Immortality

by Stephen Cave

  This certainly was the view of the Greek heroes who inspired Alexander. If a surer route to living forever had come their way, they would have taken it. Standing on the battlefield of Troy, one nobleman fighting on the side of the Trojans admitted this to his companion: “My good friend, if, when we were once out of this war, we could escape old age and death forever, I should neither press myself forward in battle nor bid you do so,” records The Iliad. “But death in ten thousand forms hangs ever over our heads, and no man can elude him; therefore let us go forward and win glory.”

  His message is clear: If there were some way of achieving eternal youth or cheating death, then he would gladly take it. But there isn’t. The position this warrior has reached is therefore much like our own, now that we have examined the first three immortality narratives and found them all wanting. Yet despite his realistic appraisal of his mortality, still the will to transcend this short span of life drives his thinking. His conclusion: In the absence of better options, our only route to eternal life is by winning glory—even at the price of falling in battle.

  Yet on the face of it, this is a very odd conclusion. After all, to die young in war is not the only alternative open to someone who has given up on the other immortality narratives—some might argue that, on the contrary, taking very good care of what life one has would be much the better option. Achilles, greatest of the Greek heroes, on the eve of battle weighed up this existential choice: “I carry two sorts of destiny toward the day of my death,” he said. “If I stay here and fight beside the city of the Trojans, I shall not return home, but my glory shall be everlasting; whereas if I return home to the beloved land of my father, my glory will be gone, but there will be long life left for me.”

  It could be argued that many of the young men who go off to battle do not really believe that they will be the ones who take a spear to the neck. But Achilles knew—because it had been prophesied—that if he chose the warrior’s path then his life would be short, albeit crowned with eternal glory; whereas if he turned his back on soldiering then a long and happy life of hunting, feasting and siring children awaited. He loved life, he said, “more than all the wealth of Troy,” yet still he chose to stay and spill his blood on a foreign battlefield for glory’s sake.

  Alexander must have weighed up the same choice as his hero Achilles. He had every prospect of a long and happy life if he stayed at home to be king of his small but powerful state. But like Achilles, Alexander chose the path of glory. As Ernest Becker observed, “men seek to preserve their immortality rather than their lives.” In contrast to those such as Woody Allen who might wish to live on in their apartments, Alexander set sail to invade the Persian Empire at the age of twenty-one and never set foot in his homeland again.

  Why? What good is eternal glory to a corpse? Is a famous dead person any less dead? Such heroes thought so. They prized fame more than happiness, love, wealth, more than this life itself—because they believed it opened the way to an existence beyond the flesh. But the heroes also knew that they could not achieve this existence on their own, which is why when he set sail, Alexander made sure that his entourage included the scribes, historians and sculptors who would do for him what Homer did for Achilles. He knew that it was these, not the priests and alchemists, who were the guardians of eternal life—they were the ones who controlled the realm of the symbolic, and it is only there that immortality is to be found.

  THE LIFE OF SYMBOLS

  ALEXANDER THE GREAT’S achievement was to step out of the natural realm—quite literally through an early death—and transfer himself completely into the realm of legend, where he still thrives today. For the ancient Greeks, this was the recipe for eternal life: to escape the course of nature, with its death and decay, and carve out a space in the symbolic realm of culture, which might survive from generation to generation—and perhaps forever.

  Nature, as we have noted before, is the bringer of decay and dissolution, which is why we strive so hard to transcend our natural limits. If nature takes its course, we die and rot back into the earth, and soon nothing is left of us. But we humans are not only creatures of nature: we live in two worlds. The first is the natural world that we share with other organisms, but the other is a world unique to us—that of the symbolic. And here, in this world of our own making, we can achieve the permanence for which we yearn.

