Professor Shelly Kagan: At the end of last class,

I quoted some words from Kurt Vonnegut, a kind of deathbed

prayer confession that he'd written in one of his novels in

which the basic gist of the prayer is to express gratitude.

Whatever the content of your life, the fact that at least

you've been able to live at all--As he put it,

most mud isn't lucky enough to sit up.

He feels lucky to have been some of the sitting-up mud.

He loved everything he saw. When I read that quote,

I did not know that Kurt Vonnegut had died the night

before. Immediately after the class

ended, a visitor to the class brought this fact to my

attention. So, I can't pass without

commenting on that death, and just remark that I hope

that to the very end, Kurt Vonnegut,

who lived until he was 84, realized how lucky he was to be

some of the sitting-up mud. The question I want to turn to

now is this. So, we've been going over the

various facts about the nature of life and death.

And the question then is, how should we live,

in light of the fact that we're going to die?

Previously, we've talked about what emotional response we

should have to that. And I've argued,

as I just reminded us, that although perhaps the most

common reaction is one of fear or terror at death,

it may in fact be that we should be grateful and consider

ourselves lucky that we were able to have had life as

well--life at all. But how, then,

should we live in light of the fact that we're going to die?

And the immediate answer that comes to mind seems almost like

a joke. I want to say,

well, we should be careful,

given that we can die, that we will die.

There used to be a TV show, a cop show called Hill

Street Blues. The show began every day with

the sergeant going over the various crimes and

investigations that were going to fill up the day's episode.

And he'd always end, as he sent off his police,

the cops. He'd end by saying,

"Be careful" or "Be careful out there."

But the particular kind of care that I have in mind isn't just

this pure fact, that if you're not careful,

you won't notice that the car's coming down the street and

you'll hit by the car and that'll be the end.

The fact that we're going to die intuitively seems to require

a particular kind of care,

because, as we might put it, you only go around once,

right? You don't get to do it again.

And so, it seems as though the fact that we're mortal,

the fact that we've got a finite lifespan,

requires us to face the fact that intuitively we can blow it.

We could do it wrong. Now, the nitpicky part of me

wants to point out that it can't be mortality,

per se, that has this implication.

Even if we lived forever, we could still do it wrong.

After all, whatever it is you've filled your life with,

with an immortal infinite life, there's still going to be the

particular pattern of actions and activities that you engage

in. And that particular pattern

could still be one that wasn't the best pattern that was

available to you. So, the possibility of having

blown it, of having lived the wrong kind of life,

is a possibility that's going to be true of us,

whether or not we're mortal. And yet, for all that,

it seems as though mortality adds an extra risk,

an extra danger of blowing it. Look, suppose we lived forever

and just have a kind of simplistic example.

You might say, imagine somebody who spends his

eternity counting the integers--1,2,

3,4, 5,6. Well, that might not be as

valuable as an eternity spent doing something else,

let's say, doing more complicated math.

But still, if you've spent a million years or a billion years

counting the integers and then realized that was sort of

pointless, you could always start over by

doing more interesting, more deep, more worthwhile

math. The immortality gives you a

chance of starting over. It gives you the possibility of

do-overs. We might then worry that what's

especially bad about death, the fact that we're mortal,

is that it robs us of the chance of do-overs.

But of course, that's not quite right either.

Even if you don't live forever, you live 80 years or 100 years,

you have the chance to reappraise your life at the age

of 20 or 30 or 50 and decide you need to change course.

So, it's not exactly as though the possibility of do-overs

disappears by death itself, via death itself.

Still, the thought that death comes when it does seems to push

us in the direction of thinking we've still got to be very

careful because, of course, given that we're

mortal, we have only a limited period of time in which to do

the do-overs. There are two kinds of

mistakes, really, that we might catch ourselves

in. We might discover,

on the one hand, that we made some bad choices

in terms of what we were aiming for.

