1. Near-Death Experiences and Spiritual Experiences

Fischer calls himself an ‘NDE realist’ (Fischer, Reference Fischer2020, pp. 148, 181), meaning only that he believes that, in brushes with death, people do indeed subjectively or psychologically experience themselves to be outside of their bodies, traveling toward a light, crossing over a river, or passing over into another realm (Fischer, Reference Fischer2020, p. 144), not that he believes anything supernatural actually happens. Still, Fischer argues at length that NDEs can be profoundly meaningful even if we live in a physicalistic reality that bars the possibility of our souls leaving our bodies to join our friends, relatives, and divinities to live out our everlasting lives in a wondrous transcendent dimension. NDEs are meaningful primarily because of their narrative nature, and Fischer identifies the common story that unfolds as ‘a voyage from a known (or familiar) place to a relatively unknown (or unfamiliar) situation or status, guided by a benevolent parental (or authority) figure (or figures)’ (Fischer, Reference Fischer2020, p. 174).

Fischer explains that this narrative journey counts as a spiritual experience because ‘the self is not the focus of the experience’ and ‘the content [of the experience] is present as objectively true – ultra-real’.Footnote ⁴ Additionally, NDEs inspire awe and wonder, even if we deny that they serve as evidence of divinity or supernatural survival. Fischer developed this line of argument with co-author Benjamin Mitchell-Yellin, noting that we can experience awe with natural grandeur (such as the night sky) or with human grandeur (such as great achievements in art or science) or with the birth of one's children (Fischer and Mitchell-Yellin, Reference Fischer and Mitchell-Yellin2016, p. 159), yet the presence of the supernatural is not needed to elicit awe in these cases. Also, one can find wondrous narrative spiritual meaning in an LSD experience without thinking there to be anything but natural causes for such an experience (Fischer and Mitchell-Yellin, Reference Fischer and Mitchell-Yellin2016, pp. 161–63). So, physicalist explanations don't undermine the meaning of NDEs. Though we can't reasonably hope for an eternal afterlife if soul/body dualism is false, the stories of solidarity and guidance that unfold in NDEs do offer us a different kind of hope because they ‘resonate with us, comfort us, and transform us’ (Fischer, Reference Fischer2020, p. 180).

I think that Fischer has gotten a lot right, and that the significance of spiritual experience does not depend on our settling the debate between physicalists and dualists or between naturalists and supernaturalists, because the significance has centrally to do with how the experience transforms us. But I also think that, if we are pursuing a general account of spiritual experience (which is not Fischer's main goal), a focus on NDEs could lead us to overstate the role that narrative plays. Some spiritual experiences are journeys, but not all. Still, Fischer's discussion of spiritual experience in the context of NDEs is a welcome advancement over his appeal to spiritual experiences in the context of his response to Bernard Williams. In objecting to Williams, Fischer is focused mainly on examples such as prayer, meditation, and yoga, which are more like activities intentionally performed.Footnote ⁵ Alternately referring to them as ‘experiences’ and ‘activities’, Fischer includes spiritual experiences on a list of repeatable pleasures that ‘seem capable of providing the basis for positive categorical desires, even in an immortal life’.Footnote ⁶

By contrast, in his exploration of NDEs, which presumably aren't the sort of experience one would typically seek out on purpose, Fischer is instead analyzing what are clearly unintentional spiritual experiences and getting to the heart of their significance. It is important to clarify the ways in which spiritual experiences ‘help to propel one forward’ in life (Fischer, Reference Fischer2020, p. 126), but not in the form of a desire or an activity that one desires to perform, keeping in mind that spiritual experiences aren't always intentional or easily repeatable activities. On the emotional end of things, Fischer places much emphasis on awe and wonder, which is a fairly common move in the analysis of spiritual or religious experience,Footnote ⁷ but Fischer also discusses love and social solidarity in his account of NDEs (Fischer, Reference Fischer2020, p. 177, p. 180). I think that this element of love – which I am inclined to call the element of connection – should be made more central to an analysis of spiritual experience, though it shouldn't be focused exclusively on the human social, or even the social.Footnote ⁸

