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AFTERLIFE
Panayot Butchvarov
The University of Iowa
Contents
I Two questions 1
II Can there be life after death? 6
III Is there life after death? 11
IV Self-verifying beliefs 15
V Would life after death be desirable? 20
I
The topic of this paper is life after death, an afterlife, the hereafter. I shall begin by
defending its possibility – logical, not physical, possibility, since at issue is the possibility
of something nonphysical.1 Then I shall consider its reality – whether there actually is life
after death. And I will end the paper by asking whether such a life would be desirable.
Whether there is life after death was a central question in traditional metaphysics, as well
as in the philosophy of religion and ethics, because it is central in everyday thought.
1 This would not apply to the possibility of reincarnation, starting a new life in a different physical body or form after each biological death, which is a central tenet of Buddhism, Hinduism, Jainism, and Sikhism.
1
“Immortality is one of the great spiritual needs of man,” William James declared.2 Aware
of the immensities of space and time, humans feel puny and ephemeral without the
consolation of faith in a life after death. Even what we value most, from the thrill of
requited love to the majesty of great art and science, appears utterly insignificant if it is
no more than a speck in space for a fleeting moment in time.
Related to that question is a second one, always central in metaphysics and in the
philosophy of mind, namely, the relationship of the mind to the body. Plato, Descartes,
Kant, indeed most traditional philosophers, took seriously the intimate connection
between the two questions and (unlike some philosophers today) were aware of its
importance. If, as they thought, the mind is neither the brain nor a function of the brain,
neither a sort of bodily behavior nor a set of dispositions to such behavior, then there is
no contradiction in supposing that it can survive the death of the body. Moreover, science
and common sense would claim that there is a known empirical reason for denying it. On
the contrary, there have been claims, the credibility of which I shall not discuss, that there
is empirical evidence for life after death, from parapsychology and individual reports of
paranormal experiences.
To be sure, much more can be said about the mind-body relationship, but my purpose
here is merely to show that life after death is logically possible. To deny that it is would
be to dismiss out of hand dualism, idealism, and contemporary antirealism, and
presumably to accept a straightforward materialism. That such a stance is unreasonable is
2 “Human Immortality,” included in William James, The Will to Believe (New York: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1912), p. 2.
2
obvious and does not require a full-scale examination. For our goal in this and the next
section is modest: to show that life after death is logically possible. And who would claim
that neither dualism, nor idealism, nor antirealism is possibly true? Indeed, our goal is so
modest as to appear not worth pursuing. Logical possibilities are a dime a dozen. It is
logically possible, for example, that a human inhabits Mars in 2018. But the case of life
after death is different. Its personal importance is unbounded. It is immediately felt by the
grieving parent as well as by the dying patient.
To say that, even though logically possible, life after death is nevertheless improbable,
perhaps empirically impossible, because of the known correlation of mental states with
brain states would be a case of ignoratio elenchi – the correlation is with states of the
living brain and thus, as James pointed out, irrelevant to what happens after that brain is
dead. Of course, if the correlation were due to actual identity or at least a causal relation,
possibilities I shall consider shortly, James would have been wrong.
There is also the question about the nature of that which might survive death- the person,
the self. Is it an Aristotelian soul, a Cartesian “thinking thing,” or, as Hume held, a
collection of certain “perceptions” (when he looked within himself, he said, he found
nothing but what he called perceptions)? Hume’s view becomes more plausible if instead
of perceptions we speak of mental states (thoughts, beliefs, desires, sensations, emotions)
and say that the self is not a mere collection of mental states but rather a higher order
entity that does consist solely of mental states, often intimately related (e.g., a memory of
a thought, a belief about a desire, a hope for a pleasant sensation). So understood, the
3
self would be analogous to an infantry company, which is not a mere collection of
soldiers, or to a car engine, which is not a mere collection of automotive parts. To look
for a special entity that is the self would then be what Gilbert Ryle called a category
mistake, like a visitor to Oxford asking "where is the University?” after having viewed
the colleges and the library, or a child asking when is the division going to appear after
having watched the parade of the battalions, batteries, and squadrons of a division.3 What
might survive the death of the body could be understood then as the self so constituted by
the dead person’s mental states. Their survival would suffice even if no soul or thinking
thing that might also have existed survived.
