In the ordinary, everyday understandings of the words involved, to say that someone survived death is to contradict yourself. Antony Flew
There are a number of distinct ways in which a person can be understood to ‘survive’ death. Most commonly, survival implies a continuation of the conscious self in an afterlife, often involving some form of reward or punishment. The medieval Christian notions of Heaven, Hell and Purgatory, and the Qu’ranic paradise, are examples of this. But a seamless transition from earthly life to afterlife is not the only model for survival after death. Resurrection is a doctrine shared by the Abrahamic religions and is a notion available also to materialists since this usually includes resurrection of the body. Another possibility is reincarnation, or the transmigration of a soul from one body to be reborn in another. Some traditions believe that the end of reincarnation and rebirth is Nirvana, a state of perfect peace. Less theologically, we also speak of people surviving through memory, fame and achievement – although Woody Allen’s comment on such ‘survival’ suggests its inadequacy:
I don’t want to achieve immortality through my work. I want to achieve it through not dying.
Which of these different concepts of survival will seem most likely depends upon a number of other philosophical issues.
At first glance, the possibility of an afterlife will be accommodated most easily by mind-body dualists. Dualism is the belief that people possess both a material and a non-material nature: a body and a soul, a ‘ghost in a machine’. The classic presentation of dualism is to be found in Descartes who claims that it is perfectly meaningful to talk of a person existing without a physical form. This separation of body and soul seems intelligible, on the surface at least. We understand what it is to be a subject of experience – to feel, to think, to will – and those activities appear to be partly independent of our physical selves; whatever the value of the evidence claimed from near-death experiences, the notion is at least coherent; and many people live happily with the possibility of communicating with the disembodied spirits of their dead friends and family.
Although the body clearly does not survive death, the dualist account allows for survival of the non-material element: the soul, spirit or mind. Descartes considered the human soul simple, indivisible and immortal, and thus able to continue its existence after the death of the body. This notion is a common one but it is not without problems. For a person to survive death, in a crucial sense they must be the same person after death as before. The criterion for this identity is elusive and constitutes its own domain of philosophical enquiry. In a straightforward sense, to survive is to continue being who you are now: with your likes and dislikes, quirks, obsessions and so on. But this is difficult to imagine and perhaps undesirable: we are so conditioned by the fact of our own mortality, an eternal existence sits awkwardly with our sense of who we are.
A key assumption of dualist accounts is that since such an afterlife is eternal, the residents are disembodied (souls or spirits). But this raises its own questions. Without a body, how do sinners feel the pain of their punishment? How do the virtuous enjoy the black-eyed houris in paradise? Since pleasure and pain are so intimately connected to our physical selves, it is difficult to see how they could play a part in a disembodied existence. Some philosophers have insisted that our bodies are crucial in determining our selfhood, and a disembodied existence would therefore fail any criterion of identity. It seems clear that to continue being oneself after death requires at least some persistence of memory or consciousness, but to the best of our knowledge both memory and consciousness depend upon physical brain-states. In the light of this, some thinkers have objected to Descartes’ assumption that we can conceive of a soul existing independently of a body. Although such metaphysical notions are deeply embedded in our language and culture, the idea of a disembodied person may not, in fact, make sense.
The problem of personal identity is particularly acute for proponents of reincarnation. Since reincarnated souls have no constant physical form and rarely remember their previous existences, they are not the same ‘person’ in any ordinary sense of the word. Of course, without this identity it makes no sense to speak of survival, any more than to say that the carbon atoms of a decomposing corpse ‘survive’ in the earth. To survive is to retain one’s identity in some meaningful way. This makes the Buddhist concept of Nirvana problematic, as such a state is transcendental and involves the extinction of individual identity. As such it is so profoundly different from our everyday existence that it hardly seems in any meaningful sense a continuation of the self.
While materialists deny the existence of a soul and therefore an afterlife in any disembodied form, they can still claim the possibility of bodily resurrection. This doctrine is common enough among the major religions and involves the recreation or restoration of a person’s body. The afterlife available to the resurrected seems in many ways similar to earthly life, but presumably without the mundane details: so what do people do all day in paradise? If they have physical bodies, do they get tired or angry or ill? In one story Julian Barnes imagines waking up in heaven where everything is perfect: tasty food, unlimited possessions, trophies for Leicester City. After a while, however, when he has experienced everything and can complete a golf course in 18 shots every time, he begins to tire of perfect happiness and asks his guide to remove the increasing sense of boredom. She replies:
Well, there seems to be a logical difficulty. You can’t become someone else without stopping being who you are. Nobody can bear that. A History of the World in 10½ Chapters, ch10
Barnes’ point is that we cannot imagine ourselves living in heaven or paradise and still being ourselves: if our flaws are corrected, our disabilities removed, our needs and wants satisfied, are we still in any meaningful sense the same person?