We can feel connected to other people, but also to other animals, and also to the world, and also to oneself. This metaphor of connection is one we commonly use, though it doesn't show that we are literally connected to anything. I think it just means that we are returning to an experience of our spirit or vitality – our joie de vivre – after having felt disconnected from self, world and others. Although it may at first seem paradoxical, I think that the self is a main reason why we come to feel disconnected, or at least there are aspects of oneself that become excessive and stifle and strangle spirit, a set of dispositions relating to identity that can be marked out as ‘ego’.Footnote ⁹ Iris Murdoch has identified the ‘fat, relentless ego’ as a problem common to both religion and morality.Footnote ¹⁰ Bypassing the term ‘religion’, I take the primary spiritual concern to be that the ego disconnects us from a more spontaneous, lived self, while also disconnecting us from others and the world, making us feel separate, alienated, empty, fake, and also bored; in which case, it is no surprise that spiritual experiences are notably absent of ego. I am not appealing here to any particular psychoanalytic idea of ego or any theory of personal identity over time. I am just pursuing the common sense observation that human beings are very self-absorbed, for social reasons and for existential reasons, and also for the reason that we're highly self-aware and, well, no matter where you go, there you are.

I think that spiritual experience can come to us at different times in different ways in varying degrees of wonder, vitality, and connection, and not just in rare, special experiences set far apart from everyday life. Rather, spiritual experiences sit on a spectrum with ordinary experiences, not found only in NDEs, meditation and prayer, but in times with family and friends, or walks alone in nature or in the neighborhood, or in religious services or at festivals, or at art galleries or while making art or making dinner, or when you are just listening to music on your headphones on the subway. Many associate spiritual experience with transcendent or supernatural realities, and I am not here to argue that such ontologies are untrue, only that the metaphysics doesn't determine the core experiential and normative significance of spirituality.Footnote ¹¹

2. Varieties of Immortality

When it comes to the question of how spiritual experience affects the desirability of immortality, a physicalist naturalist could only be talking about some enduring embodied form of extended life, while someone open to transcendent metaphysics could be thinking of a soul leaving the body for a better place, perhaps finding a more perfect body, or perhaps returning to life in another body, and so on. Now, if we are talking about some far out transhumanist possibilities, like cryopreservation, digital mind-uploading, and body switching, then it may turn out that we can achieve a kind of resurrection or reincarnation without souls, so it behooves us to keep in mind that extended life for the individual could, in theory, be achieved in numerous ways, and it is also worth noting that which options are available affects how desirable each of the other options are. In particular, I think that the perceived availability of a more perfect eternal life in communion with one's soul mates in the oceanic loving light of the divine tends to cast any pursuit of earthbound physical immortal into shadow, since clinging to this life could be perceived as just foolishly, greedily putting off the big reward.Footnote ¹²

However, Bernard Williams believes that visions of supernatural immortality fail to explain how we wouldn't get bored with bliss, that is, if we took with us to the afterlife the intellectual faculties that he believes give our present life worth. He thinks that those imagining forever in heaven have to assume that we'd lose our reflective consciousness, becoming something like lobotomized lotus eaters (Williams, Reference Williams and Fischer1993, pp. 86–87). I don't think this is right, and I think that people get chronically or existentially bored for reasons other than just continued life, one danger actually being too much egoic emphasis on our supposedly higher intellectual functions, to be explored more in what follows. But I do want to say something here about how belief in this transcendent option influences spirituality. For instance, if there is a God, then it would be rather odd for God to create us and then just let us die while God lives on, which appears to be part of the historical reason that the Judaic tradition gradually developed a belief in an eternal afterlife, though there is negligible Biblical support for this view (Gillman, Reference Gillman, Post and Binstock2004, 94–108). Such anti-abandonment logic likely influences a theist's interest in immortality, so that the desirability question is not entirely about the goodness of prolonged life in itself. Someone who is spiritual but not supernaturalist presumably must reject the heaven idea, but can still have desirability concerns extrinsic to extended life's basic goodness, such as overpopulation, intergenerational fairness, equality of access to life extension technology, etc. In this case, extrinsic concerns may tend to count against the option of radical life extension, since the pursuit of life extension would likely create so many extrinsic problems in earthly society, no matter how desirable longer life is in itself.

