philosophical investigations volume 30 issue 3 2007 [doi 10.1111_j.1467-9205.2007.00322.x] john...

8/9/2019 Philosophical Investigations Volume 30 issue 3 2007 [doi 10.1111_j.1467-9205.2007.00322.x] John Haldane -- Philos

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Philosophy, Death and Immortality

John Haldane,University of St Andrews

I

The death of Dewi Phillips means the loss to philosophy of a distinc-

tive and highly articulate voice; one committed to showing the power

of careful attention to language to reveal the structure of human

thought and practice. Over the period of his career, academic phi-

losophy became increasingly dominated by theoretical modes of

understanding, yet Phillips persisted in the method of cultural phe-

nomenology directed upon word and deed; attending to the particu-

larities of experience and practice, not antecedently presuming to find

systematicity there, or supposing that human meaning and value

require scientific or metaphysical underpinnings. Put another way, tothe extent that metaphysics might be said to be the philosophical

characterisation of the way things are, then Dewi Phillips was a

descriptive metaphysician detailing the reality to be discovered withinhuman experience.

Given, however, that metaphysics is generally associated with the

project of determining the structure of reality beyond or beneath the

domain of human experience, and of late with a scientifically inspired

model of that project, it risks confusion to describe Phillips philoso-phy as metaphysical. It might be thought to be equally misleading to

describe it as theological, given that theology has long been associ-

ated with similarly transcendentalist aspirations, and also with a style of

abstract theorising that at times has aspired to being another kind of

science. Yet while Phillips was not a theologian in the dogmatic or

systematic sense,and while he had no formal education in theology, his

thought on topics within the field of religion was generally more in

line with modern theologians than with modern philosophers.An example, relevant to what follows, is the resemblance between

Phillips account of the idea of immortality as that relates to the human

concern for meaning and to the realities of religion, and the views

Philosophical Investigations 30:3 July 2007ISSN 0190-0536

2007 The Author. Journal compilation 2007 Blackwell Publishing Ltd., 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ,

UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA.


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advanced at the end of the eighteenth century by Friedrich

Schleiermacher in his addresses in On Religion: Speeches to Its CulturalDespisers. He writes:

If our feeling nowhere attaches itself to the individual, but if itscontent is our relation to God wherein all that is individual andfleeting disappears there can be nothing fleeting in it, but all must beeternal. In the religious life then we may well say we have alreadyoffered up and disposed of all that is mortal, and that we are actuallyenjoying immortality. . . .

[T]he true nature of religion is neither this idea [of God as onesingle being outside of the world and behind the world] nor anyother, but immediate consciousness of the Deity as He is found in

ourselves and in the world. Similarly the goal and character of thereligious life is not the immortality that is outside time, behind it orrather after it, and which still is in time. It is the immortality whichwe can have in this temporal life.1

Compare this with Phillips writing two centuries later in Death andImmortality:

I am suggesting then, that eternal life for the believer is participationin the life of God, and that this life has to do with dying to the self,

seeing that all things are a gift from God, that nothing is ours byright or necessity. . . . In learning by contemplation, attention,renunciation, what forgiving, thanking, loving, etc., mean in thesecontexts, the believer is participating in the reality of God; this iswhat we mean by Gods reality. . . . The immortality of the soulrefers to the state an individual is in in relation to the unchangingreality of God.2

Schleiermacher was seeking to save the religious as a domain of

thought and feeling from the attacks of philosophical sceptics, in partby conceptualising it in terms that detached it from traditional claims

about its metaphysical or historical foundations.This put him at odds

with two sets of critics: those who judged that he failed to meet the

sceptical challenge by retaining problematic religious concepts and

claims; and those who felt that while he might have retained its forms

he had abandoned the substance of religion by giving up reference to

objective non-empirical realities of God, soul and immortality.

1. F. Schleiermacher, On Religion: Speeches to Its Cultural Despisers(London: Harper &Row, 1958) p. 100.

2. D. Z. Phillips,Death and Immortality (London: Macmillan, 1970) pp. 5455.

246 Philosophical Investigations

2007 The Author. Journal compilation 2007 Blackwell Publishing Ltd.


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Phillips was subject to analogous criticisms amounting to the claim

from both sceptics and believers that issues of objective reference were

set aside in favour of human sensibilities and concerns, interpreted as

being wholly immanent. Where traditional disputants sought directanswers to questions about existents, or about what there is reason

to believe exists or does not exist, Phillips chose to speak instead of

values, commitments and sentiments, seeming to convert talk of God

into talk about purely human matters. It is a moot point who was the

more aggrieved: the atheists who felt that a once clear and stationary

target had been replaced by an obscure and moving one, or the theists

who judged that substance had given way to shadow.

Phillips response to these related criticisms was not just to defend

his philosophical method and his own conclusions, but also to argue

that the critics shared a series of mistaken assumptions about the

character of religious beliefs and practices. More impressively, and for

his opponents more infuriatingly, not only did he not rest content

with arguing that in their rush to theorise, or to construct apolo-

getics for antecedent commitments, they had carelessly assumed that

religious claims must have a certain general character, but he also

recast their preferred terms of philosophical analysis in designs of his

own making.So that instead of saying that it is a mistake to speak of reference,

objectivity,truth,existence,transcendence, etc., he insisted that

the only way of determining what these could amount to in the

characterisation of religious belief and practice is by looking in detail

at the particularities of the contexts to which his critics insisted on

applying them. So if you are going to discuss the existence of God as

that issue might arise not in the abstract and apart from any foundation

in actual human beliefs, but through engaging critically with thosebeliefs, then you need to look in detail at how talk of God and of

Gods existence features there.

