The Philosophy Club

• the film
• a discussion
• another

Vampire logic
A vampire may, as one commentator put it, develop a taste for atheists... In Herzog’s Nosferatu, Dracula is eager to leave backward Transylvania for “enlightened” England. He acquires the soul and identity of those whose lifeblood he consumes. For an atheist, there is no God, hence no expectation of immortality, hence no eternal condemnation to live, hence a prescribed end to his eternal suffering from eternal desire. To “desire” implies not having. To not have is to suffer... Eating believers, creatures desirous of eternal life, has led to eternal indigestion.

DRACULA: “My God, I can’t wait to eat some atheists.” (as paraphrased in the Netflix rendition)1

Dracula wants to make “nothing burgers,” so to speak, out of atheists. Their nutritional value may be lacking, but he seems to have had enough of value.

1. According to Storylosopher.

Recording policy
Online meetings hosted by me may be recorded and posted publicly on our Youtube channel. However, if an attendee has any concerns about this, please let me know, and either the recording will not be posted at all or a link to the recording will only be available privately, and by request, to club members. You are free, of course, to attend anonymously or without your mic and/or camera on. Other hosts may set their own policies.

Image: The Makropulos Case (opera)

Philosophers who say: “after death a timeless state will begin”, or: “at death a timeless state begins”, and do not notice that they have used the words “after” and “at” and “begins” in a temporal sense, and that temporality is embedded in their grammar.
– Ludwig Wittgenstein, Culture and Value, 22e (1932, Winch trans, 1980).

Apart from whether it will ever be possible to live forever or even indefinitely – some people think it is or will be – would it be desirable? If so, why? If not, why not? In what sense, does desire have to be fleeting in order to be desirable? In fact, is “fleeting” built into the very idea of “desire”? Suppose you give people what they want, how long does their contentment last? How long can it last?
‽
The play by Karel Čapek, The Makropoulos Affair, published in 1922, was made into an opera by Leoš Janáček, shortly thereafter, and has just recently been revived by the Royal Ballet and Opera (2025). Back in the 1970s, it sparked a seminal paper on the subject of immortality by the British philosopher Bernard Williams that continues to stir controversy. Immortality is, of course, an ancient idea, largely connected with various religious belief systems, though there are secular “high-tech” versions such as “foreverism” that have emerged from philosophies of mind such as functionalism combined with ethical theories such as consequentialism. The notion is usually posited as a fact, or real possibility, or article of faith by some, or as nonsense by others. Most of the talk around the idea has been about its actuality or possibility. These are metaphysical concerns and not directly our subject for this occasion. Less often has anyone considered what living forever would mean. That’s where Čapek’s play and Williams’ article come in.

Exploring the semantics of immortality will eventually run up against a major puzzle in contemporary ethical theory known as the Non-Identity Problem which has more immediate and practical implications for areas such as medical and environmental ethics.

The Makropoulus Affair
Born in 1585, at the time the play takes place in 1924, Elina Makropoulos is 339 years old but appears to others like she is 30. In her youth, her father came upon an “elixir of life” which freezes physical age for 300 years – after which, you must take it again... if you still want to. Her father, court physician to Holy Roman Emperor Rudolph II, first offered the elixir to the Emperor who, suspecting it might poison him, entreated the physician to try it out on his own daughter, Elina, which he did. The thing is: to learn if it works you may have to wait a lifetime. The Emperor, like everyone else, ages and dies, waiting. Meanwhile, Elina goes on… and on... to become (and remain) a strikingly beautiful woman, a phenomenally talented opera singer, wealthy, a much-loved and admired “rock star” of her time(s). By 1922, she has literally “seen and done it all” several times over – career, family, lovers, children...

But she has had to adopt a strategy to hide from others her secret. No one believes her explanation when people around her begin to notice she does not age. She must vanish from the scene and reappear in some other country with a different identity, speaking another language, essentially starting over but with the benefit (or curse) of undying hindsight. The appeal of living forever is starting to wear thin. But, like most of us, she is afraid to die. Unlike us, she is saddled with a choice...

Elina Makropoulos (her Greek birth name) is compelled to take on several names and identities in succession in order to tolerate living for more than three centuries including:

• Elsa Muller (as German)
• Ellian MacGregor (as Scottish)
• Ekaterina Myskin (as Russian)
• Eugenie Montez (as Spanish)
• Emilia Marty (as Czech)

At the time of the play, she is Emilia.
‽
The full writeup (in progress) will delve into what Bernard Williams and others make of Elina’s plight...

The Makropulos case against living forever:

• “Philosophy and Death | Bernard Williams,” Dave Egan Philosophy (video).
• “The Makropulos case: reflections on the tedium of immortality,” Bernard Williams, from Problems of the Self, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1973.
• “Bernard Williams | The Makropulos Case: reflections on the tedium of immortality,” Victor Gijsbers (video).
• The Makropulos Affair, (1922) full text of the play by Karel Čapek; audio recording of the opera based on the play by Leoš Janáček; both at the Internet Archive.
• “Insights: The Makropulos Case,” discussion of the 2025 Royal Ballet and Opera production.

The case for:

• “We Should Want Immortality | John Martin Fischer,” Mark Oppenheimer and Jason Werbeloff, Brain in a Vat, (video).
• “The frightening infinite spaces: apeirophobia,” Anders Sandberg, Andart II, 2017.
• “Staying alive,” Sophie Grace, The Open University.
• “A stealthy Harvard startup wants to reverse aging in dogs, and humans could be next, biologist George Church says the idea is to live to 130 in the body of a 22-year-old,” MIT Review, Antonio Regalado, 2018.