As I unpack the desirability question here, I will be focused on the intrinsic question of the desirability of radically extended lifespans, and to my mind, the intrinsic question is clarified if we bracket the possibility of a more perfect transcendent immortality. I believe this supernatural option guarantees a bit too much on faith while producing a comparative bias against physical life, which has influenced religious and secular minds alike to neglect a deeper, more sacred appreciation of our immanent earthbound existence. I'd also like to keep it as real as possible, though I'll push at the bounds a bit to keep the thought experiment interesting. Current conservative medical science cautions us not to get our hopes up too high if we have them, pointing to a biological law of mortality governing human lifespans. Age 85 seems to be the average for humans on one estimate, with 115 being the upper limit that only a tiny minority will ever breach, barring genetic modification (Olshansky and Carnes, Reference Olshansky and Carnes2019, S7–S12). Of course, for transhumanists, genetic modification is just par for the course, and Aubrey de Grey and others continue to pursue numerous other strategies for considerably prolonged life.Footnote ¹³ I suspect that humans lifespans will increase, but even then, the question of desirability I want to ask is not whether it is sensible to actively desire to increase the human lifespan.

If I were to imagine being offered a fantastical immortality potion or a free spot in a cryopreservation clinic, personally, I am not sure I would choose more life if it weren't already in the genetic cards, so to speak, unless I had some strong reason for the extra time, like if it is the only way to save the planet, or something like that. When I opt for health, it is more for the purpose of experiencing life as healthy, not so that I will experience more life. To put some personal cards on the table, I feel like I have experienced plenty of life, and I feel like I ‘get the idea’, which is a somewhat bored thing to say, I'll admit. I will also confess my own view (though I am not trying to convince anyone of it) that there is no God or cosmic purpose or immaterial soul or eternal afterlife or deep metaphysical free will. Though many think such conditions are needed for there to be meaning to life, I don't think so, and so I tend not to angle my emotions toward transcendent hope. But if I – even with a personality and character that might come off as bored and pessimistic in a way – were born in a future generation that lived longer in healthy bodies because of developments in medical science, and a radically extended life of 200 or 300 years or more were in the genetic cards for me, could that be desirable? Sure, I think so, and I feel that my overall attitude is informed by, or is at least consistent with, spiritual experience or spiritual wisdom, as I will explain. I will also say more about the distinction between an active and passive sense of desirability as we get closer to the end, but first we've got to do the work of discharging Williams’ boredom thesis, with an eye to what boredom really is.

3. Boredom and Ego

Is it possible to get bored with life itself? I mean, would that really be boredom per se, rather than some more complex disaffection? Peter Toohey disagrees with Lars Svendsen on the matter, both of whom have recently written books on the subject of boredom.Footnote ¹⁴ Toohey distinguishes between simple boredom (also called situational boredom), chronic boredom (also called habitual boredom), and existential boredom. Simple or situational boredom is being bored by something or someone or by a circumstance because of some features of whatever it is that is boring – and also, it should be conceded, because of one's inability to be engaged by the boring thing. Perhaps one person would be bored in a given situation but not another, but regardless, once one has been relieved of the boring thing, one can return to one's capacity for engagement. Chronic boredom is more persistent and doesn't go away when the typically boring things do, correlating with chemical imbalance, risk-taking and sensation seeking. Existential boredom is supposed to be something more profound than a psychological or behavioral disorder, but Toohey suspects that the term more likely designates a hybrid of simple boredom, chronic boredom and depression that's just been overintellectualized, especially by moderns hung up on their self-importance (Toohey, Reference Toohey2011, Ch 2. for chronic boredom, pp. 141–42 for a key statement about existential boredom).

Although Svendsen is more interested than Toohey in earnestly exploring the phenomenon of existential boredom and does seem to think that existential boredom is in some sense warranted, there is a way in which the two writers’ diagnoses of existential boredom align. Svendsen's diagnosis for existential boredom is basically Romanticism: ‘The problem for the Romantic is precisely that he does not recognize his own size; he has to be bigger than everything else, transgress all boundaries and devour the whole world’ (Svendsen, Reference Svendsen and Irons2005, p. 142). Also from this modern European tradition, Svendsen says we get the idea of needing a personal meaning in the form of a ‘unique meaning for me, as something that alone can give my life meaning’ (Svendsen, Reference Svendsen and Irons2005, p. 153). In his 2005 book, Svendsen gains much inspiration and guidance from Heidegger's account of boredom, adding that ‘according to Heidegger, the emptiness that crops up in this more profound form of boredom is the emptiness left by “our proper self”’ (Svendsen, Reference Svendsen and Irons2005, p. 120).Footnote ¹⁵

