Illusions of Immortality (2018)

Chapter 3 Illusions of Immortality Jonardon Ganeri 1 Introduction Whenever I direct my attention to some place in my visual field, for instance, I am consciously aware of what is there. So it seems as if there must be something I am visually aware or conscious of even when I am not directing my attention there. But this could just be an illusion, and what we should say is that the very act of casting one’s attention, like the opening of a fridge door, is what turns the light of consciousness on. Julian Jaynes put it like this: Consciousness is a much smaller part of our mental life than we are conscious of, because we cannot be conscious of what we are not conscious of. […] It is like asking a flashlight in a dark room to search around for something that doesn’t have any light shining on it. The flashlight, since there is light in whatever direction it turns, would have to conclude that there is light everywhere. And so consciousness can seem to pervade all mentality when actually it does not. (Jaynes 1976, p. 23) I think that this same type of illusion is what explains the grip of the idea of immortality. Throughout one’s lifetime one is aware of being alive, and so it seems as if one is always alive, even when, at the moment of death, the door of life is closed. You think the light of life is always shining; i.e., that you are immortal. Yet this is to forget that it is living which turns on the light of life. From the fact that for as long as we are alive we are conscious of being so, it does not follow that there is a similar consciousness even when we are no longer alive. In this essay I will look at responses to the illusion of immortality in two thinkers widely separated in time and space: the fifth century Theravāda Buddhist philosopher, Buddhaghosa, and the twenteith century Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa. We will see some profound and surprising affinities between these two J. Ganeri (&) 19 Washington Square North, New York 10011, USA e-mail: [email protected] © Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2018 G. Blamberger and S. Kakar (eds.), Imaginations of Death and the Beyond in India and Europe, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-10-6707-5_3 35 36 J. Ganeri thinkers, and I will suggest that each can be read in a way that helps to illuminate the thought of the other. 2 Buddhaghosa on Death Experience and Attention to One’s Life in Total We know very little about the life of Buddhaghosa, other than that he left India for Sri Lanka, where he studied the Sinhala commentaries on the Tripiṭaka in the monasteries of Anurādhāpura. Legend has it that he was born a brahman, and in his youth traveled extensively and took part in philosophical debates. In Sri Lanka he systematized the Theravāda Abhidhamma, and wrote his masterpiece, the Path of Purification, or Visuddhi-magga, in Pali. From this work we can learn if little about his life then much about his views on death. Death, says Buddhaghosa, is a sort of “putting down” (nikkhepanaṃti) (Vism. 618 [xx. 47]). Its distinctive characteristic is to be a “falling” (cavanatta) (Vism. 460 [xiv. 123]). The task performed by death, its task in the overall economy of a conscious existence, is to disjoin (Vism. 502 [xvi. 47]), that is to break down the psycho-physical complex: “Only constructing activities break up; their breakup is death; there is nothing else at all” (Vibh-a. 100). The way death shows up, the way it is made manifest, is as an absence (Vism. 502 [xvi. 47]; Vibh-a. 101). If there were such a thing as the autonomous self, it could actively exert its agency in holding the psyche together, but there is no such self, and “no one has any power over arisen constructing activities [which] are devoid of the possibility of any power being exercised over them; they are non-self because, void, because ownerless, because unsusceptible to the wielding of power, and because of precluding a self” (Vism. 618 [xx. 47]). For, as is the standard view, “Here in this world there is no self that is something other than and apart from the aggregates” (Pm. 830; Vism. 1991, p. 847), and “When any ascetics or brahmans whatever see self in its various forms, they all of them see the five aggregates, or one of them” (SN, iii. 46). This alleged incapacity of any putative self to prevent the disjunction of a psychology looks at first as if it is in tension with something else Buddhaghosa says. He quotes an ancient saying, that Aggregates cease and nothing else exists; Breakup of aggregates is known as death. He watches their destruction steadfastly, As one who with a diamond drills a gem. Does this not entail that one does have agency here after all, not indeed to hold one’s mind together, but actively to destroy it? That is how Simone Weil took the point when she used a very similar metaphor, declaring that one should smash one’s self as if using a hammer to strike a nail with all the force one can muster, a nail whose tip rests on the self. “To say ‘I’ is to lie,” Weil said, meaning not merely that 3 Illusions of Immortality 37 it is an illusion, but that it is an act of deception that must actively be destroyed (Weil 1970, p. 130). Buddhaghosa’s