Insight Editions · No. 72
Heidegger and a Hippo Walk Through Those Pearly Gates
Using Philosophy (and Jokes!) to Explore Life, Death, the Afterlife, and Everything in Between
Thomas Cathcart and Daniel Klein
Thomas Cathcart and Daniel Klein use jokes and philosophical arguments to examine death, religious beliefs about the afterlife, suicide, memory, and technological attempts at immortality.
A study guide to Heidegger and a Hippo Walk Through Those Pearly Gates by Thomas Cathcart and Daniel Klein. Shared free for personal reading; not for sale and not endorsed by the authors or publishers. Please read and buy the original.
The Book in Brief
The argument in brief
The book moves through seven parts from denial to biotech, and every part ends with Daryl a little more shaken.
- Denial (Part I). Becker's immortality systems keep civilization sane but breed holy war; Freud calls religion an illusion, Jung a discovery.
- Confrontation. Kierkegaard: every escape fails, angst is the teacher. Heidegger: facing death turns life into Game 7. Sartre: death turns the free for-itself into a thing.
- Indifference and memory. Schopenhauer: undying Will makes death unreal. Survivors' memory is a weak immortality: no ego consciousness.
- Eternity now (Part II). Tillich and Wittgenstein: eternity is not endless time but the present.
- Souls and Heaven (Part III). What is a soul? Plato's proofs fail; the Bible's Heaven is mostly end-of-history resurrection; artists built the clouds.
- Evidence (Part IV). NDEs and seances: real experiences, weak inferences.
- Choice and technology (Parts V and VI). Suicide from Camus to Kant; biotech immortality meets tedium and the problem of the self.
- The end (Part VII). James's gut-level choice and Wilder's Our Town: notice life while you live it.
Argument spine.
| Ch | Title | In one line |
|---|---|---|
| Int | Introduction | The survey question; jokes defuse dread; meet Daryl |
| 1 | Surely There Must Be Some Mistake | Becker's immortality systems; Freud vs Jung; Taylor's stroke |
| 2 | Let Your Angst Be Your Umbrella | Kierkegaard: escapes fail, angst leads to the leap |
| 3 | Death, the Way to Go! | Schopenhauer: life is dying; Will never dies |
| 4 | Heideggerty-Dog | Face death to live authentically; memento mori; Sartre |
| 5 | Spin Your Own Immortality | Memory, memorials, last words: no ego survives |
| 6 | The Eternal Now | Tillich, Wittgenstein: eternity is the present |
| 7 | Plato, the Godfather of Soul | What is a soul; mind-body; zombies; Meno |
| 8 | Heaven, a Landscape to Die For | Polls, Bible scholarship, other heavens, art and film |
| 9 | Tunnel Vision | NDEs: experience versus inference |
| 10 | The Original Knock-Knock Joke | Seances, James's open mind, exposed mediums |
| 11 | Beating Death to the Punch Line | Suicide from Camus and the Stoics to Kant |
| 12 | Immortality Through Not Dying | Biotech, tedium, clones, the phenomenological self |
| 13 | The End | Daryl's funeral act; James; Our Town; the hippo |
Argument spine.
Argument spine.
Do You Really Think You're Going to Die?
The survey question
The book opens as a doorstep survey: do you really think you are going to die? Really and truly? Do you think your life will come to an end some day? Take your time, except that every moment that passes is one less moment in your lifetime. The authors bet the honest answer is no. We grasp death in general but not in particular, like the Armenian-American writer William Saroyan, who wrote to his survivors that everybody has got to die but he had always believed "an exception would be made in my case." Yet we cannot get death completely out of our minds. Hard as we try to repress thoughts of mortality, they keep popping up like the furry heads in Whack-a-Mole. Death is one of the immutable facts of human life.
We are the only creatures who comprehend that we are going to die and also the only creatures who can imagine living forever. That combination drives us crazy. Death scares the hell out of us. A life that does not clearly have a destination, except over a cliff, seems devoid of meaning. That is why human mortality is intertwined with the fundamental questions of philosophy.
Questions the book will chase: What is the meaning of life if it ends? How should consciousness of death affect how we live? Would life have a radically different significance if we lived forever? After a millennium or two, would we be overcome by existential boredom and long for an end? Do we have souls, and if so do they survive our bodies? What are they made of? Is yours better than mine? Is there another dimension of time that cuts through birth and death? Can we "live forever" by always living in the present moment? Is Heaven a place in time and space? If not, where and when is it, and what are the odds of getting in?
Why jokes, and why now
These are the questions that prompted the authors to sign up for their first philosophy courses some fifty years ago. They got sidetracked by professors who said that before the Big Questions they had to clear up technical minutiae: does Bertrand Russell confuse "possible necessity" with "necessary possibility"? Meanwhile time was passing and they were still going to die. Eventually they found their way back in courses in metaphysics, theology, ethics and existentialism. Then another obstacle: honestly contemplating their own death scared them to death. They could not look the Reaper in the face without fear and trembling, and they could not avert their eyes. Death: you cannot live with it, you cannot live without it.
What is a person to do? Tell a joke. It could not hoit. Jokes make a devastating point while defusing anxiety at the same time, which is why there are so many jokes about sex and death: both scare the pants off us. The authors once discovered that jokes clarify general philosophical ideas and wrote a book about that. Could jokes also illuminate Being and Non-Being, eternal souls and eternal damnation, while alleviating death-angst? You betcha. Timing is personal: both have recently attained their biblically allotted three score and ten. They will pry open coffin lids on the Big D, its prequel Life, and its sequel the Sweet Hereafter.
Route map through the big thinkers
First stop: the fabulous ways civilised societies deny mortality, especially through organised religion, and Freud's theory that we create religions and havoc to support the illusion of immortality. Next, nineteenth-century northern Europeans (why no death philosophers on the Italian Riviera?): the melancholy Dane Søren Kierkegaard, who thought the only way to transcend death-anxiety is to go through it; all suppression is counterproductive; the way to touch the eternal is to take the anxiety of nothingness into ourselves. Then grim Arthur Schopenhauer, who patented Weltschmerz ("the world makes me want to hurl") yet regarded Death with utter apathy: the death of an individual is of absolutely no consequence, so our deaths should be a matter of indifference. Indifference is not helpful; the angst-meter needs a gag.
No look at philosophies of death is complete without the twentieth-century existentialists, who saw not-existing as companion piece to existing. Martin Heidegger claimed we need the anxiety of death to keep us from falling into "everydayness", a state in which we are only half alive under a deadening illusion. Jean-Paul Sartre said the only beings without death anxiety are those already dead as doornails. Get real, they admonish. First we have to stop shaking.
A short break for a popular form of death-denial: reassuring ourselves we will live on in the hearts of those who knew us. That assumes a sentimentality that may not be there.
From here to profundity: twentieth-century theologian Paul Tillich on "When is eternity?" (Turns out it is now.) But "now" keeps shifting to "then." Then ancient Greek arguments for the immortality of the soul, after clarifying what a soul is, how it differs from a mind, how both differ from a body, and how all three differ from a zombie. After the Greeks, Heaven and other destination spots.
Then near death experiences, séances, suicide, and wild new ideas on how to avoid death altogether. Hold it, says Daryl Frumkin from down the block, walking his dog Binx: this death thing is pretty simple. First you are alive, then you are dead. End of story. The authors ask him the survey question. His reluctance becomes the thread of the whole book.
| Stop | Thinkers | Promise |
|---|---|---|
| Denial | Becker, Freud | Civilization and religion as immortality systems |
| Through the dread | Kierkegaard | Transcend anxiety by going through it |
| Indifference | Schopenhauer | The individual's death of absolutely no consequence |
| Authenticity | Heidegger, Sartre | Death-anxiety rescues us from everydayness |
| Living on in memory | (popular culture) | Assumes loved ones are sentimental |
| Eternal now | Tillich | Eternity is now, though now keeps slipping |
| Souls and Heaven | Plato, Greeks, theologians | Arguments for survival and the destination |
| Edges | NDEs, séances, suicide, biotech | Evidence and escape routes |
Argument spine.
Argument spine.
Argument spine.
Surely There Must Be Some Mistake
Knowing versus believing
Daryl lists the dead (Frank Sinatra, Norman Mailer, Napoleon, Harry Truman, Genghis Khan, his wife's Aunt Edna) and concludes logically that he will die too, as surely as apples fall down. The authors separate this scientific mind from porch consciousness: do you believe, right now, that each tick subtracts from your allotment and that at the end you will cease to exist in every sense? Their guess is that Daryl does not, because he is civilized. Society's structures and customs make day-to-day denial easy.
Becker's Big Delusion and immortality systems
Ernest Becker's The Denial of Death holds that we know we are mortal but cook up schemes to escape the truth. (Becker died two months before the book won the Pulitzer Prize.) The denial, the "Big Delusion", is for Becker more basic than the sex drive, and it produces "immortality systems": nonrational belief structures that let us feel immortal.
- Tribe, race or nation. Identify with a group that lives on indefinitely, with you somehow part of it.
- Art. The artist expects the work, and so herself, to endure, in the pantheon or at least as a signature on a sunset in the grandchildren's attic.
- Religion. The "top of the market": living on as cosmic energy in the East, joining Jesus in the West.
- Wealth. A daily goal (get more money) that keeps the Final Bottom Line out of mind; membership in the club of movers and shakers; money passed to heirs; a name on a building or a monument to yourself.
- Roles. Even without money, striving to be "hip", "saintly" or "style-setting" makes you "bigger than life" and so, you imagine, bigger than death.
The wealth system comes with a warning joke: Bob tells a beautiful woman in a singles bar that his father will die within weeks and leave him $20 million; three days later she is his stepmother. For Becker these systems are not optional extras but the basic function of a culture. Without them we would go mad with death-angst and civilization would revert to the jungle: denial of death is civilization's survival strategy. A shared delusion is easier to sustain, as with Clara, whose husband thinks he is a refrigerator: harmless, the psychiatrist says, but he sleeps with his mouth open and the little light keeps her awake.
The cost: killing for immortality
Immortality systems make us behave badly. If my system carries ultimate personal meaning, rival systems threaten it, and since they cannot all be right, civilization's remedy is to kill the other side. Christopher Hitchens's God Is Not Great inventories the crimes. Emo Phillips says it faster: a man talks a jumper off a bridge by finding common ground through Christian, Protestant, Baptist, Church of God, Reformed, then asks "reformation of 1879 or 1915?". The jumper says 1915, and the rescuer shouts "Die, heretic scum" and pushes him off.
Freud: illusion and the death drive
- "The Future of an Illusion". Helpless before death, the unconscious invents a father-figure in the sky who rewards restraint of "incest, cannibalism, lust for killing" and grants life everlasting to conformists. Religion is a cultural fairy tale.
- The Todestrieb (death drive). Later Freud saw that Eros (the drive to life, love, pleasure, productivity) could not explain war and mayhem. The death drive at its mildest is the "Nirvana principle", the wish to "conduct the restlessness of life into the stability of the inorganic". Turned inward it breeds masochism and suicide; outward, murder and war. Therapy aims to balance Eros and the death drive.
