Reassessing Immortality:
The Makropulos Case Revisited
[from
The Good, the
Right, Life, and Death, ed. Richard Feldman, Kris McDaniel, Jason R. Raibley,
and Michael J. Zimmerman, (
Not to put too fine a point on it, Bernard Williams does not think that immortality is a good idea. He itemizes his grounds for this conclusion in his well-known essay “The Makropulos Case: Reflections on the Tedium of Immortality”.[1] Its title, he reports, derives from a play by Karel Capek
which tells of a woman called Elina Makropulos, alias Emilia Marty, alias Ellian Macgregor, alias a number of other things with the initials “EM,”, on whom her father, the Court physician to a sixteenth-century emperor, tried out an elixir of life. At the time of the action she is aged 342. Her unending life has come to a state of boredom, indifference, and coldness. Everything is joyless: “In the end it is all the same,” she says, “singing and silence.” She refuses to take the elixir again; she dies; and the formula is deliberately destroyed by a young woman among the protests of some older men. (82)
Williams’ aims in his essay are twofold. First, he wants to argue that, although death is not necessarily an evil—inter alia, because death can put a welcome end to intense and unbearable suffering, but also because, as EM’s case perhaps suggests, “it can be a good thing not to live too long” (83)—nevertheless, “(other things being equal) death is reasonably regarded as an evil”. (82) But second, and more importantly, he wants to argue that the bleak outcome of EM’s father’s experiment is precisely what we could and should have expected it to be, i.e., “that it was not a peculiarity of EM’s that an endless life was meaningless”. (83) Rather, he claims, “from facts about human desire and happiness and what a human life is, it follows … that immortality would be, where conceivable at all, intolerable ….” (82) Here I shall offer reasons for believing that neither of these conclusions is correct. There is, I shall argue, nothing in general to be said about whether death per se is a good or an evil, nor are there any compelling grounds for such thoroughgoing pessimism about the prospective trajectory of an unending human life.
On the face of it, Jorge Luis Borges also endorses Williams’ second conclusion. His prospective immortal[2] is Joseph Cartaphilius, née Marcus Flaminius Rufus, a Roman soldier who, during the reign of the emperor Diocletian, sought and found and drank from “the secret river which cleanses men of death”. In Borges’ story, the company of immortals who remain in the region of this secret river have been reduced to apathetic bestiality. Eons earlier they built and inhabited a glorious city, only later to raze it and replace it with a bizarre labyrinthine parody. Long ago they abandoned its ruins as well, and they now live in caves, as primitive and inarticulate troglodytes. Cartaphilius is one of the few who can conceive of a goal still worth pursuing, the search for a second secret river whose waters would remove the immortality bestowed by the waters of the first, and, in Borges’ story, he indeed finds and drinks from it, making it possible for death finally to bring to an end a life history spanning more sixteen hundred years.
These and other imaginative literary exercises make it clear that any discussion of the risks and rewards of immortality needs to begin with a specification of the sort of immortality one has in mind. A potentially endless trajectory of physical and mental deterioration, for instance—the apparent fate of Jonathan Swift’s Struldbruggs[3]—plainly holds no attraction. Any immortality seriously worth considering will be one which, like that bestowed on EM or Joseph Cartaphilius, at least allows for continuous undiminished physical good health and unimpaired mental acuity.
EM is 342 years old at the time described in Capek’s play because she was 42 when, three hundred years earlier, she drank her father’s elixir of life. Hers is a temporary but renewable immortality. Each dose of the elixir confers three centuries of life. After three hundred years, she faces a decision. If she fails to take positive action, i.e., another dose of the elixir, a normal death ensues. Cartaphilius’, in contrast, is a durable but reversible immortality. Once he has drunk from the first secret river, he is potentially immortal forever. Immortality becomes, so to speak, the default condition. Unless he takes positive steps to end it, i.e., finds and drinks from the second secret river, life persists. But there is a second river, and so, at least in principle, he can end it.
