Postulate of Immortality........Lonesh

"The belief in immortality is based on a 'notable characteristic of our nature, never to be capable of being satisfied by what is temporal (as insufficient for the capacities of its calling)."

The postulate of immortality is very much interwoven with the postulate of God. Taking into account the sensuous nature of human beings, Kant states that it is very difficult for a man to be righteous without hope. Immortality guarantees this hope and ensures that there is a place sufficient for the reckoning of happiness in proportion to worthiness to be happy. The postulate of immortality was taken seriously by Kant even when he was traditionalistic in his rationalism. The premise of immortality was found in the "incomplete harmony between morality and its consequences in the world." He was of the view that the belief in immortality has to be based on the moral disposition and not one hope of future rewards.

Kant bases his first argument for immortality on the principle of purposiveness. As 'nothing is purposeless' each organ or faculty into the world has its own specific claim that human life as whole too, must have its own end, although it is an end not in this life but in a future life.

Kant gives the moral arguments and not the theoretical arguments for the immortality of the soul:

1. The highest good is a necessary object of the will.

2. Holiness, or complete fitness of intentions to the moral law, is necessary condition of the highest good.

3. Holiness cannot be found in a sensuous rational being.

4. It can be reached only in an endless progress and since holiness is required, such endless progress toward it is the true object of the will such progress can be endless only if the personality of the rational being endures endlessly.

 5. The highest good can be made real, therefore only on "the supposition of the immortality of the soul.

In the second critique Kant would argue that we need immortality not to achieve happiness not at all but rather in order to make "endless progress' toward "the complete conformity of dispositions with the moral law,' that is , toward virtue or worthiness to be happy. Kant also makes it clear that the postulate of immortality is that which cannot be known but can only be thought. Kant also claims that his arguments for immortality do not furnish us with any theoretical dogma but only practical and objective truth that can give rise to action-motives, and , above all, sustain a moral agent in the moral disposition involved in making himself/herself worthy of highest good.