  Although the symbolic world is one of our collective making, it is every bit as real as deserts and mountains. Many of the things that govern our actions—success, status, even money—belong to this realm. Those who spend their days at desks or in studios, in libraries or offices, are dedicating their lives to the symbolic. Symbols are the component parts of language and culture, of what makes us different from each other and at the same time what we have in common as a species and makes us different from all other living things. Homo sapiens is, as the German philosopher Ernst Cassirer put it, the symbolic animal.

  The societies of Achilles and Alexander, where no one worked in offices or at computers and food was frequently still hunted for, might at first seem to us simple. However, they were anything but: just as much as ours, they had complex status systems, poetic and musical traditions, religious beliefs and ideas of history and their place in the world. They might have been more sensitive to natural rhythms than we are, but this seems only to have heightened their awareness of the distinction between the natural and symbolic realms.

  On the one hand, they knew well that the bios, the ordinary human lifespan, was finite—that, as one Trojan warrior put it, generations of men are like leaves on the trees: as one grows, another wilts and is gone. And in contrast, it was equally clear that the symbolic realm did not follow this pattern, that kingdoms, titles, wealth and honor survived to be passed from one generation to the next, that stories persisted to be told by new generations of minstrels and bards. Culture did not seem susceptible to the natural process of decline and death. As the Harvard classics professor Gregory Nagy puts it, for the ancient Greeks, “death and immortality are presented in terms of nature and culture respectively.” The natural way was mere death; immortality lay in transferring oneself entirely into the symbolic realm of culture.

  This is just what Achilles and Alexander and the other Greek heroes achieved, thereby showing the way for Western civilization. Naively, we are sometimes tempted to see such heroes as the most courageous among us, as they seem to face physical danger so fearlessly. But on the contrary, says the anthropologist Ernest Becker—“heroism is first and foremost a reflex of the terror of death.” Heroes are motivated to sacrifice their natural life by the dread of utter oblivion, and their heroic deeds grant them instead a more permanent existence as part of culture. Heroism, in the words of the historian of fame Leo Braudy, “enables the individual to step outside of human time.”

  One might have thought that the long dominance of Christianity in Europe would have dampened this glory seeking; we have seen that the Soul Narrative grants cosmic significance—a kind of heroism—even to the lowly and obscure through a personal relationship with God. But the literature of Christian Europe suggests otherwise: Dante’s Divine Comedy, for example, is obsessed with the question of who in the afterworld properly deserves to be remembered by posterity, and Geoffrey Chaucer in 1380 dedicated a major poem to examining the inhabitants of the “House of Fame.” Not even the prospect of heaven could reduce the desire for posthumous renown.

  We might of course suspect that these works not only were about fame but also were attempts to achieve it. The Spanish poet and philosopher Miguel de Unamuno put it pithily when he wrote that “the man of letters who shall tell you that he despises fame is a lying rascal.” Clearly the attempt to impress posterity is a powerful productive impulse that has given us some of the pinnacles of human achievement. One man of letters, John Milton, author of Paradise Lost, was clear about what got him up in the morning: “Fame is the spur that the clear spirit doth raise … to scorn delights and live laborious days,” he wrote in 1637.r />
  The symbolic realm enables the projection of ourselves beyond the biological with all its shortcomings, and so we scramble toward it, proliferating images and artworks as we compete for ground in cultural space. This is what drives civilization onward, producing the Mona Lisa and the Taj Mahal, Citizen Kane and the great American novel. A place in posterity can come through invention, entrepreneurship or teaching—anything that might either seem exceptional or last beyond the lifespan of the individual to shape the future. As the philosopher and historian Corliss Lamont wrote, “The economic and social effects of this sentiment … have been and are immense and incalculable.”

  In the scientific community talk of immortality is largely frowned upon, yet many are driven by the prospect of a great discovery that might etch their name in the annals, perhaps even a theory named after them or the immortalizing epithet “Nobel laureate.” French thinkers are less circumspect: the motto of the preeminent French learned society, the Académie Française, is “à l’immortalité,” and members are known as “the Immortals.”

