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Surviving Death (Carl G. Hempel Lecture)

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Compared to his previous Saving God, Surviving Death is even more densely argued and is very difficult for non-philosophers. But I'm glad I got through it, since Johnston is an interesting thinker. I'll try to summarize.

In the book, Johnston looks for and finds a naturalistic sense in which a person could be said to survive death: a good person can truly identify with all of humanity by directing his or her actions in concert with this concern. He or she will then live on in the "onward rush of humanity."

Most people believe in an afterlife, where their personality lives on and justice is meted out in some fashion. Johnston points out that, even for the non-religious, death seems to pose some threat to the project of being good. It's not that one necessarily needs the incentive to be good, but that death is discouraging, and morality would seem to be greatly supported by an afterlife.

Johnston examines and rejects the various Christian efforts to make the notion of a future bodily resurrection coherent. Next, he rejects quickly the idea of an eternal soul, pointing out that while we can't rule it out, the preponderance of empirical evidence is against the idea.

Then Johnston enters into a lengthy discussion about what constitutes a self or a person and whether any such entity is a legitimate target for self-directed concern. He finds the common notions of person and self suspect, and determines that it is the unified "arena of presence and action" we seem to be at the center of, which is the leading candidate.

But does this arena of presence and action persist? We're well founded in saying it exists now, but Johnston argues we're not well-founded in saying this "I" will exist in the future (we can't bind it to an enduring substance). Therefore nothing justifies a future-directed self concern.

The practical implication of this conclusion is that there is no reason to favor one's own interests over another.

Johnston backs up to reconsider this surprising conclusion, and uses a variety of thought-experiments to try to break down the perceived connection of the present arena with the lifespan of a living body (these are clever).

Personal identity does not justify a future-directed concern. What's going on is that our (unjustified) disposition to direct concern to a future self constitutes our notion of personal identity (we have things backwards).

Here is the next key insight: we can change this disposition. If you change the disposition, you thereby change what it means to be a person. If the persisting self is determined to be unreal, and just how things seem to us, then we should alter our disposition.

So, to maximize the good, we should identify with the "onward rush of humanity" (a phrase used by John Stuart Mill). We would then, "quite literally", live on in this onward rush. And the good, then, could survive death.