I say that Toohey and Svendsen have a similar diagnosis for existential boredom, because they both think it results from a sense of self-importance, an explanation that isn't necessary to explain simple boredom. One sees oneself on a grand scale, and then on that grand scale, one sees something fundamentally lacking with the world as a whole. This kind of boredom seems to be driven more by an egoically inspired evaluation than by mere loss of stimulation. I think that the question whether existential boredom is a legitimate category, emotion, or attitude isn't really about whether humans can be said to get worn out with life psychologically, as if we were only wired to handle a certain quantity of life or repetition. I think it comes down to the question whether the judgment that life itself is boring is valid (and this is a judgment, not just an emotion), and by ‘life itself’ I don't mean life under such and such circumstances, but life understood with respect to its most general features – life in general, or life as such. There is an anthropocentric attitude, which I will be critiquing further in what follows, that tends to produce a negative assessment of life itself, life apart from human activity, that looks down upon animal life and nature, and this, I suggest, plants the toxic seeds of existential boredom. Svendsen, for instance, reinforces the problem by glorifying humans over other animals for having the exalted ability to experience meaning and its lack, declaring that, for this reason, animals can't really feel boredom, at least not what he takes to be the more important kind.Footnote ¹⁶ This is a source of irritation for Toohey, who thinks the more important kinds of boredom are situational or chronic, which other animals certainly do experience, for instance, when they are locked in cages as pets, or in zoos or in animal experimentation labs.Footnote ¹⁷

In his 2005 book, Svendsen seems to have no solution for overcoming boredom, rejecting Heidegger's own optimistic stance as just more problematic Romantic overreach (Svendsen, Reference Svendsen and Irons2005, p. 132). But in a 2017 article, he responds to Toohey, and accesses the theories of meaning in life provided by Harry Frankfurt and Susan Wolf to give more shape to his talk of meaning. Svendsen admits that existential boredom bears a resemblance to depression, but argues that this is no reason for dismissing it, since existential boredom can be set apart from depression as a kind of lack of meaning, rather than just psychological dysfunction. But what is it to regain meaning? Following Wolf, Svendsen agrees that there is a subjective side and an objective side to meaning, in that having meaning in life involves combining subjective attraction and objective attractiveness, or as Wolf also puts it, meaning in life comes from active engagement in projects of worth.Footnote ¹⁸ Svendsen observes that the problem of existential boredom puts a lot of weight on the subjective condition, but still follows Wolf in affirming the idea that ‘in order to have a meaningful life, a person must care about what he fills his life with. You must be committed to something, because commitment gives life substantial meaning’ (Svendsen, Reference Svendsen, Gardiner and Haladyn2017, p. 211).

What I would like to note about this kind of suggestion is that it solves what looks like a problem caused by ego in some way or other by building up that ego, making it more ‘substantial’, by giving yourself goals that are as important as you can make them, and then taking strenuous control over your life so that you are continually committed to them. I wonder if this kind of life strain is really a good long-term remedy, or can it become the problem by caging the spirit? One could put the point in terms of freedom, as Brian O'Connor has in his interrogation of an array of modern and contemporary European criticisms of idleness. O'Connor identifies a ‘worthiness myth’ which he finds in philosophers as diverse as Kant, Sartre, Frankfurt, and Christine Korsgaard: ‘It is essentially a thesis of the Enlightenment, and it continues to sustain the remarkable idea that we must build and perfect the self as an autonomous moral entity if we are to become properly human’.Footnote ¹⁹ It is a myth, because it hasn't been proven that humans naturally desire a higher or more substantial self or that we should meet this normative demand or that substantial commitments are required for meaning in life. For instance, in Kant's well-known illustration of the categorical imperative in the Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, Kant does not explain what would motivate a wanton idler to consider whether it is his moral duty to cultivate his talents to make himself useful: ‘This would seem like too much effort for someone who had already lived well and in his own way’ (O'Connor, Reference O'Connor2018, p. 46).

O'Connor suggests that freedom can mean being who you already are rather than working yourself up to be something more, and I'm suggesting a corollary about freedom from boredom – that existential boredom becomes more of a threat for those who are in pursuit of the self-inflation enterprise.Footnote ²⁰ In summary, to stay connected with self, others, and the world – while preventing existential boredom – it is wise (i) not to pursue the project of self so fervently, and (ii) to also remain sensitive to what makes life itself worthwhile and meaningful, apart from one's own desires, activities, and projects. I'll be bringing this perspective into a discussion of Williams and his critics.

