1. Clarifying Immortality

Many philosophical curmudgeons about immortality focus on the problems of a life that cannot end, rather than on the drawbacks of a life that need not end (cf. Fischer Reference Fischer, Bradley, Feldman and Johansson2013: 337). I find it a bit odd that there is so much interest in discussing a godlike immortality in which destruction is impossible,Footnote ² when most of the plausible scenarios that make this line of inquiry more than just idle speculation offer more down-to-earth possibilities of medical or other technological advances that render human finitude merely unnecessary. Maybe a life that cannot end would cease to be meaningful, but the more pressing and interesting issue, in my opinion anyway, is whether we could continue to find value in an indefinitely extended, yet still potentially finite, life. On this issue immortality enthusiasts seem to face less opposition.

Despite his focus on criticizing godlike immortality, Scheffler, for example, briefly mentions the indefinite extension scenario in a footnote and acknowledges that it complicates the conclusions he comes to about the important role of temporal finitude in the creation of human values.Footnote ³ The specifics of these conclusions and how he arrives at them will, of course, need to be discussed in greater detail below, but what Scheffler recognizes in his digression is that this scenario is compatible with the sorts of temporal finitude arguments he relies upon. In his words, cases of mere indefinite life extension ‘raise the question of whether what we really need is actually to die or only to be subject to the possibility of death’ (Scheffler Reference Scheffler and Kolodny2013: 95). I am not so sure that raising this question means that Scheffler would ultimately embrace indefinite life extension, but if immortality curmudgeons are willing to concede that this more flexible sense of immortality might not be so problematic—because it allows for the sorts of limitations and risks they see as making possible the significance of ordinary finite life—then much of my disagreement with their position will evaporate. For my part, I am more amenable to the idea that only some highly unlikely types of immortality would be truly undesirable or meaningless.

There are two reasons, however, that the present discussion cannot be curtailed by this hypothetical compromise. The first reason is that some opponents of immortality continue to have reservations about really long lives that would or could still end at some point. For instance, Williams, who does not explicitly distinguish between types of immortality (cf. Rosati Reference Rosati, Bradley, Feldman and Johansson2013: 359), suggests that after just a few hundred years a person of consistent character would cease to find life worth living (I address the boredom issue generally and Williams's argument specifically in greater detail elsewhere [Buben Reference Buben and Cholbi2015]). Even if one is not as concerned about the likelihood of boredom setting in, one might still worry that the longer life gets, the harder it is to relate to given current human limitations and the values we have that depend on these limitations.Footnote ⁴ New norms and values may be formed over the course of million year lives, but they might no longer be recognizably human—they might no longer be what has traditionally made our lives meaningful. My immediate response to this worry is that given the choice, I would rather take my chances with the possibility of finding new norms and values than begrudgingly embrace death in the next few decades so that I can retain my old ones; if this opens up the chance of becoming somehow inhuman or just ending up disenchanted, then so be it. Upon further reflection, though, I wonder if I perhaps lack the proper perspective for such a bold claim, and perhaps I can offer a more nuanced response.

At what point in the extension of a life would our sense of meaningfulness begin to crumble? The fictional character EM that Williams considers is sick of life after more than 300 years, and despite strong curmudgeonly sympathy, Seana Valentine Shiffrin (Reference Shiffrin and Scheffler2013: 146) acknowledges that she would happily take an extra hundred years. What about 1,000? 10,000? 100,000? One might shy away from the big numbers because one thinks they are beyond our current abilities to relate to, but the point is that the moment at which life would no longer be recognizably valuable seems somewhat arbitrary or dependent upon individual constitution and preferences (and future developments). Personally, I am unconvinced that my most cherished values would necessarily fade after any amount of time. A major component of attributing meaning to my life, which seems unlikely to be lost in the indefinite extension scenario, is the taking on of projects. While I would imagine that my projects might change dramatically over a million years, especially in the sense that their scope would become grander, I do not see why having projects in general would lose its appeal, and if I am right, this would make my indefinitely long life importantly comparable to my finite one. I will return to some of these ideas later in the paper.

