Introduction: Death and Meaning

Due to the Covid pandemic, the Royal Institute of Philosophy Annual Conference 2020 had to be postponed and was eventually held online in July 2021. The conference, on which this volume is based, was meant to explore the connection between death and meaning (in life). What motivated me to host a conference on that particular theme was initially my interest in the philosophical debate on human enhancement and the possibility and desirability (or undesirability) of radical life extension. Naturally, that debate is complex and touches on many different aspects of the human condition. However, there is one claim in particular that captured my attention because the question it raised struck me as being of fundamental importance for the entire discussion. It is the claim, occasionally made by transhumanists and other proponents of radical life extension, that death undercuts meaning, in the sense that as long as our lives will have to end someday, our lives cannot possibly be meaningful (More, 1990). Even religion with its promise of a life after death, it is alleged, can only ever achieve the illusion of meaning, but never the real thing. This is mainly because true meaningfulness cannot be derived from being part of somebody else’s (in this case God’s) plan, which supposedly has the inevitable effect of stifling a sense of our own personal value. Yet it is claimed that without such a sense of personal value our (individual) lives must lack true meaning, for what gives our lives (true) meaning is ‘the continuation of the process of improvement and transformation of ourselves into ever higher forms’ (More, 1990, p. 10). Since this process is understood as open-ended, it is clear that death, by bringing it to an end, destroys not only the meaning that any individual life can have up to the point of its termination, but the very possibility of meaning. If our lives can only have meaning if we can pursue ‘our own expansion and progress without end’ (More, 1990, p. 12), then life can only be meaningful if it never ends. That connection to meaning may well play a part in why death is often perceived and described as the greatest evil. It is the greatest of evils not merely because it sets an end to