The Problem of Immortality
The great master of rationalist phenomenalism, David Hume, begins his essay “On the Immortality of the Soul” with these decisive words: “It appears difficult by the mere light of reason to prove the immortality of the soul. The arguments in favour of it are commonly derived from metaphysical, moral, or physical considerations. But it is really the Gospel, and only the Gospel, that has brought to light life and immortality.” Which is equivalent to denying the rationality of the belief that the soul of each one of us is immortal.
Kant, who took Hume as the starting-point for his criticism, attempted to establish the rationality of this longing for immortality and the belief that it imports, and that is the real origin, the inward origin, of his “Critique of Practical Reason” and of his categorical imperative and of his God. But in spite of all this, the sceptical affirmation of Hume remains unshaken. There is no way of rationally proving the immortality of the soul. There are, on the other hand, ways of rationally proving its mortality.
It would be not merely superfluous but ridiculous to explain here at length how far the individual human consciousness depends upon the organization of the body, how it comes gradually to birth according as the brain receives impressions from without, how it is temporally interrupted during sleep, swoons, and other accidents, and how everything leads us to the rational conjecture that death carries with it loss of consciousness. And just as before our birth we were not, nor have we any personal pre-natal memory, so after our death we shall no longer be. This is the rational position.
Rationalism—and by rationalism I mean the doctrine that abides solely by reason, by objective truth—is necessarily materialist. And let not idealists be scandalized thereby.
The truth is—it is necessary to state it clearly—that what we call materialism means for us nothing else but the doctrine which denies the immortality of the individual soul, the persistence of personal consciousness after death.
In another sense it may be said that, since we know what spirit is, and since matter is for us no more than an idea, materialism is idealism. In fact, and as regards our problem—the most vital, the only really vital problem—it is all the same to say that everything is matter as to say that everything is idea, or everything energy, or what you please. Every monist system will always seem to us materialist. The immortality of the soul is saved only by the dualist systems—those which teach that human consciousness is something substantially distinct and different from other manifestations of phenomena. And reason is naturally monist. For it is the function of reason to understand and explain the universe, and in order to understand and explain it, it is in no way necessary for the soul to be an imperishable substance. For the purpose of understanding and explaining our psychic life, for psychology, the hypothesis of the soul is unnecessary.
All the attempts to substantivate consciousness, making it independent of extension—it will be remembered that Descartes opposed thought to extension—are but sophistical subtleties intended to establish the rationality of faith in the immortality of the soul. It is sought to give the value of objective reality to that which does not possess it, to that of which the reality exists only in thought. And the immortality that we crave is a phenomenal reality, it is a continuation of this life.
From whatever side we look at it, it is always found that reason confronts our longing for personal immortality and contradicts it. And in strict truth, reason is the enemy of life. All that is vital is anti-rational, and all that is rational is anti-vital, for reason is essentially sceptical.
Rationalists persist in endeavouring to convince men that there are motives for living and that there is a consolation for having been born, even though there must come a time, at the end of some tens or hundreds or millions of centuries, when all human consciousness shall have ceased to exist. And these motives for living and working, this thing which some call humanism, illustrate the amazing affectional and emotional hollowness of rationalism and of its stupendous hypocrisy—a hypocrisy that is resolved to sacrifice sincerity to veracity and not to confess that reason is a dissolvent and disconsolatory power.
Must I repeat again what I have already said about all this idea of creating culture, of progressing, of realizing good, truth, and beauty, of establishing justice on earth, of ameliorating life for those who shall come after us, of subserving I know not what destiny, divorced from all preoccupation with the ultimate end of each one of us? Must I again declare to you the supreme vacuity of culture, of art, of good, of truth, of beauty, of justice... of all these beautiful conceptions, if at the last end of everything, in four days or in four million centuries—it matters not which—no human consciousness shall exist to appropriate this culture, this science, art, good, truth, beauty, justice, and all the rest?
Many and various have been the rationalist devices—more or less rational—from the days of the Epicureans and the Stoics, by means of which it has been sought to discover rational consolation in truth and to convince men—though the convincers were themselves unconvinced—that there are motives for working and lures for living, even though the human consciousness be destined ultimately to disappear.
The Epicurean attitude, the extreme and grossest expression of which is “Let us eat and drink, for to-morrow we die,” or the Horatian carpe diem, which may be rendered by “Live for the day,” is not radically different from the Stoic attitude with its “Do what your conscience tells you, and afterward let it be as it may be.” Both attitudes have a common base, and pleasure for pleasure’s sake comes to the same thing as duty for duty’s sake.
