Harry Emerson Fosdick on immortality

The American minister Harry Emerson Fosdick (1878-1969) wrote a number of books, and in my first semester of college in the Fall of 1998, I stumbled across one of them on the library shelf. It may have been The Assurance of Immortality (1913). I took notes on his argument. At the time, it seemed to me that he was saying:

If you can't enjoy life now, and you have no hope for improving it, then you must hope for a better afterlife. If you don't believe in an afterlife, there would be no reason to continue living. People soldier on through situations that are not only difficult but intractably, hopelessly so, and this suggests that they believe, at least implicitly, that there's something worth waiting for on the other side of this life.

But isn't virtue its own reward? Or do we do good in the world only because we're waiting for something on the other side? Fosdick acknowledges this theme but doesn't seem to quite grasp that it truly means not being rewarded, at all, ever and finding satisfaction in a virtuous life. He says no one would sacrifice pleasure for virtue unless there were some other kind of reward.

Perhaps, he says, virtuous people seek not a selfish reward but rather the opportunity to become better. That opportunity — for some reason, in his view — must go on forever. Therefore, if someone didn't implicitly believe in an afterlife, there would be no reason for them to continue morally improving themselves.

He says, using Socrates' harper analogy, that our souls are like musicians who endure after the music of our lives ends. It could be true, I wrote in my notebook, but merely making the poetic analogy doesn't prove it. Where's the proof that our souls go on?

I always remembered Fosdick because for years afterward I continued to write a bit, privately, now and then, on this topic.

Everything I came up with ended up in this essay: "We don't need to be ‘immortal’: We can ask instead how we'll survive" (January 1, 2023). It's a 6-minute read. What I've given here is an unpaywalled "friends link" on Medium.

Fosdick's name in New York

On Easter Sunday 2022 (April 17), I was surprised to see Fosdick's name on the wall of Riverside Church in Manhattan. He was their first minister.