On Gardner and Immortality

It's particularly poignant reading thoughts on death from someone who has just died.

Martin Gardner, who introduced multiple generations to skepticism and the joys of "recreational math" through his columns for Scientific American and Skeptical Inquirer, and through the over 70 books he published on math, philosophy and skepticism, died last Saturday at the age of 95.

I date my love of paradoxes and puzzles back to the afternoons I spent as a kid poring over my dad's copies of Gardner's Aha! Gotcha and Aha! Insight, two delightful collections of conundrums that seem impossible until your mind shifts in just the right way, and then: "Aha!" It's a feeling which I can only imagine is akin to what it must feel like to be a Flatlander popping for the first time into the third dimension, and which would convince even the biggest mathophobe that the phrase "recreational math" really isn't an oxymoron.

But as I thought about the best way to commemorate him, I remembered that Gardner once told an interviewer that, out of all his books, the one he was most proud to have written was The Whys of a Philosophical Scrivener, a collection of his musings on life's hard questions. So, curious and wistful at the news of Gardner's death, I picked up a copy.

My wistfulness deepened upon discovering that a lot of the book is devoted to Gardner's contemplation of the prospect of his death, and what might follow it. A bit of an odd man out among public skeptics, Gardner was as empirically-minded as ever when it came to debunking woo, but also a believer in a higher power and in life after death. In a comment-thread discussion about this subject on Discover Magazine's obituary for Gardner on Sunday, Gardner's old friend James Randi explained, "When I questioned him on the subject he told me that he had no really good evidence to support his belief, but that it simply made him feel better to adopt it. He said that I — and other curmudgeons — had far better evidence for our convictions, but that he just felt more secure in his acceptance."

Reading Whys, it's clear that Gardner's choice to believe in immortality was undergirded by horror at the thought of a truly final death. And he confessed that he could not relate to people who felt differently. He sympathetically quoted writer Miguel de Unamuno: "I do not understand those men who tell me that the prospect of the yonder side of death has never tormented them, that the thought of their own annihilation never disquiets them."

I'm one of those people. Sure, I feel a twinge of angst when I contemplate the process of dying, because I am a pathetic wuss about pain, or when I contemplate the effect that my death would have on friends and family. But to the idea of not-existing itself, I am as indifferent as Gardner was dismayed. On this point I'm with Epicurus, who famously wrote, "All good and evil consists in sensation, but death is deprivation of sensation... [Death] does not then concern either the living or the dead, since for the former it is not, and the latter are no more."

Although I have as much trouble emotionally understanding Gardner's attitude towards not-existing as he had understanding mine, I'll admit that I'm not sure which attitude is really more rational. I don't know, for instance, how to square my intuitive sense that death doesn't harm you (since there's no longer a "you" there to be harmed) with my other intuitive sense that if life has positive value, you're better off with more of it than less of it. The only way I can see to reconcile those two intuitions is to conclude that an event (death) can retroactively harm someone who used to exist -- a conclusion that I find just as unsatisfying as the original contradiction it was intended to resolve. (For a good introduction to the headaches this question causes, check out Thomas Nagel's 1979 essay, "Death.")

But there is one point on which Gardner and I wholeheartedly agree: the utter lameness of people's attempts to redefine "immortality" into existence. You'll often hear it claimed that someone isn't "really" dead because he lives on through his work. (As Woody Allen says, and Gardner quotes approvingly: "I don't want to achieve immortality through my work. I want to achieve it through not dying.") I've also heard people argue that we're all "immortal" because our matter and energy are preserved. And then there's the notion that we're "immortal" in the sense that our existence can never be erased from the record of space-time.

In Whys, Gardner mentions all these arguments, and quotes a verse from poet Arthur Hugh Clough: "It fortifies my soul to know/ That, though I perish, Truth is so." Gardner witheringly responds, "Thank you, Arthur Hugh Clough, for this vapid thought." He then says:

"It does not fortify my soul in the least to know that after I die all unmarried men will still be bachelors, that 37 will still be a prime number, that the stars will continue to shine, and that forever I will have been just what I am now. Away with these fake immortalities! They mean nothing to the heart."

Amen, Gardner.

Whatever your philosophical outlook on how one should think about one's own death, Gardner's absence is an indisputable loss for all the rest of us. This week I'll be consoling myself by re-reading the Aha! books, and I encourage you to pick them up if you've never had the pleasure of puzzling through them. Gardner may have found the thought of literary immortality to be small consolation, but it's far more than most of us get, and no less than he deserves.