commentator, however, explains that the point here is about how one trains one’s attention on death, not about bringing one’s death about: “As a skilled man drilling a gem with a tool watches and keeps in mind only the hole he is drilling, not the gem’s colour, etc., so too the meditator wisely keeps in mind only the ceaseless dissolution of constructing activity, not the constructing activities” (Pm. 830; Vism. 1991, p. 847). So one focuses one’s attention, like a spotlight, on the activity of dissolution, foregrounding it in one’s field of vision and ignoring all else. This attention, however, does not bring about the dissolution of self, contra Weil. What it does is to shape one’s consciousness of the moment of death. Buddhaghosa says that a belief in immortality is the result of a confusion: “When he is confused about death, instead of taking death thus, ‘Death in every case is break-up of aggregates,’ he figures that it is a [lasting] being that dies, that it is a [lasting] being’s transmigration to another incarnation, and so on” (Vism. 544 [xvii. 113]). Near the time of death there is a slowing down of the activity of working memory (javana), which runs for five instead of seven moments (Vibh-a. 159). What are most remarkable in Buddhaghosa are his thoughts about the experience of death. For him, the very last moment of consciousness is an entirely unique mental state, unlike any other that has occurred in one’s life until that point. Suppose that the way you shut the fridge door determines whether the light stays on or not. Then you should be careful how you shut the door; otherwise you will waste a lot of electricity. Likewise with death; the final moment is crucial in the conservation of karma. The last moment of consciousness is the most important one in one’s entire life. For Buddhaghosa this near-death experience, or rather the at-death experience, does have future consequences. For there is, at it were, a cognitive equivalent of momentum, and the impetus of one’s cognitive life does not simply dissipate at the moment of death but has an impact on other, future, lives: An echo, or its like, supplies The figures here; connectedness By continuity denies Identity and otherness. (Vism. 554 [xvii. 165]; Vibh-a. 163) We have all been impacted on in this way, Buddhaghosa claims, because the very first moment of our conscious life was itself a recoil from the fallout of other, earlier, at-death experiences which preceded it. Here Buddhaghosa is clever in his choice of appropriate metaphors, avoiding any suggestion that any sort of personal identity over lives is involved: Here let the illustration of this consciousness be such things as an echo, a light, a seal impression, a looking-glass image […] for just as an echo, a light, a seal impression, and a shadow have respectively sound, etc., as their cause and come into being without going elsewhere, so also is this consciousness. (Vism. 554 [xvii. 166]) 38 J. Ganeri An echo, a reflection, a shadow: what do all these things have in common? They are reverberations of something else, something which is their sufficient cause, but they are not identical to that other thing. So too the last moment of consciousness, the at-death experience, casts a shadow, causes an echo, is reflected, leaves its imprint, in the flows or masses of consciousness that are to follow but which are not oneself. One does not survive death, but one is responsible for the manner in which one dies. If death is a falling, it is important that the falling does not cause a splash. If life is like looking in the fridge, and death like the state of the fridge when nobody is looking, then one wants to makes sure that one closes the door properly so that the light inside goes out. Buddhaghosa brilliantly expresses the idea that our concern is not for our individual afterlife but for a collective afterlife, the life after us of future humanity.1 Buddhaghosa claims that near-death experience takes one of three forms. It is either the memory of a past action that is of particular karmic significance (kamma); or it is the perception of an object that serves as the sign of such an action (kammanimitta); or it is the prospection of a future life-to-be (gati-nimitta) (Vism. 457 [xiv. 111]; 548–551 [xvii. 133–145]; Vibh-a. 157–160). Gethin provides an excellent analysis of these three states. “What is being said,” in the first case, “is that at the time of death a being may directly remember a past action, making the actual mental volition of that past action the object of the mind” (Gethin 2005, p. 166). Gethin suggests that “what seems to be envisaged, though the texts do not quite spell this out, is that this memory prompts a kind of reliving of the original action: one experiences again a wholesome or unwholesome state of mind.” In the second case, “what is envisaged is that at the time of death some past sense-object associated with a particular past action comes before the mind (i.e. is remembered) and once more prompts a kind of reliving of the experience.” Buddhaghosa’s example is that of someone who had had a shrine built, which then appears to him (Vibh-a. 156). Finally, in the third case, a being may see where he or she is