If Kurzweil and de Grey are right, there may already be some immortals walking next to you on the street—at least if you happen to be walking down Wall Street or Fifth Avenue. In truth they will actually be a-mortal, rather than immortal. Unlike God, future superhumans could still die in some war or accident, and nothing could bring them back from the netherworld. However, unlike us mortals, their life would have no expiry date. So long as no bomb shreds them to pieces or no truck runs them over, they could go on living indefinitely.
—Noah Yuval Harari, Homo Deus
The promise of immortality, of a life marked by deathlessness, an a-mortal, indefinite, no-longer-necessarily-finite existence, we have been told, is today within reach. It is only a matter of time. For, as Harari reports, a-mortals may “already” be among us. By which he does not actually mean that a-mortals exist, in the flesh, but rather, that there are some alive today who will become a-mortal and, therefore, who might justly already be considered a-mortal, today.
Immortality is no longer, it seems, a question of if, but of when. A question of means, to be sure, but no longer one of possibility. Thus, we must conclude, the time that remains until the arrival of our salvation—the solving of our finitude through age-reversing biotechnologies and inorganic body prostheses—is itself finite. It is “finite” because technoscientific progress has rendered predictable the coming of its advent, which reveals it to be a mere eventuality and not a true event; a mere unveiling and not a true revelation.
And while by “our salvation” we certainly don’t understand anything as banal as me or you, nor most of those on this planet whom we might wish to bestow with the dignity of “humanity,” we nevertheless participate in this deliverance to the extent that it affects each and every one of us, if not in the material realities of our daily existences, then at least in our symbolic belonging to a category—“the human”—whose meaning, and therefore essence, will henceforth be definitively altered, so soon as it is finally known, once and for all, that its essential determination is no longer finitude, but indefinitude.
The event, which is but a mere eventuality, is coming, and when it comes, we will know that it had been coming all along. Even if it will only touch most of us in the form of an abstract knowledge, this knowledge nevertheless will touch us all.
Am I, then, immortal?
In posing this question, which I in truth re-pose, for it is one that has been raised before and that I now merely cite, I wish to highlight a certain uncertainty. This certain uncertainty has to do with the confidence projected by transhumanists—so certain in the certainty of what is to come—but precisely designates their blind spot. The uncertainty that today marks this question is not just any uncertainty, nor is it one that, I believe, has ever marked it before. What is of supreme interest is its measure and meaning, which affects us all.
Am I, then, immortal? The truth is we really don’t know. We really don’t know. Yet if we are willing to admit this, then we can know that we don’t know whether we are immortal. And if we are willing also to admit that the culmination of this nonknowledge corresponds to an event that we, ourselves, are capable of affecting—it is, so to speak, in our hands, unlike the theological determination of immortality—then we can also decide how we wish to act and to intervene: how we wish to take part in the juridical, technical, and creative processes that will or will not have resulted in the realization of an immortality that we may or may not want for ourselves, our societies, and our planet.
The uncertainty of whether I am or am not immortal is certain. For, though no human to this point has yet been rendered biologically “a-mortal”—at least as far as we know—such an event seems more and more probable, every day. Who is willing to take the measure of this admission? How are we to understand the certainty of this uncertainty?
One might be tempted to respond: Naturally, the question: Am I, then, immortal? yields no easy response, but has it has ever? And, to a certain extent, we must admit that immortality’s uncertainty has always been a problem. The entire Western tradition, from Plato to Descartes, confronts this uncertainty, offering various proofs for immortality’s existence, and doing so precisely because it is nothing that can be known. Of course, this sort of nonknowledge goes both ways: the immortality of the soul, or God, is not something that can be shown to be or not to be.
Uncertainty is therefore an irreducible element of immortality’s religious determination, but one that marks it not as temporally indeterminate, but epistemologically so. Thus, whether or not we know about it, and whatever we may or may not accomplish, here and now, for the likes of Plato and Descartes, immortality’s status as a reality or a fiction is always already determined. Nothing in this world can change that.
The conditions marking the uncertainty of immortality in its current guise, as indefinite life, have, for this reason, certainly undergone transformations. If Harari, Kaku, Bostrom, Kurzweil, de Grey, and Chalmers are right, then far from settled, everything in fact still hangs in the balance. One either will or will not have been immortal; one either will or will not have achieved indefinite life, and the force of this either/or now rests on the realization of positive, technical means.
Immortality is, for this reason, today largely a practical matter. A practical, but also therefore a political matter: a political/theological matter. Taking the measure of this matter requires posing, once again, the question of the human and the meaning of its participation in a finitude one has long taken for granted.
I noted above that the question serving as my title was a citation. It is time to give credit to its author, she who first gave shape to its modern form, in its modern grammar. It is none other than the writer of Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus, Mary Shelley, who gives this question new life in her 1833 short story, aptly titled “The Mortal Immortal.” What is Shelley’s lesson for those who must face their certain uncertainty before their mortality/immortality?
“The Mortal Immortal” begins with its titular character announcing, without apparent irony or prevarication, that he has just completed his “three hundred and twenty-third year.” He goes on, over the course of this short but incredible text, to recount the life he has lived, how he came to survive this long, and his hopes for the future. He speaks of love, the errors of youth, and sorrow, thereby speaking of everything that we too might have thought to relate, as though he were indeed still one of us, which is to say, inclined to relate, to write, and to regret.
