Death is a strange thing
to contemplate; stranger still to witness.
I watched my mother pass
through its dark doorway earlier this year. As one might expect, it is an
experience I will not soon forget, and which, among its many other effects,
irrevocably altered my intellectual landscape.
One of the most striking
features, to me, was beholding the process of dying as a natural one.
At least when the death itself is “natural”--that is, uncaused by violence,
accident, or other sudden catastrophic event--the cessation of life is a
biological process as orderly and predictable as any other. Death is a part of
nature--it is, in fact, a part (the very last part) of life.
When you think about it,
it is strange that we humans should fear death as we do. We know full well that
each one of us will someday die, and yet when it happens to someone we know, it
registers--even when expected--as a seismic shock. It seems difficult to
believe--a surreal rupture in reality.
But why should it feel
this way? Perhaps part of the reason is simply that we--at least we in the
modern industrialized world--are not intimately familiar with it. Death is a
strange and foreign thing. To us, death is a taboo subject, unpleasant to think
about or discuss. It fills us with an unnameable dread--the fear of not
being.
Some of us, of course,
live with the belief that death is not in fact the end of all things, that it
is only a passage into another type of existence. The fact there is no real
evidence for this has not dissuaded billions of human beings throughout history
from believing in an afterlife, in whatever form. But the fact there is also no
proof that it is not the case has not dissuaded many others
from refusing even to countenance such a belief.
I am not here interested
in arguing for or against the truth of such beliefs. Rather, my intention is to
consider them from a philosophical point of view--and also to explain why, as
someone who considers himself to be scientifically literate and intellectually
skeptical, I find the subject worthy of consideration in the first place.
Before I can discuss the subject properly, I first have to address why, as someone who fully appreciates and
respects the role of science as the best tool we humans have yet developed in
acquiring factual knowledge about the world, I find it important to make a
distinction between this reasonable confidence in science, on the one hand, and
on the other, the viewpoint known as scientism.
Scientism does not mean
simply accepting the findings of scientific inquiry. One can be scientifically
literate without being scientistic. Scientism is, according to the dictionary,
“[t]he belief that all truth is exclusively discovered through science.” A
person holding a scientistic viewpoint would not, for instance, accept that any
truth or knowledge can be discovered in such things as literature, art, music,
or philosophy. At the very least, they would have great difficulty accepting
Shelley’s description of poetry as “the center and circumference of knowledge …
that which comprehends all science, and that to which all science must be
referred.”
The key word in the
above definition of scientism is “belief”. Scientism is just that--a belief, a
philosophical position, not itself a scientific theory amenable to verification
nor a piece of proven scientific fact. To believe that science is the only means
of discovering truth about reality is an epistemological assumption, neither
supported nor unsupported by science itself. Science can say nothing about
whether it is the only means of discovering truth about reality. It cannot
answer the question either way. Rather, the epistemological status of science
is a question that can only be addressed by philosophy. In other words,
scientism is, ironically, an extra-scientific belief.
All that is just to
explain why I do not necessarily see belief in an afterlife, however conceived,
as inherently contradictory to established scientific knowledge of physics and
biology. Perhaps a quick way to get around the objection in the minds of some
is to reframe the issue: let us speak not so much in terms of after-life
(or life after death) as in terms of seeing life in a larger
sense than that to which we might be accustomed. (If philosophy is nothing
else, it is an attempt to look beyond our customary ways of thinking.)
What is life? The
question is not as easy to answer as it might appear. Biology gives us a
certain definition, but it is one that, like any definition offered by science,
ultimately amounts to a description of its observable characteristics. The
nature of science is to observe phenomena and then to build models that attempt
to explain how physical reality works. But science can say nothing--because
that is not in its job description--about what things truly are in
their essence.
To a naturalistic cast
of mind, even to speak of “essences” sounds suspiciously like metaphysics. But
to deny the existence of anything like essences is also metaphysics. There is
no more proof for the latter position than for the former. To accept only the reality
of things that can be scientifically proven is itself an arbitrary,
non-scientific philosophical attitude, a particular epistemological stance.
Let us take love as an
example. Only the most cheerlessly literal and dully prosaic sorts would say
that love is merely the action of chemicals in the brain. It
may be true that the emotion we experience as “love” corresponds to certain
neurological states. But it is a huge leap to infer from this that love is
nothing more than these measurable variations in brain activity. Scientifically
speaking, that conclusion has no more basis than the idea that this neural
activity is only an observable effect of love on the brain. We would not say,
for instance, that blushing is the sum total of what love is--a mere flow of
blood to the cheeks.
To describe love in
purely scientific terms, as valuable as it might be in its limited way, does
not explain to us what love actually is. That is because love is
something that can only be known--only truly experienced--from the inside.
Science is not capable--is not even remotely designed--to study things from the
inside--that is, the world of subjective conscious experience (this is
precisely why subjective experience is eliminated as far as possible in the
process of scientific investigation). Science is, however, eminently suitable
for studying things from the outside--that is, objectively, via sensory or
technological observation and measurement.[1]
It has always struck me
as crucially important to make this distinction between subjective and
objective modes of reality. The mind is the case in point par
excellence. The mind--by which I do not mean measurable brain activity but
our inner conscious experience--exists both as something we can “observe”
(though only our own minds) and as something that itself does the observing. In
this way, the conscious mind is both subject and object, at one and the same
time.