But surely he can also end it—and so could already have ended it—in other ways. Although neither Capek nor Borges addresses the question, we can suppose that neither EM nor Cartaphilius is indestructible, an odd fate shared by the narcissistic rivals Madeline and Helen, played by Meryl Streep and Goldie Hawn, in the 1992 film Death Becomes Her. The potent elixir drunk by both of these characters initially confers youth and beauty but, curiously, not precisely immortality. Instead the two ultimately become nearly impervious zombies, de facto technically biologically dead and, indeed, decaying but still persistently sentient, animate, and competitive.
It seems reasonable to posit, in contrast, that an encounter with the guillotine or a suitably powerful explosive could and would put a permanent end to EM’s or Cartaphilius’ history, quite independently of whatever benefits their life-prolonging drinks might have conferred. Any immortality seriously worth considering, in other words, would remain optional. By taking sufficiently drastic action, its beneficiary could always bring his or her life to a close. This arguably renders irrelevant the difference between EM’s temporary but renewable immortality and Cartaphilius’ durable but reversible immortality. In a sense, each of these potential immortals continuously faces a decision, indeed, the same decision. Each can always explicitly raise the question, “Why not end it here and now?”. This realization, I shall argue, makes the question of immortality something rather different from what Williams takes it to be. But before I can do that, we first need to be clear about what Williams in fact does take the question of immortality to be, and so it is to that matter that I first turn.
Williams begins by considering Lucretius’ classic arguments in support of the radical thesis that death is never an evil.
Lucretius has two basic arguments for this conclusion, and
it is an important feature of them both that the conclusion they offer has the
very strong consequence … that, for oneself at least, it is all the same
whenever one dies, that a long life is no better than a short one. …
The first argument seeks to
interpret the fear of death as a confusion, based on the idea that we shall be
there after death to repine our loss of the praemia vitae, the rewards
and delights of life, and to be upset at the spectacle of our bodies burned,
and so forth. … But if death is annihilation, then there are no such
experiences …. The second argument …
says that one will be the same time dead however early or late one dies, and
therefore one might as well die earlier as later. And from both arguments we can conclude …
death is nothing to us, and does not matter at all. (83‑4)
Williams argues that the second argument contradicts the first. One will be “the same time dead” whether one dies earlier or later, as the second argument concludes, only because death is irreversible. Once dead, forever dead. The implicit suggestion here, Williams claims, is that if, on the contrary, there were only a finite period of death—i.e., if being dead were a transient and terminating condition, so that those who died later would subsequently be dead for less time than those who died earlier—then there would be some point in wanting to die later than earlier, an implication that makes sense, he proposes, “only on the supposition that what is wrong with dying consists in something undesirable about the condition of being dead. And that is what is denied by the first argument”. (84)
Williams’ considerations are not compelling. If there were only a finite period of death, then there would presumably also be experiences to be had after that period had elapsed—call them “trans-death” experiences—and one’s attitude toward the question of when one dies, whether earlier or later, would then surely depend on what one believed about such experiences. If one believed that they would be, so to speak, overwhelmingly neutral to negative, then Williams’ conclusion perhaps follows. There would then be some point in wanting to die later rather than earlier in order to get in as many positive experiences as one could before the empty interregnum of death and the subsequent endless stretch of generally unwelcome trans-death experiences. But if one believed that such experiences would themselves be overwhelmingly positive and desirable, then one might wish to die earlier rather than later in order to get one’s less promising mundane life and the interim experientially empty period of being dead over with and so to get on to the good stuff as fast as possible.[4] And if one had no beliefs at all about trans-death experiences, other than that there would be some, then one’s attitude toward when one dies would presumably depend, inter alia, on whether one’s living experiences were predominantly positive or negative and on the degree to which one was risk-adverse.