Much more needs to be said about the nature of mentality, personhood, identity, and
causation, but not here. Many discussions of personal identity might as well have been
discussions of the identity through time of an infantry company or a car engine. And most
have been just exercises in conceptual or linguistic analysis, even though concepts and
meanings (or uses) of words are empirical matters and thus call for empirical research,
presumably in psychology, brain science, linguistics, lexicography, not for philosophical
“intuitions” or a priori speculations.4 For example, Locke held that what would confirm
one’s being the same person after death is remembering one’s experiences before death,
on the grounds that memory of past experiences is one of the criteria of personal identity
before death. But John Perry has argued that memories may be deceptive, which would
3 Gilbert Ryle, The Concept of Mind (London: Hutchinson’s University Library, 1949), p.16.4 Panayot Butchvarov, Anthropocentrism in Philosophy (Boston/Berlin: De Gruyter, 2015), Introduction.
4
be an argument against all reliance on memory.5 William James called such discussions
only intellectual, not living. Whether there is life after death is a specific question that
would be resolved by neither verbal dilettantism nor a priori metaphysics. James will
receive much attention in this paper not only because his writings on our topic are classic
but also because he was both a distinguished scientist and a distinguished philosopher.
But no sustained exegesis will be attempted. This is not a paper about William James.
I said that our goal in this and the next section is modest. The topic of the whole paper is
modest. It’s about life after death, not about immortality. One’s existence after one’s
body has ceased to exist might be neither sempiternal (everlasting. infinite in time) nor
eternal (timeless, atemporal), both notions surely too recherché for the common believer.
We may not know what such existence would involve, but this is hardly an argument
against its reality, and certainly not against its logical possibility.
Although James held that “Religion….for the great majority of our own race means
immortality, and nothing else,”6 in keeping with our modesty we may allow also that the
belief that there is life after death can be nontheistic, even wholly nonreligious –
unaccompanied by belief in God, heaven, hell, or angels, independent of churches or
mosques and Bibles or Korans. Nor will we appeal to paranormal experiences that if
genuine might imply the reality of life after death.
5 John Perry, A Dialogue on Personal Identity and Immortality (Indianapolis: Hacket, 1978).6 William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience (New York, Longmans, Green, and Co., 1917), p. 524.
5
II
Most traditional theories of the relationship of the mind to the body imply that life after
death is at least possible. (The exception, of course, is straightforward materialism, to be
considered presently, which denies the existence of mind and thus of mental states.)
According to dualism, the mind is neither the brain or a function of the brain, nor certain
patterns of behavior or dispositions to such behavior, nor any other part, function, or state
of the body; it follows that its existence after the death of the body is not logically
impossible. According to idealism and contemporary antirealism, the physical world,
including human bodies, either does not exist at all or depends for its existence and nature
on our perception or understanding of it; it follows that, if there were no life after the
death of human bodies there would be no reality at all.
Berkeley held that “to be is to be perceived.” According to Kant, space and time belong
only to the subjective constitution of the mind. “We can … speak of space, extended
things, and so on, only from the human standpoint,” he wrote.7 William James noted that
the “idealistic philosophy declares the whole world of natural experience, as we get it, to
be a time-mask, shattering or reflecting the one infinite Thought which is the sole
reality…”8 More recently, Nelson Goodman dazzled his readers with examples of
features of the world that are best understood as “made” by us, as how we perceive,
7 Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Paul Guyer and Allen W. Wood (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), B 37ff.8 William James, “Human Immortality,” pp.15-18, in The Will to Believe.
6
conceive, or represent the world in language or in art, not as how it is in itself.9 Would the
world we perceive, conceive, or represent cease to exist when a tiny part of it, namely,
our bodies, cease to exis?