Jung and the wise unconscious
Carl Gustav Jung, Freud's onetime disciple, accepts that religion comes from the unconscious but reverses the verdict: perhaps what Freud calls fabrication is confirmation. We may discover religions inside us, and the unconscious, passed down the generations, may evolve and grow wiser than the conscious mind. Religious symbols come "from the heart" because they arise from a storehouse of instinctual wisdom reachable only through dreams, myths and religions. Most relevant here, the unconscious psyche knows and accepts death, often preparing for it years in advance.
Jill Bolte Taylor's stroke
The authors read Taylor as locating what Jung only speculated about: the source of religious experience, outside time and space, part of "the Immortal All". Perhaps the death-accepting psyche is the right brain. Daryl concedes there is more to death than coffin nails; the authors warn it gets scarier.
Argument spine.
Exhaustive deepen: denial systems and the Big Delusion
Civilisation, on this reading, is less a triumph over nature than a joint project to keep mortality offstage. The chapter walks from the obvious fact (everyone dies, including famous conquerors and Aunt Edna) to the oddity that the scientific mind still cannot feel its own ending. Ernest Becker's The Denial of Death supplies the frame: we know objectively that we are mortal, yet we invent schemes, roles and afterlives so the knowledge never reaches the gut. Cathcart and Klein call the everyday version the Big Delusion: moment-to-moment refusal dressed up as normality.
Organised religion appears here as the premium product in the immortality marketplace, with Freud as the unsympathetic salesman-analyst who thinks gods are wishes with incense. The jokes keep puncturing solemnity: a character who accepts death for everyone except himself; a doctor scene that delivers the verdict sideways. Daryl's common-sense interruption (alive, then dead) is treated as the temptation the rest of the book must answer, not as the final word.
Mechanisms of everyday denial
The chapter's comic inventory of denial is really a list of attention tricks. Busy-ness, status projects, family roles, and "not yet" calendars all postpone the particularity of death. Becker's cultural-anthropology frame (hero systems, symbolic continuity) sits beside Freud's older claim that religious consolation is wish fulfilled. Cathcart and Klein do not adjudicate the science; they show how both stories make the survey question feel rude. When Daryl says the story is simple, he is performing the cleanest denial of all: treating a first-person ending as a third-person fact about organisms in general.
Argument spine.
Exhaustive deepen: surely some mistake
Chapter 1 stages the refusal: death must be a clerical error. Freud's death drive talk, Becker's denial systems, and ordinary cheer ("you're only as old as you feel") are rival ways of not staring. The authors keep the jokes close so the stare does not become a sermon.
Three readings of mortality compete: biological fact, existential insult, and comic absurdity. The book will use all three without letting any one monopolize the mic.
Argument spine.
Let Your Angst Be Your Umbrella
Becker's turn to Kierkegaard
The anxieties of facing death and of facing a finite life that can never satisfy our yearning for infinity are part of the human condition. Becker nonetheless thinks there is a way to accept mortality authentically and touch a Higher Reality without clashing with anyone else's immortality system. It comes from Kierkegaard, the mid-nineteenth-century Danish father of existentialism. Skipping straight to a lawn chair in Heaven is a "highway to Nowhere": if we refuse the full load of dread before "Nevermore", we also forfeit our only chance at transcendence, because angst is the ultimate teacher.
Daryl objects that people learn better in a good mood. The authors ask him to hear Søren out "out of respect for the dead".
Existential, not personal, anxiety
In The Concept of Dread and The Sickness unto Death Kierkegaard combined philosophy and introspection, but his subject was not personal history (Mum preferred your brother) but the anxieties that come with being human and mortal. Daryl says his own therapy for anger management traced everything to his mother adoring his brother Skippy. Kierkegaard would call that a smoke screen: existential anxiety is "the Mother of all" particular anxieties, and working on Mom and Skippy may be a way to avoid the Big D. If neuroses mask the fear of death, that might explain why therapy takes so long (or, per Ronnie Shakes, after twelve years the psychiatrist says "No hablo inglés").
Too much possibility
One form of despair is being overwhelmed by too much possibility. A time-limited self faces unlimited options (kiss like Brad Pitt? quit law for street performance? an affair with the postman?), and death puts the kibosh on trying them all. Dithering burns the clock: "Is that your final answer?"
Kierkegaard's failed escapes
| Escape | What it looks like | Why it fails |
|---|---|---|
| Shutting down | Numb myself, close off the world | Isolation from family, dog Moishe, the Knights of Columbus; feel too dead to be a person |
| Virtuous detachment | Stay inside myself with "ironic distance"; life is a parade I watch | Third martini while the sun is still out |
| Everydayness | Fill every slot of the BlackBerry: latte, treadmill, email, therapy, inbox | Death appears in the rear-view mirror, not in the diary |
| Defiant self-creation | Self-help (Dyer, Tolle, Williamson), positive thinking, law of attraction | Fame is fleeting: who remembers Lawrence Luellen, inventor of the Dixie Cup? |
| All of the above | Conflicting strategies at once | "Having a wonderful time. Wish I were dead." |
Lily Tomlin supplies the self-creation punch line: she always wanted to be somebody and now sees she "should have been more specific".
Argument spine.
The numbed self ends worse off than it started; it feels "too dead to be a person, let alone a kisser", and has two options left: end the pain, or try loopholes.
Argument spine.
The way out is through
The final answer avoids autoanesthesia, solipsistic confinement, busy-bee-ing and self-aggrandizement. Only by daring the full anxiety of finitude can we touch the infinite. Borrowing from gestalt psychology, Non-Being is the ground against which the figure of Being appears. Only when we let go of illusions and admit we are lost, helpless and terrified are we ready for "the leap of faith".
The joke marks the gap between seeing the leap and taking it. When the authors ask whether Kierkegaard speaks to his angst, Daryl has vanished.
Exhaustive deepen: Kierkegaard and going through the dread
Northern gloom arrives on purpose. Søren Kierkegaard will not let anxiety be medicated away with hobbies or dogma. The chapter's umbrella gag (angst as shelter) restates his harder claim: the only way past death-anxiety is through it. Attempts to suppress thoughts of nothingness rebound; taking the anxiety into oneself is the odd path toward contact with the eternal. The leap of faith is not a maths result. It is a commitment made while the stomach is still falling.
Comic beats undercut the solemn Dane without cancelling him: characters who treat dread as fashion, or who want a pamphlet version of the leap. Daryl wants simplicity; Kierkegaard offers weather that must be walked in. Wilson-style readers (and Insight readers) should separate Kierkegaard's own texts from the Becker-tinted popularisation the book sometimes uses.
Anxiety as instrument, not mood
Kierkegaard's move, in the book's popularisation, is to refuse the pharmacy model of angst. If anxiety is only a symptom, the cure is distraction. If anxiety is a signal that the self stands before nothingness, then distraction is a kind of spiritual hearing loss. The umbrella image works because umbrellas do not stop rain; they let you walk in it. Faith-talk here is not church attendance; it is the willingness to live without a complete map while still choosing a direction.
Argument spine.
Argument spine.
Exhaustive deepen: angst as umbrella
Angst is not ordinary fear of a tiger. It is objectless dread that reveals the groundlessness under plans. Heidegger's vocabulary is thick; the authors translate into weather gear: let angst be the umbrella, not the flood.
Everydayness dulls the signal. Busy schedules, small talk, and "they say" anonymity postpone the confrontation. The chapter's wager is that a controlled dose of angst clarifies what matters before the clarification arrives too late.
Angst is useful when it is a lantern. It is useless when it is a lifestyle.
Argument spine.
Death, the Way to Go!
Life as continuous dying
For Schopenhauer, life is a constant process of dying. The past is a repository of death, a heap of events gone for good, so he flips the feel-good line into "Today is the last day of your death, so far." We cling to life only because of a perverted "will-to-live" that keeps us from our true destiny. The authors note such views kept him off the Oktoberfest guest list.
The death-row joke shows the will-to-live at work: Tony orders linguini, Pierre bouillabaisse, and Bill asks for fresh strawberries. Told they are out of season, he says "I'll wait." Daryl calls Schopenhauer "a few bread crumbs short of a schnitzel".
Better never to have been
Schopenhauer goes further: death is a welcome relief. He enlists Lord Byron: count the joys and anguish-free days you have had, and know "'Tis something better not to be." In one passage he concludes it would be better never to have lived at all. Two old men on a park bench agree: Sam wishes he had never been born, and Joe replies, "Who has such luck? Maybe one in ten thousand?"
The Buddhist reading
Schopenhauer insisted he was no pessimist. He was more Buddhist than pessimist: he read the Buddhist scriptures in an early European translation, agreed that all existence is suffering, but held that the ordinary world is illusion. What is really real is Will, the blind, irrational, aimless Force that keeps everything going.
Argument spine.
The trouble is that my individual will splits off from the transcendental Will and, "first day out of the box", attaches to illusions: career goals, patriotism, my particular religion. These attachments pit my will against yours, the source of all the world's suffering. The biggest attachment is to our own survival, so wanting to live only makes us suffer more. The remedy is to let go, accept the futility of the world of appearances, and see that both life and death are unreal, while Will itself, which has no "death event", is indestructible.
Being and Non-Being
The authors admit these quasi-mystical views make sense to them "on Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays". On days of wonder they see "through a glass darkly" that you cannot have Being without Non-Being, and that the two are in constant tension, the basic Cosmic Battle. If Schopenhauer sides with Being, which he calls Will, perhaps he is "some sort of wacky optimist" after all. The chapter ends with a cartoon dialogue between Daryl and Schopenhauer.
- Process. Life is continual dying; the past is a graveyard of moments.
- Relief. Given life's suffering, non-existence is better (Byron, the park bench).
- Release. Death dissolves the split-off individual will back into undying Will.
Exhaustive deepen: Schopenhauer's cold shoulder
Arthur Schopenhauer patented cultural Weltschmerz, then refused to give death the melodrama it usually gets. If the individual's death is of no consequence in the sweep of Will and representation, then our personal panic is a local error. The Ole obituary joke ("Boat for sale") is indifference as punch line: grief collapsed into classified ads. Cathcart and Klein admit the angst-meter still spins; indifference is philosophically tidy and psychologically useless for most readers.
The chapter pairs grim metaphysics with gags so the reader can hold the idea without drowning in it. Critical notes in the batch already warn against treating Schopenhauer as a simple "optimist about death"; he is a pessimist about life who happens to shrug at funerals.
Cosmic shrug versus kitchen table
Schopenhauer's indifference is a scale error on purpose. From the standpoint of endless Will, one death is weather. From the standpoint of Lena's counter and Ole's boat, death rearranges every object in the house. The book's joke method lets both scales share a page without forcing a premature synthesis. Readers who came for consolation will not find it; readers who came for perspective might.
Argument spine.
