The Tedium of Immortality

Episode nine in the BBC R4 series (2016) 'A History of the Infinite' by the philosopher Adrian Moore) begins with a scene from the opera ‘The Makropulos Case’ by the Czech composer Janáček. The premise of the opera is simple: more than three hundred years earlier the heroine of the opera, Elina Makropulos, was given an elixir of life by her father, the court physician. She is now nearly three hundred and fifty years old. She has reached a state of utter indifference to everything, and her life has lost its meaning. In the opera excerpt she sings a lament: ‘Dying or living it is all one. It is the same thing. In me my life has come to a standstill. I cannot go on. In the end it is the same. Singing, and silence.’ Makropolos refuses to take the elixir again, and dies.

The opera raises some profound questions, about life, about death, about purpose, and about our finitude. But how should we understand our finitude? Human finitude has many facets. We live in a reality, which for the most part is quite independent of us. We are limited in what we can know, and in what we can do, but importantly, we also have temporal and spatial limits. Though it isn’t entirely clear what those actually are.  Moore asks, as an example, if he began to exist when he was born, or if he was himself when he was still a foetus. Another question concerns how big he is. He gives his dimensions and weight, but points out that you could cut his hair off, or even amputate his legs, without destroying him. Some philosophers would argue that who a person is, is represented principally by the brain of the individual in question.  And other philosophers might argue that we are not physical entities at all.

In any case, it is clear that human beings are not infinite in size.  And, unless there is an afterlife, there will come a time when we no longer exist. Is the prospect of our annihilation something we should fear, deplore, and does it reduce our lives to meaninglessness? The Greek philosopher Epicurus did not believe in an afterlife. But the Epicurians did not fear or deplore death. They did not see how they should be affected by something they would not be around to witness. They were of the view that death was not an evil to us, since we were not around to witness it. Lucretius, also an Epicurean, reinforced the point by saying that we didn’t exist before we were born, and the fact that we won’t exist after we are dead, is just a mirror image of that. Lucretius asked, ‘is there anything terrible there? Anything gloomy? It seems more peaceful than sleep.’

The twentieth century philosopher Bernard Williams went even further. Rather than dwelling on the innocuousness of being dead, he dwelt on the awfulness of being perpetually alive. He wrote a famous article which took both its theme and its title from the Makropolos Case. Its subtitle was ‘reflections on the tedium of immortality.’ He argued that a never-ending life would become what Elina Makropulous’s life had become – tedious to the point of unendurability. For Williams, it was about whether or not you could have a life of your own, if you could live for eternity. If you are going to live for eternity, it would seem that you would need to keep finding new things to do, or new ways to be satisfied doing the same things again and again.  Williams’ argument is that you can only talk about such a life as your own life if you remain reasonably close to how you started out. In other words, can it still be your life if it goes on for eternity? Williams’ answer was ‘no’. 

For some philosophers, it is straightforwardly obvious that annihilation, followed by nothingness, is a great and uncompensated evil. Moore quotes the American philosopher Thomas Nagel, who writes that being given the alternatives of living for another week or dying in five minutes would always (all things being equal) opt for living another week. If there were no other catastrophe which could be averted by his death. Which Nagel interprets as being tantamount to wanting to live for ever. He wrote that ‘there is little to be said for death: it is a great curse. If we truly face it, nothing can make it palatable.’ Moore suggests that the opposing points of view of Williams and Nagel may be the consequence of a temperamental difference, as much as an intellectual one.  Nagel also suggested the possibility that Williams might have been more easily bored than he is. Moore says this might have been the case.