Who Wants to Live Forever? | Issue 174 | Philosophy Now

…Martin Heidegger argued in Being and Time (1927) that human beings are not simply creatures who happen to die. Rather, we are creatures for whom the awareness of death is constitutive of who we are. He called this condition ‘being-toward-death’. On Heidegger’s reckoning, the recognition that our existence is finite is not merely background noise, but the very condition that makes our choices matter. To commit to a career, a relationship, or a cause, is to accept a path that only makes sense against the approach of an ending. Consider what we most genuinely admire in peoples’ lives: the parent who sacrifices their own ambitions for their children; the artist who spends a lifetime perfecting a craft they know they will never fully master; the activist who works hard for a cause they will not live to see completed. None of this carries the same moral weight for a being with unlimited time available. An immortal can always afford to wait, to hedge his bets and keep his options open, and in doing so may find that his choices gradually lose the very weight that makes them categorical.

The transhumanists promise us more time. Heidegger suggests that it is precisely the limit on our time that makes it worth anything.

Endless Conclusions

Perhaps the most honest thing that can be said about the desire to live forever is that it’s a displacement – a confusion of one desire for another. When most of us say we want immortality, what we actually mean is that we want more time for what matters to us. More time with the people we love, more time to pursue what gives life meaning, more time to see how things turn out. That is not a desire for endless duration, it’s a desire for more depth.

Williams is right that an immortal life risks losing precisely the depth and quality that makes life worth living. Heidegger adds a sharper point still: it is not merely that immortality might produce boredom, but that a life without death is structured differently from ours in ways that may make urgency, commitment, and genuine love increasingly difficult to sustain. When every choice is revisable and no horizon is final, choices lose the weight that makes them meaningful.

The transhumanists may yet prove Williams wrong about boredom. But whether a technologically extended life would still be a genuinely human life, or in engineering away our limitations we also engineer away something essential to humanity, remains an open yet urgent question.

The ethicist Michael Sandel reminds us that there is a form of wisdom in receiving life as it’s given rather than endlessly remaking it on our own terms. I cannot help but wonder whether that’s an ominous warning to those who would seek to augment human beings exponentially. Such a project risks two things. First, to borrow some words from Jurassic Park, “Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn't stop to think if they should.” Second, as mentioned, at what point would a sufficiently augmented human being cease to be human in any sense we would recognise?

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https://philosophynow.org/issues/174/Who_Wants_to_Live_Forever

What Does It All Mean? Once a Year, French Students Try to Explain.

The French were grappling with two questions this week.

Not whether President Trump would hurl insults and leave the Group of 7 early or who the least-known player in the World Cup is.

Instead, they were asking: Can one be happy when others are not? And, Do we have control of our words?

The questions were part of this year’s written test in philosophy, taken at the exact same time each year around the country by more than a half-million 17- and 18-year-olds. The students, who have spent all year taking a required course in philosophy, have to answer one of two questions, or dissect a philosophical tract. This year, the tract came from Friedrich Nietzsche’s 1878 book, “Human, All Too Human.”

Students have four hours to write their responses. The exam is such an important part of French education that local news outlets commit live-blogs to it, beside their rolling updates on the wars in Iran and Ukraine, and invite philosophers to discuss their own responses to the questions on the radio and television and in newspapers...

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/06/19/world/europe/france-education-high-school-philosophy.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share

existentialist “manifesto”

“In what are commonly regarded as classics of existentialism–Sartre’s Being and Nothingness, Heidegger’s Being and Time, and Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception–but also in works by Jaspers, Marcel, Beauvoir, Martin Buber, and José Ortega y Gasset, there is affinity on each of the following issues: 

The human predicament that inspires the very enterprise of philosophy; the distinctive character of human existence that distinguishes it from all other types of existence; the intimacy of the relationship between human beings and their world; the radical character of individual human freedom; the tone that a life led in appreciation of this freedom must possess; and the structure of interpersonal relations consonant with this radical, existential freedom. 

Affinity with respect to these issues allows, to be sure, for interesting differences among existentialist thinkers. Nevertheless, the affinity is substantial. Each of the writers mentioned in the preceding paragraph would, at some time in their careers, have endorsed the following general statement, a sort of existentialist “manifesto”: Human beings are prone to experience estrangement from the world in which they live, and it is this sense of estrangement which has long inspired philosophical attempts to locate human existence in relation to the order of things. A sense of estrangement is rooted in the fact that, while human beings are embodied occupants of the world, their powers of reflection, self-interpretation, evaluation, and choice distinguish them from all other occupants of the world–from animals, plants, and mere things. It would be wrong, though, to infer from this distinction that there is no intimate relationship between human beings and the world. Indeed, philosophical reflection on human existence and the world reveals that neither is thinkable in the absence of the other. A main reason for this is that the world of things cannot be understood except by reference to the significance that these things have in relation to human purposes and practices. Once this intimacy is appreciated–and once the sense of estrangement is properly construed–it emerges that each human being is possessed of a radical freedom and responsibility, not only to choose and to act, but to interpret and evaluate the world. Honest recognition by people of the disturbing degree of freedom that they possess requires cultivating a moral comportment or stance towards themselves and others that honours the reciprocal interdependence of individual lives.” — The Cambridge Companion to Existentialism (Cambridge Companions to Philosophy) by Steven Crowell

