immortality, in philosophy and religion, the indefinite continuation of the mental, spiritual, or physical existence of individual human beings. In many philosophical and religious traditions, immortality is specifically conceived as the continued existence of an immaterial soul or mind beyond the physical death of the body.
The earlier anthropologists, such as Sir Edward Burnett Tylor and Sir James George Frazer, assembled convincing evidence that the belief in a future life was widespread in the regions of primitive culture. Among most peoples the belief has continued through the centuries. But the nature of future existence has been conceived in very different ways. As Tylor showed, in the earliest known times there was little, often no, ethical relation between conduct on earth and the life beyond. Morris Jastrow wrote of “the almost complete absence of all ethical considerations in connection with the dead” in ancient Babylonia and Assyria.
In some regions and early religious traditions, it came to be declared that warriors who died in battle went to a place of happiness. Later there was a general development of the ethical idea that the afterlife would be one of rewards and punishments for conduct on earth. So in ancient Egypt at death the individual was represented as coming before judges as to that conduct. The Persian followers of Zoroaster accepted the notion of Chinvat peretu, or the Bridge of the Requiter, which was to be crossed after death and which was broad for the righteous and narrow for the wicked, who fell from it into hell. In Indian philosophy and religion, the steps upward—or downward—in the series of future incarnated lives have been (and still are) regarded as consequences of conduct and attitudes in the present life (see karma). The idea of future rewards and punishments was pervasive among Christians in the Middle Ages and is held today by many Christians of all denominations. In contrast, many secular thinkers maintain that the morally good is to be sought for itself and evil shunned on its own account, irrespective of any belief in a future life.
That the belief in immortality has been widespread through history is no proof of its truth. It may be a superstition that arose from dreams or other natural experiences. Thus, the question of its validity has been raised philosophically from the earliest times that people began to engage in intelligent reflection. In the Hindu Katha Upanishad, Naciketas says: “This doubt there is about a man departed—some say: He is; some: He does not exist. Of this would I know.” The Upanishads—the basis of most traditional philosophy in India—are predominantly a discussion of the nature of humanity and its ultimate destiny.
Immortality was also one of the chief problems of Plato’s thought. With the contention that reality, as such, is fundamentally spiritual, he tried to prove immortality, maintaining that nothing could destroy the soul. Aristotle conceived of reason as eternal but did not defend personal immortality, as he thought the soul could not exist in a disembodied state. The Epicureans, from a materialistic standpoint, held that there is no consciousness after death, and it is thus not to be feared. The Stoics believed that it is the rational universe as a whole that persists. Individual humans, as the Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius wrote, simply have their allotted periods in the drama of existence. The Roman orator Cicero, however, finally accepted personal immortality. St. Augustine of Hippo, following Neoplatonism, regarded human beings’ souls as being in essence eternal.
The Islamic philosopher Avicenna declared the soul immortal, but his coreligionist Averroës, keeping closer to Aristotle, accepted the eternity only of universal reason. St. Albertus Magnus defended immortality on the ground that the soul, in itself a cause, is an independent reality. John Scotus Erigena contended that personal immortality cannot be proved or disproved by reason. Benedict de Spinoza, taking God as ultimate reality, as a whole maintained his eternity but not the immortality of individual persons within him. The German philosopher Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz contended that reality is constituted of spiritual monads. Human beings, as finite monads, not capable of origination by composition, are created by God, who could also annihilate them. However, because God has planted in humans a striving for spiritual perfection, there may be faith that he will ensure their continued existence, thus giving them the possibility to achieve it.
The French mathematician and philosopher Blaise Pascal argued that belief in the God of Christianity—and accordingly in the immortality of the soul—is justified on practical grounds by the fact that one who believes has everything to gain if he is right and nothing to lose if he is wrong, while one who does not believe has everything to lose if he is wrong and nothing to gain if he is right. The German Enlightenment philosopher Immanuel Kant held that immortality cannot be demonstrated by pure reason but must be accepted as an essential condition of morality. Holiness, “the perfect accordance of the will with the moral law,” demands endless progress “only possible on the supposition of an endless duration of the existence and personality of the same rational being (which is called the immortality of the soul).” Considerably less-sophisticated arguments both before and after Kant attempted to demonstrate the reality of an immortal soul by asserting that human beings would have no motivation to behave morally unless they believed in an eternal afterlife in which the good are rewarded and the evil are punished. A related argument held that denying an eternal afterlife of reward and punishment would lead to the repugnant conclusion that the universe is unjust.
In the late 19th century, the concept of immortality waned as a philosophical preoccupation, in part because of the secularization of philosophy under the growing influence of science.