Lecture 23: How to live given the certainty of death

What this lecture covers

Kagan turns from how we should feel about death to how we should act given it. He starts by asking why mortality demands "care" in how we live, then lays out competing strategies for filling a finite life — pursuing modest, reliable pleasures versus pursuing riskier, larger accomplishments — and a question about whether quantity of life or quality of life should be weighed more heavily. The lecture then considers whether some form of semi-immortality, through offspring, atoms, or lasting accomplishments, can make death less troubling, and closes by contrasting this whole approach with the Buddhist view that the real fix is to see life itself as not worth clinging to.

After watching, you should be able to describe the "eat, drink, and be merry" versus "aim big" strategies for living, explain Kagan's box-area analogy for weighing quantity against quality of life, summarize the two versions of semi-immortality he considers, and state why he ultimately doesn't accept the Buddhist alternative even while respecting it.

Key ideas

• Care from finitude: because time and life's opportunities are limited, decisions about what to pursue and how well to execute them carry real stakes; you don't have unlimited do-overs.
• Two failure modes: you can aim at the wrong goals, or aim correctly but fail to execute, and mortality limits your chances to correct either.
• Strategy of modest goods: "eat, drink, and be merry" pursues reliable, attainable pleasures (food, company) to guarantee some value, even if each is individually small.
• Strategy of ambitious goods: aiming at large accomplishments (a novel, a symphony, a family) risks failure but offers greater potential value; most people, if guaranteed success, would prefer this kind of life.
• Quantity times quality: Kagan models a life's value as roughly duration multiplied by quality, visualized as the area of a box, then tests whether this captures what we actually value.
• Peaks over totals: a short, intensely valuable life (Hölderlin's ideal) can seem preferable to a much longer life of barely-positive value, suggesting quality (or peak achievement) can matter independently of total quantity.
• Semi-immortality through parts: taking comfort in atoms or genetic material persisting after death, which Kagan (unlike Schopenhauer) finds unconvincing.
• Semi-immortality through accomplishments: taking comfort in works, buildings, companies, or children that outlast you, which Kagan finds more genuinely appealing, though he admits ambivalence.
• The Buddhist alternative: rather than maximizing a good life, treat life itself as fundamentally suffering and reduce attachment, so its loss stops being a loss; Kagan respects this but doesn't accept it, preferring the "life is good" starting point.

Walkthrough

How carefully should we live? (0:00)

Kagan opens by noting Kurt Vonnegut's death shortly after the previous lecture quoted him, then turns to the question of how mortality should shape our behavior. He argues that finitude requires "care" because we lack unlimited chances to redo our choices, though he notes carefully that this isn't purely a function of mortality itself — even an immortal life could be filled badly, and even a mortal life would need less care if there were few valuable things to pursue. It's the combination of a short life and a world rich with many difficult, valuable things to pursue that creates the pressure to choose and execute well, illustrated with the analogy of a musician who has only a day, rather than a month, in the recording studio to get songs right.

Time constraints and goals: finding appropriate contents for life (11:21)

Kagan sets aside the deeper question of what ultimately makes life meaningful and instead compares two broad strategies for filling a finite life. The first, "eat, drink, and be merry," goes for smaller, near-guaranteed goods like food and company. The second aims for larger accomplishments — writing a novel, building a family, a career — that are more valuable if achieved but carry a real risk of failure. He suggests most people, given a guarantee of success, would prefer the life built on larger accomplishments, but acknowledges the practical tension: bigger goals mean bigger risk, so a mixed strategy might be the reasonable middle ground, without settling on the exact proportion.

Quantity of life: the more, the better? (17:30)

Kagan revisits the earlier claim that immortality would eventually become bad, but notes that within a normal human lifespan, more life generally means more good. He proposes modeling a life's value as duration multiplied by quality — visualized as the area of a box — and tests this with a thought experiment: a 150-year life of high quality versus a 30,000-year life of barely-positive quality. Even though the second life has a larger "total," most people prefer the shorter, higher-quality life, which suggests that quantity alone, even weighted by quality, doesn't capture everything we care about; the peaks or heights that a life reaches seem to matter too. He reads Hölderlin's poem "To the Parcae," which asks only for a single summer of fully realized poetic achievement and declares that having "lived like the gods," nothing more is needed, as an extreme expression of quality mattering more than quantity.

Semi-immortality through accomplishments (32:38)

Kagan considers whether a kind of semi-immortality can soften mortality's sting. One version says a part of you literally continues, whether through children or recycled atoms; he quotes Schopenhauer's argument that matter reforming into new life should comfort us, but says he finds no genuine comfort in it. A second version says your accomplishments — poetry, buildings, companies, or a well-raised family — persist after you and give your life lasting significance. Kagan admits he is genuinely drawn to this idea in most moods (offering it as part of his own motivation for writing philosophy) while sometimes suspecting it's a comparable form of self-delusion, similar to Schopenhauer's dust.

Life is suffering: an alternative approach to living (40:21)

Kagan closes by contrasting all the preceding strategies, which assume life is good and try to maximize it, with an alternative rooted in Buddhist thought: that life is fundamentally suffering, so the real solution is to reduce attachment (including attachment to the idea of a persisting self) rather than to try to fill life with more value. He summarizes the first noble truth of Buddhism and its logic — if life isn't good overall, then losing it isn't bad — and expresses genuine respect for the view's internal consistency, while stating that as someone shaped by a Genesis-rooted, "life is good" outlook, he cannot adopt it himself, leaving the strategies discussed earlier as his preferred framework for thinking about how to live.

Before you watch

• This lecture assumes the deprivation account of death's badness developed earlier in the course, including the prior argument that immortality would eventually become undesirable.
• The previous two lectures on fear and other bad aspects of death provide the emotional backdrop for this shift toward practical strategies for living.
• Familiarity with the assigned readings on "eat, drink, and be merry" and Hölderlin's poem will deepen the discussion of strategies.

Check your understanding

1. Why does Kagan argue that it's not mortality alone, but mortality combined with a rich and difficult world, that requires us to be careful in how we live?
2. Contrast the "eat, drink, and be merry" strategy with the strategy of pursuing larger accomplishments. What is the tradeoff between them?
3. What does the comparison between a 150-year high-quality life and a 30,000-year barely-positive life suggest about whether quantity alone captures what we value?
4. Why does Kagan find Schopenhauer's "dust" argument unconvincing, and why is he more genuinely drawn to the idea of semi-immortality through accomplishments?
5. How does the Buddhist view of life as suffering offer a different solution to the problem of death's badness than the strategies Kagan otherwise discusses, and why does he decline to adopt it?