4. Categorical Desire and Desirability without Desire

Williams’ case for our eventual justified boredom with a very long life appears to access the mood of existential boredom. His point is that death is made bad by our having categorical desires that get thwarted by death, but if we live life too long, we'll run out of the desires that make death bad. To exemplify his point, Williams uses Elina Makropulos, or EM, from Karel Čapek's play The Makropulos Case.Footnote ²¹ At the end of the play, EM confesses that she is 337, though she appears only 37, because it was at that age that she was forced by her father to test out an elixir of immortality, and she wound up being the only one to consume it, therefore enduring her uniquely prolonged life alone. After her confession, EM explains to the men in the room the feelings she has had for the last two hundred years:

Williams believes that EM's feelings would be our own after a similar stretch of existence, though it should be acknowledged that, in this scene, EM was also ‘very’ drunk on whisky, sniffed what was said to be cocaine ‘or something’, and was also poisoned by one of the men. Still, in vino veritas, and I take it as plausible that someone could develop such negative attitudes toward life in EM's position, but should we expect that every long-lived person would be so distraught?

Entertaining the idea that this question gets settled by categorical desires, let us more closely define that concept. Williams specifically defines it as a desire that decides whether you continue living, which he clarifies with the case of someone rationally contemplating suicide, that is, someone who is not under undue influence of emotions or a psychiatric condition, but simply trying to sort out whether there is sufficient reason for believing it is worth it to keep going. In this context, the sort of desire that would serve as a genuine reason to keep living would be a categorical desire, though you don't have to be contemplating suicide to have them.Footnote ²³ Now, will any desire do? Not according to Williams’ intuition, because he excludes ‘just the desire to remain alive’,Footnote ²⁴ though he doesn't here explain why it must be something more than that. But let's hold that thought and next think about how these desires relate to getting bored.

According to Lisa Bortolotti and Yujin Nagasawa, who are keen on the distinction between situational (or simple) boredom and habitual (or chronic) boredom, EM strikes them as someone affected with the condition of chronic boredom (which gets characterized here as boredom with life), afflicting those having normal lifespans as well: ‘the subject is not bored with something specific, but with life in general. Among the phenomena correlated with habitual boredom or directly stemming from it, we find inactivity, withdrawal, anxiety, alienation, anti-social behavior, alcohol and drug abuse, and even depression and suicide’ (Bortolotti and Nagasawa, Reference Bortolotti and Nagasawa2009, pp. 268–69). As these critics of Williams observe, even those living normal lifespans can lose their categorical desires because of their complex and unfortunate disaffection, and one begins to suspect that Čapek and Williams are unjustifiably projecting this disorder onto immortals by simply selecting an imagined case who would be especially prone to an extremely aggravated death wish.

Connie Rosati also emphasizes this point, concluding that ‘it is hard to separate Emilia's fate from the peculiarities of her situation’, forced by her father as she was into her immortal journey alone, ‘leaving her to drift through time,’ adding: ‘Without the capacity to love – to connect – nothing our lives might hold out will seem to us to matter’ (Rosati, Reference Rosati, Bradley, Feldman and Johansson2012, pp. 377–38). Rosati also critiques Williams’ appeal to categorical desires. She believes that, even if EM could not, we could imagine many other individuals who could ‘derive happiness just from the things that she desires given that she is alive’, what Williams calls ‘conditional desires’.Footnote ²⁵ The idea is that not all desires are of the caliber of categorical desires to propel one forward into hard nothingness. Quite a lot of our desires seem to merely fill in the blank for the statement, ‘well, since I'm here, I guess I might as well __________’. But why shouldn't that be enough reason to live, or to be happy with life? Why should boredom follow just because all of one's desires are of the conditional rather than the categorical sort?Footnote ²⁶ Is boredom really the result of having no answer for the question of the larger direction I am taking my life because I have no sizable projects or commitments? Or is that just a fantasy of the intellect?

