Relation to oneself· Existence

Nothing survives

Axis: After death — Does something of us survive death?

The person ends with the body: . What remains is not the person: works, children, a memory in others, traces that last as long as someone carries them. The only eternity available is that of things done, not of the one who did them.

Who holds this position

Philosophers 1

Russellexplicit

The argument is direct and empirical: everything we know of character and memory shows them bound to the organisation of the brain, which comes apart at death; nothing therefore licenses the thought that what depends on a structure in that way outlasts it. Russell does not claim to demonstrate that survival is impossible: he shifts the burden of proof, then diagnoses the motive for the contrary belief, which is held not because there are reasons for it but because death is frightening — and explaining a wish is not proving a thing. What disappears is, in his eyes, the person herself, and admitting it is the condition of a life without pretence.

"Do We Survive Death?" (1936) · Why I Am Not a Christian (1927)

Foundations and implications

↑ What grounds it

↓ What it implies

↑ What grounds it

Nature of reality

If everything is matter, consciousness comes undone with the body that carries it: materialism grounds annihilation, as in Lucretius, where the soul, made of fine atoms, scatters at death. The link is not absolute: van Inwagen defends a materialist resurrection through divine re-creation.

↓ What it implies

Death

Epicurus' argument rests entirely on annihilation: if death is complete dissolution, it is nothing to us, and the fear dissolves with it. Were something to survive, death would become something again: it is the belief that nothing survives that grounds the liberation from fear.

Problems

Descriptive
Thinking without a brain?
The mind is born, matures, and fails with the body, is befuddled by its wine, goes out under a blow: do these bonds prove that thought dies with the flesh, or only that the instrument conditions the playing without being the musician?
mind and brain
Descriptive
Living on in one's works?
Works, children, and memory prolong a name, not a consciousness: does this immortality by proxy deserve the word survival, or is it a consolation that changes the subject?
the traces left behind