Even if there were some academic exercise that might be con-

structed independently of the fact and form of actual religious belief,

it would be idle to engage in that with the expectation that it should

determine what it would be true or reasonable for believers to say and

think. Religion is as religion does, and religious ideas are as religious

thought and practice determine them to be. No wonder his critics feltfrustrated. Unapologetically, he persisted in discussing religious themes

on his own terms, doing much to show how these reflected the

character of real religious discourse, and also exposing the distortions

John Haldane 247



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in what hitherto were taken to be obvious and unquestionable inter-

pretations of religious attitudes and utterances.

An example relevant to the present context arises from discussion

by Antony Flew, (criticised by Phillips) of the ways in which it may ormay not make sense to imagine ones own funeral. Having allowed

that it is possible to imagine a scene in which family and friends are

gathered in the presence of a coffin which, in the imagined setting, is

deemed to be ones own, Flew argues that it is nevertheless impossible

to make intelligible the supposition that one could witness ones own

funeral. He writes:

If it really is I who witness it then it is not my funeral but only my

funeral (in inverted commas): and if it really is my funeral than Icannot be a witness, for I shall be dead and in the coffin.3

In response to the insistence that one can in fact imagine ones own

funeral, Flew replies with an intelligibility challenge: Well, yes, this

seems alright: until someone asks the awkward question Just how does

all this differ from your imagining your own funeral without your

being there at all (except as the corpse in the coffin? While the

rejoinder is directed against a claim about an imaginativepossibility, it isof a sort associated with the idea that the meaning of statements is

closely identified with empirically discriminable situations, and hence

it bears also on the claim that it is possible that one might witness ones

own funeral where thatmetaphysicalpossibility is held to be determin-able by imagining such a state of affairs.

Phillips grants that the situation which the imagined scene is

deemed to picture is logically contradictory, but he challenges the

assumption that such a piece of imagination should be taken as serving

a representational function, at least in so far as this is interpretedin speculative, possibility-identifying mode. Instead, writes Phillips,

religious imagery serves religious purposes:

We can look again at Flews question when he asks what is thedifference between imagining oneself witnessing ones funeral andsimply imagining ones funeral. The answer can be found in thefact that ones presence as observer in the religious picture is an

3. A. Flew, Can a Man Witness His Own Funeral? Hibbert Journal, (195556) p. 246(quoted by Phillips in Death and Immortality, p. 63).




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expression of how a person can reflect on his life as a whole or howa person, now, can reflect on events which will occur after his death.4

Phillips argues that Flews demonstration of the incoherence of a

description of witnessing ones funeral, taken to lend support to theidea that a person could survive the death of his body, is beside the

point inasmuch as it mislocates the role of contemplating ones own

death. Such imaginative fiction does enable one to determine impor-

tant truths but not ones concerning strange metaphysical possibilities.

Instead, one is able thereby to review aspects of ones mortal life in

light of the only notion of immortality that makes any sense, which is

a spiritual standard of the sort referred to earlier in the passage that

echoed Schleiermacher.This is interesting and illuminating but it is open to the charge of

having changed the subject, and done so prematurely. A living person

contemplating their mortality by imaginatively conceiving their death

or their being deceased, and doing so for evaluative-cum-spiritual

purposes, is one thing, but it is different from a failed speculative

thought-experiment intended to establish the metaphysical possibility

of surviving death. Phillips switches to the former as if examining the

latter were missing the point; but it is one thing not to attend to apossibility (in this case the spiritual one) and a distinct thing to miss it

or to confuse it for another.

In fairness, he believes that moving on is warranted. Phillips sides

with those who argue against the metaphysical possibility of life after

death but also thinks that this is irrelevant to the particular religious

beliefs. He writes:

Certainly we have found that if that belief is construed as belief in

the existence of a non-material body, a disembodied spirit, or aphysical body, it seems to be riddled with difficulties and confusions.For my part, if this were all there is to tell, I should have to concludethat belief in immortality rests, not only on one mistake, but on alarge number of possible mistakes. . . . [However] I believe thatsuccess or failure in resolving the logical difficulties we have noteddo not have important consequences as far as belief in immortalityis concerned.5

4. Death and Immortality, p. 66.5. Death and Immortality, pp. 1718.

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Here, however, the argument is not that one possibility having been

excluded another may be followed; rather it is that whether or not the

first (metaphysical interpretation) can be successfully established, or

reasonably defended, is simply besides the point, foronly the second(spiritual interpretation) is relevant. Evidently, someone may wish bothto defend the metaphysical possibility and to argue that it and only

it is what matters for the truth of claims about immortality. More

modestly, one may accept the relevance of a religious hermeneutic of

the sort Phillips wishes to offer, yet add that not only may some version

of the metaphysical position be defensible, but that the possibility of it,

or more strictly belief in that possibility, is connected to the meaning

and value of the proposed religious alternative.