The first argument, Williams suggests, already presupposes that “the satisfaction of desire, and possession of the praemia vitae, are good things”. (84) The undesirable post-death experiences of loss and regret that, on Lucretius’ diagnosis, are confusedly posited by those who fear death would be rational grounds for such fear only if something were indeed regrettably lost, i.e., only if the pleasures and rewards of life are in fact worth having.
But if the praemia vitae are valuable, … then surely … longer enjoyment of them is better than shorter, and more of them, other things being equal, is better than less of them. But if so, then it just will not be true that to die earlier is all the same as to die later, nor that death is never an evil …. [The thought that to die later is better than to die earlier] will depend only on the idea, apparently sound, that if the praemia vitae and consciousness of them are good things, than longer consciousness of more praemia is better than shorter consciousness of fewer praemia. (84-5)
What Lucretius’ first argument consequently overlooks is that “wanting something itself gives one a reason for avoiding death” (85):
[From] the perspective of the wanting agent it is rational to aim for states of affairs in which his want is satisfied, and hence to regard death as something to avoided; that is, to regard it as an evil. (85)
Williams’ logical point is thus that a person can have a coherent here-and-now reason for attempting to prevent, avoid, or postpone his death, in particular, a reason that does not rest on expectations regarding future experiences at all, and so, contrary to what Lucretius’ first argument assumes, not on confused expectations regarding nonexistent post-mortem experiences. The logical point indeed appears to be defensible, but Williams also advances the substantive claim that “death, other things being equal, is a misfortune, and a longer life is better than a shorter life” (89), and this is more problematic. In any event, the “ceteris paribus” qualification is crucial. For if the rewards and delights of life are good things, and wanting to have them is thus relevant to assessing the value of death, then the costs and agonies of life will presumably be bad things, and wanting to be quit of them will be equally relevant to assessing the value of death—and if this is so, then it hard to see how we could draw any general conclusion regarding whether death per se should rationally be regarded as a good or an evil. The balance of costs and rewards, agonies and delights, could surely come out one way for some people and the other way for others.
Williams, of course, is sensitive to the point, and he is consequently prepared to regard his generalization as merely contingent:
For the present argument, it will do to leave it as a contingent fact that most people … will have a reason, and a perfectly coherent reason, to regard death as a misfortune …. (88)
No one need deny that since, for instance, we grow old and our powers decline, much may happen to increase the reasons for thinking death a good thing. But these are contingencies. We might not age …. If that were so, would it not follow then that, more life being per se better than less life, we should have reason so far as that went … to live forever? (89)
And this brings us back to EM and the question of immortality. For, if, other things being equal, death is a misfortune, “then it looks as though it would not only be always better to live, but better to live always, that is, never to die”. (89)
Williams himself offers two conditions that need to be satisfied by a conception of immortality that can be regarded as meeting “the basic anti-Lucretian hope for continuing life that is grounded in categorical desire” (91), i.e., in desires not themselves conditional on the assumption that one will be alive[5], but rather capable of serving as a reason for wishing to remain alive. The first is
that it should clearly be me who lives forever. The second important condition is that the state in which I survive should be one that, to me looking forward, will be adequately related, in the life it presents, to those aims I now have in wanting to survive at all. (91)
The first condition comes into play, if at all, only in connection with forms of immortality that are ostensibly achieved by disconnecting personal identity from the normal physical continuity of the biological organism, and while that might (indeed, arguably does[6]) create insurmountable problems for various traditional eschatological conceptions, it is not what is supposed to be problematic in the case of Cartaphilius or EM. It is the second condition, Williams suggests, that EM’s form of immortality fails to satisfy.
