The immortal soul

1. What thinks, judges and loves is not the same as an organ: thought has neither weight nor color, and it grasps truths that do not age, such as the equality of the triangle or justice.
2. But what is simple, without parts, cannot fall apart as a composite body does: the end of the soul cannot be conceived on the model of material decomposition.
3. A moral demand is added: it is hard to accept that the crushed just and the prosperous tyrant share one and the same destiny, sheer nothingness.

Therefore Therefore it is rational to hope that death is not the annihilation of the person, but a passage.

1. The hope of another life arises at the sharpest point of the fear of ending: it consoles exactly where death hurts, which should arouse suspicion.
2. Yet nothing in experience confirms this survival: neither the life sciences nor observation show a person without their body. The hope fills a desire, it does not establish a fact.
3. Worse, it can turn us away from the only life we have: by deferring what matters to an uncertain beyond, we risk missing the here and now, the only time given to us.

Therefore Therefore immortalist hope might be not a truth about death, but a way of not facing it.

1. Suppose some part of us escapes death. That part must still be me, and not an impersonal remnant: a survival that would be no one's would console no one.
2. But what makes me myself, whether one seeks it in a body, in the continuity of a memory, or in the story of a life, holds to that very life, to its ties and its history. Strip all that away, and it becomes hard to say in what way what remains would still be the same person.
3. The hope is then caught in a vise: either what survives resembles me enough to be me, and it would take almost a body and a memory; or it is a pure soul, and one struggles to recognize anyone in it.

Therefore So immortality, supposing it occurs, might save something while losing precisely the person: what would survive may no longer be my identity.