Table of Contents
II. The Standard Conception of Morality
II.1 The Moral Question and The Meaning Question
II.2 How Ethics Relates to Morality
II.3 How Morality Relates to Rationality
III. Three Classical Challenges to the Standard Conception of Morality
III.2 Eight Logical Principles of Human Rationality
III.4 Psychological and Moral Egoism
IV.1 God and The Divine Command Theory
IV.2 Does an Essentially Rational God Exist?
V. Three Classical Moral Theories
V.1 Aristotelian Virtue Ethics
V.1.1 Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, books 1-3: A Brief Exposition
V.1.2 Four Worries about Aristotle’s Virtue Ethics
V.1.3 Contemporary Virtue Ethics
V.2.1 Not-So-Happy Little Campers: Ten Big Problems for Millian Utilitarianism
V.3 Kant’s Ethics of Persons and Principles
V.3.2 Three Classical Worries about Kant’s Ethics
V.4 All-Things-Considered Conclusion of This Section
VI. Pascal’s Optimism and Schopenhauer’s Pessimism
VI.1 Pascal’s Optimism About The Meaning of Life
VI.2 Schopenhauer’s Pessimism About The Meaning of Life
VI.3 Pascal or Schopenhauer? Optimism or Pessimism?
VII. Existentialism, the Absurd, and Affirmation
VII.1 Two Kinds of Existentialism
VIII. The Ethics of Authenticity
VIII.1 Existential Ethics and the Concept of Authenticity
VIII.1.1 What is Authenticity?
VIII.1.2 Authenticity and Radical Freedom
VIII.1.3 Inauthenticity, Freedom-Refusers, and Freedom Deniers
VIII.2 Two Important Problems for Existential Ethics
VIII.3 Sartre on Principled Authenticity
IX.2 The Nature of Our Own Death
IX.2.1 Nagel On the Nature of Our Own Death
IX.2.2 Suits Against the “Deprivation” Account of the Badness of Death
IX.2.3 Some Critical Worries About What Nagel and Suits are Saying About the Nature of Our Own Death
X. The (Im)Possibility of Human Immortality
X.1 Williams on the Tedium of Immortality
X.2 Fischer on How Human Immortality Could Be a Good Thing
X.3 Some Worries About What Williams and Fischer are Saying About Human Immortality
X.4 Human Life Without Immortality
This final installment contains sections X.3 and X.4.
But you can also read or download a .pdf version of the complete short course HERE.
X.3 Some Worries About What Williams and Fischer are Saying About Human Immortality
For the purposes of my criticism of Williams and Fischer alike, by the term “a finite or terminating rational human life” I’ll mean a human personal life, with permanent deaths at the end of it.
Then, correspondingly, by “human immortality” I will mean a sempiternally endless or infinite human personal life.
Granting that, then we need to distinguish between
(i) a finite or terminating human personal life that’s relatively short, say, lasting up 120 years in duration as an absolute maximum, but no longer than that,
(ii) a finite or terminating human personal life that’s super-long,say, any finite number of years greater than 120 in duration, including of course Elina Makropulos’s 342 years, and
(iii) a human personal life that’s sempiternally endless or infinite.
The deep issue raised by this threefold distinction is how precisely we are to understand the concept of endlessness or infinity when it’s applied to the concept of a human personal life.
Now a human personal life like ours, simply by virtue of its being human and therefore having a necessary connection with organismic animal life, occurs in rather limited portions of space, and also has a certain temporally definite biological sequencing related to growth, maturation, aging, eating, sleeping, breathing, blood circulation, heart activity, neuronal activity, hormonal activity, ranges of body temperature, and so-on.
In other words, a human personal life is inherently filled with spatial and biotemporal parameters of various kinds.
By sharp contrast, the only well-defined concept of endlessness or infinity we have is fundamentally mathematical, and here there is an important distinction between
(i) denumerable infinities, involving one-to-one correspondence with the set of natural numbers/positive integers), and
(ii) non-denumerable infinities, which systematically outrun one-to-one correspondence with the natural numbers/positive integers, e.g., the power set (i.e., the set of all sub-sets) of the set of natural numbers.
We can meaningfully add this dual mathematical concept of endlessness or infinity to the concept of sempiternally successive time, and then understand the idea of a sempiternal endlessness or infinity that’s either denumerable or non-denumerable.
