Who wants to live forever?

I made a joke, last year, about philosophy’s failure as a pedagogy of death: if it was meant to teach me how to reconcile with mortality, it doesn’t seem to have done its job.

Not that philosophers haven’t tried. Some make the case directly, arguing that, since being dead is painless, it cannot harm us, or that it makes no more sense to mourn post-mortem non-existence than it does the time before we were born.

But some approach the problem back-to-front. If the opposite of dying is living forever, they reason, we can reconcile with mortality by showing that immortality is worse. Thus, Bernard Williams argued in “The Makropulos Case: Reflections on the Tedium of Immortality”—the spoiler is in the title—that immortality would be tedious to the point of becoming insufferable. Even if we took the precaution of stipulating endless youth and health as well as endless life, we would simply run out of things to do. Boredom would consume us like a never-dying flame, and we would long for death.

I’ve never understood the appeal of Williams’ argument, versions of which have been offered by Martha Nussbaum, Shelly Kagan, and Sam Scheffler, among others. Can’t we get around boredom by forgetting what we’ve done, by changing who we are, developing new tastes? Even if there’s something to regret in losing one’s past or personality in this way, in unwitting repetition or unrelatability, I don’t believe it’s worse than death. That’s what it would have to be to make the case for mortality over the opposite.

Martin Hägglund makes a different argument in This Life—not about ennui, but urgency. The problem with being immortal, for Hägglund, is that there would be no need to do anything now, since it could always wait—and this would be true at every moment of our lives. “If I believed that my life would last forever,” he writes, “I could never take my life to be at stake and I would never be seized by the need to do anything with my time.” Mortality is thus a condition of meaning:

what I do with my time can matter to me only because I grasp my life as finite. If I believed I had an infinite time to live, the urgency of doing anything would be unintelligible to me and no normative obligation could have any grip on me.

What to make of these assertions? They seem to predict, erroneously, that children under five—who do not grasp their lives as finite, yet—will see no urgency in doing anything. It’s been a while now, I concede, but I don’t remember my four-year-old being notably passive in the face of marching time. Perhaps Hägglund would deny that they were “spiritually free”—able to ask the reflective question, “How should I live my life?”—a denial that would also help with the avid activity of non-human animals.

Still, even if you set aside kids, cats, and koalas, I don’t think the prospect of mortality does quite as much work in our psychology as Hägglund thinks. As someone in whom the mere inkling of death provokes electric terror, I suspect I’d still get quite a bit done without it. The thought “I could just as well do this later” may be a cause for procrastination; but it’s not entirely paralyzing. I fear Hägglund has spent too much time around academics. Has he come to believe that no-one does anything without a deadline and a constant hum of e-mail reminders? There are other ways to live!

The idea that urgency depends on temporal finitude is in any case mistaken. Even if time is no object, other people are. Hägglund seems to miss this when he puzzles over endless love:

If you and your beloved did not believe that your lives were finite, neither one of you could take your lives to be at stake and there would be no urgency to do anything with your time. You could never care for yourselves, for one another, or for the commitment that you share, since you would have no sense of fragility.

But it’s enough for urgency and fragility in my life that it depends on yours: I can’t take you for granted, or assume that you will want to do things with me whenever I want to do them—or at any time at all. Oddly, Hägglund comes close to saying just this.

Living on does not protect you against the regret of having done something irreversible, the pain of not being able to fulfill a given ambition, or the heartbreak of being left by the one you love.

But then mortality is not a condition of urgency or meaning. At best, the condition is finitude in a form that includes dependency on, or vulnerability to, things outside oneself. There is no way to argue from this weaker premise to the conclusion that immortality is meaningless or that temporal finitude is a condition of value for spiritual beings like us—which is what Hägglund promised.

Why does Hägglund make this promise? Why does it matter to him that what matters to us is conditioned by mortality? Hägglund’s book is a neo-Marxist argument for a form of democratic socialism in which “wealth” is measured by socially available free time—available, that is, for intrinsically valuable activities, not just pursuing means to further ends. From this, he derives the need for collective ownership of the means of production and a truth in the slogan, “From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs.”

Let’s not fuss over the derivation—which is a high-wire act—to focus on its premise: that time is the basic measure of value for creatures like us. What bothers Hägglund is the phrase “like us,” which casts our finitude as a parochial fact about humanity, not—as he contends—a condition of successful reflection on how to live and so of spiritual life. For Hägglund, “neither life nor species-being should primarily be understood in biological or anthropological terms.” Here, his Marxism is heterodox:

The transhistorical conditions of economic life, [Marx] tells us in Capital, are ultimately due to “the ever-lasting Nature-imposed condition of human existence,” which makes us embodied and finite social beings, who have to divide labor among ourselves in order to sustain our lives. Marx thereby makes it seem as though these features of economic life are due to our supposed biological and anthropological nature. Yet the deeper question is what makes life intelligible as an economy of time in the first place.

By contrast, Hägglund’s argument is transcendental:

On this level of analysis, we can establish that all forms of spiritual life must be finite, embodied, and social—not because of imposed biological or anthropological conditions but because life is intelligible as spiritual life only in terms of an economy of time.

For reasons sketched above, I don’t think this argument works. Temporal finitude is not a condition of value, or urgency, even if—which I doubt—urgency is a condition of reflective agency.

But I don’t concede the motive for the argument, either. Why be anthropophobic about the foundations of ethics? Why deny that the facticity of human life—one part of which is our vast but limited malleability—shapes how we should live together?

It’s odd, in the end, that while I’m terrified of death and thus recoil from the human condition, wishing it otherwise, I feel no urge to deny it. Meanwhile, philosophers like Hägglund recoil from immortality, embracing our finitude—but only on condition that it’s not, after all, a regrettable fact of human nature but a cryptic source of value, without which nothing would matter at all. Hägglund’s affirmation of mortality feels to me, paradoxically, like flight.

BONUS CONTENT: Jason Isbell on urgency, immortality, and inevitable loss.