II

My own first introduction to contemporary philosophy of religion

was through readingDeath and Immortalityand, around the same time,Peter Geachs God and the Soul.6 Although I did not know it at thetime, both authors were untypical among British analytical philoso-

phers in being interested in and knowledgeable about genuinely

religious matters.The two books also stand in an interesting dialectical

relationship. God and the Soulis a collection of essays published in 1969as the first book in a series (Studies in Ethics and the Philosophy of Religion) conceived and edited by Phillips following upon the publi-cation with Routledge of his own first book The Concept of Prayer(1965). Among the subjects it treats are the possibilities of life after

death, materialism and the relationship between moral obligation and

obedience to the will of God. As well as taking particular religiousbeliefs and practices very seriously, Geach and Phillips also acknowl-

edged debts to the philosophical methods of Wittgenstein. For Phillips

these were mediated by his teacher Rush Rhees; for Geach they were

acquired directly. Remembering their discussions Geach writes:

One thing I learned fromWittgenstein, in part from theTractatusbutstill more from personal contact, is that philosophical mistakes areoften not refutable falsehoods but confusions; similarly the contrary

insights cannot be conveyed in proper propositions with a truth-value. . . . Such insights cannot be demonstrated as theses, but only

6. Peter Geach,God and the Soul(London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1969).




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conveyed dialectically; the dialectical process largely consists in theart, whose practice I have perhaps learned in some measure formWittgenstein, of reducing to patent nonsense the buried nonsensethat is found in attempts to reject these insights.7

Geach gives instances from philosophical logic, but like Wittgenstein

he deployed the method more widely, as did Phillips. In some cases

they directed it against the same targets; and in Death and ImmortalityPhillips picks up Geachs challenges of this sort against a Cartesian

account of the meaning of psychological terms.Yet their understand-

ing of the status of religion was very different; more so than emerges

even in those parts ofDeath and Immortalitywhere essays fromGod andthe Soulare under discussion. Put at its simplest Geach is a realist aboutreligious claims, taking their meaning to be given by truth conditions

that may transcend human recognition; whereas Phillips understands

the meaning and truth of religious discourse in terms of immanent

human concerns.

At the time of first reading my own orientation was (and remains)

realist. I have found in Phillips book, however, an interest that was

then rare and is still uncommon; for by careful attention to forms and

contexts of utterance he brings out the religious, spiritual and moral

sense of these styles of discourse, and there is much one can learn fromhis sensitive hermeneutical explorations. Yet whereas he presented

them as alternatives to realist interpretations, I value them as partial

analyses of claims that also purport to be about the way things are

independently of our conceptions and interests. One way of putting

this point is by analogy to the treatment of psychological terms offered

by Geach and adopted by Phillips.

In rejecting the Cartesian account of the psychological as pertain-

ing to a series of logically private mental worlds, each exclusivelyinhabited and possessed by an I that corresponds to the mind or soul

of each human person, Geach shows how the sense of psychological

terms is grasped by learning ways of using them that others could

follow. That shareable aspect is accounted for by the fact that the

relevant terms are widely used in connection with publicly observable

characteristics and situations.What Geach does not reject, however, is

that there are private experiences.These are not the only referents of

psychological predications, there is also behaviour; but in denying the

7. Peter Geach A Philosophical Autobiography in H. A. Lewis (ed.),Peter Geach:Philosophical Encounters (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1991) pp. 1314.

John Haldane 251



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idea of the psychological as an exclusively private domain, Geach is

careful to distinguish sense from reference. Phillips glosses this by

saying that unless there were a common life which people share,

which they were taught and came to learn, there could be no notionof person.8

Adapting this to the theological context yields the thought that talk

about God and immortality gets its sensefrom common life, but thatthis is compatible with it having a transcendent reference. To speak ofpraying for the dead, or of the condition of the departed, logically

requires that the sense of these terms be such as could be grasped by

others, and if one is speaking to others then that means it is already

common currency.When we look at such discourse we can see that its

terms are used in connection with various religious practices such as

gathering images and other artefacts, relating narratives, adopting peti-

tionary modes, focusing attention, reciting forms of words, invoking

invisible presences, and so on, and we can also say that such practices

are not merely contingent associations. If someone claimed to be

praying for the soul of a deceased person but did not engage in any of

these practices or intelligibly related ones, then we would reasonably

hesitate to accept that he was in fact praying.This is not to deny that

his avowal might be sincere, but absent some compensating religiousbehaviour we would conclude that he was confused about what it is to

be praying.

Just as in the earlier case, however, accepting these points does not

require us to suppose that the reference of religious expressions is

confined to the behaviour from which they necessarily draw part of

their sense.There is also the question of how that behaviour itself is to

be characterised if reductionism is to be avoided. In the psychological

example Geach talks about recognising the links between experientialterms and behavioural ones, writing that our ordinary talk about

seeing would cease to be intelligible if there were cut out of it such

expressions as I cant see, its too far off, I caught his eye,Dont look

round, etc.9 Notice, however, that members of the behavioural class

are themselves characterised in intentional terms.The other alternative

would be to identify them by means of non-intentional, physiological

or physico-dynamical predicates.That, however, would fail. First, there

are no identity and individuation conditions for these that would

8. Death and Immortality p. 5.9. P. Geach, Immortality inGod and the Soul, p. 21.




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intelligibly match those of ordinary action concepts. Second, even if

there were such it would be hard to see how the sense of psychological

terms could be given by reference to these; or if it could then that

would be tantamount to reducing psychology to behaviour in thenarrow physiological sense, which is something neither Geach nor

Phillips subscribe to.