  Of course, not all bids for renown are as worthy. The mass media of film, television, radio and Internet have enabled a whole new degree of instant, global stardom for those of dubious talent. As a result, our society is drowning in a flood of celebrities, products of a fame industry of lavish scale. The media portrayal of their glittering lifestyle seduces millions to see renown as the only measure of worth. The singer Morrissey reflected the aspirations of millions of would-be pop stars when he admitted, “I always thought that being famous was the only thing worth doing in life.” Of course, celebrity can have many fringe benefits, but the film star James Dean made clear what its real purpose is when he said, “To me the only success, the only greatness, is immortality.”

  James Dean is also notable in that his life parallels those of Achilles and Alexander for shortness and intensity, demonstrating how the cultural immortality narrative can cause people to act in ways entirely contrary to purely biological survival. Achilles and Alexander also not only died early but did nothing to ensure the well-being of the children they left behind. Their classically heroic behavior, which has inspired so many since, seems to have been deeply detrimental to their own prospects of living on. But we have seen that the will to immortality was not oddly weak in these heroes, such that they should happily die young—rather it was uncommonly strong, driving them to carve their names into our cultural space. Our craving to live forever has its roots in the most natural of all instincts but can take an entirely unnatural course when transferred to the realm of the symbolic.

  The pursuit of the eternal through the Legacy Narrative can therefore explain a great many of the curious, often seemingly counterproductive things that humans do, from soldiers accepting suicide missions on the battlefield to artists wasting away in their garrets. There is nothing people have not sacrificed for a place in posterity—freedom, wealth, happiness. Or as Socrates put it, approvingly relating the words of his teacher and lover Diotima, “Think of the ambition of men, and you will wonder at the senselessness of their ways, unless you consider how they are stirred by the love of an immortality of fame. They are ready to run all risks greater far than they would have run for their children, and to spend money and undergo any sort of toil and even to die, for the sake of leaving behind them a name which shall be eternal.”

  HEROSTRATUS WHO?

  WHAT Diotima saw as mere senselessness, however, can take on a darker aspect in the intense competition for space in the cultural sphere. Not everyone has the skill or patience to create something of value or beauty, and it is far easier simply to destroy what others have made. There is therefore a temptation for the fame seeker to brand his or her name into the cultural sphere with some heinous deed and so through wickedness to become the stuff of legend. So tempting indeed is this route to posterity that it has its own name: the Herostratus syndrome.

  On the night of Alexander the Great’s birth, July 21, 356 BCE, a previously unknown man—a nobody—set fire to the temple of Artemis at Ephesus. This temple, 120 years in the building, was one of the Seven Wonders of the World. Visited by pilgrims, kings and tourists, it was over three hundred feet long and fifty feet high and on a site considered holy for millennia. The fire destroyed it utterly. The arsonist did nothing to hide his guilt but gave himself up freely. He was called Herostratus, and when asked why he had committed this terrible act, he replied: to become famous.

  To discourage copycats, the Ephesians not only tortured and executed Herostratus but also subjected him to a damnatio memoriae—the damnation of a man’s memory through banning (on pain of death) all mention of his name. Yet here I am writing about him two thousand years later, while the names of the temple’s architects have long been lost. In a society such as his, obsessed with fame, the temptation was high to attain it through nefarious means: sacrilege, regicide, treachery. And equally, in a society such as ours, obsessed with celebrity, the temptation is high to immortalize one’s name through some wicked but dramatic act: assassinating a president or pop star, blowing up a building or gunning down fellow high school students.

  Ancient writers speculated that Herostratus was motivated by a sense of injustice—not injustice that the world was overlooking his great talents but, on the contrary, injustice that the fates should have given him no talents whatsoever. It was not fair that society should grant the immortality of fame only to those who were simply lucky enough to have been born with an artist’s eye, the silver tongue of the rhetorician or the strong arm of the warrior. Psychologists’ studies suggest that this combination of a sense of injustice and inadequacy is common to those who make their names by killing the talented or destroying their works.