And on the other hand, we might find even if we made

the right choices in terms of our goals,

we flubbed it in terms of actually accomplishing what we

were trying to accomplish. And so we literally have to

start over again, and try again.

So, there's two kinds of care that we have to take.

We have to be careful in our aims and we have to be careful

in our execution of our aims, because we have,

as it were, a rather limited amount of time to do it over.

Now, again, the nitpicky part of me wants to say strictly

speaking, it's not the fact that we are mortal,

per se, that all by itself means we have to be especially

careful. After all, suppose there just

weren't all that many things worth doing.

And suppose they weren't all that complicated,

all that difficult to do well. Suppose there were only

five things worth doing. And even if you couldn't

necessarily do every single one of them right the first time

out, at most it would take two or three tries.

And by a try I mean maybe an hour or two.

Well, that would be a pretty impoverished world that could

only offer us that much. But after all,

if that was the way the world worked and we had a hundred

years, we wouldn't really have to worry all that much about

being careful. We'd have plenty of time to aim

for each of the five things worth having and plenty of time

to get each one of the five things right.

A hundred years of life would be more than enough.

We wouldn't have to be careful. So, it's not just the fact that

we're mortal that requires us to be careful.

It's the fact that we have a relatively short span of life

relative to how much there is worth aiming for,

and how complicated and difficult it can be to get those

things and get them right. It's because of the fact that

there's so much to do and doing it properly that we have to be

careful. We just don't have enough time

to flail around, try a little of this,

try a little of that. Somebody who lives like that

may well find that the things they aimed for weren't really

the best choices. You don't have to decide that

these things weren't worth having at all,

given the relatively short period of time we've got.

We've got the extra burden of deciding what are the things

most worth going after. And we have to face the

prospect, the chance, that we'll look back and

discover that we didn't make the best choices there.

We aimed for the wrong things, not necessarily things that

weren't worth having, but given the limited number of

things we were going to be able to fill our lives with,

in that sense, the wrong choices.

And we may discover as well that we were not sufficiently

careful, attentive in how we tried to achieve these things.

Because it's not as though--although given the way

life is, you've got the chance for do-overs,

you don't have time for a whole lot of do-overs.

And so what death forces us to do is, to be careful.

An analogy that comes to mind here is an artist who goes--a

musician who goes into a recording studio.

And look, he can start trying to record his songs to cut an

album. And he may only have a certain

number of songs in his repertoire.

And so if he's got a long enough period of time,

a month in the recording studio,

he's got plenty of time, or she's got plenty of time,

to sing a couple of songs. Maybe these wouldn't be the

best things to record. Let's give it a try and we'll

see. Didn't get it right the first

take. Let's record it again.

Let's try it a third time. Let's try it a fourth time.

If you've got enough time, it's less pressing to get clear

before you start, or as you're going along,

what are the songs I should try to record, and can I get it on

one take, or at most two?

But if instead of having a month in the recording studio,

you've got only a week in the studio,

or a day in the studio, suddenly everything's much more

pressing. Time is much more precious.

You've got to decide early on just which are the songs that it

makes sense to record? And yeah, there are some other

songs, but these seem to be the better choices.

And when you record them, you can't be as careless and

inattentive as you try to get them down.

You've got to try to get it right the first time,

or at worst, the second time.

That's, it seems to me, the situation we find ourselves

in, not just given the fact that we die,

but, we might say, given how incredibly rich the

world is, how many things it offers us,

how many choices we have in terms of what's worth going

after. But for many of these things,

given how difficult they are to accomplish, although we've got

the chance for do-overs, both in terms of changing our

mind about what we should be aiming at, and trying again,

for the things we have aimed at, we've got to be

careful. The fact about our death

requires paying attention. It requires care.

Well, having said that, of course, the immediate

question then, is all right,

so I'm paying attention. I'm trying to be careful.

What should I do with my life?

How shall I--What should I fill it with?

