Is finitude a good?
On the axis: Death · a whole life
Would a life with no term end up drained of its savor, passions dulled, everything already lived? If so, it is not in spite of death but thanks to it that our days count.
This problem is brought out by the thought experiment The endless life:
At thirty-seven, Elina Makropulos drank an elixir that suspends death. Three centuries later, she has known everything, loved everything, lost everything several times over. Passions have dulled, encounters repeat, nothing tastes new any longer: her unending life has frozen into a glacial indifference, and she finally refuses to renew the elixir, as one at last consents to rest. Her story raises an uncomfortable question: what if death, far from being only what threatens us, were also what gives our days their worth?
Bernard Williams, The Makropulos Case (1973)
Would you accept an endless life? If you hesitate, what does that reveal about the place death holds in a life that has meaning?
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Justification
Division Two of opens with a problem: how can existence be grasped as a whole, when it is never complete as long as it lasts? The analysis of answers without waiting for an end, as one would wait for the end of an object. Everything turns on an ordinary phrase: "one dies". The "" speaks truly, everyone will die, but it turns death into a fact that concerns everybody and never me. Yet one can die for another, not take away another's own dying: death is the ownmost possibility, certain and indefinite as to its moment. Anxiety reveals what idle talk tranquillizes, and anticipation of this possibility, joined to the resoluteness that answers the call of conscience, lets one own one's choices, in the light of their finitude: that is existence.
Being and Time, §46-53 · Being and Time, §40 (anxiety)
Justification
The argument rests on two premises drawn from physics: all good and evil reside in sensation, and death, the dissolution of the soul's atoms, is precisely the total privation of sensation. It follows that death can be an evil for no one, since the subject who would suffer it never coexists with it: while we are, it is not present; when it is present, we are no more. The fear of dying therefore targets a nothingness, and to dread a state in which one will not be is as empty as grieving over the time before one's birth. This reasoning, the second plank of the , removes the object of the anxiety that, on Epicurus' view, poisons the whole of life.
Death is nothing to us; for so long as we exist, death is not with us, and when death comes, then we do not exist.Letter to Menoeceus, 125
Letter to Menoeceus, 124-125 · Principal Doctrines, II