John Martin Fischer has been writing about the metaphysical and axiological questions raised by mortality for over twenty years, and this latest volume reflects his broad and careful thinking about why death is bad, why immortality is possible, and the significance of near-death experiences. This is a book meant for collegiate courses rather than a monograph breaking new ground, and it is clearly reasoned and well-paced. I will focus this review on the conversations the book enables, noting the few spots where I had questions or misgivings about the arguments. One textual point: Fischer rightly clarifies that death (the state of no longer being alive) is not the same as dying (an event that sometimes involves pain). But since one's ‘death’ is commonly used to refer to the moment that a person dies, I will seek to avoid the ambiguity by replacing the word with ‘being dead’.
In chapter 1, Fischer notes that the phrase ‘the meaning of life’ is daunting and that it suggests that human beings were created by God with a purpose (2, 183). He therefore sidesteps the ‘of’ question to focus instead on meaning ‘in’ life. However, I think both that the ‘of’ question is coherent and that questions about the whole of life are not restricted to theists, so further discussion should identify the relationship between individual meaningful activities ‘in’ life and the question of what they all add up to. In addition, Fischer argues that even though a meaningful activity will have to be one that the individual finds engaging, and so meaningfulness involves a subjective element, subjective meaningfulness will not be sufficient since a passion for insignificant activities (like devoting one's life to a pet goldfish, counting the blades of grass in the yard, or transcribing copies of War and Peace by hand) would still not be meaningful. A meaningful life also requires an objective element: the activities to which one devotes oneself must be worthy of that devotion. Fischer proposes that the question of which actions are objectively worthy would be decided by social consensus. But if objective worth is decided intersubjectively, it is not clear how one avoids relativism. Or, for that matter, how one avoids the conclusion that, say, devotion to white supremacy leads to meaningful lives.
Chapter 2 on the meaning of ‘death’ introduces some surprisingly tricky questions about what states count. For example, if one's mind and heart stop for a couple of minutes but the person is revived, was one ‘dead’ or only ‘near death’? If the still living person was only ‘near death’, then how would we categorize someone who is cryogenically frozen so that their mind/brain stops for a couple of years, and is then revived? Are they dead and resurrected? Fischer is right that these questions do not yet have clear answers.
In chapter 3, Fischer makes a good distinction between whether being dead is bad and whether it should be feared. The latter presupposes one's answer to the former, I judge, and if one ceases to exist when one dies, then the former turns on whether we can coherently speak of something as bad for a person if it involves no bad experiences. This leads Fischer to a discussion of the interests that people have that do not involve pain or pleasure, or that do not involve any experiences at all (such as an interest in not having one's reputation trashed, even if one never finds out). This discussion is welcome since it pushes us to think of persons as more complex than simply subjects of pain and pleasure. In what I agree is a decisive example, Fischer gives the case of a person who suffers a stroke and loses her capacities for pain, suffering, or worry. Like the badness of a stroke, the badness of being dead can be understood in terms of the loss of all those goods that require agency. Fischer argues that this account of the badness of being dead may not eliminate fear altogether, but it should diminish it so that one no longer dreads the state of being dead. This is the only part of the argument I found unpersuasive. Imagine being told that one would soon have a stroke and that one would lose one's capacities to plan for the future, to be creative, or to recognize loved ones. I think that it would be altogether rational to dread this loss, and it would not be reassuring to hear that ‘it is not as though you are going to be tortured’ (62, emphasis in the original). I think that, given this account, being dead should be feared to the degree that the loss of one's capacities is bad, and that loss is usually pretty bad.
In chapter 4, Fischer explores questions about the timing of one's death. He discusses a Mirror Image Argument from Lucretius, according to which ‘[t]he time after we die is the mirror image of the time before we were born. Thus, we should not deem it a bad thing that we die when we actually die, rather than later’ (68). He uses this argument to illuminate the badness of being dead, but the question is addressed at a level of abstraction that drains it of the details that would make our intuitions about the timing of death clearer. Obviously, we deem it a bad thing if a parent in a car accident dies before they are able to get their child to safety or (less dramatically but with the same logic) if a parent with cancer dies before they were done raising their children. In fact, we deem it a bad thing whenever a person dies with possibilities for doing good before they were able to realize them. Lucretius's argument that being-dead-after-one-has-lived is not worse than not-being-alive-before-one-was-born, like the argument that being dead should not be feared since it is not painful, may help one think more clearly about the metaphysics of death, but the badness of the timing of one's death will turn on more mundane matters. Fischer arrives at the same point, I think, when he concludes that the timing of death is bad when ‘it thwarts categorical preferences about the future’ (82). But, if I can be forgiven the pun, the discussion of the Mirror Image Argument is pretty bloodless.
Like chapter 3, chapter 5 on the meaning of ‘immortality’ notes that the way we think about being dead is being transformed by developments in medicine. Fischer distinguishes between ‘true immortality’, the promise made in several religious traditions that death will be overcome altogether, and ‘medical immortality’, the prolongation of this-worldly life through scientific means. Recently, the average length of human lives has nearly doubled (88). In a decade or two, could scientists use stem cells or tiny ‘nano-bots’ to continually clean up damage to the body and brain caused by ageing, so that people live, say, 6,000 years? Such questions raise fascinating issues, though they do not connect to most traditional religious thinking about immortality and Fischer rightly worries that environmental crises will make them moot.
In chapter 6, Fischer considers some of the arguments that immortality is actually an unrecognizable or perhaps even incoherent thing to wish for. Typically, the fact that our time is limited makes our choices urgent and our lives precious. Wouldn't the unlimited, riskless, stageless time of immortality empty one's actions of their significance? In chapter 7, Fischer considers some of the arguments that immortality is actually an undesirable thing. Though a person might not run out of interesting things to do in 1,000 years, or perhaps even in 1,000,000 years (as difficult as such a period is to imagine!), these time frames are hardly a tiny fraction of an infinite amount of time. Would immortality not eventually become boring? Despite his naturalism, Fischer defends both the coherence and the desirability of immortality.
The book ends by considering the case of near-death experiences (NDEs) in which a person in mortal crisis (i) experiences floating above their body, (ii) reviews the events in their life, and (iii) feels that they are travelling through a dark tunnel towards a light, typically (iv) guided by a deceased loved one or a religious figure. Chapters 8 and 9 respectively consider whether such experiences or the transformative effects on those who undergo them provide evidence of the supernatural. To both questions, Fischer argues no. In the first place, there have been many examples of people who have an NDE claiming information they could not know without supernatural explanation, but Fischer finds no examples that are not trivial, false, or inexplicable through natural means. His response to the fact that NDEs inspire deep awe and transform people's lives in profound ways is more elaborate. Fischer argues that the four parts of an NDE listed above, ‘the apparent or “surface” story in an NDE’, are ‘just a vehicle for expressing a deeper meaning – a story that is meaningful to us, quite apart from supernatural content’ (174). Fischer argues that these four elements are experienced as (or later interpreted as) a journey whose symbols help people with transitions in their lives. Even negative NDEs (e.g. descents to hell) can have this therapeutic role. This is a provocative proposal that reminds me of the psychoanalytic approach to religious narratives by Carl Jung, though Fischer does not explore the questions about how these therapeutic narratives are generated by the mind nor how religious communities encourage and employ them in their stories or practices.
In sum, then, this is a text that would stimulate a rich set of conversations for a class in philosophy of religion.