The second (and, as it turns out, probably more important) reason why I cannot abandon my criticism of those who base their immortality pessimism on the perceived necessity of temporal limitations, even if they share some of my hope for indefinite life extension, is that I am not so sure I ultimately agree that a godlike immortality would be meaningless. Although a life that must go on and on would be, in a notable respect, qualitatively different from both a finite life and an indefinite one, I wonder if these lives would be all that different in the ways that really matter. It is also worth noting that if necessarily infinite life could be meaningful, then most lingering doubts about a merely indefinite life would be assuaged. Setting aside what I take to be the more reasonable sense of immortality then, it will be necessary in what follows to consider what sorts of death-related limitations thinkers like Scheffler find indispensible for a meaningful existence and how a godlike immortality that cannot end seems to dispense with them to the peril of such existence. That is, it will be necessary to focus on the ‘higher bar’ of godlike immortality and examine what elements of meaningful existence it seems to lack.

2. The Curmudgeons

There are a number of reasons why philosophers of death have argued that the meaning of human lives depends on those very lives being snuffed out. However, it should not be necessary to rehearse them all here since other thinkers have already provided helpful catalogues (e.g. Fischer Reference Fischer, Bradley, Feldman and Johansson2013), and I consider a few of the noteworthy cases in other recent work (Buben Reference Buben and Cholbi2015). Nonetheless, there are three main arguments that are especially relevant to the present discussion of Heidegger and the significance of temporal limitations. For the sake of convenience, I will call them ‘the stages argument’, ‘the risk argument’, and ‘the urgency argument’.

The stages argument claims that human values are dependent upon and organized by the stage of life in which one finds oneself. As Scheffler (Reference Scheffler and Kolodny2013: 96) puts it, ‘Our collective understanding of the range of goals, activities, and pursuits that are available to a person, the challenges he faces, and the satisfactions that he may reasonably hope for are all indexed to these stages’. Of course, the specific stages might vary from place to place or era to era, but as Scheffler emphasizes, they always begin with birth and end with death. While particular activities and goals derive their meaning from the stage they belong to, the particular stage one is in makes sense largely in reference to a complete normal series of stages that ultimately comes to a conclusion. The problem that Scheffler sees in an infinite life is that there can be no notion of a complete series. It is certainly possible that an infinite life might still have stages of some sort, but without such completeness, the significance of these stages, and the values they generate, would be essentially different from what ordinary finite human lives are founded upon (Scheffler Reference Scheffler and Kolodny2013: 203).

A related idea suggests that the meaning of a human life is essentially narrative in structure. According to this view, given that stories generally require endings in order to make sense (although there may be different ways of telling stories), a human life would not be properly meaningful if it just dragged on forever without arriving at a point (cf. May Reference May2009: 68, 72). Endings shed light after the fact on the plans and activities that came before. In explaining the narrativity thesis, Connie S. Rosati (Reference Rosati, Bradley, Feldman and Johansson2013: 376) claims that ‘Whether a person successfully completes a project or fails. . . affects the welfare value of her life by determining whether her earlier efforts were vindicated or wasted’. Furthermore, the kind of ending that death provides seems to fix or permanently define the value of a life, insofar as no sequel is possible and nothing more can be added: ‘If a life is to be good for the person living it, it must play out and conclude a successful narrative arc, thereby resolving in a satisfying way what to think and feel about that life, considered as a whole’ (Rosati Reference Rosati, Bradley, Feldman and Johansson2013: 376; cf. Fischer Reference Fischer, Bradley, Feldman and Johansson2013: 347). In a life that has no possible conclusion, it seems that the meaning of our decisions and actions would always remain somewhat indeterminate.Footnote ⁵

The risk argument holds that human lives derive much of their meaning from the constant danger of premature death. Although we know that death will eventually come for us, we spend our lives weighing risks and taking chances (or not) in the shadow of its ever-present possibility (cf. May Reference May2009: 50). For example, I might go out with friends in the middle of winter even though the roads are icy, or I might not take a trip to Egypt due to concerns about civil unrest. Scheffler (Reference Scheffler and Kolodny2013: 97) claims that ‘in a life without death, the meaning of’ several fundamental concepts ‘would be called into question’; he mentions ‘health, gain, safety, security, and benefit’, as well as their opposites. Martha Nussbaum (Reference Nussbaum1994: 227–28) says much the same thing about more abstract ideals such as courage, moderation, and justice. Absent ordinary worries about health and safety, to stick with the simpler concepts, the idea is that decisions to go out in icy conditions or travel to unstable destinations just do not matter as much. This may be true, but as in the case of life stages, Scheffler and company acknowledge that some kinds of risk might still persist even in an infinite existence—for example, there might be the risk of losing someone's affections, being imprisoned, or catching a non-life-threatening illness.Footnote ⁶ Nonetheless, given that our current understanding of these risks and the values associated with them have been formed against the backdrop of finite life, both Nussbaum (Reference Nussbaum1994: 229) and Scheffler (Reference Scheffler and Kolodny2013: 204) claim that it is perhaps a mistake to suppose that infinite beings would have similar notions.

