Immortality and Independence

Craig Morey
Nov 29 2019


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This is to be an inquiry into why individualism (by which I mean in this case a desire for independence from society, systems of collective thought, or any other sort of idealogical/geographical/governmental grouping of humans) is not more popular than it is. Put another way, why do humans have such a strong desire to be part of something larger than themselves. My argument is that the innate human inability to look squarely at the inevitability of death pushes people to seek a sort of proxy-immortality within the continuation of humanity or of specific human systems.

I’ll start this inquiry by looking at various sorts of answers to a fundamental question: “What is the best sort of life to live?”

In terms of ancient Greek virtue ethics, the answer is to be a virtuous human, with the definition of ‘virtue’ depending ultimately on whatever is seen as the function of humans. “The virtue of a knife, for example, is sharpness; among the virtues of a racehorse is speed. Thus, to identify the virtues for human beings, one must have an account of what the human purpose is.” [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtue_ethics#Key_concepts]

This answer, that the best life is to be the best sort of human (working within the bounds of whatever is understood to be the purpose of a human’s existence), feels somehow quaint to me, somewhat pastoral, simple-minded, and I suspect that I am not the only modern person to feel this way about virtue ethics. Certainly, living as a virtuous human would be a satisfactory life, but the question was about the best life. Wouldn’t the best life involve achieving more than just what ever is prescribed for banal human existence? I would say the desire to live the best sort of life, rather than just a virtuous life, is what motivated most of the great achievers, inventors, conquerors, and other great humans throughout history. These people weren’t striving to be an adequately human human, they were striving for something beyond that.

This is where I see the inevitability of death as playing a role. In the virtue ethics interpretation, living a proper human life naturally ends with death, this is not seen as something negative. But for someone who’s goal is to live beyond a simply human life in some way, death is a tragic cutoff. Looking back on the history of all of those great humans mentioned earlier, every one of them died, and in dying, they were reduced to simply being human. The best sort of life would be one of immortality, of infinite accomplishments and achievements, and such a life is impossible.

When faced with this fact, that living the best sort of life is impossible, we modern humans recoil from it and refuse to face it head on. Instead, we get drawn into schemes for achieving some sort of immortality by proxy. In early times a major one was the immortality of one’s family and descendants. The immortality of one’s tribe or clan. The immortality of one’s nation, or culture, or school of thought. And in binding ourselves to these second-hand attempts at immortality, we necessarily step away from virtue. A virtuous person would have the ability to step away from life sagely, to calmly face death even while leaving nothing behind them, no descendants, no legacy, nothing, since for the virtuous person, the good life they’ve lived ends at their death and there is no attempt to extend it beyond that point.

A more modern conception of this same sort of proxy immortality would be in seeing all of humanity itself as something with the potential to be immortal. So with this to cling to, people answer the question of how to live the best life by doing what is best for humanity, rather than by doing what would lead to a single finite virtuous life. In this way, our innate egoism is led astray by our fear of death, and we instead make ourselves into part of some larger whole. Even Nietzsche, who I would interpret as championing individualism over collective human thinking and morality, admits that as we are not ourselves capable of truly becoming the ubermensch (a human who can stand independent of all previous moral frameworks and oppression of thought), and that the best we can do is to strive in that direction and take heart in the fact that humanity will continue to progress, and that someday humanity as a whole (of which we have the honor of being a part!) will achieve the creation of an ubermensch, even though we ourselves as individuals now cannot.

Like Nietzsche (as I’ve read him anyway), I want to stand apart from the trappings and limitations of all previous trends in human thought. Unlike Nietzsche, I do not want to compromise and admit that the best hope I have is to throw my lot in with the future legacy of all humanity. And I think the key to freeing myself of the necessity of viewing myself as just one part of humanity, just a cog in the machine, is to strive to face my own mortality head on, to return to the ideal of a virtuous life self-contained within its own eventual death. If I can face the fact of my own mortality honestly, then ideally I no longer need to worry about my legacy or my descendants and can instead look for a better, more honest answer to the question of how to live the best life. And by cutting away my need for proxy immortality, I think this answer will naturally move more in the direction of individualism and egoism.


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