Exhaustive deepen: death as practice
Schopenhauer's loop is not a mood tip. Will drives wanting; wanting meets the world; the world frustrates; frustration breeds more will. Art and ascetic refusal are temporary exits, not cures. The authors' comic register keeps the loop visible without turning it into a self help slogan.
The practical claim underneath the jokes: if death anxiety is the unpaid bill for being a wanting animal, then any immortality scheme that only extends wanting extends the bill.
Epicurus still sits in the room: when death is present, you are not; when you are present, death is not. The chapter treats that as a cool logic that fails hot bodies. Daryl's survey answer ("alive then dead") is Epicurus in Bayonne English, and the authors refuse to let it end the conversation.
Argument spine.
Heideggerty-Dog, Ziggity-Boom, What You Do to Me
The jargon problem
The authors quote Heidegger at his densest: thinking Being explicitly requires "disregarding Being to the extent that it is only grounded and interpreted in terms of beings... as in all metaphysics"; time "is not a thing, thus nothing which is, and yet it remains constant in its passing away". They hope it reads better in German, which he seems to endorse ("The German language speaks Being, while all the others merely speak of Being"), and note his line that "making itself intelligible is suicide for philosophy." Reading Being and Time cover to cover is "the existential approximation of a near death experience".
The plain version
Heidegger's contribution is the injunction to confront death head-on to live authentically. In one scholar's paraphrase: if I take death into my life and face it squarely, I free myself from the anxiety of death and the pettiness of life, and only then am I free to become myself. Only humans know they are mortal; a cat fleeing the dog Moishe is not conscious of the Big Void. Most of us keep that awareness "cranked down and dim", and in Heidegger's view that is not living at all.
Memento mori
Memento mori ("Remember you are mortal") was, the authors say, repeated by a slave boy walking behind a Roman war hero in his triumph: today you are on top, one day you will be dog meat. In other eras it meant seize the day ("eat and drink, for tomorrow we die", which they attribute to Isaiah) or, for Christians, live virtuously before Judgment. The arts are full of it.
| Work | Maker | Image of mortality |
|---|---|---|
| Youth with a Skull | Frans Hals | Youth holding death |
| The Dance of Death | Holbein | Skeletons dancing among the living |
| Hamlet | Shakespeare | Hamlet and Yorick's skull |
| Danse Macabre | Saint-Saëns | Death fiddling at midnight |
| Junkyard skeleton | Jones's Junkyard, Great Barrington, MA | "As you are now, I once was; as I am now, you will be" |
Unshakable joy: Game 7
Heidegger adds that the anxiety of anticipating death brings "unshakable joy". Daryl hears "Yippee, I will cease to exist". The authors' analogy: as Kevin Garnett in Game 7 of the NBA Finals, you play with far more intensity than in a dreary Thursday midseason game in Charlotte. The Charlotte game is "everydayness". For Heidegger the worst possible news would be that our souls are immortal, because that would condemn us to an endless string of Thursday nights in Charlotte.
Echoes from Gandhi to Hollywood
- Mahatma Gandhi. "Live as if you were going to die tomorrow. Learn as if you were to live forever."
- James Dean. "Dream as if you'll live forever. Live as if you'll die today."
- Tim McGraw, "Live Like You Were Dying". A man in his forties with a fatal diagnosis goes skydiving, Rocky Mountain climbing, and 2.7 seconds on a bull named Fumanchu, loves deeper and gives the forgiveness he had denied.
- The Bucket List. Two terminally ill sexagenarians escape the cancer ward to get tattoos, see the Great Wall, race cars, skydive, scale the Himalayas and find the perfect woman. Not a spiritual quest, but life in the face of death. The men really are dying; for Heidegger that is a nondistinction, since we all are, and "exactly when is just a quibble".
Two "quibble" jokes follow. The doctor's good news is twenty-four hours to live; the bad news is that he forgot to call yesterday. And Marty, told he has six months but unable to pay the bill, is given a year.
Sartre: the for-itself becomes an in-itself
Jean-Paul Sartre read Heidegger, by his waiter's account, in six straight days at Les Deux Magots. For Sartre, death means that "the for-itself is changed forever into an in-itself that has slipped entirely into the past."
- In-itself. A thing with a fixed essence or purpose, like a rubber ducky.
- For-itself. Human consciousness, which is not a thing and has no essence; we invent our essence by choosing what to be.
- Bad faith. We long to be a thing: we dissolve into a role (profession, nationality, golf reputation), like Sartre's waiter who thinks waiterhood is his essence. This is inauthenticity, a kind of living death, though freedom to transcend remains.
- Death. At death the freedom ends and we finally get a stamped-on essence: dead meat.
The chapter closes with a shopper asking whether the small frozen turkeys get any bigger: "No, ma'am, they're dead."
Exhaustive deepen: Heidegger, Sartre and everydayness
Twentieth-century existentialism treats non-existence as the matching bookend of existence. Martin Heidegger's charge is that we sink into everydayness (the They, idle talk, curiosity) and live half-alive under a deadening illusion. Anxiety about death is not a symptom to erase; it is the alarm that can call us back to authentic Being-toward-death. Nobody can die your death for you. Jean-Paul Sartre sharpens the companion point: beings without death-anxiety are already thing-like, dead as doornails.
The chapter's show-tune title keeps the mood unserious while the claim stays severe. Get real, the authors channel, but first stop shaking. Daryl's "end of story" is exactly the everydayness Heidegger wants cracked open.
Authenticity without the poster version
Being-toward-death, in classroom posters, becomes "live each day as if..." Heidegger's sharper point (as the book sketches it) is structural: the possibility of my impossibility organises a life that is mine rather than a life on loan from the They. Sartre's doornail line is the negative image: remove anxiety entirely and you have removed the creature that could care. The show-tune title keeps ego from turning authenticity into a brand.
Argument spine.
Argument spine.
Spin Your Own Immortality
The obvious shortcoming
Two sages open. Groucho Marx: "Why should I care about posterity?
The memorial infrastructure
What Becker missed is the handiness of memorials: unlike Heaven, they have a user-friendly system and ready infrastructure. Options in descending cost:
| Memorial | Cost and catch |
|---|---|
| Statue in a park | "A few mill" to the city; limited park space |
| Named building or boulevard | Limited supply |
| Yale biography | Photos, thirty pages of endnotes; few willing professors |
| Obituary, eulogy, funeral, will, last words | Affordable "mini-marks in the sand" |
| Headstone | Lasts "a millennium less than the average fruitcake" |
| Online biopic | Hollywood Forever: eternal, self-directed |
For most of us the residue is "That Daryl, he sure was a cut-up," shrinking within a generation to "Didn't there used to be a guy named Daryl around here somewhere?" Still, obituaries, eulogies and last words give survivors a hook for their memories, so it is worth shaping them.
Argument spine.
Funeral pitfalls in four jokes
- The eulogy. No one will speak for Stanley Goldfarb until an old man rises: "His brother, Morris, was worse." Hence control types who ghostwrite their own eulogies.
- The discount mortician. Judy wants Mickey in a blue suit; the next day he is in one. The attendant explains another widow wanted black, so it was "simply a matter of swapping the heads around."
- The door frame. At Woodlawn Cemetery the coffin hits a door frame and Jack moans, alive. Ten years later, at his second funeral, Jenny shouts "Watch out for that door frame!"
- The turnout. A man at the Super Bowl has an empty seat beside him because his wife died; they had gone together since 1967. No friend could use it: "they're all at the funeral."
Hollywood Forever and the history of nobodies
Hollywood Forever, a California cemetery, offers a full-colour movie memoir posted eternally on the Net, with snappy cuts and Barbra Streisand singing "Memories", screened at the service, handed to mourners on DVD and playable at video kiosks around the grounds. The biopics are written by and star the deceased, made beforehand: customers direct their own immortality.
This raises historiography's prime question: who gets recorded? "If a grocery clerk dies in the forest, did he exist?" Howard Zinn's A People's History of the United States argues that histories of kings, presidents, generals and explorers omit 99 percent of people; it includes Plough Jogger, a farmer in Shays' Rebellion, and Harriet Hanson, a Lowell mill worker. Perhaps Hollywood Forever has it right.
Money is another route: grandniece Tiffany thinks "Thank you, Uncle Daryl" (or "Thank you for dying") with each pair of snakeskin pumps. But slip-ups happen: two fishermen spend a night at a gorgeous widow's farm; nine months later one learns his friend visited her in the night using his name, and now "she just died and left me everything."
Last words
- Dominique Bouhours (d. 1702), grammarian. "I am about to, or I am going to, die: either expression is correct."
- Aldous Huxley (d. 1963). "LSD, 100 micrograms," to his wife, who injected him.
- Conrad Hilton (d. 1979). "Leave the shower curtain on the inside of the tub."
- Emo Phillips's grandfather. "A truck!"
- Pancho Villa (d. 1923). "Don't let it end like this. Tell them I said something."
- Socrates (d. 399 B.C.). "I owe Asclepius a rooster."
- Machiavelli (d. 1527). Prefers Hell, with popes, kings and princes, to Heaven's beggars, monks and apostles.
- Thomas Hobbes (d. 1679). "It's my turn to take a leap into the darkness!"
- Karl Marx (d. 1883). "Go on, get out! Last words are for fools who haven't said enough."
The closing joke shows how little control we have. A cabbie praises the perfect Sheldon Schwartz: always a parking spot, athlete, singer better than Placido Domingo, handsomer than Cary Grant, brilliant, a lover and storyteller. He never met him: "After he died, I married his wife." Daryl ends more depressed than before.
Exhaustive deepen: legacy as soft immortality
Between heavy metaphysics and soul theory sits the popular consolation: we live on in hearts and stories. Sophie's spatula ("They're for after") detonates that consolation. Memory immortality assumes a sentimentality loved ones may not perform on schedule. Reputation, memoirs and "he lives on in our work" are spun immortality: cheaper than Heaven, leakier than DNA.
The chapter inventories the ways we cast ourselves in other people's future daydreams and then notices the casting may be declined. Comic cruelty is the method; the philosophical residue is that social immortality is a bet on other minds.
Soft immortality's failure modes
Living on in memory fails when memory is busy, angry, or extinct. Living on in works fails when works go unread. Living on in genes fails when lineages end. The chapter's cruelty is pedagogical: every soft immortality still outsources your continuance to someone else's finite attention. That is why Sophie can slap the strudel hand and still love Sol; love does not automatically equal commemorative labour.
Argument spine.
Argument spine.
Exhaustive deepen: spinning your own immortality
Symbolic immortality is the DIY kit: children, work, fame, nations, causes. Becker ranks these among the noble delusions that let cultures run. The chapter inventories the kits without sneering at people who need them.
The risk is substitution: mistaking the symbol for survival. A name on a library does not feel cold wind. A child with your eyes is not your continued first person view. Knowing the difference is not the same as discarding the love that builds the symbols.
- Literal hope. I continue as a subject.
- Symbolic hope. My meanings continue in others.
- Honest hybrid. Meanings matter; they are still not me.
Argument spine.