We've, previously in the class, talked about the possibility

that being alive, per se, may have some value.

But above and beyond whatever stand we take on that,

it's certainly also the case that part of what adds to the

value of our lives are the contents of our lives.

And so we need to ask, well, what kinds of contents

should we try to fill our lives with?

Now, I won't try to answer that. To ask the question,

what are the things really worth going after in life?

is to come up to the edge of asking, well,

just what is the meaning of life?

What's really worth going after? And although that is indeed an

important, perhaps the important question,

it's the question, I think, for a different class.

And so having come close to the edge of that question,

I'm going to now back away from it.

But still, it seems we might say, in broad strokes,

there are two different strategies that we could adopt.

And it's worth at least pausing to think about these two

strategies. Strategy number one says given

that you've only got a finite amount of time--Actually,

the basic underlying thought behind both strategies is just

this. We haven't got much time.

Pack as much as you can into life.

Pack as much as you can in. But there are two basic

strategies about how do you put that idea into practice.

And strategy number one says given the dangers of failure if

you aim too ambitiously, you should settle for the kinds

of goals that you're virtually guaranteed that you'll

accomplish. The pleasures of food,

company, sex, ice cream.

One of the paper topics asks you to reflect on the

philosophy, "Eat, drink, and be merry,

for tomorrow you die." Well, that's one of the

strategies. We're going to be dead tomorrow.

And so while we're here, let's try to pack in as much as

we can, by going for the things that we've got a very high

chance of actually accomplishing.

Strategy number two says that's all well and good.

You've got a pretty high chance of succeeding at that.

The trouble with strategy number one is the goods that you

can achieve, the sort of sure thing goods are small.

They're rather small potatoes, as things go.

Some of the most valuable goods in life are things that don't

come so readily, don't come with guarantees of

achieving them. You might want to write a

novel, compose a symphony, or for that matter raise--marry

and raise a family. Some of these things,

strat--fans of strategy number two argue, these things are the

most valuable things that life can offer us.

So that a life filled with these larger goods is a more

valuable life than a life filled with the small potatoes goods.

I suppose fans of the "Eat, drink, and be merry" strategy

don't like to call those "small potatoes goods,"

but that's the kind of language that might be offered by fans of

strategy number two. And it seems to me that as a

claim about which life, if only you had it,

if you had a guarantee--If God were going to say,

"Look, which life do you want? I promise you'll get it.

The life filled with food and drink or the life filled with

accomplishment?"--perhaps most of us would say well,

it's the life filled with accomplishment that's the more

valuable life. The trouble,

of course, is, the life with the greater

accomplishments, the life aiming for greater

accomplishments, is also a life with a greater

chance of failure. You aim for writing the great

American novel and ten years later, you still haven't

finished it. Twenty years later,

you decide you don't have it in you to write the great American

novel. You try to produce a business

and it goes under. So, what's the right strategy

to take? I suppose many of us would be

inclined to say, well, the third strategy.

There's a third strategy that's the obviously right thing to do,

which is, get the right mixture.

Aim for a certain number of--what should we call them?

Large potatoes. Aim for a certain number of the

large accomplishments, because if you do manage to get

them, your life will have more value.

But also throw in a certain sprinkling of the smaller

things, where you're at least assured of having gotten

something out of life. Well, that's all well and good

as well, but it just now brings us to the next question.

What is the right mixture, after all?

Well, I'm not going to try to answer that one either.

But again, those of you who choose the topic,

the "Eat, drink, and be merry" question,

basically I'm inviting you, in that topic,

to reflect on that question. Here's a different thought.

The entire, as I said, the underlying thought behind

the go-for-the-big-things, go-for-the-small-things,

was pack it all in. The underlying thoughts seem to

be, look, as long as you've got a life that's got valuable

contents, the more, the better.

You might say here's common ground between the two

strategies--the more, the better.

Now previously, we've--I've argued that

immortality would not actually be a good thing.