  This should be no surprise: the contest for cultural immortality is a highly competitive one that necessarily only rewards the exceptional. The “facelessness of the many gives meaning to the faces of the few,” as the sociologist Zygmunt Bauman put it; the masses form the anonymous night sky against which the stars shine. Those who believe they have an equal right to a place in the firmament of fame but who do not have the talent to earn it are likely to become frustrated, neurotic and very, very dangerous—blazing comets crashing into the earth. We cannot all be heroes; most of us accept this fact, but some choose instead to be villains.

  Still it is ironic—and a mark of our tendency to hero worship—that a figure like the pitiful Herostratus is necessary to hold up as a contrast to the great Alexander in illustrating the dark side of the quest for fame. Herostratus, after all, merely burned down a single building. This wanton act of destruction is child’s play compared to the deeds of the mighty conqueror. The people whose lands Alexander hacked his way through could tell you all about the dark side of the quest for glory: for them, Alexander is the destroyer, the accursed one, bringer of death and destruction—Alexander the Terrible.

  The “pacifying” of Greece with which Alexander’s career began involved the utter destruction of the ancient city of Thebes, during which all the men were put to the sword and all the women and children sold into slavery. This established the pattern for how he was to deal with those who opposed him. The ruthless young king had many such ancient cities pillaged and razed, countless men summarily executed, women raped and made slaves, civilians slaughtered, priests killed, temples sacked, show trials held, assassinations arranged, opponents tortured, whole peoples destroyed. His legacy is written with the blood of others.

  We find those contemptible who feed their desire for notoriety by killing a handful of innocents, but Alexander, who cut and burned his way across a continent at the cost of hundreds of thousands of lives, we call “the Great.” As the French biologist and philosopher Jean Rostand wrote in 1939, “Kill one man, and you are a murderer. Kill millions of men, and you are a conqueror. Kill them all, and you are a god.”

  Of course, the desire for cultural legacy has contributed much that is positive to civilization. Many people seek a place in posterity by building bridges,
curing disease or painting pictures. But what Herostratus and Alexander understood is that doing something saintly is by no means the most important entry requirement to the hall of fame. Rather, it is doing something extraordinary—whether extraordinarily good or extraordinarily wicked.

  A TWO-STEP GUIDE TO POSTERITY

  THIS was also well understood by a famous couple who predate even Alexander and Achilles—two figures whose bid for immortality combined every form yet devised, including the cultural, and who unquestionably had a flair for the extraordinary: Akhenaten and Nefertiti. Their example provides a nice introduction to the two steps for achieving the transition into the symbolic realm.

  In 1905, the American Egyptologist James Henry Breasted, one of the first scholars to examine the career of Akhenaten, astutely described him as “the first individual in human history.” All pharaohs were exalted as special, divine even—but their specialness came from their fulfilling the eternal role of the god-king. It was precisely not their individuality that made them special—indeed, their own personalities were entirely subsumed by their endless performance of ancient rituals and carefully prescribed duties. Their monuments make this clear: from the anonymity of the pyramids even to the colossal granite statues, it is their conformity to type that is emphasized—each pharaoh is as broad shouldered, square jawed and devoid of distinguishing characteristics as the next.

  And then came Akhenaten. His statues not only portray but exaggerate his distinctive characteristics—a thin chest and bulbous belly, weak arms and a feminine chin. Frescoes even show naturalistic scenes of his relaxing at home with Nefertiti and their children. And, as we have seen, he abolished the ancient rites and, with Nefertiti, established his own—to an abstract god with whom only he could communicate. Akhenaten used the power of the pharaoh to break free of all the role’s traditional constraints and to become extraordinary even by pharaonic standards—to become therefore unique and individual. Thus he took the first step to symbolic immortality.