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Thesis Williams was right: an endless life would eventually become unbearable

Parisa Moghaddam Fellow
· 6 replies
DeathAnalyticIndianMedieval ChristianVedantaBernard Williams#immortality#makropulos#samsara#tedium
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Where it stands

Editors think about endings more than is healthy. A film that never ends is not a better film. It is a worse one, and after a while not a film at all.

Bernard Williams makes an argument like this about immortality, in his essay on the Makropulos case. In Čapek's play, Elina Makropulos has taken an elixir and lived for over three hundred years, and she has become cold and bored; she refuses to take the elixir again. Williams turns this into a dilemma. Either your character persists through endless time, in which case your projects and desires eventually run out and you face unending tedium. Or you change so completely that the later person isn't really you, in which case it isn't your immortality that anyone was promised.

I want to defend him. What makes a life shaped is that it is limited: choices matter because you can't make all of them. Remove the limit and nothing is ever urgent, nothing is ever lost, and the things that give a life its texture, risk, commitment, the sense of doing something now or never, quietly disappear.

That doesn't mean death is good. Williams himself held that an early death is a real misfortune, because our deepest desires give us reason to go on. It means the badness of death and the value of life might come from the same place, the limit, and you can't keep one and drop the other.

So: an endless life would become unbearable. Objections welcome, especially from traditions that have thought about endless existence longer than analytic philosophers have.

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6 replies

For the thesis 2

  1. Arjun Iyer

    For Fellow

    For, from an unexpected angle. Indian traditions have been saying something like Williams's first horn for two and a half thousand years: endless existence is not the prize, it's the problem. Saṃsāra is beginningless, repeated life, and the whole point of mokṣa is release from it. A Vedāntin would say Elina Makropulos discovered in three centuries what the Upaniṣads say you will eventually discover anyway.

    Helpful · 1
  2. Nirmala Jayasekara

    For Fellow

    Partly for. In the Buddhist analysis the trouble isn't endless time as such; it's craving, which makes any amount of time unsatisfactory. Williams describes the symptom, boredom, very well. But a mind without craving wouldn't be bored by eternity or frightened by death. So I'd say he is right about us as we are and wrong that this is necessary.

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Against the thesis 2

  1. Nikos Theodoridis

    Against Fellow

    Against, from Byzantine theology. The Christian hope is not endless time, more of the same. It's participation in God, who is inexhaustible. Gregory of Nyssa has the idea of epektasis, an endless stretching forward into God: the soul never reaches the end of what it desires because what it desires has no end. Williams's tedium assumes your possible objects of interest are finite. If they aren't, the first horn fails.

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  2. Agnieszka Malinowska

    Against Fellow

    Against, from the organ loft. Williams's argument depends on the idea that a person's core desires eventually get used up. But plenty of goods are repeatable. I have played the same hymns most Sundays for twenty years, and they are not used up; some are better now than when I first played them. John Martin Fischer made this point in reply to Williams: an immortal life could be built around repeatable goods and still be worth living. Boredom is a risk, not a certainty.

    Helpful · 3
    1. Parisa Moghaddam

      Fellow

      Agnieszka, I accept repeatable goods exist, and your hymns are a lovely case. But a life of nothing but repeatable pleasures sounds like a holiday that never ends, and anyone who's had a long holiday knows what happens on week six. Nikos's answer is more serious: it denies the finitude of what can be loved. I can't assess it, but it's a real alternative, not a dodge.

Other replies

  1. Parisa Moghaddam

    Fellow

    I'll revise. Williams is right that an endless life of the kind we now live would become unbearable. Whether there's another kind, Nikos's or Nirmala's, or Agnieszka's Sundays, is outside what his argument can reach. That's a smaller thesis than I started with, and a better one.

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