Eventually rich and incredible as the world is,

eventually, the goods of life would run out and immortality

would be dreadful. But having said that,

that's not to suggest that we--most of us--come remotely

close to that condition. For most of us,

it's certainly true that dying at 30 deprives you of goods that

would have come to you, if only you'd lived to 40.

And dying at 40 deprives you of goods that would have come to

you if only you'd lived to 50 or 60 or 80.

So, one thing that we're inclined to agree is,

other things being equal, the longer your life,

the better. So here's a life, 50 years long.

And suppose you live it with a certain amount of value in your

life, 100 value points, whatever that is,

whatever the--however our units of measuring just how good a

life is. We'd say, look,

better to have a life at that value, instead of going through

50 years, went for 100 years. Fair enough.

We might say, we all agree,

don't we, that quantity of life's a good thing.

And that does seem plausible. But at the same time we'll want

to immediately say quantity of life may matter,

but it's not the only thing that matters.

Quality of life matters as well. And again, that point's fairly

uncontroversial. If you had to choose between

your life of 50 years at 100 value points or 50 years at

whatever that is, 130 value points,

you'd rather have the second life.

The length of life isn't the only thing we care about.

The overall quality of your life is something we care about

as well. And this, of course,

is another topic that we've talked about previously.

Just what is it that goes into making a life better than

another? So, we now see,

summing it up, yeah, got to pay attention to

quality, got to pay attention to quantity or duration.

Of course, the reason I just corrected myself is because you

might say, if you want to think about it mathematically,

it all is just a matter of quantity.

As long as when we measure quantity, we bear in mind we

need to measure not just the length of the life,

but the height of the box. So, the area of the box here is

50 x 100 units, so whatever that is,

that's 5,000.

I'm going to get another giggle here, right.

Imagine our little units. It's a quality,

one unit of quantity--one unit of quality for a year.

So, it's a quality year unit, whatever it is,

5,000 units. Here 6,500.

You might say, look, we can capture the

thought that the duration of your life matters,

the quality of your life matters, by multiplying the two

together. And without getting hung up on

the numbers, as though there was any kind of precision here,

the underlying thought's fairly clear.

The area of the box represents the overall quality--the overall

quantity that you managed to cram into your life in your 50

years. And we could start measuring

different kinds of lives. We might start worrying about

well, look, suppose I could live 50 years at 130 or I could live,

whatever it is, 100 years at some other number

that's a little bit less. We might say,

oh, less quality, but longer quantity,

longer duration, more valuable life filled in

that last box. We see how it goes.

But the question we need to ask is--so, if we've got this more

rich sense of quantity, where we multiply the duration

of the life times the how good a life you're having while you've

got it, does that give adequate place

to what we think is valuable? Does that give adequate place

to quality in life?

Let me draw some different boxes, some different possible

lives to choose between.

Suppose you had a nice long life, 150 years.

Again, just for the sake of concreteness,

we assign 50 quality points. So, the area is 7,500.

Let's suppose, so you can get a feel for this,

let's suppose that the best life lived on earth so far was

worth a 10. So this is an incredible life,

to be a 50. And you get it for 150 years.

A very nice life.

Now, compare it with this life.

Suppose that this life isn't really all that good in terms of

how well off you are at any given time.

It's plus one. Zero would be a life not worth

having, though no worse than nonexistence.

Negative numbers would be lives presumably that would be you're

better off dead. This life is just barely worth

having. It's plus one.

But it's a very, very, very long life,

so long that I couldn't draw it to scale.

That's why we've got the "..." in the middle.

Suppose it goes on for 30,000 years.

Well, the math here is pretty easy.

30,000 times one is 30,000 in terms of the area.

Okay. So, trying to choose between

these two lives. Life A or Life B?

In terms of quantity, our enriched notion of

quantity, where you measure the length of the life times the

height of the box, Life B's got more quantity of

what matters--30,000 versus 7,500.