about to go; this kind of object is not regarded as some conceptual symbol of one’s destiny but classified as a present sense-object perceived at the mind-door, in other words, it is truly an actual vision of the place one is headed for. (Gethin 2005, p. 167) Thus, one either actually relives the morally most significant act of one’s life, or one is presented with a sign pointing to that act, or else one anticipates being in a future state. It is striking that these are all states of what Envel Tulving calls autonoetic consciousness, or, more colorfully, mental time travel. Mental time travel refers to the possibility that a first-person perspective be located at subjective times other than the personal present. The phrase was introduced by Tulving in the course of explaining a distinction between three modes of consciousness, which he called anoetic, noetic, and autonoetic. A person possesses autonoetic consciousness who 1 That idea has recently been made the subject of a book-length philosophical treatment, in Samuel Scheffler’s Death and the After-life (Scheffler 2013). 3 Illusions of Immortality 39 “is capable of becoming aware of her own past as well as her own future; she is capable of mental time travel, roaming at will over what has happened as readily as over what might happen, independently of physical laws that govern the universe” (Tulving 1985, p. 5). It is manifest in memory when one remembers a past happening as if one were experiencing it again, and in anticipation when one projects oneself into a future experience, for example by imagining what it will be like. Autonoetic consciousness is thus a capacity to be aware of oneself in one’s own personal past or future: it is the name given to “the kind of consciousness that mediates an individual’s awareness of his or her existence and identity in subjective time extending from the personal past through the present to the personal future” (ibid., p. 1). With regard to its role in episodic memory, Tulving has described it as a capacity to revisit earlier experience, “a unique awareness of re-experiencing here and now something that happened before, at another time and in another place” (Tulving 1993, p. 68), and also as a capacity for representation, one “that allows adult humans to mentally represent and to become aware of their protracted existence across subjective time” (Wheeler et al. 1997, p. 335). Tulving views autonoesis as the source of a proprietary phenomenology: “It provides the characteristic phenomenal flavour of the experience of remembering. […] It is autonoetic consciousness that confers the special phenomenal flavour to the remembering of past events, the flavour that distinguishes remembering from other kinds of awareness, such as those characterizing perceiving, thinking, imagining, or dreaming” (Tulving 2005, pp. 1–3). William James put the idea in different words, saying that our reliving and preliving of past and future experience is distinguished by a sort of warmth and intimacy: A farther condition is required before the present image can be held to stand for a past original. That condition is that the fact imaged be expressly referred to the past, thought as in the past. […] But even this would not be memory. Memory requires more than mere dating of a fact in the past. It must be dated in my past. In other words, I must think that I directly experienced its occurrence. It must have […] “warmth and intimacy” […]. (James 1890, p. 650; emphases in original) As the very terminology implies, autonoesis is intended to identify a capacity to know or conceive of oneself in a special way, that is, as having a continuing existence in subjective time, reliving past experiences in their felt pastness and preliving or as-if-living future experiences in their felt futurity. When Tulving says that “organisms can behave and learn without (autonoetic) awareness, but they cannot remember without awareness” (Tulving 1985, p. 6), he has in mind the retrieval of past experiences as “personally experienced” (so that “episodic memory mediates the remembering of personally experienced events”). In remembering, one is aware of oneself as re-experiencing a past event. Buddhaghosa’s claim is that near-death experience is mental time travel, back to a significant past act or forward to an anticipated future condition. This sounds like an empirical claim, and we might wonder how well it bears up to empirical scrutiny. There have been various studies of reported near-death experience in Western 40 J. Ganeri patients. One, by Kenneth Ring, isolated ten recurring features: the awareness of being dead, positive emotions, out-of-body experiences, moving through a tunnel, communication with light, observation of colors, observation of a celestial landscape, meeting with deceased persons, experiencing a life review, and the presence of a border or a “point of no return” (Ring 1980).2 The psychiatrist Bruce Greyson went on to classify near-death experience according to four groups: (1) cognitive features (time distortion, thought acceleration, life review, revelation); (2) affective features (peace, joy, cosmic unity, encounter with light); (3) paranormal features (vivid sensory events, apparent extrasensory