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.

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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.

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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).

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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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