More resources:

• “Philosophy 2465 Survey | Death and the Meaning of Life,” what people say about living forever, OSU.
• “The Prescience of Karel Čapek,” lecture by Thomas Ort at CUNY, 2025. Ort reviews Čapek’s work in the historical context of the 1920-1930s and considers him more an important satirist of human pretension and less a science fiction writer, as he is still often recalled. Though rooted in the political conditions of his time, his themes run much deeper than any time or place. The themes prefigure modern technologies such as AI, genetic engineering, viruses and vaccines, or – as in The Makropulos Case, flesh out provocative “what-if” thought experiments exposing human confusion about what we really want.
• “The Strangest Idea in Science: Quantum Immortality,” Cool Worlds’ David Kipping astronomer and astrostatistician, explains how a kind of immortality may be a consequence of quantum mechanics. The metaphysics of the possibility and actuality of immortality isn’t strictly relevant to our topic – which is the desirability of the possibility, not its actuality – but, if one of the premier theories of the physical world is correct, we may not have a choice. There is a sense of “we” in which “we” are condemned to live forever because the concatenation of the logical possibility and the “many worlds theory” (falling out of quantum mechanics) entails it – desirably or not. It’s not an either/or. We will die also: both live forever and die an infinite number of times over. Both... At every point of your life when it was possible for you to die, you do die, and at every point when you could have survived, you do survive… But we may still ask whether the “we” or “you” in use here meaningfully references the subjects of life we recognize as ours? And, if these pronouns do reference something identifiable, it raises the question would a forced immortality be desirable to whom (or what) you (or we) take yourself (or ourselves) to be now? And this brings us back to the Makropulos problem.

Recording policy
Online meetings hosted by me may be recorded and posted publicly on our Youtube channel. However, if an attendee has any concerns about this, please let me know, and either the recording will not be posted at all or a link to the recording will only be available privately, and by request, to club members. You are free, of course, to attend anonymously or without your mic and/or camera on. Other hosts may set their own policies.

This is not a current events discussion group, but nearly all the topics we do relate to present concerns since not too far beneath their surface usually lurk perennial unresolved problems. One of them is behind the headlines: how should human communities be governed? If we think it should be democratically, then why do democracies eventually produce autocrats? Plato noticed 2400 years ago.

In a CNN interview with Jake Tapper, Stephen Miller, one of Trump’s top advisors said, “We live in a world, in the real world, Jake, that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power… These are the iron laws of the world that have existed since the beginning of time.”

Thrasymachus, near the beginning of Plato’s Republic, reminds us that justice is what serves the stronger, and a little later, that it is what serves the state.(1) Put these stipulations together and you get Stephen Miller’s claim.

We covered the topic of executive aggrandizement seven years ago. We are revisiting it to see if what was said then is still true, truer than ever, or may have changed. It is a review in preparation for an upcoming examination of what may be done about it… Proposed solutions should first get clear about their corresponding problem. (Also, the club was much smaller then – another reason for review.)

The problem, we will ultimately argue, is with how democracy is implemented, specifically what is wrong with “electoral representative democracy,” more specifically still, with the “electoral” part. We will try to make the case that, despite Plato’s complaint, democracy in some form is morally defensible, but that it cannot work at scale via “elections.” It is hard to see how “representation” could be avoided at scale, but must it take electoral form? Is there another way?…

Political scientist Nancy Berneo put her finger on what is problematic about electoral systems:

"Executive aggrandizement. Executive aggrandizement contrasts with all forms of coupmaking in that it takes place without executive replacement and at a slower pace. This more common form of [democratic] backsliding occurs when elected executives weaken checks on executive power one by one, undertaking a series of institutional changes that hamper the power of opposition forces to challenge executive preferences. The disassembling of institutions that might challenge the executive is done through legal channels, often using newly elected constitutional assemblies or referenda. Existing courts or legislatures may also be used, in cases where supporters of the executive gain majority control of such bodies. Indeed, the defining feature of executive aggrandizement is that institutional change is either put to some sort of vote or legally decreed by a freely elected official — meaning that the change can be framed as having resulted from a democratic mandate."(2)

We need unpack this claim because it is necessary to begin to make progress — if that is possible... Later this Spring we will entertain a new development in political philosophy, a field where genuine innovation has been rare — again, as Plato would notice, if he were around today.

‽

The original 2019 writeup “Pitting devils, democracy, and ‘executive aggrandizement’” for this topic is here. It is being revised and updated.

1. Stephen Everson translates Thrasymachus’ claims more precisely: ‘justice is nothing other than the advantage of the stronger’ and ‘justice is the same in all cities, the advantage of the established rule’ (The Republic, 338e6–339a2). “Thrasymachus on Justice, Rulers, and Laws in Republic I,” Journal of Ancient Philosophy (2020). pp. 76-98.

2. From “On Democratic Backsliding,” Nancy Bermeo, Journal of Democracy, 27 (January 2016), pp. 10-11. Note that this was likely written nearly a year before the U.S. 2016 election.

Recording policy
Online meetings hosted by me may be recorded and posted publicly on our Youtube channel. However, if an attendee has any concerns about this, please let me know, and either the recording will not be posted at all or a link to the recording will only be available privately, and by request, to club members. You are free, of course, to attend anonymously or without your mic and/or camera on. Other hosts may set their own policies.