perception, precognitive visions, out-of-body experiences); and (4) transcendental features (sense of an “otherworldly” environment, sense of a mystical entity, sense of deceased/religious spirits, sense of border/“point of no return”) (Greyson 1983).3 Needless to say, not every feature is present in every case. We can see that the features Buddhaghosa is interested in, as bearing on the overall moral impact of one’s life, are the cognitive features, and he has emphasized life review and revelation. This is both strong empirical confirmation of Buddhaghosa’s claim, and a further indication of why he sees a relationship between near-death experience and our collective moral progress. Gethin sums up the overall view as follows: Stripped of its technicalities, what this Abhidhamma account of what happens in the mind at the time of dying seems to be saying is this: the last consciousness process of a given life operates in principle as a kind of summing up of that life; whatever has been most significant in that life will tend to come before the mind. Moreover, what comes before the mind at this point is what will play the principal role in determining the nature of the subsequent rebirth. […] So a being’s bhavaṅga itself represents a kind of summing up of what he or she did in his or her previous life; in crude terms, it represents a kind of balance sheet carried over from the previous life detailing how one did. (Gethin 2005, p. 167) This, though, makes it sound far too much as if there is some kind of personal identity in play, of just the sort Buddhaghosa is so careful to resist. I should rather put the idea as being that the ethical significance of near-death experience is that it projects the ethical balance sheet of each life into the future, where it leaves an imprint on or sounds like an echo in future psychological continua. At the precise moment of death, then, it seems that there is little one can do to change the course of events, but what one can do is to attend closely to the death experience itself. Why does Buddhaghosa so closely associate near-death experience with autonoesis and so with a sense of self, or at least a sense of the subjectivity and inwardness of the experience? Perhaps because he recognizes that it is always and exclusively one’s death that one experiences, that, as Heidegger famously put it, “Insofar as it ‘is’, death is always essentially my own” (Heidegger 1996, S. 223). Thus, death experience too is a kind of attention: autonoetic attention to the totality 2 The idea of communion with light is found in Rabindranath Tagore, while meeting with deceased persons resembles the Gothic noir. 3 There is a reference here to threshold images. 3 Illusions of Immortality 41 of one’s life as distilled into a moment of maximal significance to one, the condensation of one’s life into that single moment with which one most fully identifies. From a philosopher’s perspective, Buddhaghosa’s account raises some intriguing questions. Does it follow that all the less significant acts one performs have no subsequent moral impact? If so, then we have a very rarified form of act-consequentialism, in which just a single one from among all of one’s past acts is of any ultimate moral importance. What about the epistemology? Are near-death experiences veridical? If we feel inclined, as well we might be, to view the vision of future states as a kind of prospection, should we also think the same of the autonoetic memory of one’s past deeds? In other words, how does one know that the life that flashes before one’s eyes is indeed one’s own? Again, how does near-death experience know which past action has the maximal moral significance? How does it make its selection? I cannot answer these fascinating philosophical questions here, and perhaps they are anyway tangential or irrelevant in an exploration of the significance that death holds for each of us from the first-person perspective. Instead I will turn to the second author I want to discuss, Fernando Pessoa. 3 Fernando Pessoa’s Fiction of the Interlude The seal impression, the echo, of Buddhaghosa’s final moment of consciousness might well have left its imprint on the life-continuum of Fernando Pessoa. In his unfinished modernist anti-novel, The Book of Disquiet, Pessoa reflects and reflects again on the phenomenology of death and the afterlife: And then I wonder what this thing is that we call death. I don’t mean the mystery of death, which I can’t begin to fathom, but the physical sensation of ceasing to live. Humanity is afraid of death, but indecisively. The normal man […] rarely looks with horror at the abyss of nothing […]. And nothing is less worthy of a thinking man than to see death as a slumber. Why a slumber, if death doesn’t resemble sleep? Basic to sleep is the fact that we wake up from it, as we presumably do not from death. […] Death doesn’t resemble slumber, I said, since in slumber one is alive and sleeping, and I don’t know how death can resemble anything at all for us, since we have no experience of it, nor anything to compare it to. (Pessoa 2001, p. 40) Here we have the refrigerator light illusion again. To think of death as sleep is to imagine it as a state that continues