And yet, most of us, when we think about this

choice, do not find B to be a preferable life,

even though the quantity of value--Just suppose we could

measure quantity of whatever the goods are that we've got crammed

into our life. Well, this has very,

very, very small amounts stretched over a very long time.

The quantity's larger, but Life A seems preferable.

Now, for any--at least, this may not be true for

everybody, but for those of us who share that thought,

you might say quantity isn't all it's about.

Or when we try to take quality into account,

it wasn't so much that we couldn't measure it,

it's that if you reduce the importance of quality into,

fold it into quantity, so that what it's all about is

the total amount that you're getting, well the total amount's

bigger in B than A. If you don't think B's a better

life, that suggests that totals aren't what it's all about.

Well, what else might we then choose between with regard to A

and B? Well, the natural response is

to say, even though Life A is shorter, it attains a kind of

peak, a kind of height that isn't

approached anyplace in Life B. And perhaps,

then, in evaluating lives and choosing between rival lives,

we can't just look for the quantity of good,

we have to look at the peaks. We have to look at the heights.

In choosing between lives, it's important to think not

just about how much did you pack in,

total, but what were the greatest goods that you had or

accomplished in your life? And perhaps,

then, we should conclude, quality can trump quantity.

Perhaps with the right quality in place, quantity becomes of

secondary importance. Yeah, it might be that if we

could have a longer life where we achieved great things,

rather than a shorter life where we achieved great things,

better to have the longer life. Quantity might matter,

too, as long as we think the quality's what matters the most.

But a more radical version of the theory would say,

actually, quality's all that matters.

The peaks are all that matter. That, at any rate,

is the position that gets expressed by Hölderlin in the

poem "To the Parcae," to the fates.

That was in one of the essays that I had you read.

But let me read that now. "To the Parcae."

A single summer grant me, great powers,

and a single autumn for fully

ripened song that, sated with the sweetness

of my playing, my heart may more

willingly die. The soul that,

living, did not attain its divine

right cannot repose in the nether world.

But once what I am bent on, what is

holy, my poetry is accomplished: Be welcome then,

stillness of the shadows' world!

I shall be satisfied though my lyre will not

accompany me down there. Once I

lived like the gods, and more is not needed

[Kaufmann 1976]. Hölderlin is saying he doesn't

care about quantity at all. If he can accomplish something

great, if he can ascend to the heights and do something great

with his poetry, that's enough.

Once he's lived like the gods, more is not needed.

So, in thinking about what we want to do with our lives,

it's not enough to have the kind of theory that we've begun

to sketch in previous weeks, where we think about what are

the various things worth having in a life?--we also have to

address this question of quality versus quantity.

Is quality only important insofar as it gets folded into

producing greater quantity? Or does quality matter in its

own right as something that's worth going for,

even when it means a smaller quantity?

And if quality does matter, does quantity matter as well?

Or is, indeed, quality all that matters?

Is Hölderlin right when he says once I've lived like the

gods, more is not needed?

Now, Hölderlin, I imagine, in thinking about

why that kind of life is the best kind of life he could

aspire to, is thinking,

in part, about the lasting contribution that his poetry

makes. There's a sense in which,

when we think about having done things like that,

we feel that we attain a kind of immortality.

We live on through our works. And so the next question I want

to turn to in thinking about strategies of how to live in

light of the fact of, in terms of facing our

mortality is, well, maybe a kind of

immortality is worth going after.

Or maybe, at the very least, we can take a kind of comfort

in thinking that we have or can attain a kind of immortality.

I emphasize the word "kind," of course, because strictly

speaking, if you live on through your works, it's not as though

you are literally living on. It's semi-immortality or

quasi-immortality. I suppose people who don't

believe in it would prefer to call it pseudo-immortality.

Actually, this reminds me of a joke.

Here's a Woody Allen joke. "I don't want to be immortal

through my work; I want to be immortal through

not dying." Well, as you know,

previously I've argued that genuine immortality,

unending life, would not be a good thing.

