Naturalism, Death, and Functional Immortality more

Contemporary Pragmatism Vol. 6, No. 1 (June 2009), 39–65 Editions Rodopi © 2009 Naturalism, Death, and Functional Immortality Charles A. Hobbs I consider a naturalistic approach to death, seeking a naturalistic or “functional” version of immortality. Making use of John Dewey and some other classical American philosophers, I first articulate the naturalism of this project. I then discuss what such naturalism means for understanding the self and its survival. Finally, I consider the existential question about to what extent such a view of immortality is satisfying. 1. Introduction Everyone dies. Now given this fact of our existence, I hold that the meaning of living, that is, of our experience, is never a completely separate issue from the meaning of our deaths and dying.1 It is from this context that I wish to articulate another approach to the meaning of death, which is simultaneously an approach to the meaning of our living.2 My approach is a naturalistic one. I shall articulate a kind of immortality in this world that is not to be conceived in a traditional Western sense of eternal, immutable, or otherwise ongoing existence of one’s individual personality beyond the death of his or her earthly lived body. I wish, instead, to articulate what I shall term a naturalistic or functional immortality.3 Concerning this view, there is in the final analysis a significant question regarding to what extent one can live as a naturalist and with that alone, that is, an existential question about the extent to which such a naturalistic view of death is satisfying, and in this I shall later turn to some of the essays of John J. McDermott on the matter. This approach is in the spirit of understanding philosophy’s proper role as one of being relevant to life, or, as James Campbell has said recently said with reference to pragmatism: “Philosophy’s job is to address our problems of living – whether the metaphysical ones that tormented James, or the scientific ones that challenged Peirce, or the social ones that invigorated Dewey – and to be ever vigilant in challenging the purely intellectual solutions to which philosophers too often acquiesce.”4 As for the job at hand here, it is one of addressing our mortality by way of the issue of immortality, with the problem being one of whether or not we can live satisfactory lives without any certain knowledge of or even belief in personal survival after death and without much likelihood of 40 CHARLES A. HOBBS our even being remembered as individuals for very long beyond our current existence. The concern here is thus not one simply of abstractions, for it is about our living with this fact. Now let us proceed from here by addressing a matter of terminology, especially the word immortality. The term appears employed quite often to refer to a survival, or continued existence, of the individual human personality. This is what is often meant when immortality is characterized as eternal life. Such immortality typically means, in short, the perpetuation of “personal” or “subjective” consciousness beyond one’s death. Kai Nielsen characterizes the position well: In speaking of immortality we are speaking of the endless existence of a person after what we call her ‘death’ or at least the death of her body. What is agreed on all sides, and what is an inconvertible fact, is that after a time for all of us our bodies cease to be energized and left alone they will simply rot, and no matter how they are manipulated, when they are thoroughly in that state there is no evidence of their ever being reenergised. (In that respect we are not like batteries.) Believers in immortality believe that, all this to the contrary notwithstanding, we, as human beings, persons, selves, somehow do not really die but have instead an endless existence after such a de-energisation and disintegration of our bodies or (if you will) our ‘earthly bodies’.5 As Nielsen clearly and forcefully puts the matter, immortality is most often understood, again, as the unending existence of the person beyond death. This, however ultimately incoherent or unlikely, is the major component of what believers in immortality typically mean by the term. I should be clear from the start that the view under consideration here, that of functional immortality or what George Santayana called “ideal immortality,” is of a very different species from the more conventional species described above.6 According to the functional view of immortality, there is no necessary postulation of eternal life as it is most often understood. Rather, there is, according to this view, an end of one’s personal experience beyond which he or she does not go, at least not as first-person endeavor. In other words, given the naturalism this position entails, which we shall address shortly, there is no ultimate personal survival of the body’s demise, or at least not as we can know consistent with naturalism. Yet while there may be no such ultimate personal or subjective survival, death does not necessarily mean an absolute end of the self simultaneous with one’s biological demise, particularly if the self has an irreducible social aspect. We will return to this notion of the self, but let us move now to first briefly consider at least a preliminary formulation of the view of immortality under consideration by turning to some of the remarks of Charles S. Peirce. Naturalism, Death, and Functional Immortality 41 While not at great length, Peirce provides an expression of the view under consideration. In his brief 1893 article “Immortality in the Light of Synechism,” we find a comment that is fairly representative of Peirce’s scattered remarks on the subject. Referring to his doctrine of continuity (synechism), he writes, ... synechism recognizes that the carnal consciousness is but a small part of the man. There is, in the second place, the social consciousness, by which a man’s spirit is embodied in others, and which continues to live and breathe and have its being very much longer than superficial observers think.7 That is, we can speak of a “survival” of the self through what Peirce is here calling the “social consciousness” by virtue of which one’s spirit lives on. Elsewhere, tying this notion of immortality to the purported words of Jesus, Peirce discusses this further: “Do you believe in a future life?” Some kind of a future life there can be no doubt of. A man of character leaves an influence living after him. It is living: it is personal. In my opinion, it is quite proper to call that a future life. Jesus so spoke of it when he said he would always be with us.8 Now we can readily recognize that there are those who would dismiss such an understanding of immortality as being, in Martin Gardner’s words, among “... those shabby pseudoimmortalities that atheists and pantheists are forever proffering as substitutes for the real thing.”9 This is not surprising, for a continued existence in the sense, as Peirce has said, of spirit as embodied in others, might well be thought of as simply amounting to a kind of mere residue. Indeed, this seems to be the case with regard to a former personal consciousness, and this is in large part, I think, why such a form of immortality, that is, immortality as embodiment in others, has for many people fairly dubious importance. It is here that one well may recall Woody Allen’s remark that he does not want immortality by virtue of his work, but, rather, that “I want to achieve immortality by not dying.”10 That is, immortality, if there is such a thing, is most often conceived of as a subjective affair, and, accordingly, a functional or social immortality, by itself, may not appear as amounting to very much at all. Yet such consideration should not necessarily preclude us from considering more closely a view of death according to which there is an alternative model of immortality to some ongoing personal consciousness. I also respond that the view of death articulated here will probably only strike one as “thin” or, as Gardner has put it, as being among “shabby pseudoimmortalities,” if one conceives of the self in Cartesian fashion as wholly atomistic or individuated, that is, non-contextual and non-relational. In any case, let us first turn more explicitly to the meaning of philosophical naturalism and its relevance for 42 CHARLES A. HOBBS the current project. We can then return to the issue of the self, doing so from a naturalistic viewpoint we shall have articulated. Then, as I have indicated, let us provide a more explicit account of the meaning of functional immortality and the consequences of believing it and it alone with regard to death, which is to say that we shall further discuss death in terms of how we deal with it as a significant part of the meaning of our living. In this regard, it will be important to indicate that functional immortality is not ultimate immortality but rather involves a sense of one’s continued existence that suffices for some by temperament to make life sufficiently meaningful to get through another day. 2. Naturalism and Its American Sources “Functional immortality” requires some account of naturalism, and, in providing it, I shall here deal especially with naturalism as expressed by some classical American philosophers, including John Dewey. As part of this, I will discuss the issue of materialism in relation to naturalism, which is a significant issue regarding the extent to which materialism sometimes entails scientism. An important reason for this has to do with what such naturalism is not. Presently, “naturalism” is often associated with reductive physicalism.11 Yet unlike such scientistic naturalism, classical American naturalism (and Kai Nielsen’s as well) is not a form of reductionism. Thus it can quite readily admit meanings and values, aspects of the world not normally considered as wholly material, as real and not somehow simply or merely phenomenal or epiphenomenal. A beginning difficulty that any opening discussion of naturalism faces is that there is not a great deal of agreement about the “nature” of naturalism. That is, there are and have been a number of understandings of philosophical