THE ART OF LIVING, THE ART OF DYING

What gives life meaning in the face of our finiteness?

"Philosophizing means learning to die", Montaigne once confessed. He was not the first to point out that life can truly be understood only in light of its finitude. The "Ars moriendi", the art of dying, has a long-standing tradition, inseparably linked with the "Ars vivendi", the art of living, whose origins date back to antiquity. 

Lorenz Jäger takes on a profound subject and, in his equally wise and graceful exploration, asks what finitude means for our way of life. He looks at earliest literary works such as the Epic of Gilgamesh and the Bible, the questionable tranquility of the Stoics, the Japanese celebration of impermanence, or the immortality dreams of Silicon Valley. He engages with Georg Büchner, an early departure, as well as with Hans-Georg Gadamer and Claude Lévi-Strauss, both centenarians. Throughout, Jäger also reflects on our present, on what can make our lives rich and meaningful, on our handling of time in the face of finitude, the shaping of our goals and desires – a book that is existentially meaningful in the best sense.