EM, we recall, was 342 “because for 300 years she had been 42”, and “if one had to spend eternity at any age”, Williams adds, “that seems an admirable age to spend it at”. (90) Her problem, he continues, was not
that she was too old at the age she continued to be at. Her problem lay in having been at it for too long. Her trouble was, it seems, boredom: a boredom connected with the fact that everything that could happen and make sense to one particular human being of 42 had already happened to her. Or, rather, all the sorts of things could make sense to one woman of a certain character; for EM has a certain character, and, indeed, except for her accumulating memories of earlier times, … seems always to have been much the same sort of person. (90)
The theme of boredom will become important later, but the first thing that needs to be noted is that what Williams offers is surely a peculiar interpretation of someone’s “continuing to be at a given age”. There are, of course, people who, so to speak, get stuck at a given age—“perpetual adolescents”, for instance, whose interests and desires never manage to mature beyond those of a typical nineteen-year-old—but a general conclusion regarding the desirability of immortality can hardly be derived from considering such atypical cases of arrested development, and EM seems to be just such a case. Not only does she continue to be physically “one particular human being of 42”, but evidently psychologically and emotionally as well, and while that is a perfectly acceptable literary conceit, it is surely neither inevitable nor plausible.
It would be interesting to interrogate Williams’ conception of something’s “making sense” to a particular person of a particular character, but there is unfortunately hardly any textual evidence to consult. Williams just employs the notion without elucidating it. Often, when something doesn’t make sense to me, my curiosity is aroused, but, on the face of it, EM also appears to be utterly devoid of curiosity, at least curiosity about what the future might hold. There are also such people, of course, but that is clearly just another mere contingency, and so again not the sort of observation on which one could base the general conclusions that Williams wants to secure. Still, it is perhaps worth remarking, in an anticipatory way, that a healthy and robust curiosity is arguably one effective prophylactic against boredom.
“There are difficult questions,” Williams writes, “if one presses the issue, about [EM’s] constancy of character” (90), but it is not clear that he ever does properly press the issue and really engage the relevant questions. For, although he claims that EM “seems always to have been much the same sort of person”, he apparently also holds that EM wasn’t “at the beginning … like what she is at the end: cold, withdrawn, already frozen”. (91) It is important for Williams’ thesis that something happens to EM during the course of those three long centuries, so that, at the end she has become something different from what she was at the beginning, a person who now refuses to accept the possibility of going on, for his leading thesis is precisely that, under conditions of immortality, just such a change is inevitable.
Williams asks how the accumulation of EM’s memories during those years is related to the “character that she eternally has, and to the character of her existence”, but he fails to suggest any satisfactory answer. On the one hand, if her three centuries of life consist of “much the same kind of events repeated”, then “it is itself strange that she allows them to be repeated, accepting the same repetitions, the same limitations”. (90) On the other hand, if the pattern of her experiences is “not repetitious in this way, but varied”, then the problem becomes one of understanding how EM’s character can “remain fixed through an endless series of very various experiences”. They must then “happen to her without really affecting her”, which would evidently imply that she did not become “detached and withdrawn” (90) in the course of three centuries of living, but was already so at the outset. It is clearly at best difficult, and perhaps impossible, to extract any consistent picture of EM’s character from all this.
In a certain sense, Williams appears to be untroubled by such observations, since, he suggests that
the more one reflects to any realistic degree on the conditions of EM’s unending life, the less it seems a mere contingency that it froze up as it did. That it is not a contingency is suggested also by the fact that the reflections can sustain themselves independently of any question of the particular character that EM had; it is enough, almost, that she has a human character at all.[7] (90-1)
It is hardly obvious, however, that this is right, and I want to argue, in fact, that it is not. In order to do so, I first need to secure a few points regarding the notion of character.
It is a logical point that not everything a person does can be an instance of “acting in character”. Certain innate factors, e.g., genetic predispositions, might be partially determinative, but one’s character isn’t something one is simply born with like one’s sex or eye color. Some actions and experiences, especially (but not exclusively) in one’s youth, are necessarily formative of character, and the fact that character must be formed implies inter alia that it is the sort of thing that can also be reformed or transformed.