Thankfully, Rosati goes even deeper in her analysis, bringing to our attention that we live in ‘a world that we do not experience simply in terms of desire – bare, conditional, or categorical’ (Rosati, Reference Rosati, Bradley, Feldman and Johansson2012, p. 368). And when she speaks of desirability, she doesn't mean only an active desire for something, as in a ‘genuine longing’ but also allows for a ‘mere standing readiness to continue living, other things equal, for as long as one can’.Footnote ²⁷ Rosati goes on to distinguish between the desirability of living and the desirability of being.Footnote ²⁸ The felt desirability of living pertains to the aesthetic, pleasurable experiential qualities of life, such as feeling a blanket against one's skin, or hiking in the woods, or simply breathing in air and letting it fill your lungs (ibid.). The desirability of being pertains more specifically to the being of our distinctive human agency: ‘capacities to reason and assess, to explore and discover, to create and appreciate beauty of form and sound, to will and to love’ (Rosati, Reference Rosati, Bradley, Feldman and Johansson2012, p. 371). Rosati indicates that the desirability of our agential capacities is really what explains the desirability of immortality, rather than the desirability of living, since living contains not only pleasures but also pains. Rosati also claims, ‘The object of seeming worth cannot be life or being alive, but your (or my) being alive, your (or my) existing as [an] individual agent with a distinctive vantage point’ (Rosati, Reference Rosati, Bradley, Feldman and Johansson2012, p. 370, emphasis in the original). But I think this is untrue, even if a rational being with a vantage point is needed to make the judgment of worth. While Rosati denies Williams’ view that categorical desires are needed to make it meaningful enough to go forward in life, she still maintains what I take to be a neighboring view that human agential capacity explains the desirability of life, expressing a common intuition that you have to add something to life, probably in the form of a rational human characteristic, in order for life to gain some sort of meaning.

Against this view, I think that in spiritual experience, the meaningfulness of life itself becomes manifest, a view that I think should be taken more seriously. And by meaningfulness, I mean objective meaningfulness, a qualification I use in the way that Susan Wolf emphasizes, following David Wiggins, indicating that it is not just some one person's idiosyncratic, dim-witted or perverted point of view.Footnote ²⁹ When these philosophers speak of meaning, they are on the hunt for something that gives an individual human life meaningful direction, but what I am pointing to is something that gives all direction (or even lack of direction) meaningful grounding. When one experiences wonder, vitality and connection in spiritual experience, one comes to see that life isn't meaningful just because of me, or because I just happen to experience it or value it. In spiritual experience, we come to appreciate the deep value that life itself has – not just my life, but the vastly wondrous, spontaneous, creative, vivacious, interconnected, awe-inspiring phenomenon of life and reality itself.Footnote ³⁰ One is also readily inclined toward gratitude because life wouldn't be meaningful if it weren't for something beyond my agency that enables me to experience this life and my agency.Footnote ³¹ Further contributing to a sense of objective meaningfulness, one readily concludes that life was meaningful before I and other rational creatures and our kin got here, and life will be meaningful even when I and all of humanity are gone. Life's basic meaningfulness has nothing to do with me and my aims. Life is the basic creative potentiality that is able to breathe the play of spirit into my agency and its preoccupations, without which all of my endless aimfulness would become empty vanity.Footnote ³²

This inadequacy of human vanity emerges in what has come to be known as the ‘midlife crisis’, which has been helpfully explored by Kieran Setiya. Also harboring a critique of Bernard Williams, Setiya identifies a problematic sort of goal orientation in life as a central explanation for the emptiness of a midlife crisis. Interestingly, he does not believe that immortality in itself would alleviate the underlying problem that supposedly occurs at ‘midlife’ (Setiya, Reference Setiya2014, p. 3), even though awareness of mortality seems to be among the triggers, because mortality inspires you to quantify the number of completed projects you will achieve in life, leading to the question of what it all adds up to (Setiya, Reference Setiya2014, p. 10). Yet, Setiya suggests that we could find a radically extended life worth living if we can overcome the key problem that generates the crisis, which is precisely the idea of completing projects, or what he more concisely terms ‘telic activities’. Setiya observes that many recent philosophers have difficulty seeing the value of life as anything but telic, and he calls out Williams in particular for defining persons in terms of desires and projects. ‘Williams is wrong. You are not what you plan to get done. And the activities you love need not be projects. Atelic activities, ones that do not aim at terminal states, have value, too. There is pleasure in going for a walk, just wandering or hiking, not to get anywhere, but for the sake of walking itself’ (Setiya, Reference Setiya2017, p. 140).

