When the pandemic began, I started thinking more than I ordinarily would’ve about my own mortality. In particular, I started thinking about the consequences of my belief that there isn’t an afterlife.

I’m not strongly confident in my belief that there isn’t an afterlife. I could be wrong and part of myself hopes that I am. But my bet, given what I’ve learned about biology and philosophy and so forth, is that biological death is final. From my subjective perspective, death might be as if I were in a dreamless sleep, or like how it was before I was born. But objectively, after I die, I won’t be anything at all. Or so I think.

If I take this claim as my starting point, what does it entail about the attitude I should take toward my life and toward my death, if it entails anything?

The Question

When I reflect on the finality of death, in light of my assumption that there isn’t an afterlife, the shortness of my life becomes apparent to me. There’s a finite number of moments that I’ll get to experience in my life and not an infinite amount. When it is over, nothing will come afterward. The lights go out and that’s it.

This is somehow hard to comprehend — the idea that the movie of my life will come to a close in eternal and dreamless sleep. Yet I am here now, animate, and with my own will and consciousness, and, assuming that I’m right that biological death is final, I will not be here and so empowered forever. There is scarcity in this sensation of being alive and that enhances the subjective sense of value that I associate with my life. Its scarcity gives me a feeling that it is a miracle or a gift that I am alive at all.

The ancient philosopher Marcus Aurelius emphasizes the insignificance of life. Summarizing his view, he writes,

In short, all that is of the body is as coursing waters, all that is of the soul as dreams and vapors; life a warfare, a brief sojourning in an alien land; and after repute, oblivion.¹

At another point, he says,

Keep before your eyes the swift onset of oblivion, and the abysses of eternity before us and behind...²

When reading Aurelius, it’s important to recall that he was a great emperor of Rome who rose to the pinnacle of human achievement. His minimizing of life may have played a therapeutic role in keeping his ego in check and his judgement sound. But, for me, Aurelius’ observations bolster my sense of life’s specialness. In view of the “abysses of eternity before us and behind,” as he puts it, the fact that I am here now makes me think that these moments of being are even more special.

Other ancient writers take the view opposite Aurelius and emphasize the value of life. In Homer’s Odyssey, when the main character Odysseus travels to the underworld and talks to the ghost of his friend Achilles, the ghost says that, in comparison with death, life’s value is immense. The ghost says,

I would rather follow the plow as thrall to another
man, one with no land allotted him and not much to live on,
than be a king over all the perished dead.³

What makes this passage surprising is that Achilles’ life and the circumstances of his death were ideal according to his tradition. In this tradition — the tradition of the ancient Greeks — the strong and especially those that die gloriously on the field of battle are exalted. Achilles does just that in the Iliad, the prequel to the Odyssey. He embodies everything in the Homeric world one could hope to achieve. It is therefore surprising that Achilles defies this tradition in saying, in effect, that it’s better to be a poor, unknown man who is alive, than to be a great man who is dead. It’s better, in other words, to have a meager life than to have had a great life.

A more recent expression of this kind of view can be found in the contemporary philosopher Tom Nagel's essay “Death.” There, he writes,

There are elements which, if added to one’s experience, make his life better; there are other elements which, if added to one’s experience, make life worse. But what remains when these are set aside is not merely neutral: it is emphatically positive. Therefore life is worth living even when the bad elements of life are plentiful, and the good ones too meager to outweigh the bad ones on their own. The additional positive weight is supplied by experience itself, rather than by any of its contents.⁴

The idea that Homer and Nagel have in common, and which I affirm, is that the experience of life itself has value, in comparison with being dead, or in absolute terms, regardless of whatever good or bad things occur within it.

Paradox

There is an ancient Epicurean argument that purports to show that death is not to be feared which creates some tension for the idea that life has value. If this argument is correct, then one of its consequences is that the value of life cannot be analyzed in terms of any subjective comparison between life and death. Life can still have value, as both Homer and Nagel believe, but, counterintuitively, its value cannot consist in its being qualitatively better than being dead.

Here's the argument. The first premise is:

1. For anything, if it doesn’t exist, nothing could be good or bad for it.

This assertion seems self-evident to me. While one might be able to make plausible claims about things that don’t exist — for example, that Santa wears a red hat — there is nothing or no one for whom these claims are good or bad from a first-person perspective. There may be third persons who would prefer that Santa wear a green hat, to continue the example, but there is no Santa from whose subjective perspective wearing a green or red hat could make any qualitative difference.

