Question As far as I am aware most if not all religions promise the possibility of eternal happiness in the next life. However the concept of eternal happiness is impossible to understand. How could we be happy without our negative emotions - don't we enjoy our negative emotions sometimes (watching a sad or scary film)? Aren't our negative emotions a release? People who are happy for extended periods, e.g. people in-love or people suffering from mania cannot keep up being happy because it is exhausting and also people in these states become irrational. So why do we buy into the concept of eternal happiness in the next life so easily?

Accepted:
August 17, 2008

Comments

It's a nice question, and one that' s been discussed before in various versions. You've put particular emphasis on the idea that without negative emotions, we couldn't really be happy.

Let's suppose you're right. As your own way of putting things suggests, it doesn't follow that there couldn't be such a thing as eternal happiness. The reason is that the kind of happiness that's at issue isn't best thought of as an emotion or mood but as some more global feature of our lives. In fact, your own point is that negative states can be part of, well, our happiness.

We could also spend a bit of time on whether "negative states" that we enjoy (the frisson of "horror" we pay good money for at the movies, for example) really are negative states. But let that pass. I think the partisan of eternal life would probably object to being tied to the word "happiness." Some talk, for example, of "eternal bliss." But whatever state that's meant to pick out, it may not be quite the same as the one we describe as "happiness." This isn't to disparage happiness; it's just to say that there might be more than one kind of condition that we'd want to think about if we were thinking seriously about eternal life.

And while we're at it, we might want to query the word "eternal." Should we think of eternal life as unending? Or as outside time altogether? If eternal life is atemporal life, then our usual ways of thinking about what it is to be happy may not be up to the task.

Of course, the idea of life outside time might seem too paradoxical to take seriously, though the idea that God is outside time has a long history in theological thought. But the larger point here may allow us to dance around the question: if there is such a thing as eternal life, it seems a reasonable bet that we're not in a very good position to imagine what it's like.

Needless to say, the fact that we have trouble imagining something isn't a reason for believing that it's true. But the fact that we have trouble imagining something isn't always a good guide to whether it's possible either.

A couple of further points. The first is that I'm not particularly inclined to believe that something like eternal happiness awaits us, but that's not because I think the idea is incoherent. The second is a bibliographic note: there is a well-known paper by Bernard Williams, in which he argues, roughly, that anything that could count as one's own endless life would be intolerably boring, and that any sort of endless "life" that escaped this fate wouldn't be one's own. (Williams means to raise a problem about personal identity here; you can chase down the essay, which is called "The Makropoulos Case: Reflections on the Tedium of Immortality." It's in his Problems of the Self, Cambridge University Press, 1973.) I find William's arguments singularly unconvincing, but you might feel differently. John Martin Fischer offers a reply called "Why Immortality is Not So Bad," in International Journal of Philosophical Studies, 1994 pp. 257-270. And you can read an interesting discussion by Tim Chappell here.