23. How to live given the certainty of death

Summary

Professor Shelly Kagan asks how people should live knowing that they will die. He begins by recalling Kurt Vonnegut’s expression of gratitude for having been alive at all: even if life is brief, being one of the “sitting-up mud” is fortunate.

Living Carefully With Limited Time

Death makes mistakes matter partly because it limits the time available to correct them. Kagan distinguishes two ways a person can go wrong:

• Choosing the wrong aims: Spending time on things that, among the available options, are not most worth pursuing.
• Failing to achieve worthy aims: Having good goals but carrying them out carelessly or unsuccessfully, and needing to try again.

People can change direction and attempt “do-overs” during life, so mortality does not eliminate the possibility of correction. But the time available for those corrections is limited. The need for care arises not simply because life ends, but because life is relatively short compared with the many valuable and difficult things a person might pursue.

Kagan compares this to recording music: an artist with plenty of studio time can experiment and repeat takes, while one with only a day must choose songs carefully and perform attentively. Likewise, a finite life calls for care both in selecting goals and in pursuing them.

What Should Fill a Life?

Kagan does not try to settle the question of life’s ultimate meaning, but outlines two broad strategies for using limited time:

1. Choose reliable, accessible goods. Pursue pleasures and satisfactions—such as food, company, and other readily attainable experiences—that are very likely to succeed. This resembles “eat, drink, and be merry.”
2. Aim for greater, riskier accomplishments. Pursue goods such as writing a novel, composing a symphony, building a business, or raising a family. These may make life more valuable if achieved, but they are less certain and may consume years without success.

A mixed approach seems attractive: pursue some ambitious goals while also making room for attainable pleasures. But deciding on the right balance remains difficult.

Quantity and Quality of Life

Kagan considers whether a longer life is always better. Other things being equal, additional years can bring valuable experiences and opportunities. But duration is not the only consideration: a life’s quality matters too.

He illustrates one way to combine the two by treating a life’s total value as its duration multiplied by its quality. Yet a comparison challenges the idea that the total quantity of value is all that matters: a very long life that is only barely worth living could have a larger numerical total than a shorter, much richer life, while still seeming less desirable.

This suggests that quality may matter in its own right, not merely as a component of a total. The “peaks” of a life—its greatest goods or achievements—may matter more than the sum of all its good experiences. In a poem addressed to the Fates, Hölderlin expresses the more radical view that one sufficiently great achievement can make a life complete: once he has “lived like the gods,” more is not needed. Kagan leaves open whether quality can outweigh quantity, or whether quantity still matters once a life has attained great heights.

Semi-Immortality Through What Remains

Kagan examines the idea that people may find comfort in a kind of “semi-immortality”—not literal survival, but something continuing after death.

• Continuing through one’s physical parts: Some people take comfort in descendants carrying on their cells, or in their atoms being recycled into the world. Schopenhauer argues that matter should not be dismissed, since it can become part of new forms of life and nature. Kagan says he finds this unconvincing as a source of personal comfort.
• Continuing through accomplishments: Works of art, books, discoveries, buildings, businesses, or the achievement of raising a decent person may endure beyond their creators. Kagan is ambivalent: sometimes he suspects that valuing lasting achievements is self-deception, but usually he finds that meaningful work that survives its creator can add significance to a life. He does not, however, conclude that one great achievement is all a person needs.

An Alternative: Regard Life as Suffering

Most of the approaches discussed assume that life is valuable and that death is bad because it deprives us of further valuable life. A different approach challenges that premise: if life is, on balance, bad, then losing it may not be a deprivation.

Kagan presents Buddhism as a prominent example. The First Noble Truth is that life involves suffering, including loss, illness, pain, and death. On this view, reducing attachment to things that will be lost—and loosening the belief in a permanent self—can lessen suffering and fear of death.

Kagan respects this approach but says it does not fit his own outlook. He identifies more with the view that life can be good, associated in his account with the Genesis declaration that the world is good. For him, the main question remains how to make a finite life as valuable as possible.

Speakers and Sources Featured

• Speaker: Professor Shelly Kagan, the lecturer.
• Kurt Vonnegut: Quoted on gratitude for having lived; Kagan also notes Vonnegut’s death.
• Hill Street Blues: Referenced for the sergeant’s recurring warning, “Be careful out there.”
• Woody Allen: Quoted joking that he wants immortality through not dying, rather than through his work.
• Arthur Schopenhauer: Quoted on the continued transformation of matter after death.
• Friedrich Hölderlin: His poem “To the Parcae” is quoted and discussed.
• Buddhism: Its Four Noble Truths, especially the First Noble Truth, are described.
• The Book of Genesis: Invoked through the declaration that creation is good.