Similar remarks apply to the already deceased. It may bother us when the legacy of a loved one is disparaged, but there is no subject of experience that is affected by such remarks. The legacy of our beloved may be affected, and that may bother survivors, but the beloved herself is not affected. Since she no longer exists, there is nothing that could be affected.

The second premise of the Epicurean argument is sometimes called the Termination Thesis.⁵

2. When I die, I cease to exist.

This claim follows from my starting assumption, namely, that there isn’t an afterlife. If I believe that biological death is final, then I must believe that I will cease to exist after my biological death occurs. Otherwise, biological death wouldn’t be final.

When we put (1) and (2) together, we get:

1. For anything, if it doesn’t exist, nothing could be good or bad for it.
2. When I die, I cease to exist.

Therefore,

3. When I’m dead, nothing could be good or bad for me.

There are some grammatical issues that make what I just said somewhat misleading. (3), properly understood, is not the claim that, after I’m dead, nothing could be good or bad for me. It is rather the claim that, after I’m dead, I don’t exist, and, by (1), nothing could be good or bad for anything that doesn’t exist.

If the argument that I have just given is valid, then we are left with the question of how being alive could be better than being dead when nothing could be good or bad for me when I’m dead. The problem is that there is no “me” for whom anything could be better or worse across these two states. There’s no way to compare these states because there’s nothing in virtue of which anything could be compared.

The tension that this conclusion creates for the idea that life has value is that it upsets commonsense notions about the behavior of value. If I possess something of value, such as a lifelong friendship, for example, and I lose my lifelong friend, then one would believe that, in losing my lifelong friend, I have lost the corresponding value of this friendship. Schematically, there is a subject, that is, me, and an object of value, that is, this lifelong friendship. When I, the valuing subject, lose this object of value, then I suffer the loss of something that I valued. But in the case of my own death, both the subject and the object of value — that is, me as the subject and my own life as the object — drop out of existence together. There cannot be the same sense of loss, since the valuing subject, which is what usually endures the loss, does not exist and therefore cannot endure anything.

These reflections do not entail that life does not have value, period — one can value his own life subjectively and desire it to go on; or one might adopt an absolutist view of life’s value — but what they do entail is that the subjective value of life cannot be understood by way of comparison between life and death. One cannot say that it is subjectively or qualitatively any better to be alive than to be dead.

In his Letter to Menoeceus, after presenting a version of the argument I just gave, Epicurus says,

The wise person does not deprecate life nor does he fear the cessation of life. The thought of life is no offense to him, nor is the cessation of life regarded as an evil.⁶

While I admit that these reflections strain the limits of my comprehension, Epicurus’ argument has had something like its desired effect on me. I still want to go on living, but, inasmuch as I believe that biological death is final, I feel somewhat more at ease about my own mortality. How could the prospect of my not existing be bad for me?

This conclusion is closed under my starting assumption, namely, that there isn’t any afterlife. If I give up this assumption, then death remains a mystery. If, instead, there is an afterlife, then it could be better than what one experiences in this life, but it could also be much worse. This mystery, contra Epicurus, could give one reason to fear death.

Judgement

In many religious traditions, believers hold that there is a divinity whose power consists in its ability to set the conditions of the afterlife.

In some cases, believers hold that, if one is morally good, then one will be rewarded in the afterlife; if one is bad, then one will be punished. On this view, it is presupposed that there is a moral standard by which lives may be measured. One cares about meeting this standard because this will determine the content of one’s experience in the next life. One wants reward and pleasure in the afterlife and not pain — or, at least, one wants the absence of pain — so one is motivated to meet this moral standard in the pursuit of her own pleasure and in the avoidance of pain.

In other religious traditions, there isn’t a necessary connection between one’s moral behavior and her being rewarded or punished in the afterlife. Within the Christian tradition, for example, Calvinists believe in predestination — that God alone decides who is chosen and who isn’t and that there isn’t any necessary connection between one’s being chosen and her moral behavior in life.

In both kinds of tradition, however, one cares about God’s judgement because this judgement determines the conditions of the afterlife. But if one does not believe in the afterlife, then this would seem to weaken the force of God’s judgement. Why should one care what God’s judgement is if it has no effect on one’s experience?

