Should We Strive For Immortality?
Peter Thiel vs. Heidegger
I don’t mean immortality in the figurative-poetic sense commemorated by Shakespeare in Sonnet 18. Nor do I mean immortality in the Socratic-spiritual sense—for if the soul is immortal there is nothing to strive for. Nor do I mean immortality in the religious sense of an afterlife. I mean immortality in the sense intended by tech futurists, for whom the fight against aging and for longevity is but an asymptotic jump to never dying.
Peter Thiel thinks that any argument against pursuing immortality is a symptom of an an inability to appropriately value life. If an immortal life isn’t worth living, the problem isn’t immortality, he says, but what we imagine life to be, in the first place.
On the other hand, Heidegger and other existentialist thinkers claim that finitude is the basis for both care and meaning. Strip us of our mortality, and life loses meaning. A counter-argument to the Heideggerian claim is that one might still be meaningfully finite even if one lived forever. Choices might still be limited, and time one-directional, even if the sting of death were removed.
Often, religious thinkers will claim that the pursuit of immortality is a kind of hubris, a form of playing God. And yet, the same argument might be made (and is made) against many forms of technological innovation that have vastly improved quality of life. Over time, some religious thinkers have embraced various technological innovations not only as permissible, but even as laudable. One might just as plausibly say that God wants us to find cures for malaria and cancer as God wants us to wipe out death altogether. I see no principled reason why the pursuit of immortality should be different from the pursuit of any other human advantage. The outcome might be terrible—but not any more terrible, in principle, than airplanes and smart phones.
Thus, the argument for or against the pursuit of immortality, in my view, is a philosophical—rather than theological—problem. Religiosity isn’t predictive of where one will or should stand on the issue.
I’m willing to venture, perhaps out of a spirit of playfulness, that the reason we should resist the pursuit of immortality is not because it is an undesirable end, but because it is a distraction from the higher end of knowing how to live well, be it to 20, 50, 100, 1000, and forever. But one critical response might be that as far as Maslow’s hierarchy of needs go, longevity is a more basic need than virtue—“let’s extend life expectancy by a hundred years and then talk about the meaning of life.”
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