But still, many of us aspire to this kind of semi-immortality.

And actually, it can take,

I think again, two broad forms.

Sometimes people want to say there's a sense in which,

although it's not as though you're literally living on,

there's something like that going on, insofar as a part of

you continues. If I have children,

then literally some of my--in my case, there's a male--one of

my cells continues. And then their cells continue

in their children and their cells continue in their

children. If you think of an amoeba

splitting and splitting, and splitting and splitting

again, part of the original amoeba

could be there for many, many, many generations.

Some people take comfort in the thought that,

literally speaking, a part of them will continue,

if not through cells through my offspring, perhaps at least my

atoms get recycled, get used again.

And so I get absorbed into the universe, but I never disappear.

Some people take comfort in that thought.

The German philosopher Schopenhauer thought that this

should reduce somewhat the sting of death.

He said, "But it will be asked, ‘How is the permanence of

mere dust, of crude matter, to be regarded as a continuance

of our true inner nature?'" And he answers,

Oh! Do you know this dust then?

Do you know what it is and what it can do?

Learn to know it before you despise it.

This matter, now lying there as dust and

ashes, will soon form into crystals when dissolved in

water. It will shine as metal;

it will then emit electric sparks… It will,

indeed, of its own accord, form itself into plant and

animal; and from its mysterious womb it

will develop that life, about the loss of which you in

your narrowness of mind are so nervous and anxious.

Well, that's a very moving passage, but I have to say,

I don't buy it. I don't find any comfort at all

in the thought that my atoms will still be around getting

reused into something else. So, this first kind of

semi-immortality, where you take comfort in the

thought that literally there are parts of you that will continue,

this strikes me as a kind of desperate striving,

desperate reaching for straws. Perhaps in Schopenhauer's case,

leading him to delude himself into thinking,

"Oh, it's not so bad that I'm going to die and going to die

soon. At least my atoms will still be

around." It doesn't work for me.

There's a second sort of approach, though,

where it's not so much that you're supposed to be comforted

by the thought that your parts will continue to

last after you, but that your

accomplishments will continue to last after you.

Hölderlin writes poetry, which we're still reading some

200 years later. You can write a novel which can

be read for 20 or 50 or 100 or more years.

You might make some contribution to math or

philosophy or science, and 50 or 100 years later,

people could still be talking about that philosophical

argument or that mathematical result.

You might have other kinds of accomplishments.

You might build a building that will last after you.

Stone cutters, I've read interviews with stone

cutters who take a kind of pride and comfort in the thought that

long after they're gone, the buildings that they helped

build will still be there. You might try to build a

company that will last after you die.

Or, for that matter, you might take pleasure and

comfort in the accomplishment of having raised a family.

Here, not so much the thought that some of your cells are in

your offspring, but rather the thought that to

have raised another decent human being is a nontrivial

accomplishment, something worth having done

with your life. And that accomplishment

continues after you're gone. Well, what should we think

about this second group of approaches to attaining

semi-immortality? I've got to say that I'm of two

minds when I think about them. Unlike the dust and the atoms

stuff, where I just think you're deluding yourself,

I find myself drawn to this second set of thoughts.

I find myself tempted by the thought that there's something

worth doing about producing something that continues for a

while. That it's significant.

And even if my life here on earth is a short one,

if something that I've accomplished continues,

my life is the better for it. That's Hölderlin's thought,

I suppose. And it's a view that appeals to

me. I suppose it explains,

in part, why I write philosophy, in the hopes that

the things I write might still be read 20 years after I die,

or 50 years or, if I'm so lucky,

100 years after I die. Well, in certain moods,

perhaps in most moods, I'm drawn by that thought.

But in other moods, I've got to confess,

I'm skeptical of it. I remind myself of Schopenhauer

writing his little passage, his Ode To Dust,

and I find myself saying, just like Schopenhauer was so

desperate that he deludes himself into thinking,

"Oh, it doesn't matter that I'm about to turn into dust.