naturalism; there are indeed varieties of it. There is ethical naturalism, there is metaphysical naturalism, there is methodological naturalism, and there is, again, scientistic naturalism, to name a few.12 Central to naturalism, whatever its particular form or manifestation, is an insistence that every hypothesis and phenomenon is to be examined by the same basic methods of inquiry. Another way of putting this is simply to say that what is and is knowable is fundamentally natural as opposed to “super”-natural. All forms of naturalism deny that any such thing as the supernatural applies to intelligible descriptions of the various phenomena, causes, and processes within our natural world. This is the philosophical attitude expressed by Santayana in his 1905 The Life of Reason: “Men and gods are not conceivable otherwise than as inhabitants of nature.”13 Still, what exactly constitutes the naturalism of the current project and where did it come from? There is, again, also the issue of exactly what kind of naturalism we are endorsing and employing in the present project. Assumptions and ideas of philosophical naturalism can be seen within the work of the first Western philosophers, that is, within the pre-Socratic, Ionian philosophers such as Thales, reportedly the first to provide explanations of natural phenomenon with no appeal to supernatural causes, and Jonathan Naturalism, Death, and Functional Immortality 43 Barnes, for example, has characterized these philosophers as holding empirical principles of inquiry that are at least anticipatory of naturalism in its more modern forms.14 Later on, it is Aristotle who can unmistakably be understood as a naturalist. As Dewey points out, Aristotle is the first real historical instance of naturalism, into which only later on a dogmatic supernaturalism is injected, such that the dominant trend in philosophy later became very much anti-naturalistic, that is, until relatively recently in history.15 Ancient Greek and Roman thought was, on the whole, quite naturalistic in spirit, and Roy Wood Sellars expresses this point well with regard to the Epicurean philosophers, who constitute the most striking example of naturalism after Aristotle, and who were indeed committed to ethics as first-philosophy. Sellars characterizes the Epicurean as a “... naturalist who took pride in the fact that he had conquered ignominious fears and ungrounded hopes...”16 and Epicureanism, as Sellars (himself a naturalist) approvingly reminds us, was the only thoroughly naturalistic school of its time, according to which “Wise conduct needed no cosmic sanctions.”17 Now in addition to such ancient pre-Socratic, Aristotelian, and Epicurean roots, naturalism also has more recent historical roots in America, with Dewey, among others, playing a significant role. It seems here relevant to mention Jaegwon Kim, not in his capacity as philosopher of mind or metaphysician, but rather with regard to his recent article on the nature of naturalism and its proximate origins in several mid-twentiethcentury American philosophers.18 As part of a rather helpful tracing of some of these sources of contemporary naturalism, Kim, in his 2003 article “The American Origins of Philosophical Naturalism,” first considers the issue of whether naturalism contains particular subject matter or whether it is a method or set of methods only. That is, he considers the question of “whether naturalism is, or includes, a set of substantive philosophical theses concerning a specific subject matter, or is, merely or principally, a set of methodological precepts concerning the proper way of conducting our intellectual inquiries.”19 Kim notes that, of course, both could be the case.20 As a part of this, he asks, “If naturalism is a methodological precept, does it concern philosophy alone (all of it?), or is it intended to apply to all areas of cognitive endeavor?”21 On the other hand, if we consider philosophical naturalism as including substantive claims, then what exactly are they? There are a variety of doctrines with which naturalism tends to be associated, including “empiricism, materialism, physicalism, reductionism, scientific realism, moral realism, epistemological externalism, and nominalism.”22 As Kim notes, a relevant question here is one of ascertaining the commonality of these and related positions such that they tend to be associated with naturalism.23 With such considerations in mind, by the term naturalism, I hereafter refer to philosophical positions, quite often rooted in the classical American tradition, according to which, broadly speaking, nature is understood as what is given or provided in experience. That is, nature is understood as continuous with experience. In his Epilogue (“The Nature of Naturalism”) to the classic 1944 44 CHARLES A. HOBBS expression of mid-twentieth-century American naturalism, Naturalism and the Human Spirit, John Herman Randall, Jr. says that naturalism “is not so much a system or a body of doctrine as an attitude and temper: it is essentially a philosophic method and a program...” and it is further characterized as follows: ... naturalism, refusing to admit impassable gulfs and dualisms, either ontological or methodological, holds that everything encountered by men has some natural status in Nature, this does not mean that naturalism can absorb all the philosophic theories of what man encounters and in that sense cease to be a distinctive position. It is indeed fundamentally opposed to all those theories and interpretations which assert dualisms and gulfs....24 Randall adds with explicit reference to Dewey’s “Antinaturalism in Extremis” (the first essay of the same 1944 volume) that naturalism is the active antagonist of such dualisms and gulfs “so long as they are flourishing.”25 Moreover, according to Randall, there exists “no room for any Supernatural in naturalism – no supernatural or transcendental God and no personal survival after death.”26 For naturalists such as Dewey and Randall, there are to be no appeals to transcendental entities, and this view receives lively expression more recently, for example, by Nielsen, who says, “There are ... no purely mental substances and there are no supernatural realities transcendent to the world or at least we have no sound grounds for believing that there are such realities or perhaps even for believing that there could be such realities.”27 Dewey, in “Antinaturalism in Extremis” (a rather aggressive article attacking Kant and German idealism, Thomists, and others), characterizes naturalism as follows: The fact of the case is that naturalism finds the values in question, the worth and dignity of men and women, founded in human nature itself, in the connections, actual and potential, of human beings with one another in their natural social relationships. Not only that, but it is ready at any time to maintain the thesis that a foundation within man and nature is a much sounder one than is one alleged to exist outside the constitution of man and nature.28 The naturalist looks to the human realm itself in order to understand any form of value. That is, human experience, of whatever kind, is understandable in natural terms. In seeking to account for or understand that which is problematic or difficult in experience, American naturalism asserts that there is not any need for appeal to that which is not accessible to experience. John McDermott has provided a fine Deweyan summation of the understanding of experience that is here at work, describing experience as “nothing less than what we do and what Naturalism, Death, and Functional Immortality 45 is done to us, as well as the ‘way’ in which these transactions proceed....”29 Thus, for example, the naturalist does not have to deny spirituality or “mystical” experiences. He or she would rather be interested in what kind of human experiences these spiritual experiences are and how they proceed, as Dewey is, for example, in his 1934 A Common Faith, a work in which he defends the association of naturalism with a religious aspect of experience. As Dewey recognizes, the religious, which is a dimension of experience (along with the aesthetic), need not necessarily be associated with anything supernatural in order to still be quite meaningful as experience, although not as knowledge.30 The point is that such experience, as natural, is perfectly open to inquiry and in no way some closed domain or something simply rejected out of hand. This general position of not going beyond the natural in order to account for the natural is American naturalism’s adequacy thesis. With respect to it Larry Hickman writes that attempts to do otherwise, that is, attempts to search outside of human experience for absolutes, norms, or standards, inevitably “end in appeals to authority, a priorism, or the dead weight of tradition.”31 Committing to such an adequacy thesis does not, of course, mean that we must embrace some crude materialism or physicalism (with which, again, naturalism is now often identified), but, rather, simply that there are not adequate grounds for trying to comprehend that which is natural in non- or super-natural terms. We might say, simply, that what is natural is enough. Although naturalism need not entail a reductive materialism (or “physicalism”), there have nevertheless been some critics, such as W. H. Sheldon (in his 1945 “Critique of Naturalism”32), who charge naturalism with crass philosophical materialism, that is, with being definitionally limited to “physical nature.”33 Sheldon levels the following accusation (his term) against the naturalism expressed by Dewey and his Columbia associates such as Sidney Hook: Their naturalism is just materialism over again under a softer name. They claim to have superseded that perennial type of metaphysic; I believe they slip back into the same old rut. True, they are careful to define materialism in such a way as not to be accused of it; but to all intents and purposes they stand for the same sort of thing that materialists have always stood for. Thus they do not, as they claim to do, settle the old conflict between idealism and materialism (or for that matter, between scholasticism and process-metaphysic); they perpetuate