H. H. Price pointed out that whether there is life after death is empirically verifiable: “Let
us consider the proposition ‘The person A has survived the death of his physical
organism’. It is clear that if this proposition be true, there is one person,
namely A himself, who has conclusive evidence of its truth. If he finds himself having
experiences after he has died, and can remember experiences which he had before he died
and recognize them to have been experiences of his own, he has conclusively verified the
proposition ‘I have survived’. No amount of philosophical argument purporting to show
that the conception of survival is nonsensical could have the slightest weight against this
first-hand empirical evidence.” And, Price went on, “the proposition ‘I have survived
death’ is not capable of being conclusively falsified, if it be in fact true. The same applies
to the prediction ‘I shall survive death’. The reason for this curious asymmetry is fairly
obvious. It might in fact be false that I shall survive. But if I do not, I shall not have any
experience whatever after I am dead, and shall not then be able to have empirical
evidence for or against anything; so I shall be in no position to learn by experience that
the proposition ‘I shall survive death’ has turned out to be false, because I shall no longer
be an experient at all.”10
9 Nelson Goodman, The Ways of Worldmaking (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1978), especially chapters I and V.10 Belief (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1969), pp. 462-3.
7
All three – dualism, idealism, and antirealism – face the objection levied by
straightforward materialism. It coincides with the standard objection to religious faith
that appeals to science, made popular today by authors such as Richard Dawkins 11and
Daniel Dennett.12 The latter objection is radically misconceived. A proposition explicitly
and intentionally expressing only faith, religious or not, is by definition invulnerable to
empirical evidence, and therefore to any scientific objection.13 For much the same reason,
now, the objection levied by straightforward materialism to the epistemological
propositions associated with dualism, idealism, and realism is also misconceived. It is
based on scientific data about the physical world, and thus would be question-begging if
the mind is different from the physical world or if there is not a physical world at all
Materialism faces also internal difficulties. The straightforward version, which just denies
that there are mental states (e.g., that I have been thinking of William James), has the
virtue of simplicity but also the vice of obvious falsity. The so-called identity theory,
which admits that there are mental states yet claims that they are identical with certain
brain states has the virtue of possible truth but the vice of gross generality, and when
11Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion (New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt,
2008).
12Daniel C. Dennett, Science and Religion: Are They Compatible? (New York:
Oxford University Press, 2011). Notoriously, the objection ignores the sophisticated distinction between faith and reason in traditional theology, such as Thomas Aquinas’s.
13 In this respect, genuine religious faith is like the unquestioning acceptance by common sense of the existence of concrete instances of the external world, such as Moore’s hands (“Proof of an External World,” in Philosophical Studies, New York: Harcourt Brace, 1922).
8
made specific (e.g., saying that my thinking of William James is an electrical activity in
my brain) it is also guilty of obvious falsity. Behaviorism, which identifies mental states
with certain patterns of behavior or the dispositions to that behavior, is in such conflict
with commonsense as to render senseless most ordinary discourse and all discourse in
history, literary criticism, even epistemology, and thus is too implausible to be taken
seriously.14
What about functionalism? Isn’t the functional dependence of our mental states on our
brains obvious? Here is James’s reply: “When the physiologist who thinks that his
science cuts off all hope of immortality pronounces the phrase, ‘thought is a function of
the brain,’ he thinks of the matter just as he thinks when he says, ‘Steam is a function of
the tea-kettle,’ ‘Light is a function of the electric circuit,’ ‘Power is a function of the
moving waterfall.’”15 “But in the world of physical nature,” James continued, “productive
function of this sort is not the only kind of function with which we are familiar. We have
also releasing or permissive function; and we have transmissive function. The trigger of a
crossbow has a releasing function: it removes the obstacle that holds the string, and lets
the bow fly back to its natural shape. So when the hammer falls upon a detonating
compound. By knocking out the inner molecular obstructions, it lets the constituent gases
resume their normal bulk, and so permits the explosion to take place.”16 “My thesis now,”
James concluded, “is this: that, when we think of the law that thought is a function of the
brain, we are not required to think of productive function only; we are entitled also to
14 Stephen P. Stich, From Folk Psychology to Cognitive Science: The Case Against Belief (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1983), p.2.15 “Human Immortality,” p. 13.16 Human Immortality, pp. 13- 14.
