"Death is what gives life meaning"

@SecularOutpost

Death is what gives life meaning.

The fact that life can be lost is what makes life meaningful.

It’s the risk of loss of one’s own life that gives the other things meaning.

https://twitter.com/SecularOutpost/status/1236376219597168640

1. You can file this under: if you want a shallow answer to an existential question, ask an atheist.  

Atheists face a dilemma of their own making. How do they play the losing hand they dealt themselves? Some of them are more forthright about the consequences. By contrast, Jeff's strategy is to make a virtue of necessity.  

2. Jeff's statement would make a swell motto for a suicide cult. 

3. Would you hire a lifeguard with Jeff's philosophy?

4. It's an easy thing for Jeff to say because he's 40ish with a son living at home. A while back I watched an interview between Stephen Braude and Robert Lawrence Kuhn in which Kuhn admitted that as his own death becomes more imminent, he's terrified by the prospect of oblivion. And Braude made a sympathetic comment. But for Jeff, death is still too much of a personal abstraction for that to hit home.

5. It's good that Jeff is asking one of the ultimate questions, but his commitment to atheism forces him to look for answers in the wrong places, so he can only offer a wrong answer.

6. Jeff's answer is a half-truth, which lends it some specious plausibility. Losing something you value is a painful way of making you appreciate how valuable it was to you, especially if you took it for granted or neglected it. We may need to lose something to realize just how much it meant to us or how we failed to take advantage of unrepeatable missed opportunities. 

7. That, however, is quite different from saying that loss or temporary experience is what constitutes the value, significance, or importance of something. 

8. One crucial ambiguity in Jeff's statement is whether death is what makes life intrinsically meaningful to the decedent or else meaningful to the living. Death is a loss, both to the decedent and to those who miss him. So, according to Jeff, is death what makes life meaningful a relation: what other's valued in the decedent? Or the decedent's own loss?

9. If death is what makes life meaningful, is there a best time to die? Is life more meaningful if you die young or old? 

10. Suppose I had a time machine that enables me to revisit the happiest moments of my life. If the happiest moments are repeatable, does that render them meaningless? If it became too repetitious, they might lose their nostalgia, but I just mean every so often. 

For instance, if I could step into the time machine and see my late grandmother again, would that make her life meaningless? For instance, I have fond boyhood memories of  when we used to visit her at her house. Likewise, I have fond memories of her when she used to visit us on Christmas Eve. If I could go back in time to one of those days, would her life cease to be meaningful?

Likewise, I had a dog I was very fond of when I was a boy. After she died I never got another dog. She was the right dog at the right time and the right place. I can't reproduce those circumstances. But suppose I could use the time machine to see her back then. Would my renewed access render her life meaningless? 

And, again, meaningless to whom? Meaningless to me? Meaningless to her? She's be happy to see me again. And we gave her a good life. 

By the same token, I have many other fond childhood memories. Summer days at the waterfront home of my parents. The play of sunlight on the western waves. The play of moonlight on the waves at night. Mountain views. A particular night with an glowing ruby lunar eclipse. Other nights with a lunar halo. Or, come winter, watching the snow come down our through the branches of our long wooded driveway. If those days weren't lost forever, if the time machine enabled me to reexperience them, would that make them worthless? 

11. The hypothetical time machine is, among other things, a way of cheating death by having access to the past. Not only access to loved ones before they died, but access to otherwise unrepeatable experiences in general. In this life we lose things we cherish that we can't get back. But is that what confers value on them? 

12. Suppose you have a younger teenage brother with cancer. The cancer is curable. But if the loss of life is what makes life meaningful, is it more meaningful for him to forego cancer treatment and die at 15?

13. In fairness, Jeff said "The fact that life can be lost is what makes life meaningful"–not will be or must be. Yet his position commits him to something stronger than the bare possibility of ultimate loss. Isn't he saying the inevitability and finality of that loss is what makes life precious? 

14. Hovering in the background of Jeff's statement is the implied contrast with the world to come in Christian eschatology. It some ways that's like a time machine but superior: where the best of the past comes back around, only better than ever.