the conflict by taking sides.34 So the naturalists, it seems, are not what they say they are, and, as such, they promise more than they deliver. Sheldon later continues: ... when I accuse the naturalists of materialism, I mean a working materialism, a philosophy that goes beyond pure theory to set up a way of 46 CHARLES A. HOBBS life. And I say that their program and method leads to or implies that in the last analysis all processes in the known universe, mental, spiritual, vital, or what not, are wholly at the beck and call of the processes we have agreed to call physical, and therefore the only reliable way of control over nature – and over other men – is secured by knowledge of spatio-temporal distributions. That is the only materialism that counts, that has bearing on human life and the prospects of man’s future.35 Such naturalism, in short, says Sheldon, is limited to the physicality of nature. Dewey and his former Columbia students Hook and Ernest Nagel in the 1945 article “Are Naturalists Materialists?” are explicit in responding to Sheldon’s charge: When the consequences of this view (frequently given the label “reductive materialism”) are strictly drawn, statements such as “I am in pain” must be regarded as logically entailing statements of the form “My body is in such and such a physico-chemico-physiological state.” Whether any competent thinker has ever held such a view in the specific form here outlined is doubtful, though Democritus, Hobbes, and some contemporary behaviorists are often interpreted to assert something not very dissimilar to it. Those who do hold it maintain often that the obvious differences between a color and an electro-magnetic vibration, or between a felt pain and a physiological condition of an organism, are “illusory” and not “real,” since only physical processes and events (i.e., those describable exclusively with the help of physical terms) have the dignity of reality. But whatever may be said for reductive materialism – and very little can be said in its favor – it can be categorically asserted that it is not a view which is professed, either tacitly or explicitly, by the naturalists whom Mr. Sheldon is criticizing. If “materialism” means reductive materialism, then those naturalists are not materialists.36 Sheldon criticizes naturalism for being a form of reductive materialism in disguise, that is, a form of materialism that ignores the environment and context in which things happen, but this is not in fact the general position of these naturalists, who are in fact here explicitly distancing themselves from crass versions of materialism (versions, it is noted, often associated with the likes of Democritus and Hobbes). As Lewis S. Feuer puts it, these Columbia naturalists (Dewey, Nagel, Hook) were not holding “that mental states, emotions, joys, apprehensions of meaning, were subsumable under the heading of physical entities or events....”37 They were instead maintaining the more nuanced and defensible position (again in the words of Feuer) “that these mental occurrences were adjectival to physical ones and were in this sense analogous to such properties as temperature and solubility, which were not themselves physical entities, inasmuch as for instance, they had neither volume nor shape...” and Naturalism, Death, and Functional Immortality 47 simply that such mental occurrences have physical causes, which is to say that “they depended on certain organizations of physical things, without, however, being themselves additional physical entities.”38 In responding to Sheldon’s concern, Dewey and company are explaining, in short, that naturalists need not mind being called materialists so long as this does not mean reductive materialism.39 Also instructive on this issue is Ernest Nagel’s 1954 presidential address (“Naturalism Reconsidered”) to the American Philosophical Association.40 Nagel says that Naturalism does not maintain that only what is material exists, since many things noted in experience, for example, modes of action, relations of meaning, dreams, joys, plans, aspirations, are not as such material bodies or organizations of material bodies. What naturalism does assert as a truth about nature is that through forms of behavior or functions of material systems are indefeasibly parts of nature, forms and functions are not themselves agents in their own realization or in the realization of anything else. In the conception of nature’s processes which naturalism affirms, there is no place for the operation of disembodied forces, no place for an immaterial spirit directing the course of events, no place for the survival of personality after the corruption of the body which exhibits it.41 Naturalism disavows any transcendental or disembodied entities or forces, but as Nagel is pointing out, this view does not at all mean some reductive materialism, although it does mean that the naturalist cannot be sure of any personal immortality beyond death. Also, the rejection of any kind of reductionism follows from the basic pluralism of such naturalism. According to this commitment, not only materialistic reductionism would be rejected, but also any and all other forms of it, such as absolute idealism or metaphysical monism. That is, there is a commitment to irreducible variety or plurality of things within the world, that is, a plurality that is never ultimately reducible to anything else more basic. Let us look again to Nagel, who says that a ... major contention of naturalism is that the manifest plurality and variety of things, of their qualities and their functions, are an irreducible feature of the cosmos, not a deceptive appearance cloaking some more homogeneous ‘ultimate reality’ or transempirical substance, and that the sequential orders in which events occur or the manifold relations of dependence in which things exist are contingent connections, not the embodiments of a fixed and unified pattern of logically necessary links.42 48 CHARLES A. HOBBS Thus any strict determinism is rejected. There are, as fundamental features of reality, plurality and variety. In any case, whether naturalism is of the materialistic variety or of a more pluralistic variety, nature is understood as adaptable or malleable in the sense that while there is indeed determination within nature or natural processes, such processes are also open in a significant respect. As Peirce well recognized (in for example his 1892 “The Doctrine of Necessity Examined” and his 1898 “The Logic of Continuity”), nature is describable both by law and chance. In other words, the universe is tychistic, that is, has the habit of chance such that not all events are causally determined to occur in the manner in which they do by the antecedent happenings.43 Accordingly, so-called laws of nature are hence understood as modifiable habits, rather than immutable, and so chance here means, as Douglas Anderson has said, that “nature has a habit of breaking habits.”44 Naturalists, it should not be surprising, reject strict dualisms, and, in particular, they reject Cartesian dualism. To do this is a significant part of affirming continuity between the human and nature with regard to the totality of the realms of experience. Accordingly, of great significance for naturalists are issues regarding the implications or consequences of experience for understanding nature. Such is the fundamental importance experience plays for naturalism and which suggests its association or link with empiricism as opposed to rationalism, although, to be sure, naturalism’s link here is to a radical or immediate form of empiricism, one congruent with our lived experience. It is such an empiricism that enables one perhaps to circumvent or sidestep the problem/question of whether the naturalism with which we are concerned must or must not be identified as a form of materialism. Dewey is here instructive in his seminal 1905 article “The Postulate of Immediate Empiricism,” saying that “Immediate empiricism postulates that things – anything, everything, in the ordinary or non-technical use of term ‘thing’ – are what they are experienced as.”45 From this perspective, we can understand nature as experience, that is, as what presents itself to us, as Heidegger, for example, interprets the classical Greek notion of phusis or nature.46 As Dewey puts it, “if one wishes to describe anything truly, his task is to tell what it is experienced as being” and that “things are what they are experienced to be...”47 Indeed, experience is Dewey’s most significant concept, the most significant statement of which is his 1925 Experience and Nature. For Dewey, it is imperative that whatever claims philosophers may raise be always traced back to experience itself, and that general philosophical conclusions have to be made consistent with experience, consistent, that is, with the experienced doings and undergoings of life. As a part of this, it seems worth emphasizing that Dewey’s understanding of experience refers not simply to the experience of an isolated individual, but rather to something much broader. As commentator S. Morris Eames puts it, for Dewey, experience is inclusive of Naturalism, Death, and Functional Immortality 49 ... the experiences and reports of experiences of other men, living and dead, mature and immature, normal and abnormal. Experience is thus taken in a broad and full sense; it covers anything and everything that can be denoted. Experience includes feelings, sensations, concepts, psychical events, physical things, relations, actualities, potentialities, the harmonies and disharmonies of life. Experience includes our memories and imaginations, our pasts and projected futures, our present awareness, our illusions and hallucinations; it includes truths and falsehoods, objects of beauty and ugliness, goods and evils; it includes language and events, and “death, war, and taxes” (EN, LW 1: ch. 1). Experience includes all that is, has been, and has potentiality of becoming. For Dewey, experience is ultimate reality, if one chooses to use an old metaphysical term.48 Such a rich naturalist account of experience serves to expose inconsistencies of traditional accounts of nature, and Dewey’s effort, indeed, is one of