9
consider permissive or transmissive function.“17 But, he asked, “how can such a function
be imagined? Isn't the common materialistic notion vastly simpler?...The immediate reply
is, that, if we are talking of science positively understood, function can mean nothing
more than bare concomitant variation.”18 This, of course, was essentially the Humean
position on causality. As Richard Fumerton says in his important recent book on the
mind-body problem, “[f]unctionalist accounts of mental states, properly understood, are
no more plausible than the crude logical behaviorism that preceded them.19
If James and Fumerton are right, there is really no evidence that mental states cease to
exist when the body does, though perhaps there is also no evidence that they continue to
exist. If the mind is not the brain or a function of the brain, nor a set of patterns of
behavior or of dispositions to such behavior, then there is no contradiction in supposing
that the mind can survive the body. That there is life after death becomes a possibility,
and it is at least as plausible as the claims of dualism, idealism, and antirealism. If this is
not widely recognized today in philosophy, the reason probably is that the hypothesis of
life after death is understood in its stronger version as belief in immortality and a part of
the elaborate system of religious hypotheses. The weaker version I have described,
however, is belief merely in existence after death, even if of finite duration, and it is
unrelated to any religious hypotheses.
17 Human Immortality, p. 15.18 Human Immortality, p. 20.19 Richard Fumerton, Knowledge, Thought, and the Case for Dualism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), p. 26. See also the previously cited book by Stephen Stich.
10
III
But, it would be said, we are interested in the fact (the reality, actuality) of life after
death, not its mere logical possibility (consistency, conceivability). Life after death may
be possible, but is it actual? It may be possible that we will survive our deaths, but is it
true that we will? On this, James offered two lines of reasoning. The first was more
straightforward, though it was viewed by him as an argument for religious belief. It has
two parts: (1) the belief in life after death is legitimate, and (2) it is essential to life even
before death.
Both parts were highly original. The ground of the belief in life after death is “passional”
(i.e., emotional, nonintellectual), James held, not intellectual. But the commitment to
intellectual reasons is also passional, not intellectual. Therefore, the belief in life after
death is as legitimate as the commitment to intellectual reasons. It is no argument for
rationality to say that it is rational to be rational. “We want to have a truth; we want to
believe that our experiments and studies and discussions must put us in a continually
better and better position towards it; and on this line we agree to fight out our thinking
lives. But if a pyrrhonistic sceptic asks us how we know all this, can our logic find a
reply? No! certainly it cannot. It is just one volition against another,--we willing to go in
for life upon a trust or assumption which he, for his part, does not care to make.”20 The
belief in life after death is just one volition against another. We have a right to it just as
we have a right to the other. Both are ultimately passional. We have a right to both. The
20 The Will to Believe, pp. 9-10.
11
will to believe is thus justified, rendered legitimate, by the right to believe.21 We should
note that a similar defense can be made of a right to accept the epistemological
propositions associated with dualism, idealism, and antirealism. The acceptance of them
is ultimately passional, but so is also the acceptance of materialism. Neither can be
decided on intellectual grounds. Indeed, the history of philosophy has amply shown that
this is so.22
The belief in some existence beyond the body’s death, I have suggested, need not be
religious. It could be just a strong, even if tacit, natural conviction, like a person’s
conviction in normal circumstances that he or she will be alive tomorrow. Indeed, as we
shall see, one can think of the former as giving rise to the latter. “Faith,” James wrote,
“means belief in something concerning which doubt is still theoretically possible; and as
the test of belief is willingness to act, one may say that faith is the readiness to act in a
cause the prosperous issue of which is not certified to us in advance. It is in fact the same
moral quality which we call courage in practical affairs.”23 That I will be alive tomorrow
is, in normal circumstances, a matter of faith and courage, not investigation or argument.
We come now to the second part of James’ reasoning in support of the belief that life
after death is not only possible but actual. The first part was that our passional nature is
such that we lawfully may, have the right to, decide on an option between propositions.
The second part now tells us that when we face forced, that is, unavoidable, options we
21 ? L Jonathan Cohen has claimed that while “belief is a disposition, not an occurrent feeling…it is a disposition to feel that p, not to say, or act as if it is the case, that p….” (An Essay on Belief and Acceptance, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995, p. 1.22 The Will to Believe, p. 11.23 “The Sentiment of Rationality,” included in The Will to Believe, p. 90.