The urgency argument relies upon the idea that value and scarcity go hand in hand—it says that human values can exist only if there are limited opportunities for our pursuits. ‘Every human decision is made’, according to Scheffler (Reference Scheffler and Kolodny2013: 99), ‘against the background of the limits imposed by the ultimate scarce resource, time’; ‘our assignments of value are a response to the limits of time’. In a life that cannot end, in which time is no longer scarce, there would be less need to prioritize certain activities over others or to rule out any altogether. There is nothing that one could not eventually get around to under such circumstances, and so it seems that nothing one might do would matter as much. Todd May (Reference May2009: 63; cf. Nussbaum Reference Nussbaum1994: 229; Smuts Reference Smuts2011: 140–41) explains that ‘The urgency we associate with our engagements, and urgency that stems from the fact that sooner or later we will have lost the time to complete or at least to participate in them, goes missing in immortality’. Now someone might point out that having unlimited time is not the same thing as being absolutely free from all chronological constraints; after all, certain activities have temporal deadlines built right into them. Kolodny (Reference Kolodny and Scheffler2013: 168) mentions the example of proposing marriage to the object of one's affections before his or her other suitors can do so. While Scheffler (Reference Scheffler and Kolodny2013: 99, 206) grants that this sort of example might add a bit of temporal scarcity, and therefore urgency and value, to an infinite life, he is unconvinced that this much weaker and merely situational limitation would lead to the kinds of values that humans have developed in the face of the more profound and all-encompassing scarcity caused by death.

Having presented several of the major cases for thinking that a godlike immortality would undermine the specific values and general sense of meaning that exist in ordinary finite human life, we are now in a position to consider some rebuttals. In fact, the beginnings of some possible responses by immortality enthusiasts have already been suggested (and subsequently, but perhaps prematurely, rejected by the curmudgeons) along the way. The problem I mentioned at the outset, however, is that some of the resources available for generating thoughtful responses have been ignored or at least misunderstood. There is no end of literary references in contemporary philosophical discourse on the desirability of immortality; science fiction and fantasy genres, in particular, are rich sources for different (and mostly disappointing) versions of immortality (cf. Fischer and Curl Reference Fischer, Curl, Slusser, Westfahl and Rabkin1996). However, many notable and very relevant continental thinkers fail to attract much attention (on either side of the debate) when this topic comes up. As will become clear, making the effort to understand Heidegger will show immortality enthusiasts that they might find a hint of support where at first glance they saw only more opposition.

3. Heidegger's View of Death

In support of Williams's curmudgeonly position, A. W. Moore (Reference Moore2006: 327) says that ‘for Heidegger. . . a life in which life itself was not always at issue, that is to say a life in which death was not always a possibility, would be a standing invitation for meaninglessness to reassert itself’. Timothy Chappell (Reference Chappell2007: 35; cf. Fischer Reference Fischer, Bradley, Feldman and Johansson2013: 340), a noted defender of immortality, adds: ‘Some people—perhaps the Heidegger of Being and Time is one—will respond that a life without death at the end of it would be meaningless because it would be shapeless’. Passing comments like these, from proponents and critics of immortality alike, are really all that has been said about Heidegger in the course of this debate. My hope for this paper is twofold: while I ultimately want to undermine the arguments of the immortality curmudgeons that have been presented so far, I also want to correct this somewhat problematic reading of Heidegger so that I might enlist him in my subversive efforts (the overview below of the discussion of death in Being and Time is necessarily only a summary; I offer a more thorough exegesis elsewhere [Buben Reference Buben2016: ch. 5]). It seems to be quite common to see him as arguing that death provides the limit or boundary necessary to give life shape and meaning, but I believe that the reverse is true of his notion of death as ‘a way to be’ (Heidegger Reference Heidegger, Macquarrie and Robinson1962: 289)—it is meant to demonstrate a kind of indefiniteness and thereby liberate individuals, rather than constrict and define them. A life surely has its limitations, but according to Heidegger, these come primarily from other aspects of existence—aspects that would not necessarily be threatened by immortality.

