Grief: Seven Philosophical Questions
Question 4. Is there an afterlife?
The meaning of death reflects the meaning of life. What we think of death mirrors what we think of life.
What, then, do we think about life?
Are we merely atoms (Stephen Hawking)? Are we merely electro-chemical machines (Francis Crick)? Are we merely bio-chemical realities like genes (Richard Dawkins)? Are we merely the blind outcome of evolutionary processes (Daniel Dennett)? Are we merely the conditioned products of our environments (B.F. Skinner)?
Each of these sees in human life no more than a functionality, a material process of some sort. If human life is no more than a material process, then what is death? Death could mean no more than that a process has “stopped.” Like an old watch, a faulty kitchen appliance, a tired HVAC system, a functionality has ceased to function. We tend not to mourn functional processes that have stopped. Instead, we try to fix them, replace them, or just forget about them and try something else.
But here we are not thinking about a toaster or a rose bush that didn’t survive the winter or even an old cat. We are thinking about a deceased loved one.
Even if death involves the “stopping” of the material processes of the body, the question of her personhood remains. She was, in life, never simply reducible to the material processes of her body, nor to the social forces of her time and place. She incorporated these, yet she was also the surplus beyond these: Radically unique, utterly irreplaceable, precious beyond measure.
Death stopped the bodily organism, but the personhood of anyone is intelligible only partly as a bodily organism.
Questions abound in grief and death: Where is she now and how is she now, after the stopping of the body? Can anything of her endure beyond the stopping of her body? Does my grief for her indicate something I recognized about her personhood that was always more-than-body? What would you not give for one more day, one more conversation, one more chance? Does she whom you grieve not stand above the entire material universe?
Grief bears a meaning that seems to reveal something about the non-finite value of the life of the beloved. We grieve because the beloved is infinitely worthy of our tears. Far beyond the collapse or termination of a functional process, the loss of the person is a loss whose meaning we can hardly fathom.
Part a, The Mystery of Life and Death
Grief points to the mystery that encompasses all life and death. In joy we wondered where our beloved came from. In sorrow we wonder where has she gone. Grief illuminates this mystery of life and death: We cannot know out of what she came to exist; we cannot know into what she has slipped away.
Let us firstly consider the word “mystery.”
“Mystery” is a technical term that contrasts with “knowledge.” If knowledge is what is known or knowable, mystery refers to what is intrinsically unknowable. Mystery does not mean what is presently unknown, like scientific discoveries in one hundred years from now. Future scientific discoveries are inherently knowable, but just not known presently. They are not mysterious since they can be known. Rather, mystery is what simply cannot ever be known. It refers to something meaningful that cannot be grasped within the limitations of the human mind. The notion of an afterlife is meaningful, but mysterious. It cannot be grasped by common sense or scientific theory.
Beyond what is knowable to the human intellect then, there remains the unknowable, the mysterious. Leibniz articulated the two great questions about the mystery that surrounds all existence and passing: “Why is there something rather than nothing? Why are things as they are, and not different?”
Secondly, let us consider what our grieving is signifying about mystery.
When we grieve, we are grieving the mortal passing of our beloved, which is the inevitable occasion when we confront Mystery (capitalized) in the most visceral terms. The emergence of anything from nothingness into existence is only partly explicable by material processes, but existence remains essentially mysterious because no set of material processes can explain why there are material processes. If mystery envelops the emergence of life, then the passing away from life also shares in that mystery.
The death of Socrates is instructive. At the end of the trial in which he was sentenced to death, he was about to be led away when he spoke the words that have pierced the conscience of many over the millennia: “But now it is time to depart—for me to die, for you to live. But which of us is going to a better state is unknown to everyone but God.”[1]
Socrates has much to say about living and dying in the presence of Mystery. In his self-defense against the spurious charges laid against him (impiety, infidelity to the state, and corrupting the youth), he gives an account of his life. This account is less a biography and more of a life’s mission. Indeed, it is an explanation of how he was commissioned by God to be the man he is.
He restates, not so much what he has done, but who he is.
If Socrates must meet death, he will meet it as he met life: with all of his body and all of his soul. The death of Socrates is not akin to the final page of a book of biographical facts, still less the termination of a biological process.
Death, for Socrates, is nothing less than the crystallization—the framing—of the meaning of his life.
What Can Death Be?
Socrates was neither a prophet nor a mythical hero. He was just a man, but a man who fell in love with the wisdom. Wisdom does not pass away. It belongs to divine Mystery. Socrates’s major commitment, his calling, was to become an ever more genuine version of himself as a wisdom-lover through constant self-examination in the immortal light of this wisdom; and not for his own sake only, but for the sake of all.
Socrates may have been a genius who has continued to inspire us for two and a half millennia, but he was a humble genius. He never claimed to know those things that lie beyond understanding. He insisted that the wisdom for which he was both famed and hated came to this: All I know is that I know nothing.[2]
Where others claimed to know what they did not know, Socrates grasped that much of life is wrought in Mystery. So too, death. Nevertheless, he suggests during his trial that
Death is either annihilation or it is a transition.
If it is annihilation, it is like “a sleep in which the sleeper has no dream.” For the one who dies, such a sleep is truly a benefit, a reward for the troubles of life.
If death is a transition, then the one who is cognizant of the Mystery of lasting and passing in the cosmos, whose conscience is clear, who did not waste his talents, will meet his reward with hope. For Socrates, if “death is a removal from hence to another place, and what is said be true, that all the dead are there, what greater blessing can there be than this, my judges?”
On the one hand, if death involves no more than the annihilation of life, then there seems to be no need for any kind of divine intelligence or agency with regard to an afterlife of the soul. Regardless of the deepest sleep, death would simply mean the biological cessation of a biological process. If that is all that this person’s life ever was, then that is all that death can mean.
A transition, on the other hand, seems to require more than biology. If death is a transition that involves a “passage” at the end of biological life into a beginning of something beyond physical and biological reality, then life and death become significant in more-than-natural ways.
Let us consider the two possibilities: there is no afterlife and there is an afterlife.
Notes:
[1] Plato, Apology, 42a4.
[2] Plato, Apology, 23a2-b3.
[3] Plato, Apology, 40c5-9.
Previous Part
There Is No Afterlife. There is only a material universe.
Possibility Two:
There Is an Afterlife.
