Facing Our Mortality Without Fear: Advice From The Great Philosophers

Dante, when preparing to write his poetic vision of heaven, the Paradiso, admitted that he was “setting out on uncharted seas.” I know how he felt. Before we embark on our own perilous journey we might we might do well to say a few quick words about philosophy, which will serve as our guide or “rudder.” Philosophers, when pondering life and striving to see the “whole,” may have it occur to them that what they’re looking at is not the whole at all. After all, if there is an afterlife, then our earthly life is only the “half.” Indeed, if the hereafter should happen to represent an eternity, our earthly life is not even half, but only an infinitesimal part of the “big picture.” It may also occur to philosophers that if our earthly lives actually are the whole story, with nothing more beyond, it becomes immensely difficult to find meaning in it. Without an afterlife, our earthly life becomes something like Shakespeare’s tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, and signifying nothing. Or like Buddha’s vision that, “All the worlds are like a flickering flame; they are like a shadow, an echo, a dream.” Our life must “signify” something and yet it seems clear that this something is not self-contained in our life on earth. As we said earlier, death as extinction not only ends life but seems to devalue it as well. In Part One of this book we tried to address the first half of Socrates’ two alternatives, that death may merely be extinction. In Part Two we’ll examine his other alternative -- the persistence of the soul in an afterlife. It will not be our objective to try to prove anything with regard to the afterlife but simply to construct a kind of “working-hypothesis.” What if there is an afterlife, then what would it need to be like to make our earthly lives meaningful? We’ll try to determine as rationally as we’re able what the content of such an afterlife would need to be. This is a question worthy of philosophy. Certainly, Socrates and Plato felt it to be so. If we formulate our task this way, it allows us to examine philosophical concepts like justice, mercy, truth, goodness, and beauty in the light of our attempt to construct a sensible heaven. If we really had definite knowledge of the nature of the afterlife, we could then work backwards and determine the best sort of earthly life. How can we really run the best possible race if we don’t know where the track ends? If the finish line is at the edge of precipice, past which we plunge into oblivion, it will be exceedingly difficult to make any sense of the race itself. In the above epigram, Socrates states that reflection on the afterlife and what it might be like is a suitable occupation for one who is “soon to leave this world.” But surely, life is short, and in a sense we’re all “soon to leave,” so that speculation on this subject may be timely for all of us. Death should make philosophers of us all. Philosophy can be thought of as a kind of happy medium between religion and science. Science is concerned with the “part,” philosophy with the whole. Science seeks to know the “how” of things, philosophy the “why.” The “why” is what we need in order to give meaning to our lives. Religion also seeks to know the why, but relies primarily on revelation rather than reason. Because philosophic endeavor is concerned with the why or purpose of things, it has a greater urgency about it than science. We might go about our lives fairly well without knowing for certain whether light is essentially a wave or a particle, but we’ll have a much harder time if we have no concept of meaning or purpose for our lives. Even if we’re unable to answer questions concerning life and the hereafter with certainty, each of us must still come to our own conclusions about the why and whither of life and death. There’s no avoiding it. To not do so is simply to drift through life on the tide of received opinion, or to lead a merely random life. In the Phaedo, Socrates tells us: “It is our duty to do one of two things: either to ascertain the facts, whether by seeking instruction or by personal discovery; or, if this is impossible, to select the best and most dependable theory which human intelligence can supply, and use it as raft to ride the seas of life.” This is essentially what philosophy is. It isn’t usually possible to break down questions of life and death into tidy logical syllogisms, but it is possible to discern the broad choices and alternatives that life presents us with. Unfortunately, in choosing our personal philosophy of life we don’t have the luxury, as do scientists, of testing it first in a laboratory. Our laboratory is our life. Probably the best criteria in determining if we’ve made the right choice is whether our philosophy is life-affirming and life-enhancing. Does it help us to thrive and flourish, and more importantly, does it engender such values as truth, goodness, beauty, love and joy in our life? Do we feel good about ourselves when we follow this path? This is the sort of criteria we must use in working out a philosophy to live by. If these things are true, then in time we may begin to regard our working-hypothesis as a full-fledged philosophy. The proof, as they say, is in the pudding. At this point, it may be regarded as a philosophy worthy of choice. We may choose to place our faith in it. Images of the afterlife taken from our religious traditions have tended to be rather bland and unimaginative -- one might almost say boring. Congregations of angels singing Allelieua for eternity and that sort of thing. It has sometimes been observed that our depiction of Hell, as portrayed in literature and painting is often much more vivid and interesting than our portrayal of Heaven. For instance, Dante’s Inferno is more compelling than his Paradiso. The various religious traditions rarely have anything to say of a specific nature about “heaven” of the afterlife. Sheol, the abode of the deceased in Judaism, and the Greek Hades, were often depicted as places where listless, shadowy spirits passed their days. For the most part, they were joyless places. Ecclesiastes, for example, states that “There is no work or thought or knowledge or wisdom in Sheol.”# And in the Odyssey, the ghost of Achilles tells Odysseus that he would rather life on earth as a lowly bondsman of an indigent farmer than to be king of the dead. In Hinduism and Buddhism, the afterlife appears to involve the complete loss of individual identity as the soul is absorbed and dissolved into the Brahman or Nirvana. Or it is reincarnated endlessly on earth with an indefinite postponement of the afterlife. And in the Gospel of Matthew, Jesus begins nine parables with the phrase, “The Kingdom of Heaven is like . . . “ and yet somehow we never really learn what the kingdom of heaven is like, other than that it is very hard to get into. And even this assertion seems unreasonable to me.# The Islamic Koran does present a fairly specific picture of heaven, though it seems mostly to express wish-fulfillment based on those things that are particularly lacking in many Islamic countries, such as water and shade. Still, to give credit where credit is due, I’ve collected every reference to heaven in the Koran and assembled them in Appendix A for those who are interested. Any effort to construct a reasonable afterlife should be consistent with, and an extension of, our earthly life. It should be, so to speak, the other half of the puzzle -- the two together forming a meaningful whole. For example, it should try to make sense out of the often painful and harsh nature of this life. Most visions of the afterlife -- the beatific vision, staring into the face of God for eternity, even blissful concepts like the Buddhist nirvana or the Hindu moksha, etc., -- are basically non-sequiturs, and don’t explain or justify the nature of our earthly lives. That’s what we’ll try to do here.