “true immortal” who cannot die would be quite different. As we saw in chapter 6, such a person really would be confronted with billions and billions of years—and that just for starters—then billions and billions more, extending into an unending future. This would be the lot of all of us if we have (or more properly are) immortal and indestructible souls, as Plato and plenty since have argued. For a person with such a soul, nonexistence is not an option, and the aimlessness of unceasing eons beckons.

  TOGETHER, these two problems suggest it would be disastrous for a civilization if its members really were to achieve personal immortality. In Borges’s story, the immortals begin by building their dream city, but as tedium and aimlessness set in, they make their city ever more absurd, until it is a nonsensical labyrinth of dead ends and staircases leading nowhere. Finally they abandon it altogether to live like troglodytes in the desert. This is a fitting allegory: in a society where time has no value and everything worth doing has been done, there remains only ever-more-pointless and destructive play. If civilization exists to aid our perpetuation into the future, then if that perpetuation were guaranteed, civilization would be redundant. A meaningful life and a productive society require limitations that define them. We need finitude.

  THE WISDOM NARRATIVE

  “MANY people find that their belief in immortality is strongest when they think least about it,” wrote the American philosopher J. B. Pratt in 1920. After one thinks about these beliefs a great deal, it is clear why. Our predicament now is this: we yearn to live forever, but if we did it would be awful. We need finitude to give life value, yet that finitude comes packaged with the fear of death. Civilization exists to give us immortality, but if it ever succeeded it would fall apart. Given these contradictions, the immortality narratives seem to have found the right solution: promise eternity but don’t deliver.

  But once you have seen their many flaws, it is difficult again to find solace in their assurances. We of course are not the first to find ourselves in this position: for as long as there has been civilization, there have been doubters, those who have seen through the dominant narrative of their day and remained unpersuaded by the alternatives. And among those doubters were those not willing to accept that living without the illusion of immortality meant living with the constant fear of death. They therefore looked deeper into the human condition, to attack the very roots of the fear of death and the will to immortality. We owe the origins of the Wisdom Narrative to such rebellious and profound thinkers—thinkers like Shiduri, the barmaid at the end of the world.

  When Gilgamesh met the barmaid he was gripped by existential angst. “I am afraid of death,” he lamented, “so I wander the wild.” The death of his friend Enkidu had made his own mortality real to him—which is of course just the realization that forms the first part of the Mortality Paradox. This realization constitutes knowledge—of the reality of death—but not yet wisdom. Just as we have seen many times in our study, Gilgamesh reacted to this knowledge by pursuing the immortality narratives—indeed, to varying degrees all four, though by the time he reached the inn at the end of the world his focus was on the most primal: Staying Alive. As we have seen, he failed in his quest—but the story does not quite end there.

  Having exhausted the four paths and accepted his mortality, Gilgamesh returned to take his proper place as king. In the poem’s brief climax, he marvels at the beauty and strength of his city—its walls, temples and date groves. According to Sumerian legend, he then went on to bring many decades of peace and prosperity to his people. He was hailed as the one who looked into “the deep” and “saw what was secret.” This “secret” was revealed by the barmaid: that the immortality narratives were nonsense—eternal life the gods kept for themselves, and we should therefore learn to value what life we have: “enjoy yourself always by night and by day.” This was “of everything the sum of wisdom.”

  Wisdom, therefore, meant finding a way to accept and live with mortality. This was not the only narrative to be found in Sumerian-Babylonian culture—other texts, for example, have lively portrayals of the afterlife, some even with Gilgamesh as its ruler. But it was a persistent one, diligently copied out by generations of scribes for two and a half thousand years (until the arrival of Alexander the Great absorbed this region into the Greco-Roman world). And it was an influential one: a tradition of what has come to be known as “wisdom literature” spread throughout the Near East and Mediterranean. One example of this literature is still read by millions of people around the world, for it is in the heart of the Hebrew Bible and Christian Old Testament.

  Of course, as we have seen, the Bible contains powerful immortality narratives, including the Resurrection Narrative that emerges toward the end of the Old Testament and dominates the New Testament, and the hints at a Soul Narrative that have subsequently come to be so influential in the Christian tradition. But the Bible has many threads with many authors—and some of them sympathized instead with the barmaid’s seditious alternative. These authors wrote those books of the Bible that explicitly concern themselves with the meaning of wisdom. They are usually grouped together in the middle of the Old Testament, even though possibly written at very different times, and include at least Job, Psalms, Proverbs, Ecclesiastes and the Song of Songs. In places, the parallels between these works and the message—even the wording—of the Gilgamesh epic are astonishing.