12
must make that decision.24 “Our passional nature not only lawfully may, but must, decide
an option between propositions, whenever it is a genuine option that cannot by its nature
be decided on intellectual grounds.”25 “[N]ot only as a matter of fact do we find our
passional nature influencing us in our opinions, but…there are some options between
opinions in which this influence must be regarded both as an inevitable and as a lawful
determinant of our choice.”26
Where do we face such forced options? “Moral questions immediately present
themselves as questions whose solution cannot wait for sensible [i.e., empirical] proof.
[For] a moral question is a question not of what sensibly [empirically] exists, but of what
is good, or would be good if it did exist…”27 We face forced options also in certain
situations “where faith creates its own verification,”28 what H. H. Price was to call self-
verifying beliefs.29 “Do you like me or not?…Whether you do or not depends, in
countless instances, on whether I meet you half-way, am willing to assume that you must
like me, and show you trust and expectation. The previous faith on my part in your
liking's existence is in such cases what makes your liking come…. The desire for a
certain kind of truth here brings about that special truth's existence….”30
24 “(L)et us call the decision between two hypotheses an option. Options may be of several kinds. They may be—1, living or dead; 2, forced or avoidable; 3, momentous or trivial; and for our purposes we may call an option a genuine option when it is of the forced, living, and momentous kind.” (The Will to Believe, p.3.)25 The Will to Believe, p. 11.26 The Will to Believe, p. 19.27 The Will to Believe, p. 22.28 William James, “The Sentiment of Rationality,” included in The Will to Believe, p. 97.29 H. H. Price, Belief (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1969), pp. 349 ff.30 The Will to Believe, pp. 22-24. In “The Sentiment of Rationality,” an essay also included in The Will to Believe, James offers another example: “Suppose, for example, that I am climbing in the Alps, and have had the ill-luck to work myself into a position from which the only escape is by a terrible leap. Being without similar experience, I have
13
“Are there not somewhere forced options in our speculative questions…?” James then
asked.31 Yes, those that lead to the belief in immortality. The reason is a version of
Pascal’s wager. “[We] see, first that religion offers itself as a momentous option. We are
supposed to gain, even now, by our belief, and to lose by our nonbelief, a certain vital
good. Secondly, religion is a forced option, so far as that good goes. We cannot escape
the issue by remaining sceptical and waiting for more light, because, although we do
avoid error in that way if religion be untrue, we lose the good, if it be true, just as
certainly as if we positively chose to disbelieve. …. Scepticism, then, is not avoidance of
option; it is option of a certain particular kind of risk. Better risk loss of truth than chance
of error,-that is your faith-vetoer's exact position.”32 Put briefly, the belief in life after
death is a good bet: “You must either believe or not believe that God is--which will you
do? Your human reason cannot say. A game is going on between you and the nature of
things which at the day of judgment will bring out either heads or tails. Weigh what your
gains and your losses would be if you should stake all you have on heads, or God's
existence: if you win in such case, you gain eternal beatitude; if you lose, you lose
nothing at all.”33 Believing in life after death is the better bet. This was, in effect, James’s
response to Clifford’s admonition, quoted later in The Will to Believe, that “It is wrong
always, everywhere, and for every one, to believe anything upon insufficient evidence."
no evidence of my ability to perform it successfully; but hope and confidence in myself make me sure I shall not miss my aim, and nerve my feet to execute what without those subjective emotions would perhaps have been impossible……There are then cases where faith creates its own verification. Believe, and you shall be right, for you shall save yourself; doubt, and you shall again be right, for you shall perish. The only difference is that to believe is greatly to your advantage.”(The Will to Believe, p. 59.).31 The Will to Believe, pp. 23-24.32 The Will to Believe, 25-26.33 The Will to Believe, pp. 5-6.