To deny the afterlife does not, in fact, entail the denial of God, or of any other divinity. It also does not entail the denial of a true and objective moral standard for human conduct. In fact, these three ideas — that is, the afterlife, the divine, and objective morality — come apart. Each one can be accepted or rejected independently of the others, without contradiction. But what denying the afterlife does entail is that, if one believes in any divinity, for whatever divinity one believes in, it does not have the power to set the conditions of the next life, since there is no next life.

To put the point another way: If there is no afterlife, then there is no evaluation of one’s life that is privileged by virtue of the fact that it determines the conditions of the next life.

This claim does not entail that there is no privileged evaluation, period. If there is a true and objective moral standard by which lives are to be measured, as some religious people believe, then the life-evaluation deriving from this standard would be privileged, even if nothing in one’s experience necessarily depends on it. This life-evaluation would be privileged by virtue of its being true in an objective sense. Jewish believers who do not believe in an afterlife but who do believe in an objective moral standard, revealed through God’s prophets and acts, are an example of this case.

For reasons outside the scope of this essay, I’m skeptical about any objective moral standard by which my life may be measured. I also don’t believe in any divinity. So I don’t believe that any evaluation of my life deriving from either of these standards is meaningfully privileged. In the absence of such standards, my personal opinion is that the most important evaluation of my life is my own: the judgement I deliver to myself.

There are many reasons why I believe my self-judgement is primary, but one that I would like to emphasize is that I uniquely experience its emotional consequences. If I feel that the life I have lived is one I can affirm, then I feel happy and at peace; if, on the other hand, I feel regret over the way I have led my life, then I suffer such consequences. No one else feels the emotional weight of these consequences as I do. Like the believer who feels joy at earning admission to Heaven, or despair at having been damned to Hell, so I feel such emotions, though perhaps to a lesser degree, but I feel them here on Earth, in this very life, as consequence of my own judgement and not that of any divinity.

This view can go wrong when the author in question misjudges her life. Consider the twin cases of a moral monster and a depressed comedian. The moral monster is an evil person, who, on his deathbed, engages in such self-evaluation and finds himself contented with his monstrous acts. The depressed comedian, in contrast, brings great joy to many but, on his deathbed, considers his life a failure. In both cases, one wants to say that such self-judgements are wrong. The monster should feel shame and suffer from his monstrous acts, whereas the comedian should feel pride and joy from the happiness he brought to others.

In the case of the moral monster, the source of his misjudgement is that his values are corrupted. The monster is contented with his evil life because he has lived according to his values, but his values are abhorrent to us. In the second case, the comedian’s error is that his emotional reaction is divorced from his values. Even if the comedian’s values are sound, and even if he recognizes the good he has done, he may still regard his life as a failure and despair.

There is a third point worth making. Suppose, for the sake of argument, that there is a true and objective morality. If this were the case, then one would be able to show that the self-judgements of both the monster and the comedian are inconsistent with the precepts of morality. Their self-judgements, in other words, really would be wrong. But there is an important sense in which this wouldn’t matter. For even if one persuades the monster and the comedian that their judgements are fallacious, their emotional reactions to their lives may remain unchanged. Such intellectual reasoning can, but need not move them emotionally.

Religious believers might hold that one’s emotional reaction would be brought into conformity with objective morality or with the judgement of God by means of the punishment or reward one receives in the afterlife. But, if one does not believe, then there is nothing to enforce alignment between moral truth and one’s emotional reaction to his life.

These cases do not move me from my view that the author’s opinion of his life is primary. In the end, it is still the force of my own judgement that I will feel on my deathbed, and not that of any abstract theory or divinity. My takeaway from these cases is that, if I want to be at peace and to have some sense of satisfaction or joy in the life that I have led, then I must live in a way that is consistent with my values. Since I do not want to be a moral monster, even if contented, I must guard against the deterioration of my values, so that the judgement I give to myself is morally sound. Finally, I must take care that, unlike the depressed comedian, my emotional reactions accord with my values in the right way, perhaps by maintaining my mental health.

Responsibility

There is still another conclusion that I would like to draw out of the denial of the afterlife. It is that, if there cannot be any redemption in the afterlife, then all of the people who have suffered great tragedy in human history — all of the victims of great injustices and of natural disasters and disease and so on — all of these human lives will not be redeemed in the next life.

