Julián Marías on Human Happiness, Death and the Call for Personal Immortality

This chapter discusses Marías’s argumentation for affirming that my life (each one’s) presupposes, not as an epistemic attitude of part of I myself, the executive I, but as an intrinsic ontological postulate without which my life itself as radical reality is impossible, the assumption of its own indefinite perduration. This allows Marías to conclude that my (each one’s) conscious hope for personal immortality after my biological death occurs is justified inasmuch as it is a self-affirming exercise, a conscious endorsement of my own human reality, and so a sign of authenticity. Marías’s argumentation is complex, composed of several argumentative steps. The crucial step in Marías’s argumentation is his identification of human happiness with the realisation of living. It is argued that this identification is problematic even under Marías’s premises.