The Eternal Now
It is always now
It is always now: Daryl getting up with his pooper scooper, scooping Binx's mess into the neighbour's mailbox, opening a Bud Light. "Now" follows him the whole way and always will. That puts Eternal Life in a new frame: eternity is right now, not after death.
Tillich: a dimension that cuts into time
Paul Tillich (Frankfurt, then Cambridge, Massachusetts), an existentialist Christian theologian, held that eternal life is not life that goes on and on, like Law and Order. To Tillich, as to Heidegger, that would be Hell. The eternal is in every moment: a dimension of time that cuts into time, present now as the Eternal Now.
- Step 1. Unlike rocks, humans can look down on time and see the whole, including the end.
- Step 2. That vantage point produces anxiety and despair (bad news).
- Step 3. But to see our finitude we must have one foot outside time; we can speak of a "life span" and know what we mean (good news).
- Step 4. We become "separated" from the eternal dimension and fall into despair, yet it remains there; the task is to reach the transcendent perspective, "like right now".
To grasp this we must leave linear, see-you-next-Saturday time and think of time as a dimension, an organizing principle. Woody Allen (Allen Stewart Konigsberg) helps: "Time is nature's way of keeping everything from happening at once."
Out of time is not out of order
Jumping outside time is not the same as scrambling its sequence, as in Memento and Mulholland Drive, or the riddle of the country song played backward (you get your girl, truck and dog back). Reversal raises questions about cause and memory but stays inside linear time; jumping out views time as a whole.
Wittgenstein, in the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus: "If we take eternity to mean not infinite temporal duration, but timelessness, then eternal life belongs to those who live in the present." The "now" is timeless, not a part of time. The authors find this surprisingly New Age, like Baba Ram Dass (born Richard Alpert), whose early-1970s Be Here Now was a guide to post-hallucinogenic spiritual consciousness. Because we dwell on past or future, Eastern traditions offer practical rituals: meditation, yoga and tai chi to empty the mind and simply Be.
Is now over yet?
| Thinker | Claim about "now" |
|---|---|
| Zeno | Time divides into infinitely many portions, leaving no room for now |
| Michael Frayn | "By the time we've reached the 'w' of 'now' the 'n' is ancient history" |
| William James | "The specious present": now feels like it has content and duration but is only the boundary of past and future |
| The farmer | Lifting a pig to the apples saves no time, because "What's time to a pig?" |
| William Blake | "Eternity in an hour" (the authors add "Pants pressed while you wait") |
Nobody just hates death?
Daryl has "always planned on living in the present someday", then asks whether no serious thinker simply says death sucks. The authors cannot name a single major philosopher or religion that holds death is nothing but the worst cheat imaginable. Religions would not stay in business without reconciliation, and even philosophers make death a logical bookend to birth. Raging belongs to poets: Dylan Thomas's "Rage, rage against the dying of the light."
Argument spine.
Exhaustive deepen: Tillich and the slipping now
Paul Tillich answers "When is eternity?" with now. The trouble is logistical: now keeps becoming then. Cathcart and Klein play with the slipperiness until the reader feels why mystics and theologians refuse to put Heaven on a calendar.
Jokes about missed moments and delayed epiphanies do the teaching. If eternity is available only as presence, then death-anxiety is partly the fear of never having been present.
Presence against chronology
Tillich's eternal now is easy to sloganise and hard to inhabit. Mystical literature is full of people who touched the second and then had to buy milk. The book uses that comic gap to keep theology from floating away. If eternity is a quality of attention, then the war against sleep (to steal a title from elsewhere in this batch) and the war against death are cousins.
Argument spine.
Exhaustive deepen: the eternal now
The Eternal Now is sold as a free upgrade: skip the ache of waiting, live in a thickened present. Tillich, Ram Dass, and pop mindfulness share the pitch. The authors' counter is temporal honesty: a present with no thickness is a point that cannot hold experience; a present with thickness already contains memory and anticipation.
Wittgenstein and Michael Frayn supply the comic physics: by the time you finish saying "now," the first syllable is archaeology. Film tricks (Memento, Mulholland Drive) scramble sequence without leaving time; they are not the same as jumping outside time.
If eternity is only an endless stack of nows, boredom returns as a design feature, not a bug. If eternity is outside time, the word "experience" may no longer apply.
- Self help now. Drop the past, ignore the future, feel calm.
- Phenomenological now. The living present is already a braid of retention and protention; calm is not the same as amputating time.
Argument spine.
Plato, the Godfather of Soul
Greek dualism: from motor to Forms
Daryl insists death is the Beginning; the authors note Becker ranks the immortal soul high among delusionary systems, but first want to know what survives, in case it is a part we don't even like. The Greeks were dualists (not duelists, "more of a Roman thing"): soul and body are different kinds of being. Thales saw the soul as the force that moves the body, since corpses do not move "at least not on a level surface". Other pre-Socratics added knowing and perceiving, since the dead do neither.
| Thinker | Parts of the soul | What is immortal |
|---|---|---|
| Thales | The motor that moves the body | Not specified |
| Plato | Reason; Spirit (Will); Appetites | Reason only, which contemplates the Forms |
| Aristotle | Vegetative; animal; reason (passive and active) | Active reason |
| Hebrew Bible | No parts: a person is a soul and a living body | No natural immortality |
| Indian thought | Atman path | See prose |
For Plato, Reason communes with the eternal Forms (Beauty, Wisdom, the Ideal Triangle from which earthly triangles get their triangularity). Will is irrational but nobler and, harnessed, leans toward Reason; the Appetites drag us toward sensuous desire. Woody Allen says the soul gets poetry and philosophy "while the body has all the fun"; Plato replies that the fun-loving Appetites are part of the soul. The goal is to strip off the sensuous and move toward the Forms: contemplating the triangle trumps sex, drugs and rock 'n' roll. Aristotle split reason into passive (perception) and active (thinking), and only active reason is immortal ("try reasoning with your cat. Or your carrot").
Hebrew and Christian: you are a soul
Ancient Israel would not have raised the question. In the Hebrew Bible humans do not have souls and bodies; they are souls and they are living bodies, so a corpse is like a dead battery, missing not a part but life itself. The lyricist of "Body and Soul", Edward Heyman, was Jewish; the rumour his rabbi told him to retitle it "Body and Body" is unsubstantiated. The New Testament keeps the usage: "What does it profit a man if he gains the whole world and loses his soul?" means loses his life. The cost-benefit joke: offered wealth, women, fame and long life for his immortal soul, a lawyer asks Satan, "What's the real catch?"
India: atman, karma and reincarnation
In Indian thought the atman transcends most Greek soul-functions; thought and emotion belong to the "subtle body". Mark the contrast in one line: emotion, the universal Self, not the individual person. The Self is not owned individually, like a Harley or Panama hat, but pervades everything (the Hindu asks the hot-dog vendor to "make me one with everything"). Plato and Aristotle had a universal Reason but kept individual survival; Hinduism, Buddhism and Jainism see immortality as transcending individuality, stepping off the wheel of birth and death.
- Daryl's version. Napoleon, then Daryl, then a bunny: the same me in new bodies, a good deal.
- Buddhist version. Buddhists, the main source of the Western idea, deny a soul: rebirth is a flame passed from candle to candle with no self transferred.
- Hindu version. The subtle body keeps truckin' on the same gravel road of struggle and purification; the goal is to leave the road and become one with the universal Self.
- Karma. Evil makes us evil, good makes us good, in this life and beyond; rebirth is a chance to evolve, not reward or punishment.
The Garuda Purana lists returns: killer of a Brahmin comes back with tuberculosis, killer of a cow as a humpbacked imbecile, murderer of a virgin as a leper. The Reincarnation Station website quiz predicts one author returns as a panda, the other as a rat. A golfer wants to return as a lesbian: still make love to women, but hit from the shorter tees.
Back in the West: soul, mind, brain
Most Greek soul-functions (moving, knowing, perceiving, desiring, willing, reasoning) are now mind functions; psyche is the Greek for soul, and psychology studies the mind. If soul is mind and mind is brain, immortality is gone, as the ICU word "braindead" suggests.
Argument spine.
- René Descartes (17th c.). Mind and Matter are wholly different with no point in common, which leaves the interaction problem: perception, voluntary movement and drugs ("plasticine porters with looking-glass ties") all cross the line. Joke: What is Mind? No matter. What is Body? Never mind.
- Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz. Mind and matter run in parallel like two synchronized clocks, a harmony preestablished by God.
- T. H. Huxley (19th c.). Mind is an "epiphenomenon", like a shadow: brain causes mind, but mental states cause nothing.
- Gilbert Ryle. Ridiculed "the ghost in the machine": a mind is not a thing but capacities and dispositions, which leaves nothing obvious to be immortal.
- A. M. Turing (1950). Could a big enough computer answer questions so as to pass for human, like HAL in 2001? If so, perhaps our sense of mental control is an illusion, as meditators and psychedelic users report minds "a half-step behind" behaviour.
Can a machine be creative? Edinburgh University computers produced jokes such as "What kind of murderer has moral fiber? A cereal killer." Today the camps remain dualists, physicalists (mental states identical to neural states) and functionalists, whom the authors call neutral, "so who needs them?"
Zombies
The zombie problem challenges physicalism. Saul Kripke asked whether God, having made a physically identical world, would have to do anything more to add consciousness. Wittgenstein: "What is left over when I subtract the fact that my arm goes up from the fact that I raise my arm?" Zombies, beings that behave like us without consciousness, would refute physicalism if they existed. Even if they do not, conceivability may be enough: Robert Kirk imagines micro-Lilliputians in Gulliver's head who intercept all sensory input and drive all motor output, so Gulliver acts normally but is conscious of nothing. Physicalists reply that conceivable is not possible, and the authors' minds "or brain, you choose which" shut down.
Otto Rank: soul as life-power
Daryl says soul is deeper than mind: Aretha Franklin is Queen of Soul, not Queen of Mind, and a good soul feels your pain. Otto Rank agrees. In primitive times soul meant life-power (mana), present in everything and immortal, so death-anxiety had not arisen.
- Primitive era. Universal, immortal mana; we are part of the Eternal Force.
- Will enters. Life-power merges with individual will-power; wills can be broken, so a crushed will threatens a crushed soul.
- Tribal will. Individuals hitch their will to the immortal tribe and share its immortality.
- Biblical era. Tribal will is projected onto a monotheistic God; individual will becomes rebellion, giving sin and guilt ("The wages of sin is death", Paul).
- Remedies. Self-surrendering love dissolves the ego before death can; since few manage it, artists create authentic responses to death-anxiety.
Daryl is "not too good at self-surrendering love" and says he knows a lot about art but not what he likes. He wants his "Me" to be immortal.
The Meno proof
Plato "proved" immortality in several dialogues; the best known is in the Meno, where Socrates argues the soul existed before birth. Few people care about prenatal eternity, perhaps because nobody remembers it, which raises the question of post-mortem memory: without continuity of Me-ness, why should either of me care?