Attempting to “look” at
one’s own mind is a bit like trying to see one’s own eyes without the aid of a
mirror or other reflective surface. Hume famously said that when he attempted
to discover his “self”, he saw only a bundle of impressions. This has become a
somewhat popular notion in the modern world--that our individual ego is
ultimately an illusion, a mere magic trick played by the activity of the brain.
I, for one, have always
found the bundle theory of the self a little difficult to accept, and not only
because it seems to negate the reality of what we take to be ourselves and
others as truly existing individuals. Like Hume, “I” cannot speak of “my”
inability to perceive my self without making reference to that very self: “I”
cannot see “me”. What is this “I” that is doing the perceiving? The problem of
consciousness is that it is, in its very essence, subjectivity: it is only a
looking at, never something that can itself be looked at (except, in some sense,
from within… but this is not so much a “looking at”, as though it were an
object of perception, as much as it is an intuitive sense of its own
existence).
It is true that one can
never prove that the conscious mind is not just an illusion (a trick of the mind,
if you will). But it is equally true that one can never prove that the
individual self is only an illusion. Some may be skeptical of
my skepticism in this matter, believing optimistically that neuroscience will
someday explain all the mysteries of consciousness, and prove with crystal
clarity that the individual self, like love, is simply atoms
clanging about in the void.
But I think this is a
category error. Consciousness can never truly be “explained” in scientific
terms precisely because it is, by definition, a subjective phenomenon rather
than an objective one. You can never get inside someone else’s inner conscious
experience. You can never know what it’s like to be someone else. Subjectivity
is forever inaccessible to scientific observation because it does not exist as
an object of external perception. For this reason, scientism must discount its
very reality.
The nature of
subjectivity is precisely what defines us as individuals: “I” only have access
to “my” experience. Whatever else the self may be, it is at the very least
demarcated by its inability to share the experience of others (I mean of course
literal, direct sharing, not empathetic, imaginative, or mediated sharing).
Further, this is precisely why the prospect of death so troubles us--it signals
(or appears to signal) the annihilation of our individual sphere
of subjective conscious experience. The fear of death is nothing more nor less
than that I, as such, will cease to exist.
There are of course
certain religious or philosophical traditions, primarily originating in Asia,
that teach that the individual self is in fact an illusion. But unlike a modern
Western naturalistic view of the world, these traditions also maintain that the
consciousness we perceive as the self is part of a larger, universal
consciousness. Just as common observation shows us that our physical selves
return to the dust whence they came, these philosophies hold that our conscious
selves also return to the greater consciousness from which they originally
emerged.
The idea that these two
views--bodily dissolution and immortality of conscious being--stand in
contradiction to each other is a logical fallacy. One can only discount the
possibility--not the certainty, but the mere possibility--of the survival of
consciousness if one assumes that consciousness is only a byproduct of matter
and has no existence in its own right.
And, though I am no
theologian, to my mind there is also no necessary contradiction between the
Western theistic notion of individual survival after death and
the Eastern notion of union with the greater oneness of being. When it comes to
the contemplation of such ultimate questions (even if one considers them as
mere mental exercises), we encounter the inadequacy of language and human
thought, just as we do anytime we contemplate infinity. Without attempting to
make any theological claim, I can only say that my intuitive sense is that
these two seemingly divergent views of the afterlife may actually converge into
a unitary whole if only we were capable of following them beyond the event
horizon of our logical and linguistic limitations.[2]
For many, of course,
such questions are at best purely academic, like medieval scholastics debating
how many angels can dance on the head of a pin (a caricature, for what it’s
worth, of interesting metaphysical questions about the nature of mind and how
it relates to physical reality). But the apparent discrepancy between supposedly
hoary beliefs in such things as souls, on the one hand, and strict empiricism,
on the other, is only superficial and based on arbitrary metaphysical
assumptions.
Why do I say this? The
reason has to do with metaphysics--metaphysics in the true philosophical sense,
which simply means asking questions about the fundamental nature of reality and
existence. To say, for example, that only matter exists is a metaphysical
statement. To ask what matter is--not on the level of mere physical
description but to ask the question of its ultimate nature or essence--is a
metaphysical question. This is why it is appropriately called meta-physics:
it asks questions about reality that go beyond the mission statement and the
capabilities of physics.
The ultimate metaphysical
question has been said to be: Why is there something rather than nothing? This
is not an invitation to introduce theology into the equation, nor is it,
properly understood, a question that can be answered by science; it is to
consider why anything at all--whether God, nature, or anything else--should
exist in the first place. And not only why, but how. Why, in other words, is
there even such a thing as reality? How did it get there? What even is reality?
Like questions about
infinity, such considerations are, to say the least, mind-boggling. These are
of course not questions that can ever be definitively answered, but if nothing
else they do serve the purpose of helping us encounter the limitations of our
own knowledge.
In Western metaphysics,
there have traditionally been two basic ways of looking at reality: either as
fundamentally material, or as fundamentally mental. (There is also dualism, which
gives the material and the mental an equal degree of ontological status.) The
more common modern view is that of materialism, which holds that the
fundamental reality is what we call “matter” and that all mental phenomena are
essentially byproducts of material processes. Less common, perhaps even a
little outré by modern standards, but of great importance in the history of
philosophy is idealism, which holds that the fundamental reality is mind (or
soul or spirit). In this view, matter is the product of
consciousness, not the other way around.
