***This is the pre-refereed version of a paper that is forthcoming in the American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly. (Note: There are some fairly substantial differences between this pre-refereed version of the paper and the one that will ultimately appear in print.)***

Eternity, Boredom, and One’s Part-Whole-Reality Conception

Abstract: Bernard Williams famously argued that eternal life is undesirable for a human because it would inevitably grow intolerably boring. I will argue against Williams and those who share his view. To make my case, I will provide an account of what staves off boredom in our current, earthly-mortal lives, and then I will draw on this account while advancing reasons for thinking that eternal life is desirable, given certain conditions. Though my response to Williams will partly overlap with some prior responses to Williams, especially the one offered by J. M. Fischer, my response will also be distinctive in some important ways. For instance, it will be distinctive in that it will discuss the role that one’s part-whole-reality conception plays in fending off boredom, where by ‘one’s part-whole-reality conception’ I mean ‘one’s conception of his or her place (or purpose) in the whole of reality’.

Bernard Williams famously argued that, although it may well be desirable to live for a great many years, it would be intolerable to live forever.[1] In describing the nature of the intolerability that he intends here, Williams implicitly or explicitly refers to a number of distinct but commonly clustered phenomena: chronic boredom or tediousness, joylessness or anhedonia, colorlessness, indifference, meaninglessness, and a sense of a lack of purpose or reason to continue on with life. In what follows I will frequently use ‘boredom’ as a summary term for this whole cluster of phenomena. (One cautionary point here, though: I think that ‘boredom/depression’ might be a more appropriate summary term to use, since it might do a better job of indicating that Williams here has in mind not only chronic boredom but, indeed, a whole cluster of phenomena.[2] For brevity, I will stick with ‘boredom’ as my summary term. But, as readers proceed through this paper, I would like for them to keep in mind the cautionary point just noted.)

Williams is thinking that, if you were to live for, say, thousands of years, then, at some point along the way, you would surely fall into a state of intolerable boredom, if only because there would be nothing new for you to do or experience. Granted, we can imagine you undergoing certain radical psychological changes that might effectively eliminate this problem of intolerable boredom. For instance, given the assumption that the continuity of your memories is not required for the continuity of you, we can imagine you losing all of your memories at once and yet still remaining yourself, in which case your activities and experiences could indeed be new again for you. For the purposes of this paper, however, I will leave aside all discussion of radical psychological changes, as I want to focus on the following question: Is it desirable for a human being to live forever, assuming that he or she will always retain his or her memories in some good measure, and also assuming that he or she will always retain his or her fairly determinate character or personality? Focusing on this question seems appropriate, for it is really this question that we (in the contemporary West, anyway) typically have in mind when we ask whether eternal life is desirable for a human.[3] Throughout this paper, I will, for convenience, use ‘a human’ to mean ‘a human who retains memory-and-character constancy in some good measure’. And, against Williams and those who share his view, I will argue that eternal life is desirable for a human, given certain conditions.

Aside from this introductory section, there will be four sections to this paper. In section I, I will provide a more detailed statement than I have so far of the argument made by Williams and others for the claim that eternal life would inevitably grow intolerably boring. In section II, I will consider some of the extant responses to this argument from Williams and those who share his view. What I say in section II will set the stage for section III. There I will provide an account of what staves off boredom in our current, earthly-mortal lives, and then I will draw on this account while advancing reasons for thinking that eternal life is desirable, given certain conditions. In section IV, I will briefly conclude the paper.

One point of clarification concerning the setting for eternal life: Discussions of eternal life might focus either on the possibility of living of an eternal afterlife (e.g., in the Christian heaven or in the house of Hades that Socrates speaks of near the end of the Apology) or on the possibility of extending humans’ earthly lives such that they literally go on forever (e.g., Williams considers the possibility of a human’s living forever here on earth by taking an extraordinary elixir that allow for this). In what follows I will take into account both the eternal-afterlife possibility and the extending-earthly-life-forever possibility – though, to anticipate, I am more confident that the eternal-afterlife possibility is desirable than that the extending-earthly-life-forever possibility is desirable.

One final preliminary remark: Though my response to Williams will partly overlap with some prior responses to Williams, especially the one offered by J. M. Fischer, my response will also be distinctive in some important ways.[4] For instance, it will be distinctive in that it will discuss the role that one’s part-whole-reality conception plays in fending off boredom, where by ‘one’s part-whole-reality conception’ I mean ‘one’s conception of his or her place (or purpose) in the whole of reality’.

I. The Williams-Ribeiro-Barnes argument (or, for short, the WRB argument)

Williams is not the only one to have argued for the claim that eternal life would inevitably grow intolerably boring. For example, Brian Ribeiro is another philosopher who has argued for this claim, and a vivid, fiction-based argument for this claim is advanced in the final chapter of Julian Barnes’s novel entitled A History of the World in 10.5 Chapters.[5] The narrator in this chapter wakes up one morning and finds himself in ‘heaven’, which operates under the principle of providing people with whatever they want. Though the narrator is fulfilled in ‘heaven’ for many thousands of years, enjoying a wide variety of both lower and higher pleasures, he eventually tires of it all and forms the desire to ‘die off’ (i.e., to cease to exist). This, moreover, is not something peculiar to the narrator. Indeed, everyone who enters ‘heaven’ has this same experience. That is, each human who enters ‘heaven’ is fulfilled there for a great many years, getting whatever he or she wants, but each human nevertheless eventually tires of ‘heaven’ and, accordingly, forms the desire to ‘die off’. Thus the conclusion for which Barnes argues – and this is the same conclusion for which Williams and Ribeiro argue – is that it is a non-contingent fact about us (i.e., about human beings) that we cannot endure to live forever. We are not, so the argument goes, built for eternity: Though we can certainly bear living for a finite amount of time (perhaps even for many, many thousands of years, provided that the external conditions are right), we are unable to tolerate an eternal existence.