So if reductionism is to be avoided, and the sense-constituting

behaviour is itself already psychologically described, we need to recon-

sider the relationship between the experiential and behavioural com-

ponents of the sense of psychological terms. What suggests itself is

interactive partnership, each making its own distinctive contribution

and constraining the other. The situation in which psychological

concepts are formed is yet more complex, involving abstraction and

generalisation across ranges of sense-contributing factors, including

rationalistic constraints between and within types of psychological

states (such as that it is impossible to intend what you believe it to

be impossible to do, or to plan for what you believe has already

happened).

Similarly, the kinds of practices that contribute to the sense of talk

of a world to come, or of praying to and for the dead, etc., will already

have to be characterised in religious terms. Phillips touches on this atone point when he writes:

Questions about the immortality of the soul are seen not to bequestions concerning the extent of a mans life, and in particularconcerning whether a mans life can extend beyond the grave, butquestions concerning the kind of life a man is living.

And yet, important though I think these conclusions are, they areinsufficient as an analysis of religious conceptions of eternal life and

the immortality of the soul.

10

What follows is a discussion of the idea of overcoming death by

turning towards the eternal and dying to self, which then leads to the

somewhat Schleiermacherean conclusion I quoted earlier according to

which the immortality of the soul refers to a state of mortal life.

Without rejecting his good insights into the character of religious

spirituality, I wish to suggest that Phillips account remains open to the

objection that it has changed the subject, and that it has done so in a

way that loses contact with other sources that contribute to the sense

10. Death and Immortality p. 49.

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of talk of soul, immortality and the life of the world to come. I also

wish to revisit briefly the metaphysical issue of the possibility that

death is not the end, since in contrast to Phillips I do believe that

success or failure in resolving the logical difficulties facing this haveimportant consequences so far as belief in immortality is concerned.

III

Phillips is instructive in drawing discussion away from philosophical

abstractions and returning them to human realities, but he is never-

theless given to an abstractness of his own, for he tends, having alighted

on favoured examples or authors, to generalise in anthropological and

cultural terms, not necessarily attending to the differences or charting

the sources of particular conceptions.This observation is not intended

ad hominem, or in a spirit of outdoing his avowed aversion to philo-sophical abstraction, for generalisation and abstraction are necessary in

any broad enquiry. The point is rather that in the process some

important human realities seem to go undiscussed, most significant of

which is the Christian profession of Jesus Christs death, resurrection

and ascension.Needless to say, western thinking about immortality draws upon

different strands of religious and philosophical thought that at times

have become badly tangled, and at other times damaged in becoming

or being separated. Nonetheless there are identifiable moments within

these. In the world in which Christianity was born, belief in personal

post-mortem existence was not at all common. Aristotelians sup-

posed that an analysis of the human soul indicated the existence of an

immaterial principle, the active intellect (nous poetikos) ofDe AnimaIII,5; but this was something abstract and universal: an actualising cause of

mindedness in individual human beings whose own minds perished

with their bodies, leaving nous as it always had been separate, unaf-fected and unmixed. For the most part the Stoics were agnostic about

and largely uninterested in personal immortality, holding to the view

that at death the sparks of divinity that animated individual lives are

drawn back into the Divine fire. The exceptions were those Stoics

(such as Seneca the Younger) who were influenced by Platonism andPythagoreanism, and it is to these two schools (and their founders) that

one has to look for Greek philosophical doctrines of personal immor-

tality. What one finds, certainly in Platonism, is a characterisation of




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earthly, animal embodiment which views it as source of disorder and

ignorance; not something evil as in Manichaeism but nonetheless a

burden and an impediment to true personal existence. Here the soul

conforms to the sort of description that Phillips believes faces logicaldifficulties concerning the description of its presumed-to-be essential

psychological functions, and the personal identity of a surviving

immaterial element. He writes:

The supposition, therefore, that something called a thinking sub-stance could survive the disappearance or disconnection of theseother [physical bodily] features [of human existence] is fundamen-tally confused.A belief in the immortality of the soul which dependson such suppositions while thinking it has grasped the essence of the

self has really grasped nothing at all.11

The Platonic/Cartesian conception of the soul is the one favoured by

philosophers seeking to demonstrate the difficulties of non-materialist

views of human persons; and because it appears to have a purely

philosophical provenance and character, focusing on it also saves

getting entangled in religious and theological intricacies.Yet Phillips

himself reminds us, repeatedly and emphatically, of the religious char-

acter of talk of souls and the afterlife so it will not do to leave this out.