In once sense, Williams recognizes this, but, in another, he appears to deny it. Someone who, like the mythical Greek seer Teiresias, lives through a series of distinct and diverse lives that, unlike successive Buddhistic reincarnations, are “nevertheless cumulatively effective in memory”, he claims, cannot have a character “either continuously through these proceedings or cumulatively at the end … of them”. (94) For the Teiresias fantasy, he argues, ignores
the connection, both as cause and as consequence, between having one range of experiences rather than another, wishing to engage in one sort of thing rather than another, and having a character. (94)
Teiresias, he rather obscurely concludes, “is not, eventually, a person but a phenomenon”. (94)
It is hard to understand Williams’ reasoning here. If “having a character” is a matter of manifesting a certain constancy in preferences, desires, reactions, and dispositions, then it is perhaps plausible to conclude that, in this sense, Teiresias cannot continuously have a character—that is, one and the same fixed particular character—from life to successive life. The diversity of his experiences and his steadily accumulating memories of them could hardly leave such matters unaffected. But if “having a character” is a matter of there being coherent relationship among one’s preferences, desires, reactions, and dispositions and the experiences that shape them, then there is surely another sense in which Teiresias can consistently be said to have a character from life to successive life—a dynamic character which is continuously changing, developing, and evolving in intelligible ways precisely in consequence of the diversity of his experiences and his memories of them. And, in any case, Teiresias would also, inevitably, have some determinate resultant particular character “cumulatively at the end”, not in the incoherent sense that his character would ultimately somehow consist of a mere accumulation of the various preferences, desires, dispositions, and reactions manifested across a series of distinct lives, but in the sense that his experiences across that series of lives and his memories of them cannot help but have some cumulative effect on his ultimate reactions, dispositions, preferences, and desires.
In the dynamic trans-temporal sense of ‘character’, an excitable and impulsive youth can by degrees become a calm and reflective adult and, later, an irascible and impatient old codger, or an impetuous tomboy mature into a staid matron, without even once acting “out of character”. And from this perspective, we can even make consistent narrative sense of quite dramatic changes in manifest behavior and personality. Shortly after his fortieth birthday, stodgy conservative Charlie grows a beard, buys a sports car, and becomes a lively fixture of the local nightclub scene. “Ah yes,” we say knowingly, “Charlie was just the type to have a mid-life crisis.”—and we may be right. The notion of a person’s character perhaps necessarily carries the implication of a certain stability across time, but there are various sorts and levels of stability, and so it is good enough if we can tell a reasonable story about how the sort of person Charlie was intelligibly could and did become the sort of person he now is.
But if this is correct, then one consequence is that I can now reasonably conclude that, under conditions of immortality, my present particular character would surely change and develop, perhaps even in directions that I cannot now foresee. Indeed, it might in part be precisely an intense curiosity regarding the endless possibilities for personal growth and change opened up by an unending life—possibilities that I can now coherently concede I cannot now empathetically anticipate—that would motivate me to opt for immortality in the first place.[8]
What makes the question of character directly relevant to the issue of immortality is Williams’ second condition, “that the state in which I survive should be one that, to me looking forward, will be adequately related, in the life it presents, to those aims I now have in wanting to survive at all”. (91) For one thing that this admittedly vague formula implies, he claims, is that “any image I have of [my] future desires should make it comprehensible to me how in terms of my character they could be my desires”. (92)
In light of what we have already noted about a person’s character, however, it is not clear how to interpret this “comprehensibility” constraint. The most straightforward reading—the one which seems to shape Williams’ negative conclusions—would require me to envision myself, with my present particular character, having and being motivated by the envisioned future desires. But my forward-looking perspective on my own possible future desires could instead be informed by an understanding of how someone of a certain particular character could plausibly have those desires and an understanding of how, in terms of my present character, I myself might come to be such a person, without supposing that, given my present particular character, they could consistently now be my desires. It might, for example, be perfectly comprehensible to, say, a callow and flighty fifteen-year-old that there will almost certainly come a time when he will want to settle down, marry, have children, and so on, without those being desires that he could potentially have or even empathetically imagine having now, i.e., at age fifteen. Thus understood, however, Williams’ “comprehensibility” constraint is entirely compatible with the observation that, under conditions of immortality, a person’s particular character can and likely will change and develop, even in presently unpredictable ways.