overcoming the merely apparent separation between humans and nature. The strategy for this is one of articulating a philosophical method that shows both humans as a part of nature as well as nature as being for us cognitively accessible, and, as scholars such as Eames have emphasized, this is the main goal and point of the first chapter of Experience and Nature (“Experience and Philosophic Method”), where Dewey writes that “experience is of as well as in nature.”49 As a part of this, Dewey’s account, like that of his naturalist contemporary Santayana, rejects the Kantian view that reason or reflection is any sort of transcendental activity. That is, it has a natural as opposed to a transcendental status. In any case, naturalism can be understood as a doctrine denying breaks or strict divisions within experience, and this, of course, is a part of naturalism’s strong tendency of anti-dualism. Now contrary to this, an influential and widespread traditional postulation has been that there is a gap or separation between experience and nature. Eames has pointed out that, when such dualism has been perpetrated, experience has been understood as subjective and nature as objective.50 Descartes himself, of course, is the obvious exemplar of such a philosophical bifurcation or dichotomy. Naturalism flatly and wholeheartedly rejects such a separation. Instead, there is, according to the naturalist, an interrelation of nature and the human organism. There is a unity of organic interaction between these two aspects, and hence humans are constitutors of nature. In sum, naturalism, at least according to the present project, is understood as an anti-reductionist, anti-supernaturalist, contextualist, historicist, non-dualist and non-scientistic endeavor. This does not, however, mean that we must endorse or be led to relativism, nihilism, or subjectivism. There is good reason, in any case, to avoid reductionism, and the primary reason for this is one of respecting the primacy of experience, as opposed to founding a philosophical project, primarily, on some epistemology or ontology, rather than upon experience itself. Such an attitude is consistent with classical American 50 CHARLES A. HOBBS naturalism, and also quite consistent with the more recent naturalism of Nielsen, whom I mentioned earlier, and so it remains in some quarters alive and well. With this, let us now turn in the following section to a naturalistic conception of the self. 3. The Naturalistic Self The functional immortality view of death also requires some such account of the self in naturalistic terms, and so I shall here take this up. First, it is fair to say that naturalists are in large part responding to Descartes and, more specifically, to Descartes’ starting point for philosophy, namely the cogito. Now when Descartes articulated his formulation of the cogito, that is, the I that is thinking, he was doing much more than simply declaring the foundation for a metaphysical/epistemological dualism. He was also articulating what would come to be an extremely influential view of the self, namely the self as a mental substance, distinguished from extended, material substance. Modern rationalists, of course, are not alone in this understanding of the self, for it is also found within modern classical empiricism (e.g. Locke, Hume), according to which the basis for knowledge is experience in the sense of individually private perception, which is understood as the sensory effects of those “primary” qualities that cause them in determinate or lawful ways. Thus, naturalism is largely a response to classical modern philosophy in general, as well as its twentieth-century empiricist heirs, such as the philosophers of logical positivism. In any case, the functional immortality view of death follows from an understanding of the self as relational, as social, as opposed to being confined only to this or “my” body. That is, this understanding of death presupposes an organic self extending well beyond my personal body, experience, and/or thoughts. Functional immortality assumes what Eugene Fontinell has called “a Field Model of the Self,” according to which “a self is composed of submicroscopic, microscopic, macroscopic, and ultramacroscopic fields...,” a view also found earlier in the idealism of William Earnest Hocking.51 As Fontinell, among others, points out, James’s position is quite consistent with this, insofar as he rejects any notion of an encapsulated self, that is, any notion according to which the self is contained inside the boundary of one’s skin or simply within some mind or ego.52 Instead, such a pragmatist notion of self can be well understood as a kind of non-dualistic, outward radiation and overlapping with other fields. In Fontinell’s metaphorical phrase, it is fields within fields.53 Similarly, in the words of John McDermott, one “is neither a container nor a box in a world of boxes.”54 As Randall exclaimed in his 1958 Nature and Historical Experience, “It is indeed amazing that students of man should ever have convinced themselves that the mechanisms of human behavior are located exclusively within the skin of the organism, or within a private and subjective ‘mind’, in view of the obvious fact, that everything that distinguishes man from other Naturalism, Death, and Functional Immortality 51 animals is a common and social possession.”55 In any case, Fontinell provides a helpful set of eight principles with which such a rich naturalist view of the self should adhere. According to him, our understanding of the self should do as follows: 1. preserve individuality without falling into atomistic individualism or egocentric isolationism; account for change, growth, and development; account for a range and diversity of relations; account for continuity, identity, sameness, and difference; account for a variety of structures or dynamic systems such as the psychological, personal, historical, cultural, social, and religious; indicate how individuals both make and are made by language, history, art, science, religion, and other institutions; allow for creative participation in wider processes or fields; allow for radical transformation without obliteration or absorption into another reality or process.56 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. Again, Fontinell describes such a self as fields within fields.57 He explicitly references and allies himself with James, who, as Fontinell points out, talked of the self as “all shades and no boundaries.”58 Such a notion of the self eschews atomism, dualisms, and reductive materialism, to name a few of its foes. More positively, it emphasizes context, function, and relationality. It is on the basis of such a naturalistic view of the self that I identify the aforementioned functional immortality view of death, according to which the self lives past or through death not in the sense of a continued personal or subjective experience of one’s own (although, as far as we know, this cannot be absolutely ruled out, a point Fontinell for his part emphasizes), but rather in the sense of living on through, for example, one’s children, one’s ideas, and the various relationships cultivated in life that do not and presumably cannot simply end simultaneously with one’s biological demise. Accordingly, while death is a significant limitation on the activities of the self in the sense that its former center is no longer making a contribution, the self nevertheless goes on in its exerting of influence upon and within the world, albeit in a sort of restructured way. Put simply, meanings are real and live beyond my own person, affecting other people in a personal way. In his 1931 Immortality and the Present Mood, Julius Bixler expresses this position well: 52 CHARLES A. HOBBS My friend’s ideals do not die when he dies. Indeed, as many have testified, his death may make possible for me a more perfect loyalty to his ideals. A life which has been is not a non-existent thing. An achieved possibility is a part of the nature of the real. The world is a very different place because of those who have left their mark upon us.59 Such a conception of immortality, of course, may appear to many people as insubstantial or thin, but this is precisely because they have a thin conception of the self, a conception that is part of the Cartesian legacy according to which the self is understood as individualized and atomistic as opposed to being understood as a significant part of something bigger. That is, it may well not satisfy those who thus desire to be preserved eternally as their unique individualized selves, since this would seem to require another world than this one; such immortality of one’s individuality does not appear to be the case with regard to this world. The functionalist version of immortality, of course, does not assume any other world than this one, and, I should add, such a version of immortality is itself nothing new. We can find instantiations of it at least as far back as ancient Greece. To name but one example, we find Socrates, at about the middle of Plato’s Symposium, saying that he concurs with Diotima’s claim that love is a desire for immortality understood as the reproduction of the self in this world, and so is a preservation through, for example, one’s children and/or one’s teaching.60 It is in this way that Socrates refers to the “children” of Homer, namely the Iliad and Odyssey, and also to all more literal (biological) children, as the essence of immortality. In any case, to return to classical American naturalism, we can see, for example, in Dewey’s Experience and Nature, a sense of the self that is quite consistent and required for the sort of immortality at issue here. The living person or self is transactionally constituted by events and interactions inclusive of that which lies beyond our skin. In this regard Dewey writes, “The thing essential to bear in mind is that living as an empirical affair is not something which goes on below the skin-surface of an organism....”61 Rather, he says “it is always an inclusive affair involving connection, interaction of what is within the organic body and what lies outside in space and time, and with higher organisms far