This conclusion exposes at least one assumption I was not aware I had. On some unconscious level, I believed that these victims would be saved in the next life and that their suffering would be somehow relieved and vindicated by a benevolent God. I suspect that this tacit belief was caused by the Christianity with which I was raised. Jesus says,

Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the Kingdom of Heaven.⁷

But to believe that biological death is final is to deny this. It is to believe that there is no otherworldly redemption for those that have suffered such injustice. And it is also to believe that there is no poetic justice or punishment for those that perpetuate such disasters.

These reflections cause me to believe that these injustices are even worse than they first seemed. If one believes in the afterlife, then one can console oneself with the idea that victims are “in a better place.” But if one does not believe, then there is no consolation. These reflections produce in me a sense of urgency — or even a sense of responsibility to prevent such loss of life and such suffering while I can.

Meaning

In bringing these reflections to a close, there is one more topic that I would like to discuss, which is whether the finality of death has any consequences to life’s meaning. In my opinion, it does. And the way it does is fairly straightforward: If one does not believe in the prospect of the afterlife, then one must make do with the contentments of this life — not for any grand reason, but simply because there isn’t any other option.

This straightforward conclusion is the wisdom of the ages. In the Epic of Gilgamesh, an ancient poem of Mesopotamia that dates back roughly four-thousand years to 2000 B.C.E., the same message can be found. The fact that this message has been preserved for so long, and that its influence can be found in other world religions, suggests that there is something true in it — or, if not true exactly, something helpful or instructive to humankind.

This epic tells the story of the king Gilgamesh who tries to escape death and to acquire immortality. During his journey, he comes upon a woman tavern-keeper that lives at the edge of the world who tells him this:

The life that you seek you will never find:
when the gods created mankind
death they dispensed to mankind,
life they kept for themselves.

But you, Gilgamesh, let your belly be full,
enjoy yourself always by day and by night!
Make merry each day,
dance and play day and night!

Let your clothes be clean,
let your head be washed, may you bathe in water!
Gaze on the child who holds your hand,
let a wife enjoy your repeated embrace!⁸

On my reading, the point of the tavern-keeper is that it is these magic moments in life, moments that we have here and now — of joy and love, courage and victory, great heartbreak and redemption — it is these experiences that make life’s meaning; and, through these experiences, one may find redemption in this life rather than in the afterlife.

Gilgamesh’s quest for eternal life, in other words, like perhaps one’s one own quiet hope for some form of immortality, is futile. In accepting the futility of this desire, one must let it go and instead contend with life’s impermanence. In many cases, this may lead to greater enjoyment of life. Epicurus says,

The correct recognition that death is nothing to us, makes the mortality of life enjoyable, not by adding an infinite time, but by removing the longing for immortality.⁹

In considering the shortness of my life, and my own impermanence, I feel a sense of gratefulness in my mere existence. When I walk in the park on a beautiful day and I feel the sun shine upon my face and feel the love in my heart, I tell myself that this is as good as it gets, that this is salvation if I should ever have it.

To sum up what I’ve found in asking what kind of attitude I should take toward my life and my death, in view of my assumption that there isn’t an afterlife, I can now list five conclusions. I believe that life is a gift that cannot be compared to its absence; that, under the assumption that there is no afterlife, death is not to be feared. I believe that my own evaluation of my life is to be prioritized because I uniquely suffer its consequences. I find some sense of duty to help others get as close to salvation in this life as they can. And I find the meaning of my life in the simple but magic moments of daily life, moments of joy, of beauty, of meaning, and, most of all, of love.

1. Aurelius, M. (2005). Meditations. New York: Penguin Books, p.18.
2. Ibid.
3. Homer (2007). The Odyssey. Translated by R. Lattimore. New York: Harper Perennial Modern Classics, p.180.
4. Nagel, T. (1979). Mortal Questions. New York: Cambridge University Press, p.2.
5. Feldman, F. (2000). The Termination Thesis. Midwest Studies in Philosophy, [online] 24(1), pp.98–115. doi:https://doi.org/10.1111/1475-4975.00024.
6. Epicurus (1994). Letter to Menoeceus. Translated by R.D. Hicks. [online] classics.mit.edu. Available at: https://classics.mit.edu/Epicurus/menoec.html.
7. Matthew 5:3 (KJV).
8. George, A. (2003). The Epic of Gilgamesh. Translated by A. George. London Penguin Books, p. 194.
9. Epicurus.