It is this last codicil that Williams explicitly rejects. He instead argues that the direction in which one’s particular character—anyone’s particular character—would ultimately develop under conditions of immortality is utterly predictable and indeed inevitable. One by one, the categorical desires which propel us into the future would flicker out, and, like EM, we would become cold and stagnant. For
what is essentially EM’s problem, one way or another, remains. In general we can ask what it is about the imagined activities of an eternal life that would stave off the principal hazard to which EM succumbed, boredom. (94)
There is, he suggests,
a profound difficulty, of providing any model of an unending, supposedly satisfying, state or activity that would not rightly prove boring to anyone who remained conscious of himself and who had acquired a character, interests, tastes, and impatiences in the course of living, already, a finite life. The point is not that for such a man boredom would be a tiresome consequence of the supposed states or activities …. The point is rather that boredom … would be not just a tiresome effect, but a reaction almost perceptual in character to the poverty of one’s relation to the environment. Nothing less will do for eternity than something that makes boredom unthinkable. (94-5)
Now there is quite a bit going on in these passages, but the first thing we need to ask, I propose, is how we are to understand the notion of a state or activity here. How are states or activities supposed to be individuated? Consider the analogous claim—or perhaps it is only a paraphrase—that the indefinite repetition of any kind of experience must inevitably result in boredom. The plausibility of such a conclusion clearly depends upon how finely or broadly one individuates “kinds of experiences”. Eating a cheeseburger and reading Middlemarch, for example, are quite narrowly individuated “kinds of experiences”. They consequently allow for very little variation and are indeed likely to become boring pretty quickly if repeated. But eating a meal and reading a book are also “kinds of experiences”—more broadly individuated—that allow for a great deal of variety, and there is no obvious reason to suppose that boredom with respect to them must necessarily set in, even when they’re indefinitely repeated. And there are also such “kinds of experiences” as taking a risk and falling in love which seem pretty effectively insulated against boredom, perhaps even conceptually so.
Correlatively,
Williams speaks of “the environment” to which one would be relating and
reacting as if it were itself something fixed and invariant, but that is surely
just wrong. Our cultural and
technological environment, at least, is dynamic and constantly changing, and
so, consequently, is the range of possible human activities and
experiences. There is, for
instance, a steady flow of new books to
read and new culinary possibilities to explore, and one can reasonably consider
whether EM might not have found hang-gliding or scuba diving or even playing
computer games an engaging pastime, were such activities available to her. Taking a trip is one kind of activity
or experience, but there are significant differences between taking a trip to
There’s quite a lot of “ceteris paribus” in all this, of course. We’re supposing, for instance, that the human species doesn’t manage to exterminate itself en masse, e.g., by atomic warfare, in the meantime. And we’re supposing that our hypothetical immortal will have available the means, including especially the financial resources, to pursue whatever experiences or activities he or she finds attractive. A gradual descent into abject poverty is as unappealing as the prospect of continuous physical or mental deterioration. Anyone contemplating opting for immortality would consequently be well advised inter alia to get an early start on a good program of diversified conservative investments. But, like Williams, we shall take all that as given and continue to concentrate our attention on the individual psyche.
