Abstract

The ultimate survival or annihilation of each one of us is in question. Will my death be the end of me completely, or shall I survive it in some way? No one knows the answers to these questions, and many philosophers since Kant have contended that the answers are inherently unknowable. If this is so, the supreme challenge that faces us is to live in a way that permanently acknowledges and confronts this ignorance, not seeking to finesse it by pretending to ourselves that we really do know, or by embracing a faith, or by evading thinking about it. This, easy to say, is very hard to do.