It is true that there are people who assert that reason suffices them, and they counsel us not to seek to penetrate into the impenetrable. But of those who say that they have no need of any faith in eternal personal life in order to find incentives to living and motives for action, I know not well how to think. A man blind from birth may also assure us that he feels no great desire to enjoy the world of sight nor suffers any great anguish from not having enjoyed it, and we must needs believe him, for nihil volitum quin præcognitum, nothing can be willed that is not previously known. But I cannot be persuaded that he who has once in his life, either in his youth or at some other point of time, cherished the belief in the immortality of the soul, will ever find peace without it. And this kind of blindness from birth is scarcely possible among men, except by a strange aberration. And the merely and exclusively rational man is an aberration and nothing but an aberration.
I do not know why so many people were scandalized, or pretended to be scandalized, when Brunetière proclaimed once again the bankruptcy of science. For science, in so far as it is a substitute for religion, and reason, in so far as it is a substitute for faith, have always foundered. Science will be able to satisfy in an increasing measure, and in fact does satisfy, our increasing logical and intellectual needs, our desire to know and understand the truth; but science does not satisfy the needs of our heart and our will, our hunger for immortality—far from satisfying it, it contradicts it. Rational life and truth stand in opposition to one another. And can it be that there is any other truth than rational truth?
It must remain established, therefore, that reason, human reason, within its limits not only does not prove rationally that the soul is immortal and that the human consciousness is through all the ages indestructible, but that it proves rather—within its limits, I repeat—that the individual consciousness cannot persist after the death of the physical organism upon which it depends. And these limits, within which I say that human reason proves this, are the limits of rationality, of what we know by demonstration. Beyond these limits is the irrational, which is all the same whether it be called the super-rational or the infra-rational or the contra-rational. Beyond these limits is the absurd of Tertullian, the impossible of the certum est, quia impossible est. And this absurd can only base itself upon the most absolute incertitude.
The vital longing for human immortality, therefore, finds no rational confirmation, nor does reason give us any incentive or consolation for living or give to life itself any real finality. But here, in the depths of the abyss, the despair of the heart and the will and the scepticism of reason meet face to face and embrace fraternally. And it will be from this embrace, a tragic, that is to say a profoundly loving, embrace, that the fountain of life will flow, a life earnest and terrible. Scepticism, uncertainty—the ultimate position at which reason arrives by practising its analysis upon itself, upon its own validity—is the foundation upon which the despair of the vital sense must build its hope.
Disillusioned, we have had to abandon the position of those who seek to convert rational and logical truth into consolation, pretending to prove the rationality, or at any rate the non-irrationality, of consolation; and we have had to abandon likewise the position of those who seek to convert consolation and motives for living into rational truth. Neither of these positions satisfies us. The one is at variance with our reason, the other with our feeling. Peace between these two powers is impossible and we must live by their war. We must make of this war, of war itself, the condition of our spiritual life.
Faith in immortality is irrational. And nevertheless, faith, life and reason have mutual need of one another. This vital longing is not properly a problem, cannot be formulated in propositions capable of rational discussion; but it announces itself in us as hunger announces itself. Neither can the wolf that throws itself upon its prey to devour it or upon the she-wolf to fecundate her, enunciate its impulse rationally and as a logical problem. Reason and faith are two enemies neither of which can maintain itself without the other. The irrational demands to be rationalized and reason alone can operate on the irrational. They are compelled to seek mutual support and association. But association in conflict, for conflict is a mode of association.
There is no possible permanent position of agreement and harmony between reason and life, between philosophy and religion. And the tragic history of human thought is simply the history of a struggle between reason and life—reason bent on rationalizing life and making it resign itself to the inevitable, to mortality; life bent on vitalizing reason and forcing it to serve as a support for its vital desires. And this is the history of philosophy, inseparable from the history of religion.
Our sense of the world, of objective reality, is necessarily subjective, human, anthropomorphic. And vitalism will always rise up against rationalism, the will will always stand up against reason. Hence the rhythm of the history of philosophy and the alternation of periods in which life imposes itself, giving birth to spiritual forms, with periods in which reason imposes itself, giving birth to materialistic forms, although both of these classes of forms of belief may disguise themselves under other names. Neither reason nor life ever acknowledges itself vanquished.
No doubt it will be said that life ought to submit to reason and to this we shall reply that nothing ought to be done that cannot be done, and life cannot submit to reason. “Ought, therefore can,” some Kantian will retort. To which we shall demur: “Cannot, therefore ought not.” And life cannot submit to reason, because the end of life is living and not understanding.
There is always someone who will tell us of the religious duty of resigning ourselves to mortality. This is indeed the very summit of aberration and insincerity. And over against sincerity will be set the opposing ideal of veracity. Be it so, and yet it is quite possible to reconcile the two. Veracity, respect for what I believe to be rational, for what we call truth in the logical sense, moves me to affirm that the immortality of the individual soul is a logical contradiction, is something not only irrational but contra-rational; but sincerity leads me to affirm also that I do not resign myself to this former affirmation and that I protest against its validity. What I feel is a truth, as much a truth at any rate as what I see, touch, hear, and what is demonstrated to me—I believe that it is even more of a truth—and sincerity obliges me not to hide my feelings.
