Can 'discarnate persons' exist?

"We are laid asleep

`In body, and become a living soul:

`While with an eye made quiet by the power

`Of harmony, and the deep power of joy,

`We see into the life of things."

`W.Wordsworth. Lines composed a few miles above Tintern Abbey.

 

`It is comforting, when we lose somebody dear to us, to postulate a belief in survival of bodily death. This essay will examine the justification of such a belief, by exploring the notion of discarnate persons. It will examine serious objections to this idea, then pose alternatives and questions as to what a post-mortem existence might be like.

`Bodily survival can give us hope, ethical responsibility and free will (in the sense that we are not completely constrained by the material world) - but these must not be reasons to believe in it, only happy consequences of the notion. First we must establish whether we can logically and meaningfully entertain the idea of a discarnate person.

`A belief in discarnate persons allows for a survival thesis, but is by no means necessary. Neither is it necessarily immortality, though it is a necessary (pre)condition of it. Note also that we are not seeking the 'survival' that Beethoven endures through the performances of his great symphonies - but actual after-death continuance - and to achieve this, three theories are put forward - dualism, reconstitutionism and the astral body thesis.

`The crux of the matter lies in the validity of the dualist stance. Dualists maintain that we are composite beings of both corporeal matter and incorporeal "soul". This soul must be the "essence" of human existence - otherwise, it becomes nothing more than a bizarre appendage, much like an orthodox internal organ. Naturally if the "true" person is incorporeal, one can argue for continuance after bodily death. Flew dubs this the Platonic-Cartesian viewpoint, objecting to Plato on the grounds that he, like so many dualists, automatically presumed a composite human nature without justifying the grounds for such a presumption.

`Descartes seemed to have a strong case in reasoning that knowledge is only deductive - it is not true knowledge if there can conceivably be doubt. His search for certainty spawned the "I think, therefore I am" principle - the "I" being an essence that depends on no other material thing for its existence - ie, is incorporeal. It follows that each of us is separately and individually distinct from a world that may or may not exist. Note that "thought" for Descartes included understanding, willing, imaging, (imagining) and feeling. Descartes found it inconceivable that mere matter could think in this way. This identification of thought with consciousness enabled him to treat physical matter as external and logically separate from the certainty of our consciousness. Now, quite apart from the difficulties associated with this systematic doubt, Flew objects by highlighting a notion whose truth is so well-grounded that it has become a logical truism - that all human beings are mortal.

`This is the common-sensical assertion by monists who reduce mental (and in this case spiritual) activity to physical reactions in the body, and Flew seems perfectly right to argue that a 'person' is simply flesh and blood. Given this, it is plainly self-contradictory to argue that a person who has clearly died and perhaps been cremated, can nevertheless survive as a discarnate person. The dualist response that the essence of the person would live on, is rejected as being intangible, indeed, unintelligible. For a "personality" must be defined in terms of this corporeal person - it is derived from one's character, beliefs and dispositions that render it nonsense to talk of a personality surviving the person on which it is based. This would be like saying a grin can survive the face of the clown whose death has brought about the end of his gleeful performances.

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`To retort we must identify some "essence" which transcends the physical. This can then be added to the body along dualist lines, or entirely subjugate the body to its influence, as in Idealism. Unfortunately, by arguing that persons have both states of consciousness and incorporeal characteristics, one cannot later say that one is able to intelligibly conceive of one's own bodily death. Neither, according to Flew, could I say that I can imagine myself witnessing my own funeral. It is of course simple to imagine something doing this, in the way that a video camera might capture the events. But ...

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