Of course we can see why
such a view is quite problematic from a modern scientific point of view. But
there is actually no reason why it should be. Consciousness presents an
insurmountable puzzle for science because it--subjective consciousness-- is
precisely what is doing the observing, and cannot itself be observed (except
from the inside, which is to say subjectively, but never from the
outside as an object). For this reason, many scientists and philosophers of a
naturalistic bent take an eliminativist position with regard to consciousness:
only because their materialist assumptions require them to dismiss the reality
of anything that cannot be observed as an object. There is simply
no logical reason, however, why one should assume that the objectively
observable phenomena which are the proper domain of science are in fact the
only things that exist. Neither is it logical to conclude that because a)
things that by definition are not susceptible to scientific observation cannot
be observed by science, therefore b) those things must not be real.
One does not need
recourse to gods or spirits to hold an idealist position. One can believe, for
example, in the reality of the mind, of love, or whatever the objects are that
are studied by logic and mathematics. But there is really more to the
materialism-idealism problem than this overly simplistic dichotomy might
suggest. The problem, in fact, only exists at all if we assume that matter and
mind are two completely different and separate things.
The materialist resolves
the problem, in fact, by assuming that mind is nothing more than an effect of
biological processes. But the idealist can also resolve the problem by
postulating that all matter--organic or otherwise--is in some sense the
expression of an idea (the word which is at the heart of
idealism).
To speak of it this way
does not necessarily entail the introduction of theology by other means. It is
entirely possible to think of the ideal as simply an inherent part of physical
reality--it is in fact possible to conceive of physical reality itself as
emerging from a sort of field of ideality.
What does this mean? It
might be helpful here to resort to our currently fashionable lingo of
“information”. According to one school of semiotics, everything that exists is
an informative thing--it is something that contains
information. This means that it is possible to know something about it, or to
derive knowledge from it. Our knowledge would have to be regarded as utterly
meaningless if we did not make the assumption (which can only ever be an
assumption) that the knowledge we purport to possess in some way corresponds to
the truth of things--in other words, that what we believe to be true about the
world is not merely a story we are telling ourselves, but that, no matter how
colored by our own subjective limitations and biases, it is nevertheless
reflective, to whatever degree, of the way things really are. This is the only
possible thing we can mean by “knowledge”. If there is no correspondence at all
between our presumptive knowledge and the reality of the world, then we are
condemned to perpetual ignorance and all of science is bunk.
To believe that this
correspondence exists or is even possible, we must assume that the information
(the objects of our sense perceptions, at least some of the patterns we
perceive in nature, the embodiments of mathematical equations) that we are
capable of deriving from our observation of reality must in some sense actually
exist within that reality. If we do not assume this, then science becomes
impossible and invalid, and all of our scientific observations amount to
nothing more than making out shapes in the clouds.
The fact that the
universe is orderly enough to be scientifically understood is remarkable. If
the human mind is capable of understanding the universe at all, then it is
capable of mirroring that reality, however imperfectly. But why should it even
be possible that a being arose within the universe that was capable of
understanding how the universe works?
What I am getting at
here is that, just as the library of a large research university is taken in
some sense to mirror the whole of knowledge (as studied through the various
disciplines of the university), the human mind may be regarded similarly as
mirroring the whole of reality to the degree that it is capable of imitating
its structure and behavior in the form of such things as logic, mathematics,
and scientific theories and models.
Furthermore, the very
nature of human thought--the logical structures it has been able to discover
and which it has always relied upon intuitively in order to survive in the
world--may itself be seen as mirroring the logical structure of reality. As
physics has demonstrated over and over, the universe does seem to behave in a
rational manner. This is assumed even when we encounter mysterious phenomena
such as we find in quantum mechanics--we do not simply give up and conclude
that the universe is utterly unintelligible. We assume instead (and rightly so)
that behind and beneath the apparent randomness lies some principle we have yet
to work out. (“There must be a logical explanation.”)
The ancient philosopher
Heraclitus understood this connection between mind and reality in his
conception of the logos--a principle of reason that orders all
things and that is accessible to human thought. If we assume that science gives
us true knowledge of the world and that the universe behaves rationally (even
if often in ways that are far more intricate than we can make out), can we also
believe it is simply an extremely fortuitous accident that we human beings just
happen to be capable of comprehending its rational nature?
To imply that it is not
an accident does not require belief in supernatural intervention. What I am
suggesting, rather (and here we are at last coming to my point about
metaphysics), is that such things as consciousness and rationality are not
completely random accidents of evolution (in other words, not simply emerging
by chance from biological matter) but are instead inherent characteristics of
the universe itself--and that this is precisely why humans
have evolved the rational capabilities such as they possess. These rational
capabilities are reflective of the rationality of the world environment in
which human beings evolved. Reason would not have been nearly so adaptable had the
world itself not acted according to reason.
It is not just humans
either. All biological entities act according to their own observable,
predictable logic. For that matter, all of physical reality behaves according
to the logic of physics and mathematics. The world is intelligible (to a large
degree, and at least in principle) because it works according to reason.