Anti-antinatalism

“… raises serious ethical concerns about suffering and the responsibilities of parenthood. These are not trivial questions. But the antinatalist position, as often expressed, collapses under its own absolutism. It demands a kind of perfection – a life without pain – but rejects or ignores the very pleasures that might make life worthwhile even in the midst of pain. It dismisses joy as a false positive, efforts to induce pleasure as chemically mediated, and meaning as contingent. But in doing so, it reveals a deeper discomfort, with the very texture of life: its ambivalence, its contradictions, and its refusal to be all good or all bad. A more robust (and honest) philosophy of life would accept this ambivalence, not flee from it. It would recognize that joy can emerge unbidden, that love is sometimes worth the grief it entails, and that the richness of existence lies in its imperfection. To live is to risk, yes – but it is also to discover, to connect, to create, and to care. From the Buddhist perspective, suffering arises not from existence itself, but from our untrained minds’ attachments, and the Buddhist path to liberation is not rejection of life, but its transformation through mindfulness and compassion. Similarly, Erich Fromm reminds us that isolated existence is unbearable because we are sentient social beings. For such beings it is the experience of connection – a profound oneness with others – that makes life meaningful and beautiful. So perhaps antinatalists are so because they’re caught in a form of existential isolation, mistaking their painful state for the totality of life’s meaning. Yet it is precisely through forging connection that life’s ambivalence may become bearable, even worthwhile. And perhaps that, in itself, is enough justification to continue.” © DENIZ KOSE 2026 Philosophy Now

Anti-antinatalism

“… raises serious ethical concerns about suffering and the responsibilities of parenthood. These are not trivial questions. But the antinatalist position, as often expressed, collapses under its own absolutism. It demands a kind of perfection – a life without pain – but rejects or ignores the very pleasures that might make life worthwhile even in the midst of pain. It dismisses joy as a false positive, efforts to induce pleasure as chemically mediated, and meaning as contingent. But in doing so, it reveals a deeper discomfort, with the very texture of life: its ambivalence, its contradictions, and its refusal to be all good or all bad. A more robust (and honest) philosophy of life would accept this ambivalence, not flee from it. It would recognize that joy can emerge unbidden, that love is sometimes worth the grief it entails, and that the richness of existence lies in its imperfection. To live is to risk, yes – but it is also to discover, to connect, to create, and to care. From the Buddhist perspective, suffering arises not from existence itself, but from our untrained minds’ attachments, and the Buddhist path to liberation is not rejection of life, but its transformation through mindfulness and compassion. Similarly, Erich Fromm reminds us that isolated existence is unbearable because we are sentient social beings. For such beings it is the experience of connection – a profound oneness with others – that makes life meaningful and beautiful. So perhaps antinatalists are so because they’re caught in a form of existential isolation, mistaking their painful state for the totality of life’s meaning. Yet it is precisely through forging connection that life’s ambivalence may become bearable, even worthwhile. And perhaps that, in itself, is enough justification to continue.” © DENIZ KOSE 2026 Philosophy Now

An extended tradition

“Reflecting on the classics of existentialism from the vantage point of contemporary thought reveals new dimensions in them, which in turn may suggest further perspectives on contemporary problems. By developing existential themes in dialogue with philosophers such as Daniel Dennett, John Searle, and John McDowell, for instance, Haugeland is able to read Heidegger in a way that reveals more to this thinker’s project than he himself might have imagined–or appreciated. The legacy of existentialism is not always identical to the legacy that the canonical authors may have imagined for themselves–a point that they, in turn, often exploited in their own dealings with their historical predecessors. Indeed, the very idea that Kierkegaard and Nietzsche–or Pascal or Augustine or Montaigne or even Socrates–belong to an extended tradition of “existentialism” is something of an artifact of how these figures were interpreted by Heidegger, Sartre, Marcel, Jaspers, and other canonical existentialists. Whatever suspicions this might engender from a purely historical point of view, it is unobjectionable as philosophy–especially existential philosophy, with its insistence that thinking is always a free, creative response to its own history.” — The Cambridge Companion to Existentialism (Cambridge Companions to Philosophy) by Steven Crowell

An extended tradition

“Reflecting on the classics of existentialism from the vantage point of contemporary thought reveals new dimensions in them, which in turn may suggest further perspectives on contemporary problems. By developing existential themes in dialogue with philosophers such as Daniel Dennett, John Searle, and John McDowell, for instance, Haugeland is able to read Heidegger in a way that reveals more to this thinker’s project than he himself might have imagined–or appreciated. The legacy of existentialism is not always identical to the legacy that the canonical authors may have imagined for themselves–a point that they, in turn, often exploited in their own dealings with their historical predecessors. Indeed, the very idea that Kierkegaard and Nietzsche–or Pascal or Augustine or Montaigne or even Socrates–belong to an extended tradition of “existentialism” is something of an artifact of how these figures were interpreted by Heidegger, Sartre, Marcel, Jaspers, and other canonical existentialists. Whatever suspicions this might engender from a purely historical point of view, it is unobjectionable as philosophy–especially existential philosophy, with its insistence that thinking is always a free, creative response to its own history.” — The Cambridge Companion to Existentialism (Cambridge Companions to Philosophy) by Steven Crowell