outside.”62 Experience and, indeed, meaning and our embodiment within the world are never something simply somehow merely internal to one’s person. Rather, in Darwinian fashion, Dewey describes the self, or, in his term, the organism, as fundamentally interactive with its environment. As such, the skin demarcates the boundary of self and world, as organism and environment, in what is ultimately an unimportant way. Rather, experience goes beyond the skin and is transactional, and the self is not independent of its context, and this means the cultural, historical, societal contexts. In chapter 4 (“The Act of Expression”) of his 1934 Art as Experience, Dewey elaborates on this theme: Naturalism, Death, and Functional Immortality 53 The epidermis is only in the most superficial way an indication of where an organism ends and its environment begins. There are things inside the body that are foreign to it, and there are things outside of it that belong to it de jure, if not de facto; that must, that is, be taken possession of if life is to continue. On the lower scale, air and food materials are such things; on the higher, tools, whether the pen of the writer or the anvil of the blacksmith, utensils and furnishings, property, friends and institutions – all the supports and sustenances without which a civilized life cannot be. The need that is manifest in the urgent impulsions that demand completion through what the environment – and it alone – can supply, is a dynamic acknowledgment of this dependence of the self for wholeness upon its surroundings.63 The self, in this way, is dependent on its environment, on a context. It is contextual or relational. Now the final point here is one of inquiring into what the consequences are of the functional immortality view for living. We should of course remember here that the functional immortality view is of a different sort than most other prominent beliefs or views about death, not only in the senses that this view affirms an immortality that is not personal or subjective and that it affirms a naturalism that is not wholly reducible to materialism, but also in the sense that this view of death is, quite simply, an empirical fact. Regarding the commitment here to a naturalism that is not merely materialism, Dewey is helpful, as we have seen. For Dewey, it is experience that is the center from which meaning develops and grows. Materiality is of course required, but without being wholly dependent upon or reducible to it. That is, in classical American fashion, I assume a naturalism that affirms the human spirit.64 In any case, let us now turn again to the issue of practical consequences and, as part of this, to the existential issue of whether such an understanding provides equanimity in the face of death. This final consideration arises from the question of whether one can live with the naturalistic meaning of our living and dying alone. 4. Practical Consequences: the Existential Question One’s biological demise, while a significant coming-to-be, does not and cannot erase that one did exist in this world and, by virtue of it, that one presumably continues, in some degree, to exert an influence on and within the world. One continues, after one’s biological demise, to exist functionally within this world insofar as existence is constituted by such influence, and so I would here point out that the naturalistic or functional immortality of which I speak is not a mere sentimentalism to the effect that one shall live on within the thoughts of family and friends, although it does include the significance of such memories insofar as this is the mode through which such influence is transmitted, at least in the more immediate future beyond one’s death. In any case, the functional 54 CHARLES A. HOBBS immortality account of death does not constitute a belief that is mutually exclusive of more speculative beliefs concerning death, such as those of personal immortality and of reincarnation, the Epicurean view that death is nothing to us, or Thomas Nagel’s deprivation view of death. From a pragmatist point of view, these other categories of beliefs are to be considered meaningful only if they in fact make some difference in our conduct, certainly as James says about metaphysical positions generally in Lecture II of his Pragmatism. Yet all must accept the functional immortality view of death as an empirical fact, regardless of whether it is supplemented by any of the other more speculative beliefs about the meaning or nature of death, for this means simply continuing to exert some influence (and, of course, hopefully for the better). While not taking part in the same discussion I am, the contemporary British philosopher Derek Parfit has nevertheless made some observations lending support to the view of immortality suggested here. In his 1984 Reasons and Persons, Parfit writes that There will later be some memories about my life. And there may later be thoughts that are influenced by mine, or things done as the result of my advice. My death will break the more direct relations between my present experiences and future experiences, but it will not break various other relations. This is all there is to the fact that there will be no one living who will be me. Now that I have seen this, my death seems to me less bad.65 Parfit examines and then criticizes the notion that death is best characterized as mainly the loss of one’s identity, that is, in the Enlightenment sense of the term, such that it is understood as that experience which becomes conscious. One’s cognitive and bodily experiences are not best likened to lightening flashes which quickly come and go. We instead have the ability to make connections between such experiences so as to establish a kind of comprehensive framework which we consider to be our identity. From this perspective, at death, since the brain ceases functioning and the body in general decays, what happens is simply that one loses the ability to establish and maintain such an identity. Now Parfit’s criticism here is that this modern Enlightenment emphasis upon identity, which has resulted in a view of death as simply the termination of everything making up one’s personality, disregards or ignores significant aspects of the person that remain after his or her death, for example, memories about the person or perhaps articles, books, or other things we have written or produced. The modernist sense of the self, dependent on a clear distinction between identity and non-identity, leads to a sense of death according to which such things are not indicative of a continued existence beyond our death. Now, to be sure, my death is of significance in that it ruptures those more immediate relations between one’s future and present experience. Yet with a more expansive sense of the self, we can see how death does not necessarily rupture Naturalism, Death, and Functional Immortality 55 all relations. Contrary to many of the so-called postmodern thinkers, this does not of course mean that the notion of identity must simply be abandoned completely. A significant amount of that which constitutes the self is indeed identity. However, the important supplement to this is that not all that makes up the self can or has to be understood as wholly constituted through such identity, such as, for example, the continuation of one’s words and actions within the lives of other people. One’s personality is made up of a number of elements. Yet not every one of them presupposes the control of some reflective self. That is, personality (understood as a complex of mental, physical, and social elements) is not in all respects dependent on a cogito, that is, upon an “I” that is selfaware. In any case, the question in the end is not one of whether or not such a notion of immortality is intelligible, but rather one of whether, as unsupplemented by any of the other views of death, a naturalistic or functional view gives us what we need. This brings to mind Albert Camus’ declaration, in The Myth of Sisyphus (which John McDermott is fond of citing), that “I want to know whether I can live with what I know and with that alone.”66 To reformulate this question, and to make it more specific, we can ask, with regard to death: can one go about living with only the knowledge that one’s existence exerts an influence, makes a difference, upon at least some future affairs, that is, without any supplementary knowledge to the effect that death involves or means anything more than this? In other words, to what extent, on its own, does the functional immortality view of death provide satisfaction? Can one live without faith in anything more? Are the practical effects of this efficacious for coping with our living in the world? In McDermott’s words, the question is one of whether we can “live with this secular liturgy, stunningly apart from a meaning transcendent of our everyday affairs...,”67 or, as he asks elsewhere, “can we experience ourselves as terminal and yet live creative, probing, building lives which, nonetheless, ask for no guarantees and for no ultimate significance to be attributed to our endeavor?”68 That is, we must ask, as McDermott has, about whether or not one can have equanimity in the face of death, that is, in the face of one’s own death. I respond that there are those of us who wish to exist as unconstrained by illusions as we can, and this would seem to entail an honest acceptance, however troubling it might be, of the ultimate disaster that shall come to pass for us as individuals. In any case, the comfort, if there can here be comfort, is in the empirical reality not only of a continued, albeit limited, existence through memory and influence, but also through being a part of that which is larger than any individualized self. This latter consideration is advocated by James as part of the conclusion he states in the Postscript of his 1902 The Varieties of Religious Experience. James writes: 56 CHARLES A. HOBBS ... we can experience union with something larger than ourselves and in that union find our greatest peace ... the practical needs and experiences of religion seem to me sufficiently met by the belief that beyond each man and in a fashion continuous