Thinking the Unknowable: The Essential Louis Dupré offers a sophisticated response to the subjectivist ills of modern philosophy. Edited and introduced by Peter J. Casarella, prominent theologian and student of Dupré, the book unfolds in four parts: establishing the foundations for a new theology of language, addressing the idea of God in modern philosophy, dealing with the phenomenology of religion, and turning to the concept of mysticism.
Some psychologists account for the religious belief in a life after death by a natural resistance man feels to a total destruction of the self. Humans tend to attribute a permanent moral value to selfhood. Does this attitude in any way justify a belief in immortality? I think not. For whatever significance people attach to an afterlife, they rarely conceive it as a somewhat modified continuance of their present existence. Religious immortality is the exact opposite of a ghostlike endurance of life. While denying that the desire for mere survival is an adequate foundation for the religious belief in immortality, I do not deny that a desire for being preserved may well play a significant role in that belief, but on a higher level than present life offers. Indeed, the American philosopher William E. Hocking defined religion as “an ultimate demand for conscious self-preservation, man’s leap as individual and as species, for eternal life in some form.” This desire may be all or partly unconscious. The religious dissatisfaction with present life in no way implies a desire of protracting it beyond the grave: it rather is a call for total change. “The soul’s hope has not been for more of the same, but for something altogether higher and better.”
The very desire of religious eternity understood as unending bliss seems to arise not mainly from fear of annihilation, but from those “peak” experiences in which humans perceive a glimpse of a permanent, qualitatively different form of existence. In ancient Greece at least, a desire to participate in the godly life through Dionysian ecstasy played a significant role both in the belief in and the desire of that life after death, particularly among the initiated in the mysteries.
According to the existentialist philosophers of the recent past, the idea of life after death basically conflicts with the very nature of man’s self-understanding and self-realization within the limits of a finite freedom. An eternity of free self-realization would destroy freedom altogether, since an unending succession of possibilities of self-realization is impossible. Human existence implies many possibilities of being human yet after a certain time they will all be exhausted. In her philosophical novel Tous les hommes sont mortels Simone de Beauvoir shows that an indefinite protraction of life would not only be absurd but also unendurable. Man lives his life as a limited succession stretching from a time of preparation, to maturity, and ending in decline. The finitude of the time for achievement belongs to the very conception of a life’s task. The cycle of life may remain incomplete, but it cannot be indefinitely extended. If Plato and Aristotle were around today they would sadly have survived themselves.
It is on the very transformation of existence in the religious expectation of an afterlife that a philosophical investigation should concentrate. How much discontinuity is compatible with the preservation of personal identity? Jacques Maritain simply assumed that while all images and impulses will vanish after death, our intellectual powers nevertheless remain awake to the soul’s substance and, through it, to God. But can the mind preserve its identity when sense perceptions and sense impulses no longer sustain it? Must such a bare state of consciousness not result in a loss of all creative imagination and, in the end, even of memory? H. H. Price envisions life after death as a world of mental pictures in which “imagining replaces perceiving.” He assumes that images of organic sensations could provide a substitute to our present life. Yes, it might do so during a few weeks or even years, but not indefinitely. Could personal identity even survive a total disruption of one’s habitual environment? Can a person remain the same without a body or with another, “spiritualized” body? Prior to a discussion of those problems of identity we must at least provisionally settle on the meaning of the preliminary question: What is a person and how far can the concept be stretched?
(excerpted from chapter 8)