7 - Technologies of self-immortalisation in ancient Greece and early India

Summary

Nowadays, the mention of ‘technologies’ and ‘immortality’ in the same breath brings to mind futuristic biochemical methods to stop bodily decay, restore youth, and transfer a mind's contents and processes to an artificial, unalterable substratum. And yet of course a wide variety of past cultures have also been concerned with attaining some sort of immortality. This essay explores the idea, present in both ancient Greece and early India, that immortality can be achieved through some structured methods, what I call ‘technologies of self-immortalisation’. At the outset, three key terms require qualification: ‘immortality’, ‘self’ and ‘technologies’.

What, then, is immortality? Despite the variety of beliefs about immortality, we may envision two main models: as a never-ending bodily existence, and as the indefinite continuation of one's ‘self’ in an afterlife. The former model, for example, is the one advanced by Daoist and Western alchemists. In their mountain dwellings and hidden laboratories, they sought to make their body eternal through a regimented lifestyle, sexual techniques, the manipulation of substances and the ingestion of elixirs. The latter model, common to many religious traditions, is the one relevant to this essay.

The notion of ‘self’ is a complex one. This term, it would appear, sits together with a number of other concepts, most notably the ‘soul’. And, as emphasised by philosophers, classical scholars and anthropologists, it is inherently linked with a set of yet other themes, such as ‘self-awareness’, ‘introspection’, ‘personhood’ and ‘identity’. For the purposes of this chapter, I look below not at unanalysed assumptions about the self, however this latter may be understood, but at consciously formulated ideas about how to produce an immortal self through the application of certain methods.

I call such methods ‘technologies’, borrowing the term from Michel Foucault's influential ‘Technologies of the Self’. In that essay, Foucault defines ‘technology’ as a set of practices, literary genres, and attention to certain ways of thinking, all of which contribute to producing a particular kind of self-understanding.