Reflection on Mark Johnston, Surviving Death (2010)

 

I read the book by Mark Johnston, Surviving Death, many years ago. It did make an impression on me. Let me try to recall Johnston’s project.

 1. Johnston’s central move is radical: he rejects the traditional idea that you or I, as individual egos or soul-substances, survive death. He argues that this picture (of a persisting inner “thing” that continues after bodily death) is philosophically confused, and tied to a kind of subtle egoism (“I want me to go on”). So he agrees with me, or rather I with him, that “surviving death” can seem incoherent if imagined as the continuation of the same embodied subject.

 

2. But he also rejects simple annihilation: i.e., the conclusion that, therefore, everything that matters is simply extinguished. Why? Because he thinks this assumes that what we fundamentally are is a self-enclosed individual subject. Which is what he challenges.

 

 3. We are not really what we think we are, according to Johnston. He draws on Christian tradition to argue that the soul is not best understood as a separate, bounded entity, but as something essentially relational and participatory. Our identity is bound up with truth, goodness, and love, which are not private possessions but realities we participate in. So the question shifts from whether an individual consciousness continues to whether that which is the true nature of the soul (its participation in love/goodness/truth) could survive.

 

 4. Johnston’s answer is that what survives is not the ego, but the life of love and truth in which we participate. In other words, when you love someone, that love is not merely inside your head but a participation in something real and enduring. And that participation is not annihilated by your biological death. Therefore, we “survive” insofar as our life has been taken up into what is not subject to death: namely, the Good (the life of God).

 

5. Johnston thinks much traditional belief in personal immortality is driven by the fear of non-existence and attachment to one’s own ego-consciousness. And he calls this, in effect, a kind of spiritual narcissism. True salvation, for Johnston, would actually involve being freed from the demand that this particular self must go on.

 

6. This leads to a moral transformation. The highest form of life is one in which one’s concern for one’s own survival recedes. (Recalls Schopenhauer, albeit from a different metaphysical ground.) We should strive to live in truth, loves others (i.e. will their objective good), and thus participate in what is intrinsically good. This is already a kind of “eternal life,” for Johnston; not in duration, but in quality of being.

 

7. Thus he reinterprets and in a way demythologizes Christianity. “Resurrection” is not the reanimation of individuals; “eternal life” is participation in divine love; “salvation” is liberation from the false self. He speaks of God the reality of perfect love and truth in which we participate.

 

 I agree that love cannot be meaningless; that a “ghostly survival” is not fitting for a human being; and that the Good is unconditional. My ego consciousness is an alienated form of consciousness and I lay no value on its survival (I hope I don’t have to deal with all my inadequacies for all eternity). But my love of my children and many others seems to require their continued existence as themselves (previous entry: cf. Gabriel Marcel). Justice also requires personal recognition, not just absorption into the Good. We must all face the real meaning of what we did and how we lived, if the universe is as it ought to be. I resist losing the concrete, embodied person, or at least that spiritual part of us that can love and seek truth beauty.

    Johnston tries to save what is deepest in the hope for immortality while abandoning what he sees as its egoistic or incoherent elements. So instead of insisting on the continuation of the same individual he claims that what is really real in me – i. e., my participation in the life of truth and love – is not lost.

     I would still affirm life even if I knew death was final. Johnston would say that very stance is already participation in something that does not pass away. I could embrace Johnston for my own personal fate but when it comes to people I love, I don’t think so. I do not need to persist; it is enough that I have participated in truth and love. There is a kind of purification in that, something even ascetical, a relinquishing of possessiveness, even toward my own being. That appeals to me. (This might reveal that I find it hard to love myself, not in an ego-centered way, but as loved and made by God.)

 But the moment I turn outward to your children especially but all the people, places, things I love, something changes. It is easier to say that I do not need to go on than to say: “You whom I love will dissolve in being part of the life of God (love), like a Buddhist perhaps imagines the soul becoming part of Being and Nothing. And I think that reveals something about love itself. Love is not symmetrical self-regard; it is a directed affirmation of another as irreplaceable. It is to encounter this person as not substitutable. And that is precisely what Johnston’s view struggles to preserve.

     Johnston wants to purify love of possessiveness. Fine. I should not cling to my survival. Fair enough. But when extended to others, it risks becoming not insisting that they live on as the irreducible individual soul they are. To love someone seems to involve the hope that they themselves are not simply lost. Not just that love existed, or goodness was instantiated. Johnston argues, in effect, that what matters survives in the Good. But love longs for more. It long for preserving not only that what is good about the beloved but that they are there. This is where I have more moved by thinkers like Gabriel Marcel who insist that love is not satisfied with abstraction or absorption; it longs for presence. Thus Marcel: love implies “Thou shalt not die” – not as a theory or wishful thinking, but as a demand that reality itself be faithful to the beloved.

    With one’s children, the issue becomes almost unbearable. They are not replaceable. They are not “instances of the Good.” They are this child, with a face, a voice, a history. So my hope is not that “goodness continues,” but “you will not be lost.” My love of my children compels me to hope.

     So I agree with Johnston that ee must let go of egoistic clinging and that our deepest reality lies in participation in the Good. But Love also affirms the irreplaceable person and hope reaches toward life beyond this world, not mere participation. If reality is truly faithful to love, it must somehow preserve both the purification of the self, and the eternal life of the beloved.