What is it, exactly, that makes us (i.e., humans) unfit for eternal life? The answer given by Williams, Ribeiro, and Barnes can be put as follows:

(a)  Unless a human has new types of activities or experiences that are open to him or her, he or she will inevitably fall into a state of intolerable boredom. Indeed, the repetition of the same old types of activities or experiences over and over again, with no prospect of new activity-types or experience-types on the horizon, will surely result in a human’s becoming intolerably weary of life. Call this the humans-need-newness thesis.

(b)  The number of types of activities or experiences that are open to a human is finite, even if it is also mind-bogglingly large. Or, as the narrator in Barnes’s chapter on ‘heaven’ puts this claim, ‘There aren’t an infinite number of possibilities – that’s one of the points to remember about it all…’ (p. 288). Call this the finite-possibilities thesis.

(c)  Given that humans need new types of activities or experiences, given that there are only so many types of activities or experiences that are open to a human, and given the truism that a human who is living an eternal life would have an infinite amount of time on his or her hands, it is inevitable that a human who is living an eternal life would reach a point at which he or she has exhausted all of the possibilities that are open to him or her – that is, it is inevitable that he or she would reach a point at which there are no new types of activities or experiences that are open to him or her. And, once this point is reached, an intolerable sort of boredom will surely follow in due course for this human (or, at any rate, this is so on the assumption that the humans-need-newness thesis is true).

I will refer to the above argument as the Williams-Ribeiro-Barnes argument (or, for short, the WRB argument).

II. Considering some of the extant responses to the WRB argument

Fischer rejects the WRB argument by denying the humans-need-newness thesis. Indeed, on Fischer’s view, humans can stave off boredom even if they do not have new types of activities or experiences open to them. This is so, Fischer thinks, because there are certain types of activities and experiences that are satisfying even if they are repeated over and over, ad infinitum. In short, then, Fischer rejects the humans-need-newness thesis by appealing to repeatable or inexhaustible pleasures or goods (i.e., pleasures or goods that never wear out or lose their luster). Though I agree with Fischer’s general strategy of rejecting the WRB argument by way of denying the humans-need-newness thesis, I think that Fischer’s argument against the humans-need-newness thesis is inadequate as it stands. I will elaborate on this last point soon, but first I want to consider the move of rejecting the WRB argument by denying the finite-possibilities thesis.

Timothy Chappell notes that it is rather controversial to accept the existence of repeatable or inexhaustible pleasures or goods, and, with this point in mind, he thinks that those of us who wish to reject the WRB argument might do well to make the move of denying the finite-possibilities thesis, as opposed to making the move of denying the humans-need-newness thesis.[6] And Chappell says the following:

A simple response is just to deny on commonsensical grounds, as indeed I already have, that there is only a finite number of things that can happen to or be done by any individual person. We could also go a little deeper, and point out that the notions of ‘repetition’ and of ‘things that can happen’ that are in use here are fatally indeterminate. If I climb the same mountain or hear the same opera twice, is that repetition? If I climb the same mountain twice by the same route (in the same weather?), or hear the same production of the same opera twice (with exactly the same cast?), is that repetition? Yes and No are equally good answers to both questions, because whether two time-ordered items count as instances of the same type, so that the latter item is a repetition of the former, depends on how we describe them (p. 39).

Thus Chappell claims that the number of types of activities or experiences that are open to a human can reasonably be thought of as being infinite, as opposed to being finite.

What would Williams, Ribeiro, and Barnes say in response to Chappell’s proposed rejection of the finite-possibilities thesis? Here we can consider Williams. In his article on boredom and immortality, he discusses a play about a woman named Elina Makropulos (i.e., EM). When EM is 42 years-old, she takes an extraordinary elixir that prevents her from aging. Then, after having lived for 300 years at the biological age of 42, she finds that she is intolerably bored. This leads her to refuse to take the elixir again, as she would rather die than continue on with her life. With reference to EM, Williams says: ‘Her trouble was…a boredom connected with the fact that everything that could happen and make sense to one particular human being of 42 had already happened to her’ (p. 90). Presumably, even as he says this, Williams is well aware that, if EM were to continue to live, then there would be some sense in which there are new types of activities or experiences that are open to her; but presumably Williams would say that the sense in which this is so is not the sense that matters. An example will help here. In the play EM falls in love many times, with many different men. But, after having lived for 300 years at the biological age of 42, and after having fallen in love many times, with many different men, she finds that she has tired of the falling-in-love type of activity or experience.[7] Now suppose that we say to EM: ‘We know that you have fallen in love with smooth, wealthy men from various nations, but note that you have never fallen in love with a smooth, wealthy Australian man. Indeed, that type of activity or experience is still open to you.’ It seems obvious that Williams would say that we are missing the point: Even if EM’s falling in love with a smooth, wealthy Australian man is a type of activity or experience that EM has never had, this is not really relevant, for EM has previously fallen in love with smooth, wealthy men from various nations and the fact that a smooth, wealthy man is Australian is not a difference that matters (i.e., it is a difference that is too incidental to matter). Speaking generally, then, the point here is that Williams, Ribeiro, and Barnes would presumably respond to Chappell’s proposed rejection of the finite-possibilities thesis by claiming that, even if there is some sense in which each human has an infinite number of types of activities or experiences that are open to him or her, the fact remains that each human has only a finite number of types of activities or experiences of the right sort (i.e., of the non-incidental sort) that are open to him or her.[8]