with him there exists a larger power which is friendly to him and to his ideals. All that the facts require is that the power should be both other and larger than our conscious selves. Anything larger will do, if only it be large enough to trust for the next step. It need not be infinite, it need not be solitary. It might conceivably even be only a larger and more godlike self, of which the present self would then be but the mutilated expression, and the universe might conceivably be a collection of such selves, of different degrees of inclusiveness, with no absolute unity realized in it at all.69 To sum up here, it was James’ belief that, with regard to immortality, there can be comfort through being part of that which is greater or larger than our individual selves, and that, as he says, pretty much anything larger will do. It need not necessarily be some bigger heavenly ego or anything infinite, but rather something simply larger than one’s own self as individual, and this seems an important aspect of the term functional immortality, in that it is not ultimate but it does the job of getting at least some of us through another day. As for Dewey, that which is larger than our individual selves is of course society, which, as he says near the beginning of his 1916 Democracy and Education, has its existence “through a process of transmission quite as much as biological life,” with the transmission occurring “by means of communication of habits of doing, thinking, and feeling from the older to the younger.”70 What Dewey is describing I would call, broadly, pedagogical, with the role here of pedagogy as one of itself constituting through activity and tradition, over the long-haul, the functional immortality of which I speak. We might thus just as well call the functional view of immortality a social immortality in which we are “immortal” not through our living on forever as individuals, but through the continuity between the individual and the greater trans-temporal process of society. I do not take issue with Dewey’s characterization of society, but it is worth recognizing that we are not guaranteed any sustainable equanimity in the face of our death, for, so much more likely than not, it is only a matter of time before we, or at least most of us, as individuals, are completely and utterly annihilated and forgotten. This is why, despite the Deweyan social answer I have mentioned, it may well be the case that a thorough-going naturalist position on death inevitably entails an element of bitterness or sadness, or, as Santayana says, “A note of failure and melancholy must always dominate in the struggle against natural death.”71 This is despite any Jamesian speculation about that which may be larger than and friendly to us. Naturalism, Death, and Functional Immortality 57 Speaking of James, there is here another relevant passage from The Varieties of Religious Experience (from Lectures VI and VII on “The Sick Soul”): The fact that we can die, that we can be ill at all, is what perplexes us; the fact that we now for a moment live and are well is irrelevant to that perplexity. We need a life not correlated with death, a health not liable to illness, a kind of good that will not perish, a good in fact that flies beyond the Goods of nature. It all depends on how sensitive the soul may become to discords. “The trouble with me is that I believe too much in common happiness and goodness,” said a friend of mine whose consciousness was of this sort, “and nothing can console me for their transiency. I am appalled and disconcerted at its being possible.” And so with most of us: a little cooling down of animal excitability and instinct, a little loss of animal toughness, a little irritable weakness and descent of the pain-threshold, will bring the worm at the core of all our usual springs of delight into full view, and turn us into melancholy metaphysicians. The pride of life and glory of the world will shrivel. It is after all but the standing quarrel of hot youth and hoary eld. Old age has the last word: the purely naturalistic look at life, however enthusiastically it may begin, is sure to end in sadness. This sadness lies at the heart of every merely positivistic, agnostic, or naturalistic scheme of philosophy.72 It is with this sentiment that I would like to return to John McDermott, for we would do well to consider now his position on death in conjunction with the present project. In existentialist fashion, McDermott believes that the meaning of death, and, indeed, that of life, is most rich and striking when understood according to completely natural terms. Eugene Fontinell has in fact already performed a careful articulation and assessment of McDermott’s position in a recent essay.73 Fontinell says the following: If there is one need claimed, explicitly and implicitly, by all the traditional religions, it is the need to know that we are not alone. McDermott, on the other hand, repeatedly, explicitly and implicitly, argues that we must learn to accept the fact that we are alone – starkly and chillingly alone. There is no one, “nothing,” other than ourselves and other members of the human community who can help us to render life meaningful, who can participate with us in the struggle to achieve “salvation.”74 58 CHARLES A. HOBBS As such, the nature of the human person, as we have seen with Dewey, lies mainly in his or her interaction with others. Indeed, as Fontinell himself notes, McDermott says that “The quality of the other and how we transact with the other constitutes our very being as human.”75 Simply put, McDermott is in the company of Nietzsche, among others, in rejecting any “God” or, more broadly, in rejecting any transcendent meaning. In any case, McDermott also holds that, in an important sense, each of us is radically alone. There can be for McDermott no salvation at all apart from temporal salvation, that is, if there can even be any such salvation at all. Thus the question, again, is one of whether we can live with the affairs of time only, that is, apart from any transcendent meaning.76 McDermott’s own answer is yes, and, moreover, that “it is only in this way that we live a distinctively human life.”77 With regard to the proper response to living in the face of our death, he further elaborates “that we should experience our own lives in the context of being permanently afflicted, that is, of being terminal,” and that “This is not to propose a morbid personal style, but rather to ask that this attitude ride as an abiding presence in the active recesses of our conscious life.”78 Now while the answer may well be that it is possible to live in this way, it also seems worth adding that such living is by no means necessarily easy. As Fontinell rightly notes, McDermott makes “terminality an energizing rather than a de-energizing phenomenon/belief.”79 Referencing Norman O. Brown’s work, McDermott declares that “The message is clear and twofold: avoid the temptation to invest in meaning which transcends our own experience of the life-cycle; and affirm the imminence of death as the gateway to an unrepressed life in which the moment sings its own song, in its own way, once and once only.”80 To accept one’s mortality is, in short, to live a more abundant life. McDermott recognizes, of course, that far from all of us respond to our terminality in this way. He says that while in one way or another everyone is aware of the fact of our mortality, we tend to respond to this in a variety of ways, with fear being one way and forgetting it being another common response. More destructively, denial of the fact that we shall die is also a common response. One might well respond, of course, by asking how indeed we can deny such a basic and fundamental fact of existence, but still, examples of such denial are widespread. McDermott is emphatic that such denial of the trauma of death quite often takes the form of “belief in some form of salvation or immortality.”81 In his view, there is a serious problem with this, and it is not only that such belief seeks to negate what death is, namely complete and utter annihilation, but also that it involves a serious misunderstanding of what constitutes the proper importance and value of human life. That is, what properly defines being human, and thus gives human life its unique flavor, is our being aware of our mortality. The authentic response to this, then, is to own up to the brutal fact that we shall die, as opposed to engaging in whatever strategies of belief in immortality as a means of pretending otherwise. Naturalism, Death, and Functional Immortality 59 Now to return to the topic of a functional immortality, the question may arise as to what extent it is problematic from McDermott’s standpoint. Now for McDermott, to repeat, the belief in immortality constitutes an illegitimate denial of death. There exists nothing but ourselves and other individuals of the human community that can aid in rendering life meaningful, and this would be the one and only form of “salvation,” if there is to be any. Let us, however, be clear about what McDermott refers to by the term “immortality.” He writes as follows: The history of culture has presented many varieties of immortality. Perhaps the most ingenious, although the least plausible, is that of traditional Roman Catholicism, wherein each of us, bodily, is resurrected glorious and immortal or damned and immortal. The attraction here is that our eternal life will be affectively continuous with our mortal life. Other versions of the doctrine of immortality involve claims of reincarnation, metempsychosis, immersion, or absorption, each attempting to perpetuate the me which is me, in one form or another.82 This is a fairly wide ranging list. Yet it is clear who McDermott takes the main culprit to be, and it is also clear that he would concur with Nielsen who says that “none of the faces of immortality provide live options.”83 In any case, McDermott’s brief taxonomy here does not include the “immortality” of which I speak, but nor should it, for, as I suggest, the acceptance of a functional immortality is not a denial or shunning of death, but is rather simply a naturalizing of a doctrine that is otherwise