And in self-defence life searches for the weak point in reason and finds it in scepticism, which it seizes hold of, endeavouring to save itself by maintaining its hold. It needs the weakness of its adversary.
In an outburst of passion, Lamennais exclaims: “But what! All hope lost, shall we plunge blindly into the mute depths of a universal scepticism? Shall we doubt that we think, that we feel, that we are? Nature does not allow it; she forces us to believe even when our reason is not convinced. Absolute certainty and absolute doubt are both alike forbidden to us. We hover in a vague mean between these two extremes, as between being and nothingness; for complete scepticism would be the extinction of the intelligence and the total death of man. But it is not given to man to annihilate himself; there is in him something which invincibly resists destruction, I know not what vital faith, which the will itself cannot master. Whether he like it or not, he must believe, because he must act, because he must preserve himself. His reason, if he listened only to that, teaching him to doubt everything, itself included, would reduce him to a state of absolute inaction; he would perish before even he had been able to prove to himself that he existed.”10
It is not strictly true that reason leads us to absolute scepticism. No, reason does not lead me and cannot lead me to doubt that I exist. Whither reason does lead me is to vital scepticism, or more properly to vital negation—not merely to doubt but to deny that my consciousness survives my death. Vital scepticism comes from the clash between reason and desire. And from this clash, from this embrace between despair and scepticism is born holy, sweet, saving incertitude, our supreme consolation.
The absolute and complete certainty, on the one hand, that death is a complete, definite, irrevocable annihilation of personal consciousness, a certainty of the same order as the certainty that the three angles of a triangle are equal to two right angles, or, on the other hand, the absolute and complete certainty that our personal consciousness is prolonged beyond death in these or those conditions, including withal the extraneous and adventitious addition of eternal rewards and punishments—both of these certainties would equally make life impossible for us. In the most secret chamber of the spirit of him who believes himself convinced that death puts an end to his personal consciousness, his memory, for ever, there lurks a shadow, all unknown to him perhaps, a vague shadow, a shadow of a shadow of uncertainty, and while he says within himself: “Well, let us live this passing life, for there is no other!” the silence of this secret chamber speaks to him and murmurs: “Who knows!...” He may not think he hears it, but he hears it. And likewise in some secret place of the soul of the believer who most firmly holds the faith in future life, there is a muffled voice, a voice of uncertainty, which whispers in the ear of his spirit: “Who knows!...” These voices are like the humming of a mosquito when the gale roars through the trees in the wood; we cannot distinguish this faint humming, nevertheless, merged in the clamour of the storm, it reaches the ear. Otherwise, without this uncertainty, how could we live?
“Is there?” “Is there not?”—these are the bases of our inner life. There may be a rationalist who has never wavered in his conviction of the mortality of the soul, and there may be a vitalist who has never wavered in his faith in immortality; but at the most this would only prove that just as there are monsters, so there are people who are affectively and feelingly stupid, however much intelligence they may have, and people who are intellectually stupid, however great their virtue may be. But in normal cases I cannot believe those who assure me that never, not even for a moment, not in the hours of greatest loneliness and tribulation, has this murmur of uncertainty breathed upon their consciousness. I do not understand the men who tell me that the prospect of the yonder side of death has never tormented them, that the thought of their own annihilation never disquiets them. For my part I do not wish to make peace between my heart and my head, between my faith and my reason—I wish rather that there should be war between them.
“Lord, I believe; help thou my unbelief!” This may appear to be a contradiction, for if the man believes, if he trusts, how is it that he beseeches the Lord to help his lack of trust? Nevertheless it is this contradiction that gives all its deepest human value to this cry torn from the heart of the father of a demoniac. His faith is a faith that is based upon incertitude. Because he believes, that is to say, because he wishes to believe, because he has need that his son should be cured—he beseeches the Lord to help his unbelief, his doubt that such a cure could be effected. Of such a kind is human faith. Of such a kind was the heroic faith that Sancho Panza had in his master, the knight Don Quixote de la Mancha, as I think I have shown in my “Life of Don Quixote and Sancho”—a faith based upon incertitude, upon doubt. Sancho Panza was indeed a man, a whole and a real man, and he was not stupid, for only if he had been stupid would he have believed without a shadow of doubt in the follies of his master. Neither did his master believe in them without a shadow of doubt, for neither was Don Quixote, though mad, stupid. He was fundamentally a man of despair, as I think I have shown in my book. And because he was a man of an heroic despair, the hero of that inward and resigned despair, he is the eternal exemplar of every man whose soul is the battle-ground of reason and immortal desire. Our Lord Don Quixote is the prototype of the vitalist whose faith is based upon incertitude, and Sancho is the prototype of the rationalist who doubts his own reason.