Immortality

Immortality is a popular idea at all times about a significant increase in human life expectancy.

Those who explore possible ways of gaining immortality, as a rule, are looking for the answer to the question «How to become immortal?». To a lesser extent, interest is shown in the question «Why become immortal?».

Strictly speaking, immortality as a form of infinite physical existence is not possible at all, because according to modern ideas, the Universe in which a person can live will not always be like this.

Immortality: benefit for people or a dead end path

There are different opinions on this matter. Some believe that the immortality of outstanding people is a good opportunity to do more and better for life.

According to another opinion, immortality, even with the best of intentions, is stagnation and degradation. Death is a natural mechanism of evolution, violating which can lead to a dead end of development. Without a change of generations, there is no change in ideas and habitual ways of thinking, so that the development of mankind can run up against the wall of its immortality.

By the way, do not forget the interpretation of immortality as a curse.

Physical and mental immortality

Usually, when discussing possible ways of gaining immortality, they mean maintaining the human body in a healthy state for a long historical perspective. At the same time, they think to a lesser extent about “mental immortality”.

Types of immortality

Immortality is a concept denoting the overcoming of mortality and oblivion of man and the human race. In everyday life, in religious, philosophical and scientific literature, it is used in various senses. We can single out the following most frequently used meanings and their corresponding types of immortality:

• the actual mental and bodily continuation of the individual’s life after death (personal immortality);
• the existence after death of some impersonal psychic entity, which is absorbed by the absolute spiritual substance, God (metaphysical immortality);
• the achievement on earth or in the human mind of some eternal, enduring quality of life (ideal immortality);
• reincarnation of individuals living on this earth into future human or other living forms (immortality as reincarnation or transmigration of souls);
• the realization of the natural and biological infinity of man, the continuation of human life through offspring (biogenetic immortality);
• inclusion in the eternal cycle of nature of the substratum of human corporality (material, physico-chemical immortality);
• the endless impact, influence of the life and work of a person who once lived on the minds, actions and activities of subsequent generations (sociocultural immortality);
• manifestation of the significance of the consequences of past events of human history in the present and arbitrarily distant future (historical immortality).

Psychologically, each type of immortality is associated with the hope of immortalization, overcoming mortality, either through the continuation of life in offspring (biogenetic immortality), or through the continuation of one’s life as a result of one’s activity (sociocultural and historical immortality), or through various forms of transcendental connection with eternal spiritual entities. and values ​​(metaphysical and ideal immortality), etc.

A person’s faith in immortality and the desire for it play the role of a kind of psychological and value-ideological guarantor of the integrity of generic human existence and the existence of unshakable higher values ​​and meanings. They provide psychological protection of a person from the fear of death and give him the opportunity to live a full life, despite the knowledge of the inevitability of his death.

The idea of ​​immortality is found among ancient peoples, and its content is modified:

• among the Greeks and Jews, immortality was understood in the form of a ghostly existence in the realm of shadows (Hades — among the Greeks, Sheol — among the Jews);
• in India and Egypt the doctrine of the transmigration of souls dominated;
• we find echoes of it among the later Greeks.

Later, among the Jews, the doctrine of immortality was already associated with the doctrine of the resurrection of the dead and the afterlife retribution; in this form it passed into Christianity and Mohammedanism.

In the latest idealistic philosophical systems, the incorporeal existence of the soul is more emphasized; materialism completely denies immortality as a phenomenon that contradicts the laws of organic development.

In the form of a systematic doctrine, the concept of immortality was first substantiated and developed by Plato (the dialogue «Phaedo», translated by Karpov, second edition, 1883, and Klevanov, 1861), and since then various more or less convincing evidence. Kant, considering it impossible to find any theoretical proof of the madness of the soul, substantiated belief in it on the postulates of practical reason.