What, Williams asks, could make boredom unthinkable? One possible answer that he explores is: “something that could be guaranteed to be at every moment utterly absorbing”, but “if a man has and retains a character”, he continues, “there is no reason to suppose that there is anything that could be that”. (95) One might imagine
the immortal man [as being] content at every moment, by just stripping off from him consciousness that would have brought discontent by reminding him of other times, other interests, other possibilities. (95)
But that, argues Williams, is not to imagine someone engaged in an activity that was continuously totally absorbing per se. It is rather to posit the contraction of a person’s original character through an impoverishment of his awareness of alternatives to his present activities. “Just as being bored can be a sign of not noticing, understanding, or appreciating enough, so equally not being bored can be a sign of not noticing, or not reflecting, enough.” (95)
But why should consciousness of other times, other interests, and other possibilities bring discontent? Of course, if one is, so to speak, condemned to pursue just one activity for all eternity, then memories of earlier rewarding occupations and thoughts of other intriguing pastimes might indeed plausibly have that effect.[9] As Williams himself points out, even for a person strongly drawn to the pleasures of concentrated intellectual inquiry,
it seems quite unreasonable to suppose that those activities would have the fulfilling or liberating character that they do have for him, if they were in fact all he could do or conceive of doing. (96)
But such limited horizons are just what an immortal needn’t have. The proximate antidote to boredom may perhaps consist in becoming completely absorbed in one’s present activities, but the permanent antidote to boredom is surely novelty, that is, the continuous availability of diverse and potentially engaging alternative new experiences and activities, and that is arguably something that an endlessly open future in a constantly changing environment, and perhaps only that, could in principle provide.
Novelty and curiosity complement one another in combating the encroachment of ennui. We are sometimes moved to try something new simply because we are curious about what it will be like. We become engrossed in a novel, a play, a film, inter alia, because we are curious about what will happen next and about how the characters (who may have become familiar to us) will react to and be affected by it. What intrigues us, what puzzles us, what engages our curiosity can also interest us, hold our attention, and become a focus of our activity.
As we are in fact constituted, of course, we cannot actually explore every phenomenon that we find puzzling or try out every form of activity that appeals to us. Our lives are too short for that, and so we need to set priorities and make choices. But immortality removes just that limitation. An immortal could always sensibly enter a newly possible or newly salient project on his agenda for future attention, secure in the confidence that he will have time to get around to it, sooner or later.
I do not see, then, that Williams has given us sufficient grounds to believe that, under conditions of immortality, a descent into permanent boredom would be unavoidable. The most that might plausibly be expected—perhaps this much is even arguably inescapable—is the periodic onset of boredom. But even if this is so, we still need to distinguish between inevitable boredom and irreversible boredom. Even if the periodic onset of boredom were inevitable, that is, it would not follow that unending boredom was inevitable. There might still be numerous entries on my agenda of projects for future attention—and if not, well, lots of things in the world change, sometimes quite dramatically, even when I do not, and there is no logical or conceptual reason to conclude that such new developments could never prove sufficiently exciting to shake me out of my ennui. Indeed, my knowledge, or even my belief, that I was immortal[10] could in itself give me a powerful incentive for keeping my agenda full and actively seeking ways to put an end to a stretch of boredom if and when it set in.
The most radical way to put an end to a stretch of boredom, of course, is to put an end to it all, that is, by taking sufficiently drastic action, to put an end to a life which, although indefinitely extendable, always remains optional. If what I have so far argued is right, however, that could only be an irrational act of desperation, and one that was wildly disproportionate to what is actually appropriate in the circumstances. For even inevitable boredom is not necessarily irreversible boredom, and so here too especially an immortal can take solace in the thought that “this too shall pass”.
The reminder that any reasonably coherent conception of corporeal immortality is the conception of a condition which can be terminated brings us back, finally, to the question of immortality itself. Offered a drink from EM’s elixir or Cartaphilius’ secret river, what decision do I actually confront? What do I choose, if I decide to drink, and what, if I decline? What could be, to use Williams’ phrase, “those aims that I have now in wanting to survive at all”? (91) In short, if I desire immortality, just what is it that I want?
The general form of Williams’ own answer is: the satisfaction of (some of) my present categorical desires, and the specific answer will consequently depend upon what my present categorical desires concretely are. Williams’ fundamental critical observation is that it is difficult to imagine how any such present desire could, as it were, prove forcible and durable enough to propel me into an unending life. The critical point is well-taken, however, only if the choice is thought of as being made once and for all, i.e., only if what propels me into an unending life must also be sufficient to propel me through it. Williams, that is, evidently thinks of opting for immortality as, so to speak, here and now accepting a permanent commitment to carry on, come what may. That is presumably why any activity suitable for eternity must be one which makes boredom unthinkable. But surely I can now desire immortality—and perhaps thereby necessarily now hope that there will never come a time when I want to die—without supposing that my present specific categorical desires can give me any assurance in the matter. My present desire for immortality, in other words, is consistent with my acknowledging the possibility that, if I get it now, I won’t always want it later.