14
IV
James’s first line of reasoning in support of the belief in life after death was that the
belief is legitimate and essential to life before death. His second line of reasoning was
that the belief, to use H. H. Price’s term, is “self-verifying.” Price explained that this did
not mean that the occurrence of belief is a sufficient, or even a necessary, condition of its
truth: “Let us say that a belief is self-verifying if the belief that p either makes p true or at
any rate increases the probability of p. (Perhaps you do not actually fail in your
undertaking, but the belief that you are going to fail makes it appreciably more likely that
you will).”34 James did hold that “[t]here are…cases where a fact cannot come at all
unless a preliminary faith exists in its coming…where faith in a fact can help create the
fact..”35 Price was more cautious: “It is true that facts are always independent of the
proposition believed; but they need not always be independent of the believing.”36
34 Belief, p. 352. Price referred to Vergil’s saying about a crew competing in a boat-race that they can because they believe that they can (potest quia posse videtur), and remarked that while the belief, of course, is not a sufficient condition of its truth, it may well be a necessary condition. 35 The Will to Believe, p. 57. ? The Will to Believe, p.25.36 “Suppose the proposition is ‘Timothy will succeed in walking across this plank’. It does not follow in the least that because there is this proposition, there will also be a state of affairs which makes it true, nor even that such a state of affairs is in the least degree probable. But suppose that someone, for instance, Timothy himself, believes this proposition; then his believing may quite well bring about a state of affairs which makes the proposition true, or at least more likely than it would have been otherwise. It may even be that in some cases believing a proposition p is a necessary condition for p's being true (p would not have been true, unless it had been believed).”(Belief, pp. 361-363.) Later Price also commented: [P]erhaps it is better to begin with the negative case (non
15
James’s claim that the belief in life after death is self-verifying becomes more plausible if
we agree that a belief is neither a Husserlian “mental act,” a “believing,” nor a choosing
among considered possibilities or a calculating of probabilities, nor of course an uttering
of a sentence. It is a disposition, as Price pointed out,37 a living attitude, as James called
it,38 a certain way of living. As we saw, James did argue explicitly that faith sometimes
creates its own verification, e.g., the beliefs that “you like me” or that a terrible leap when
climbing the Alps will save me. But his point was not merely that holding such a belief
may at least help make it true, e.g., that by believing the person likes me will make that
person like me, or that by believing that my leaping will be successful I will succeed in
leaping. He held that the evidence of the truth of such a belief (if it is true) would only
become available after the belief and, therefore, that waiting until we had the evidence in
order to believe would be self-defeating. This is why we must believe that life after death
is not only possible but also actual. “[R]eligion offers itself as a momentous option. We
are supposed to gain, even now, by our belief, and to lose by our nonbelief, a certain vital
good.”39 We want to gain that good now!
possunt quia non posse videntur). This was illustrated by the example of the man who cannot walk across the plank because he thinks he cannot, and also by the golfers who were ‘beaten because they expected it’, if we take this to mean ‘They could not win or draw because they thought they could not’. Such thoughts as ‘I cannot do it’, ‘It is quite impossible that I should succeed’, plainly have an inhibiting effect. ….... When the negative thought ‘I cannot do it’ verifies itself, it does so by preventing you from trying, and this is an intermediate link between the thought and the state of affairs which verifies it. And when the positive thought ‘I can do it’ verifies itself, the intermediate link is the trying which this thought makes possible…” (Belief, pp. 371-2.)37 Belief, p.38 “Is Life Worth Living,” in The Will to Believe, p. 54. 39 The Will to Believe, pp. 23-24.
16
The point of believing that I will be alive tomorrow is not only that believing this will
help make me live at least until tomorrow, which may or may not be true, but that in
normal circumstances I have no choice in the matter, that my believing this is what James
called a “forced option” in the sense that in normal circumstances it is a necessary part of
my life today, a vital good now. By believing in life after death I do not make myself live
after death; rather, I live now as someone who will be alive after death. The belief in
immortality, or at least in some afterlife, makes us live as if we are immortal, or at least
as if we will have an afterlife. It is in a peculiar way essential to, partly constitutive of,
our life now, in the present, before death.
Elsewhere I have argued that in ordinary circumstances sentences like “I will be alive
tomorrow” are accepted by the speaker as true for practical reasons, and that their case
thus lends support to the “pragmatic” theories of truth.40 In ordinary circumstances, I
“take” that sentence to be unquestionably true, I believe in it neither because of inference
from experience nor because of a priori argument or its coherence with other sentences.