Socrates questions an uneducated slave boy with a stick in the sand, getting one-word answers until the boy "fancies that he knows" how long a line produces a square of eight square feet. Socrates claims he is not teaching, only asking, so the boy must be recollecting, which implies an immortal psyche. To a modern educator it looks exactly like teaching by the Socratic method. A couple learn Chinese to understand their adopted Chinese baby when he starts talking; three old men take a memory test, and "nine" turns out to be 285 subtracted from Monday. In The Republic Plato gives another "dubious" proof of indestructibility; the authors set beside it the Eternal Fruitcake Conundrum (Dave Barry: the Postal Service cannot damage them; Johnny Carson: there is only one fruitcake in the U.S., passed around yearly). Daryl's verdict: Plato's the fruitcake.
Exhaustive deepen: souls, minds, bodies, zombies
Before Heaven comes ontology. What is a soul, how does it differ from a mind, how do both differ from a body, and how do all three differ from a zombie that behaves like a person with the lights off? Plato (the "godfather of soul" pun) supplies classic immortality arguments; the chapter tours dualism, continuity puzzles and the comic horror of a perfectly functioning hollow person.
Philosophy-as-practice-for-death (the Phaedo mood) sits beside modern mind-body talk. Progress notes already flag functionalism, Chalmers-shaped gaps, and classroom myths (Meno's geometry). Keep the jokes; keep the warnings.
Four-way cut: soul, mind, body, zombie
The pedagogical cut is four-way so no single word can smuggle an answer. Soul-talk promises survival; mind-talk invites psychology and AI analogies; body-talk anchors decay; zombie-talk asks whether behaviour without inner life would still count as you. Plato's dialogues give the classical scaffolding; modern puzzles (copying, swapping, uploading) stress-test it. Keep the pun; keep the map; verify technical asides.
Argument spine.
Exhaustive deepen: soul before survival
Before asking whether anything survives, the chapter asks what could survive. Greek dualism turns the soul from a motor (Thales) into a three part city (Plato) and then into layered life functions (Aristotle). Hebrew usage refuses the spare part model: you do not have a soul; you are a living soul, so a corpse is a dead battery, not a body missing a passenger.
Indian atman talk goes the other way: the treasure is not your private survivor but the universal Self beyond the subtle body's thoughts and moods. Buddhist rebirth without a transferred self is the hardest sell for Daryl, who wants Napoleon then Daryl then bunny with the same "me" ticket.
Online soul auctions (Wally Scott, Alan Burtle) make the category mistake comic: lawyers can pass a deed; nobody can say what control the buyer bought. Rank's "life power" and the modern mind brain merge both threaten the immortalist product.
- Setup. A slave boy recovers a geometric result under questioning.
- Plato's spin. Learning is remembering; the soul knew before birth.
- Edition note. The demonstration is doubling the square, not a Pythagorean theorem set piece; the metaphysical leap from pedagogy to prenatal knowledge remains the contested step.
Argument spine.
Heaven, a Landscape to Die For
What Americans believe
- 81% are confident of an afterlife of some kind.
- 79% agree every person has a soul that lives forever, in God's presence or absence.
- 76% believe in Heaven; about 5 points fewer believe in Hell ("that upbeat 5 percent").
- 60% describe Heaven vaguely: a state of eternal existence with God, or merely symbolic.
- 30% say it is an actual place of rest and reward.
- Admission: 43% because they confessed and accepted Jesus; 15% because they tried to keep the Ten Commandments; 15% because they are basically good; 6% because God loves all and will not let them perish.
The "actual place" third sets the stage for everyone's picture: the decor, how you look, whom you meet, who does the dishes. Diane Keaton's documentary Heaven (1987) mixes evangelicals, bearded New Age prophets and ordinary believers with archival Hollywood clips, in a winking "we know better" spirit. Her interviewees describe a city (one scholar says the New Jerusalem is 5,000 times the size of New York) with streets of gold or crystal, trees, birds, angels and loved ones; rent-free mansions of precious stones; no pain, no ageing, fatty food without weight gain; split views on sex; residents who look as they did, with no blood and the ability to walk through walls. One child says the diet is all marshmallows.
What the Bible says: two camps
| Text | Modern scholars | Traditionalists |
|---|---|---|
| Hebrew Bible | "Heaven" is the firmament, a dome between the waters above and below; no afterlife concept | Sheol, a netherworld of weariness rather than punishment, like Hades |
| Daniel | "Everlasting life" as resurrection, a return to life, not a place | Supports afterlife |
| Kingdom of heaven | A euphemism for kingdom of God; a future time "at the end of the age" | A place the soul goes |
| Luke 23 | Perhaps a temporary "parking garage" for the dead; Jesus cared more about God's reign | "Today you will be with me in Paradise" means immediate Heaven |
| Revelation | Visions of the end of history by John alone on Patmos | Jasper walls, gold city clear as glass, jewelled foundations, God as light; Hell a "pool of fire and sulphur" |
Paul in 1 Thessalonians has the elect rise together at the end, not as lone souls at death; popular culture then pushes the same menu: the Left Behind novels of LaHaye and Jenkins turn the Rapture into airport fiction.
On the modern reading, nobody "goes to Heaven" at death: the general resurrection transforms all the elect at once at the end of history, and even the "weeping and gnashing of teeth" refers to exclusion from God's kingdom, not an afterlife Hell. The full doctrine of resurrection grew after Jesus' death, when disciples had experiences they took to mean he was still alive. Woody Allen hedges: he does not believe in an afterlife "although I am bringing a change of underwear", and fears "no one will know where it's being held".
Admissions policy
Conservatives read the Hebrew Bible for the Law (honour parents, no coveting, "eat borscht, don't eat mussels marinara"); liberals for the prophets' call to justice, summed up by Micah: "do justice, love kindness, walk humbly with your God". In the New Testament old-schoolers cite prescriptive sayings (no divorce); liberals note Jesus' answer to a lawyer asking the way to eternal life: love God and your neighbour as yourself, and judge not. Paul says eternal life is a gift that cannot be earned, "so much for admissions criteria". The woman with the bloody 5-iron who hit her husband "five, six, maybe seven times" says "just put me down for a five."
Still, churches talk of a divine report card, with Saint Peter as club doorman. Peter's jokes: the man whose one good deed (tearing a biker's nose ring) happened two minutes ago; the bad-day admissions policy (the jealous husband, the aerobics man hit by the refrigerator, and the third man "naked, hiding in a refrigerator"). Mark Twain: "Heaven goes by favor. If it went by merit, you would stay out and your dog would go in." Culture shapes Hell too: Pierre's Hell has his first wife, Belgian cheese and California "champagne".
Argument spine.
Other heavens
| Tradition | Afterlife | Spirit it reflects |
|---|---|---|
| Pure Land Buddhism | Amitabha's Buddha lands: jewel trees in seven gems, nets of pearls, five billion flower palaces | In the Age of Dharma Decline, devotion eases the path to Nirvana |
| Islam | Jewelled couches, immortal youths, wine without headache, fruit, fowl, dark-eyed companions | Reward for deeds; "72 virgins" not in the Koran (weak hadith) |
| Hinduism | Many tiers, none "Paradise"; refined purgatories set by karma | Goal is transcending all existence |
| Confucius | Heaven as abode of ancestors; refused to speculate | Practical ethic of right relationships |
| Norse Valhalla | Gold-shield roof, boar flesh, drink from a goat's teat, daily fighting | Warrior culture ("celestial Ultimate Fighting") |
The seventy-two virgins come from a hadith in which one man heard from another who heard from a third that Muhammad said the smallest reward is 80,000 servants and 72 virgins; clerics rate the chain "weak". The authors, on Social Security, find the servants more appealing.
Artists furnish Heaven
- Master of James IV of Scotland, The Holy Trinity Enthroned (early 16th c.). Heaven is up, above clouds or on them, in muted pastels with rainbows but no rain.
- El Greco, The Burial of the Count of Orgaz (late 16th c.). Near-transparent whiteness, togas and choir robes as uniforms, optional halos and wings, airspace full of cherubs, then harps and lyres and a heavenly choir.
- Hieronymus Bosch, The Garden of Earthly Delights, left panel. Eden as Heaven once removed: rural, lush, friendly animals, low-hanging fruit.
The Eden joke: Al and Betty, 83, married sixty years and kept healthy by Betty's diet, die in a plane crash on the way to their 65th reunion. Heaven has a mansion, a championship golf course and a lavish buffet where nothing makes you fat. Al glares: "You and your stupid oat bran! We could have been here ten years ago!"
Children's books continue the work: Maria Shriver's What's Heaven? ("somewhere you believe in") and Cynthia Rylant's Dog Heaven, where dogs need no wings because they would rather run, God is an old farmer in a goofy hat, and biscuits come shaped like kitty-cats, squirrels and ham sandwiches. Bible illustrations show residents contented "just short of smug". Cartoonists favour cloud Heaven (they work in black and white) and a comedy of manners: still human, still banal. That raises the authors' worry of eternal ennui: Gil dies landing a salmon, wakes by a stream where every cast lands a huge fish, grows bored by afternoon, and asks a passer-by, "So, this is Heaven?" "You think so?"
Heaven on film
- 1926, Faust. Light piercing mist, half-built Greek temples, murky imagery from Dürer and Bruegel.
- 1941, Here Comes Mr. Jordan. The "dry ice" Heaven of walkable clouds.
- 1943, Cabin in the Sky. All-black musical; clouds plus a rickety two-by-four stairway, in period stereotype.
- 1946, A Matter of Life and Death (US: Stairway to Heaven). Heaven in black and white, earth in colour ("One is starved for Technicolor up there"); clerks, conveyor belts, wings on garment racks. Asks whether Heaven is a hallucination from brain damage.
- 1983, The Meaning of Life, Part VII. The Reaper at a dinner party ("Is it about the hedge?"); botulism in the salmon loaf; a Las Vegas Heaven with a Tom Jones look-alike.
- 1998, What Dreams May Come. Post-Star Wars effects: a Monet landscape with flying dogs; "Thought is real, physical is the illusion", New Age airhead philosophy.
The Otto Preminger joke: God wants one more film, with a score by Beethoven, sets by Leonardo and a script by Shakespeare; Preminger agrees, and Peter adds, "I've got this girlfriend who sings."
Hell, briefly
Hell has its own post-biblical life: Dante's Inferno with nine levels, Greek Hades across the Styx, and mostly artists' and comedians' nightmares. It adds a fresh angst: an eternal soul that ends up in the torture chamber. "Let's not go there." Loretta Lynn sums up the human position: "Everybody wants to go to heaven, but nobody wants to die."
Exhaustive deepen: mapping Heaven
Is Heaven a place in time and space? If not, where and when is it, and what are the odds of entry? The long chapter surveys theological menus, cartoon Pearly Gates, beatific vision talk, and competing destination spots.
Fred-the-rabbit energy returns: afterlife reports that sound like paradise until the ontology drops (reincarnation, wrong species, wrong state). Daryl remains unconvinced that any of this is more than much ado about Nothingness.
