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Immortality and Meaning: Reflections on the Makropulos Debate

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  16 September 2009

Mikel Burley
Mikel Burley
Affiliation:
University of Leeds
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Abstract

This article reflects upon the debate, initiated by Bernard Williams in 1973, concerning the desirability of immortality, where the latter expression is taken to mean endless bodily life as a human or humanoid being. Williams contends that it cannot be desirable; others have disputed this contention. I discuss a recent response from Timothy Chappell and attempt to pinpoint the central disagreement between Chappell and Williams. I propose that neither side in the debate has firm grounds for its claims, and then proceed to consider four reasons for suspecting that the whole debate has yet to be placed on a conceptually coherent footing.

Type
Research Article
Information
Philosophy , Volume 84 , Issue 4 , October 2009 , pp. 529 - 547
Copyright
Copyright © The Royal Institute of Philosophy 2009

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References

1 Schleiermacher, F., On Religion: Speeches to Its Cultured Despisers [1799], trans. Oman, J. (New York: Harper & Row, 1958), 100Google Scholar.

2 My references will be to the version reprinted in Fischer, J. M. (ed.), The Metaphysics of Death (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1993), 73–92Google Scholar. The reason for Williams' essay being entitled ‘The Makropulos Case’ will become clear in due course.

3 See Fischer, J. M., ‘Why Immortality is Not So Bad’, International Journal of Philosophical Studies 2 (1994), 257–70CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Comparable points have been made by, for example, Lamont, C., ‘Mistaken Attitudes toward Death’, Journal of Philosophy 52 (1965), 29–36, at 33CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and Momeyer, R. W., Confronting Death (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988), 19Google Scholar.

4 Chappell, T., ‘Infinity Goes Up on Trial: Must Immortality be Meaningless?’, European Journal of Philosophy 17 (2009), 30–44CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

5 Chappell, ‘Infinity Goes Up on Trial’, 32.

6 I would not myself refer to friendships or bringing up children as ‘projects’, but I will not press this terminological point here.

7 Chappell, ‘Infinity Goes Up on Trial’, 32.

8 Chappell uses this expression in ‘Immortality and Identity’, the written version of a paper presented at the Death: What It Is and Why It Matters conference (University of York, 18th July 2008), 5. See also Chappell, ‘Infinity Goes Up on Trial’, 40.

9 Chappell, ‘Infinity Goes Up on Trial’, 34.

10 Williams, ‘The Makropulos Case’, 77.

11 Chappell, ‘Infinity Goes Up on Trial’, 36.

12 The case of Elina Makropulos is adapted from Karel Čapek's 1922 play Věc Makropulos (‘The Makropulos Case’ or ‘The Makropulos Affair’), or perhaps more immediately from Leoš Janáček's 1926 opera which was based on that play. Williams is not very careful to distinguish between these two works of art, as has been pointed out by Mulhall, Stephen in ‘The Mortality of the Soul: Bernard Williams's Character(s)’, in Crary, A. (ed.), Wittgenstein and the Moral Life: Essays in Honor of Cora Diamond (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007), 355–79, at 359Google Scholar.

13 Williams, ‘The Makropulos Case’, 82.

14 See Moore, A. W., ‘Williams, Nietzsche, and the Meaninglessness of Immortality’, Mind 115 (2006), 311–30, at 314CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Moore was writing before the publication of Chappell's paper, and hence was making a general comment on the state of the debate, not specifically upon the disagreement between Chappell and Williams. Wittgenstein has noted the role that temperament plays in philosophical disputes more widely: ‘If it is said on occasion that (someone's) philosophy is a matter of temperament, there is some truth in this. A preference for certain comparisons is something we call a matter of temperament & far more disagreements rest on this than appears at first sight’ (Wittgenstein, L., Culture and Value, ed. von Wright, G. H. and Nyman, H., revised edn of text by A. Pichler, trans. Winch, P. (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 1998), 17e–18e)Google Scholar.

15 Wilkes, K. V., Real People: Personal Identity without Thought Experiments (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988), 46Google Scholar. This sceptical view of fantastical thought-experiments is foreshadowed in a speech by Philo in Hume's, DavidDialogues Concerning Natural Religion [1779], Pt 2, ed. Popkin, R. H., 2nd edn (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1998), 17Google Scholar: ‘Were a man to abstract from everything which he knows or has seen, he would be altogether incapable, merely from his own ideas, to determine what kind of scene the universe must be, or to give the preference to one state or situation of things above another.’

16 Overall, C., Aging, Death, and Human Longevity: A Philosophical Inquiry (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), p. 145Google Scholar.

17 Glover, J., Causing Death and Saving Lives (London: Penguin, 1977), 57Google Scholar.

18 Lamont, ‘Mistaken Attitudes toward Death’, 32.

19 See, for example, Aristotle, : ‘Nothing is complete unless it has an end, and an end is a limit’ (Physics, trans. Waterfield, R. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), III.6a14)Google Scholar; Kant, : ‘… an infinite aggregate of actual things cannot be regarded as a given whole …’ (Critique of Pure Reason, trans. and ed. Guyer, P. and Wood, A. W. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), A429/B457)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Wittgenstein, : ‘isn't that which we can imagine multiplied to infinity never the things themselves, but combinations of the things in accordance with their infinite possibilities?’ (Philosophical Remarks, ed. Rhees, R., trans. Hargreaves, R. and White, R. (Oxford: Blackwell, 1975), §147)Google Scholar.

20 Nagel, T., ‘Death’ [1970], in his Mortal Questions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), 1–10 at 2Google Scholar. I was reminded of this remark of Nagel's by Havi Carel's paper ‘More Is Not Better Than Less: Epicurean Responses to Deprivation Theory’, given at the conference Death: What It Is and Why It Matters, University of York, 18 July 2008.

21 Steele, H., ‘Could Body-Bound Immortality Be Liveable?’, Mind 85 (1976), 424–27CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Among the few philosophers who have discussed Steele's paper is Overall, in her Aging, Death, and Human Longevity, 130, 146, 163.

22 Winch, P., ‘Understanding a Primitive Society’, in his Ethics and Action (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1972), 8–49, at 44Google Scholar. The Eliot reference is to a line from his play Sweeney Agonistes (1926).

23 T. Chappell, ‘Immortality and Identity’, 1.

24 For the idea of something's ‘standing fast’ for us, see for example Wittgenstein's, On Certainty, ed. Anscombe, G. E. M. and von Wright, G. H., trans. Paul, D. and Anscombe, G. E. M. (Oxford: Blackwell, 1979), §144Google Scholar: ‘What stands fast does so, not because it is intrinsically obvious or convincing; it is rather held fast by what lies around it.’

25 Nussbaum, M. C., ‘Mortal Immortals: Lucretius on Death and the Voice of Nature’, in her The Therapy of Desire: Theory and Practice in Hellenistic Ethics (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994), 192–238, at 226Google Scholar.

26 Ibid. 229.

27 Earlier versions of this paper were presented at the University of Leeds in February 2008, and at the Death: What It Is and Why It Matters conference, University of York, 18 July 2008. I am grateful to members of the audience at both of these events for their stimulating comments and questions, and especially to Tim Chappell, whose own paper at the York conference was in large part a response to mine. I am also indebted to Robin Le Poidevin and Roy Holland for discussing some of these issues with me, and to David Brown (University of Leeds) for useful correspondence. My research has been assisted by a Royal Institute of Philosophy bursary.