Death and reincarnation: spirit and matter
The transmigration of souls was a core of Pythagorean teaching. What philosophy and the religions say about it, what physicists suppose, what studies of near-death experiences have really found and where the line between belief and knowledge runs.
Beside number, the soul stood at the centre of Pythagoras’ teaching. The Pythagoreans taught that it is immortal and after death passes into new bodies (see Pythagoras: the priest). Xenophanes, a contemporary, tells mockingly that Pythagoras once took pity on a dog being beaten, because in its yelping he recognised the voice of a dead friend. A fragment attributed to Philolaus, though probably not by him, describes the body as a prison or tomb of the soul, to which it was bound as a punishment (see The ancient sources).
This subject touches questions that everyone must answer for himself. Precisely for that reason it is worth keeping apart three things that are often mixed up: what is believed, what is reported and what has been tested (see Grammar: reading closely).
What is believed
The Pythagoreans and Plato. Plato took up the Pythagorean teaching of the soul and developed it. In the Phaedo he has Socrates talk with friends about the immortality of the soul on the day of his execution, and at the end of the Republic the myth of Er tells how souls choose their next life after death. Plato gives arguments for this, but he calls the myth itself a myth.
India. In the Upanishads, in Buddhism and in Jainism rebirth is a basic assumption, often joined to the hope of finding a way out of the cycle of births. Whether Pythagoras knew of this is an old and unresolved question.
Judaism and Christianity. The Bible knows no transmigration of souls. The Letter to the Hebrews says: “It is appointed unto men once to die, but after this the judgment” (Hebrews 9:27). Christian hope is directed to the resurrection, not to a return in another body. The Church Fathers expressly rejected the transmigration of souls. In the Kabbalah, by contrast, there has been a teaching of the transmigration of souls since the Middle Ages, called gilgul (see The Kabbalah).
All these teachings are statements of faith. That is no defect, but it is a different kind of statement from a measurement.
Gadamer on Pythagoras
In The Beginning of Philosophy the philosopher Hans-Georg Gadamer (1900 to 2002) considers the religious side of the Presocratics, from Homer via Orphism to the cult of Dionysus. What interests him most is that in these cults the soul stands at the centre of religious life. Gadamer notes that ancient biographies present almost all early thinkers, from Anaximander to Parmenides, as connected with Pythagoras. He reads it this way: Pythagoras united in himself the basic motifs of early philosophy, the riddle of numbers and the riddle of the soul and its fate. The passage is also found in Alfried Lehner, Die Esoterik des Pythagoras.
What physicists suppose
Some well-known physicists have spoken personally about soul and consciousness. The German book Die geheime Physik des Zufalls. Quantenphänomene und Schicksal (“The secret physics of chance”) collects such voices.
- Hans-Peter Dürr, long director at the Max Planck Institute for Physics in Munich, held that the dualism of the smallest particles is not confined to the subatomic world. The dualism of body and soul was as real to him as that of wave and particle, and he believed in an existence after death. This world, he said, is as it were the slag, the beyond the comprehensive reality by which our life is already embraced.
- C. G. Jung and Wolfgang Pauli searched from 1932, especially intensively after the war, in a long correspondence for a common language for physics and psyche (see Quantum physics, magic and the unconscious).
- The physicist and molecular biologist Jeremy Hayward considered it possible that consciousness is a basic element of the world alongside space, time, matter and energy.
- The Heidelberg medical physicist Markolf H. Niemz suggests that the soul leaves the body at death at the speed of light.
These voices deserve to be taken seriously, but placed correctly. They are the world views of physicists, not results of physics. Often entanglement is cited, which Einstein called “spooky action at a distance” and which Anton Zeilinger and others have confirmed in experiment. But physics has a theorem by which no message can be sent through entanglement. Entangled particles show matched measurement results, yet neither can tell the other anything. Whether and how this has to do with consciousness is open. Most physicists see no connection.
What is reported in near-death experiences
Many people who have survived cardiac arrest report experiences during that time, of peace and light, of a review of their own life or of the feeling of floating above their own body. The Dutch cardiologist Pim van Lommel interviewed 344 survivors in ten hospitals and published in The Lancet in 2001 that 62 of them, or 18 per cent, described such an experience. That these experiences occur is therefore well attested. How they arise is disputed.