This question of identity is the philosophical sticking-point for many materialist accounts of an afterlife. Because resurrection usually occurs elsewhere and some time after death – often on the final day of judgement – there are problems with the idea of continuity: it is difficult to see in what sense a resurrected body is the same as the person who died. There has been a great deal of discussion about this point. Many favour a type of ‘re-creation’ in which the living body is reconstituted as an exact copy. The problem here is the failure of the criterion of identity: Bernard Williams has argued strongly that such a resurrected body would be only a replica and the resurrected person would therefore not be the same person. In which case, it is difficult to speak of survival. Our intuitions on this point can further be tested by certain thought experiments. For instance, what if God created two replicas not one? How would we decide which (if either) was the person who originally died? If an object disappeared suddenly, and then reappeared at a different place and time, how could we know that it was the same object that had rematerialised and not a copy? Is there in fact a difference? Such questions are not easy to resolve, but they strike at the heart of any materialist notion of survival after death.
The claims of evidence for an afterlife are controversial, to say the least. These include paranormal events like ghost-sightings, electronic voice phenomena and the claims of spiritualist mediums who help the living to communicate with the dead. A particular class of evidence involves near-death experiences which purport to reveal something of the afterlife to the subject involved; and especially out-of-body experiences (or OBEs) in which subjects experience the sensation of floating outside their body. All such evidence implies a dualist conception of personhood which assumes the soul or mind is separable from the body, and can furthermore survive death and retain both consciousness and personal identity. Many researchers have sought to provide naturalistic explanations of these phenomena, and as evidence such claims remain inconclusive.
For many Christians, the resurrection of Jesus Christ provides strong evidence of the possibility of our surviving death. However, the literal truth of such a claim is in doubt and should be subject to the same scepticism as all miracles, especially those attested in scripture.
Unsurprisingly, there are many points of contact between a belief in an afterlife and a belief in God. Traditional theism posits a God who is omnipotent and wholly good, and for many thinkers it has seemed inevitable that this God would not intend our extinction. Rather he would allow his creation more space in which to flourish and realise their aspirations than a mortal lifespan allows. This is particularly true of those whose lives are unnaturally short or are blighted by disease or misfortune. In this sense, the existence of an afterlife serves as a solution to the problem of evil, correcting the injustices of this life and compensating the faithful for their earthly suffering.
For Immanuel Kant, an afterlife was the only way of affirming the rational pursuit of the summum bonum, or highest good of human existence. The summum bonum is a state where a person is both virtuous and happy and is the rational end of all of our moral endeavours. However, everyday experience tells us that virtue and happiness rarely coincide in this life. Since it is not rational to aim for an impossible end, there must be a further realm in which virtue is ultimately rewarded. An afterlife, governed and apportioned by a just God, provides exactly that. Of course, this is merely wishful thinking on Kant’s part: there is no guarantee that the summum bonum is in fact achievable. But clearly the existence of an afterlife fits well with our intuition that this life is insufficient for the fair allocation of justice.
In a similar vein, certain non-theistic religions like Buddhism and some varieties of Hinduism assert the existence of an afterlife in the doctrines of karma and reincarnation. The workings of karma in these traditions are attributed to nature, rather than to God, although it is difficult to conceive how something as impersonal and amoral as nature could arrange for the dispensation of ultimate justice. For this reason, belief in an afterlife tends to imply (but does not require) belief in a deity.
Correspondingly, belief in a deity tends to bring with it the possibility of survival after death. The theistic conception of God as transcendent and incorporeal offers a model for the disembodied existence of human souls. Moreover the explanatory role of an afterlife, in both the problem of evil and the moral argument for the existence of God, ensures its continued importance in theology.
Our attitude to our survival depends upon our understanding of other philosophical issues, notably the mind-body problem and the concept of personal identity. As dualism has fallen out of favour, and the criteria of personal identity have been strictly clarified, any claim of life after death seems increasingly implausible.
Whether we remain hopeful or sceptical, we would do well to heed the words of Epicurus:
... a right understanding that death is nothing to us makes the mortality of life enjoyable, not by adding to life an unlimited time, but by taking away the yearning after immortality. Letter to Menoeceus