January 6, 2006

Dear Colleague,

    To thinkers of the eighteenth century, enlightenment meant growing out of childhood to maturity and, with it, an ability to dispense with the consolations of magic and fantasy. Of all our childish fantasies, perhaps the most persistent is the belief that death is a mere gateway to eternal life--that we humans are immortal. One might think that the elite of the Enlightenment would want to junk the idea of immortality. Not so! Major figures in different areas of endeavor subscribed to it with passion. In 1794, the revolutionary leader Robespierre had the Convention promulgate the decree stating that the French nation believed in the immortality of the soul as well as in the Supreme Being. The poet Goethe ended his poem Urania (1801) with the lines:

    When my eyes their final tears have shed
    You beckon, call me to divinity.
    A man, a pilgrim, lays down his weary head.
    A god begins his passage instantly.

    And there is the great philosopher Kant. "What we call the immortality of the soul is the existence and personality, continuing into infinity, of the same rational being." This is a far better existence in that the soul "is exalted from an imperfect, sensual life to the perfect, everlasting, spiritual life," in which the limitations and indigence of physical life are finally overcome--man, after all, is an "indigent being" only "to the extent that he belongs to the world of sense" (Critique of Practical Reason).

    How to explain this? Were the Enlightenment thinkers so fearful of returning "to dust" after death that, though they were able to discard most superstitions, they held on to the one of immortality? If so, they can be forgiven. After all, oblivion is the ultimate horror and can seem worse than hell, even to John Wesley. But maybe we should give a little more credit to the Enlightenment thinkers. They hung on to immortality not so much from remnantal childish fears, but because they--like their forebears from the ancient Greeks to medieval philosophers--were committed to the idea of Truth. As thinkers in earlier ages saw it, the capacity for truth--to "see" truth--lay in reason or the human soul, which "is an esse absolutum," possessing a being independent of the body and so can persist beyond bodily dissolution and death. (Josef Pieper, Death and Immortality, 2000). If we modern and post-modern people no longer believe in immortality, is it because we have at last outgrown superstition, or is it because we have lost our faith in reason--its divine capacity to see truth? Actually, the mysterious, extra-material status of reason remains with us to this day, and the best place to see it is in argumentation. In any argument, someone always wins--usually me! And I win because my argument--my picture of reality--is true, backed by reason, whereas other people's arguments--their pictures of reality--are merely the effects of causes, whether this be genetic equipment, getting up from the wrong side of the bed, or dialectical materialism. No wonder I still have a residual belief in immortality!

Best wishes,

Yi-Fu