Given the problem with telic activities, Setiya concludes that ‘the best life, the ideal life, would be one in which we could, without evaluative error, treat telic activities purely as means’ (Setiya, Reference Setiya2014, p. 16). To put it another way: ‘The way out is to find sufficient value in atelic activities, activities that have no point of conclusion or limit, ones whose fulfillment lies in the moment of action itself. To draw meaning from such activities is to live in the present – at least in one sense of that loaded phrase – and so to free oneself from the tyranny of projects that plateaus around midlife’ (Setiya, Reference Setiya2017, p. 144). I think Setiya provides a much needed balance to the problematic orientation we have been discussing, but I think we can take the analysis even further away from telic activity, because, as I have indicated, we don't even have to understand the desirability of life in terms of human activities or ends at all, telic or atelic, which still traps meaning in the sphere of the human ego. Sure, everything we experience can be placed under the description of an activity, but that doesn't mean that its value is entirely or most basically captured by that description.

What is really needed is the experience of connection that gives being in the moment or mindfulness its depth, a component which Brian Treanor includes in his description of ‘vital action’:

In my analysis of spiritual experience, I gloss what Treanor describes here simply as an experience of vitality and connection that balances ego for the benefit of self. No boredom here. Treanor claims there is a loss of self, or at least an egoic kind of self, which can allow for reconnection with one's deeper lived self, which those favoring the ego would probably view as the animal. Now, for Williams this was the whole problem with visions of an eternal afterlife in heaven, or even with just losing oneself in intense intellectual inquiry, because Williams felt ‘the desire for freedom can, and should, be seen as the desire to be free in the exercise and development of character, not as the desire to be free of it’.Footnote ³⁴ What we need to resist, then, is the idea that there is some kind of either/or that we must choose between, when in reality there are times when we must develop character and discipline and other times when we must affirm connection with the world and with others and with a deeper, more amorphous self that does not align with some idea of character that we are overweeningly aiming for. To not allow ourselves freedom from a too demanding and limiting ego can produce alienation and boredom and a negative assessment of life itself.

5. Concluding Remarks on Spiritual Ambivalence about Life

On the way toward affirming the desirability of radically extended life, I have really just been promoting a view of the desirability of life that doesn't depend on desires or even on any special qualities of human existence. Spiritual experiences of wonder, vitality, and connection bring out what is most deeply positive about living. I am not asking anyone to imagine a life that is free of activities, or a life dominated by spiritual experiences, but only to imagine an evaluation of the desirability of life focused by spiritual experience rather than by ego. It is important not to place too much emphasis on the value of human goals, because an imbalanced view about the value of life can impact the way we live and life's resulting desirability. Talk of appropriate commitments and such may carry an important moral or ethical message for wayward or lost humans, and the moral and spiritual are also natural allies in many ways. However, the spiritual should be allowed to speak for itself sometimes, and the silencing of an often overly self-absorbed ego is a condition for hearing the spiritual wisdom.

I think this desirability of life achieved by way of balancing or diminishing ego also allows for the view that death is not bad, though death is often viewed as life's enemy. For this reason, I call this pairing of attitudes about life and death coming out of spiritual experience ‘spiritual ambivalence’. To think more about this phenomenon, and to see how spiritual ambivalence can get expressed in different ways, I will close by considering a brief sampling of different spiritual traditions, including Daoism, Buddhism, and Epicureanism.

Daoism celebrates action without action, which is one way to translate wu-wei. In that ancient Chinese mystical tradition, there is a way of having everything you need, but not because you were trying hard to get it. Perhaps this isn't good advice for youngsters who need to learn from a more formative morality about how to become mature adults, but then spirituality is more like advice to disciplined adults who need to learn how to be more childlike and less controlling. Daoists do not recommend a life of inactivity, but instead encourage us to be more ziran, or self-so, like the other animals, who are what they are in what they are doing. The idea is to not reach so strenuously beyond oneself in what one does, distending oneself out of harmony with oneself and one's surroundings.

Judging from references to death in the Zhuangzi, a primary text in the Daoist canon, acceptance and affirmation of death is recommended, alongside the affirmation of life: ‘Life and death are matters of fate. … [The Sage] takes death in youth to be good; he takes old age to be good. He takes life's beginning to be good; he takes life's end to be good’.Footnote ³⁵ I am not advocating for any particular spiritual tradition, and I find myself immediately wanting to reframe the startling assertion that death in youth is good.Footnote ³⁶ But notice the cultivated ambivalence toward life on display here, a spiritual ambivalence explained by balancing of the ego and its fear of death and need for control. Life is good, yes, and lived better with ego tamed – and Daoist tradition certainly has its alchemical seekers of immortalityFootnote ³⁷ – but also, death is not bad, because it is all part of the Way of Nature, and it is not about you.