Heidegger's main goal in Being and Time is to provide a phenomenological account of what exactly a human is without importing the assumptions or narrow scope of inquiry that the various sciences take for granted. Thus, rather than considering the biological characteristics of a species or the theological implications of God's creation, for example, Heidegger is interested in the much broader project of describing the way existence generally shows up for beings like us—especially our own existence. Even the word ‘human’ is too loaded with biological and anthropological baggage for Heidegger's purely phenomenological project, so he adopts the term ‘Dasein’, which stands for the sort of ‘entity which understands what it is to be’ (Guignon Reference Guignon1983: 68); it is the entity that is capable of having a meaningful existence (Heidegger Reference Heidegger, Macquarrie and Robinson1962: 193). Embarking on his quest, then, to provide a thorough characterization of Dasein, problems arise once it appears that ‘there is in every case something still outstanding’ about it (Heidegger Reference Heidegger, Macquarrie and Robinson1962: 276). As Dasein shows up to itself (or, in more common terms, as I experience my life), there is never a conclusion, and so it seems that the task of providing a thorough account of Dasein cannot be completed. Following Epicurus (Reference Inwood and Gerson1994: section 125), who famously points out that ‘when we exist, death is not yet present, and when death is present, then we do not exist’, Heidegger adopts the view that death, at least in the ordinary sense of the cessation of life, is not a part of existence (cf. Watts Reference Watts2011: 103); ‘Dasein’ literally means ‘being-there’, while death actually means not being there.Footnote ⁷

Heidegger avoids the apparent difficulty above by pursuing a complete structural account of the way Dasein is ‘in-the-world’, rather than a description of what transpires between the literal birth and death of this entity. The latter type of inquiry would seem to have the shape of a biology, physiology, anthropology, or some other science that deals with a specific sense of human development, and this is precisely what Heidegger (Reference Heidegger, Macquarrie and Robinson1962: 291–92) says he is not interested in seeking. Instead, he spends much of Being and Time making a case that Dasein can be understood in its entirety as ‘ahead-of-itself-Being-already-in-(the-world) as Being-alongside (entities encountered within-the-world)’ (Heidegger Reference Heidegger, Macquarrie and Robinson1962: 237). This is what he calls Dasein's ‘care structure’, and he says that ‘the authentic potentiality-for-Being-a-whole becomes visible as a mode of care. . . . In terms of temporality, the articulated structural totality of Dasein's Being as care first becomes existentially intelligible’ (Heidegger Reference Heidegger, Macquarrie and Robinson1962: 277). Dasein is a moving into and relating to its rather indefinite future from its current set of involvements, which has arisen from a fairly defined background or past. It is the moving forward, or ‘ahead-of-itself’, characteristic of Dasein that Heidegger somewhat misleadingly discusses in terms of ‘Being-towards-death’.Footnote ⁸ I say ‘misleadingly’ because this expression might give the impression that Heidegger is especially concerned with Dasein's end point, when his emphasis is in fact on the ‘Being-towards’. Although death in the sense of ‘Dasein's own concluding event’ is not part of existence, death in the sense of ‘a way to be towards future possibilities’ very much is. Heidegger (Reference Heidegger, Macquarrie and Robinson1962: 289) states, ‘The “ending” which we have in view when we speak of death, does not signify Dasein's Being-at-an-end [Zu-Ende-sein], but a Being-towards-the-end [Sein zum Ende] of this entity. Death is a way to be, which Dasein takes over as soon as it is’.

This distinction has been one of the most difficult issues for scholars of Heidegger to grasp, judging by the disagreement and confusion in the secondary literature (for a helpful survey of conflicting views of what Heidegger is up to on the topic of death, none of which line up precisely with mine, see Dreyfus [Reference Dreyfus and White2005]). Jean-Paul Sartre is among the first (and perhaps the most notable) in a long line of critics and commentators to struggle with it when he conflates Heidegger's sense of proper Being-towards-death with waiting for biological demise. Against Heidegger, Sartre (Reference Sartre and Barnes1956: 536) argues that ‘Sudden death is undetermined and by definition can not be waited for at any date; it always, in fact, includes the possibility that we shall die in surprise before the awaited date and consequently that our waiting may be, qua waiting, a deception or that we shall survive beyond this date; in the latter case since we were only waiting, we shall outlive ourselves’. Piotr Hoffman (Reference Hoffman1983: 82, 107–108) wonders if Sartre ‘has missed Heidegger's point’ given that Heidegger's more technical use of ‘death’ has nothing to do with an event that can be waited for at an uncertain time, but refers instead to a way of being toward available possibilities, however long one exists. The interesting thing about Sartre's mistaken critique of Heidegger is that the former ends up relying on something like the Epicurean position that Heidegger has already granted. For example, Sartre (Reference Sartre and Barnes1956: 547–48) states,