supra-natural. Functional immortality does not even constitute a belief in the typical sense of the word, for what it denotes is simply an empirical fact. That we exist and how we exist, and that we constitute an influence in and upon the world, however great or small, is empirically undeniable. In this sense, McDermott can be said to accept a functional immortality, as indicated, for example, by his response to Rainer Maria Rilke’s poem “The Ninth Elegy.”84 In responding to Rilke’s question, “having been once on Earth–can it ever be cancelled?,” McDermott is emphatic: “I think not. Celebrate!”85 We are, of course, still left with the existential question, as earlier recognized, of to what extent functional immortality is satisfactory for the individual, as un-supplemented by extra metaphysical baggage or speculation. As far as communal inquiry goes, it is with this question that we may be stranded, especially in light of the irreducible nature of temperament, as described by James. I mean here that the question is one whose answer can never be completely generalized and is always precarious, and particularly given that the answer to such a question can indeed change for the individual over time. So while there can be equanimity in the face of death, this does not mean that any and everyone shall experience such an acceptance or calmness. In Jamesian fashion, I suggest, again, that it is a personal question whose answer, 60 CHARLES A. HOBBS in the end, can only be given by the individual person, and varies according to temperament, need, and context. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS For his many comments, questions, and suggestions on work leading to this, I give special thanks to Ken Stikkers. I also thank Tom Alexander, Larry Hickman, Doug Anderson, John McDermott, Bryan Wiebe, and Ann Clark. NOTES 1. And vice versa. That is, the meaning of death is inseparable from the meaning of living. There is not any confrontation of death that is wholly distinct from a confrontation of life, and there is not any contemplation of death that escapes reflection upon that in and about life which we value, that is, whatever it is that makes our lives worthwhile when they are in fact worthwhile, and the kinds of relationships we choose to engage in with other people. Thus reflection upon death constitutes an inescapable aspect of our quest to lead examined lives. I agree here with Richard W. Momeyer’s discussion in his Confronting Death (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988); see especially p. xiv. 2. I here say “the meaning of our living” as opposed to “the meaning of life” because I hold with pragmatists generally that life is an abstraction compared to our living that occurs only in the present as opposed to some other time. John McDermott expresses this point well in his 1991 essay “Why Bother: Is Life Worth Living?” McDermott says the following: “The term ‘life’ can only be used retrospectively as in my life, or, if you knew of my life, or, what a life I have had, or, I have no life, or, plaintively, this is a life? The term ‘living’, on the other hand, is a process word, a present participle, a happening, and a witness to the ‘specious present.’ Following John Dewey, we live only at this time and at no other time and so life is an abstraction, perched above our living as a desperate effort to identify ourselves, to become existentially instantiated. Yet, the only part of our past, which exists, is the past that is present to us. And the future is but a ‘gossamer wing,’ vapid, elusive, and most always, by far, doomed to be different from the futured intentions of our present. Our living is not out of something or in something. Nor is it about something, or on behalf of something. Rather, our living is constitutive of our person. Who we are at any moment is precisely our living.” Journal of Philosophy 88 (1991): 678–679. McDermott’s essay is reprinted with additions in Philosophy and the Reconstruction of Culture, ed. John J. Stuhr (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993), and also in McDermott’s The Drama of Possibility: Experience as Philosophy of Culture, ed. Douglas R. Anderson (New York: Fordham University Press, 2007). 3. Thanks to Larry Hickman for the phrase “functional immortality” (from personal discussion at Center for Dewey Studies). 4. James Campbell, “One Hundred Years of Pragmatism,” Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society 43 (2007): 5. 5. Kai Nielsen, “The Faces of Immortality,” in Death and Afterlife, ed. Stephen T. Davis (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1989), p. 2. As Nielsen goes on to point out, there are two different versions of Western immortality. He explains as follows: Naturalism, Death, and Functional Immortality 61 “Jewish, Christian and Islamic defenders of immortality take two fundamentally different positions in their characterization of the afterlife. The first position ... is probably the more religiously orthodox position and the second position, until rather recently, would more likely appeal to philosophers and perhaps even to common sense since the time of Descartes, and in certain strata of society extending down to our own time.... The two views are, respectively, bodily resurrection by God to eternal life, and Cartesian dualism with its belief in an indestructible, immaterial individual self distinct from the body in which this self is said to be housed. This self is also thought to be capable of, without any body in which it must be housed, to exist as a disembodied individual who is also a person.” Ibid. Reprinted in Nielsen’s Naturalism and Religion (Amherst, N.Y.: Prometheus Books, 2001). 6. See Chapter 14 (“Ideal Immortality”) of Part III (“Reason in Religion”) in The Life of Reason (New York: Scribners, 1955). 7. Peirce, Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce, ed. Charles Hartshorne, Paul Weiss, and Arthur Burks (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press), vol. 7, p. 356. 8. Peirce, Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce, vol. 6, p. 354. 9. Martin Gardner, The Whys of a Philosophical Scrivener (New York: William Morrow and Co., 1983), p. 280. 10. I thank Andrew Youpa for alerting me to this quotation; I cannot locate a print citation for this, but a “google” search turns up numerous attributions (without print citation) of this to Allen. 11. I note this as a dominant trend. There are certainly exceptions such as, e.g., the work of Canadian philosopher Kai Nielsen, whose naturalism very much resembles some varieties of classical American naturalism, particularly Dewey’s naturalism. See, e.g., Nielsen’s Naturalism and Religion (Amherst, N.Y.: Prometheus Books, 2001), Naturalism Without Foundations (Amherst, N.Y.: Prometheus Books, 1996), and On Transforming Philosophy: A Metaphilosophical Inquiry (Boulder, Col.: Westview Press, 1995). See also Robert Sinclair’s “Nielsen’s Conception of Philosophy: Its Essential Tension and Deweyan Resolution” and Nielsen’s reply, both in Reason & Emancipation: Essays on the Philosophy of Kai Nielsen, ed. Michel Seymour and Matthias Fritsch (Amherst, N.Y.: Humanity Books, 2007), pp. 161–171, 173–180. In any case, as with any –ism, we do well to define what we mean by it. Other names associated with related forms of non-reductive “naturalism,” in no particular order of importance, include John Lachs, Joseph Margolis, Nicholas Rescher, John Ryder, Charlene Haddock Seigfried, John E. Smith, and John J. Stuhr, to name just a few. There is also of course the compelling naturalistic (and existentialist) view of John J. McDermott, which I discuss in the last section of this paper. 12. Nielsen provides a helpful typology of naturalisms. He distinguishes cosmological (worldview) naturalism, methodological naturalism, ethical naturalism, and scientistic naturalism. See Naturalism and Religion, p. 136. 13. The Life of Reason, p. 17. 14. Early Greek Philosophy, ed. and trans. Jonathan Barnes (New York: Penguin Books, 1987), p. 49. 15. Dewey, “Anti-Naturalism in Extremis,” in The Later Works of John Dewey, ed. Jo Ann Boydston (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1989), vol. 15, p. 46. Originally published in the Partisan Review 10 (January-February 1943): 24–39. 16. Roy Wood Sellars, “The Emergence of Naturalism,” International Journal of Ethics 34 (1924): 320. 62 CHARLES A. HOBBS 17. “The Emergence of Naturalism,” ibid. 18. Jaegwon Kim, “The American Origins of Philosophical Naturalism” in Philosophy in America at the Turn of the Century (Charlottesville, Virg.: Philosophy Documentation Center, 2003) Of course, the origins of American naturalism can be said to ultimately go back much further than this, not only back to C. S. Peirce, William James, and John Dewey, but also further back to include philosophers such as Henry David Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson. 19. “The American Origins of Philosophical Naturalism,” p. 85. 20. Ibid. 21. Ibid. 22. Ibid, p. 86. 23. Ibid. 24. Naturalism and the Human Spirit, ed. Yervant H. Krikorian (New York: Columbia University Press, 1944), p. 374, 358. 25. Ibid, p. 358. 26. Ibid. It should be noted, however, that Randall immediately adds that “There is room for religion, to be sure, since that is an encountered fact of human experience.” (ibid) This is, to be sure, Dewey’s position on religious experience (or the “mystical”) as well, as evidenced by his 1934 A Common Faith, in which Dewey says the following: “There is no reason for denying the existence of experiences that are called mystical. On the contrary, there is every reason to suppose that, in some degree of intensity, they occur so frequently that they may be regarded as normal manifestations that take place at certain rhythmic points in the movement of experience. The assumption that denial of a particular interpretation of their objective content proves that those who make the denial do not have the experience in question, so that if they had it they would be equally persuaded of its objective source in the presence of God, has no foundation in fact. As with every empirical phenomenon, the occurrence of the state called mystical is simply an occasion for inquiry into its mode of causation. There is no more reason for converting the experience itself into an immediate knowledge of its cause than in the case of an experience of lightning or any other natural occurrence.” The Later Works of John Dewey, vol. 9, p. 26. 