If we hold that reality
is merely atoms in the void, then it becomes difficult to make sense of
subjective consciousness--something which we know to exist, in whatever way,
because it is precisely what “we” are. If there is no consciousness, there is
no “me”. To speak of the self as an essence is simply to state that there is a
center of subjective conscious experience that is unique to each human being;
no matter what changes a self may sustain over a lifetime, it is the only
subjectivity that has access to its own memories and to its own experience.
Subjectivity is inherently tied up with identity.
One of the most bizarre
and frightening things about the prospect of death--or at least the idea of
death, conceived in a particular way--is the notion that “I”--this subjectively
aware consciousness that is my only way of experiencing existence--that, for
me, constitutes reality itself--will someday simply cease to exist--as though
all of reality will just vanish--as though I had never existed at all, my
entire lifetime forgotten. It does not seem comprehensible because it is not.
Sheer nothingness, total oblivion, is by definition not something that the mind
can grasp. There is literally nothing there for it to grasp.
Another ancient
philosopher, Parmenides, stated that there is no such thing as nothing. Though
his idea has been often criticized, it remains a compelling ontological
problem--not to mention a problem of logic and linguistics. How can we speak of
“nothing”? According to Parmenides, there is literally nothing there to speak
of, and therefore nothing real that might correspond to the concept. In fact,
we cannot even conceive of nothing, because to conceive anything at all--an
image of total darkness, perhaps--is itself something. We have
already lost the game. Try again--fail again.
The ancient Greek
philosophers believed that nothing can come from nothing. Modern physics, in
its laws of conservation, agrees. Even the Big Bang is assumed to have emerged
from something. It is hardly logically tenable to hold (apart from
the assumption of divine intervention, creatio ex nihilo) that
absolutely nothing existed and then suddenly, for no reason (because no cause
would have been possible), something suddenly started existing. To believe the
universe simply came into existence uncaused (by God or anything else) is a
logical absurdity.
Just as matter and
energy could not (again, apart from miraculous intervention) have simply come
into existence from nothing, nor do they simply pass out of existence, it is
possible to conceive that the same might be true of other properties of the
universe--including consciousness.
Is consciousness an
inherent property of the universe? To truly consider this, we must get past
certain assumptions about what “consciousness” might mean. We can imagine
different levels of complexity of consciousness, from the human to lower
animals to plants to microorganisms. We can perhaps even surmise that minerals
and even subatomic particles might possess some very elemental and primitive
form of proto-consciousness, even if hardly recognizable as such. In any case,
to believe that consciousness is not an inherent part of
physical reality is to believe that it emerged at random--which is to say that
it may very well never have emerged at all.
But can we truly believe
this? Can something like consciousness--what we might call the universe’s
awareness of itself--simply have emerged by accident? Or was its emergence the
inevitable, completely natural result of a universe that possesses
consciousness as one of its fundamental properties?
If consciousness is in
fact a fundamental characteristic of physical reality, it surely exists on a
scale from the complex consciousness of human beings to something that might
best be thought of as pre-consciousness inherent in matter itself. It would
mean that our own individual consciousness did not simply emerge from nothing,
nor that it disappears into nothing, but instead exists within a larger
universal matrix of consciousness.
Is it even possible to
comprehend a universe in which consciousness never emerges? Consciousness, for
us, is virtually synonymous with reality itself. Our only experience of reality
is via consciousness. This is a tautology--consciousness is, after all,
synonymous with experience. Berkeley believed that to be is to be
perceived--suggesting that a world of which no one and nothing was aware would
hardly be a world at all. It might as well not even exist.
A world that cannot be
perceived would hardly be admissible as a real world by science. It would be
dismissed as a fantasy world. Science, after all, is based entirely on
experience--that is to say, consciousness. Science is simply the conscious mind
reporting what it perceives. Scientism is, in fact, based on the principle that
to be is to be perceived. That which cannot be perceived cannot be admitted to
existence.
It is impossible for us
to conceive of reality apart from experience. For us, our experience of reality
is practically synonymous with what we take to be reality itself. If something
is utterly beyond the scope of experience, it is difficult to believe in its
reality. This is exactly why so many people have difficulty accepting such
concepts as God and heaven--to be is to be perceived.
If our individual
consciousness does exist within and emerge from a larger matrix or field of
universal consciousness, it becomes easy to wonder in what form it may have
existed prior to our birth--and, more compellingly, what form it might take
after our death.
Of course, I have no
more idea than anyone else (such things do indeed lie beyond the range of my
perception), though I will venture a few thoughts on the matter.
First, to take an anthropological
approach, I am struck by the fact that belief in an afterlife has been a
feature of human cultures throughout almost the entirety of our history. There
is even evidence of such beliefs in the burial customs of Neanderthals. Of
course this does not prove that such beliefs are true. But I don’t think it is
insignificant that the intuition of another existence beyond this one is, for
all practical purposes, a human universal.[3]
I am also compelled by
the fact which I alluded to earlier that both Western and Eastern mystical
traditions seem to reach an uncanny level of basic agreement on what union with
the ultimate ground of being is like. For instance, some Christian mystics
speak of union with God in terms of becoming one with God, without separation,
while not actually annihilating the individual self. Without making any
commitment to the truth claims of such mystical experiences, I find the similarities
across cultures and religious traditions worthy of note. All agree that the
experience ultimately cannot be expressed in human language.[4]
If one assumes that our
consciousness does not simply poof out of existence (which would be no more
reasonable than the idea that our body just suddenly evaporates into
nothingness), then what exactly might happen to it? Does it simply dissolve
back into the constituent atoms of pre-consciousness? Does it become absorbed
like a drop into the universal ocean of cosmic awareness? Or does our
individual self--what we always experienced as “I”-- somehow, in some manner,
survive?