If I get what now? What do I get, if I take the proffered drink and so opt for immortality? The obvious answer seems to me also to be the correct one. I get a possibility. I get the option of going on, of continuing to live, for as long as I continue to want to live. I get an open future.
As we are presently constituted, our individual futures are not open. In Heidegger’s memorable idiom, we “live toward our deaths”. The fact that a human life is bounded at both ends and has a roughly foreseeable duration limits our conception of what is possible for us and for the others with whom we invariably interact, and so constrains both our rational anticipation of future circumstances and the projects that we can reasonably envision, coherently plan to pursue, and sensibly undertake. Opting for immortality undoes those constraints.
If I desire
immortality, then what I want can only be such an open future, the option to
continue to live for as long as I continue to want to live. As Williams points out, most people in fact
mostly do continue to want to live, and I have argued that there is no a
priori reason to suppose that this would necessarily change under
conditions of immortality. It does seem
plausible, however, that, given enough time, anyone will likely find some
occasion explicitly to confront the question “Why not end it here and now?”,
and so to make a deliberate decision about the matter. And the important thing to see at this point
is that, if and when, for whatever reason, the question becomes salient, all
that one needs in order to decide to carry on is an answer that is good enough for “here and now”. This is simply a matter of keeping one’s
quantifiers in good order. Whether or
not I am potentially immortal, at any given time, I may need some reason not to
end my life then and there. But it does
not follow that I ever need some (one) reason never to end my
life, i.e., not to end it at any time.
And it certainly does not follow that I need such an expansive, durable,
wholesale reason in order rationally to opt for immortality, i.e., to choose an
open future, here and now.
What I am suggesting, in short, is
that the decision to accept a drink from EM’s elixir or Cartaphilius’ secret
river is less momentous than Williams makes it out to be. For by drinking, I make no eternal and
irreversible commitment. I decide only
that, as I am now, I would now like to have the option of continuing to
explore the possibilities that ceteris paribus are and will become
available to me. What I choose, in other
words, is something that always exists, as Aristotle would put it, only in the
mode of potentiality.
Looking back on my life so
far, I find it a mixed bag. I recall
both periods of enjoyable and rewarding activity and intervals of boredom and
stagnation, occasions of pleasurable companionship and interludes of
loneliness, projects of seeking and episodes of discovery—and there are
stretches of time with which I don’t associate any substantial memories at
all. And I also observe that I myself
have changed in many ways, some of which, from my earlier perspectives, I did
not anticipate and, indeed, could not have anticipated. And if I am realistic about my prospects as a
potential immortal, then what I should expect is more of the same.
Williams is right, that is, to insist that corporeal immortality would not dissolve the connections among desire, experience, and character, and so could not exempt one from living a human life. His mistake, I have argued, lay in supposing that, in choosing immortality, a person necessarily chooses to perpetuate himself as he is then and there, to project both his present categorical desires and his present particular character across an endless future. What is at stake in immortality, however, is not an endless future, but only an open one, and opting for an open future is not making an eternal commitment. It only removes some of the many constraints of finitude—but the others still remain. Even a potentially endless human life must still be lived one day at a time, and sufficient unto each day are the desires and decisions thereof. The choice to accept the proffered drink is ultimately just one more such decision, but I am now in a position to conclude, contrary to Williams, that there is everything to be said in favor of making it. For, as we have seen, at best, it liberates, and, even at worst, it does not compel. At worst, opting for immortality could only someday turn out to have been a mistake—and if it ever did, then it would always still be possible to correct it.[11]
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NOTES