The Acts of the Apostles relate that when St Paul reached Athens hemet Epicurean and Stoic philosophers who, hearing his talk about

Jesus and the resurrection, took him up on to the Areopagus hill and

asked him to deliver his teaching there. In the course of this (a scene

beautifully rendered by Raphael) Paul told them that they should

seek God:

Yet he is not far from each one of us, for In him we live and move

and have our being . . . but now he commands all men everywhereto repent because he has fixed a day on which he will judge theworld in righteousness by a man whom he has appointed, and of thishe has given assurance to all men by raising him from the dead. 12

On hearing these last words some mocked but others said We will

hear you again about this. Apparently, however, they did not, and

Pauls subsequent remarks regarding the vain wisdom of the philoso-

phers suggests that he decided to concentrate his efforts on preaching

11. Death and Immortality p. 6.12. Acts 17: 27, 3031.This and subsequent citations are fromThe Holy Bible: RevisedStandard Version Catholic Edition (London: Catholic Truth Society, 1966).

John Haldane 255



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Christs resurrection as a religious message to whoever might receive

it.The Epicureans and Stoics might have made the mistake of inter-

preting his earlier talk of resurrection (anastasis) as naming some

unfamiliar goddess Anastasia, but no such confusion could be sus-tained once Paul elaborated and talked of Jesus being raised from the

dead. This was a shocking teaching for the philosophers who either

excluded the possibility of post-mortem personal existence, or asso-

ciated it with the liberated soul. Either way the idea that someone who

had died might then pass again among the living was, for them, an

absurdity.Yet it was this scandalous resurrection teaching that Paul later

made the foundation of his presentation of faith in Jesus. In his FirstLetter to the Corinthians Paul writes:

Now I would remind you brethren in what terms I preached to youthe gospel, which you received, in which you stand, by which youare saved, if you hold it fast unless you believed in vain. For Idelivered to you as of first importance what I also received, thatChrist died for our sins in accordance with the scriptures, that hewas buried, that he was raised on the third day in accordance withthe scriptures, . . .

Now if Christ is preached as raised from the dead, how can someof you say there is no resurrection of the dead? But if there is noresurrection of the dead, then Christ has not been raised; if Christhas not been raised, then our preaching is in vain and your faith isin vain.13

Here Paul ties the resurrection claim in three directions: back intoHebrew scriptures to the suffering servant of Isaiah 53 and to the

godly one of Psalm 16 who will not enter Sheol (the abode of the

dead);across to the gospel of salvation through Christ; and forward tothe future life hoped for by the Corinthians (but about which they

have become anxious). Notwithstanding the references to earlier

anticipations, however, there was no extensive tradition of belief in

immortality in pre-Christian Judaism. Indeed until close to the time of

Jesus it was generally denied, and among his contemporaries only the

Pharisees and the Essenes appear to have believed in an afterlife.Yet

some five or so centuries earlier, Job was reported as affirming I know

that my Redeemer lives, and at last he will stand upon the earth, and

after my skin has been thus destroyed, then from my flesh I shall see

13. 1 Corinthians 15: 14, 1214.




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God.14 And toward the end of the second century B.C., 2 Maccabeeswrites of Judas Maccabeus that he made atonement for the dead, that

they might be delivered from their sin and that in doing this he acted

very well and honourably, taking account of the resurrection. For if hewere not expecting that those who had fallen would rise again, it

would have been superfluous and foolish to pray for the dead.15

The lesson of Wittgensteins reflections on apparently simple

naming is that there is no such thing as pure, atomistic ostensive

definition. Even where ostension is unburdened by the difficulties of

presumed logical privacy, it is answerable to the requirement to provide

pointing with some form of referent-constraining sense.The possibil-

ity of reapplying the same term to the same object, or to another like

it, requires some type of sortal identification, and this cannot intelli-

gibly be supposed to stand in isolation. Related considerations have led

some philosophers to insist that there is no semantically coherent unit

smaller than an entire language (or language game), and others that

every term is theoretical, its meaning being given by the network of

generalisations in which it features. Setting these bold and improbable

hypotheses to one side, however, there remains the insight that new

objects, events, features and so on, are introduced within an existing

framework of concepts and conceptually informed practices.Paul observes this condition when he speaks of Christs resurrec-

tion tying it in the three directions I mentioned. But there is a fourth

direction which he proceeds towards in the Corinthians chapter

quoted above. He writes:

That he appeared to Cephas, then to the twelve.Then he appearedto more than five hundred brethren at one time, most of whom arestill alive. . . . Then he appeared to James, then to all the apostles.

Last of all, as to one untimely born, he appeared also to me.16

So we have Christ was raised from the dead drawing meaning from

(i) Hebrew experiences of suffering and hopes for salvation; (ii) the

content of Christs teaching about himself and his purpose; (iii) the

Corinthians understanding and fear of human mortality, and (iv)

experiences, third and first personal, of Christs post-crucifixion

appearances.The resurrection claim in turn enters into the interpre-

14. Job 19: 2526.15. 2 Maccabees 12: 4345.16. 1 Corinthians 15: 58.

John Haldane 257



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tation of these, and they and it into subsequent Christian understand-

ings of death and immortality.When the issue of belief in immortality

is raised for discussion it is appropriate to ask which belief? and

generalisations about theories of immaterial bodies, immaterial soulsand resurrected persons are too broad for the purposes of compre-

hending how the issue was understood by Pauline Christians and those

who followed in this tradition. Here one needs to attend to the way in

which talk of life after death links in with the matters identified above:

faithful appeals and hopes,anticipated fulfilments, personal experiences

and theological reflections.

