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Is it irrational to want to be remembered after you die?

Rohan Desai Contributor
· 3 replies
Meaning of life#legacy#mortality
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Founders talk a lot about "legacy". I've caught myself thinking about it too: building something that lasts after me. But I won't be around to enjoy being remembered. Epicurus argued that death is nothing to us, because when we exist death isn't there, and when death is there we don't exist.

So is wanting to be remembered irrational? Horace boasted his poems would be a monument more lasting than bronze. Was he just wrong to care?

3 answers

  1. Giulia Ferrante

    Fellow

    Horace wasn't wrong to care, I think, but notice what he cared about: the poems, not his fame as such. Wanting your work to last is different from wanting your name to. The first seems perfectly rational.

    Helpful · 1
  2. Claire Dubois

    Contributor

    Samuel Scheffler, in Death and the Afterlife (2013), argued that much of what we value depends on the assumption that humanity will continue after us. If we learned everyone would die soon after us, many projects would feel pointless. So caring about what happens after our death is built into ordinary valuing.

    Helpful · 2
  3. Arjun Iyer

    Fellow

    The Gita would say: act without attachment to the fruits, and that includes being remembered. My father wanted his name on a temple hall. When the hall was rebuilt the name went with the old wall. He laughed and said it was a lesson he should have learned earlier.

    Helpful · 3

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