27. Naturalism and Religion, p. 29. 28. Dewey, The Later Works of John Dewey, vol. 15, p. 54. Also in the 1944 Naturalism and the Human Spirit volume, pp. 1–16. 29. See the Preface of McDermott’s The Culture of Experience: Philosophical Essays in the American Grain (Prospect Heights, Ill.: Waveland Press, 1976), p. ix. It is significant that McDermott also notes here “that only in the American philosophical tradition is this [conception of experience] the primary concern” (ibid). 30. Paul Kurtz is helpful on this point, saying as follows: “The naturalists do not deny that aesthetic and religious experiences are central to human life; in a sense they provide content to a rich and full life. The real issue for the naturalists however is how you interpret these experiences. Dewey constantly talks about the immediate experiences that we have, undergo, suffer, enjoy; but he denies that the term ‘knowledge’ should be applied to this range of awareness in any special way. For it is one thing to have a raw, brute, and unrefined immediate experience, it is another thing to interpret, relate, organize, or deduce from this experience ‘concepts,’ to claim that they apply to the world, and to act upon them.” See Kurtz’s “Naturalism in American Philosophy” in Philosophy and the Civilizing Arts: Essays Presented to Herbert W. Naturalism, Death, and Functional Immortality 63 Schneider, ed. Craig Walton and John P. Anton (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1974), p. 207. 31. Larry A. Hickman, “Theism and Naturalism in American Philosophy: An Overview” Journal of Korean Religion 7 (2005): 220 (and see p. 221 for the phrase “‘adequacy’ thesis of American naturalism”). 32. W.H. Sheldon, Journal of Philosophy 42 (1945): 253–270. Sheldon’s article is largely a critique of Naturalism and the Human Spirit. 33. Dewey, “Are Naturalists Materialists?” The Later Works of John Dewey, vol. 15, p. 109. Originally published in Journal of Philosophy 42 (1945): 515–530; also reprinted in American Philosophic Naturalism in the Twentieth Century, ed. John Ryder (Amherst, N.Y.: Prometheus Books, 1994), pp. 102–120. 34. “Critique of Naturalism,” p. 254. 35. Ibid, p. 256. 36. Dewey, The Later Works of John Dewey, vol. 15, pp. 113–114. To be fair (according to Lewis S. Feuer), it was Ernest Nagel who was mainly responsible for the composition of this article, with Dewey himself actually writing very little (probably not much beyond the first paragraph). Ibid, p. xvi. 37. Introduction to The Later Works of John Dewey, vol. 15, p. xvi. 38. Ibid. 39. See also Chapter 7 (“Nature, Life and Body-Mind”) of Dewey’s Experience and Nature, in which Dewey writes as follows: “‘Matter’, or the physical, is a character of events when they occur at a certain level of interaction. It is not itself an event or existence; the notion that while ‘mind’ denotes essence, ‘matter’ denotes existence is superstition ... the dependence of life, sentiency and mind upon ‘matter’ is ... practical or instrumental.” The Later Works of John Dewey, vol. 1, pp. 200, 201. 40. To the Eastern Division APA meeting in Baltimore, and originally published in Proceedings and Addresses of the American Philosophical Association 28 (1954–55): 5–17. Reprinted in American Philosophy in the Twentieth Century, ed. Paul Kurtz (New York: Macmillan, 1966), and in Presidential Addresses of the American Philosophical Association: 1951–1960, ed. Richard T. Hull (Amherst, N.Y.: Prometheus Books, 2006), pp. 265–275. 41. American Philosophy in the Twentieth Century, p. 547. 42. Ibid, p. 547. 43. Peirce writes in “The Logic of Continuity” that tychism is the doctrine that absolute chance is a factor of the universe. This is from his Cambridge Lectures on “Reasoning and the Logic of Things” (Lecture Eight). See Reasoning and the Logic of Things: The Cambridge Conferences Lectures of 1898, ed. Kenneth Laine Ketner (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992), pp. 242–268. I offer further discussion of Peirce’s tychism in my “Peirce’s Tychism and the Epicurean Swerve,” forthcoming in Southwest Philosophical Studies. 44. From personal discussion with Anderson. 45. Dewey, The Middle Works of John Dewey, ed. Jo Ann Boydston (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1977), vol. 13, p. 158. 46. Heidegger, Introduction to Metaphysics, trans. Ralph Manheim (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1959). 47. Dewey, The Middle Works of John Dewey, vol. 3, p. 159. We also find such a naturalism, whereby nature is experience, in James’ radical empiricism, which is, indeed, more or less what Dewey means by immediate empiricism. 64 CHARLES A. HOBBS 48. “Experience and Philosophical Method in John Dewey” in Experience and Value: Essays on John Dewey and Pragmatic Naturalism, ed. Elizabeth R. Eames and Richard W. Field (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2003), p. 15. Originally published in the Midwestern Journal of Philosophy 4.1 (Spring 1976): 15–29. 49. Dewey, The Later Works of John Dewey, vol. 1, p. 12. 50. Experience and Value: Essays on John Dewey and Pragmatic Naturalism, p. 14. 51. Eugene Fontinell, Self, God, and Immortality: A Jamesian Investigation (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1986), p. 46. Regarding Hocking (who himself writes of the self as a Field of Fields), see, for example, his “Fact, Field, and Destiny: Inductive Elements of Metaphysics” in Review of Metaphysics 11 (1958): 542. Reprinted in A William Ernest Hocking Reader, with Commentary, ed. John Lachs and D. Micah Hester (Nashville, Tenn.: Vanderbilt University Press, 2004). Thanks to Douglas Anderson for calling my attention to the Hocking article. 52. Self, God, and Immortality: A Jamesian Investigation, p. 47. 53. Ibid, p. 46. 54. John J. McDermott, Streams of Experience: Reflections on the History and Philosophy of American Culture (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1986), p. 196. 55. New York: Columbia University Press, p. 173. 56. Self, God, and Immortality, p. 46. 57. Ibid. 58. Ibid, p. 47. 59. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, p. 36. 60. Symposium 207a–212c. 61. Dewey, The Later Works of John Dewey, vol. 1, p. 215. 62. Ibid. 63. Dewey, The Later Works of John Dewey, vol. 10, pp. 64–65. 64. Again, I recognize that there are of course other varieties of naturalism, and certainly including the scientistic kind that does reduce all things to matter, a charge that, as Dewey notes in “Anti-Naturalism in Extremis,” is often leveled by antinaturalists at naturalism is general. (The Later Works of John Dewey, vol. 15, p. 56). Such would be a vulgar naturalism necessarily excluding from its concerns or recognition issues of human meaning and spirit. 65. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984, p. 281. 66. Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus, and Other Essays, trans. Justin O’Brien (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1955), p. 51. 67. Streams of Experience: Reflections on the History and Philosophy of American Culture, p. 90. 68. Ibid, p. 164. 69. James, The Works of William James (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1985), p. 413. 70. Dewey, The Middle Works of John Dewey, vol. 9, p. 109. Dewey adds the following: “Without this communication of ideals, hopes, expectations, standards, opinions, from those members of society who are passing out of the group life to those who are coming into it, social life could not survive. If the members who compose a society lived on continuously, they might educate the new-born members, but it would be a task directed by personal interest rather than social need. Now it is a work of necessity.” Ibid Naturalism, Death, and Functional Immortality 65 71. The Life of Reason, p. 290. 72. James, The Works of William James (1985), p. 119. 73. Experience as Philosophy: On the Work of John J. McDermott, ed. James Campbell and Richard E. Hart (New York: Fordham University Press, 2006), pp. 116– 139. 74. Experience as Philosophy, p. 127. 75. Streams of Experience, p. 197; Experience as Philosophy, p. 127. 76. Streams of Experience, p. 90. 77. Ibid, p. 164. “The Inevitability of Our Own Death” was originally published in the Texas Humanist (April 1981), and, since Streams of Experience, it has also been reprinted in American Philosophic Naturalism in the Twentieth Century (1994) and in The Drama of Possibility: Experience as Philosophy of Culture (2007). 78. Streams of Experience, p. 164. 79. Experience as Philosophy, p. 136. 80. Streams of Experience, p. 163. 81. Ibid, p. 162. McDermott adds the following: “I do not refer here to a hope that somehow, somewhere, somewhen, all will go well for all of us who are, have been, or will be. Certainly, such a hope is a legitimate and understandable human aspiration. But to convert this hope into a commitment, a knowledge, a settled conviction, is to participate in an illegitimate move from possibility to actuality. It is understandable that we wish to escape from peril, but it is unacceptable to translate that desire into an assured belief that we have so escaped.” Ibid. 82. Streams of Experience, p. 162. McDermott adds the following: “Obviously, I have no final knowledge of these claims nor do I know of anyone who has. Evidence on their behalf is scanty, scattered, tentative, highly personal, and empirically dubious. Yet many of us cling to one or more of these solutions, as a redoubt, a trump card, or a lastminute reprieve from the overwhelming evidence that we are terminal.” Ibid. 83. Nielsen, “The Faces of Immortality,” Death and Afterlife, p. 28. 84. Duino Elegies (New York: W.W. Norton, 1939), p. 73 (as cited by McDermott in Streams of Experience, p. 257). 85. Streams of Experience, p. 168. Charles A. Hobbs Visiting Assistant Professor Department of Philosophy 77 Spes Unica Hall Saint Mary’s College Notre Dame, IN 46556 United States