A single detail would carry the most weight. Some patients describe what happened in the room while they were unconscious: who said what, which device was used. If they knew something they could not have learned in any ordinary way, that would suggest perception is possible without a working brain. But most of these reports were written down only years later, and one can no longer rule out that the patients heard, inferred or filled in details afterwards.
What has been tested
This very question can be tested, and it has been. The physician Sam Parnia led two large studies called AWARE, Awareness during Resuscitation. The idea was simple: in rooms where resuscitations take place, pictures were set up so that they could be seen only from above, from the ceiling. Whoever really floats above his body should see them.
- AWARE I (published 2014) recorded 2060 cardiac arrests in 15 hospitals. Only a small share of patients survived and could be interviewed. One single man described details of the resuscitation that matched the records, among them the announcements of the defibrillator. But most cardiac arrests took place in rooms without pictures, and no patient described one of the pictures.
- AWARE II (published 2023) showed pictures on a tablet above the patient’s head during resuscitation and played words through headphones. Of 567 patients 53 survived, and 28 were interviewed in detail. Eleven reported memories or perceptions from that time, six near-death-like experiences. None named the picture shown, one remembered the words played in. Hearing, though, is possible without open eyes, so this is no evidence of perception outside the body.
The result is therefore twofold. Experiences during cardiac arrest are real, and some people seem to have fragments of consciousness even during resuscitation, which matters for medicine. But even the most careful test so far has not shown perception without a body. That does not prove there is none. It only means the question is open.
Research on reincarnation
Can more be said about rebirth than an article of faith? From the 1960s the American psychiatrist Ian Stevenson collected, at the University of Virginia, reports of children who told of a former life, and checked whether the persons and places named existed. His book Twenty Cases Suggestive of Reincarnation (1966) is the best-known work of this kind, and his collection comprises several thousand cases. Critics such as the philosopher Paul Edwards objected that most cases come from families who believe in rebirth, and that the interviews often took place only after the families had already searched for the earlier person. What the child really said first can then hardly be separated from what the adults knew later.
In the German-speaking world the mathematician and physicist Joachim Felix Hornung has collected material on reincarnation, near-death experiences and research into the afterlife on his websites. He distances himself from modern esotericism and explains what “esoteric” originally meant for the Pythagoreans: the knowledge of the inner circle, as opposed to what was taught to outsiders.
What remains
Applied to the four questions from Chance and pattern, an honest picture emerges. The experiences are real. Perception without a body is claimed but has not so far been shown under test conditions. Rebirth is a statement of faith for which there are collections of cases but no proof that convinces sceptics.
This need not weaken faith. Whoever believes in the immortality of the soul, whether with Pythagoras, with Plato or with the Bible, mostly does not do so because of an experiment, and no experiment has refuted it. But he should know on what ground he stands. Death is the place where one feels the unsayable most clearly (see What a secret is). For the Pythagoreans number and soul belonged together: whoever recognises the order of numbers also recognises something about the place of the soul in the world. That remains a hope that has accompanied philosophy for two and a half thousand years.
Sources and further reading
Sources
- Xenophanes, fragment B 7, preserved in Diogenes Laertius VIII 36
- Plato, Phaedo, and Republic X 614b to 621d (the myth of Er)
- Hebrews 9:27, King James Version
- Pim van Lommel et al., Near-death experience in survivors of cardiac arrest, The Lancet 358, 2001, pp. 2039 to 2045
- Sam Parnia et al., AWARE, AWAreness during REsuscitation, a prospective study, Resuscitation 85, 2014, pp. 1799 to 1805
- Sam Parnia et al., AWAreness during REsuscitation II, Resuscitation 191, 2023, 109903
- Ian Stevenson, Twenty Cases Suggestive of Reincarnation, New York 1966
- Paul Edwards, Reincarnation. A Critical Examination, Amherst 1996
- Hans-Georg Gadamer, Der Anfang der Philosophie (The beginning of philosophy), Stuttgart 1996
Further reading
- Alfried Lehner, Die Esoterik des Pythagoras (The esotericism of Pythagoras)