Death is a precipice
before which all of us, if we are honest with ourselves, must tremble. The
truth is that, despite whatever religious or spiritual convictions some of us
may have, we do not actually know what it is like to die. No
one has come back to give us a report. Any such beliefs can only ever be a
matter of faith--including the belief that there is no after-existence
whatsoever. We do not know this either.
Though this proves
nothing one way or the other, it is a logical truth that only the person who
believes in an afterlife can possibly be proven right. If there is no
afterlife, none of us will ever know that fact. Though it can never be
confirmed by the living, belief in an afterlife is nevertheless subject to
verification in a way that its opposite never can be. So if you believe there is
no afterlife and you are right, you will never know you were right and no one
else will either; but if you do believe in an afterlife and you are wrong, you
will never know you were wrong and neither will anyone else.
Even though the human
mind has proven itself remarkably capable of discovering truth about the world,
it must be remembered that our mind is limited by our own biology. A worm is
aware of things, but its consciousness is quite small compared to ours. How do
we know that there are not--whether elsewhere in the observable universe or
existing on some dimensional plane of which we as yet have little or no
awareness--entities that are far more advanced than we in terms of
consciousness?
For that matter, how do
we know that the universe we can observe, and of which we know
only little, is the sum total of reality? Do we truly believe that to be is to
be perceived (by us)? Is this not a rather anthropocentric epistemology? Might
a world exist even if none of us can perceive it? Do we not believe that our
own universe existed before it could be perceived by any conscious mind?
It is common for (some)
atheists and agnostics to caricature the ideas of religious believers, but in
this they are often guilty of the straw man argument and are aiming their criticism
at cartoons that no one actually believes. In considering the Christian concept
of heaven, for instance, it helps little to envision this as a place of puffy
white clouds (in the literal sky) populated by winged, white-robed figures
playing harps for all eternity. To address the idea of heaven seriously, we
must first attempt to understand what it actually means.
Again, I am no
theologian, but my own understanding of the (specifically Christian) conception
of heaven is that, rather than being defined as a place, as though
it existed either inside or outside the physical universe (but either way in
physical relation to it), it is more a matter of union with God. Any serious
theologian would tell you that to speak of divine things requires the use of metaphors
and images that only suggest the realities they attempt to describe. Many
critics of religion may be surprised to know (or at least I would assume they
would be surprised, based on the way they so often characterize religious
belief) that throughout most of the church’s history, its theologians have
interpreted biblical texts in ways that are often allegorical or symbolic and
not necessarily literal.
If there really is a
God, one would imagine that such a being would be beyond the ability of any human
language to describe or thought to comprehend. Otherwise, such an entity would
be too obviously the product of the human imagination.
Across religious
traditions, and even in many historical secular (in the sense of being based on
rational thought rather than religious revelation) philosophical systems,
whatever we might refer to as “God” is generally conceived as the ultimate
reality, or the ground of all being. In the philosophy of Neoplatonism, which
exercised a great influence on the development of Christian theology,
individual souls are considered both to emanate from the One (or the Good) and
to return to it. This return entails a union (in fact a reunion) with the One,
which is sort of like a homecoming for the soul--a return to the “place” from which
it originated.
This idea is remarkably
in line with many Eastern systems of thought about the relationship between the
individual consciousness and what is seen as a greater universal consciousness
of which the self is a mere expression or manifestation. Of course, those in
the Western monotheistic tradition are careful to differentiate God from the
universe or the self, though in the writings of many Christian philosophers
(and mystics, as alluded to above) this line may become blurred. But it doesn’t
seem to me that these two conceptions are necessarily in logical contradiction
to each other. For instance, we speak of marriage as “the two becoming one”,
and believe this (ideally) to be an inseparable union, while each individual
also maintains their own distinctive identity--it is, in fact, their individual
identities that allow them to love (each other). The Christian church, in fact,
sees marriage as a figure of the union of God and man.
As with the problem of
the self, I suspect that attempting to figure out the exact relationship
between our individual selves and any larger consciousness must inevitably run
aground on the treacherous rocks of language and the limitations of the human mind.
It is the same with any consideration of eternal life--as Kant demonstrated,
the human mind cannot help but think in terms of time and space; this is why we
become so bewildered anytime we dare to contemplate infinity or eternity.
Though the prospect of
eternal non-existence is indeed dreadful, the idea of eternal life can also
produce a sense of vertigo when you really think about it. Even if the eternal
life we might discover is a good one--as we are promised heaven will be--the
idea of it going on forever can almost induce a sense of
panic. (Just try to think about forever. Take all the time you
need.) But, assuming that universal consciousness is indeed eternal (as it
could never pass in or out of being), one might also imagine that such feelings
only emerge out of our own inability to comprehend what it would actually be
like. After all, we are talking about something that allegedly exists outside
of time and space--and beyond the loneliness of the separate, individual self.
