Ritröð Guðfræðistofnunar - 01.09.1998, Page 169

Death, Jesus, Derrida
New Testament (see Acts 23:7-9).18 In the Greek philosophical traditions the
Platonic idea of the immortality of the soul was subject to explanations about
the nature of the body which in most cases would not allow for an idea of a
continued existence of a soul at the moment of physical death.19 If individual
freedom had triggered concerns about your final destiny, the inconsistent
phantasies about death and dying in the Hellenistic world of Graeco-Roman
and Jewish-Christian culture around the turn of the calendar was but an
embryonic drama of what was to develop in the western world throughout the
middle ages in images of purgatory and personal agony over death.20
If modern empirical criteria have affected the perception of immortality,
the question of immortality may perhaps be said to maintain its persistence
all from ancient times to the present. D. Z. Phillips observes that most philo-
sophers would consider any belief in immortality based on a mistake. The fact
that the prerequisites of such beliefs cannot be proven on the basis of (repeat-
ed) experimental data make them, indeed, false. And a belief built on mendac-
ity is by definition not true. Conflicting postulates about the immortality of
the soul such as an immaterial body or as a spirit without a body or in the
form of a bodily resurrection may all be explained as logical fallacies as Phil-
lips explains.21
18 Cf. Otto Kaiser and Eduard Lohse, Death and Life, Biblical Encounters Series, J. E. Steely
transl. (Nashville, TN: Abingdon, 1981), praesertim 121-129 [Tod und Leben (Stuttgart:
Kohlhammer, 1977)].
19 On the Epicurian and Stoics views of the body and the soul, vide Julia E. Annas, Hellenis-
tic Philosophy of Mind (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1992).
20 Cf. Jacques Le Goff, The Birth of Purgatory, A. Goldhammer, transl. (Chicago, IL: The
University of Chicago Press, 1984) [La naissance de Purgatoire (Paris: Gallimard, 1981)];
for a historical introduction into ideas about death and dying in the western world, vide
e.g., Philippe Ariés, The Hour ofOur Death, H. Weaver, transl. (Harmondsworth: Penguin
Books, 1981) [Essais sur l’histoire de la mort en Occident (Paris: Seuil, 1977)].
21 Death and Immortality, New Studies in the Philosophy of Religion, W. D. Hudson ed.
(London: Macmillan, 1970) 1-19. As for immaterial bodies of souls Phillips notes that
without such entities having any impact on the physical world their existence cannot be
proven nor felt. With regard to the idea that there is a spirit that continues to exist without
a physical body, its proponents claim that the real “person” is identical with such a spirit
rather than the physical body. Yet, if the thinking person is considered to be this true self,
Phillips claims, there is no way to separate thinking from physical functions (logic that
leads to the idea of reincamation if the postulate is to hold). Finally, as concerns physical
resurrection, Phillips argues that the concept of a “new” resurrected body no longer con-
nected with the old body can no longer be seen as one and the same body. A new body
is, thus, cut off from the old one and resulting in something that has no preceding identity
(the logical fallacy being that if identical with the old body, there would be no sense in
claiming the old ever having ceased to exist), ibid. Phillips further points out that ideas
about the life after death as never changing relationships between individuals are logically
inconsistent as these relationships are meaningful only through change, ibid., 16-17.
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