  Ecclesiastes, for example, begins with a fine expression of the recognition of the fact of death: “For the fate of humans and the fate of animals is the same; as one dies, so dies the oth
er” (3:19). The author goes on to make clear that neither glorious afterlife nor legacy awaits: “The dead know nothing; they have no more reward, and even the memory of them is lost” (9:5). And what conclusion does the author draw for what we mortals should then do? “Go thy way, eat thy bread with joy, and drink thy wine with a merry heart … Let thy garments be always white; and let thy head lack no ointment. Live joyfully with the wife whom thou lovest all the days of the life of thy vanity” (9:7–9). This is the barmaid’s speech almost verbatim.

  Psalm 90 puts the central message even more pithily: after acknowledging that our fate is to “turn back to dust,” the psalmist urges, “So teach us to number our days”—that is, to realize they are limited and so appreciate their worth—“that we may get a heart of wisdom.” Such writing came in different forms with different points of emphasis, but throughout, as the historian of religion Alan Segal succinctly put it, “wisdom and mortality are unconditionally wed.”

  Nowhere did the Wisdom Narrative come to eclipse all immortality narratives. But throughout this region, the cradle of civilization, its presence can be found—even in Egypt, with its fabulously sophisticated immortality system interweaving all four narratives. One text found inscribed in the tomb of a King Intef of Thebes dating back to around 2000 BCE asks: What has become of those who built the great pyramids? The walls of their tombs are now crumbling, and “none returns from there to tell their conditions, to tell of their state, to reassure us … [So] follow your heart and happiness! Make your things on earth!”

  IN these early civilizations, this alternative narrative never got beyond exhortations along the “make merry while you can” lines. This is the kernel of the narrative but by no means its full extent. As usual, it took the arrival of the Greeks to turn insight and intuition into rigorous philosophy. “Philosophy” of course means “love of wisdom,” and Greek philosophy followed in the wisdom-literature tradition of its Mediterranean neighbors by concerning itself primarily with the question of how to live—and in particular, how to live given the fact of death. Some philosophers, like Plato, developed immortality narratives. But others followed the barmaid—such as the Epicureans and the Stoics, two schools that developed in the third century BCE. Despite their differences, both of these schools taught that the fear of death could be conquered without resorting to illusions of everlasting life.

  When Greek philosophers took these ideas to Rome they found favor with an urban elite increasingly rejecting the family-based traditional religion, with its vague notions of biological legacy and a shadowy afterlife. A strong Wisdom Narrative subsequently thrived in Rome’s crowded marketplace of ideas, with Stoicism becoming something like the empire’s unofficial philosophy. Its heights were reached in the second century CE in the work of the emperor Marcus Aurelius, a thoughtful philosopher and committed Stoic.

  But two centuries later, the Wisdom Narrative—temporarily—all but disappeared from view, as it was eclipsed by the powerful Resurrection Narrative promoted by the early Christians. Of course, it continued to be carried in those Hebrew wisdom books that the Christians kept in what they called their Old Testament. But Christianity’s main selling point as it swept to prominence across the Roman Empire in the fourth century CE was its promise of an imminent and tangible paradise to come.

  With the revival of classical learning and the loosening of Christianity’s cultural grip during the Renaissance came the reemergence of the Wisdom Narrative tradition in Europe, with representatives such as the French essayist Michel de Montaigne. “All the wisdom and argument in the world eventually come down to one conclusion,” he wrote in 1580, “which is to teach us not to be afraid of dying.” At the same time, similar threads can also be found in other cultures, including Hinduism and especially Buddhism. Now in our much more secular and open age, these ideas are once again being explored as an alternative to the illusions of the immortality narratives.

  There is therefore a long tradition of those who have challenged the grip of the will to immortality and sought ways of tackling the fear of death that do not have us wandering the desert on a fool’s quest. In what remains, I will use the thinking of the Near Eastern wisdom literature and the philosophers of Greece and Rome to show that this alternative can help us to maintain both our sanity and our civilization even in the face of an existence that must end.