although the door on life has been shut, and that, Pessoa exactly observes, is a mistake. We should not extrapolate in that way from the known to the unknown: “We generally colour our ideas of the unknown with our notions of the known. If we call death a sleep, it’s because it seems like a sleep on the outside; if we call death a new life, it’s because it seems like something different from life” (ibid., p. 66). As for the phenomenology of dying, Buddhaghosa has already answered Pessoa’s question, for he has told us that it feels like traveling in mental time to another place, past or future. Buddhaghosa, recall, says that the way death manifests itself is as absence, and Pessoa brilliantly expands on the theme: “Whoever lives 42 J. Ganeri like me doesn’t die: he terminates, wilts, devegetates. The place where he was remains without him being there; the street where he walked remains without him being seen on it; the house where he lived is inhabited by not-him. That’s all, and we call it nothing […]” (Pessoa 2001, p. 412). This then is how to imagine the afterlife: we imagine the world exactly as we know it, but airbrush ourselves out of the picture. There is an imagined absence in the imagined scene, and that is what it is to imagine one’s nonexistence, rather than a blackness or a dream, or any other state in which some semblance of subjectivity or first-personal perspective is maintained. To imagine being dead is to imagine the world from what Thomas Nagel famously called “the view from nowhere” (Nagel 1986). And thus immortality really is an illusion. As Pessoa puts it, “How vain is all our striving to create, under the spell of the illusion of not dying!” (Pessoa 2001, p. 412). There is, though, another thought in Pessoa, and a more complicated one. It is the idea that in death we are more real than we are in life. It is not death that should be likened to sleep but life itself: “What we call life is the slumber of our real life, the death of what we really are. […] We’re dead when we think we’re living; we start living when we die” (Pessoa 2001, p. 178). Pessoa recognizes, and even embraces, the paradox and absurdity of the thought: “I’ve always felt that virtue lay in obtaining what was out of one’s reach, in living where one isn’t, in being more alive after death than during life, in achieving something impossible, something absurd, in overcoming—like an obstacle—the world’s very reality” (ibid., p. 145). The impossible act is to imagine one’s life as an “interlude” between one death and another: “Life is thus an interval, a link, a relation, but a relation between what has passed and what will pass, a dead interval between Death and Death” (Pessoa 2001, p. 412). “Whatever be this interlude played out under the spotlight of the sun and the spangles of the stars, surely there’s no harm in knowing it’s an interlude” (ibid., p. 348). “[M]y salvation lay in interspaces of unconsciousness” (ibid., p. 463). Pessoa offers us one clue as to what he means in saying that death is more real than life. It has to do with the fact already noted, that death is a “view from nowhere”: Since every noble soul desires to live life in its entirety—experiencing all things, all places and all feelings—and since this is objectively impossible, the only way for a noble soul to live life is subjectively; only by denying life can it be lived in its totality. (Ibid., p. 232) To visualise the inconceivable in dreams is one of the great triumphs that I, as advanced a dreamer as I am, only rarely attain. To dream, for example, that I’m simultaneously, separately, severally the man and the woman on a stroll that a man and a woman are taking along the river. […] How absurd this seems! But everything is absurd, and dreaming least of all. (Ibid., p. 157) The highest ideal in life is to experience everything from every point of view, which is in effect to inhabit simultaneously every subjective existence. That is impossible, and the next best thing is not to experience anything at all, since what the two states have in common is the refusal to be imprisoned within a single subjective stance. 3 Illusions of Immortality 43 Forced to occupy a single first-person perspective, we are as if imprisoned on the surface of life, hoping for an immortality that lies in seeing the world without ourselves in it. This thought might help us to understand better something in Buddhaghosa. Consciousness rises and falls like a sine wave, in his view, lapsing into intermediate states of bhavaṅga, and the purpose of each wave of consciousness is to shift attention from one object to another. The purpose of an entire life is analogous, its function to shift the summary or balance sheet that is held in the life-continuum, the bhavaṅga, from one to another. So a life is framed by two death experiences, and indeed its sole moral function is to effect a change in their contents. Cessation, nirvāṇa, is the dissipation of this process and that is what, for Buddhaghosa, counts as the highest ideal in life. Unlike Buddhaghosa though, Pessoa understands that this is an impossible ideal, and indeed its very impossibility is what makes it, for him, worthwhile. What the illusion with which I began reveals is that it