This passage sounds precisely like something Heidegger would agree to when it comes to the event of physical passing away. What Sartre and numerous others seem blind to is the fact that Heidegger has moved on to another way of talking about death in which it does come to mingle with life.

This is not to say that Heidegger is completely uninterested in talking about the more ordinary sense of death. He actually thinks that reflection upon common everyday issues and the often thoughtless ways we respond to them can provide some indication of the structure or form of Dasein. Frank Schalow (Reference Schalow, Kisiel and van Buren1994: 311) describes Heidegger's method of ‘formal indication’ as looking to everyday ‘factical life as the inroad for developing concepts to bring what is hidden on a pre-philosophical level to an explicit philosophical understanding’. The important thing to notice about this method is that while reflecting on common ideas, such as the one that ‘everyone must die’, can highlight aspects of existence that often go unseen, the common ideas themselves are not the deepest and most essential insights about what we are. As suggested above, it is not having an end point that essentially defines Dasein, but rather its forward projection as long as it exists. Unsurprisingly, it is through thinking about the often uncritical and disowned everyday attitudes toward death that Heidegger is able to get a handle on the nature and significance of this projection.

For example, he draws attention to the everyday failure to acknowledge that physical demise can come at any moment and that it often disrupts the projects and relationships that one cares so much about (Heidegger Reference Heidegger, Macquarrie and Robinson1962: 302). Just to be clear, it is not the fact that we can expire that makes it true that our specific engagements can be dissolved at any moment. This is always true; I can always sever ties and abandon projects. Heidegger simply finds reflection on the cessation of life helpful (perhaps as a sort of reminder) for bringing this truth into the light. Some might wonder about the point of harping on about something so obvious, but as Heidegger's observations of everydayness suggest, we do not always pay attention to the obvious. Instead, we tend to get wrapped up in our day-to-day affairs, rarely giving even a moment's thought to our impending doom. When death does occasionally force itself onto our radar, we do our best to remove the bogey as quickly as possible and get back to life as usual. Thinking through this ordinary situation leads Heidegger to the conclusion that it is not any specific projects or relationships that allow Dasein to find itself meaningful, but rather its capacity for engaging in them. Despite various pressures (especially social and cultural) to see certain items, associations, and activities as necessary for living a good and meaningful life, the fact that one's engagements can be dissolved at any moment is an indication that they are perhaps not so compulsory after all. For Dasein, it seems the only thing necessary is that it ‘at the most basic level is a reaching forward into possibilities’ (Guignon Reference Guignon, Stokes and Buben2011: 197), and realizing this has a liberating effect.

Consider the following, admittedly very obscure, passage:

What Heidegger is getting at here is that Dasein, as Being-towards-death, has a sort of freedom in the sense that it is somewhat indeterminate when it comes to its specific engagements in the world. Hubert L. Dreyfus (Reference Dreyfus1991: 312; cf. Heidegger Reference Heidegger, Macquarrie and Robinson1962: 308, 311) agrees that Heidegger's point is ‘that Dasein can have neither a nature nor an identity, that it is the constant impossibility of being anything specific’. Obviously, we define ourselves, intentionally or not, through all kinds of activities and relationships, but the idea is that no particular involvement or approach to life can ever be definitive for Dasein in the same essential manner as its pure possibility. The benefit of understanding itself in this way is that it allows Dasein to take ownership of itself and the choices it makes in the face of the aforementioned pressures to conform and ‘do what one does’.Footnote ⁹ Realizing that you are not essentially determined to be anything specific means accepting that you are free from necessary determination by thoughtless everyday norms and expectations, even if you end up doing the things that these norms and expectations would have dictated (Heidegger [Reference Heidegger, Macquarrie and Robinson1962: 311] puts this sense of freedom in terms of having ‘been released from the Illusions of the “they”’). In accepting this freedom, however, Dasein simultaneously loses the comfort and ease of carelessly going along with the ready-made decisions it previously depended upon. The price of taking on responsibility for attributing meaning to oneself is an anxious awareness of one's independence (Heidegger Reference Heidegger, Macquarrie and Robinson1962: 310–11).Footnote ¹⁰