Of course, one might try to Phillipsise these claims so as to free

them from any metaphysical or ontological significance, but this

response invites three objections. Firstly, it looks to be regressive.

Claims about surviving death are interpreted as expressions of a

religious outlook on this life, and other claims of an unmistakably

religious sort are then interpreted in the same way. Religious,

however, is itself denied anything but an attitudinal reading whose

distinctive character either begins to evaporate or is fixed by reference

to attitudes to religious stories and images. What makes these reli-

gious once more appears to be the attitudes taken towards them, ones

of reverence and awe, say. But this seems to get things back to front, orat least to be inaptly unilateral; for in discriminating between different

attitudes we need to make some reference to their proper objects.

Phillips wants to say that God is to be interpreted in terms of

Godly attitudes (understood very broadly), whereas the characteri-

sation of such orientations, along with other intentional attitudes, is

defeasibly to be given by reference to theirobjects. Certainly one mayallow some influence in both directions, but only to allow it in only

one direction seems premature and close to stipulative.This leads to the second point, which is that Phillips appears

resolute in not allowing any other interpretation.As noted earlier, his

proposal is not that something other than the metaphysical should be

looked to because the metaphysical option proves impossible; but

rather than the metaphysical option should not be looked to at all.

Sometimes he suggests a distinction between religion and superstition,

with the latter being the belief in God as a supremely powerful agent

within the Universe, and prayer and the rest being quasi-empiricalprocesses of influence and exchange.That is a recognisable characteri-

sation of a superstitious simulacrum of religion, but it has long been

denounced as such from within the ranks of religious believers who




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patently presume a metaphysical dimension to their faith.The debates

within Western Christianity over works and justification, or over

prayer for and to the dead, or about devotion to saints and the

veneration of Mary, or about the status of the Mass as the mysticalpresentation of the sacrifice of Calvary or as its idolatrous representa-

tion, have often included allegations of superstition without it being

supposed for a moment that true faith was without ontological pre-

suppositions. Superstition on this account does not consist in making

metaphysical claims but in making the wrong ones and falling short of

the transcendent reality that true religion aspires to. Phillips closes off

that distinction by treating as misconceived any attempt to interpret

the internal accusatives of religious verbs (worshiping,praying to,

hoping for, etc.) as aspiring to transcendent reference.That, however,

looks increasingly stipulative and question-begging.

The third objection is one of simple implausibility.What we read in

Maccabees and in Paul about certain beliefs and practices being in vain

unless death is not the end, bears no other serious interpretation than

that the authors supposed that unless it is literally the case that natural

death does not mark the cessation of our existence, then various

religious beliefs are without foundation or purpose. Paul preached

Christ risen; and the structure of the New Testament hinges on Jesusdeath and resurrection. Notwithstanding the efforts of demythologis-

ing scriptural interpreters, themselves generally motivated by na-

turalistic philosophical prejudices, there is no credible alternative to

understanding the early Christian Church and its martyrs other than

by reference to their belief in Christ rising from the dead and living

eternally. It is a useful corrective to spiritualising hermeneutics to read

Book IX of Augustines Confessions where he recounts the last days,

death and funeral of his mother Monica. He writes:

As the day now approached on which she was to depart this life a day which thou knewest, but which we did not it happened,though I believe it was by thy secret ways arranged, that she and Istood alone, leaning in a certain window from which the garden ofthe house we occupied at Ostia could be seen. . . . We were con-versing alone very pleasantly and forgetting those things which arepast, and reaching forward toward those things which are future

[Philippians 3. 13].We were in the present and in the presence ofTruth, which thou art, discussing together what is the nature ofthe eternal life of the saints: which eye has not seen, nor ear heard,neither has entered into the heart of man. (10. 23)

[Then following her death]

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So, when the body was carried forth, we went and returnedwithout tears. For neither in those prayers which we poured forth tothee, when the sacrifice of our redemption was offered up to theefor her with the body placed by the side of the grave as the custom

is there, before it is lowered down into it neither in those prayersdid I weep.17

Augustine speaks matter-of-factly of their speculations about the life

to come, and refers to the requiem Mass (Missa pro defunctis) said onMonicas behalf, and the rite of committal of the body by the grave.

No doubt these personal and liturgical events involved reflections on

the spiritual condition of the participants, but it is beyond dispute that

they are referred to the presumed realities of God, soul and immor-

tality, and in a manner that takes the transcendent to be a preconditionof the intelligibility and validity of those events. Of course, this does

nothing to show that those beliefs and their suppositions are true but

it does return our attention to the philosophical question of whether

they could be so.

IV

Besides taking up Geachs criticisms of soulbody dualism from his

essay, Immortality, Phillips devotes a lengthy discussion to a later

chapter ofGod and the Soulon The Moral Law and the Law of God.His reason for doing so is that he sees it as an example of a style of

argument linking morality and immortality (conceived metaphysi-

cally).The idea is that it would be reasonable to expect a future life if

there were absolute prohibitions, because the only way in which these

could be rationally grounded would be by reference to Divine com-mands which it would be in ones long-term interest to observe.