The genuine conception
of heaven--the one that people actually believe in--is not a place of endless
individualistic pleasure-seeking, which as Aristotle pointed out would be
tedious beyond words.[5] It is something much better than
that. It is a place of loving union with all and everything. It is a realm, or
a state, where all desires are fulfilled--not every single desire we might have
on earth, as these are often petty and ultimately below us (which is to say,
not truly fulfilling to our being), but the truest desires of our souls of
which we are hardly even aware--above all, our desire to love and to be loved.
If heaven means anything at all, it means the home-- which is to say the very
source and origin--of love.
In the Christian
tradition, this makes perfect sense because heaven is defined as where God is,
and the Bible declares that “God is love”. Therefore, to be in the presence of
God (which is what heaven really means) is to be in the presence of love in all
of its fullness and perfection--in other words, the ultimate fulfillment of our
being, as creatures that were made for love.
Thomas Aquinas, in
considering the problem of the “last end” or ultimate fulfillment of the human
being, took the approach of first examining what it is that we desire, on the
quite reasonable grounds that desires generally correspond to an object that is
or might be their satisfaction. We experience hunger, for example, because food
exists and is something we need for bodily survival. We experience loneliness
because other human beings exist and we require their companionship in order to
be fulfilled as social animals.
His argument is too long
to go into here, but in his examination of human desire, Aquinas eventually
came to the conclusion that human beings ultimately desire a happiness that is
both perfect (that is to say complete, unmarred by any sort of unhappiness) and
eternal (as the end of any good thing, or even the possibility of its end, inevitably
detracts from our happiness). Aquinas reasoned that it would not make sense for
desires to exist that do not correspond to any possible fulfillment or truly
existing object, while it is at the same time obvious that the desire for
perfect and eternal happiness has no such object in this world. If he were not
a Christian philosopher he may have ended there and concluded, as do many
modern existentialists, that life is absurd.
But, being the Catholic
thinker that he was, Thomas did not feel the need to stop there. Instead, he
concluded that these seemingly inordinate desires, which would seem to
correspond to the true fulfillment of our being, may in fact be fulfilled in
the beatific vision--a distinctively Catholic way of describing union with God
(a fulfillment which is of course only possible after death). In this ultimate
union with the ground of all being, the human desire for a happiness that is
both perfect and eternal at last finds the object of its quest--a state of
rest, bliss, peace--a place of perfect and everlasting joy and love--a place or
state in which all is well with our souls--where everything is beautiful and
just--where everything is exactly the way we, for some reason, feel
things should be.
So where does all this
lead us? Not to any conclusive proofs about anything, that much is certain.
Such proofs will always remain out of our reach--at least as long as we are
alive in this world. But I think it is important at least to consider the
possibility that what we take to be our selves--our conscious, subjective
awareness--and indeed, this brief mortal life which we are currently
experiencing--may in whatever way be only one small part of a larger whole,
like the proverbial iceberg. Death may be, finally, an illusion; the life we
know may be only one small part of life.
The subjectivity of
consciousness is one of its most salient features. It is not necessary to
accept a metaphysical dualism (the dreaded mind-body distinction) in order to
accept the reality of a subjective consciousness that is not reducible to the
material. Rather than seeing these as two separate substances as Descartes
might have, we might instead see them as simply two aspects of the same thing.
The materialist, in fact, does just this in assuming the mind to be merely the
product of brain activity. But it is no less reasonable--even if less orthodox
at present--to assume that what we conceive as “matter”--that which is
externally observable--represents what we might call the surface of reality;
and further, that what we experience as subjective awareness is what
constitutes its interior being.
In this way, the human
being might be seen as a microcosm of the universe as a whole. Everything that
exists is a product of the universe; everything in some way shows us something
about the cosmos of which it is one manifestation or expression (or outgrowth,
if you will). In theological terms, all created things show us something about
their Creator (as in the ancient Hebrew formulation that man is made in the
image of God).
The difference between a
materialist and an idealist approach to metaphysics is that, while materialism
takes a “bottom up” view (atoms and subatomic particles, for instance, being
the fundamental reality that makes up everything else), idealism takes a “top
down” view (all physical things being expressions of the rational order
inherent in the universe). For the idealist, there is such a thing as
irreducible complexity, and every phenomenon that emerges in the universe, in
some way, shape, or form, always already existed.
It is somber indeed to
contemplate the possibility that this life--an imperceptible blip in the
incomprehensible vastness of cosmic time--is all we will ever get to
experience. The fact it seems to be our only chance at
existence and awareness is understandably perplexing and, quite frankly,
disappointing. This is all we get?
It is difficult to
account for the seeming irreconcilability between what we desire--to keep on
living indefinitely--and the extremely limited possibilities that reality seems
to offer us. This is not just a matter of quantity of life; it is also a
matter of quality. It seems that, no matter how fabulously wealthy we might be
or how long we might live, we can never feel that we have had
enough, nor that all the desires of our heart have been anything close to
fulfilled.