Although Heidegger believes that a bit of anxiety is an important aspect of Dasein (especially conscientious Dasein), he is careful not to overstate this independence or suggest that Dasein's freedom makes absolutely anything available. Dasein may well be a somewhat open-ended pursuing of possibilities, but it does not determine which possibilities are available to pursue; it has been thrown into circumstances that leave some options open and others closed. Heidegger (Reference Heidegger, Macquarrie and Robinson1962: 321) states, ‘Every Dasein always exists factically. It is not a free-floating self-projection; but its character is determined by thrownness as a Fact of the entity which it is’. At any given moment, we have already been delimited by where and when we exist, our various capabilities, and our ever-growing and changing assortment of previous decisions and experiences, just to mention a few key examples. As Dreyfus (Reference Dreyfus1991: 308) sees things, Dasein is especially in debt ‘to the culture for an understanding of itself’. Within a horizon of predetermined possibilities, Dasein is responsible for making something of itself that it can find valuable. In the structural terms introduced above, Dasein is ‘Being-already-in’ as much as it is ‘ahead-of-itself’ and ‘Being-alongside’.

To summarize, Heidegger's understanding of the limitations that help to give shape and meaning to existence does not include necessary chronological finitude. In fact, apart from the foundational boundary setting he describes, we experience existence as a rather open-ended projection into the future. Thus, it seems that Heidegger need not see immortality as a threat to meaningfulness. In the one place where he brings up the possibility that ‘Dasein “lives on” or even “outlasts” itself and is “immortal”’, he actually does not have much to say for or against (Heidegger Reference Heidegger, Macquarrie and Robinson1962: 292);Footnote ¹¹ he just does not find it especially relevant to his discussion of Being-towards-death. I do not want to make too much of this point given that Heidegger seems to be entertaining a more religious or ‘otherworldly’ sense of immortality (transhumanist techno-optimism was even more marginal in his day than it is in our own), but he has a clear opportunity, at this point in the text, to call attention to the axiological perils of immortality of any kind by making common chronological finitude part of his account of the structure of Dasein, and he does not do it (cf. Call Reference Call2013: 127–28; Watts Reference Watts2011: 103–104). If Heidegger does not express concern that an afterlife—which at least in most Christian accounts has a sense of continuity with what came before—would jeopardize the possibility of meaning for the recently deceased, then it is not obvious to me that he would be concerned about the prospect of such continuity in the here and now. Just to be clear, I am not suggesting that Heidegger would be an advocate for immortality of any sort (and again, he does not seem to feel that what might be ‘after death’ is a pressing issue in Being and Time), but I do not see any reason to think that his views on death and meaning commit him to opposing immortality. Thus, it is not out of the question that he might offer helpful resources to those hopeful that immortality could be meaningful. Because he never introduces a mandatory ending for Dasein, Heidegger's account could apply to mortal and immortal Dasein alike. However long Dasein exists, it will always be engaged in the process of making meaning described in this section. On this view, mortal and immortal existence could be relevantly similar, and this is precisely what Scheffler and his sort of immortality curmudgeon doubt.

4. Immortality and Inhumanity

In response to Heidegger's account of Dasein, perhaps some naysayers would cling to the fact that Heidegger is just not speaking about what humans actually find meaningful in their own lives. Heidegger's very broad view of what we are appears to allow for specific notions of significance and value that might be too far removed from our own current notions to find worthwhile. Maybe so, but this is a fairly contingent and superficial point. Specific interests, values, and projects are always malleable; I imagine that early humans, and maybe some of our other ancestors in the genus Homo, had interests, values, and projects that would be difficult for contemporary humans to relate to. I also find it somewhat difficult to relate to the interests, values, and projects that I had early in my own finite life. Nonetheless, what I have in common with both my ancestors and my younger self, what is most characteristic and interesting about us (what makes us all Dasein), is our capacity to take an interest in our own existence. Given this shared essential ability to find ourselves meaningful, despite the variety of specific ways we might go about it, I have difficulty understanding why thinkers like Scheffler (Reference Scheffler and Kolodny2013: 207) worry so much about the way humans happen to see things at any particular moment: ‘If we never died, then we would not live lives structured by the kinds of values that now structure our own lives or by the kinds of values that have structured the lives of other human beings now and in the past’. There is no doubt some truth in this statement; things would be different without death. However, few (perhaps, for instance, Williams) would deny that, in both our own particular histories and the general history of beings like us, there is evidence of a capacity to develop and adapt to new values without losing all connection to what came before (cf. Chappell Reference Chappell2007: 34–35; Smuts Reference Smuts2011: 138). On the personal level, consider the example of religious conversion in which one takes on values that might conflict dramatically with those previously held while still retaining something of one's former identity (even if metaphors of rebirth suggest otherwise).