It is known that Buddhism's core doctrine of non-self resonates well with what is being confirmed by empirical cognitive science today.Footnote ³⁸ Our experience of a unity of consciousness and personhood and of agential control is mostly an illusory, constructed experience emerging from the brain. When we are having an experience of loss of ego in spiritual experience, this really does seem to be getting us closer to the truth, though the focus of my point here has only been that we get the meaning of connection out of a spiritual experience, and that this diminishes the strength of our egoic impulses. Belief in a controlling agent and hope for an enduring self after the body dies are among the causes of dissatisfaction with life, and so the Buddha advises us to relinquish these dispositions in order to lessen our suffering. But the aim of nibbāna, or extinguishing the craving for existence as if blowing out the flame of a candle, is not the same as actively desiring to die (or vibhavataṇhā), which is instead taken to be a perverse inversion of the craving for immortality. Also, not all desire is discouraged as craving, as some simplistic interpretations of Buddhism have it, so love and compassion can be encouraged, enabling a kind of love of life. Thus, we see that yet another spiritual tradition affirms the idea that life is good and that death is not bad.Footnote ³⁹

The Epicureans also have this basic view, which has been much maligned by analytic philosophers of death in recent years. Well known for the view that death is not bad (because when dead, there is no experiencing subject for whom death can be bad), Epicurus also affirms the desirability of life: ‘The wise man does not deprecate life nor does he fear the cessation of life. The thought of life is no offence to him, nor is the cessation of life regarded as an evil. And even as men choose of food not merely and simply the larger portion, but the more pleasant, so the wise seek to enjoy the time which is most pleasant and not merely that which is longest’.Footnote ⁴⁰ Samuel Scheffler has less of an issue with the Epicurean view that death is not bad than with the similar but separable Epicurean assertion that we should not fear death. For Scheffler, this fear is not just a fear of the loss of future opportunities of which I will be deprived by death, but more basically a fear of the annihilation of me:

Scheffler suggests that the Epicurean attempt to fight fear with philosophical arguments is inadequate (Scheffler, Reference Scheffler2013, p. 87), and also finds arguments à la Buddhism that there is no self in the first place similarly inadequate (Scheffler, Reference Scheffler2013, p. 103), choosing instead to address the appropriateness of the panic response. I mention Scheffler's point, not to engage or oppose Scheffler's argument for the appropriateness of death panic, but only to add that, even if a case can be made that fear of death is appropriate, I think it is also true that loss of fear of death is desirable, which would seem to be a better fit for Scheffler's overall view that eventual death is good. As for how to achieve that loss of fear, philosophical argument may help on some level, but I think spiritual experience and spiritual wisdom can play a bigger role, and there are certainly other methods.

Again, I am not advocating for any one particular way of housing spirituality, only noting an underlying pattern. The spiritual ambivalence I am highlighting does not produce the view that life is both good and bad, but rather the view that life is good and death is not bad, a kind of soft ambivalence that sides with life, yet does not side against what is often viewed as life's opposite. This ambivalence pivots on the diminution of the ego, tending to reduce the role that ego plays in evaluating life or death, and there can be many variations on that theme, given the metaphysical or philosophical principles housing the spirituality, though I don't think any elaborate structure is needed – the humblest hermit shack will do.

Many secular theorists today think it can't make sense to care about life but not be troubled by death, because they think caring about life must be entirely egoicFootnote ⁴¹, based entirely in commitments to one's own life in some way, caring about projects or ideals or the people you are attached to, or in concern for pleasures or opportunities that one is deprived of because of death. Williams asserted an egoic ambivalence, an ambivalence conditioned on ego's rise and fall, declaring life good when ego is buzzing along with categorical desires, and not so good when ego peters out, implying that this makes death good.Footnote ⁴² I think this is too dark a picture of life, and it is a more complex ambivalence, a harder ambivalence, one that flips its evaluation of both life and death when ego dries up, while the softer spiritual ambivalence doesn't flip – it always loves life. Spiritual ambivalence can even love life if euthanasia is chosen on the reasonable conclusion that my life is no longer livable, because this love of life is not based only on the conditions of one's own life. An enduring love of life without fear of death is a possibility with spiritual ambivalence, and spirituality is a possibility for secularists that I think is desirable, because it makes life overall more desirable, no matter how long one lives it.Footnote ⁴³