It would seem, as
Aquinas observed, that human beings simply cannot find
fulfillment in this brief and invariably imperfect span of existence that we
call life. Some people may report feeling, near the end, that they have led a
satisfying and fulfilled life; but, while this may in some sense be true, I can't help but feel that any sense of satisfaction or fulfillment we might feel at the end of this life is ultimately a form of settling--of learning to be content, not with the life that we might ideally have wished for, but only with the life that was possible. While this attitude may be philosophically advisable, it does not
sweep away the problem as to why human beings should yearn for so much more
than we can ever possibly have.
One of the many ways
life is less than satisfying, of course, is not simply the prospect of our own
death but the reality of the death of loved ones. As I mentioned at the
beginning, we perceive a wrongness in the death of someone we
know, despite the fact that we always knew, intellectually, that it was bound
to happen someday. Yet when someday arrives, the present, no longer
hypothetical, reality of the event is virtually incomprehensible.
Of course, I would love
more than anything to know that I will in fact see my mother again. The idea
that this is only a wishful fantasy and that I will never again see her face
nor feel her embrace is sad beyond words. But reality is so structured that, if
this is in fact the case, I will never learn that it is the case. I will never
have to receive such disappointing news. I will reach the end of my own life,
still not knowing for a fact, with certainty, whether I will ever see her again
or not, and that will be the end of it. If, on the other hand, some form of
survival awaits us, I will someday know. If this is in fact the case, I imagine
that it will take a form which I cannot yet comprehend.
Even assuming that consciousness
can somehow survive death, who is to say that it will retain the form of
our individual consciousness--the identity that defines us as
who we are? Will there even be a Mom, or a Steven, as such, still capable of
knowing and loving each other? Or will our consciousnesses be dissolved into
atoms or absorbed into an oceanic soul?
I have a theory about
that, which can of course only be a theory, at least in this lifetime. It goes
like this: The subjectivity that is our conscious existence is, like our
physical body and all other physical objects and forces, a manifestation of the
universe itself. It is a real part of the whole and should not be discounted.
The universe possesses subjectivity at the very least because we do and we are
part of the universe. The type of complex consciousness we possess was always a
potentiality within the universe, and it was only a matter of time before its
natural, inevitable unfolding. No magic or miracle was required.
The very idea of
subjectivity involves an “I”--that is, an individual perspective, a self. Even
the notion of “we” implies multiple subjectivities acting or associating as one
(as we know, such collective phenomena do not necessarily entail the
annihilation of the individual self--otherwise it would hardly make sense to
speak of a “we”).
If the universe is
indeed a “top down” system, which is to say one of irreducible complexity, this
means that the ground of all being contains within itself all forms of
consciousness that might possibly exist. These forms, as instantiated in
individual beings, may be seen as referents to or manifestations of an original
source (yes, this is a variation of the Platonic theory of forms). Love, for
example, in this view, only possesses meaning because it refers to, or partakes
in, something essential and real within the universe--in other words, it is not
just invented out of thin air, not a mere social construct (though we may
attach our constructs to it). We might say the same about human reason: that it
refers to or participates in the reality of universal reason. As Heraclitus
said, the logos speaks to those who listen.
Each human being, too,
is a manifestation or expression of the universe--which is to say of nature. We
do not create ourselves, but are “given” existence. The “I”, like any other
natural phenomenon, is itself a manifestation of the nature of the universe--an
expression of some aspect of itself--perhaps, one might even venture, an
instantiation of the subjective consciousness that lies at the heart of all being
(man in the image of God, as it were). In short, none of these things are
“unnatural” intrusions upon the universe or random aberrations of nature, but
are in fact part of the universe’s way of showing itself--they are
completely natural. The universe contains atoms; it also contains
conscious minds--in particular, conscious minds differentiated as individual
selves. There is no reason to suppose that the highest level of being--the
ground of all being--should be lacking in any characteristic that the universe
displays, including that of individual subjectivity.
Many years ago I came up
with this metaphysical formulation: As all points in space exist, so all points
in time. Modern physics has shown us that space-time is a continuum, a single
unitary whole. In some sense, all past and future events exist.
Because, as Kant showed, we cannot help but think in terms of time, it becomes
extremely difficult to speak (or think) in a coherent manner about matters that
transcend our ordinary experience of time. So to say that the past or the
future exists (present tense) is only a manner of speaking.
Nevertheless, if we use the present tense loosely, we can see how the unity of
time-space means that all things--all moments in time, past and future--always
exist somewhere in the space-time continuum.
I have also, when
contemplating the past, sometimes sensed the strange intuition that, somehow
and in some way, the past is not truly lost but still exists and may perhaps be
seen again--an odd, unexplainable feeling that the past will someday return. Of
course, from the current scientific perspective this does not make much sense.
But the idea, to my mind at least, feels true. The idea is not
one of literal time travel, but rather it is the notion that all that has happened
always remains--that each moment in time still and always, in whatever way,
exists, held in the space-time continuum or the ground of all being. (As Kurt
Vonnegut said of someone dead, he is still very much alive in the past.)
Though it may be easily dismissed
as wishful thinking, there is an internal logic to the notion that all things
lost--be they people, places, times, or things--are contained within the ground
of all being. Even if our own memory and knowledge fade, the universe, at the
level of the whole of space-time, bears the memory of everything that ever
happened, so that all things are, at least in principle, recoverable (meaning
they are never truly non-existent).
