Looking Beyond Shadows: Death, Time, and Immortality

“To them. I said, the truth would be literally nothing but the shadows of the images. That is certain.”

Plato. The  Republic

All politics, we learn from Plato, is “shadow.” It follows that what we human beings ordinarily accept as a properly political subject matter is actually mere reflection. But what are the reflected “images”?  That is the real question.

To answer, people worldwide will need to acknowledge that individual needs and values are never discoverable at superficial or surface levels. Though millions can readily understand that they value certain private attachments and affiliations, few are able to connect such preferences to variously universal promises of politics. What then?

To distinguish reality from shadows of reality, three basic concepts must be examined: death, time and immortality. What can these core concepts teach us about the human future, either singly or in their pertinent intersections? To answer thoughtfully, scholars must begin their disciplined inquiries with the individual, with the microcosm. Though invisible, power over death inevitably represents the ultimate reward for political compliance.  Nonetheless, an antecedent question must always be posed:

How can one gain power over death, and what can such gain have to do with the fate of a particular state or nation?

There are many conceivable nuances. On occasion, the search for immortality can demand a faith-confirming end to an individual’s life on earth, that is, an act of martyrdom.  At times, assorted high-minded doctrines of charity, caring and compassion notwithstanding, this priority can oblige the suffering or deliberate killing of certain designated “unbelievers,” “heathen,” “apostates,” etc. Whatever special circumstances of “sacrifice” may be involved, reason would first give way to unreason. In the end, we know from long history, there could be no more lethal human surrender.

There is more. Any cultivated hopes for an individual somehow rising “above mortality” can have critical consequences for the planet as a whole, for the macrocosm.  Still, crucially relevant connections remain untested and inconspicuous.

Back in the nineteenth century, in his posthumously published Lecture on Politics (1896), German historian Heinrich von Treitschke observed: “Individual man sees in his own country the realization of his earthly immortality.” Earlier, German philosopher Georg Friedrich Hegel opined in his Philosophy of Right (1820) that the state represents “the march of God in the world.” Inter alia, such widely-believed views tie loyalty to the state with the promise of power over death. This is always a monumental promise, one recognized only in the “shadows” of political activity.

There can be no greater promise.

Though understandably compelling, immortality must remain an unworthy and unseemly human goal. This owes both to its being scientific nonsense (“An immortal person is a contradiction in terms,” reminds philosopher Emmanuel Levinas) and because the search itself can foster war, terrorism, and genocide. The dignified human task, therefore, must not be to remove individual hopes to soar above death (that is, to achieve some tangible sort of immortality), but to “de-link” such a futile and vainglorious search from grievously destructive human behaviors.

Karl Jaspers writes in Reason and Anti-Reason in our Time (1952): “There is something inside all of us that yearns not for reason but for mystery – not for penetrating clear thought but for the whisperings of the irrational….” The most seductive of these irrational whisperings are those that offer to confer some selective power over death. Significantly, however, it is somewhere within the expressed criteria of such “selection” that abundantly far-reaching evils can be spawned. In essence, this is because the promised power over death requires the “sacrifice” of certain despised “others.”

To deal more satisfactorily with the incessant and interrelated horrors of national and global politics, we will first have to understand the verifiably true sources of such reflections. These underpinnings of our daily news events, we could then discover, are rooted in certain conceptual intersections of death, time and immortality.

“Is it an end that draws near,” inquires Karl Jaspers in Man in the Modern Age (1951) “or a beginning.” The worthy answer is by no means self-evident. Yet, determining such an answer now represents nothing less than a sine qua non of human political destiny.

There are still further conclusions to be drawn. To look suitably “beyond shadows,” people everywhere on this imperiled planet must first identify two additionally salient forces of politics. These also animating forces concern Meaning and Belonging. They represent other true images of universal politics – images additional to immortality or “power over death” – that can also bestow tangible personal feelings of self-worth, life direction and “membership.”

The overriding problem, again, is that such feelings are not necessarily benign and can elicit war, terrorism and genocide.

“In the end,” says Goethe, “we are creatures of our own making.” To best ensure that such “creatures” are dignified, decent and organically cooperative, all societies must first be able to distinguish true human feelings from the contrived expectations of “shadows.” This capacity can be accomplished only after humans can finally yearn not for what Karl Jaspers calls “whisperings of the irrational,” but for the penetrating clear insights of a universal Reason.

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Louis René Beres was educated at Princeton (Ph.D., 1971) and is the author of twelve major books and several hundred journal articles dealing with international relations and international law. Some of his publications have appeared in The Harvard National Security Journal (Harvard Law School); International Security (Harvard University); The Atlantic; US News & World Report; The National Interest; e-Global (University of California, Santa Barbara); Yale Global Online; World Politics (Princeton); The Brown Journal of World Affairs; The Israel Journal of Foreign Affairs; The New York Times; The Hudson Review; American Political Science Review; American Journal of International Law; Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists; International Journal of Intelligence and Counterintelligence; Parameters: Journal of the U.S. Army War College (Pentagon); Special Warfare (Pentagon); The War Room (Pentagon); Modern War Institute (West Point); Israel Defense (Tel Aviv);  BESA Perspectives (Israel); INSS (Tel Aviv);  Horasis (Zurich); and Oxford University Press. Professor Beres was born in Zürich at the end of World War II.