Morality on this account is logically connected to the four last things:

death, judgement, heaven and hell.This is an overly brief gloss of an

interesting but not uncontroversial reading of Geachs essay. Given

Phillips rejection of the possibility of post-mortem survival or resur-

rection, the point of the further discussion is to disconnect morality

from the idea of heavenly reward or punishment. This he does by

suggesting that Geachs instrumentalist or prudential view fails to

17. Augustine,Confessions translated and edited by A. C. Oulter, (Philadelphia: West-minster Press, 1955) Book IX, Chs. 10, 23 and 12. 32




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capture the real nature of morality as a set of ideals that neither require

nor could be given any external justification:What needs to be done

is to give up the conception of morality as a guide to conduct, and to

see that the beliefs and ideals for which one has a regard are themselvesthe terms in which we see what we ought to do, the alternatives which

face us and the consequences of our actions.18

Leaving aside the question of whether the contrast between moral-

ity as a guide to action and as a set of autonomous ideals is not

mis-drawn, and allowing Phillips preferred characterisation, this is

entirely compatible with the idea that the form, source and meaning

of morality derive from God and from his plan for our eternal life. One

way in which this might be so would be if moral values reflected Gods

nature as love, and the embodiment of that love in creatures; if

goodness comes from God and reaches back to Him, both in the sense

of pointing to its source and also in the sense, in persons, of searching

and striving for unconditional love. Phillips writes:

It is only when a man has become absorbed by the love of God thathe ceases to ask such questions [what is the point of bothering toobey Gods commands?], not because he is sure of his profit, butbecause profit has nothing to do with the character of his love.The

immortality of the soul has to do, not with its existence after deathand all the consequences that is supposed to carry with it, but withhis participation in Gods life, in his contemplation of divine love.

Delete not with its existence after death and all the consequences that

is supposed to carry with it but and what remains is certainly com-

patible with the idea of an afterlife. I have also suggested that on a

familiar understanding of the remainder it presupposes belief in meta-

physical realities of soul and God. In conclusion I will outline a case for

thinking that it may also presuppose the fact of immortality.Although Phillips evidently hadGod and the Soulbefore him when

writing Death and Immortality, he does not mention its third chapterWhat Do We Think With? in which Geach argues against both

materialism and immaterialism, these being, respectively, the views that

we think with a material part of ourselves (the brain), and that we

think with an immaterial part (the soul). As Geach points out, as

described materialism and immaterialism are contraries and hence

while they cannot both be true they could both be false. He then

18. Death and Immortality, p. 32.

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argues that certain properties of thought are such that it cannot be a

material process, hence materialism is false. Given his earlier rejection

of PlatonicCartesian dualism he concludes to the truth not of imma-

terialism but of anti-materialism: thinking is a basic, non-materialhuman activity. A move away from materialism does not, of course,

bring us immortality, and Geachs own preferred interpretation of this

is through the Christian doctrine of bodily resurrection.This Phillips

does discuss (in connection with the essay on Immortality), pressing

the issue of the identity of the ante- and post-mortem persons. His

objection to Geachs proposal of a one-to-one relation between these

is to say that if such a connection existed then why should we say that

the previous bodies had died? He continues But, of course we know

with certainty that all human beings die. Even if the [one-to-oneconnection] supposition is conceivable, it does not follow that it makes

sense now for us to say that men live after death.19

This is unduly conceptually conservative. Earlier we saw how the

meaning of concepts relating to immortality and afterlife tie in with

other claims, central among which in the present context is Pauls

preaching of the resurrected Christ. Believing that, it makes sense to

say I know all men die but I know also that my redeemer lives,for as

by a man came death, by a man has come also the resurrection of thedead. For as in Adam all men die, so also in Christ shall all be made

alive (1 Corinthians 2122).The point here is conceptual not meta-physical, and is addressed simply to Phillips suggestion that our ordi-

nary knowledge that all men die is in tension with the supposition that

someone who had died then lived again.

There is,though,a related objection to this possibility deriving from

an application of Lockes principle that one thing cannot have two

beginnings of existence.20 If we say that A came into being at time 1,and ceased to be at time 2, then we cannot say that A existed at time

3. If A originated at t 1 and is in existence at t 3, then A never ceased

to exist at t 2. Much might be said here, but for present purposes let

me just make two brief points. Firstly, there is an ambiguity in the

phrase beginnings of existence. It might be interpreted, as it usually

is, to exclude gaps in the history of one and the same object; but since

there are clear cases in which objects having been brought into

19. Death and Immortality, p. 16.20. John Locke,Essay Concerning Human Understanding, Book II, Ch. 27:Of Identityand Diversity.




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existence are then taken apart and later reassembled, this is an implau-

sibly demanding requirement on identity. Better then to distinguish

between absolute and phasal origination. Some piece of machinery M

came into existence at the factory at t 1, then existed as such until t 2when it was taken to pieces; these remained dismantled until t 3 when

they were reassembled and M came to be (phasally) again. Here t 1 is

also a point of phasal beginning, but it is the one and only point of

absolute origination. Likewise, then, we might say that Jesus came into

being (absolutely and phasally) at the point of his conception; ceased

to be at the point of his death, and came to be again (phasally) at the

moment of his resurrection.