We ourselves possess
many more memories than those we are able to recall, as evidenced by the fact
that long-forgotten experiences may be unexpectedly called up by a particular
trigger encountered by chance--a long-ago experience we never would have
remembered otherwise, yet which nevertheless is stored somewhere in our brains.
In the same way, the space-time continuum may be thought of as bearing the
trace or record of every past event, even if these traces are in practice
inaccessible to us.
One aspect of many
people’s notion of heaven is that we will have access to all knowledge and that
everything lost will be found. Again, this idea possesses an internal logic. If
we are truly to be united with the ground of all being, it makes sense that we
would then have access to all knowledge and indeed all of reality, past,
present, and future--because we would then be a fully integrated part (even if
somehow also maintaining our own individual identity) of universal being
itself.
One thing I know:
assuming there is any reality at all to these concepts of survival after death
(in whatever form), the reality of it will prove to be something that we cannot
in any way, in our present state, comprehend. All of our religious ideas will
be seen to be like nursery stories told to children, using figures and
metaphors that we are capable of comprehending but that do not in any way reach
the full reality of what they attempt to describe. Those who claim to have
glimpsed this ultimate reality--religious and philosophical mystics--tend to
more or less agree not only in what they do describe but even more on the fact
that it is not truly describable. One would not expect it to be.
I can only imagine that
any such ultimate reality, any ground of all being, if it truly does exist,
must contain within itself the fullness of reality--that no thing will be
lacking (at least not any good thing--according to Neoplatonism, the Good only
contains the good, evil being a mere deprivation of being). I can’t escape the
sense that all human desire seems to converge on a point beyond the horizon,
invisible to us, and which therefore many dismiss as a land of fantastic wish
fulfillment and fairy tale make-believe. But it may also simply be that this
land lies beyond our sight.
The fulfillment of our
profoundest desires, in any case, does not appear to exist in this world.
I like to think, with Aquinas, that maybe, just maybe, this is an indication
that our souls (if we want to call them that) are, in this present state,
somehow separated from their true fulfillment. As far as we know, only human
beings feel the strange craving for perfection and eternity--two features that,
as Thomas astutely observed, are nowhere to be found in this lifetime. As I
once wrote in one of my college philosophy papers, speaking of Aquinas’s
conclusion that the last end of man consists in a state of perfect and eternal
happiness: if human existence does indeed have a last end, that one sounds as
good as any.
It is entirely possible,
of course, that all of this may in fact be mere fantasy. (But again--you can
never prove that.) The only options we have before us are to believe in it or
not. There may be, however--I suspect, for very many of us, there is--a middle
ground: despite all of our doubts and uncertainties, to hope. Hope, by
definition, exists in the absence of empirical certainty or present reality.
But sometimes it is all we have. Do the longings of our hearts tell us
anything? Do they correspond to some reality beyond the vale we can perceive? Is
there another land, we might say, somewhere over the rainbow--one that is far
more conducive to human happiness and fulfillment?
I suspect it is not so
much my religious upbringing as simply the fact I am human (judging from
anthropology) that causes me to feel, in some way I can never prove, that this
is somehow true. But is it really? From one perspective, it seems
too good to be true. From another, it seems too good not to be
true.
I know that my mother
died in the belief that she would find herself in heaven, reunited with her
parents and other loved ones who went before her. When my time comes to follow
her through that dark passage, what will I find on the other
side? Is there actually a “there” there? Will it be like falling forever into a
dreamless sleep, never to wake again? Or will it be like awakening from a dream
into a fuller state of consciousness and life? Will it be not so much life
after death as life after life?
For each of us, only
time will tell. In the meantime, if I, full of doubts though I may be, want to
hold out for the possibility that, in some way beyond all present
comprehension, I might someday, in whatever form, see Mom again, I say: Why not
make a little room for hope? It is, after all, a hope that can never be disappointed.
Sometimes I am (almost) okay with the notion that maybe this life is all there
is, so be it. A little short and unsatisfying, but I guess that’s just how it
is.
But at other times, when
the heart feels the unbearable immensity of forever--when it is painfully
apparent how far this brief and unhappy existence falls short of the heart’s
truest desires--when I want to believe that Mom’s own hope was justified and
that she is waiting for me someday to join her in perpetual happiness--when I want to
hope for a dream that lies beyond the reach of all sight and reason, a hope I
know I can never prove but can only feel in the profoundest recesses of my
soul--I can only say, to all compassionate souls: just let me have this.
[1] And yet, it must also be noted that
science, as an activity of the human mind, is inherently limited by the
subjective consciousness which performs it, as well as by our specific nature
as biological entities and the senses we happen to possess. We cannot have a
“God’s eye” view of reality.
[2] I base this opinion partly on the language
of authors in the Christian mystical tradition, who often sound like many of
their Eastern counterparts when describing--or attempting to describe--what
union with God is like.
[3] Might the origins of religion, for that
matter, lie in the primitive intuition that the universe is rational?
[4] On his deathbed, Thomas Aquinas found
himself “in a state of ecstasy, declaring that all that he had written was of
no significance beside the beatific vision that he had been granted, and in the
face of which words fail.” [Roger Scruton, “Effing the Ineffable”]
[5] One thinks of the old Twilight
Zone episode in which a dead man who believes himself to be in just
such a hedonistic heaven becomes unbearably bored and wants to go to “the other
place”: “This is the other place!” Cue diabolical laughter.
