not bothering to cite this properly. no apologies.

although the Buddha insisted his position was a "middle way" between eternalism and annihilationism, people tend to reflexively lump buddhist rebirth in with other doctrines of life-after-death, considering them equally offensive to secular sensibilities. the centrist framing doesn't help this, since it makes it seem like avoidance of extremes on a quantitative continuity of positions rather than a qualitative development over the other options.

this might be improved by noting a parallelism between rebirth in buddhism and Kant’s resolution of the first mathematical antinomy in the Critique of Pure Reason. that is, we transpose Kant’s argument from the (in)finitude of the world to the (in)finitude of the individual.

the thesis of the first mathematical antinomy is that “the world” has a beginning or temporal limit and that it has a spatial limit. the antithesis is that it has no limit in time or space. each one of them attempts to prove itself by disproving the other. Kant’s response is that they are both wrong, because they are both right in refuting the other. they both rest on the incorrect premises that “the world” exists as a totality. they perform a sleight of hand, covertly moving from making statements about phenomena to making statements about a whole that can never be given in experience. Kant says that although there is no limit to “the world” as totality of experiences, it is not infinite, either: it is indefinite in size. we can only ever find a procession of particular things in the world, and never a simultaneity of them that could be judged complete or conclusively unlimited.

the Buddha adopts a similar position, but instead of talking about the timeline of the cosmos, he talks about the timeline of an individual. the “eternalist” holds that the self continues to exist after death, while the “annihilationist” holds that the self ends with death. the Buddha denies that any totality of the soul exists at all that could be ascribed either a limit or a lack of limit. instead, we could say there is a “sum of appearances and their conditions”—but an indefinite sum. we can’t say that something ends at death, because there isn’t any “something” to end. based on seeing other people born and die, a beginning and end to the evidence available to us of the continuity of their lives, we conclude that our own lives must have birth and death, though we have no knowledge of these events "from inside," and infer in an ultimately unjustifiable way that the continuity actually stops there.

buddhism thus rejects inferences that don't have a phenomenological basis. it still does depend on the possibility of bringing an end to the sequence of rebirths, but it bases this possibility on its analysis of the autoproduction of the deluded subject through karmic causality. intentional actions (karma) condition subjects, giving them a disposition to actively repeat the same actions in similar situations, and also cause them to passively experience corresponding effects: determining whether they find experiences they undergo pleasant or painful in the present life, and ultimately determining the realm of their future rebirth. karmic causality is distinguished from conventional efficient causality in that it operates solely on the subjective side, meaning the means for ending the continuity of consciousness are of a piece with that continuity.

regardless of the ultimate success of the karmic analysis, this puts buddhism ahead of a significant chunk of western philosophical systems in the wake of Kant or phenomenology. (one might get a lot out of going through Ray Brassier's arguments that most philosophy fails to synchronize subjective and subject-indifferent temporality and therefore make sense of death—buddhism simply absolutizes the subjective side rather than the subject-indifferent one Brassier prefers, at least when it comes to analyzing and dismantling deluded consciousness.)

the more refined kinds of common-sense annihilationism don't believe in anything that looks like an unchanging essence of the person that would truly come to an end with death, but do hold that some kind of binary qualitative change takes place—experience might only be a particular organization of matter, and that organization is destroyed while the matter continues. like buddhism, it takes a particular analysis of causality to make this end plausible, but here it is a restricted physicalist one. this is much more defensible, but at this point it's worth bringing up the precariousness of all causal theories, buddhist or otherwise. Nāgārjuna makes clear that causes and effects are not real existents; our labelling of one phenomenon as "cause" and another as "effect" is an act that pragmatically finds singular points and relationships in a continuum of reality that ultimately has no divisions at all. from this standpoint, the standpoint of emptiness, we still can't say that a distinct change happens between "living" and "dead," as annihilationism holds, but neither can we say that a particular action in one life has as its effect a later fruit.