Destination ethics
Heaven chapters are ethics in costume. Admission rules encode who counts as good. Geography talk (where is it?) often hides justice talk (who deserves it?). Reincarnation jokes flip the costume: the afterlife as lateral move, not promotion.
Argument spine.
Argument spine.
Argument spine.
Exhaustive deepen: how culture built Heaven
Polls show belief; the Bible supplies contested raw material; artists and studios supply the furniture most people actually picture. The Master of James IV hangs Heaven above clouds in pastel tones with spare rainbows. El Greco fades the palette toward white uniforms. Bosch's Eden panel makes Heaven rural and edible. Cartoonists prefer cloud floors because ink is cheap; filmmakers add dry ice, conveyor belts, and eventually digital gardens.
A Matter of Life and Death still asks the sharpest film questions in the chapter: is Heaven a surgical hallucination, is dying for love the test of love, and is black and white richer than Technicolor? What Dreams May Come answers with sensory overload and New Age slogans. Monty Python answers with botulism, a hotel check in desk, and a Tom Jones style revue; South Park: Bigger, Longer and Uncut later rhymes the bare chested angel gag.
Pearly Gates doctrine is collage: Matthew's keys plus Revelation's pearl gates, glued by later imagination. Knowing the glue does not ban hope; it bans pretending the collage is a single verse.
Argument spine.
Tunnel Vision
The standard script
The authors walk Daryl through the classic NDE: heart stops; he lifts out of his body and hovers over it, feeling beatific; celestial music; a brilliant light at the end of a tunnel; dead relatives at the entrance (Uncle Bertie, dead since 1987, Aunt Lulu, his soccer coach Billy Wasalinski, Frank Sinatra); a sepia life review with his childhood dog Buster; then a voice: "Your time has not yet come," he must finish his term as treasurer of the Knights of Columbus. He wakes on the operating table, clinically dead for about ten seconds.
The craze began with Raymond Moody's Life After Life (1975): hundreds of unrelated people reported some or all of these elements. It became a huge bestseller and a film, and the internet let experiencers compare notes. NDEs seemed to give empirical evidence for Heaven, Hell, God, Satan, telepathy "and doggie angels".
The sceptics' case
Argument spine.
Sceptics admit they cannot disprove an afterlife, but subjective reports do not prove one either. As with any paranormal experience (say, flying teapots circling your wife's head) there is no objective test. The question is whether NDEs connect to ordinary reality or are caused by "brain farts". Neurosurgeon Philip Carter: "The brain is the ultimate computer. When it shuts down and reboots, it comes back with a lot of activity." Both experience and memory may be products of an altered brain, as with epileptics whose transcendent seizure memories match recordable EEG events. The resuscitated old man who saw a figure in white: "Sure, Doc. It was you."
To the argument from inter-subjective consensus, sceptics answer that the similarities come from communication: everyone knows the script from TV or from Moody. They add that over 20 percent of Americans believe they have been abducted by aliens. Carter and others value NDEs not as proof of an afterlife but as a hint that dying can be pleasant, though only about 10 percent of near deathers have the pleasant version; most feel scared and awful.
William James and the flimsy screen
Some philosophers and many mystics hold that altered states, whatever their cause (a "magic mushroom", say), give information about a reality outside time and space. In The Varieties of Religious Experience James reports a conclusion forced on him under nitrous oxide: normal waking consciousness is "but one special type of consciousness", and around it, "parted from it by the flimsiest of screens", lie entirely different forms, there in completeness at "the requisite stimulus". This echoes Jill Bolte Taylor's stroke in chapter 1, or the authors' pub sign: "Reality is a hallucination brought on by lack of alcohol."
Exhaustive deepen: tunnels and three readings
Near-death reports (tunnel, light, life review, return) get three readings: brain chemistry under oxygen debt; genuine contact with another order; storytelling under cultural scripts. The chapter refuses to let wonder erase the evidence bar, and refuses to let scepticism erase why the stories grip us. Figures quoted in popular NDE lore should be treated as contested; the batch critical list already flags soft statistics.
Why NDE stories stick
Whether or not tunnels report another world, they report what minds do at the edge: compress a life, seek light, negotiate return. Cultural scripts shape the imagery; that fact cuts both ways. Scripts can invent; scripts can also be the only language available for something real. The chapter's job is to keep both blades open.
Argument spine.
Exhaustive deepen: tunnel vision
Near death reports share a script: float, tunnel, light, greeting party, life review, return. Believers read postcards from the other side. Sceptics read oxygen debt and narrative reuse. William James keeps a third door open: the experiences are real as experiences even when their metaphysical reading is unsettled.
Consensus among reporters is not proof. Shared culture (Moody, television, pulp afterlives) can write the same dream in many heads. The chapter's alien abduction statistic is a warning about how common vivid wrong stories can be.
- Pleasant near death reports are the minority in the authors' summary (about 10%).
- More than 20% of Americans, in the figure they cite, report alien abduction beliefs: a caution about testimony volume.
James's move matters more than the tunnel postcard: take the experience seriously as data about dying, without smuggling in a travel brochure for Heaven.
Argument spine.
The Original Knock-Knock Joke
Weirdness in the 1870s
Respected thinkers sneaking into darkened rooms drew the academic response: "Have these good men vacated their gourds?" But the 1870s were full of it. Madame Blavatsky, "a flamboyant Russian American by way of Tibet", founded the Theosophical Society in New York in 1875 to study "spiritualism". Seances were the rage in England and America, and the song "Spirit Rappings" ("Rap-tap-tap lost friends are near you") was "arguably the first rap hit".
James's case for an open mind
- Truth evolves. His American pragmatism held that truth is not static; true theories fit the known facts and open the way to future truths, and are dropped when contradicted.
- Against dogmatic materialism. Materialists from Lucretius to Hobbes stop truth in its tracks; ruling out survival a priori closes the door on new evidence.
- The will to believe. We have a right to believe what is "live enough to tempt our will" where facts cannot decide (religion, free will), never against known facts. Diary: "My first act of free will shall be to believe in free will."
- Two temperaments. Tender-minded (principles, ideas, idealist, optimist, religious, free will) versus tough-minded (facts, senses, materialist, pessimist, irreligious, fatalist, sceptic). Most people mix both.
Groucho Marx was pure tough-minded. At an expensive Hollywood medium's table, offered one last question, he asked: "What's the capital of North Dakota?"
The investigators
The Society for Psychical Research in England and its American affiliate (both still exist) approached spirits with fear and trembling for their academic reputations, and so were as sceptical as possible.
| Medium | Claim | Exposure |
|---|---|---|
| Madame Blavatsky | "Spirit letters" appearing in tiny drawers of a gilded shrine in Madras | Richard Hodgson, an Australian student of Sidgwick, found double-sided drawers; servants passed in letters forged from steamed-open real correspondence |
| Eusapia Palladino | Italian trance medium, aroused in trance, curled on male sitters' laps | Hugo Munsterberg caught her slipping out of a shoe resting on his foot and moving a table behind her with her bare foot |
Blavatsky thus anticipated Marshall McLuhan: "The medium is the message." Yet Sidgwick and James kept open the possibility that among all the frauds about 5 percent of mediums might be genuine, and James was furious with Munsterberg, arguing that occasional cheating did not explain everything Palladino produced under close control. The authors put it down to James's tender-mindedness ("It was that lap thing").
Seance jokes and the rights of the dead
- The ventriloquist. Out of work, he opens a seance parlour: $50 for knocks, $150 for spoken answers, and the $500 special in which he talks while drinking a glass of water.
- The waiter. Patrons summon their beloved late waiter Snark Withers; he appears only on command and complains, "This isn't my table!" Why must the dead appear on demand, without even caller ID?
- Grampy. Milton Pitzel pays $20 at Madame Freda's parlour to talk with his grandfather, who reports bliss with bubbie. Milty's last question: "So when did you learn to speak English?"
The psychomanteum
New Agers have turned seances into a twenty-first-century product: the psychomanteum, a dim room where, for a fee, you gaze into a large mirror, fall into a trance and commune with the dead, a practice traced to Greeks gazing into reflecting pools. Psychologists explain it as hallucination from visual sense deprivation in a monochrome, horizonless field, the Ganzfeld Effect. A visitor to psychomanteum.org saw "white swirling energy" she took for her cat Blu, then dreamed she was Blu chasing a rabbit. Daryl's report: since he started hanging out with the authors, Gladys would rather talk with Aunt Edna than with him.
Exhaustive deepen: séances as knock-knock jokes
Contacting the dead is framed as the original knock-knock: who is there, and how would you know? Mediumship, fraud incentives, grief's vulnerability and the rare hard-to-dismiss anecdote share the stage. Philosophy's job is to ask what would count as contact if we are not already committed.
Comic setups (phones from beyond, mixed messages) keep the tone light while the epistemic problem stays sharp.
Contact and the burden of proof
Séance philosophy is applied epistemology under grief pressure. The knock-knock frame asks for identity conditions: what would make the caller the person named, not a cold reader or a wish? Entertainment mediumship fails the test by design. Harder cases deserve patience without surrendering the burden of proof.
Argument spine.
Argument spine.
Exhaustive deepen: ghosts and knock knock jokes
Seances, mediums, and messages from the other side are the chapter's second postcard. The comic frame is the knock knock structure: who is there, and how would you know? Fraud, wish, and rare hard cases share the same stage lighting.
The philosophical load is evidence standards. A good story is not a controlled test. Cold reading, prior knowledge, and grief's hunger for reply explain most of the hit rate. The residual uncanny cases still do not settle whether a surviving person is speaking or whether the living are ventriloquizing hope.
Argument spine.
Beating Death to the Punch Line
Camus: the one serious problem
The part opens with Jimmy Durante as Banjo in The Man Who Came to Dinner: "Did you ever get the feeling that you wanted to go, but you wanted to stay?" The authors congratulate Daryl on facing what Albert Camus called the ultimate question. The Myth of Sisyphus opens: "There is but one truly serious philosophical problem, and that is suicide." Whoever considers suicide and declines has consciously opted for life, accepting responsibility for existence and beginning the lifelong task of creating himself.
Camus thought life meaningless in any ordinary sense. Sisyphus pushes a stone uphill all day only to watch it roll down. You might expect him to endorse the coffee-shop graffito "Life's the joke; suicide's just the punch line." Instead he concludes: "We must imagine Sisyphus happy." Perhaps, like Meursault in The Stranger, Sisyphus "opens his heart to the benign indifference of the universe". The authors' party-on version is Peggy Lee's 1969 "Is That All There Is?" by Leiber and Stoller (of "Hound Dog"), which Stoller said was inspired by Thomas Mann's story "Disillusionment": if that is all there is, keep dancing. Camus's serious answer is that suicide is a failure of moral courage, an abdication of our responsibility to embrace the absurdity of life.
Is it romantic panache? Goethe's The Sorrows of Young Werther is the classic case.
That novel sparked a wave of imitative suicides in late eighteenth century Europe.
The Stoics: quality of life
If Daryl is terminally ill, he has philosophical company. The Stoics held the goal of life is flourishing, "living in agreement with nature", so when flourishing ends, departure is permitted.
