Would Your Life Be Different If You Had Certain Knowledge About The Afterlife?
Nah.
Pascal assumes the answer is “yes.” We should live good, pious lives because there’s a chance there’s a God, a Judgment Day, a reward for our goodness at the end of the tunnel of this world. But if we knew there wasn’t an afterlife—his wager implies—we should live it up, or at least not be so constrained.
Heidegger, by contrast, adopts a posture in Being and Time of “methodological atheism,” the inverse posture of Pascal’s “methodological theism.”
By methodological atheism I mean that Heidegger does not weigh in on whether God exists or not, but suspends the question. In so doing, he claims that finitude is our grounding condition and our fundamental experience regardless of our views about what happens after death.
Even if I believe in ghosts, participate in seances, think that I am the reincarnation of Sun Ra or Jesus or the Baal Shem Tov, I am nonetheless as burdened by my finitude as the next person.
Hedonism or materialism is likewise just as suspect as any metaphysical system it seeks to challenge—because it posits certainty about the life I am supposed to live. In form, it hardly matters whether my pope dons a white hat and scepter or sports a toned, Instagram-worthy bod. The fitness guru and the spiritual guru alike tell me there is some general answer to how I am supposed to live that chafes against my own sense that I am finite. We simply can’t help but ask “what is it all for?”
If Heidegger is right, Pascal’s wager is dumb—it’s rooted in a fallacy that knowing how it all ends would spare us from the challenge of having to live this very life. In theory, you might say that it matters if we think we’ll burn in hell, or come back as plants, if we’re naughty. It matters if we think we have “nine lives” or many chances to go back and make amends once we’ve learned our lessons. But note—these theories are always theories that inform how we live now. The choice to hold them and to act on them remains a choice.
We can kick the can down the road only so far before someone has to answer what the point of living is. We might as well be the ones to answer it.
To what extent are you with Pascal—hedging against the possibility of some Absolute Truth—that might be real? To what extent are you with Heidegger, for whom the core question is what are you going to care about, regardless of what’s true?
If you think this is too stark a dichotomy, consider Kierkegaard as a kind of middle-ground position. Without denying the reality of Absolute Truth, Kierkegaard affirms that what matters most is not Truth, but our Passion for it (see the intro to his Concluding Unscientific Postscript).
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Eh. Think I’m with Heidegger on this one, except if I had certainty, which I certainly don’t. The trouble with me with the wager is that is elides all the ways in which you have to live as a Christian to attain eternity, which is unappealing, and removes the question altogether about how to judge whether or not the gospel is true, but instead presents me with a rational choice problem. I like Hausman’s poem the loveliest of trees because it gives voice to finitude, and am not very moved by the 34th Canto. I do think we can have truth, but truth as an expression of the choices we have to make in this life, not absolutely true, but descriptively true.