What Heidegger shows us is that our sense of meaning comes not from any particular point of view or set of specific circumstances (including human fragility and deterioration), but from the basic constitution of our encounter with existing. Even though each Dasein has a certain starting point, its thrownness is constantly shifting and expanding as long as it is, and it is this malleability that contributes to the possibility of taking on new values and projects in the future, including those that an earlier version of oneself might have had a hard time imagining. It may be the case that no human being has ever had the perspective of an immortal, but this fact does not preclude the possibility that an immortal could find his or her existence deeply meaningful in a way that is not relevantly dissimilar from the way ordinary human beings find meaning in their mortal lives. Scheffler's claim that the absence of chronological finitude would necessitate too great a leap in this regard is at best unfounded speculation.

Returning to the various curmudgeonly arguments considered earlier, we have already seen that some comparable conceptions of stages, risk, and urgency, which were all deemed necessary for generating a sense of significance and value, might still persist in an immortal existence. Of course, Scheffler is quick to point out that ‘comparable’ is not ‘the same’ as the conceptions mortal human beings currently have, but if we, equipped with a Heideggerian sensibility, can be more flexible than Scheffler in accepting the many ways stages, risk, and urgency manifest themselves, then immortality really does not appear so threatening to many of our current ideas of value and significance. Incidentally, it is not always clear whether Scheffler (see, e.g., 2013: 203–205) imagines immortal beings with a birthday or has in mind instead perpetual beings that have no origin. Either way, he believes that these beings are unlikely to have values like ours. If he is speaking about beings with an origin, this fact (i.e., having an origin) alone might be sufficient to generate and maintain at least some values like ours. If he is speaking about beings without an origin, Scheffler might have a point, but this just is not a problem I (and I assume anyone reading this) could personally ever have to worry about.

In the cases of risk and urgency, our notions of value obviously depend upon our having limitations. Heidegger's position is that our most important and relevant limitations (e.g., our spatiotemporal location, our various personal capabilities, and our previous choices) have little to do with our current mortal situation, and it would appear that many of our experiences of risk and urgency line up with this idea.Footnote ¹² Although I am a philosopher of death who gives his own impending doom considerable attention, it is rarely the case that my decision-making process involves concerns about how my actions might lead to my premature demise. In fact, most of the value-generating risk I encounter has to do with things such as the repercussions of landing a new job, my comfort level when teaching unfamiliar material, and what I might be missing when I have to rule out certain activities in order to engage in others. That is, the risk is inherent in the situation I am thrown into and the activities it allows me to choose from. In the same vein, most of the value-generating urgency I experience has to do with my ability to meet the responsibilities I have taken on. That is, I usually worry about things like whether or not I will be able to write a good paper by the submission deadline, but my bucket list comes up only occasionally. Even in a thoughtful and self-aware existence, as Heidegger might see it, for the most part one does not so much fear death as feel anxious in the face of one's limited, but still significant, capacity for choice and action.

Now some might argue that the threat to risk and urgency posed by immortality is more profound than I have acknowledged thus far. Aaron Smuts (Reference Smuts2011: 140), for example, claims that even if certain activities have their own sense of risk and urgency built in given ‘the forward march of time’, the prospect of infinite duration would practically guarantee that anything one might want to do or experience would eventually come around again. If so, then failure to succeed or to complete a task on time would cease to matter much (Smuts Reference Smuts2011: 143). Smuts supports this claim by pointing out that the sorts of limitations Heidegger attributes to Dasein seem to make one's set of realistic goals, hopes, and projects finite. In his words, ‘If we could grow no smarter, no more powerful, then we would run out of projects that we would be capable of completing’ (Smuts Reference Smuts2011: 144), and end up in a state of perpetual boredom or frustration. Even if we could expand our capacities and be meaningfully occupied for billions of years, given unlimited time and any limitations at all on our capabilities, we would eventually run out of ways to see our lives as unique and valuable.

