Abstract
This chapter is a philosophical exploration of the topic specifically sidestepped in Patočka’s paper: the survival of the soul after the death of the body. First, I summarise arguments by some philosophers of religion (such as D Z Phillips) who offer a position analogous to that of Patočka: that the immortality of the soul should not be understood literally (ontologically), for that might be confused, but rather in a Platonic sense as the matter of a life lived in the light of absolute moral concerns. However, I further argue that this appears insufficient to make sense of the multiple examples of the contacts with the dead or the spirits, rooted in rich situated practices of cultures and religions (rather than in confused metaphysics of academic philosophers). Here, the explicit rejections of ontological commitments as “confused” may amount to failing to do justice to the terms in which observers of a religion, but also bereaved people, understand their own experiences and in which these experiences are conceptualised in the lives of the broad social practices (including religious practices in a narrower sense). Here, I am following some insights achieved by the recent “ontological turn” in (the philosophy of) social sciences.
Ale já jsem zemřel a nezanechal žádných potomků ani majetku
Budu však žít navěky
A nikdo mi v tom nezabrání
Oldřich Wenzl, “Po veselé noci” (“But I have died and left no offspring or possessions/Yet I will be living forever/And nobody will stop me”. From the Czech poet Oldřich Wenzl’s poem “After the merry night”.)
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Notes
- 1.
The numbers within slashes refer to the page numbers of the printed Czech text, included within slashes in the above English translation.
- 2.
I stick with generic “he” where the wording of the works I quote has it, too.
- 3.
Price (1995, 206) notes that communications through a medium “are sometimes excessively boring to hear or to read. It would seem that the art of saying very little in a very large number of words is as well understood ‘on the other side’ as it is here.”
- 4.
Among thinkers favourably inclined towards spiritualism, Broad and Price are probably the most rigorous philosophically. Their cautiousness is notable; nowhere does either of them claim that the survival hypothesis is the most probable, or the only possible, explanation of mediumistic communications. They mainly state that it is a possible explanation that seems to fit some cases better than other explanations do but that does not fit most other cases. They stress the need to keep the possibility open.
In his robust discussion of the possibility of survival, Sudduth (2016) – while being respectful towards the rigour, clarity, and humility of Broad’s and Price’s arguments – argues that exactly in this important aspect, the survival hypothesis fails: it is neither statistically more probable than its opposite, nor can it be tested for likelihood against its rival hypotheses, and thus it cannot be considered the best explanation of the total evidence. Yet he observes that while the hypothesis proves “inferentially unjustified” (cannot be proven), his critical arguments do not show that one cannot be “epistemically justified” in one’s belief in survival based on one’s own experiences. As Sudduth notes, belief in afterlife/survival has, in this respect, a nature similar to belief in God (see Chap. 11).
- 5.
The sense of presence of dead children also varies strikingly. Klass (1999, chapter 4) suggests four main expressions of the continuous bond: attachment to “linking objects” (a toy, a piece of clothes); embracing religious ideas and devotion; relying on memories; and identifying the presence in an aspect of the bereaved parents’ life (“Our children live on in the love that we share”). It is in the connection to religious ideas that the sense of presence comes closest to what the survival hypothesis talks about: uncanny or awe-inspiring events (such as inexplicable-looking movements of significant inanimate objects) are understood in the light of the perceived wish of the deceased child to reach out to the parents.
- 6.
Hufford (2020, 94) stresses the need to retain the distinction between religion (there being a particular “spiritual institution” to which people can commit themselves) and spirituality (taking into account spiritual realities as independent). He notes that even the religion-friendly secularist position “defin[ing] spirituality as that which provides ultimate meaning to the believer incorporates a theory about the origins of religion and simultaneously excludes some of the most common spirit experiences”. Encounters with spirits may equally well not provide any – ultimate or not – meaning to the lives of those who experience them. Which is part of what “independently real” means.
- 7.
In his detailed criticism of ontologism in anthropology, Paleček (2022, 167) points out that a lot of the ontologists’ troubles stem from their tendency to “ascrib[e] to [the locals] intentions, desires and reasons, where actually there are none”. This, I suspect, applies also to “beliefs” in the sense in which a Western intellectual helps himself to this term when trying to talk about some “other” people’s relationship to the world (cf. Risjord 2020).
- 8.
Burley (2020a, 55f, 68) observes that for a philosopher of religion working in a “radical pluralist” way, the important task is to highlight the diversity of religious perspectives – by staging them and giving them voices in a manner similar to a dramatist –, without downplaying their differences or assuming the need to strive to resolve them. Elsewhere, when he is making this point, he even argues that “coming to see the diversity more clearly may (…) just as readily reveal that the disputes are liable to be irresolvable” (Burley 2020b, 314).
- 9.
Researchers into spiritualism have exhibited, from the very beginning, a strong, almost paranoid anxiety about being “duped” by fraudulent mediums or misinterpreting the cases, rather than an eager willingness to believe anything. The history of the Society of Psychic Research is one of constant trials and scrutiny; the scrutiny is more intense in present-day research into mediumship, with the consent of the mediums themselves, regardless of the additional stress this brings to them. See Bowie (2014, 25ff).
- 10.
Cf. the differences between cases of ADC (after-death-communication) and phantom limbs or “yearning search”, briefly discussed by Rees (2001, 276ff).
- 11.
I thank Mik Burley for insightful comments on the manuscript and the participants of the workshop Death and Afterlife for a helpful discussion. The editors of this book, Gustav Strandberg and Hugo Strandberg, read through the manuscript thoroughly and offered me several very valuable suggestions, which I haven’t accommodated quite as they deserved, I am afraid.
This text was supported by the project “Centre for Ethics as Study in Human Value” (project No. CZ.02.1.01/0.0/0.0/15_003/0000425, Operational Programme Research, Development and Education).
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Beran, O. (2024). The Other Modern Séances. In: Strandberg, G., Strandberg, H. (eds) Jan Patočka and the Phenomenology of Life After Death. Contributions to Phenomenology, vol 128. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-49548-9_8
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