  DEATH IS NOTHING TO US

  THE immortality narratives take the problem of mortality at face value: death thwarts our will to live on; death itself is therefore the problem; so the solution is to deny death. Followers of the wisdom approach cannot do this: they have seen that immortality is the illusion; death is the reality. In order to succeed, they must therefore reach deeper—to undermine the causes that drive us to develop these comforting illusions in the first place.

  The first step to undermining the will to immortality is to realize that genuinely unending life would most likely be a terrible curse—we looked at the reasons for this in previous pages. But although this might make us less keen to live forever, it is unlikely to persuade us that it is fine to be dead instead. The second step therefore tackles exactly this—and in this section we will explore the argument that the fear of actually being dead is nonsensical. The third and final step is to cultivate virtues that undermine those aspects of our nature that lead to both the will to persist forever and the corresponding existential angst.

  Gilgamesh said to the barmaid that he was scared to look upon the face of Death. But later, having reached Utnapishtim, the wise man told him, “No one at all sees Death.” It is a mysterious comment, given that the old immortal had just explained how everyone (barring him and the gods) must die. One would think that we would all see Death. But Utnapishtim was right.

  We have seen that the second part of the Mortality Paradox, the inability to imagine our own nonexistence, leads us to see death as a kind of eternal darkness. Gilgamesh was terrified of exile in this “House of Dust … whose residents are deprived of light.” But he was wrong to see death this way—and this seems to be what Utnapishtim was telling him. We do not “see” or experience death; death is the end of all experience. Once we have rejected the immortality narratives, then we all know that this is the case—yet the impossibility of imagining it makes it very hard to accept. Predictably, it was a Greek philosopher who came along to spell it out for us: Epicurus.

  “Death is nothing to us,” he wrote around 300 BCE: “For all good and evil lies in sensation and death is the end of all sensation.” We cannot conceive of such a state, but we must try to understand and internalize it—only then can we live free of fear, he believed. Such fear, though natural, is irrational: “While we are, death is not; when death is come, we are not. Death is thus of no concern either to the living or to the dead. For it is not with the living, and the dead do not exist.”

  Though much quoted, this idea is also often misunderstood. Many modern philosophers take it to mean we should be utterly indifferent to dying. But this is not Epicurus’s main concern. We might be anxious about the process of dying, fearing it might be painful (though many who have near-death experiences describe it as quite pleasant), and we might wish to prolong the pleasures of life, and so in that sense see death as unwelcome. Epicurus’s main point, however, is that we should not fear the state of being dead. He was addressing the anxiety that Shakespeare described when he wrote, “The weariest and most loathed worldly life That age, ache, penury and imprisonment Can lay on nature is a paradise / To what we fear of death.”

  In seeing this, Epicurus was perhaps the first person in history to have overcome the lure of the second part of the Mortality Paradox, the trap of a self-consciousness that cannot see outside of itself. Until then, people could not help but see death as an eternity of semiconscious being, as conjured by ideas of Sheol, Hades or the House of Darkness. Epicurus showed us how we might finally close the gates to the underworld.

  His argument is exactly what the natural sciences also teach: that we are esse
ntially living things. From this follows the explosive conclusion that neither you nor I can ever literally be dead. Living things cannot be dead things. To talk of someone “being dead” is just a shorthand for saying they have ceased to exist. Ludwig Wittgenstein, the philosophical giant of the last century, summed up what this means for us as conscious, experiencing creatures: “Death is not an event in life,” he wrote. “We do not live to experience death.” He concluded from this that in this sense “life has no end.” That is, we can never be aware of it having an end—we can never know anything but life.

  We might compare ourselves to an ocean wave: when it breaks on the shore, its short life is over, but it does not then enter some new state of being “a dead wave” or “an ex-wave.” Rather, the parts that made it up are dissipated and absorbed back into the sea. Similarly with us: when the self-regulating, organized complexity of a human organism fails, then that person reaches a full stop; they have not entered into a new state of death. They have ceased, and their constituent elements slowly lose their human shape and are subsumed once more into the whole.

  The teachings that try to reassure us that death is just a transition—like shedding an old set of clothes for a new one, as the Bhagavad Gita says—are playing on our intuitive fear of death as a step into the abyss. But they could not be more wrong: a transition is exactly what death is not, whether into the abyss or anywhere else. It is an ending—and that, when properly understood, is exactly why we should not be afraid. This is something those Roman stoics understood who had inscribed on their tombstones “Non fui, fui, non sum, non curo” (“I was not; I was; I am not; I do not care”).