By the end, his story finished yet with no clear closure provided, we are left to wonder at the marvel of this man, who may very well be just that—a man—or perhaps something else, and so much more. In this way, Shelley’s fiction offers us a view onto immortality, but from one who very much remains mortal.
Our question, in reading “The Mortal Immortal,” concerns what it is like to be in such a state. It concerns what it is like to be between these two states—perhaps destined to live forever, but perhaps not:
July 16, 1833. —This is a memorable anniversary for me; on it I complete my three hundred and twenty-third year! The Wandering Jew? —certainly not. More than eighteen centuries have passed over his head. In comparison with him, I am a very young Immortal. Am I, then, immortal? This is a question which I have asked myself, by day and night, for now three hundred and three years, and yet cannot answer it. I detected a gray hair amidst my brown locks this very day—that surely signifies decay. Yet it may have remained concealed there for three hundred years—for some persons have become entirely white-headed before twenty years of age. I will tell my story, and my reader shall judge for me.
Thus begins Shelley’s text. Her narrator—who, we learn in the ensuing pages, drank an alchemist’s elixir, after which, to all appearances, he stopped senescing at the age of twenty—here asks us to judge, for him, as to his immortality. Having once been mortal, the imposition of immortality is something he can well speculate on, but is not, evidently, something that he can know. “Am I, then, immortal?” he asks, the adverbial “then” marking out the role that observation, reason, and judgment are to play in the formation of any possible response.
The problem of immortality offered in Shelley’s “Mortal Immortal” is an insoluble one. He tells us his story and asks us to judge for him. His question is how he—or anyone, for that matter—can know if he is immortal. It is how he—or anyone—can know if he shall die. Supposing, for a moment, that he is immortal—whatever that might mean—he nevertheless remains haunted by the question of his mortality, as all of us so-called mere mortals are. Supposing that he is mortal, and thus not knowing under what conditions or in what time frame death might surprise him, he is still left questioning his possible immortality. He is, therefore, a mortal immortal to the extent that this aporia haunts—and even constitutes—his being.
However, I would suggest, as I begin to conclude, that if this is the aporia that constitutes his mortal immortality, in the ontological uncertainty of his being, and of the time of his demise, then we too must be mortal immortals, and in just the same way.
Indeed, we too live in the uncertainty of the date of our demise; we too live with the certainty of the impending nature of the impossible possibility of death, which latter impossible possibility haunts us not in the mode of a when but of an if. We too know not when we shall die, nor if we shall die. Such nonknowledge is, perhaps, the novelty of our biotechnological modernity and of the technoscientific configuration of modern prostheses of immortalization.
The consequence of these forces is to ontically extend the separation between what Heidegger has called “being-toward-death” and Derrida “the condemnation to die.” This separation is therefore growing wider, and its growth is a consequence both of radical transhumanist fictions and of basic research in the life sciences. What it exposes is that the impending impossible possibility of death, which is a general, structural feature of life and world, no longer need be conflated with the predestination to demise as a factical, present event.
The separation between being-toward-death and the condemnation to die may, to a certain extent, have always been the case. It may have always been a virtual possibility, one we sense every time that we fail to believe in the reality of death, for us. What has changed, therefore, and perhaps irreversibly, is the visibility of this separation, which we now suffer as a coming historical event that we may choose either to embrace or reject.
Am I, then, immortal? Naturally, this is another way of asking: Can I die? Can I still be sure of the certainty of my death, as a present event that comes and that I, perhaps, welcome? The lifting of the “when” of ontic demise is, in this respect, also a kind of loss, as the continued and unabating propagation of HeLa cells constantly reminds us, and as does the revelation of cryptobiosis in the biomedical acceptance of forms of suspended animation. In both cases, what is spelled out is the end of a certain fantasy of sovereign control, and one that finds its correlate today in the threat of the rebirth of my cyborg, clonal, or digital avatars, years, or perhaps eons, after my demise. This, too, is a form of loss.
Am I immortal? I return to my first question. In the first place, is it not more probable that the beverage of the alchymist was fraught rather with longevity than eternal life? Such is my hope. And then be it remembered, that I only drank half of the potion prepared by him. Was not the whole necessary to complete the charm? To have drained half the Elixir of Immortality is but to be half immortal—my Forever is thus truncated and null. But again, who shall number the years of the half of eternity? I often try to imagine by what rule the infinite may be divided. Sometimes I fancy age advancing upon me. One gray hair I have found. Fool! Do I lament? Yes, the fear of age and death often creeps coldly into my heart; and the more I live, the more I dread death, even while I abhor life. Such an enigma is man—born to perish—when he wars, as I do, against the established laws of his nature.
Is it the case that I know that I shall die? This question can now be heard with multiple intonations. Not only: do I know that I shall die, do I know that my life shall come to an end, do I know, in sum, that I am condemned to die? But also: can I be sure that the limits of my “I” begin and end with those of my corporeal being? Can I be sure that death is something that happens all at once, irreversibly, and without remainder? Might I not instead live on, and even do so in spite of myself?
Mortal immortality names this possibility, no longer as the metaphysical phantasm of immortality but now as the possibility that I might live, or live on, and do so without foreseeable end. I don’t know that I’m not immortal. I don’t know that my life won’t be extended, radically, and this nonknowledge shall never be surpassed. Death, let us say, is no longer a given. Nor has it ever been.