is a mistake to think we know something about those regions of our mind to which we do not actively attend, based on merely an extrapolation from our attentive states; just as it is a mistake to think we can know the state of the unseen light from its state when we actively attend to it. One of the most recurring themes in Pessoa is that we must show some respect for the unknowable, for it is the framing narrative that makes the more mundane narrative of our actual lives, consisting in what is indeed known, experienced, or seen, have meaning. We do not know “what is beyond the theatre doors” (Pessoa 2001, p. 348), whether it is even life or death. This is the source of the absurdity of life: our impossible desire to know what we know to be unknowable: “Let’s absurdify life, from east to west” (ibid., p. 372), he says. For Pessoa, the endeavor to be conscious of unconsciousness is absurd: The consciousness of life’s unconsciousness is the oldest tax levied on the intelligence. (Ibid., p. 68) That’s all, and we call it nothing; but not even this tragedy of negation can be staged to applause, for we don’t even know for sure if it’s nothing […]. (Ibid., p. 42) Let us affirm—and grasp, which would be impossible—that we are conscious of not being conscious, and that we are not what we are. (Ibid., p. 413) Of these absurd attempts to be conscious of that of which one is, by definition, not conscious, and whose absurdity one fully understands, the attempts to imagine the afterlife and to imagine being all subjectivity at once are the supreme examples. Yet it is just this absurdity which manifests itself in the very character of our longings, which are, Pessoa says, “half-tones of the soul’s consciousness”: The feelings that hurt most, the emotions that sting most, are those that are absurd: the longing for impossible things, precisely because they are impossible […]. All these half-tones of the soul’s consciousness create in us a painful landscape, an eternal sunset of what we are. (Ibid., p. 196) To realize a dream, one must forget it, tearing away his attention from it. To realize is thus to not realize. Life is full of paradoxes, as roses are of thorns. (Ibid., p. 322) 44 J. Ganeri So the strange, dream-like quality of the lives we lead, and their inherent absurdity, comes about as a result of our incessant longing, as it were, to attend to the unattended region in the visual field, to see it as unattended, to render central the peripherality of vision. We know we can only do this precisely by not directing our attention there, and so the only way to realize our longing is by noting the tangential and ethereal effects it has on what is held in view. The stage is the place on which attention falls, but what we dream of is the interlude. Exactly so too with our desire to know the afterlife, something in principle unknowable because defined as the absence of our consciousness. This absurd longing shows up instead in “the half-tones of the soul’s consciousness” while we are alive, and is the source of our most intense emotions. This is perhaps as near as Pessoa gets to Buddhaghosa’s concept of bhavaṅga, the echoes of past balance sheets that reverberate in present lives. For Buddhaghosa too this is a fiction of the interlude, for his opinion was that our minds revert back to a glimpse of those echoes in between every two distinct moments of attentive consciousness. They are the unattended default state, the baseline from which consciousness arises and to which it again falls back. They are the seal imprints of past deaths that haunt our present lives. I wondered earlier why it was that the phenomenology of dying, the experience of death, should be that of an autonoesis or temporal subjectivity, a flying off in mental time to another time and place, something that is especially puzzling because the idea of autonoetic consciousness seems to bring with it a sense of self as identical over time. Here again I think Pessoa comes to Buddhaghosa’s aid. He is commenting on something I’m sure we have all experienced, coming across some of our old writings and reading them with a dreadful sense of alienation and familiarity: [I]n this case there’s something besides the flow of personality between its own banks: there’s an absolute other, an extraneous self that was me. […] It’s as if I’d found an old picture that I know is of me, with a different height and with features I don’t recognize, but that is undoubtedly me, terrifyingly I. (Pessoa 2001, p. 188) I do not recognize myself at such times, in the sense of using some features of the presented self in order to identify it as me. Indeed, I barely acknowledge myself in those old writings at all. And yet I know that it is me, and the combination of absolute familiarity and total alienation is indeed terrifying. I wonder if this could be the autonoesis of death experience, at once a summing up of one’s moral debt, done from the inside and wholly first-personally, and at the same time a taste of alienation, of distancing, of knowing that whatever it was or will be, it is no longer I. I relive the past but relive it with a sense that I am already traveling in foreign lands. 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