Dust is really, really important," I'm just

deluding myself as well, when I think there's something

grander, something significant,

something valuable about having made an accomplishment,

having achieved something that continues beyond me.

So in certain moods, at least, I find myself

thinking that I've just deluded myself.

But that's only certain moods. And at least most of the time,

I find myself in agreement with Hölderlin.

Not necessarily in thinking quantity doesn't matter at all.

To have written one great work is all you need and more great

works doesn't add anything--that strikes me as going too far.

But at least to have done something significant that

abides, that does seem to me to add to the value and

significance of my life. Well, let me mention an entire

different approach. I'm going to give very,

very short shrift to this last approach, but it's probably

worth mentioning as well. The entire assumption of all

the lines of thought that I've been discussing so far today

have in common the underlying belief that the way to deal with

the fact that we live and then we're dead is to try to make the

life that you've got as good as possible,

as valuable as possible, to pack as much into it as you

can, even though there's room for disagreement about what's

the best strategy for doing that.

The picture is one in which we say we can't do anything about

the loss of life, so the right response is to

make the life that we've got as valuable as it can be,

to see it as valuable as it can be.

But there's a rather different approach.

That alternative approach says, yes, we're going to lose life

and that's horrible. But it's only horrible insofar

as you think of life as something that it's bad to lose.

After all, if we were to decide that life wasn't really a

valuable gift, if it wasn't really something

worth embracing, and something that we could

turn into something full of value, then its loss wouldn't

actually be a loss. That's a point we've seen

before, right? The central badness of death is

explained in the depravation account.

You are deprived of the fact that you could have had more

life that would have been worth having overall.

But if life isn't worth having overall, then its loss is not a

bad thing, but a good thing. The trick, then,

isn't to make life as valuable as it could be,

but rather to come to recognize that on balance,

life isn't positive, but negative.

I know that what I'm about to say has a kind of Classics

Illustrated simplicity to it,

and it's a bit of an over-exaggeration,

but in gross terms, we might say the first general

outlook--that life is good and so the loss of it is bad and so

the answer is make as much of it as we can while we've got

it--you might say that is, in broad strokes,

the western outlook. And in broad strokes,

the notion that life isn't really as good as we take it to

be, but is, in fact,

bad overall, perhaps it's oversimplification

to call it the eastern outlook, but at least it's an outlook

that gets more expression typically in eastern thought

than in western thought. Foremost example of this second

outlook is, I suppose, Buddhism.

Four noble truths in Buddhism. The first noble truth is that

life is suffering. Buddhists believe if you think

hard about the underlying nature of life, you'll see that

everyplace there is loss. There is suffering.

There is disease. There is death.

There is pain. Sure, there are things that we

want and, if we're lucky, we get them.

But then we lose them and that just adds to the suffering and

the pain and the misery. On balance, life isn't good.

First noble truth, life is suffering.

And so, armed with this estimation, what Buddhists try

to do is to free you from attachment to these goods,

so that when you lose them, the loss is minimized.

And indeed, Buddhists try to free you from what they take to

be the illusion of there being a self.

There is no me to lose anything. Death is terrifying insofar as

I worry about it being the dissolution of myself.

If there is no self, there's nothing to dissolve.

It all makes sense--and I have tremendous respect for

Buddhism--it all makes sense, given the thought that life is

suffering. But for better or for worse,

I'm a child of the west. I'm a child of the Book of

Genesis, where God looks on the world and says,

"It's good." For me, at least,

the strategy of minimize your loss by viewing the world as

negative, is not one that I can be at rest with.

For me, life can be good. And so the choices for me,

and I suppose for most of us, remain among the strategies

with which I began. How is it that we can most make

our lives valuable? What is it that we can do that

will allow us, with Hölderlin,

to say, "once we lived like the gods"?