Does Life End?

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Are we mortal or are we somehow immortal? Do our lives have a final and inevitable ending, or will we live on forever? Questions about the ultimate fate of our lives have animated the work of philosophers, poets, authors, and scientists for generations, yet much of the time we hear from those who favor the position of immortalism. You might not realize that the doctrine of mortalism has been very common as well.

Such ignorance may, I hope, find some redress in the recent book *Mortalism: Readings on the Meaning of Life, by Peter Heinegg. A professor of English and comparative literature at Union College, Heinegg has collected over fifty different texts from as many writers throughout the ages, starting with ancient Mesopotamia and continuing through today. There are excerpts from the works of Plato, Epicurus, Seneca, Shakespeare, Pascal, Goethe, Kierkegaard, Santayana, Joyce, and many more.

What is "mortalism"? It's not a standard term, but rather one which Heinegg uses to denote the belief that "the soul - or spark of life, or animating principle, or whatever - dies with the body." This is, Heinegg argues, "one of the most logical and credible ideas ever to have dawned on the human race." It's a shame, then, that there is no word that already denotes such a principle, but perhaps that will change.

Reactions to mortalism vary. For some, it causes pessimism, despair, anguish, and worse. They find themselves unable to handle the prospect that just as they once did not exist, so, too, will there be a time in the future when they won't exist again. For others, mortalism is a liberating perspective because it allows them to focus themselves wholly upon what this life has to offer rather than worry about what some future existence might involve. The entire range of emotional and intellectual reactions is covered in Heinegg's book.

Perhaps the most common reaction to the idea of mortalism is no reaction at all - because most people, whatever they believe about their own mortality, don't actually give it a great deal of thought. Heinegg acknowledges that he was at one time in the same position, writing:

Life in general has no use for death; fanatically, programatically self-involved, life is forever busy, fussy, fretting over the future. It's a command and control center that will admit, if pressed, that it could and ultimately will be "knocked out," but in the meantime it goes restlessly on. Many people seem to have instinctively accepted Epicurus' paradox that death means nothing to us, because before our death arrives, it doesn't exist, and once it does, *we don't exist.

Sometimes, however, we do contemplate our own mortality - perhaps in despair, perhaps in hope. Hopefully, Heinegg's book will inspire people to give the subject more conscious consideration rather than ignoring it. Death is as much a part of life as anything; thus, ignoring the topic of death is, in fact, ignoring an important aspect of our lives: that life will end. Ignoring the topic won't make it go away. Wishing that we could live on forever won't make it so - and there are good reasons to think that maybe we wouldn't want to live forever anyway.