Q: still, aren't there limits? specifically, isn't there a difference between the "wrongness" of reducing the continuum of historical time to singular events and the wrongness of positing whole other realms and human-inhabited world-systems?
A: outside science fiction, the picture of the universe we're accustomed to is averse to the idea that anything interesting on the human level exists outside the bounds of the historical record and earth's atmosphere, short of space being converted into a frontier for resource extraction, and despite the abstract arguments for the likelihood of alien life. if we believe Hans Blumenberg's The Legitimacy of the Modern Age, this conservative universe came about as an extension/response to the medieval nominalist insistence on the smallness and total arbitrariness of the world created by God's act of will. (on a purely historical level, we probably shouldn't too hastily accept Blumenberg's narrative, but it serves as an example from an abundant literature on continuities between medieval european and modern thinking.) to act as though much "exists" beyond what is empirically established comes off as an unjustifiable leap, despite the fact that the sheer arbitrariness of the particular world we live in can find no a priori justification over numerous others. buddhism, on the other hand, tends towards profligacy, with sūtras introducing inconceivable epochs and millions of world-systems with innumerable bodhisattvas ministering to them. the premise that would make conscionable this careless attitude is the one for which figures like Blanqui and Nietzche have attempted to construct a scientific argument: that everything conceivable as possible is actual. if this is true—and even if not, as i've found it belongs to the class of ideas that can affect one's behavior through contact alone—karmic causation becomes as viable a way of linking life-events as any other, and only a pragmatic criterion can choose among them. if you can describe what the greater context of other lives should look like, in line with known actions, you can be assured that those individuals are "somewhere" living. (Possible Girls real??) of course, you can't describe it, and ought to be careful trying, since the workings of karma are famously inconceivable to anyone without the insight and savoir-faire of a Buddha.

besides epistemological hang-ups, what people actually seem to be worried about is that rebirth is cope. i don't think it can be meaningfully construed as such, though, and so the stakes of accepting it are not particularly high. rebirth doesn't, for instance, lend imaginary consistency to finite human life through investment in a fantastical continuation, because this continued existence is a dreadful thing we're meant to be trying to escape, tied to the ultra-finitude of impermanence. it doesn't promise happiness; after you die you remain in ignorance and only your bad habits repeat themselves into the future.

Q: what, then, is the pragmatic significance of rebirth?
A: notably, it renders suicide fairly useless. isn't this in a sense the ultimate issue with "special plans for this world"?—that killing yourself, or destroying everything that exists, is pointless, because a universe that couldn't stop itself from producing you in the first place is only going to do so again. along with suicide, it also becomes pointless to have the sort of distracted attitude toward life that unconsciously rationalizes inactivity by imagining life will soon be over. every action taken becomes associated with an infinity mirror effect, a momentary tangent line encompassing all the past repetitions of the act that conditioned you to do it now, and the future ones that it sets you up for. the Lotus Sūtra, for example, is full of proclamations that if someone is listening to the sūtra now, it "proves" that they've already listened to it attentively innumerable times before. this compounding goes some way to explaining the absurd timespans the sūtras describe spent in purgatories and god-worlds. rebirth also forces you to recognize a type of identity with all that exists, as "in the long run" no act or experience is completely foreign to you, so the ontological boundary-drawing exercises people engage in to avoid taking seriously e.g. animals or heinous humans become an obvious waste of time. at the "perfect teaching" level, where all possible causalities or narratives of events hold, Tiantai meditation aims to make the practitioner perceive each individual moment as the ontological root of the entire universe. Brook Ziporyn (in Emptiness and Omnipresence) argues that this is an improved formulation of what Bataille calls sovereignty. for Bataille, sovereignty is a mode of action which escapes utilitarian reason by becoming fully involved in a single moment, to the exclusion of all past conditions and future ramifications, i.e. without consciousness of death. Ziporyn says that Bataille's version is still limited insofar as "exclusion of all causality" still means attaching itself to a single, particular causal narrative, while the Tiantai acceptance of all such causal narratives simultaneously (including that one) achieves the same effect. i'm still unsure about the ramifications of this.

this is not an unambivalent endorsement. i have difficulty accepting what seems to me a crude set of moral rules and a flawed, anti-materialist theory of subjectivity. to get anything more useful out of karma itself i think would require studying the relationship between its theory of action and morality and the social circumstances it belongs to, then beginning again from our own circumstances. however, i do find annihilationism lacking, i think the middle way gives a challenge that cripples a lot of philosophical systems that are still too acceptable to those who would also repudiate rebirth, and i think our cosmological horizons are probably in need of reevaluation.