There are a few things to say in response to this line of argument. First, while it might be true that beings like us are essentially limited, Smuts has not established that the world in which we live holds only finite worthwhile possibilities for beings like us (and depending on one's views about the boundaries of this universe or the possibility of unlimited other universes, there might be reason to believe that this understanding of our world is false). He seems to believe this to be true, even dismissing the notion that he might simply be ‘suffering from a dearth of imagination’ (Smuts Reference Smuts2011: 144), but without a proper demonstration, it remains unclear why one should deny that there are infinite possibilities to occupy infinite time. I also think that Smuts (Reference Smuts2011: 135–36) is too quick to dismiss Fischer's (see, e.g., Reference Fischer2009: 84–86) notion of ‘repeatable pleasures’. After all, I have already experienced a variety of pleasures that continue to drive me forward, and it is not at all obvious to me that I would enjoy them only for some limited number of times—maybe I will get irreparably sick of ice cream cones, sexual encounters, and reading my favorite books if granted infinite time (even if I am careful to space these experiences out), but the opposite seems just as likely. Nor is it immediately clear that a life consisting of such pleasurable experiences is somehow beneath my human dignity. But perhaps the primary reason why I am unconvinced by the argument that infinite time with only finite capabilities would necessarily spell disaster is that certain existing human projects and activities might be perpetually interesting, despite our basic limitations. I agree with Heidegger that the process of self-cultivation and ownership is not something to be finished with or actualized; it is a project that lasts however long you do. The possibility of continual progress along these lines is one issue to consider here, but there is also the constant need to adjust to shifting external circumstances and the ever-present danger of regressing to worry about. (On a similar indefinite self-tinkering in Kierkegaard, see Buben [Reference Buben and Cholbi2015: 212–14].)

And speaking of never being finished, it will be helpful to say a little more about the alleged significance of the normal stages of a complete human life and the idea of meaningful life as a concluded story. Heidegger points out that we never really experience such completeness or culmination, and he seems to suggest that it would be misguided to try to base the meaning of one's existence even partially on something that is not really part of one's existence.Footnote ¹³ Of course, we can always imagine the way life might conclude whether we are mortal or not, but an actual conclusion to a life story often only means something to others who survive; this may not be entirely true for someone with a very specific diagnosis (or sentence) and short timeline, who has the chance (and lucidity) to ponder his or her imminent death, but it seems unlikely that most people experience some sort of meaningful culmination. If a conclusion in the ordinary sense of death is not really part of a potentially meaningful mortal existence, it should not matter if it would not be part of an immortal existence. Freed from the sort of dubious completeness stipulation that Scheffler and some narrativists make, we can then embrace a variety of meaningful stages (or chapters), familiar or otherwise, without needing to die. Scheffler himself admits that the specific stages of finite life are already somewhat contingent and variable, so I can see no reason to think that finite life and infinite life are essentially different in this respect. Surely, they would diverge in relatively superficial ways, but they could both still be understood in terms of orienting stages. With a renewed confidence in the value-generating capabilities of mostly ordinary notions of stages, risk, and urgency, and an optimistic attitude about the prospects of a relevantly similar life laden with particular values we may have yet to consider, I remain largely undaunted by the concerns of the immortality curmudgeons.

The contemporary discussion of the desirability of immortality largely revolves around a dispute about how integral the sort of chronological finitude promised by death is to meaningful existence. While Scheffler, for example, believes it to be quite essential, many others do not. The interesting thing about Heidegger's account is that he does not have a horse in the race. He is obviously unaware of the debate about immortality over the last few decades, but after considering some key issues that happen to be involved in it, he simply does not find them all that relevant to his consideration of the possibility of meaningful existence. What we get from Heidegger, then, is an unbiased take on the role of death in life that does not explicitly conclude in favor of either the curmudgeons or the enthusiasts, but which also does not rule out hope for the sort of meaningful immortality that the enthusiasts champion. In other words, Heidegger provides a kind of independent corroboration of the idea that immortality need not be meaningless.