Book Review: The deconstruction of time

As time wore on, the early evangelical fervour wore off, and Feuerbach's credo was, more "modestly", simply taken for granted by the Twentieth Century. Beliefs in an after-life or in God would, I suppose, be primary examples of Sartrean mauvaise foi (note his normative credal language: bad faith), and in the world of Existentialist psychotherapy their denial would be implicitly foundational. The excellent Yalom, for instance, typically takes the inevitability of death as the first of his four "givens" of existence, and, unself-consciously dismisses any religious belief which questions death's absolute finality as "denial". (As Iris Murdoch succinctly puts it: "Almost anything that consoles is a fake".) In this respect Existentialism might appear to be as compulsively bullet-biting as some religions were bullet-denying.

But this take-no-prisoners Existentialist credo is a metaphysical belief too, (Bonhoeffer described both Existentialism and psychotherapy as secularised offshoots of Christian theology) and one of the functions of Bowker's book is to challenge this secular belief by throwing it into sharper relief. He takes this general assumption that the origin of religion lies in the denial of the terrifying fact of death (through the offer of various forms of eternal life), and shows this account to be demonstrably false. The sheer diversity and contrary nature of the religious, ethnological and anthropological data which Bowker surveys will not support so simplistic a view, especially since many of the great world faiths also began without any substantial belief in personal survival after death whatsoever. (As Michael Caine might say, "Not many people know that" - Freud and his followers certainly did not, but Bowker does).

Having demonstrated that the denial of mortality has rarely been a significant cause of religion he moves on in the central section of the book to survey the experiential and religious constraints which act on discourse about Death. Readers who are unfamiliar with some of the cultures with which Bowker deals may feel at first overwhelmed by the unfamiliar vocabularies and uncompromising detail of his treatment, but Bowker's erudition is always tempered by a parallel lucidity which rewards patient effort, since his insights are often original and bold. For instance, it is common to hear Buddhism held up as a religion of which it has no belief in any form of individual continuity after bodily death; common, but wrong. Bowker points out that the foundational Buddhist teaching of anatta (that there exists no enduring "soul", "spirit" or entity which constitutes human individuality) should not lead one to suppose that Buddhism is compelled to take a sceptical view of an individual's post-mortem continuity. On the contrary, Bowker demonstrates from classical Buddhist texts (he is able to translate the Pali for himself) that the Buddha himself explicitly denied annihilationism. Moreover, given the indubitable existence of differentiated individual consciousness (encoded, according to Buddhist psychology, variously as citta or alaya vinnana) and the equally inescapable law of cause and effect (the law of karma which states that all actions and thoughts have consequences) it is almost inevitable that the karmic momentum generated in an average life will compel further re-births. Even within sceptical Buddhism, then, there is room for a modified form of postmortem continuity after death.

If the book as a whole raises the important question: "What meaning, then, are we to assign to death?", his survey makes it clear that the answering human imagination has been almost unbelievably profligate in generating pictures and theories about the meaning and claimed finality of death. Death is an enemy or a friend, a defeat or a punishment, a release or an opportunity, a seed falling to the ground, a final breath returned to its source, the fading smoke of a fire, the dissipation of salt savour, the sloughing of a skin. (The theme of sacrifice recurs repeatedly and interestingly throughout the book, although unusually Bowker makes no mention of the work of Rene Girard, particularly La Violence et le sacré which attaches considerable anthropological and religious importance to the idea).

Bowker is acutely aware that although the evidence shows abject accounts of the origins of religious belief to be false, nonetheless the sheer variety of meanings which his study reveals raises further problems. All the theories of a life after death could be false, but they cannot all be true together, so in the final section of the book he moves on to examine how we might assess the rival truth-claims made by religions and philosophies on the subject. He widens his investigation to discuss recent work in cosmology, evolution and thermodynamics, before passing on finally to consider Near Death Experiences.

In exploring the wider human experience of death, his methodology is essentially that of Husserl and the mainstream of European phenomenology (which he discussed in his earlier Licensed Insanities), but he also draws on Critical Realism, urging that both traditions should agree that all human knowledge is corrigible, approximate, provisional and incomplete, and this means that all our speculations about death and a possible future state are likely to be wrong, but they may nonetheless be wrong about something. He argues with scholarly plausibility that many human speculations about death and

Robert Smith