But, supposing that we do have some conceptually competent grasp of the temporal-mathematical concept of sempiternal endlessness or infinity, nevertheless I do not think we have the slightest idea of how this concept meaningfully applies to the concept of a human personal life, given the necessary connection between such a life and an inherently spatially-limited and temporally definite biologically-sequenced organismic life of a specifically human sort.
E.g., in an endless or infinite amount of time, since every denumerably infinite series has the same cardinality, the very same human person could visit every single point in any denumerably infinite space.
And even though, necessarily, every human person, by virtue of their specifically human organismic lives, grows, matures, and ages throughout those lives, that very same person could also somehow exist for an endlessly or infinitely long time without growing, maturing, or aging, like Elina Makropolus.
But none of this makes any sense!
How could the constitutive moments of a single human person’s life map one-to-one to all the points of any infinite space?
Does Elina Makropulos need to eat, or not?
If so, what are her digestive processes like?
Does she need to sleep, and if so, why?
Is she constantly exchanging heat, energy, and matter with the environment, like every other non-equilibrium thermodynamic system that’s also an animal?
Is she subject to entropy?
And so-on.
Hence I don’t think we have the slightest idea of what the concept of “human immortality” really means.
Correspondingly, on the charitable assumption that they are actually making sense, I think that Williams and Fischer are actually talking about a finite or terminating human personal life that’s super-long, and not about human personal immortality, which is in fact an incoherent notion.
On the one hand, then, Williams is absolutely right that there’s something deeply questionable about the very idea of immortality for creatures like us.
But also Williams is quite wrong that a finite or terminating higher-level human personal life that is super-long would be intolerable, for all the reasons that Fischer gives.
And on the other hand, Fischer is absolutely right that Williams’s argument for the intolerability of human immortality is unsound.
But also Fischer is quite wrong that he’s shown anything about how human personal immortality could be good, since the very idea of such a thing is incoherent.
X.4 Human Life Without Immortality
In fact, immortality for creatures like us, human persons, is simply impossible because its very idea is incoherent, and more precisely because its possibility is ruled out by the very idea of human personal life like ours.
Our rational lives as human persons are finite but unbounded, like the surface of a sphere.
Or to make the same point slightly differently, since every such rational human life necessarily has egocentric centering, it’s like the shape of the visual field, which is the interior of a finite sphere projected perspectivally outwards from a single oriented region on that interior surface.
Our subjective experience of the finite unboundedness of the interior of this perspectivally-projected human-life-sphere—a sphere that’s completely filled up with all the things we experience, and ourselves at the center, as conscious and self-conscious rational animals, fully embedded and fully embarked on our lives in a thoroughly nonideal world (i.e., a world that’s a complete fucking mess) and in solidarity with all other human persons—is as close to immortality as we’ll ever get, because it is as close to immortality as it’s possible for “human, all-too-human: creatures like us to get.
Furthermore, and perhaps most poignantly, for us to hope for human immortality, or for us to desire and long for immortality, is a tragic conceptual, metaphysical, moral, and existential mistake, a serious cognitive illusion.
As per the second epigraph of this section, Wittgenstein clearly saw—his attention having been duly concentrated by the horrors of front line action on the Eastern Front in the Great War—that this hope, desiring, or longing for a sempiternally endless or infinite life in effect just endlessly or infinitely puts off till tomorrow what you can, really necessarily, only ever feel, choose, or do right here and right now, today, over and over and over again, until, inevitably, you die.
“He lives eternally who lives in the present.”
For us to hope, desire, or long for human immortality is therefore a fundamental refusal of our own innately-specified capacity for principled authenticity, and in this way it constitutes a special form of nihilism that Simon Critchley aptly calls passive nihilism.[i]
So here’s where Kantian ethics, classical existentialism, and Wittgenstein’s 1921 logico-philosophical masterpiece, the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, meet up with Nietzsche’s classical existentialist philosophy.
Indeed, in my opinion, Wittgenstein’s thought about living eternally in the present is essentially the same as the one Nietzsche had about “the greatest stress” and eternal recurrence.
Both of these thoughts express a profound dual insight about the nature of principled authenticity for rational but also “human, all-too-human” animals like us, and about the self-undermining passive nihilism that constantly tempts us in the form of the seemingly benign and natural desire for endless or infinite life.
So I’ll leave you to explore that profound dual insight, as one final “task for the reader.”
NOTE
[i] S. Critchley, Infinitely Demanding (London: Verso, 2007), pp. 3-6.
Against Professional Philosophy is a sub-project of the online mega-project Philosophy Without Borders, which is home-based on Patreon here.
Please consider becoming a patron!