- Cicero. When a person's circumstances hold a preponderance of things in accordance with nature, he should stay; when he sees a majority of the contrary, it is appropriate to depart from life.
- Seneca. The wise man lives "as long as he ought, not as long as he can" and weighs "the quality, not the quantity" of life, the phrase the right-to-die movement adopted.
- Dr. Kevorkian. Raises the further question of assisted suicide: supreme love or near-murder? Situation ethicists answer "it depends".
- Bill Maher. Suicide is our way of telling God "You can't fire me. I quit."
What would you die for?
- 68% would die for their children.
- 48% (tie) for spouse and "to save the world".
- 40% for freedom of knowledge and learning for all.
- 36% for freedom and democracy; 32% for freedom from news censorship.
- Sample: just 25 respondents, averaging 2.7 causes each.
Most soldiers (suicide bombers and kamikazes aside) choose to risk death rather than die, a lower level of commitment. Socrates, per Plato's Apology, refused acquittal on condition he stop philosophizing; Joan of Arc must have known her death was inevitable. Philosophers on dying for a cause are uninspiring: Bertrand Russell, "I would never die for my beliefs because I might be wrong"; Michel Foucault, "To die for the love of boys: what could be more beautiful?" Epicurus says a wise man may die for a friend, surprising for a hedonist, partly because death was "no big whoop": "Death is nothing to us, since when we are, death has not come, and when death has come, we are not."
The moral case against
| Thinker | Position on suicide | Main argument |
|---|---|---|
| Augustine | Forbidden | "Thou shalt not kill" covers the self, since self-love is scripture's standard; Stoic flourishing is too narrow; wait in hope |
| Aquinas | Forbidden | Against natural law of self-love; harms the community; life and death belong to God alone (echoed in state laws) |
| Hume | Permitted, even laudable | If I am a burden or block someone more useful, resigning life is "not only innocent, but laudable" |
| Kant | Forbidden | The rational will is the source of duty, so destroying it can never be dutiful |
Hume's argument makes him "singularly unpopular with the seniors in Sun City". The practical-issues fable: a cuckolded schlemiel points a gun at his own head, the lovers laugh, and he warns, "Don't laugh, you're next!" The duty joke: a wife finds her husband in bed with her best friend: "Me, I have to! But you??"
Argument spine.
The reveal
Daryl finally speaks: he has got a chunk of Milky Way out of his molar. He was using the gun to pick his teeth: "I came out to walk the dog. Why would I carry a toothpick?"
Exhaustive deepen: suicide on the spectrum
Death as lifestyle choice is the darkest comic turn. The chapter sketches a spectrum from philosophical resignation to despair, and asks when talk about "beating death to the punch line" is analysis and when it is danger.
Talking about the edge without handing a map
Philosophical suicide talk (Camus-adjacent moods, stoic exits, despair) is not a how-to. If you are in crisis, stop reading method into jokes and seek local help; this book is not a counsellor.
Argument spine.
Exhaustive deepen: beating death to the punch
Suicide is framed as the one death you can schedule. The chapter refuses both romantic glamour and simple condemnation. Werther effects, soldierly risk, and philosophical offers (Socrates via Plato) sit on one spectrum: how much agency do you claim over the exit?
Most soldiers choose risk of death over certain death; that is a lower commitment than the kamikaze or the suicide bomber. The authors use the contrast to pressure soft talk about "owning" one's death.
Choosing the time of death can look like mastery. It can also be the last move of a will that never learned another game. The chapter keeps both readings in play.
Argument spine.
Immortality Through Not Dying
The appeal of staying here
Earthly immortality offers familiarity: Daryl keeps his passion for the Mets and knows Guido's is the best pizza in Bayonne, with no leap of faith, change of address or wardrobe. Until recently it lived in fantasy and science fiction. Now there are Biological Immortalists (cloning, stem cells, ending non-accidental death), Cryobiological Preservation Immortalists (freeze us while we wait) and Cyber Immortalists (digitize the nervous system). Their claims raise ethical questions (room on the planet, natural, holy, affordable, tedious?) and metaphysical ones: am I still me as a defrosted brain, regenerated stem cells, a microchip, or one of four copies? Sean and Bridget, dating forty years, consider marriage: "At our age, who'd have us?"
Eternity is long: Woody Allen says "especially near the end." Sy finds his father's 1942 shoe-repair ticket for Herman's on West Fifty-third; seventy years on Herman is still there and says, "They'll be ready next Tuesday."
Medicine and competitive longevity
Doctors already act like immortalists: they aim to wipe out heart disease, stroke and cancer without mentioning the diseases queuing for the top spots. Long life has also become an achievement. Michael Kinsley, writing in the New Yorker ("Mine Is Longer than Yours") after his Parkinson's diagnosis, calls competitive longevity the Baby Boomers' final contest: people brag about it "as if living to ninety were primarily the result of hard work or prayer, rather than good genes and never getting run over by a truck." The paradox: the winner has no one left to one-up. Steven Wright pities teetotallers who will die in hospital "and they won't know why."
Biology's immortality and how we lost it
Our germ line (egg and sperm cells) descends unbroken from the primordial ooze, so parts of us are immortal. Single-celled organisms split into two identical daughters; no original remains to age, so they have biological immortality. Once we evolved two-sex reproduction, that primordial immortality was lost to us.
| Technology | How it would work | Status in the book |
|---|---|---|
| Stem cell therapy | Undifferentiated cells programmed to replace broken parts; a future "totipotent" insert repairs anything, forever | Blood-producing cells succeed; spinal cord and partial brain in the works |
| Telomerase therapy | Telomeres, like shoelace tips, shorten each division until the cell dies; telomerase rewinds the clock | Geron found the gene in 1997; success only in petri dishes; most think it cannot reverse ageing |
| Nanorobotics | Devices of 0.1 to 10 micrometers doing perpetual molecular search-and-repair | Working models expected in 20 to 30 years |
| Cryonics | Cool tissue below zero so all biological activity, including cell death, stops | Routine for sperm, eggs, embryos; whole bodies or brains frozen after death |
| Cloning | Somatic cell nuclear transfer; clone yourself young, repeatedly | Dolly the sheep; human cloning illegal and unconfirmed |
| Upload / cyber | Copy the brain to a robot, keep backups across the galaxy (Michael Treder) | Speculative |
The stem-cell picture is a 1956 Chevy Bel Air with every part replaced, identical to new but with no original material: "Now imagine that you are that Bel Air." The ageing caveat gets the frog joke: offered a princess for a kiss, 75-year-old Malcolm pockets the frog: "At my age I'd rather have a talking frog."
Cryonics traces loosely to Clarence Birdseye, who learned from the Inuit in Labrador that frozen fish and caribou keep. Two problems: the best time to freeze is while alive (awkward mid-deal or mid-affair), so clients freeze just after death, "a choice based on lack of faith"; and you must trust a future stranger to thaw and fix you. The parrot frozen for swearing comes out contrite and asks, "What did the chicken do?"
Overpopulation and fairness
If the Grim Reaper, our population stabilizer, retires, environmental ethics asks where the immortals will live. The obvious fix is fewer births. Jonathan Swift's 1729 A Modest Proposal satirically suggested selling poor Irish children as food for the rich. A Reform Jewish Yom Kippur meditation asks whether, offered an end to death on condition that birth also cease ("never again a child, or a youth, or first love"), "could the answer be in doubt?" Fairness is the other problem: most people lack basic medical care, so nanobots and telomerase would go to Warren Buffett, Bill Gates and Tiger Woods, giving "eternal survival of the fittest."
Risk, tedium and recurrence
If only catastrophe can kill you (a falling grand piano, a ride with Thelma and Louise), the stakes rise from dying now or later to dying at all, and you might live risk free in a bomb proof box.
- Source. "The Makropulos Case: Reflections on the Tedium of Immortality", built on Karel Čapek's play The Makropulos Affair (and Janáček's opera).
- The case. Elina Makropulos, kept alive 342 years by an elixir, declines another dose: her life has reached "boredom, indifference and coldness. Everything is joyless."
- The claim. After some number of years (varying by person) one can have no new experiences; the good life ends before repetition and boredom set in.
- The joke rebuttal. Emo Phillips listened to a Philip Glass record for five hours before noticing it had a scratch.
Nietzsche's eternal recurrence says we will live the same life again forever (Woody Allen: "I'll have to sit through the Ice Capades again"); the Superman asserts his will to power despite the futility, but for the rest of us it is Groundhog Day. Hirokazu Koreeda's After Life (1998) gives the dead three days to pick one memory to relive for eternity: old men reconsider an eternal orgasm, a girl drops Disneyland when told thirty others chose it, a man picks a breeze on a tram before summer vacation, an old woman dancing in a red dress.
Speed-living
Rather than give up infinite experience, the authors try Manfred Clynes, Viennese-Australian neurophysiologist, inventor and concert pianist. Computers have a "tick rate" that can rise; Clynes proposes speeding time-consciousness with nano- or picotechnology so thinking runs 10,000 times faster: a year would last 10,000 years, seasons would not change for 2,500 years, and ageing as we know it ends. Would it be the speed-reader's Moby Dick in twenty-five minutes ("It's about a whale")? Mrs. Frumkin asks what it does to foreplay.
Meaning may not depend on quantity. In David Ives's play Time Flies two mayflies, Horace and May, learn on their first date that they live one day, panic, then fly to Paris. A Buddhist monk spends 90 percent of waking hours in one thought; is his life blah? Clynes raises the phenomenological question of the relativity of lived time, as in the turtle who waits thirty days behind a rock to catch his friends eating the sandwiches.
Clones and the problem of the self
Cloning by somatic cell nuclear transfer produced Dolly, and nature clones constantly: identical twins come from one egg splitting. But twins are not the same person: different experiences, memories, meanings (the psychologists who named their twins John and Control). The Murphy twins drunk in a Boston pub discover they share a Dublin street, school and 1964 graduation. Clone Immortalists answer by downloading the nervous system into the clone, which then laughs at your jokes, votes for your American Idol favourite and makes love to Gladys. Asked who he is: "Du-uh! I'm Daryl Frumkin. Who the hell are you?" The nagging doubt points to the self, what every form of immortality wants to preserve.
- 6th c. B.C., Gautama. We build a self from the five skandhas ("heaps of clinging"): form, sensations, thoughts, habits, awareness; self and world are illusory.
- 17th c., Descartes. In the Meditations an Evil Demon may fake reality, but doubt cannot doubt itself: "I think, therefore I am."
- 18th c., Berkeley. "Esse est percipi": no material things, only perceptions sent by God, "cosmic spam"; swap God for a software engineer and you have cyber-life.
- c. 1900, Husserl. Experiences must belong to an "I-myself"; the self is the perspective point that knits memory and anticipation into a "living present", continuous through time.
- 20th c., C. D. Broad. Knowing all physical facts about beer does not tell you how beer tastes: the "what-it's-like" of experience, or qualia.
