Impersonal Immortality
According to Borges, Schopenhauer once said the doctrine of transmigration was nothing but a popular form of his doctrine of the will to live. There is (to paraphrase them both) something in man and nature that wants to live forever, that created the universe and is manifest in all things. It lies dormant in rocks, sleeps in plants, dreams in animals and reaches consciousness in man. We could summarize this view by saying that, from the right metaphysical altitude, the differences between things become indistinct and everything in the universe is sublated into one immortal Platonic force. From this force, consciousness gives man a false sense of detachment and an equally false sense of mortality; animals, on the other hand, are immune to this error because of the “corporeal immediacy in which they live, oblivious to death and memory.” Thus Schopenhauer was moved to posit an, “immortal lion that maintains itself by the infinite replacement of individuals, whose engendering and death are the life pulse of the undying figure” and Keats to imagine that, “the nightingale enchanting him was the same one Ruth heard amid the corn of Bethlehem in Juda.” Elsewhere, Carlyle seems to concur when he declares that, “An everlasting Now reigns in nature that hangs the same roses upon our bushes as charmed the Roman and Chaldean in their hanging gardens.”
Here we have an impersonal immortality from which man is excluded only to the extent that he diverges from the species that includes him. In our time, of course, a lot of emphasis is placed on individuality, but I wonder if the conscious experience of selfhood really differs that much from person to person. It seems probable to me that the qualia of subjectivity are identical for everyone in those moments when our minds are conscious but absent of content. Perhaps we can take this still further. Imagine an omniscient observer tasked with classifying every thought and brain state a given man had in his life, his entire conscious history, into two broad categories: Those which, with only superficial differences, will recur in the minds of other men and those which are idiosyncratic, one of a kind, and never to be repeated in the history of the universe. If the latter category turned out to contain, as I suspect it would, a negligibly small number of thoughts or else remain empty, could we not then postulate, after Schopenhauer, an immortal man who maintains himself by the infinite replacement of individuals; could we not then juxtapose humanity with the nightingale of Keats and the rosebush of Carlyle? There is, however, a certain irony involved in picturing humanity as a fluctuating, ganglionlike substrate for the diffuse pulsations of an immortal collective consciousness because every recurring mental impulse must be accommodated and thereby immortalized, including, of course, the immortality of the denial of immortality. |