Do you ever wonder what the point of life is if everyone is just going to die anyway? Or what the process of dying feels like? If you are anything like me, you think about these two questions all the time. It is fascinating that the only absolute in life is something we know nothing about. Everyone knows that they are going to die, but nobody knows when, where, or why. Thinking about death in can actually be a really scary, if one let's one's self go deep into it. Pascal kind of obsesses over this in his book, Pensées. He bluntly states, "As men are not able to fight against death, misery, ignorance, they have taken it into their heads, in order to be happy, not to think of them at all. Despite these miseries, man wishes to be happy... But how will he set about it? To be happy he would have to make himself immortal..." (Pascal, 60).
I don't think I completely agree with Pascal. Sure, there was a time when I obsessed over the idea of immortality. What scares most people the most about death is the unknown that is associated with it. No one knows what happens to you after death. If you believe in the separation between the body and soul, what happens to your soul after your body can no longer exist? According to Pascal, if humans were immortal, it would get rid of all the fear and anxiety that stems from death. Perhaps if there was no death, people would be happy because they would not waste their time thinking about how their life will come to an end. However, life would not be the same if immortality was a reality.
In the Phaedo by Plato the Socrates' Argument from opposites is introduced. Socrates makes the argument that everything that comes to be exists from its opposite. For example, one can not know what lightness is, without there being darkness. It is the same between life and death; one can not exist without the other.
The reason why people live is because they know that they are going to die. Death acts as a catalyst to take advantage of all the experiences that make life beautiful. So in a way, death is necessary for people to fully grasp the meaning of life. Do you think immortality would make someone lead a happier life? I don't.
Building off of your idea of immortality, I found Pascal’s argument about diversion and misery fascinating as well. As you have previously mentioned, Pascal argues that “to be happy he would have to make himself immortal.” Seeing as one cannot do this, it becomes a diversion from one’s thoughts about death. However, making diversions for oneself is actually destructive and leads to misery: “The only thing which consoles us for our miseries is diversion, and yet this is the greatest of our miseries.” This paradoxical statement actually has some truth in it and is valid in our life today. Pascal is saying that when we seek distractions from things we find sad/unfortunate in life, i.e. the thought of death, it actually does not solve anything but rather creates more despair in our life. He goes on to explain that diversions impede upon our time for self reflection which help us cope with our miseries. Instead of making diversions for ourselves in life, we should be aware of our imminent death and consider this when making our decisions throughout life.
ReplyDeletePascal transitions from this idea of misery into a statement regarding the fact that people do not take time to enjoy the present; they look back to the past as well as look toward the future. Pascal wants people to live in the present because in doing so one will find happiness: “The present is never our end. The past and the present are our means; the future alone is our end. So we never live, but we hope to live; and as we are always preparing to be happy, it is inevitable we should never be so.” I disagree with some of Pascal’s statement because the future is not the end. For those that believe in God and heaven and have accepted Christ as their savior, the future is merely the beginning of an eternity with God. While I believe we should live in the present, we should also look toward the future and think about how we should be living now and how it will impact our future.
The topic of immortality is interesting. This type of immortality of being, one that would be clearly visible, typically only exists in stories in the form of vampires and elves. It’s certainly important to discuss whether this type of immortality would lead to happiness. But since the likelihood of that happening is very little (unless we find a way to upload our consciousness to a computer), accepting death and refusing immortality in this case is easy, and probably pretty common. Would our responses change if we had this technology readily available?
ReplyDeleteA second type of immortality is immortality of the soul, if you believe one exists. This is the idea that your soul has the ability to live forever, even after your body has expired. In the abrahamic religions, the soul is something that must remain pure according to various guidelines in order to exist immortally in the afterlife. The belief in something after death is a kind of desire to live forever. It reassures us that our deceased loved ones aren’t truly gone, and that death is not the end. As someone who doesn’t believe in an eternal soul or an afterlife, it’s easy to play around with these ideas during times of loss. I toyed with the idea of doggy heaven when my dog passed away. But ultimately, I was lying to myself. That’s not really how I see the world. In many ways, my spiritual worldview provides me with different tools for the acceptance of loss. But that’s a conversation for another time.
Lastly, we tend to have a desire to make things besides our bodies and our souls eternal. We preserve the objects that have sentimentality to ourselves. Things we can keep, we take pictures of as a way to make them immortally. We hope that our relationships with other people last forever. We even say things like “I’ll love you forever,” in order to preserve the sentiments that give us the most joy. Now some of these things very well might last a long time, even for the duration of our lives. But sentiments shift from day to day, year to year, and so on. All of our physical possessions will be lost, deteriorate, or will at the very least end up burning with the rest of the Earth when the sun expands. So when you say clinging to immortality removes us from present happiness, I would agree with you. But does that extend beyond our own immortality and apply also to other aspects of our lives?