Everyone one of us will one day die, and even without us, the world will still go on. Samuel Scheffler in his greatly original book “Death and Afterlife” tackles the various ways the values in our lives are obliviously but powerfully affected by these facts, as well as the motives that define them. The afterlife he discusses is not the personal afterlife in which an individual continues to exist in some form after dying. According to Scheffler, a personal afterlife does not exist, and he poses a question regarding how we should perceive our individual mortality, in case our existence ends at death. However, Scheffler mainly discusses the collective afterlife, which refers to the continued existence and survival of humanity even after our own individual deaths.
The collective afterlife refers to the continued existence of people already existing at the time of our death, and the renewal of humanity by birth of new people even a long after we have died (Scheffler 67). According to him, the collective afterlife is greatly essential to us –in some cases more vital than our individual existence– but that importance is often oblivious since most are the times we take it for granted. According to Scheffler we would not value life the same way we do if we were to know that there would be no “collective afterlife.” Considering that we would need to die for life to have meaning, yet dying would take away our existence which is very important to us also, it would be both reasonable and unreasonable at the same time for us to fear our own deaths.
Scheffler argues that the collective afterlife plays a major role in determining the values in our lives. He acknowledges that we would not be satisfied to look at collective afterlife as compensation or a substitute for our individual immortality (“Webcache,” n.p.). He however asserts that we cannot ignore how the collective afterlife adds meaning to our current mortal lives. Scheffler even gives an example that living in one’s apartment forever would not constitute the life that one would want hence appreciating the shape and definition of life as we know it – that it has an end point. This may support why it would be unreasonable for us to fear our own deaths since living forever may not seem to be a suitable option if we are to find meaning in life as we do.
According to the doomsday scenario, a person should imagine that they died of natural causes after living a normal lifespan, and thirty days after their death, the earth is to be destroyed completely after colliding with a huge asteroid. The infertility scenario makes us imagine that humanity has been stricken by infertility such that all people who are alive had natural deaths and the earth had no more people. In the doomsday scenario, the people one leaves behind after death would have their lives ended suddenly by a great disaster. In the infertility scenario, the population would reduce so much that only a small number of old people –who cannot maintain civilization– with counted days would be left. Scheffler suggests that if we examine both cases closely, we would discover that the lives of those presently in existence would be negatively affected, were they to ponder on the prospects of future absence of the human race. This shows that future generations have great importance on our present lives. In his conclusion, this reasserts that the existence of people in the future matters more to us than the fact that the people we know and possibly love, including ourselves, will stop existing. This shows how much we care about future generations whose existence will come after we die. Considering the collective afterlife, we could be unreasonable to fear our own death considering that our lives must have an end for other generations to come and continues human existence.
The concepts of fear, death, as well as confidence shift our attention towards the attitudes we possess with regard to our own individual mortality, away from the attitudes we have towards the future of humanity. Scheffler finds that the attitudes we have towards our own deaths to be paradoxical. He explains that there is a need for us to die if we are to live; meaning that for life to be meaningful, it must have an end. With regard to this, it would therefore be unreasonable for us to fear death.
It is not a very new claim that being immortal would deny meaning to our lives. Death is actually rescues us from the hands of fate as long as it comes soon enough. Scheffler makes a fundamental point that a life without death would not even in its earlier days be meaningful, or even be a life for that matter. The reason for this is that we conceive life as just a progression through the stages of childhood, adolescence, and old age, which are finite in nature (Scheffler, 96). There are many values we hold on to that show that life would lose meaning if we became immortal, elucidating more on how the concept of death defines the things we value in life. Many of these values mainly involve us trying to protect ourselves from disvalues like harm, danger and even disease, which are themselves affiliated with the possibility of death (Scheffler, 96-97).
Wanting to never die would be confused in case Scheffler is right (Scheffler, 68). If we lived forever, life would be both impossible and a disaster, since never dying would actually deprive us of a life. Despite the knowledge of this fact, our fear of death does not reduce in any way. In fact Scheffler himself also does not point to any precise reason that it should. He recognizes that even though it would be important for us to die for life to have meaning, the roots of our fear of death may be stronger than what most philosophy would acknowledge. It would be reasonable for me as an individual to fear my own death because it would deny me certain goods in the future like seeing my children or grandchildren growing up. Another major reason that may make it reasonable for me to fear my own deaths is because of what my death would mean: the end of existence of the actual subject of the fear in question.
In conclusion, life as we know it must have an end to have meaning Scheffler explains. It is also very important to us that the earth has future people to continue the existence and survival of humanity. This triggers us to think of the attitudes we hold about those who will survive after our deaths, making us realize that their existence may matter even more than our own. These arguments may make it possible for us to view it as unreasonable for us to fear our own deaths. Conversely, our own deaths may deprive us of various important future goods, and terminate our personal existence making it highly reasonable for us to fear our own death. Therefore basing our conclusion on the Scheffler’s arguments, it would be both reasonable and unreasonable for us to fear our own death.
Works cited
Scheffler, Samuel, and Niko Kolodny. Death And The Afterlife. 2013. Print.
Webcache.googleusercontent.com.,‘03. Introduction'. N.p., 2014. Web. 13 Dec. 2014. (Link: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:Hu3bwGVjZPgJ:sophos.berkeley.edu/kolodny/03.%2520Introduction.pdf+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk)