For the authors, Husserl names what we really hope survives the grave: the phenomenological self, and any immortality that fails to preserve continuity of self-consciousness is not the kind we want.
Teleportation sharpens it. "Exact" teleportation has moved atoms and photons, a cut and paste; "inexact" teleportation sends information as a blueprint and rebuilds the object, relying on entanglement ("you tickle one particle and the other one laughs"; Einstein's "spooky action at a distance"). Teleporting a human would be cloning at a distance, and the original Daryl of Bayonne is obliterated while Daryl of Gusev Crater, Mars, is fine. The robot lovers Dusty and Lily show the qualia problem: Lily's "numbers skyrocket" and "all my bulbs light up", but she cannot say what it feels like. Can we download our qualia? "Give us our qualia or give us death."
Daryl takes eternal Bayonne "even if I'm made out of spare parts". The authors warn the schemes are still on the drawing board; the best hope is that he belongs to the last generation to die. Daryl: "I think I'm having a heart attack!"
Exhaustive deepen: not dying by technology
Biotech, cryonics, cloning fantasies, mind-upload talk and "stop the presses" forecasts promise immortality without metaphysics. Identity questions return: is a copy you? Would a millennium of life end in existential boredom? The chapter's 2009-flavoured optimism is already dated by 2026; progress notes list unmet forecasts. Sales pitch and science come apart under scrutiny.
Daryl's survey question survives the lab. If the body can be patched forever, the meaning questions of the introduction do not vanish; they get louder.
Longevity is not meaning
Tech immortality promises more years and quietly assumes years are the scarce good. The introduction already asked about existential boredom after a millennium. Identity continuity (are you the upload?) and value continuity (would you still care?) are separate problems. Dated forecasts in the book are useful as a caution about futurism's half-life.
Argument spine.
Argument spine.
Exhaustive deepen: identity under repair
Stem cells, telomerase, nanorobots, freezers, clones, and uploads share one sales claim: keep you going. They diverge on what "you" is. A Bel Air with every part swapped, a thawed brain, a young clone with your downloaded tastes, and a robot with your voting record on American Idol are not obviously the same metaphysical object.
Michael Treder's cyber plan stores backups across the solar system. That solves body failure and multiplies the identity problem: which backup is the surviving person when two wake? Dusty and Lily can report high scores and lit bulbs without ever answering what love feels like. The authors' demand to keep qualia is not a geek side quest; it is the condition under which immortality is still theirs.
- Biological. Repair the organism forever; catastrophe still kills.
- Cryonic. Pause now, trust strangers later; faith in future thawers.
- Cyber. Leave meat; keep software; risk empty qualia and copy wars.
The Reform Jewish Yom Kippur meditation remains the chapter's moral center of gravity: endless life purchased by ending birth is a bargain the living should refuse. Fairness compounds the refusal: eternal kits for Buffett and Gates are not a human victory lap.
Daryl will take Bayonne in spare parts. The authors' last warning is crueler and more honest: the schemes are still on the board, and he may belong to the last generation that still has to die.
Argument spine.
The End
Daryl's routine
Part VII's epigraph: "It ain't over until the fat lady sings. Oops, she's singing." Daryl had dealt with the dead all his life without ever thinking about "deathiness". His opening gags:
- The Hokey-Pokey inventor. "We put his left leg in. That's when the trouble started."
- The furniture. Goes back to Louis XIV, "unless I pay Louis by the thirteenth".
- Boat 99. The dock keeps calling boat 99, then remembers it has only 75 boats: boat 66 was in trouble, upside down.
- The crossword master. To be buried "6 down and 3 across".
James: the dumb sense of what life means
Getting serious, Daryl says philosophers ignore how ordinary people think, except William James. James held that professionals and "ordinary schlubs" alike reach their answers to the big questions by intuition, a "dumb sense of what life honestly and deeply means" ("dumb" as in wordless, not stupid), "just sensing and feeling the total push and pressure of the cosmos."
- Step 1: gut. Everyone starts from a felt sense of the cosmos.
- Step 2: rationalize. Some philosophers build impersonal arguments to match, hiding the gut origin.
- Step 3: cherry-pick. They select evidence that fits and ignore what doesn't, "dirty pool".
- Step 4: choose. Where facts are not clear, we are free to choose the philosophy that seems best, including a heaven in the clouds.
Daryl's conclusion is tolerant: if Heaven is where the universe seems to push you, who is he to say you're wrong; he hopes to drop by for a beer, as he sometimes does with "those two old guys" in the last row.
Our Town
The scene ties the book together: it is Heidegger's anticipation of death waking us from everydayness, Tillich's Eternal Now, and the After Life memory choice of chapter 12, all in one exchange.
The title joke
Heidegger and a hippo reach the Pearly Gates; Saint Peter has room for one and asks the meaning of life. Heidegger answers with the very sentence quoted in chapter 4: "To think Being itself explicitly requires disregarding Being... as in all metaphysics." Before the hippo can grunt, Peter says: "Today's your lucky day, Hippy!" Daryl signs off: "Safe trip home! You too, Freddy."
Exhaustive deepen: no neat ending
The finale returns the survey question to Daryl and to the reader. No coffin stays comfortably closed. Jokes have defused anxiety without deleting it. The method (comic philosophy) is itself the proposed stance: look unflinchingly, then laugh so you can keep looking. End of chapter is not end of story.
Leaving the question open on purpose
A neat ending would betray the survey. The authors return the microphone to Daryl and to you. Jokes were never the answer; they were the stamina strategy. Philosophy without laughter froze; laughter without philosophy trivialised. The duet is the point.
Argument spine.
Argument spine.
Exhaustive deepen: the end without a neat bow
Chapter 13 refuses a system. After Heaven tours, tunnels, clones, and uploads, Daryl is still going to die, and the survey question still stands. The comic method was never a side show: arguing while laughing is how the book keeps dread from freezing thought.
The synthesis already lists the takeaways. This last chapter's job is tonal: no coffin lid of certainty, no sneer at those who hope. Pass the oat bran, check the Mets score, and keep the question open.
Main Points
Main Points
- We know we will die but do not believe it. The scientific mind accepts mortality; porch consciousness quietly assumes an exception (Saroyan).
- Culture is a death-denial system. Becker's immortality systems (tribe, art, religion, wealth, roles) keep us sane and also make us kill rivals.
- Escapes from dread fail. Numbing, ironic distance, busyness and self-creation all postpone the confrontation; Kierkegaard's angst is the teacher.
- Facing death intensifies life. Heidegger's Game 7 versus a Thursday in Charlotte: endless life would be everydayness forever.
- Eternity may be a dimension, not a duration. Tillich and Wittgenstein: eternal life belongs to those who live in the present.
- Any immortality worth having must preserve the self. Memories, clones and uploads fail if the phenomenological "I" and its qualia do not continue.
- Freud and Jung read the same unconscious opposite ways. Illusion (Sky Daddy, death drive) versus discovery (a wise psyche that accepts death).
- Schopenhauer offers release, not hope. The split-off will suffers; Will never dies; death is an event only in appearance.
- Sartre makes death the end of freedom. The for-itself becomes an in-itself: finally a thing, "dead meat".
- Being remembered is not being alive. No ego consciousness survives; survivors control the story (Sheldon Schwartz).
- "Soul" has meant very different things. Motor, rational part, whole living person, universal Self, life-power (Rank).
- The mind-body problem is unsolved. Dualism, parallelism, epiphenomenalism, behaviourism, physicalism and zombie arguments each leave gaps.
- Plato's proofs do not prove. The Meno slave boy looks taught, not reminded.
- Popular Heaven is mostly post-biblical. The Hebrew Bible has the firmament and Sheol; the New Testament mainly a future kingdom; artists added clouds and harps.
- NDEs are real experiences, weak evidence. Shared scripts, brain events and selection effects explain much; only a minority are blissful.
- Open-minded inquiry needs tough-minded checks. The SPR exposed Blavatsky and Palladino; James's tolerance went too far.
- The ethics of suicide splits on duty and quality. Stoics and Hume permit it; Augustine, Aquinas and Kant forbid it.
- Biotech immortality raises justice and population questions. Who gets it, and what happens if births must stop?
- Endless life may be tedious. Bernard Williams's Makropulos case; but meaning may not scale with time (mayflies, the monk).
- Notice life while you live it. Wilder's Emily: only "saints and poets, maybe" do.
Frameworks and mental models
| Name | What it says | Use it when |
|---|---|---|
| Immortality systems | Cultures supply shared ways to feel deathless | Explaining zeal for nation, legacy or status |
| Kierkegaard's escapes | Numbing, detachment, busyness, self-creation fail | Spotting avoidance of a hard truth |
| Being-toward-death | Anticipating death frees us from everydayness | Setting priorities; the Game 7 test |
| For-itself / in-itself | Humans choose their essence; things have one | Noticing when a role has become an identity |
| Eternal Now | Eternity cuts vertically into each moment | Practising presence, meditation |
| Zombie argument | If conscious-less duplicates are conceivable, physicalism is incomplete | Testing claims that minds are just mechanisms |
| Tough vs tender-minded | Temperament shapes philosophy | Understanding why a debate will not settle |
| Makropulos tedium | Infinite life exhausts new experience | Weighing life-extension promises |
| Phenomenological self | Experience must belong to a continuous "I" | Judging uploads, clones, teleporters |
Arc in one page
Denial (Freud/Becker) softens the blow; Kierkegaard demands we walk into it; Schopenhauer shrugs; Heidegger and Sartre weaponise anxiety against everydayness; legacy immortality fails the Sophie test; Tillich relocates eternity into presence; Plato and company argue souls; Heaven chapters moralise destinations; NDEs and séances test evidence under pressure; suicide talk warns without instructing; biotech offers years that still need meaning; the ending returns the survey. The method throughout is comic stamina in the face of the cliff.
Argument spine.
About this book
Heidegger and a Hippo Walk Through Those Pearly Gates: Using Philosophy (and Jokes!) to Explore Life, Death, the Afterlife, and Everything in Between by Thomas Cathcart and Daniel Klein, 2009. This is a chapter-by-chapter study of the book, with summaries, maps, tables and diagrams; short quotations keep their page references. It is shared free for personal study, is not for sale, and is not endorsed by the author or publisher. Please read and buy the original.
Insight Editions · rajeshrmahapatra.com/insight-editions
- We know we will die but do not believe it. The scientific mind accepts mortality; porch consciousness quietly assumes an exception (Saroyan).
- Culture is a death-denial system. Becker's immortality systems (tribe, art, religion, wealth, roles) keep us sane and also make us kill rivals.
- Escapes from dread fail. Numbing, ironic distance, busyness and self-creation all postpone the confrontation; Kierkegaard's angst is the teacher.
- Facing death intensifies life. Heidegger's Game 7 versus a Thursday in Charlotte: endless life would be everydayness forever.
- Eternity may be a dimension, not a duration. Tillich and Wittgenstein: eternal life belongs to those who live in the present.
- Any immortality worth having must preserve the self. Memories, clones and uploads fail if the phenomenological "I" and its qualia do not continue.