On that gap-inclusive account of identity there is a sense in which

it may be said that one who is resurrected never ceased to exist save in

the respect that one phase ended and another began. In general that is

unproblematic, but and this is the second brief point there may be

particular reasons to think that in the case of rational beings there is

also the possibility of a persisting carrier of identity across the gap in

bodily existence. Leaving aside particular theological reasons for

favouring this in the case of Christ,21 if one is disposed to reject

materialism regarding human persons, on account of the nature of

consciousness or intellectual activity say, then, deploying the principleacting follows upon being,agere sequitur esse, there may be reason toconsider that the proper subjects of consciousness or intellection

cannot be material substances. Even if a disembodied subject of con-

sciousness or of thought hardly constitutes a human person, in part for

the reasons favoured by Geach and by Phillips, such a residual entity

might yet prove sufficient to constitute the one-to-one relation

between ante- and post-mortem incarnate persons. Such was the view

of Aquinas whom Geach quotes (from his Commentary on 1 Corin-thians. 15) as saying my soul is not I.22

I want to conclude, however, not with a metaphysical argument

from the ontological nature of attributes, but with a line of thought

that would have appealed to Phillips philosophical preferences and to

21. According to the Apostles Creed, between death and resurrection Christdescended into hell [crucifixus, mortuus, et sepultus, descendit ad nferos, tertia die resurrexit

a mortuis]. Hell in this context is not a place of damnation but limbus partum, thecondition in which the just of earlier generations awaited the liberating saviour.22. Aquinas,Super 1 Epistolam Pauli ad Corinthios. Lectio 2: anima autem cum sit parscorporis hominis, non est totus homo, et anima mea non est ego :the soul since it is part of amans body is not the whole man, and my soul is not I.

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his ironic sense of humour. If enquiries into the metaphysical character

of mental processes seemed aberrant to him it was because he believed

that the life, meaning and value of thought lay in its content. As it

happens there are some arguments from the substance of humanthought and feeling to transcendental realities, although they are gen-

erally neglected. Elsewhere I have examined the argument from our

inclination to believe in God, and from our desire for Him, to His

existence.23 Here I end by introducing an argument to our immor-

tality from our love of God and His love of us.The pleasing irony is

that the author of this proof is one and the same as the man credited

with authoring the most purely a priori of proofs of Gods existence,

namely St Anselm.

Sometime in the 1070s the Abbot of Bec set out to discover that

one argument (unum argumentum) that would provide a fount fortheological speculation. Believing he had found it, he then set it down

in the Proslogion. A decade before, however, in the Monologion he hadpresented a series of reflections on several fundamental issues including

immortality.There (in Chaps. 6869) he argues as follows:24

(1) To be rational is to be able to distinguish between just and unjust,

true and untrue, good and not good, and greater good and lessergood.

(2) But without appropriate love and loathing of the objects so

distinguished, these rational capacities are devoid of purpose.

(3) Therefore, since the point of rationality is to distinguish these

qualities, the purpose is also to love or spurn the objects so judged.

(4) Rational creatures are made to distinguish and to love the supreme

essence: God.

(5) Since human persons are rational creatures therefore they werecreated to know and to love the supreme essence.

(6) Either they were created (a) to love it eternally, or (b) only to love

it finitely.

(7) But (b) is blasphemous (and hence impossible), for God would not

create persons in order for them then either to turn against so

great a good, or else to lose it contrary to its will.Therefore, they

were created to love it eternally.

23. John Haldane, Philosophy, the Restless Heart and the Meaning of Theism, Ratio,Vol. XIX, No. 4, 2006, pp. 421240.24. See Monologion in Anselm of Canterbury:The Major Works, B. Davies and G. R.Evans (eds.), (Oxford: OUP, 1998) pp. 7374.




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(8) But a person cannot love God eternally unless it lives eternally.

(9) Therefore persons were created in order that they might live

forever, so long as they choose to do that for which they were

created.Space does not admit of commentary so I will only remark, first,

that I regard this as a genuinely interesting argument meriting further

study; second, that while it presumes the existence of God, in context

that is not problematic, and the conclusion adds interestingly to the

usual theistic assumptions; third, that premise (2) is insightful into the

value of rational faculties; fourth, that the character of the thought

about persons and their relation to God ought to resonate with a

Phillipsean sensibility; and fifth, that judging and loving are intentionalattitudes, and the argument does not require that someone who loves

God does so knowingly. D. Z. Phillips sought to know and love the

highest good and would not willingly have turned against it. But a

person cannot love the highest good (God) eternally unless he lives

eternally. In providence, therefore, I pray that Dewi Phillips lives to see

the glorious refutation of his benign scepticism about the resurrection

of the dead and the life of the world to come.25

Department of Moral PhilosophyUniversity of St AndrewsFife KY16 9AL

[email protected]

25. The writing of this paper was made possible by research support from the Institutefor the Psychological Sciences. I am grateful to Dr Gladys Sweeney, Dean of theInstitute, for facilitating this support.

John Haldane 265

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