Its truth is presupposed by virtually everything I do and plan today, including perhaps
paying the life insurance premium that is due today. It’s not just that if I did not take it to
be true I might suffer disastrous consequences today, that in some circumstances if I did
not believe that I will be alive tomorrow I might not remain alive today. Rather, my life
today would be radically different if I did not have unquestioning faith, not just hope, that
it will continue for at least one more day. Acceptance of the sentence “I will be alive
tomorrow” is, in this sense, practically necessary and thus true, as James would have said.
40 Anthropocentrism in Philosophy, pp. 183-5.
17
We have been asking whether the sentence “There is an afterlife” is not only possibly
true but actually true. But we should also ask what the word “true” would mean in this
context. For we ought to free ourselves from the confines imposed by the usual theories
of truth and acknowledge the wide range, complexity, and subtlety of the use of the word.
“[B]elief (as measured by action) not only does and must continually outstrip scientific
evidence,” James wrote, “but… there is a certain class of truths of whose reality belief is
a factor as well as a confessor; and… as regards this class of truths faith is not only licit
and pertinent, but essential and indispensable. The truths cannot become true till our faith
has made them so.”41 We may call pragmatic the sense of the word “true” in which it is
true that I will be alive tomorrow, without denying that it also has other senses, like that
in “I am typing now” as well as that in “Two plus two equals four.” “True” is versatile
enough to allow, yet without equivocation, for great diversity in what “makes” sentences
true. In this respect, it resembles “good” (as medieval philosophers acknowledged in their
doctrine of the transcendentalia). Gustatory pleasure, knowledge, compassion, right
conduct, and justice are all standard examples of good things, but they seem to have little
else in common. Yet there is no equivocation in calling all of them good. Red is a color,
green is a color, and blue is a color; they are very different colors, but there is no
equivocation in calling all of them colors.42
41 The Will to Believe,” pp. 56-59.42 For more on this large topic, see Anthropocentrism in Philosophy, pp. 180ff.
18
“Immanuel Kant,” James wrote elsewhere, “held a curious doctrine about such objects of
belief as God, the design of creation, the soul, its freedom, and the life hereafter. These
things, he said, are properly not objects of knowledge at all….theoretically speaking they
are words devoid of any significance. Yet strangely enough they have a definite
meaning for our practice. We can act as if there were a God; feel as if we were free;
consider Nature as if she were full of special designs; lay plans as if we were to be
immortal; and we find then that these words do make a genuine difference in our moral
life. Our faith that these unintelligible objects actually exist proves thus to be a full
equivalent in praktischer Hinsicht, as Kant calls it, or from the point of view of our
action, for a knowledge of what they might be, in case we were permitted positively to
conceive them. So we have the strange phenomenon, as Kant assures us, of a mind
believing with all its strength in the real presence of a set of things of no one of which it
can form any notion whatsoever.”43 Even if James’s exegesis of Kant is questionable, his
own view is clear. If we really believe in immortality, then we live now as if we are
immortal, as practically immortal. This is especially obvious when the belief makes a
genuine difference in our moral life.
V
Whether a mere possibility or a reality, would life after death be a good or a bad thing?
Numerous answers have been offered by various religions and superstitions. In the case
43 The Varieties of Religious Experience, p. 55.
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of the strong version of the hypothesis, which holds that we are immortal, the answer
might depend on whether one expects to go to heaven or to hell. In the case of the weak,
modest, version, which holds merely that we do not cease to exist when our bodies do,
the answer is that we do not know. We do not know even whether life after death would
involve a body – if not the dead one then another. Rebirth, transmigration, reincarnation,
even the resurrection of the dead body may be possible. Most are even imaginable,
perhaps like seeing yourself in the mirror but looking very different from what you
expected, though in the case of resurrection even seeing what you did expect. We also do
not know whether we will be able to communicate with others, living or dead, which is a
major reason most desire to live after they die. But if life after death is possible, then
there seems to be no reason for denying that such communication would also be possible.
Life after death may be miserable, but it may also be happy. Of course, we do not know
how long it will last, whether its duration will be finite or infinite, or whether it will be in
time at all.
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